Didn't have a personal computer at home, so I browsed the Web at work. Still accessing USENET newsgroups; I saw the WWW as a complement to that, not a replacement. (Obviously, that changed later.) Discovered the Yahoo! Directory early on. That was like visits to my University library. I would track down a book of interest via the card catalog, then head to the stacks. There I discovered all kinds of other interesting books surrounding the target of my search. (Yes, I was, and still am, a nerdy bibliophile.)

The Yahoo! Directory was like that. I'd look up a topic of personal interest. That would reveal the goodies, and also some stuff that, in my mind, belonged elsewhere in the index. The associated sites were crude at times, and there was a lot of naivete in the writing, but lovingly crafted by hobbyists and experts to share what they learned and knew. It did take a critical eye to separate the wheat from the chaff, sort of like with the mis- and dis-information posted today, but much easier to judge back then.

Then Google took over with PageRank. Focus on popularity as a proxy for relevance. (Basically a form of crowdsourcing, and sometimes equally off the mark.) No more delightful side trips and serendipitous discoveries; the Web was now focused on getting users to what they (supposedly) want, as quickly as possible. (Isn't that what American enculturation teaches us to do? Be productive, and diligent.)

My apologies in advance for what follows. I want to compare, but mostly contrast, what we had in the "golden age" to what exists today. The ranting may obscure my attempt to point out the good and not so good of the old versus the new.

*RANT ON (I guess) Later came advertising, because hey, how will you pay for this suff. (And capitalism as practiced in the U.S. says "nothing succeeds like excess".) Those naive early web authors didn't think much about that, or it least it seems that way based on what appeared to readers. *RANT OFF.

Probably the worst aspect of the web today is all the SEO pollution, as SEO consultants (those with little or no scruples) and ignorant small business people (not necessarily based in this country) flood their pages with tags and phrases designed to attract readers via search results, in hopes of a sale conversion to something they offer. The assumption here is that at least some consumers are easily distracted, and primed for an impulse buy. (The SEO consultants fan the flames with shouting: "get your results to the TOP of Google's search results", not necessarily because of relevance.)

There's a lot of good stuff out there today. Much more than back in the mid-90s, but sometimes it's much harder to find it due to all the cruft. Maybe I should call it what it is: CRAP! Kind of nice taking a trip down memory lane. Don't want to go back to that reality, but wish that some of the positives lived on today ... and were possible (easy?) to find.

Merger-generated synergy is more than just layoffs (or "redundancies" as the Brits say). It also includes sales and marketing schemes such as cross-promoting products between subsidiaries (whether they make sense or not), and bundling applications (at a "reduced price" unless you're Amazon) from one division with hardware from another. After all, you've (supposedly) just reduced the sales cost on one product, so you can afford to discount the sale price on the total transaction.

Another synergy is to cut costs (in product/program development) and increase revenue by selling the same or similar products under different brands. Retain the old entity names after the merger (example: HP/Compaq, IBM/Sun), but replace competing product lines with rebranded versions of the "best version" (probably cheaper to build or more profitable, but possibly highest volume). Eventually, customers will forget that there's really less competition and less choice. (At least, that's the theory.)

Just remember this: synergy is all about benefits for the producer; any advantages for the consumer are secondary to that. It's a marketeer's dream (and a savvy consumer's worst nightmare), but it's still synergy.

Boldrin and Levine have posted the bulk of their book Against Intellectual Monopoly on the Web. So, if you don't want to purchase a dead-tree version of the work, you can download what amounts to an e-book (free of charge, but minus the front and back matter) from Mssr. Boldrin's website.

Last time I checked, there was a copyright regime in place for published works. I call these authors enlightened, not hypocritical, for finding a middle ground. Their publisher, Cambridge University Press, probably requires a copyright on any works that they distribute, if for no other reason than to protect their investment. The publisher also shows a degree of enlightenment, in allowing the simultaneous posting in digital form without DRM, unlike most publishers these days. By the way, Lawrence Lessig has followed a similar approach with his book Free Culture. (That work is also copyrighted, but the PDF version on the Web is released under a Creative Commons license.)

Apparently I was unclear in my critique of Mark Shuttleworth's proposal to replace the "filing system" model implicit in GNU/Linux. Understanding the hierarchical model of UNIX file systems works for me, but not for a user like my mother. (I helped introduce her to computing at age 72 or so, though she opted for Windows over the MacOS approach that my spouse and I originally recommended. I watched how files piled up on her computer over time. It's clear that she doesn't grok files and directories, but she doesn't need to understand that model for what she does.) By the same token, her "filing scheme" would never suffice for the thousands of files that I use in my own projects.

Perhaps the easiest problem to tackle is that there appears to be no consistent set of rules for saving files by default. Application A stores files in one place, and application B in another. Your 99.9% of users probably expect that data is data, and therefore that it should be "all in the same place" unless they say otherwise. Turns out that their expectations are more sophisticated than the "system design", which is little more than aggregating applications from disparate sources.

Mark could make a notable contribution to usability if he could get the developers of widely used applications -- Open Office, Gnumeric, Acrobat Reader, Firefox, the GIMP, etc. -- to save files in a consistent fashion -- consistent across applications. Then develop some kind of Spotlight-type wrapper for "find" for those users who don't use an explicit filing system to organize/retrieve their work. Such a scheme would make it easier to form an accurate and useful mental model of how the system works in this regard. It's not revolutionary technology, but would make life easier for a lot of users (myself included), and just might be simple enough (to implement) that developers would buy into the idea. A more radical approach is likely to die on the vine.