One thing I love about the internet is how much we, the users, own it. We own the internet. Case in point:
Last Friday I was thinking about how I haven’t been out surfing in quite awhile. I went to my go-to site for local surf conditions and found it in a state of disarray. Frankly, it feels stale now. It used to be a wealth of great info and it felt fresh. It was well taken care of at one point. Now it just sits there…getting old and looking older.
What is a web developer to do when a formerly informative site is no longer fun to visit? I realized that a lot of their information was coming from outside sources. Their tide chart was coming from the Scripps Institute. And several other informative parts of the site were publicly available elsewhere on the web. So I took the URLs of that info and made my own surf conditions page:
It has everything I want to know about local surf conditions and I don’t have to go elsewhere and see an old, stale site. I don’t own this information, but now I’ve taken ownership of how I get it and I present it in a way that suits my needs. Nice!
Second case in point: would you like to watch me work today? Sound like fun? No, I know it doesn’t. But you can. ustream.tv lets you set up and stream a live video feed on the internet. Before ustream, delivering streaming video was the kind of difficult voodoo that you needed a PhD in quantum mechanics to pull off. And my PhD is in collecting tech gadgets, so I was out of luck. Now I can just do it. And…I can put my streaming video feed wherever the hell I want:
http://robknight.net/live (Watch 10am – 2pm, 04 May 2007)
The webcam world, formerly only for women of questionable judgement and cat’s litterboxes, is now available for anyone with a camera. And you know what? It’s as free as a slice of turkey sausage in a Dixie cup at Trader Joe’s.
We own the internet. Go forth and create!