Internet Archivist

Posted on 2 Jul 2002 at 17:32

Davey Winder enjoys a new way of surfing - in his sleep - and continues his search for the elusive perfect email client.

WinDrivers.Com

www.windrivers.com

This month my hat goes off to the editorial department at PC Pro for tipping me the wink about WinDrivers.Com - a truly fabulous resource if ever there was one. Essentially it does just what you'd expect from the name, bringing together a vast collection of Windows device drivers. But it does it with style and efficiency - an unusual combination.

A search engine helps you get directly to the driver you require, be it for a hard disk, scanner, ISDN, modem, graphics card, CD-ROM, whatever. If you're looking for a device driver for Win 3.1, 95, NT or even 98 then look no further.

The Wavey line

Homesteading is the current trend on the Net, it seems, both for the millions of folk who like the idea of joining an on-line community and getting some Web space for free, and for the business folk behind them who want to make millions of dollars selling the advertising space created. I'm biased, and slightly bitter I guess, when it comes to Internet homesteading. After all, my introduction to the Net came by way of Prestel's MicroNet service, Europe's FidoNet BBSs and the Cix Conferencing System. All three are fine examples of community building, yet none has risen to the financial peaks of such places as GeoCities, Tripod or the aptly named Fortune City.

It has been said that there are now some 10,000 people publishing personal Web pages each day, offering ripe pickings to the community pushers. GeoCities, for example, has seen membership rise from 10,000 at the end of 1995 to an amazing 1.5 million today. Oh, and with over 600 million hits per month, you can see why investors are keen to jump aboard the ship and advertisers are queuing up for the cruise. GeoCities is now worth well over £100 million, and its founder David Bohnett (a 41-year-old former software salesman) is a happy, not to mention rich, bunny. Yet MicroNet vanished off the face of cyberspace years ago, FidoNet is still active but almost inconsequential in the bigger scale of things, and Cix, while remaining active and lively, maintains a steady but definitely not soaring membership level.

Where have we Brits gone wrong: why hasn't Cix become the UK version of GeoCities, for example? I'd like to think it's because we're not quite so shallow when it comes to defining what constitutes community. People pay real money to join Cix because they want to join a real community; a collection of varied minds that interact and create a feeling of collective on-line soul. A mere collection of Web pages, no matter how large, can't offer this same feeling. An analogy could be with a large US shopping mall where there are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of shops but very little meaningful interaction between shoppers and certainly no real sense of community. However, go inside a coffee bar or pub and you're likely to find a core of regulars who do interact, who do form a community. GeoCities is the shopping mall; Cix is the bar.

So is the Internet, as some self-styled West Coast gurus would have us believe, truly the final frontier as far as community building in the 20th century is concerned? Or is it the case that community and cash go hand-in-hand on-line, and the real motivation has less to do with sharing than with greed? Several attempts have been made to build a true community on-line, like Howard Rheingold's Electric Minds project. I was proud to be the UK host for that scheme, and in six months or so we had built up a truly global, truly interactive, truly sharing community. But then the money ran out, and the revenues didn't materialise, so the community came crashing down. Its members have gone on to form new, smaller communities, which are thriving. This suggests that bigger is not always better, and where money rears its head a community gets swallowed up whole and spat out in little pieces. For what it's worth I'm happy and proud to be a member of the greatest little on-line community in the UK, and that's Cix.

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