Long ago, when the web moved at 300 baud¹ and seemed fast, most of the good ideas for a virtual online community were already created.

When the US government decided that the Internet was public domain, the creative energies of thousands of University students and faculty rose to the challenge and began to build communication channels. Things that we take for granted these days...e-mail, newsgroups² , and listservs³ were conceived and built. Over time these arcane protocols spawned an awe-inspiring virtual library of thought. If you lived in those heady early days, had an Internet connection, and were willing to suffer the pain of configuring your PC or Mac, you could find an answer to literally any question. In today's web of "click here", and "win this", it is increasingly difficult to weed out the noise and connect to the signal. The reality of this information overload has inspired any number of business models to deal with the cacophony⁴ .

Now if you, like me, are constantly asked your opinion on this or that "new" idea for the Internet, and like me you feel as if you have no frame of reference for whether anything is actually going to work...then ponder this. Before animated gifs, and a plethora of plug-ins, the 'Net was words. People wanted to search and retrieve these words in a way that made sense. As mentioned earlier, my personal favorite are Listservs. You send an e-mail to a server that "subscribes" you to the list, and "viola!", the next day you have a neatly indexed digest of posts and responses to the topic of the list. Very little noise, lots of signal. So⁵...let's take the hottest "new" technology of 1996...PUSH. Now push technology companies had a good idea, at the time everyone thought it was original...but think about it. What is "Push Technology?" You ask for information on a particular subject, and when some is found, you get it. Sound familiar? That's right. Push was invented YEARS before anyone had ever heard of WYSIWYG⁶, in the form of our old and dear friend, the ListServ.

SO...the next time someone asks you if "X" Technology is gonna make it on the 'Net, look for something like it from 1975...If you find it, start funding that puppy, and buy some shares for me!