Seth's Blog - Warning: The internet is almost full

Last August I took a very long (2.5 weeks is long in my book) vacation. Part of it was living in a small hotel in Jamaica without a phone, TV or even an Internet access. Just books on a beach, plus a few pinacalladas of course.

After less than a week I stopped by the lobby to check my email and see "what's going on out there". They had just one lonely iMac sitting abandoned and no customers (Gustav was about to hit the island, so there were only 3 couples left in the entire hotel).

I checked the email, hopped on 2-3 news websites on top of my head, including news.yc, reading every article that seemed interesting and that was it... Took me about 15 minutes. So I left wondering how come I had managed to waste hours surfing every day.

Internet isn't changing: the web (even FIDO before WWW) has always been full of digital noise. But the amount of time you stare at your browser slowly and quietly brings your standards for quality signal lower.

Good reading material isn't growing as rapidly: not every day brings memorable/important events and the number of smart writers with something to say isn't growing as fast.

But on any given day there will always be CNN and their "breaking news", reddit with upvoted articles, startups announcing ground-breaking products that "change the way we live". And most of the time the "news" are exaggerated, articles are boring rants or pictures of fat cats, and "ground-breaking software" is probably another seven HTML-ized MySQL tables or just a web-wrapper around some open source product that would better work on a desktop, but being online allows founders to escape GPL obligation for sharing.

I guess I don't have much of a "positive attitude" today, heh? :)

"No one goes there any more, it's too crowded" - Yogi Berra

As Clay Shirky would point out, the issue here is filter failure. 15 years ago, you might have been able to understand the stuff on the internet - but what about all the newspapers and books written? Or music made?

I doubt it. This problem isn't new. You're always at the knee of the curve as you go up an exponential.

Full of pithy and sensationalist blog posts? Most certainly.

The libraries have been full with more content than any single human could digest long before the internet.

For some reason it seems unlikely that a few major "content providers" will emerge that monopolize new content. We had that already, it was called TV. Does anybody really want to go back to that?

This may be considered off topic, but I visited the major London datacentre last month and perhaps there is also an argument that the growth in the internet is becoming a major hardware (and resultant energy) problem. http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn/news/2232079/hp-warns-datace... Do we keep our faith in Moore's law, or make a concentrated effort at slicker programming?

But the number of people with access to the internet keeps growing, and filtering tools keep improving... I might not be able to view everything cool online, but I can still view more of the things I'm really interested in.

My attention span has always been filled - more content on the internet just means I can be more selective when picking what to fill it with.

"Its not information overload, its filter failure"

One huge factor he omits is the additional overhead of all the surveillance installed by the telcos at the request of the federal government.