A billion websites online. Think of that.. fathom that for a brief moment–you, if you have a site, are just one in a billion others.. Twitters flutter like moths at a light in mid-summer … the flurry of activity of brief and intense. Every time you think you have an earth shattering quip or amazing view of a topic, it’s drowned out by the noise of the billion others talking about the same thing..
Things are getting busy on the superhighway.. .DotComs are running low.. other extensions have had to be created to keep up with the demand.. Sometimes it seems that the internet is the place where ideas go to die–where someone can be discouraged by such a lack of attention that they start to drop out of their intelligent arguments. Often times is is disheartening to know that what you say means something, but no one is around to read it. Like a restaurant with no customers.. you can have the best food in town, but everyone is just busy going to BUZZFEED and reading the latest lackluster ‘list,’ or silently and legally stalking friends on Facebook to purposely get jealous of their social lives..
Words mean things. However, with one billion sites, the word count is enormous. Not enough time to read them all..
When my sister used to get bored at her former job, she’d joke to me that she thought was went to ‘every website on the internet today’ .. That was ten years ago. Back when the number of sites was in the millions, blogs were in their infancy, and people still remembered Al Gore saying he invented all of this to begin with.
But what happens when the people who run these websites lose their interest? …I have one answer that may be applicable: BLOGGER.COM happens..
Or TUMBLR inactivity..
Or dead TWITTER accounts..
Or WordPress stopping the pressing….
Or hosted sites stopping the FTPing…
One billion strong. And growing. But how many are being read? And how many, really, are being updated?
I have a few sites that I lost interest in myself–I think now gambling companies or someone just parking their fraud domain now house the homes that were once the proud vestiges of my self-thought writing abilities.
So … live long and prosper, internet..
In the future, I ponder who will ‘street sweep’ the superhighway and take out the trash? Geocities got rid of lots when they completely shut down a few years ago. At any moment, Blogger and Karp’s Tumblr and Zuckerberg’s Facebook and the CIA’s Twitter can do the same. Or wait, doesn’t the CIA have a back door to all of them? And does it matter.. do you really think spooks and spies have time to read all of the words anyway? I doubt it.. Even the computer algorithms attempting to dispose of the remnants of our privacy probably have trouble trying to hone in on one billion chattering chimps all at once.
In a world where everyone has a voice, what voices matter? Do hit counts mean anything? Not always..
Does advertising sell? Not really..
But we try.. One billion affiliates and ad programs, links and ‘templates.’
In the end, though, having a website and a buck will still buy you a cup of coffee….
