The eagle has landed. Red team go / by Keren Moran
What do you expect to find here?

Would I have clicked this heading: "Internet"? - been interested enough to move my finger?
Feeling particularly mellow I might quick-scan some of the photos and read through a couple of paragraphs. About 20 words in a link to something else (somewhere else ) would probably distract /entice me and I'd move on.

DON'T GO YET

Of course it's not just me. I'm not even an extreme specimen of this not-so-new-anymore culture.

One very good friend of mine recently subscribed me to his newsletter imaginatively dubbed: "Da Gadget News".
Once a month I get a weird assemblage of this crazy guy's online travels delivered to my inbox. Links to devices that Let Women Pee like Men arrive alongside news and reviews of new Automatic Human Washing Machines and a " funky" new service called textOK that sends "I'm OK" SMS to your pre-registered friends and family during disaster - to name a few.

The bizarre manifestations of human peculiarities he sends aren't really the thing I'm getting at though. New inventions, viable and not-so-much have been around forever and today the web is undeniably the most efficient venue to "air and declare"
For me these disjointed amalgamations of information are just choice snapshots - as personal as photos from a trip to Paris and as impersonal as a photo of just another figure smiling at the camera with the Eiffel tower in the background.

In 1996 a group of people in San Francisco founded a non-profit organization with the intent of creating and preserving an internet archive /library.
The mission attached to this endeavor is preventing the Internet - " a new medium with major historical significance. from disappearing into the past. Libraries exist to preserve society's cultural artifacts and to provide access to them.Without cultural artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures."

Remember Y2K? How airplanes were supposed to stop in mid air and banks would be like super markets in this month's New Orleans ? Take a trip in time with their Wayback Machine and visit that dodgy website someone paid $50,000 for before the Dot com crash in 2001..

Before that crash, I was employed in a Start-up company in Israel . We were developing an application that could combine Cinema on Demand, Video conferencing, thousands of Television Channels, online Shopping malls - you name it - we had it - and it would all be accessible over the Internet and simultaneously (duh)!
We spent 2 years of frenzied toil developing this monster that got as far as tottering on unstable legs to it's very own flash launch event in NYC before crashing with so many other pipe dreams and inflated Dot.Com egos.

For a few years many of my friends and colleagues went traveling, became cynical, and abandoned beliefs that the internet was going to change the face of the earth tomorrow.
Funny thing is now, 5 years down the track there is again a rustling and murmur as the same ideas start to resurface and refinance.

This time though the statistics are different. Many many more people have broadband. Things like Google Earth and Skype are exciting but expected."Where to next"? - used and abused - still works and I guess Here is as good a "place" as any.