Previous news: 12 August 2007

The internet grows up
I've been running this website in one form or another since early 2001, so I've seen the internet slowly change over the years.

Back when I started out with a website people accessed the internet with slow infrequent visits using a modem, websites didn't have too much in the way of rich media (video or Flash) and there were far fewer websites. It used to be like walking down a small town’s high street and walking past a series of little shops, run by local people.

These days the internet is more like a giant shopping mall, there are bigger more flashy websites with pipelines of cash pumped into them to force their way into as many peoples browsers as possible.

Although they are more heavy weight websites these days (Like YouTube) the emergence of blogging has allowed many more people to express their creativity, thoughts and talents far more easily than used to be the case. Previously a person would need to understand (or at least think they did) HTML in order to put their thoughts or products onto the internet. These days the entry bar has been lowered, now people can just concentrate on creating the content rather than needing to know the technologies of how to distribute it.

I've changed the way my website has operated over the years to try and keep up with the way the internet works. The first big thing I launched was a forum, so that people couldn't just come and read the website content but they could interact with others who came here. As time has gone on the type of visitors to this website has changed, so once more I must tweak the way this website operates.

What I see now as a way forward is to add comments to the front page news items - allowing anybody to quickly and easily voice their opinions, without requiring a forum membership, signing in or anything of that nature. So I guess you could say I'm making the front page more like a blog, which it kinda always has been, you've just not been able to add your own comments directly.

Predictions!
Here's something for me and everyone else to look back on and laugh at in a few years time, but here's where I see the internet going based upon the current trends :)

1) We'll see the wireless broadband router in peoples homes to turn into home servers - which host a family’s photos, music and all their electronic media. So site's like Facebook will fade away as everyone has their own (Easy to use) internet media presence.
2) YouTube will slowly turn into a real TV presence, with channels of content and paid contributors who get paid enough to work for YouTube creating content full time.
3) RSS will evolve into it's own beast - becoming a separate way of using the internet, much different to web browsing
4) The web browser will deal some deadly blows to desktop applications, at some point making desktop applications a minority way to develop software

Mav