jtara - 6:22 pm on Mar 4, 2008 (gmt 0)

I think I've heard of this concept before....

... it's called... oh, gee, let me remember, it's been so long...

... it's called a HOME PAGE!

No, really.

Most of us probably weren't there at the very beginning, but I remember.

The reason it's called a "home page" is that in the original concept everybody was supposed to have one.

A web page, that is, which was to be a starting point for storing all your stuff online that you wanted others to see. (Password protection came along very soon after that, so you could share stuff with only selected people.)

Unfortunately, the commercialization of the web turned the concept upside-down and inside-out. Instead of EVERYBODY (the public) being publishers of information, the vast majority now are just consumers of it.

The social networking sites bring back the concept to a degree, but there we become publishers of only trivial information.

And the concept of "home page" - a single place to find links to all the stuff that an individual wants to publish - has been lost, and the term is just another bit of Internet jargon that has lost connection with it's original meaning.

So, Microsoft just reinvented the web, the way it was intended in the first place. Kinda.

Or maybe FTP.

Yawn.

Next, up from Microsoft: Gopher.