Enrico’s reflections

In the beginning the Web was made by few willing people but they could only create their web pages if they knew HTML, rarely there were forums or chat and so there was small interaction. Nowadays interaction with users and easiness of use are the keys to success. People is happy to create something personal because in the net they could find for sure someone to share their own interest, or only because you want to express themselves. On the other hand companies have understood that the net is so huge that it's impossible to create contents for everyone and it's easier, cheaper and more profitable to host user-created material and to give the users the tools to create and share they thoughts, images, audio, clips and so on... Furthermore people that find custom made material can effortless reuse it, comment it, reorganized it or tag it, this fact increase interaction and gives birth to a network effect and anyone can have benefit from it because it improves their imagination and their capability to associate things. I think this has helped changing the idea about people that uses a computer. They were imagined as asocial people! Nowadays it's the opposite, since everybody is connected if you're not you're out of this world. I consider myself as one of the 'old' Internet-people: I own a website where I keep the programmes I did and where I wrote some information about me and my career at the university but only some friends of mine know about it. I don't want to expand because I've notice that keeping a blog takes a lot of time.

The cons of this new revolution are that this much freedom creates many problems. First of all there's the usual Internet problem: anyone can access the web pretending to be someone else. Oddly these people are still believed and many teen-agers have been lured this way. I think its a matter of education, in my humble opinion you can't trust someone met on the web because the only things you know are the one he's told you. The second problem is that you must pay attention to what you publish because we're bounded to an elder idea of copyright. Finally not everybody take advantage from these new technologies but in my opinion the things people have to master about the web are not blogs, IMs, or video-casting because there is small commercial feedback from these new technologies. If you don't want to be cut off try to improve your knowledge of E-Commerce, places to get reliable news, security and so on...