With the advent of the internet and the web, we have all lost something valuable. The Librarian. Not only is this social position one of respect, and possible hotness, but also one of context. In a way all of use are like librarians now, constantly awash in a sea of information, important and unimportant. But, a librarian is paid to have vast general knowledge to serve their customers and to be able to find materials they don’t know of off-hand. Obviously, Yahoo, and then google, and maybe Cuil have killed that role. But the overarching general knowledge is something I think few of us work at like a job. There are real Librarians for the general internet. Sure, dmoz.org makes a go at it, but it’s very Web 1.0 and clunky, ad web directories, by default, are. Searching by crawled keyword (Google, I’m looking at you) has left us with a curious set of skills. We are better than ever at coming up with phrases that may lead us to what we want, but based on text, not on knowledge. Will this lead to a contraction of language. Maybe, if English isn’t already in death throes due to insufficient spelling and grammar checkers. Of course, then, there are those lolcats I’m so fond of.
Rocketing back to getting to the point: I have always wanted a list of when internet memes first showed up, since I’m not an internet Librarian. They made one at dipity.com. Booyah!
