Is the act of "randomly" surfing the net a dying trend?: When the internet first started, people used to surf the net randomly out of pure fascination. They would try to find sites they never heard or, or even more bizarre, create fictitious website names (of things and places they know) and see if there is a corresponding website.
e.g. They would randomly type www.london.com or www.cars.com or www.potatoes.com and see what's there. Such was the popularity of such behaviour that companies, like large diy retailer B&Q purchased the domain www.diy.com in order to get traffic from such random "internet ramblers" that might be tempted by diy solutions.
In fact the practice of random surfing became so popular that it give rise to sites such as www.stumbleupon.com, which is still alive today. That in itself tends to support the view that "surfing the internet" is indeed very much alive today!.. except that in a very different guise to what it was when it first came into being. In fact it's a tradition that's been around since the beginining of media development. If we take the original Newspapers, TV or Radio (Wireless, as we used to call it) programs. These were always presented to us in a random fashion, whether it be news, current affairs, comedy or soap, the randomness of it is what captivated our interest. Imagine if we could predict all of the contents of tomorrows newspaper, there would be no point in reading it, would there?!.. So there you have it: Information that is interesting tends to be random, and so lives on our love with "surfing" the internet!, the only difference is, that it's an evolving process!.. (Ooops: I've just accidentally clicked on "next blog"!)
No comments:
Post a Comment