Internet, HTML and Blog

The Web was predicated as the 4th dimension or 4th generation of media at the inception of the World Wide Web in late 1980s. Printing, radio, and TV are refereed to as three dimensions of traditional media. In 1989, I was reading an Oreilly books talking about the Web when only universities and government agencies had access to the Internet via text-based and Unix-based interface at the time. The Web would be really nice I though.

There’re three milestones in the course of the Internet becoming a true media for average people, not just a tool for scientists and scholars.

The first milestone is the Internet that use a standard communication protocol TCP/IP. Without a simple yet powerful standard, a computer network will never be able to grow into a global network that connects millions of computers seamlessly.

The second milestone is the HTML, which give the boring Internet a colorful interface. Anyone could master the basic HTML tags for creating Web pages. Just like the TCP/IP, HTML is a simple and powerful standard for rendering web pages. The simplicity again prevails. The Web, without participation of mass, will never be a interactive media.

The third and the latest, sure it won’t be the last, milestone for the birth and popularity of the new generation of media is the Blog. Blog refers to both a software tool for easy publishing and writing styles that is conversational. Wordpress.com, one of the most popular free blog hosting services, caters a community of bloggers close to half million. There goes Spring Snow Blog. With the blog software, one can easily setup a new website in less than 30 minutes without knowledge of computer or HTML. Once again, simplicity prevails. Technorati.com is a blog search engines that indexed 55 millions of blog posts. Blog search engines work better that general search engines, like Google or Yahoo Search!, when it comes to locate a blog site or specific blog posts.