Look at this blog space and you’ll notice that every day more people put up their personal blog. Some people clearly expect it to be read (I’m not one of them), others don’t but are just keeping it as a kind of diary, some people have it as a groupspace…
Anyway, the thing is, my son and I were discussing the other day, how many new web pages are created every day. I reckon at least a million, he thinks that’s an overestimate. Anyway, must be heaps (technically speaking). So if more and more web pages are created, the web’s getting bigger and bigger. For all these ‘births’, are there ever any ‘deaths’? If not, will there come a point where Google just stops searching and says ‘1 million matches found…we give up!’. There will be corners of the web where the light of human eye never, ever, penetrates! It will be like the universe, in which, presumably, there are whole systems we’ll never know about. That is, if the universe, like the web, is infinite.
So could you live in this universe? A sci-fi thriller yearns to be written about a hero/heroine who takes up residence on the net (I don’t read sci fi so no doubt thousands have already been written). I know there’s stuff about people living in computers – but what if you actually kept turning up unexpectedly in people’s blogs? It would be like turning up in their lives – oh shit, this is one grungy hangout, this place stinks, let’s move on…ahhh, now here’s intellectual heaven, can I play on your lawn with your labrador?’..