The Rise of the Junkweb and Why It's So Awesome 181
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Have you noticed your Facebook stream or looked at reddit lately? A huge chunk of what goes by lately are photos with text over them, usually quotes about this or that. 'It's the Junkweb,' writes Chris Brogan. 'Why "junk?" Because the original intent of the Internet was that links were gold, that searchability was key, that this ability to find anything and use resources from wherever was magic. And this new web? The web of pictures with text over them? They're junk. They're a dead end. The picture is the payload.' Facebook and Pinterest are doing what so much of our 'awesome' tech hasn't been able to do well: let the everyperson into this universe. For whatever reason, the 'photos with text' experience gives us that feeling we get when we read magazines. 'It makes the texty text of blogging a lot less stark. It draws our eyes in. It's fast to consume, and it brings an emotional response faster.' Now with the release of Google's Panda search technology, it has been acknowledged that links and pages aren't everything and with Google+ goes the realization that it's no longer a links-only world. who shares is as important as how it's shared. 'I'm spending far more time on the Junkweb than I am on the Smartweb,' concludes Brogan. 'Deny it, if you want. The numbers show otherwise. We are in love with this new method of interacting.'"
It's ugly (Score:2, Insightful)
I hate the text of photos. People should post the actual text and have a photo with it if necessary. But the text over photo is awful for a whole lot of reasons.
Re:It's ugly (Score:1, Insightful)
Never seen Lolcats, I guess?
Yeah, it's funny when geeks were doing it. Now that everybody is doing it, it's awful. It's junk. Got it.
Re:In general, I HATE it, but LOVE it (Score:5, Insightful)
So, pretty similar to the rest of the web...
junkweb has always been there (Score:5, Insightful)
1990's people used to email this crap to each other. stupid pictures and the dumb dancing baby animation
with the rise of facebook and other social networking people share this crap and its more viral. and the sites that carry it found a way to monetize on the junk
Re:In general, I HATE it, but LOVE it (Score:5, Insightful)
But what's more annoying than these Facebook photos are all those "tutorial" or "news" videos. Not only are they almost always flash, but often the "news" videos don't show any actual footage of the event they're about, but just a guy reading off a script...
Result: I cannot use this in my open-office without bothering the neighbours. I cannot quickly skim or skip over those parts that I already know. I cannot search through it, to go straight to the juicy bits. I cannot copy-paste command line examples from those tutorials directly into my shell. When I try to save them for later reference, they are huge... Give me back text any day!
people spend a lot of time on the SmartWeb, too (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia is the #6 most visited website on the internet, and is a textbook example of hypertext: it's mainly text, with some illustrations, intended to be informative, with an emphasis on making the documents hyperlinked and searchable.
I will admit that the idea's been losing some traction outside of Wikipedia, but partly because many people have started pooling their efforts there. Ten years ago I ran websites with information on subjects of interest to me. But today I just edit Wikipedia articles. There's little reason for me to create Trepidity's Ancient Greek Temples Homepage when there's no way it could ever compete with the information Wikipedia already has on them.
Meaningless Dreck (Score:5, Insightful)
I am far more concerned about the proliferation of endless pages that are designed only to echo content to gain page rank for some pointless website I have little interest in, or to garner the display of as many ads as possible. Often I will be reading something that I find interesting but when I follow a link in the text - or in the sidebar - I get a page that is an aggregate of pointless links (but has ads) and if I try to click on the link to the original thing that interested me, I get yet another page and so on and so on. There is a massive amount of this dreck out there on the web, and I think its sole purpose is to gain pagerank mostly.
When the internet was academic primarily, there was not much data but it was perhaps a bit more informative, now that we have the commercial internet the bulk of the it seems to be almost devoid of purpose and content.
The LOLCat meme and others like it - endless motivational posters etc - is at least created by someone who thought it was funny and hoped to create a meme that lasts. Its tiring and its jumped the shark IMHO but its far preferable to webpages without meaning or purpose.
Re:"We are in love with this..."? (Score:2, Insightful)
Brogan's probably the kind of guy who likes watching the ads on TV, too. "Infomercials 24/7, the numbers show we're in love with them!"
Re:"We are in love with this..."? (Score:5, Insightful)
What a surprise: technology that enables us to create and enjoy wondrous works of art can and will also be used to produce lowest common denominator crap. Hell, even Gutenberg's printing press wasn't used at first to print new works, or even to make existing works (like the bible) available to the masses. It was used to mass-produce indulgences for the church to sell to sinners; the clergy couldn't hand-write the things fast enough to meet demand.
Re:It's ugly (Score:5, Insightful)
They first started it all with overlaid ASCII characters making The Mona Lisa, Statue of Liberty, etc. Oh yes, and porn.
Then, when they got their hands on graphic software, they did it with pics and text.
Every example of the presence of bad/crappy/funny/intelligent/etc..... can be traced back to a geek doing it. That group has the same humorous and degenerate proclivities and impulses as everyone else and they had the first access.
By the way, don't use "unwashed masses" in the future. It's a red flag.
Re:Nah... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"We are in love with this..."? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm entirely content with letting Joe Sixpack have an outlet (or inlet) from this cyber universe. His (or her) treatment of the medium as "funny looking TV" will provide the capital support for those of us who actually use the net as an information source.
The net is evolving. Much like our genome, which if you haven't looked, is 95% nothing. Those of you who believe in intelligent design should ask yourself, "What intelligence would design something so poorly." The net is stuffed with junk, and unlike television, nobody is succeeding in inventing ways to force us to take it in. Look at how advertising revenues are dropping, as advertisers figure out that most of the adverts on the internet are studiously ignored or even blocked, by more of that marvelous technology that isn't captive to a corporate bottom line.
The sea of unwashed humanity who inhabit the infobahn for the pretty pictures and pirate music and hi-def videos will keep the infrastructure expanding. We owe a debt of gratitude to these people. Without them, _we_ could scarcely afford all this connectivity. And the very same connectivity that lets Trudy post what she's having for breakfast and keep track of Aunt Millie's kittens, allows me find an obscure article in a journal or find out what side effects the expensive drug my doctor wants me to take might have. To each their own.
Most of the sand on the beach does nothing but sit there and look pretty, but where else would we go to play vollyball?
Re:It's ugly (Score:3, Insightful)
I get the spirit of what you're saying, but there is a deeper truth here.
They don't have the same sensibility as us, so we're disinclined to like the things that they generate and/or circulate.
Subjectively speaking, anything that we like cannot help but suck once they get their hands on it.
Original intent of what now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because the original intent of the Internet was that links were gold, that searchability was key, that this ability to find anything and use resources from wherever was magic.
Um, no. The original intent of the Internet was to allow computers to communicate. The above quote doesn't even describe the World Wide Web. What it does describe is GOPHER. Why should anyone take seriously the comments of someone who obviously has no clue about the subject of which he speaks?