All website I designed 10 years ago were static HTML, now many of the sites I develop entail blogging, networking, video and more interactive opportunities.

Yes, such systems were silos — well, IRC wasn’t and the Usenet wasn’t really either, but I digress.

I guess, because I would be considered just an end user, I do not have enough technical knowledge to disassociate the web from a browser, because, except for RSS/XML feeds in a reader on my phone, that’s pretty much the only way I interact with the web. Even my ‘Berry has a browser for web interface. And the reader just gets stuff and converts it.

I’ll be interested to see what all the more knowledgeable and inventive folks in the field of internet tech development come up with next. But I truly do appreciate the opportunity to learn from and be challenged by people like you.

I don’t want to argue semantics, but to clarify and, if you will, put context around “the internet” – none of those services you mention fall into the category of a public and open internet that I speak of. Each was a silo for member-only content. AOL didn’t even move away from this until a few years ago. Compuserve was slurped up and made extinct. Prodigy… who knows what the hell happened to them. But none of those were open protocol services. All were walled gardens. The same could be said of BBSes which I too used.

As well, DARPANET, which was the predeccesor to the internet that I speak of is not to be construed as “the internet” as it too was not open protocol-based.

First, some background: In the early 1980s, I was exposed to the internet through bulletin board forums and file transfer protocols on sites hosted by AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe. In 1993, I was introduced to the world of Internet Relay Chat and the art of telnetting to external computer mainframes. In 1996, I worked as a tech support rep for an Internet Service Provider–a mere 12 months or so after the World Wide Web was officially launched.

Looking back some 25+ years, the internet has been much more than “Read only.”

* The early Prodigy forums–and later, IRC–enabled people from multiple locations to meet in a virtual place to share information and speak in a common voice.

* While my college experienced lacked the notion of any Facebook or even BlackBoard, we used a text-based VAX bulletin board community in 1994, creating content on our intranet, allowing other people to post replies, and enabling anyone to email the content from the bulletin board to beyond.

I don’t disagree with your sentiment that the internet (and its World Wide Web) are changing into a new generation, but I take fault with your logic that “Read/Write only” is from 2004 (when Tim O’Reilly coined Web 2.0) and not earlier. Clearly, you’re not suggesting the content creation I cite above from the mid-1990s, let alone the early 1980s, was only readable and not writeable.

Oh, and for the record, I may be your opponent but you’re not mine. Another faulty figment of yours that I’d enjoy you respecting.

You touch on something in this post, and Ari said something in one of his tweets, though, that could use some development. And perhaps shame on me for not doing a search of your blogs to see if either of you commented further on it.

But for government sites it is important to remember the target audience, and the fact that many users are still just folks looking for info and using basic tech and browsers like IE6.

So, many people don’t mind a simple list of logically codified links to info. They would say it’s “user friendly,” and that wins over some great looking site that takes forever and a day to load, and even longer to sort through. Your initial point about the visual attractiveness of the site being less important than functionality was really well taken.