The Internet has changed a lot since its inception. The web in the beginning consisted of only static content, some fixed information. But now information on the web has become dynamic. Each moment sees a change in the front page of websites. From the publisher centric web pages to user centric pages. In fact this is web 2.0 where the users post(upload) the content. Because of this user centric approach, the web has really become a personal diary. Let’s take a simple example. If you are one of those persons who do not delete any mails (I think nobody these days deletes their mails because of unlimited/high storage mail storage space), you can really take a look back into history what you were doing some two years back on this particular day- the mails you have sent to a particular person, the concerns you had, the messages you forwarded or you received. Its really interesting to turn back to the pages of history. Yes I was wondering whether the words ‘turn back to the pages of history’ is correct. There are no pages involved. Our whole approach of looking into history has changed. All of us are part of our history. Each and every action of ours which we do on the net is really a history.
There are sites which help us to plan trips and help us maintain information about the books we have read. I update my personal blog to keep an update on the books I have completed reading. When I look into my personal blog, I can see the tremendous change in my own way of writing. I started my personal blog as a means of record keeping of my personal actions, especially with respect to the books I have read and the places I have visited. Sometimes I just check my blog to see when I did a particular thing.
With the advent of numerous travel and book sites, you can maintain an up to date information on the books you have read and your reviews or even recommendations. There is not even need of going through each and every site and remembering the site names and the passwords. The current web design approach looks like a centralized or a customized home page. A single company will not spend its revenue building cool features for each and every aspect of an individual, rather they concentrate on one particular aspect and provide the API(Application Programming Interface), which can be utilized by any other site to access that particular site. Like the other day, I saw some applications in Linkedin like tripit and Reading List. From user perspective, he/she need not remember all the site names, but rather access everything from a single page.
If you enable logging of your history of browsed pages, you can even find out about your mood and interests in a specific period of time. Really Internet is turning to be a personal diary. It has a vast amount of data of each of our actions, like the friends we conversed with, the friends we avoided, our mood, our purchases. There are a lot of statistics which can be used to target an individual. Only thing that is needed is to make the best use of all the information.