But the Internet has no Dewey decimal system... (1995)

With search engines acting as such a necessary tool for internet use in 2009, we sometimes must remind ourselves that they did not come pre-packaged with cyberspace.

The 1997 book Predicting the Future looked at past and contemporary predictions of the future and assessed their accuracy. A 1995 prediction by Bill Gates about "the internet as a self-publishing medium" was met with great skepticism due to the lack of editors and, believe it or not, a Dewey decimal system on the web. An excerpt from the book appears below:

The lack of an equivalent to the Dewey decimal system on the Internet is a different matter. While it is true that experienced Internet users can eventually find what they're looking for, [Clifford] Stoll and other critics insist that it takes more expertise and time than Internet enthusiasts are willing to admit. This point of contention may eventually be answered by software developments that are still just blips on the horizon. But such a development, according to many experts, including both Internet boosters and doubters, is likely to have to await a formalized method for paying royalties to those who self-publish on the Internet. Bill Gates is sure this can be managed down the line, but as things stand there are still vast legal tangles to be resolved concerning payment to original authors whose work is published by major companies, let alone compensation for self-publishing.

Previously on Paleo-Future:
The Internet? Bah! (1995)
The Answer Machine (1964)
Bill Gates on Charlie Rose (1996)

Comments

[Purple Pony Art]

Oh my goodness, this brings back memories. I graduated from a library and information science program in 1997 and organizing the internet was such a big topic at the time. I should dig out my notes since I feel so nostalgic now :-)

[Michael Heinz]

But that was a very valid point - the web was just a toy until the first search engines and indexing sites appeared - providing the exact equivalent of Dewey's card catalogs.

[Lucario]

This article was definitely written in the days before Yahoo, DMOZ, and Google.

[wwwwolf]

And nowadays, the next big thing is supposed to be the Semantic Web, which would be the next step needed to make the web organisable by machines.

And, of course, the big problem in the web has always been content/presentation dilemma in HTML, making it hard for machines to actually process the pages.

[GeneW]

Yahoo was around in 1995. I got my first internet account through school that year and Yahoo.com was the first place that I surfed to on my Lynx browser running through Kermit.

[Ralph Hyre]

Self publishing on the internet is still a chaotic mess. Presentation is confounded with the message, and I'd rather use an aggregator, but there isn't a universal one I can go to for all the info.

There isn't yet enough organized syndication that allows me to present everybody else's blog post (and relevant commentary) through a single user interface (perhaps even one I design myself)

How many blogs must I visit? More than 5 is too many! Worse, if I want to review the most popular blog posts, I have to choose between technorati, digg, delicious, Yahoo, stumbleupon, google, or any of 30 other 'aggregators'

Things were more organized in the days of Usenet, although that had different failings.

> But such a development, according to many experts, including both Internet boosters
> and doubters, is likely to have to await a formalized method for paying royalties to
> those who self-publish on the Internet.

[meu]

You know, I think he's right - as the poster above mentions - self publishing online is a mess, and people now do worry about intellectual property/copyright issues/paying royalties/making money on the internet, as he mentions .

Also, there were search engines back in 1997 and in some ways, I think it was easier to search for and access information online back then than it is now. So much information now is scattered in self-published blogs & these blogs have varying degrees of organization.

[Jaden]

Well, Bill was right in a sense. But we've 'solved' those problems by going to one or two primary places to get all our information (through Google or Wikipedia) and taking all the content without paying at all.

[Elaine]

What's funny is that during the 7 years I worked in a library, people used to come in and get really indignant that we didn't have a card catalog anymore, or that kids aren't taught the completely obsolete skill of using one. I had the Dewey decimal system memorized, but that just told me approximately where on the shelf I would find the book. All the important info was far, far easier to store and search with the computer system. And you can't do a keyword search with a card catalog, or get the book you're looking for when you only have a vague idea of the title or the the author's name.