Mat Harden

There’s a lot of information out there on the Web. And I mean a “lot”! I’ve often wondered how many blades of grass there are in the whole world and nobody has every been able to satisfy that query. But now I wonder if there’s more info on the Web than grass on the Earth? Hold on, what the hell am I talking about?!

Anyway, I’ve always tried to stay up with my chosen field by reading .Net magazine, various über geek blogs and now in this “Web 2.0″ world, I follow things like jQuery news on Twitter.

Sometimes it all gets too much. Some days I’ll turn on the PC and be totally overwhelmed with the information I’m presented with. I find myself in a quandary; I want to know everything, but I also need to sleep. But there are times when I think I’m too deep. Like the other day I read a jQuery Tweet that said…

Parse JSON with jQuery and JavaScript redux using the Flickr Services API
http://twitter.com/jquery/status/2799132940

…and I thought to myself “oh good, that’ll be useful”. And then I realised that this sentence wouldn’t really mean a lot to many people. Or does it reach more than what I imagine?

Then today, I opened-up PopURLs. Now from what I’ve just said about too much info, I know this is asking for trouble. But I just wanted to take a quick look. The top of the page looked like this.

PopURLs instantly exposes so much information

What I mean is there’s so many abbreviations and mash-ups of terminologies. Looking at this tiny snippet of the Web, I can see “GTD“, “Palm webOS“. These I can decrypt and understand. But then there’s the slang terms, swear words and vulgarities that seem to be more commonplace since the explosion of the social Web. Here I can see “WTF” and “rimjob” right there at the top.

I’ve got a baby boy who’s only 11 weeks old. When he’s old enough to talk, I need to be a good Dad and know the answers to everything, like: the major capital cities of the world. When this little guy gets control of a PC, then there’s going to be a lot of explaining to do! So when he comes across a page like PopURLs, is it right that he should turn around to his Dad and say “what’s a rimjob?” I think not. So what do we do?

Don’t say “NetNanny” or some other Internet kiddy-safe software. Also, we’re talking about another 10 years or so from now. So who knows what the Web will be like by then? He’ll have access to it from everywhere. Or should I say “it’ll have access to him everywhere”?