WEBS WITHIN WEBS

Dick Pountain/14 October 2006/20:07/Idealog147

From Rupert Murdoch's purchase of MySpace to Google's recent high-profile aquisition of YouTube, all the signs are present that a new bubble is inflating, this time fuelled by online communities rather than mere dot coms. One of the telltale signs is a proliferation of horrid new jargon, designed to impress and flumox the punters who have to pay for it all: 'Web 2.0' is immensely irritating (it means a new web that's created by its users, a bit like graffiti but with adverts); grimmest of all though has to be 'VC2' which stands for 'viewer created content' and means more or less the same thing.

Nevertheless I'm not entirely immune to this feeling in the air that the web is on the move again, and so I shook off my blanket of indolence and updated my own website for the first time in several years. My site was originally constructed in NetObjects Fusion, which at the time seemed like a good idea, and may well have been. However one component of the site was a database of back-issues of this column, and Fusion made such a pig's ear of updating this that I had to hand code all the additions. Eventually I automated the process using batch scripts, but it was still sufficiently tedious that I did it less and less often.

This time round I took a much simpler route. First I peeked into the horrendously profligate HTML that Fusion had generated - hundreds of identical sequences everywhere you looked - and found I could hand-prune it down to about one tenth of its size. I loaded the remnants into Microsoft Word and redesigned in that (frankly, the site doesn't mean enough to me to splash out on Dreamweaver). Then it  occurred to me that there's a perfectly good database of Idealog, with proper search facilities, on the PC Pro site, so I junked that section completely and replaced it with a single link. Ditto the section that contained my illustrations, which are now all on my Flickr site, so that got replaced by a link too.

I've written in this column recently about how much I enjoy using Flickr, but recently I created YouTube and MySpace accounts in pursuit of a research project I'm doing for Dennis Publishing. Before you go to have a snigger though, I can tell you that these latter contain no content beyond my name and mugshot, because I fit into both about as well as a turd fits into a jacuzzi. My first MySpace "friend" was into Death Metal and posed for pictures dressed as an intergalactic gladiator in crotchless tights - I stared at my blank page and slowly started to type "I'm 61 years old, into Bartok, Mingus and Hank Williams..." before my fingers refused to continue. Back in June The Guardian's acerbic, occasionally hilarious, critic Charlie Brooker admitted that at 35 he's too old for MySpace, and I have a quarter of a century on him.

As I created that link from my own site to Flickr though, a profound truth was suddenly revealed to me. Wonderful as the World Wide Web is - and I yield to no man in my admiration for Tim Berners-Lees great invention - it's just too much like hard work for individuals such as myself to maintain isolated websites. What all these community sites actually represent is a partitioning of the web into smaller spaces, within which everyone has similar interests, and inside which maintaining a personal page is very, very much easier than building and maintaining a website. What's more, they all contain mechanisms for getting your stuff looked at by other people that are far quicker, more effective and less tedious than scrabbling to improve your site's ranking in Google, which has now become almost impossible for private citizens.

A few years ago the larger ISPs tried to provide content along with internet access in a concept that was referred to as the "walled garden". Walled gardens failed miserably because of the naffness of the provided content, and users made it perfectly clear that all they wanted from their ISP was TCP/IP on the end of an Ethernet cable, and perhaps some effective spam filtering. But there's a sense in which communities like Flickr and MySpace are walled gardens revisited, this time planted and tended by the users themselves.

Or perhaps a better metaphor is that they're walled cities rather than gardens. The world of the web is passing from its age of primitive cultivation, everyone tending their own little plots, into urbanism: MySpace and YouTube are cities into which people flock from the surrounding countryside. These cities are owned by great feudal lords like Murdoch and the Google founders, but in the finest liberal tradition they allow citizens to do pretty much what they wish, while plotting ways to rake off some of their money in taxes. Outside the city walls there are only small towns which will be either soon swallowed by the nearest city or will perhaps grow to rival it and go to war, in the manner of the hilltowns of renaissance Italy. In this spirit I'd like to be a latter-day Machiavelli, a hired gun who roams between the great lords offering sage advice and stirring things wherever possible...