The Wall Street Journal (January 4, 2002) carried an article recently by Kevin Kelly entitled “The Web Runs On Love Not Greed”:
If we could return back time a mere six years ago and ask anyone, even a geek, whether we could create three billion interactive, graphically rich, hyperlinked text pages on every subject known to humans, we would have been told it was impossible. I would have told you it was impossible. Send three trillion e-mails? Where is the time even to push the send button? Who is going to pay for the creation of three billion Web pages, each one of which must be designed and coded and hosted? The economics of this don’t work out. In 2,000 days? It’s impossible. Yet, here at the end of a very bad year, this Web is alive and still growing. It looks like a miracle.
The answer to the mystery of why people would make three billion Web pages in 2,000 days is simple: sharing.
Will we ever appreciate this Web woven out of love and greed for the miracle it is?
Perhaps as more of the world wins access to it, and more of our books, and movies, and history are added, we will come to see it as a dream come true, a collective dream created by people like you and me, sharing what they love. Who would have guessed that at the end of a harrowing year the heart of this gift and miracle already beats?
Look back to our own lives in 1995 and compare with today. How much has changed in the past 6 years in the way we communicate, the way to get access to information, the way we buy things. It is perhaps impossible to imagine a world without the Internet and the Web – that is the extent these technologies have permeated our lives. In today’s gloom and doom days, it is easy to forget what we have gone through in the past few years.
If the Web with all its richness and depth can be created in 2,000 days, why cannot we create a miracle in India in the next 2,000 days?
