Nosce te ipsum

I've been meaning to post about this one since I first read it a week ago. An interesting piece showing the rare optimisim for the medium we so dearly love.

Something is happening right now, and the developer community has an electric gleam in its eye. Curious, inventive people are making cool stuff again. There[base ']s been a notable shift, and it[base ']s incredibly exciting.

We[base ']re nearing the tenth anniversary of the Netscape IPO, when a flood of capital launched the Internet into mainstream culture. Those were heady times that changed the world. When I started as an interaction designer at Netscape in January of 1996, we were 750 people crammed three-to-a-cube into two small buildings.

[base "]The Web as we know it is changing probably more than it has since the first graphic showed up[sigma] The idea of the webpage itself is nearing its useful end. With the way Ajax allows you to build nearly stateless applications that happen to be web accessible, everything changes.[per thou]

Invention inspires invention. Ideas are collapsing into each other, recombining, and having powerful effects. The Internet has always been a medium for democratization, and by reconnecting with our idealism we[base ']re once again uncovering its poetry, nobility, and transformative power.