What Went Wrong With the Internet? Nothing.

These days it's hard to consume any mass media without hearing someone talking about what went wrong on the Internet. After spending the late 90's covering the boom, journalists and pundits alike have made the Internet their favorite whipping boy. The thinking goes something like this: A lot of people were getting rich on the Internet, then the stock market bubble burst and now dot-com's are as pass� as the Macarena � therefore, the Internet has failed to live up to its promise.

Was making a bunch of 20-somethings rich the promise of the Internet? Was it even driving our economy into the stratosphere? In a word, no.

I'm hear to tell you that absolutely nothing went wrong with the Internet. In fact, the Internet is thriving. Not thriving if you think generating unprecedented economic growth is thriving. I'm talking much more about what the early Internet pioneers had in mind -- a new paradigm in communications -- a distributed, many-to-many network. Look back at what people were saying about the Internet in its first 15 years and you see very little talk of commercialization. Heck, I remember in the mid-90's when it was still very controversial whether advertising and commercial sites should even be allowed. At the time, the Internet was still largely used as a forum for sharing information, some academic, some, well, not so academic. I got excited about the Internet because I saw it as a social/cultural phenomenon -- long before "P2P" was in the popular lexicon a lot of people talked about the potential for the Internet to dramatically alter the media landscape, smashing barriers to entry for publishing and broadcasting -- introducing a new ecosystem for memes to thrive.

The explosion of "blogspace" is proof enough, in my mind, of the thriving Internet. The very fact that you are reading this for these moments of your life and NOT watching/reading something produced by a big company is, in itself, remarkable when you think about it.

Now, don't get me wrong. Spam, pop-ups, porn, ink cartridges -- all are the bane of sane people everywhere. And yes, the hype about the Internet changing everything was, perhaps, overdone. But, the Internet HAS changed everything. Not as quickly as some thought, perhaps, but change nonetheless. Since this is the first post, let me end here and just say that the various ways the Internet is changing our world is one of the major themes here . . .