I’m obviously going to have to add to this item … I just stopped by ”Gopher still going strong” on Kottke.org to post this comment:
“Gopher still hot? Dang right! I’m still getting hits in my blog from this post. Can we say that it (gopher) is paradigmatic of “long tail”?
K … what’s going on here? I know a) I get fed up with just how bloated FF is and b) it’s sometimes a perk to use telnet and/or pine. Maybe some of us really appreciate sleek / parsimonious?
p.s. Thinking about the interface I’m cobbling together for my “Participatory Deliberation” is where sleek/parsimonious came up. When I slip into that mode I see Web2.0 as spring-loaded and self-evident. A series/collection/suite of single-page apps?”
X-posted to Togo at LiveJournal
You know about WWW-browsers (obviously), and you very likely know about FTP … and maybe about IRC, too.
Do you know about “gopher”? Gopher pre-dates WWW, like IRC and newsgroups (NNTP), and email … it was a way of allowing folk to access other people’s files, kinda like a web browser, but it didn’t rely on HTML pages.
Here’s a blast from the past that’s still appropriate today: “ A Practical Guide to Defeating The Radical Right” and “Directory: Cyberpunk and Postmodern Culture“
Some of the documents in there date back to 1994 … around the time I started publishing web pages.