{"id":287,"date":"2006-05-22T21:24:54","date_gmt":"2006-05-22T21:24:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/2006\/05\/22\/hitchhiking-on-the-internet\/"},"modified":"2006-05-23T17:22:29","modified_gmt":"2006-05-23T17:22:29","slug":"hitchhiking-on-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/2006\/05\/22\/hitchhiking-on-the-internet\/","title":{"rendered":"HITCHHIKING ON THE INTERNET"},"content":{"rendered":"

“I really didn’t foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course – the computer industry didn’t even foresee that the century was going to end.”<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u201dDouglas Adams<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In his seminal work, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em><\/a>, Douglas Adams imagined an intergalactic and interactive guide to, well, Life, The Universe, and Everything<\/a>. In his series of novels (“the increasingly inappropriately-named Hitchhiker’s trilogy”), Douglas forecast an electronic guide whose entries were made by writers travelling all over the galaxy. In his own words:<\/p>\n

“You’ll be able to read and write to the Guide wherever you are … when you write in something as simple as ‘The coffee here is lousy<\/em>!’ the Guide will know exactly what to do with that information and where to put it. And if you see, a few seconds later, a note which says ‘Yes, but the cheesecake is good<\/em>‘ it might be worth looking round the other tables to see who you’ve just made contact with.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Douglas helped launch the H2G2 website<\/a> to meet that need, but sadly did not live to see his idea reach full fruition. The internet, to my knowledge, has not quite yet reached intergalactic proportions, but I think Wikipedia<\/a> comes very close to fulfilling some of the ideas that he had 30 years ago.<\/p>\n

While searching for something else, I discovered recently that the BBC has taken over H2G2<\/a>. It is run very much like Wikipedia, with individual writers submitting their own informative articles explaining whatever it is they’re most interested in at the moment. But British. And funny.<\/p>\n

Here’s<\/a> H2G2’s entry on Douglas. And here’s<\/a> Wikipedia’s. Five years ago, I wrote about my encounter with Douglas<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“I really didn’t foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course – the computer industry didn’t even foresee that the century was going to end.” \u00e2\u20ac\u201dDouglas Adams In his seminal work, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams imagined an intergalactic and interactive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-people","category-www"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4E3H-4D","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semitrue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}