| plantations |
[2007 May 17th | 11.07pm] |
Nicholas Carr in today's Guardian technology supplement talks about the increasing concentration of use of the web into a smaller number of 'mega-sites' like Google and Wikipedia. He puts some of this increase down to social sites like Facebook and MySpace, and some of it to the positive feedback effect of Google's search results - more popular sites get linked to more often so rank higher in searches so end up more popular.
Thing is, though, I remember reports like this, what, ten years ago? The web was a lot newer then, but was about becoming established. I remember reading at least one article along the lines of "people spend more time online than a year ago, but a greater proportion of it at a small number of major sites", these being the big portal sites of their day like Yahoo! and Altavista. So, fair enough, it's a sensible enough article, but it's not saying anything unexpected. I'm sure Google's ranking system has provided an important way for this aggregation to increase, but it's something that was going to happen anyway. First few years of the web were stumbling around, seeing what you could find here and there, but soon some places become influential and their importance increased as more people got to know about them. It happens with anything new. |
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