Parley-vous ''gopher''?
posted Tuesday, July 18, 2006 at 12:33 pm MSTI'm obviously going to have to add to this item ... I just stopped by ''Gopher still going strong'' on Kottke.org to post this comment:
"Gopher still hot? Dang right! I'm still getting hits in my blog from this post. Can we say that it (gopher) is paradigmatic of "long tail"?K ... what's going on here? I know a) I get fed up with just how bloated FF is and b) it's sometimes a perk to use telnet and/or pine. Maybe some of us really appreciate sleek / parsimonious?
p.s. Thinking about the interface I'm cobbling together for my "Participatory Deliberation" is where sleek/parsimonious came up. When I slip into that mode I see Web2.0 as spring-loaded and self-evident. A series/collection/suite of single-page apps?"
X-posted to Togo at LiveJournal
You know about WWW-browsers (obviously), and you very likely know about FTP ... and maybe about IRC, too.Do you know about "gopher"? Gopher pre-dates WWW, like IRC and newsgroups (NNTP), and email ... it was a way of allowing folk to access other people's files, kinda like a web browser, but it didn't rely on HTML pages.
Here's a blast from the past that's still appropriate today: " A Practical Guide to Defeating The Radical Right" and "Directory: Cyberpunk and Postmodern Culture"
Some of the documents in there date back to 1994 ... around the time I started publishing web pages.