Gopher – Gopher was one of the old Internet protocols before the WWW. It imposed a much stricter hierarchy on content, which had to be placed in folders and indexed with a text menu. It only lasted from 1991 to 1993. here is a list of still-functioning Gopher servers – amongst others, Firefox has a Gopher protocol. And here is an Ars Technica writeup on what the Gopher-heads are up to now.

BBS Banners – Just about the most amazing cultural Internat art ever, these were character graphic images done in ASCII or ANSI characters, which, when you dialed into a bulletin board system, would gradually scroll up welcoming you with all kinds of surprising artwork. Most of the graphic artists in the BBS community worked for free or little money; many are forgotten forever now. Here’s a whole gallery of rendered BBS art.

“Under Construction” GIFs – There was practically a whole subculture just revolving around animated gifs in the early web days. Believe it or not, you saw these things every day in the mid-’90s web. A whole gallery of Under Construction GIFs.

Old Portable Gadgets – Old digital gizmos were not much better than a programmable calculator with a hyperthyroid problem, but they’re amazing to revisit now. A blog devoted to cataloging these, called It Ain’t Dead Yet, has lots of shots that will jog your memory. Crikey! Is that a Timex Sinclair 1000?

Unix System Manuals – If you went to college in the 1970s and took comp-sci, chances are at some point you found yourself thumbing through stacks of manuals in a room full of noisy PDPs and Vaxes. Relive those days with this collection of original Unix First Edition Man Pages. Complete with a page for ‘b’, the compiler for the B programming language! What, you didn’t think they started with C, did you?

Peter Brittain
Digital Agency

More funding is being thrown at research to try to make computers have common sense. You’ve seen this story before, and you’ll see it again – just the players change. Related to this is the concept of the semantic web – the Holy Grail of Internet information retrieval where you will someday be able to type “Abbey Road” into a search engine and it will know that you mean the street, not the album or the studio. Or something like that!

The article makes a comparison to the sense of a child who looks out the window, sees snow falling, and knows to go put on a coat before going outside. Now, a knowledge system would be able to make this connection given this simple rule: “If snow is falling outside, then it is cold.” The snow bit flips on the cold bit. However, even after we give the machine all of these rules to work with, it still wouldn’t match the reasoning of a human who can extrapolate new rules from other related rules.

Consider if you had an erupting volcano nearby and so lava was falling. Even if you’d never seen lava before or heard of a volcano, you’d look at the lava, smell the sulfer in the air, watch the screaming villagers running away from it, and conclude that whatever this new stuff is, it must be bad news. So maybe wear two coats before going out.

Talk about reinforcing a cliche! As this post demonstrates, our biggest web businesses all got their beginnings in garages, basements, and bedrooms. With the exception of some offices.

Not pictured: Yahoo! was started in a trailer on the campus of Stanford University! Certainly, they deserve some more juice than some teenager who draws MySpace backgrounds, don’t they?

One notable mention is PopCap games. If we may be so bold as to speculate, PopCap basically owes its success to being the first link you find on Sun Microsystem’s Java.com site after you’ve successfully downloaded and installed Java. Now trace the

psychology: you just installed Java, got it set up, and now need to test it. Hey, there’s a handy site right here! So you go there and it’s games! What a fun reward after the hard work of installing Java. Hey, this site is fun, think I’ll bookmark this!

Read-Write Web has a characteristically well-thought-out post about the new world of thinking digitally instead of physically. You can particularly appreciate the part about computer-phobia.

Who among us, working in a tech-related field, has not had an acquaintance who waved away our computer-jargon with the retort “I don’t understand computers!” Or gotten a phone call from a relative late at night, who needed help with their home computer?

At the same time, software engineers, web designers, and graphics artists seem to be at a loss when it comes to dealing with the physical world. A great programmer is stumped when their car stalls, a brilliant web designer will have their website in perfect order while their desk is buried under three feet of junk, and many IT professionals tend to let their health go, developing the expanding waistline and fluorescent-lighting complexion that goes with spending all your time in a cubicle or a server room.

We have to remember that the first microprocessors emerged in the early 1970s, which makes them about 40 years old. That’s an extremely short time, when you consider how used we are to the digital age. In all of human history, we’ve only had the span of two generations to adapt to a world with computers in them, and yet they are everywhere in our world. No wonder some of us have a hard time dealing with them!

Compare things like cars and phones. We’ve had those around for nearly a century, and as a result we’ve gotten more of a handle on them. The average person may not have mechanic knowledge, but they at least understand that a car needs gas, oil, a battery, and coolant. They understand how to do simple maintenance tasks like changing a flat tire or replacing an air filter.

And telephones make sense to people on a level where computers do not. The average citizen – excluding the tech-savvy reader we expect you are – is still fuzzy on the concept of the Internet; how can that web page be across the country and yet right in front of them at the same time? Yet they have no problem understanding that the voice on their telephone is coming from a person very far away.

Peter Brittain

That’s just what this guide does. Very complete and yet easy to scan, it touches on every aspect from layout to logos, setting down once and for all what exactly Web 2.0 is and what it is not. It uses lots of examples and spots trends you probably didn’t even notice.

Part of the Web 2.0 design trend has been inspired by the move to mobile platforms. If you browse websites on a cell phone, the smaller icons and logos, simpler design, and cleaner, clearer aesthetic works far better on a small screen than the old styles.

What has me curious is, what’s coming after this? The soft and glossy design style is great, but with everybody doing it perhaps we’ll look back on this time as a sort of “disco era”, when the Web 2.0 design trends are all associated with the first decade of the 21st century. Look back on the styles of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s – you cannot look at a pair of bell-bottom pants or a polyester leisure suit and not know immediately what decade it came from. When we look back on Web 2.0 and say, “That’s so aughties!”, what styles will we be using then?

Peter Brittain

Wikipedia gives an excellent description of the RFI attack. Briefly, you used PHP’s “include” function to include whatever file was specified after the ‘?’ prompt in the URL. Guess what? We’ll just include our own file from some other server there and look at your web page that way! No password cracking, no muss, no fuss, and not even any trace left.

Guard against this! Turn off “register_global” on your server if it isn’t off already, and just plain don’t allow URL-include in the first place. If you have several pages of code that have to link together, include the file specifically by name in the code itself.

Peter Brittain

This makes sense when you combine a couple of factors of human nature. One is habit. We people are getting more and more used to instant gratification. Have thought, text message, post to Twitter. Get sudden urge to hear old 80s song again, search YouTube, listen to it. You get the picture. We’re surrounding ourselves by mobile devices of every shape, and it’s just training us to be less and less patient with lag.

The other factor is uncertainty. If you knew, every time, that no matter how long it takes, the page you want will eventually come up, you’d probably wait longer. But there’s so many things that could go wrong. Is it a bad connection? Server failed? Account suspended? Bad link? Too much Javascript slowing the page down? A Flash load? Webmaster mistake? We don’t know, but if it doesn’t come up in a few seconds, we know that we’ll get what we’re lookign for somewhere else.

Just one more reason to only host your site on a server running Linux (the fastest, most efficient system), and with a local web host so you cut out all the lag you can.

Peter Brittain

People always ask, “How do these idiots make money?” There’s your answer: they don’t. They pay money. At the end of the chain, perhaps all of the spam that has ever been sent in the history of mankind has only made one, single person any profit: the guy who made the spamming tools and sold them to a few suckers.

Anyway, look for trouble on the Twitter front. Which means more interoperability for malware and worms, which should be all over this like ants on a sugar cube soon. Bots – even the ones who infect PCs – have traditionally used IRC to communicate in a network and collect orders, but now they might have Twitter available, too.

Peter Brittain

Crowd Psychology – This is what happens when individuals find that they have more power as a group than when they act alone. If you’ve done something that has a bunch of people upset, expect one to post your link, two more to demand to know your name, five more to dig up the information and post it, and a mob to form in front of your door by sundown. Watch this very carefully!

Opinion Leadership – The strongest voice and the clearest communicator comes out at the top of the thread. Others start looking up to that person – sometimes to the point of holding their own opinion until they’ve read the thoughts of the “opinion leader”! This is often the “top submitter” on a social news site.

The Bandwagon Effect – When a large crowd rallies around a certain idea, the idea becomes more popular and attracts more supporters. It’s a snowball!

The Idea Economy – You’ve heard this term bandied around on web marketing blogs. It is, quite literally, an economy. You take out what you pay in. people with nothing to contribute, such as jokers or trolls, find themselves voted to the bottom of the thread while the people with the ideas that speak to people get voted to the top.

Turf Wars – Don’t let the people on Digg know you go to Facebook. Don’t go on Facebook asking about 4chan. Don’t go in 4chan bragging about your MySpace page. And so on. Social web members are starting to get a little territorial, seeing the differences between the various sites as a wedge of “us vs. them”. This can be tricky.

The Herd Mentality – Often decried on the site itself, even by its guiltiest practitioners! Face it – people like to hang out with other people who agree with them. Yes, it makes us all sometimes petty, irrational, and argumentative. But it’s still human nature – ignore it and you go broke!

This starts with a commercial during the SuperBowl. The SuperBowl is the biggest game of the year of the sport which our friends across the ditch so laughably call “football”, though we’ll throw our lot in with the idea of what football should really be called. Anyway, the advertisements during the SuperBowl are nearly as big a draw as the game itself.

So GoDaddy decided to buy some airtime for its own commercial, and, well, the fallout from the sexist advertisement actually drove customers away. One Twitter comment summed it up nicely: “They assume every web designer is teen male. This midage female web designer taking work elsewhere.”

Now, we have as much of a sense of humor as anybody. But in addition to being gross, sexist, raunchy, and tasteless, the advertisement is also pointless and unfunny. And to the point, they’ve just offended half of their market base. While women lag behind men statistically in other tech professions, there is a more equal ratio of women to men in the Internet-related industry than any other branch of IT.

Plus, as far as the audience goes, studies are finding that women are outnumbering men on the Internet. So now if you have a GoDaddy site and your visit numbers have dropped due to women refusing to patronize sites hosted by them, now you know why.