The Hero with a Thousand Faces advances the theory of a monomyth. This is a prototypical structure which stories and myths have all grown up around for a thousand years. Obviously, this blog is unlikely to discuss comparative mythology, however I’m working on working out a reasonable monomyth for the web. Here’s what I have so far.
AOL spent the better part of the last 10 years doing their best to answer every question about the growing influence of the web with “yes, but” answers. We did acquisitions large (Netscape) and small (Navisoft), invested in technologies, and otherwise built a path which ran in parallel to the rest of the web.
All forms of media — print, television, and internet — will likely dedicate coverage today in equal measures to reliving and rehashing the morning of September 11th, 2001. I will do no different, although there is always a temptation to let these somber anniversaries slip by unrecorded.
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Imagine a personalized portal, customized to your interests and needs. It could have content from major sources that were based upon what you liked and didn’t like. Okay, big deal, there are lots of these, the most popular of which seems to be My Yahoo. But, now imagine that instead of just pushing the same stories, links, and Yahoo content, it allowed anyone to put any RSS feed they like onto the page. Yup, Google and Yahoo allow that, sure. But imagine it’s at Netscape.com, and the year is 1999. You’ve got the original My Netscape, which brought us something no less innovative and essential to the Web 2.0 experience than RSS.
When I arrived at AOL in 2001, various groups in the company were developing no less than 3 (three!) different web server platforms. Why did we have so many, what ever happened to them, and what were they all about, anyway?