Quotes about Web

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that.

If a newspaper, a radio station or a TV station doesn't please advertisers, it disappears. It exists to make you (the marketer) happy.

That's the reason the medium (and its rules) exist. To please the advertisers.

But the Net is different.

It wasn't invented by business people, and it doesn't exist to help your company make money.

It's entirely possible it could be used that way, but it doesn't owe you anything. The question to ask isn't, "but how does this help me?" as if you have some sort of say in the matter. You don't get a vote on whether Google succeeds or whether your customers erect spam filters.

The question to ask is, "how are people (the people I need to reach, interact with and tell stories to) going to use this new power and how can I help them achieve their goals?"

As Stewart Brand says, the main event of the emerging World Wide Web is its current absence of a business model in the midst of astounding abundance. The gift economy is one way players in the net rehearse for a life of following the free and anticipating the cheap. This is also a way for entirely new business models to shake out. Furthermore the protocommercial stage is a way for innovation to fast-forward into hyperdrive. Temporarily unhinged from the constraints of having to make a profit by next quarter, the greater network can explore a universe of never-before-tried ideas. Some ideas will even survive the transplantation to a working business.

The wake up call was finding this startling statistic that web usage in the spring of 1994 was growing at 2,300 percent a year. You know, things just don't grow that fast. It's highly unusual, and that started me about thinking , "What kind of business plan might make sense in the context of that growth?"

We started our company in 2002 when nothing was getting funded anywhere and everyone was still licking their wounds from the big bubble bang. Nobody cared about us except us. We were in Vancouver fer crissakes. But we were able to focus on finding and connecting with the people who mattered most: the customers, the users, the community. You get more done when no one's looking over your shoulder.

Letting your data connect to other people's data is a bit about letting go in that sense. It is still not about giving to people data which they don't have a right to. It is about letting it be connected to data from peer sites. It is about letting it be joined to data from other applications.

It is about getting excited about connections, rather than nervous.

Catalyze a Virtual Community

Many companies think that building a virtual community is as simple as throwing up a cool Web site that compels people to visit every day. Dream on. These sites are commercials, not communities. If you want to build a virtual community, here are the principles to implement:

Community before commerce. In the words of John Hagel III and Arthur G. Armstrong (authors of Net.Gain), "put community before commerce." That is, the purpose of these efforts is to build a community, not sell more stuff, so cool it on the commercialism. The community exists for its own benefit, not yours.

Communication comes next. Build in the capability for people to communicate with each other via message boards and Internet mail lists. Peer-to-peer communication is more important than being able to communicate with the company. You're hosting the event, but it's a cocktail party, not a lecture.

Place the community's interests above your own. The big picture is that a vibrant community will help you, but getting to this place means sacrificing short-term interests. For example, people should be able to freely discuss and endorse competitive products.

Tolerate criticism. Not only should peple feel free to plug competitive products, they should be able to criticize your own. This freedom produces two desirable results: first, good public relations because tolerating criticism on a company-sponsored site is unheard of; second, free and voluminous customer feedback.

Encourage "personalities." Remember how one of the keys to the success of MTV was veejays with an attitude? The same is true of a Web site, so encourage your employees to develop online personalities to show that corporate thought police don't control your site.

Every book that comes into being does so within the context of a web of interconnections between individuals, and this is no less so in the present case. The idea for this book first occured to me in 1994 while reading a passage from William Irwin Thompson's book - Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science - in which he briefly discusses David Cronenberg's great film - Videodrome - and I would never have stumbled across the works of Thompson if they had not been recommended to me by my friend John Lobell - and the website companion to this book -  CinemaDiscourse.com - would not exist without Lobell's initiative and enthusiasm for the essays contained herein.

Freedom of connection with any application to any party is the fundamental social basis of the internet. And now, is the basis of the society built on the internet.

With over billion documents available today, it is hard to believe the Web emerged one node at a time. But it did. Barely a decade ago it had only one node, Tim Berners-Lee's famous Webpage. As physicists and computer scientists started creating pages of their own, the original site gradually gained links pointing to it. The modest Web of a dozen primitive documents was the precursor to the planet-sized self as the Web is today.

When I first began tinkering with a software program that eventually gave rise to the idea of the World Wide Web, I named it Enquire, short for Enquire Within upon Everything, a musty old book of Victorian advice I noticed as a child in my parent's house outside London. With its title suggestive of magic, the book served as a portal to a world of information, everything from how to remove clothing stains to tips on investing money. Not a perfect analogy for the Web, but a primitive starting point.

When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed.  Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied.  Only those relationships matter.  The body is an old crock that nobody will miss.  I have never known a man to think of himself when dying.  Never.