I sometimes speak of The Seven Wonders of the Internet, but I had never tried to enumerate them before tonight. At dinner, Kris and I brainstormed candidates. We came up short.

The Seven Wonders of the Internet include:

Google

Before google there was AltaVista. AltaVista allowed you to search the internet. Sort of. It was bogged down by poor interface design and questionable search algorithms. When google came along seven years ago, it was swiftly adopted by geeks and then the rest of the web. Google's clean interface and accurate results have yet to be topped. It's not perfect (more and more of the site is devoted to advertising; the search algorithms are constantly being tweaked), but it's damn near.

eBay

"eBay is the perfect use of the internet," I used to say. It still holds true. Match sellers with buyers and take a small portion of the transacted price. It's a win-win-win scenario! Like many things, eBay was better "before": before it became dominated by professional eBayers, before the redesign last year that left the site sluggish. But even for all the backward movement, the eBay continues to innovate. The search functions are drastically better than they used to be, and "buy it now" is a keen idea.

Craigslist

When I describe Craigslist to people, they're generally unimpressed. "Classified ads on the internet? So what?" "Try it," I say, and then all skepticism vanishes. With Craigslist, you can find a job, buy a car, get a date for Saturday night, and sell that old couch. Most anything you want to do is free. It's community policed, meaning spam is taken down when users flag them. Best of all: Craigslist is fun. Want a hammock? Check the site several times each day to see if a new one as been posted!

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free user-edited encyclopedia. If you are an expert on wooden pencils, then you can write or edit the Wikipedia article on wooden pencils. Yes, there are articles with questionable content. Yes, some entries are poorly written. (Last fall I spent an afternoon re-writing the Titanic entry for better style — I see today that it needs another revision. This sentence would never see publication in a print encyclopedia: "The sinking resulted in the deaths of more than 1,500 people, ranking it as one of the worst peacetime maritime disasters in history and by far the most famous.") But the fact remains that for the past three years, the Wikipedia has often been my first source for information on almost any subject.

e-mail

Four of The Wonders of the Internet are web sites, but the last two are technologies. E-mail has revolutionized communication. Can you remember that it was little more than a decade ago that all communication was via phone or the postal service. In that decade, these two traditional channels have been almost wholly supplanted by cellular phones and e-mail (except for business purposes). E-mail provides the immediacy of the telephone with the physicality of the written word. Unlike the telephone, e-mail is non-obtrusive. It's a perfect synthesis. (Instant messaging is even more immediate, and certainly quite popular among young people, but how many adults actually use it regularly? I'm sure the usage is far below that of e-mail.)

Weblogs

Blogger ushered in the revolution, but Movable Type and LiveJournal fomented it. Weblogging has brought self-publishing to the masses. Everyone has something to say, and they're saying it. Those who rail against weblogging don't get the point: if you don't want to write, don't write. But those that do want to write now have a forum for their dreams, opinions, and visions. They have audiences, from one person to thousands. Heck, even my mom has a weblog.

Those six are, to us, the obvious wonders of the on-line world. But what's the seventh? There we disagree. Kris would add MapQuest, though I protest on the grounds that (a) the same functions are done better elsewhere (including Google), (b) the site has too much advertising, and (c) pages are bulky and slow to load. "I would be lost without MapQuest," Kris says, and she means it literally.

Perhaps MapQuest should be considered a minor wonder. Maybe AskMetafilter should, too. AskMe's concept is perfect: tap the power of a community to answer difficult questions. In application, it has a few quirks that prevent it from greatness (but I won't go into those here). Other sites that don't qualify as one of The Seven Wonders of the Internet, but might (or might not) qualify as minor wonders include:

• Amazon — your online megastore.
• Slashdot — terrible design and editing, but tremendous geek cred and influence.
• Internet Movie Database — an amazing resource for info on film and television.
• Project Gutenberg — this online library of public domain books is useful at times, but just is not a daily destination
• Flickr — photo-sharing, networking, and more.

There must be other sites I'm forgetting. And for all I know, my Six Wonders of the Internet are, to you, the Six Useless Chasms of the Internet. I look forward to the great sites yet to come.

On this day at foldedspace.org

2004 — The Berry Patch   I haven't provided a house update in a while. Kris and I worked like dogs in the yard this weekend, and the gardens are beginning to take shape. Here are some photos of our progress.

2003 — Crater Lake   In which we photograph Crater Lake.

2002 — Candle in the Wind   We chatted for several hours, during which time Aimee said that she could never keep a weblog because she’d end up writing about candles.

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