You know those cool Web 2.0 sites? They may be killing the Internet

I spent time today surfing a couple of very interesting sites. The first was Google Sky, an extremely cool site that lets you peruse planets, cruise constellations and examine x-ray images.

In addition to the wealth of astronomical goodness, Google Sky is a very slick implementation, with gorgeous colour photos, real-time tracking of the coordinates viewed, and infrared, microwave and historical overlays of each view.

This Web 2.0 package is the kind of thing that 10 years ago people would have paid for on a CD, and gladly.

My second online destination was The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, an amazing archive of the proceedings of London's famous court. There are more than 197,745 criminal trial stories here, spanning the years 1674 to 1913. The vast majority of the stories detail the trials and tribulations of ordinary people, but there are also the notorious standouts, such as Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, who murdered his wife in favour of his lover and then fled to Canada; and Oscar Wilde, caught up in libel proceedings in 1895. (Many commentators, including the BBC, have referred to Wilde's more famous trial for gross indecency, but that case presumably was tried elsewhere, as it is not detailed at the Old Bailey site.)

Web 2.0 is certainly the up-and-coming thing, with Web 3.0 on its heels, but it's great to see a new, entirely Web 1.0 text-and-photo site that is so interesting and fun to use.

These two Web destinations have me pondering a recent Backbone story which warns that more advanced uses of the Internet (video, IP TV , VoIP, file sharing, Web-based applications, etc.) are simply overloading the Internet. From the article: Illinois-based Nemertes Research Group raised eyebrows last fall when a report it wrote declared the Web could slow to a crawl in two years, clogged by traffic. And that position is echoed by market research group TeleGeography, which noted traffic was up 75 per cent last year while capacity grew only 47 per cent.

And here's a quote from the same article, from a VP at Cisco: “Online video demand in North America jumped from seven per cent of traffic in 2005 to 18 per cent of traffic this year, and it will grow by a factor of 19 through 2011,” said Olaf Krahmer, Cisco Canada vice-president of service provider operations.

When Cisco notes with concern the rise of Web traffic, it's maybe time for us to notice too.

Of course, maybe new technology and growing capacity will save us. But it's also possible that the term "information superhighway" will come back in use as it, just like a physical road, gets bogged down by traffic.

I tend to come down on the side of optimism: I think the big brains who run the Internet will figure all of this out. But in light of this article, maybe I'll spend more time reading about past crimes and less time gazing into the limitless depths of the universe.

By Peter Wolchak
Backbone magazine

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