My Personal Internet

I've been thinking for some time about the idea that the Internet I see when I'm browsing is different from what other people do. By this I mean both the content I read and the actual experience of being online.

Of course, what people read or listen to reflects their personal interests, biases and their environment. Yet at first, the web was this collection of static pages that were presented to anyone who visited. A sort of "absolute truth" - we would read the same news from the same media sources, and would get the same results when searching something.

With time, the web adapted and "got to know me". Amazon would suggest you different books depending on what you bought and what you looked at. Google modified results based on your language, country and your own personal search history. But the biggest change was the "social" revolution - and by this I don't mean all sites like MySpace, Facebook, etc. I mean the ability of private people to publish their own ideas, and reach the entire world - at no cost.

I have many subscriptions in Google Reader (over 100), yet of those, only 4 are for "big news sites" such as Ynet or TheMarker. A few more are various social news aggregators (like Slashdot), about 10 for comics and fun stuff, and around 10 official blogs for specific companies (Jonathan Schwartz - Sun's CEO, Google Official Blog, John Nack from Adobe).
Most of the rest is for individuals whose opinions and writings I find interesting - I read Bruce Schneier to be up to date on security news and Michael Stal for his ideas on software architecture; Jeff Atwood for anything related to computers and Seth Godin for his great insights on marketing; Barry Ritholtz makes sense of the world of finance and Chase Jarvis has excellent videos about professional photography.

There is no need for the pretense of objectivity you see in the TV news - I subscribe to people because of their unique and personal view of the world. In 2003, during the US invasion to Iraq, there was nothing interesting or new on the subject on CNN or any other channel. So I was reading "Where is Raed?" by an Iraqi blogger from Baghdad, who was telling what was actually happening around him.

The are also some very useful tools that change the whole experience of being online. Since installing the "Adblock Plus" extension to Firefox, I no longer see any ad banners, annoying flash or pop-up - I don't even know they are there, and the sites load much faster. The "Better Gmail 2" add-on changes the interface I see on the Gmail site.
Yesterday, Moshe noticed one of the Google search experiments and I thought - "I know I've read about this a long time ago, how can I find it again?". No need to go through thousands of search results - I just searched the historic posts of the google related blogs I read in Google Reader.













Also, after my last post, I realized I need some software for working with screenshots. Well, I guessed I stumbled on such software some time in the past, yet didn't have a use for it then. I use delicious, which is like bookmarks, but with tags and online so it can be accessed from any computer I use. And of course - there's a Firefox extension. A short search - and I'm done.














Right now, Reader and delicious serve as a repository of the things I once read and found interesting online. It is the slice of the web that I like.

That is my personal internet.

What is yours?