Too Many Experts and Not Enough Amateurs?
There’s a hole in the web and I wonder if it’s being noticed. For a few weeks, I’ve been doing random, but general, Google searches, for the first time in about two years. Usually, I dash in, grab the information I need, and get out fast, rather than spend time browsing. Oh, my fur and whiskers, there’s been a change.
Today, there are more websites than ever before. There are row upon row of business sites, a cacophony of blogs, news sites to match every ideology, and plenty of sites best left unmentioned. Yet there’s one kind of website that used to be abundant, but now seems to be disappearing.
In the old days of GeoCities and AOL Hometown, anyone could build and maintain a website. They usually weren’t much to look at ( except when they had WAY too much to look at ); they may have had awful designs, annoying ads, tricky navigation, and enough animated gifs to give a design school graduate a coronary; but they were easy to build, easy to maintain, and, above all, they didn’t cost a cent.
Say what you will about those old freebie sites, but they did one thing surprisingly well. Overall, many of them presented excellent content. That’s because they were produced by amateurs, in the best sense of the word. They were produced by people who truly loved their subjects. One might have a full catalog of the work of an obscure artist, another might tell you everything there is to know about vintage Christmas ornaments, while a third might be an autobiographical memoir of growing up in a small town back in the 40′s. Of course, there were also such unforgettable moments as “the THIRD prairie dog on the internet.” Hey, I’m not saying they were the Algonquin Round Table, for crying out loud, but there were thousands of them and they covered every topic imaginable. Now, most of them have disappeared into the recesses of the Wayback Machine.
Free web hosting is pretty much a thing of the past. A few free hosting services survive, but they seem to be pretty much ignored. Today, the web is home to businesses and to experts, both real and self-proclaimed, who can spend time and money on their sites. Those amateurs of the old days couldn’t always afford to do that, and the web is poorer for their absence.
Note: It’s been suggested that free blogging services became the next outlet for the sort of amateur I’m talking about. That opens a whole new can of worms, so as soon as I’m in the mood for more keyboard babbling, I’ll post on just why a blog can never tell a story as well as an informational website. Hold the brickbats until I’m finished.
About the author
A loose cannon by right of descent, Jeffrey developed a fascination with figuring out anything related to computers precisely because he never even saw one in school. He's been writing for thirty years and blogging for four, primarily on local history, medieval history, church architecture, and religious art. Jeffrey describes his interests as, "too confounded many for a well-ordered life."
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