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STROLLING DOWN THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY
The Internet is like Al Gore. Or, rather, it is like what Al Gore did
for the Internet. The beneficent, all-knowing Father Gore did not
invent the infrastructure, nor the zero/one, nor the rat's nest of
wires worming away from the back of your comp-box. All that
Professor Frink claptrap oozed out of other eggheads far back in
the distant recesses of time when our Neanderthal forebears still
had to put on pants to play poker with
Russian housewives or buy chemicals to
counteract the hideous effects of a gas
station diet and a sedentary lifestyle.
No, what the once and future president
(the inconvenient truth will set you
free!) did was give a nerdy burble way
off the public radar enough legal wiggle
room to blossom into Technicolor, lives-
don't-run-without-it maturity (seriously,
check out the statement from two of the
dudes who really did invent the Internet,
Khan and Cerf, at www.interesting-
people.org/archives/interesting-
people/200009/msg00052.html). In
so doing, he gave each lonely one of us
the keys to our own electronic destiny-
one that is way cooler, way shinier, and
with way more friends than the oh-so-
passe real one.
Yet, after hours of bathing in the mechanized glow of the comput
er eye, even those of us who've joined the Firefox-fronted tabbed
browser revolution can grow weary of each page's subjective myo
pia. Why, for instance, can't we info-glutted, time-starved surfers
peruse South American soccer scores, bitch-tastic celebrity gossip,
and to-do lists laden with meaningless occurrences simultaneously
without the nagging need to click between the two? Enter www.
netvibes.com. Once the now ubiquitous rigmarole of creating an
account has been dispensed with, users can populate a personal
ized homepage with "modules" that might contain syndication
feeds (those little omnipresent RSS or Atom buttons), podcasts,
ready-made basketball calendars, and a teeming plethora of other
candy-colored delights. View the latest toe-curlingly cute entries
of www.stuffonmycat.com, indulge your linguistic fetish with
Grammar Girl's quick 'n' dirty grammar podcast (http://grammar.
qdnow.com/), view a randomized www.wikipedia.org article or
pre-organized stock quotes from dozens
of financial indices. Further, even the
absolute freshest fruits from the Web
2.0 tree can be effortlessly plucked and
situated on top of whatever personal
izes your backdrop since the ridiculously
friendly "add a new module" function al
lows individual users to add sites, feeds
and functionality or have them vetted
for the community at large via the
NetVibes ecosystem. Once the ground
work has been properly laid, you can
access your homey, familiar new abode
on the web from any connected machine
from here to Mumbai.
What, however, is one to do when what
needs getting at isn’t a carefully curated
collection of electronic ephemera, but
something of a more substantial size?
Though a decade ago our former baggy-
jeaned, Titanic-loving selves might have stood drop-jawed at the
staggering enormity of a gigabyte of space, the disenchanted
creatures we've since become can get that amount of space utterly
free of charge at www.box.net. Rather than fretting the entire
commute to work or school over whether that slide-presentation
was successfully saved on some fragile fragment of plastic and
foil, save it in its swollen, unnecessary entirety to your account
and make blaming the inevitable technical glitches on the :rappy
office machines all the more plausible. Further, savvy friends <"an
also gain access to predetermined caches of info if they've been
Ain't it great to live in the future?
previously named as friendly. Regardless of how far flung these
computer-canny compatriots might be, they could thereby easily
access video of Mr. Murray Sparkles the poodle viciously attacking
shafts of afternoon sunshine or a several-hours-long party playl
ist from their home machines in Manila, Managua or Mozambique
without waiting for the international mail to deliver the goods.
Yet when these constantly mutating, vast quantities of newness
make the forehead itch for the foil fedora, the simple remedies of
a bygone era are only a click away at www.etchy.org. The worry
ing variety of genitalia inscribed onto electronic mock-ups of the
beloved Etch-a-Sketch and saved to the site's archive aside, a few
brief moments engaged with this ancient form of creative technol
ogy can be remarkably therapeutic. Email your heartfelt, abstracted
(using the arrow keys rather than the white plastic wheels of old)
representation to a friend for a slightly less confrontational way to
say, "You've let me down again and again."
Finally, it has been brought to the attention of yours truly here at
the Monkeyhouse that in my zeal to regularly churn up and regur
gitate the finest detritus of the web in which we live, I may have
inadvertently neglected locally-grown cyberproduce. Consider my
cheeks red. Hence, from this moment on, each ensuing iteration
of this column will include at least one Athens-based webventure.
Thanks for opening my simian eyes to this whole new world are
due to some masked avenger going under the clearly fictitious
name of Jason Mallory at www.scenemissingmagazine.com. In
addition to regular snarfle-worthy blog entries, plenty of gorgeous
photos (available bound on actual paper via links on the site),
interviews, audio, et cetera ad infinitum, the "lists forever" sec
tion of Scene Missing Mag contains Top 5 and Top 10 lists well
worth wasting company time reading. With the right chemical
inducements and a punched ticket to the imagination station, the
listed figurative battle between Count Chocula and Ben Franklin,
for instance, is seriously epic and the implied regularity of zombie
dreams in another list is bound to stir genuine sympathy. As a to
ken of goodwill, Scene Missing is now a part of my NetVibes page,
though, by way of full disclosure, the module has been placed
in the teeth of the menacing sperm whale that serves as my rad
backdrop.
Brandon Waddell
I need a lover with soul power Will you hook me up? Links warmly welcomed at
outthere@flagpole.com so long as the Monkey gets his due in the subject line
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