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ATS Weekly: Front Office
We Are AboveTopSecret, and We Matter
ATS Weekly, Edition 003, August 2, 2005
Soon, the "digeratti" will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Netscape Initial Public Offering on Wall Street. We're certain to see a
great deal of grand back-slapping and a fresh new round of speculation and pontification of all things Web. With this important Web-anniversary
looming, it occurred to me that AboveTopSecret.com has exemplified all the best attributes the online culture has to offer. Sharing, collaboration,
free-thinking, debate, and forward-looking can all be used to describe both the culture of the Web and that of ATS. How did we get here, and what will
we do next?
Netscape. Not too long ago, the Web was invisible to nearly everyone. Then suddenly one day, it became everything. In the far-flung future, history
will record September of 1995 (the IPO of Netscape), as a phenomenal tipping point on par with the taming of fire, the creation of the first wheel,
and the Web's handicapped close cousin the Guttenberg printing press. This grand statement is easily backed up when you consider that all of
humanity's knowledge, thoughts, ideas, hopes, and fears are being documented and interconnected in an impossibly large index anyone can access.
I urge everyone who's not familiar with what I'm taking about to read Kevin Kelly's (the founder of Wired Magazine) excellent article, We Are The Web, that celebrates the 10-year
anniversary of the Netscape IPO. He and I shared some similar experiences (he had far more), but I look a bit further back than Netscape's grand
flourish on Wall Street for the early rumblings of what we now know as the Web.
During the very early days of the Internet, a great deal of speculation from a wide variety of "experts" passed through various corporate
channels on what exactly would spring form the "information superhighway." Most envisioned what was possible to envision in 1989, a vast array of
thousands of channels of interactive programming available anytime and anywhere. I count myself among the nay-sayers of that era, working with people
at CompuServe, my opinions were disruptive to them. While they expertly focused on the problems of delivery technologies, bandwidth, and storage I
argued that content would be the problem. You see, it was assumed that the owners of premium content would gladly jump on the bandwagon and "ride the
light". Content was the problem.
Fifteen years later, I realize how wrong I was, content is not the problem. As Mr. Kelly's piece points out, the magnitude of available content is
difficult to comprehend much less quantify. Several estimates place the total number of Web pages at over 800 billion, or about 130 pages for every
person alive. In just 5,500 days since the failure of the "interactive television" concept, nearly one trillion pieces of content have been created
and made available to 1.3 billion people.
How did this unprecedented historical event happen? It's simple, you did it. What we certainly didn't know then, and what many still fail to
understand now, is that September of 1995 did not herald an era of technology and information. Instead, it launched a new culture of participation
based on an ethics of sharing. The enabling technology of hyperlinked pages created fundamental shift in thinking the likes of which is found no where
else in history.
You and I are fortunate to be participating in this most amazing and important cusp of history. Each day you post to AboveTopSecret.com, you add to
humanity's collective stored knowledge base, the Web. And the general quality and thoughtfulness of the typical ATS member has elevated our site to
one of high popularity. As humanity looks to the Web for answers, increasingly their searches lead them here. Here are some amazing numbers to
consider from our July traffic statistics:
- Slightly more than one million unique users found their way to AboveTopSecret.com through Internet Search Engines.
- Just over 190,000 unique search terms brought these one million visitors.
- Over 750,000 distinct pages were logged.
- We averaged 6,343 pages per hour (1.76 per second) with a peak of 17,552 pages delivered in one hour (4.9 per second).
- 14,100 distinct URL's referred visitors to ATS.
This is phenomenal influence and power by any standard of measure. We are a large and vital community of like-minded people who have gathered to
tell the world we think our own thoughts and scrupulously analyze the "official line". In 2002, we were a simple and small and barely audible group.
But now, we shout with a undeniably booming voice that is difficult, if not impossible to ignore. And it's because of the Web's culture of
collaboration and the ethics of sharing that you come to ATS and tell the world your story.
The world is now listening. ATS matters. What will you do next?
SkepticOverlord,
ATS Community Director
Creative Commons Usage Guidelines for this article.
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