Brain Candy #99 - The Web Today

It's worth repeating - if you want good sources, some are better than others. I frequently sing the praises of Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org for the English Wikipedia) but of course, it is a collaborative effort and some edits aren't always improvements. If you like to be a bit more certain, there is another information source that I've used that often taps into Wikipedia as well as other resources. It is Answers.com, which calls itself a reference search service. Answers.com will take a query from you and evaluate information from around 100 encyclopedias, dictionaries, glossaries and atlases, presenting what it considers most appropriate. Since Emmylou Harris is playing on the jukebox as I write this, I typed her name in. What came back was her Wikipedia article, and a couple of Emmylou Harris-related ads - it is an ad-supported site. The Wikipedia article is fairly complete, although it might have been nice to have another source. Typing in "chili," I get several dictionary definitions, some recipes, translations into 10 different languages (some of which my browser doesn't know how to represent) and some links to alternate spellings. "Dingo" gets several dictionary and encyclopedia definitions, as well as a few translations and some ads - no recipes, though. Overall, it's a good site to get a quick high-level overview from the dictionary definitions, with more detail in the encyclopedia entries. For some things, like places or specialized terminology, other resources come into play. If you need more, there's always Google.

Another of the major changes due to the web is that news and weather are also at your command, anytime you have a connection. You can get your news from Google, or from CNN, or many national and local newspapers (those that haven't gone to subscription only). There are many weather sites, too, that let you peek at what's coming your way, or perhaps toward someone close to you in every respect but proximity.

Web users can talk to the world. If you're inspired to, it isn't too hard to blog. In some sense, my Brain Candy columns are a blog, since they're posted on the web (in at least two places) and they are a sort of chronological record of my thoughts. Blogs didn't exist as a concept when I started writing these columns. I just wanted to capture my columns on the web. I guess I was part of the wave before it even had a name.

The web has revolutionized "shopping." I quote the term "shopping" because I'm using the term loosely. I want to speak of things beyond normal commerce. The Amazon/EBay/Priceline-type sites are part of the revolution, but I'm also thinking of things like downloadable classic texts from Gutenberg, data and forms from your friendly local bureaucracy, library books from the local library, DVD rentals from Netflix and similar sites and other such stuff. I can deal with my bank, my credit card companies, and common creditors on-line. No muss, no fuss. Some things, like music and movie downloads haven't yet lived up to their potential in my opinion, but someone will get them right eventually. I have no doubt that new ideas will bear fruit as time passes.

What do I see coming? I'm pretty sure that the satellite/aerial/map server software a la Google Earth will be a big thing. CNN has featured it prominently during recent natural disasters. I'm just getting started with it, but I was "flying" through a middling-fair representation of Monument Valley without having to traverse too much of a learning curve. It isn't yet an excellent representation of most non-urban places in the US, but it points the way to the future. My home city of Akron is mapped in detail throughout the city, while Canton is only mapped in low resolution. Small places, unless they have some sort of mapping connection (e.g. Rolla, MO or Bartlesville, OK), are usually of low resolution. Outside the US, it was even more hit-or-miss. I tried Almeria, Spain and found that the center city images were detailed, but the resolution was low away from the center. All of these observations are of the tool and its data as it exists today. Even a few months might change this. NASA has its own software that is supposedly quite nice too - developed for educational purposes and then released to all who are interested.

The two schools of thought over the future of the Web are that either we've only just begun, or we've developed to some degree most of what can be done and the future consists of refinements of what we already have. I think that the future is wide open - if we want it to be. There are major battles being fought over intellectual property and free versus paid access to government information that might easily stunt or even reverse the progress we've already made. It has been pointed out, whether true or not, that our copyright laws are being controlled by Mickey Mouse. Disney and related forces wish that Mickey and other modern moneymaking intellectual property never be allowed to enter the public domain and their efforts have driven multiple cycles of change to copyright law worldwide. These changes block humanity from free access to vast quantities of commercially non-viable intellectual property. Much of this content is disappearing, since it's off-limits to preservation efforts in the public domain due to the restrictive copyright laws and economically unprofitable to exploit by the copyright owners. Is it just for our society to give up the benefits of public domain just to protect Mickey?