A River Called Internet.

The once indefinable, uncontrollable, growing like Topsy Internet of 18 months ago is now defined as two major and different entities.

Commercial and non-commercial. That's it.

There is growing concern that the Internet is being gobbled up by the commercial big boys and the sheer weight of their bandwidth-hungry downloads are pushing the non-commercial sites into a hang time state, waiting to be processed through the world telephony system.

Frankly, I can't say if such is the case. Oh, sure, there will be those purists who will continually shout from a soap box about the corruption of the Internet by vested money interests and vapor-like "dot.coms", but hey, that's a given in any theatre of world mass communication. But, for some folks, crass commercialization is evil. For myself, I enjoy some of the big money sites. Those guys show the rest of us some of the best coding and bells and whistles being scripted today. I mean, after all, the world would be a very dull place if it was made up of just plain vanilla HTML.

Flowing in the 'commercial' branch of the River Internet are the outlets, services and sales organizations that enable users to find and purchase whatever it is their hearts desire. And, my feelings are: "Bully!" I just love the convenience. And the selection. And the fantastic opportunity to completely sink into credit card debt hell. The latter being a right that should never be denied anyone: The right to go broke in computer graphics style.

The other branch of the river carries the non-commercial elements of the 'Net. These include educational sites, sites like the one you're reading, philanthropic sites and social gathering sites.

The 'philanthropic' sites are those where ideas, 'freebies' and downloads are offered to who ever wants them. The educational sites range from those presented by the highly respected worldwide universities, to the 'how-to' sites, to sites on poetry, painting and pastry making. Medical sites abound where information presented often represents a post-graduate level education, while at the same time sometimes appearing top heavy with crass advertising.

Oh, well, somebody's got to pay for the labor involved in building and maintaining an educational class web site. We can't give all the labor away, can we?

We have the 'how-to' and the collecting sites, sites established and maintained by folks who are natural-born teachers and love doing just that, teaching. More power to them and we should all applaud their efforts. Just because they can teach a person a thing or two, doesn't mean they have any understanding of graphic design or the art of presenting a good photograph. Nevertheless, they try. Some of these site owners make the effort to learn something about good web site design; others could care less. Some of the 'how-to' and collecting sites look fantastic and are fully functional right down to CGIs; some sites look sloppy as hell. Thus, a clear indication of the quality of instruction.

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