Since Al Gore invented the Internet years ago, several fads have emerged. Maybe fad is too strong of a word. Let me rephrase, let’s call them movements. Hmm…now it sounds a little to much like something you do in the morning after your cup of joe, your newspaper at your side.

Let’s just point out some examples and we can name it later.

A little history first…as I remember it. Caveat: I have trouble remembering yesterday sometimes, so the accuracy of my timeline here may be suspect. Regardless, all the following did happen. Just not necessarily in this exact order.

So, the Internet gets kicked off with predominantly text based sites. Colors, images, and animated gifs made for what was considered a rich user experience back then.

Businesses set up static sites to advertise there company. At this point, businesses use the site as a static billboard. Simply listing the services or products they offer. If someone wants to purchase a product, they have to call and place orders over the phone, fax, or through a mail or delivery service.

There are news sites too, but everything at this point is pretty boring.

Search engines become very important. After all, there is some real content being developed. At this point, people are really starting to think about searching content although for the most part there isn’t a standard way to go about finding content. The first two search engines I felt loyalty to were webcrawler.com and excite.com.

Then things started to get a bit interesting. Dynamic CGI pages with database interaction gave people a way to use sites for more than just a personal homepage. Perl was my CGI language of choice back then.

Java adds to the wow factor of what can be done on a web site. Eventually people even learned how to use Java for something other than a scrolling ticker across their page.

E-commerce gradually gets introduced and businesses figure out that they can actually make some money by setting up an online storefront. This is good news for women everywhere…aw relax, I’m just kidding. A host of companies are bourne out of the E-commerce wave.

Portals start to be used…Yahoo defines the portal game and becomes the gold standard…for a while.

At this point the Internet is really starting to take off…(by the way, I’m starting to realize that I’m not writing a book on the history of the Internet, so I’m going to try to get to the point a bit quicker…)

Dot com hilarity ensues…

Enter a smattering of technologies in no particular order…

• Java
• PHP
• Javascript
• DHTML
• XML
• Ajax
• PHP
• Ruby
• Flex
• Flash
• etc.

Sometime in the middle of all this we were introduced to web-based email clients such as hotmail. Of course when the grand daddy of them all Gmail came on the scene, they one upped the other email venders by offering a ton more storage space.

So, to review…we had static content, then images, animated gifs that said the site was under construction, then the dynamic stuff hit, we started buying online, and then emailing via web browser.

Sites like…

• Google
• Amazon
• Yahoo
• Hotmail
• Ebay
• Slashdot
• Craigslist
• etc.

Then things start getting a bit more interactive with…

• YouTube
• Wikipedia
• flickr
• MySpace
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• blogger
• etc.

People start to realize that they too can have a voice…even though most people don’t care to listen to it (or more likely read it).

The next best thing to talking to George Glass your imaginary friend is to start blogging. Content grows and grows. In some cases, people learn to write intelligently about activities that are going on in their country such as war or strife. Others use their experience to write about technology. Some just write about whatever fancies them at the moment. Again content grows.

Because talking on cell phones to keep in touch isn’t enough, social networks led by MySpace.com hit the streets. Kids all over who I’m guessing are barely passing in grade school suddenly can customize a MySpace page.

(I guess it would be turning a blind eye to the obvious to leave out that many technological advances in the Internet have been fostered by porn and gaming, but that will be left for another rant.)

We have Web 2.0 now with people talking about Web 3.0, semantic web, and enough buzz words to fill up the rest of my Gmail quota.

So at this point we have tons of static content, we have video, audio, rich clients, news, dictionaries, online encyclopedias, Instant Messaging, and collaboration. We also have many programming languages. We have tools for making web pages, applications, web applications, and browsers to view them. We have information everywhere. In fact there is so much information these days, that people are becoming sedentary from sitting at their computers playing games and looking at cool stuff all day.

The issue is, since there is so much information, often hitting you at once, it is becoming more and more difficult to track the important stuff. Sure, when we want a particular thread of information, it is easy to just look up that bit in Google. A couple turns of the Google crank and out spits your results. But I want more.

I want something that can create, discover, organize, collaborate, and annotate a Body of Knowledge. Interesting? Confusing? In comes Spinscape.