Mitochondrial Web

The advertising industry is like a giant tributary of creativity feeding the internet with what seems to be a never ending stream of content.

The financial world is blazing across the bandwidth offering people opportunities to buy anything and manage their monetary assets in all kinds of flexible ways.

The educational world is ridding itself of the confines of the classroom and spreading its wings across a network of unlimited knowledge.

Commerce is booming in this digital shuk offering buyers products never before attainable at any price one chooses.

Community and communications has become an open stream connecting people from past present and into the future.

Every single day is another surprise, full of new visual toys and entertaining and interactive websites to play with. It is like a sea, a giant ocean teeming with intelligent life in the form of art, design and information technology.

Looking back at the late 90's it now occurs to me that this was the internet's version of the Big Bang not the Bubble Bust.

I feel extremely lucky to be a part of the birth of this new online realm, its like finding a new planet with life on it, a new societal platform that is going through very similar growth and development pattern as the very planet we live on. Perhaps we can learn from our past mistakes throughout history so that we do not replicate them, virtually, in this new online world that we live in.

The Internet gave life to a world teeming with intelligent technology, it has rejuvenated a world that was starving for better ways to communicate and has built bridges that would connect us as a global nation. It exposes to those who are lacking in cultural luxuries the ability to indulge in them and to cultivate original thought, education, creativity and opinion.

The landscape was raw, its resources limited and its potential unknown. The first signs of life that started to develop as primitive incarnations of what we know today were struggling just to stay alive, fed with venture capitol, youthful ideas and over-inflated expectations, it lasted just long enough so that the evolutionary process could take.

In a primitive world where survival was key the web set up fierce battles of the delivery services that ran in packs on bikes and vans delivering a can of coke and a pint of Ben & Jerry's to anyone who would log on and request it. You had web currencies that ran themselves into early extiction.

Travel sites promising carpet rides to the moon and the amazonian commerce sites that now quietly lay below the surface of the waters still vicious and deadly like mighty crocodiles who devour the herds as they must cross through the shallow waters with only one or two making it to the other side; bruised and bitten.

The giant search engines roamed freely with very limited purpose other that to use their mighty necks to see above the landscape. They too fell one by one as the evolution of the search became a mighty intelligent being that does all.

The once fierce GIF and the nimble JPG have been overtaken by the sleek and elegant SWF and the the regal Quicktime.

It seems that we have sped through the prehistoric age of the web, the speed of its advancement has accelerated its evolution and we are now embarking on a new age.

The bust was a bang and that bang has shattered across the world.

The Internet age has begun.