Nick Carr on 8/31/07, writing about the effort to change how the Internet domain system’s “WHOIS” records work:

What makes the WHOIS deadlock interesting is that it reveals, in microcosm, the great and ever widening divide that lies at the net’s heart — the divide between the network as a platform for commerce and the network as a forum for personal communication. The way that tension is resolved — or not resolved — will go a long way toward determining the ultimate identity and role of the internet.

Carr’s succinct (and I think accurate) anatomy of the couer d’Net caught my eye and echoed something just beyond my memory’s grasp. Then I realized, right, this is very much the same dichotomy that I wrote about a long time ago in one of the annual “state of the Web” pieces (from October 1996) that I used to write for Salon:

Two very different groups are emerging with different ideas of how to drive the Web forward: call them the information peddlers and the community builders. The former see the Web as a conduit to distribute information and sell products on a few-to-many pattern; the latter see it as a place to exchange information, many-to-many — to yak.

Not only does this tension between what Carr calls “a platform for commerce” vs. “a forum for personal communication,” or what I called “the information peddlers” vs. “the community builders,” remain prevalent; it is a fissure cutting right through the center of what we’ve come to call Web 2.0.

Here’s a link to the full piece, headlined “After the Gold Rush.” Yes, we were saying that the Web gold rush was behind us. In 1996.

Gnomedex is a friendly, human-scale conference of early-adopter geeks. When Jason Calacanis asked the crowd how many people were on the Web back in 1994 or 1995, four out of five hands went up. The event’s marketing tagline is “The Blogosphere’s Conference,” but of course this is only one slice of one blogosphere (there was, for instance, almost no overlap with this other blogosphere).

The sessions have been a wildly mixed bag. Things got off to a rocky start with the keynote by Robert Steele, a former intelligence officer turned crackpot libertarian who delivered a scattershot rant whose agenda was so vast that it was no agenda at all. For instance, Steele simultaneously advocated the “restoration” of the U.S. constitution (through, among other things, the impeachment of Dick Cheney) and the abolition of the U.S. constitution (via a new constitutional convention).

Steele believes that “central banking is an evil cancer,” but he could not make the effort to explain why. He raced flippantly through his own slides, showing a complete disrespect for the crowd (if he couldn’t take the time to prepare a presentation, why should we take the time to listen?). Among Steele’s positions: Henry Kissinger is a war criminal; the federal government is “going away”; wikipedia is for “morons” but Amazon.com will become the hub for a new global mind; we can attain world peace through “open everything” — including “open carry” of guns. There was something here for anyone to agree with, something else for anyone to disagree with, and in the end nothing of substance.

Far more valuable were Darren Barefoot’s exploration of the relative value of different forms of digital do-good-ism and Ronni Bennett’s presentation on aging and the Web (sites need to do a better job of making themselves accessible to the elderly). Vanessa Fox led a thoughtful discussion about the line between public and private information in a blog-based universe.

The day closed with Calacanis. His title slide read, “The Internet’s environmental crisis: How the Internet is being destroyed by selfish polluters — and how we can stop them.” Calacanis pines for the early days of the Web, before the SEO spammers got involved. But the talk was really a pitch for his new “human-powered” search company, Mahalo (which I wrote about here). Dave Winer called him out from the back row, declaring that the talk itself was “conference spam.”

I just thought there was something naive and/or disingenuous about the idea that Mahalo is a blow against spam. There are many classes of spam-related pollution of today’s Net — e-mail spam, comment spam, spam blogs — and of them all, actual spamming of search results is probably the least pressing. Google still does a pretty good job. The day that Google’s results look like the flow of spam into your e-mail inbox is the day that people will start clamoring for something like Mahalo. But unless Google slips up badly, that looks unlikely.

Mahalo is ad-free today, but sooner or later it will begin running search advertising. already runs Google text link ads, and one imagines it will push that more aggressively over time. (If the service succeeds in drawing big numbers, the pressure will be on to “monetize” the traffic; somebody has to pay all those “humans.”) Calacanis has an editorial background and promises clear labeling of all ads. That’s great. But Google’s ads are clearly labeled and separated from the search results, too. Having editors is a fine thing but it is no more a guarantee of incorruptibility than a good algorithm.

UPDATE: Darren Barefoot posted the full text of his talk. It’s an entertaining and enlightening walk through the comparative social value of many of the different kinds of volunteer activities and contributions people make on the Net to try to improve the world.

I watch precious little TV, but I had a long flight home late at night last Friday, and was brain-dead after too many hours awake but too wired to go to sleep. So I flipped the channels on Jetblue until I found myself staring at a group of a half-dozen or so of what looked like hybrid squirrel-rats, with raccoon eyes, who stood on their hind legs like begging dogs, only with an attentive, thousand-yard stare.

Meerkats. How little I knew! The show, Meerkat Manor — apparently, a big hit over on Animal Planet — follows a meerkat tribe or clan or whatever the term is. There’s a dominant female — she’s the only one allowed to breed — and a dominant male and a bunch of offspring. They hide from Kalahari predators in elaborate burrows — the title’s “manor” — but also engage in fierce territorial strife with other meerkat gangs.

Maybe it was my sleep deprivation, but I found these meerkats intensely dramatic: family tragedy, clan warfare, survival vs. the elements, all enacted by cute critters with sharp claws. The show anthropomorphizes its subjects to a degree that probably makes serious wildlife students cringe; each animal gets a name (like “Zaphod” and “Mozart” and “Flower”) and the gangs are “Whiskers” and “Lazuli” and such. In each show’s intro the meerkats are even given hushed voice-overs. But then the rest of the show proceeds in a less ridiculous, hyper-documentary mode. And fiber-optic cameras show you the action down in the burrows themselves! In this view, the meerkats all look like shoplifters caught on some dim subterranean security camera.

It was over to Wikipedia for me, to learn more. There I discovered that the show’s Wikipedia entry was under lock-down. There’d been an edit war over the meerkats! But why? Apparently some contributors posted information about some major deaths among the Whiskers in the latest season of the show. But that season hasn’t been aired yet in many places, so other contributors view the information as spoilers. And that has led to a fight. If you visit the discussion page you can follow an impassioned debate over whether it is possible to have a spoiler for a work of non-fiction.

If only the meerkats knew what mischief they were making for this strange species that’s filming them.

Salon has a piece today on “The New American Way of Death” about MyDeathSpace, a site that points to the MySpace profiles of recently deceased members, highlights the untimely deaths of young people and offers a discussion space for visitors to post notes — often rude — about the departed. It’s a good, well-researched article that raises questions about the site without taking a crotchety “ban the bums” line. (One of the pleasures of my new status is that I get to read the Salon daily lineup as a surprising cornucopia of reading material rather than the end-product of an inevitably messy editorial process in which I’ve been immersed.)

The thing is, there’s very little that’s “new” about MyDeathSpace. In 1996 I wrote a piece for Salon (we took that summer to publish a special “Death Issue”) titled “Ashes to Ashes, Bits to Bits.” The piece covered a number of topics, including the Well community’s response to Tom Mandel’s death and Timothy Leary’s vision of digital eternity. It also recounted an early instance of the MyDeathSpace phenomenon of flaming the dearly departed: the City of Berkeley’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial site hosted discussion boards, and they became a flashpoint for old political arguments. (The page, remarkably, is still there.)

As I wrote back in 1996: “If we are going to build our memorials on the Net, we have to expect that its boisterousness and its disrespect will spill over into their precincts.” As in the Web of “home pages” and discussion boards a decade ago, so on today’s sometimes anti-social “social Web.”