Some Knowledge

I don’t think this question can be answered.  The net is in a continuous state of flux, with pages being created and deleted continuously.  The Internet is like a boiling sea of stuff that appears and disappears almost as fast as a person can point and click.  Just by typing up this page, I’ve increased the number of web pages by one.  There are millions of people blogging and making posts to forums and generating websites of stuff.  Every picture posted to Photobucket or any other content hosting site will be a new page.  Even the search engines cannot say how many sites exist on the net.

One thing is for certain, the Internet is huge.  I’ve seen estimates that there are over 500 billion sites on the web.  Those estimates were from a couple years ago.  Today, there could be far more.  Every time Google crawls a page the number of sites goes up, because Google caches sites on their own servers, copying content for their own records.  Nevermind the thousands of robots scraping content for splogs, there is a lot of automatic website creation filling up servers all over the world.

I have seen maps of internet connections for the world that look like some mad artist has gone nuts with colored pens and a ruler.  Starbursts of connections and designations for routers and backbone lines.  No person could singlehandedly figure all this out.  It’s almost like trying to diagram the nerve cell connections in some creature’s brain.  The star topology of the web branches out like neurons, connecting and bridging signals from one location to any other by a series of jumps.  Tracing the individual packets that make up any communication would be like trying to sequence the atoms paths in an ink drop dispersing in water.  Well, perhaps I exaggerate, but it is complex.

What have we created with this vast network of minds and computers?  A better system for merchandising?  The thought of all this technology being for nothing more than to sell shoes is ridiculous.  The net is like having the most learned institutions of higher education as your personal servants.  We can find out just about anything about anything that anybody has thought to post on a website.  The more people who take part in this exchange of knowledge and information, the more powerful the net becomes.  It is not just the servers and the wiring that makes up the Internet, it is the individual remote units, the PCs connected to modems all over the world, and the people who use these machines that gives the net its power.

There are so many different aspects to the Internet that it is almost hard to believe that it all runs on the same machinery.  This is the power inherent in the idea of a general purpose computing machine.  You can use one machine to watch videos, listen to music, read reports, email your friends, download programs, play games, write blog posts, meet people, find and solve problems.  There seems to be no end to the usefulness of this vast system.  Each day tens of thousands of people, probably millions, are employed in keeping the system operating and updated.  Think of all the people working in all the IT departments of all the corporations and universities and governments as working on what is basically one entity, the net.

The Internet is not just computers these days.  The net is taking over telephone communications.  There are many wireless devices like cell phones, IPhones, PDAs and any number of gadgets with web access.  There are refrigerators with net access.  This web of communication is moving into every facet of communications and technology.  The Internet has the power to unite the world in ways that were never envisioned by man when he formed his systems of government.  There is much potential in this technology.  Every day the world reaps the benefits of instant access to knowledge and information.  The future will be a very interesting place.