Categories: uncategorized
Date: 21 June 2007 13:42:12
A combination of this rather wonderful winning of the intarwebs that you should all go and read *right now* and playing with del.icio.us and Greasemonkey scripts today has got me thinking about the way I use the internet.
Odd as though it may sound, the one thing that's had the biggest effect on how I use the internet over the past few years is Firefox. I really do have a Highly Personalised Browsing ExperienceTM. I haven't joined a site in ages and not gone to look for addons or userscripts pertaining to it pretty much straight away.
I use scripts for LJ that change how I tag posts, that unfold stacked comments, that make various changes to userinfo pages. I can't remember what KoL looked - or played! - like before I downloaded everything I use on it. My browser has a pink skin and my tabs are multicoloured. I've got a load of stuff for del.icio.us already, altering colours and fonts and options to get everything exactly as I like it. The search bar next to the address bar has all the search engines I use in it (Google, Wikipedia, IMDB, the KoL Wiki, Bible Gateway, Dictionary.com, YouTube) and I've got a script that makes results open in a new tab. Not even Google itself remains immune. I've got a thing for making favicons show up on the results page (I have a Thing about favicons, though god knows why), a thing for opening lots of results in different tabs all at once.
And in fact I'm going to have to stop listing things there - partly because I use so many, but also because I'm so used to them that I forget what's an addon or a script and what's a built-in feature! (And all this is why I still can't understand people who don't use Firefox...)
It's a far cry from the internet of even just a few years ago. It's gone - in my memory - from being this thing that was really cool that not many people I knew did to being completely the norm - in fact, far and away my main method of communicating with people now. I'm crap at writing letters, I've mislaid my mobile somewhere around the flat yet again and the landline's still broken, but if you email me or IM me or comment on my LJ I'll almost certainly read it in minutes and reply immediately.
Even more recently than that, it used to be that there were people who were just offline, people who were just online, people you met online and then offline, and people you met offline and then found online. It doesn't work like that anymore. Apart from the RYLers and the Shipmates I'd be hard pressed to say which of you I met first in the flesh and which of you I saw around on LJ before that. And either way, we've all got so many mutual friends - both fleshly and digital - that it's entirely a moot point now.
So come on then - how do you use the internet? How has it changed over recent years? What do you think about the web as the primary method of communication?