The Internet - drowning in its own waste?

[LochnarITB]

I started to write a post talking about big business and advertising and interactivity. I struggled with it because I kept coming to the same point you were drawing. Its going down and the hand is waving. The net offers the opportunity for people with a passion to express it freely. The Lurker Lounge is an excellent example of that. Just as with TV, most of what is out there is designed to draw in advertising dollars. Although there are good sites that do rely on advertising, those dollars do tend to bend most sites to their will. Witness how many searches take you to other "search engines" or sites full of banner ads where the only place you find your search term is in the keywords designed to draw you in. All this drek is the water the net surfers are drowning in. Finding the sites that do justice to their passion means swimming up through all the rest. Most people expect things to just work, like the toaster sitting on their counter, so they believe that what they can reveal through a simple search is the be all end all on their subject. They can't or won't take the time and effort to even understand the computers they search on, why would they put such effort into using something they consider part of that computer? Computers 101 should be required of every person purchasing a computer followed by Internet 101 for anyone signing up with an ISP, maybe even Internet 102 for those choosing AOL or MSN. :P