originally published February 7, 2007

The Internet is like Al Gore. Or, rather, it is like what Al Gore did for the Internet. The beneficent, all-knowing Father Gore did not invent the infrastructure, nor the zero/one, nor the rat’s nest of wires worming away from the back of your comp-box. All that Professor Frink claptrap oozed out of other eggheads far back in the distant recesses of time when our Neanderthal forebears still had to put on pants to play poker with Russian housewives or buy chemicals to counteract the hideous effects of a gas station diet and a sedentary lifestyle. No, what the once and future president (the inconvenient truth will set you free!) did was give a nerdy burble way off the public radar enough legal wiggle room to blossom into Technicolor, lives-don’t-run-without-it maturity (seriously, check out the statement from two of the dudes who really did invent the Internet, Khan and Cerf, at www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200009/msg00052.html). In so doing, he gave each lonely one of us the keys to our own electronic destiny - one way cooler, way shinier, and with way more friends than the oh-so-passé real one. Ain’t it great to live in the future?

Yet, after hours of bathing in the mechanized glow of the computer eye, even those of us who’ve joined the Firefox-fronted tabbed browser revolution can grow weary of each page’s subjective myopia. Why, for instance, can’t we info-glutted, time-starved surfers peruse South American soccer scores, bitch-tastic celebrity gossip, and to-do lists laden with meaningless occurrences simultaneously without the nagging need to click between the two? Enter www.netvibes.com. Once the now ubiquitous rigmarole of creating an account has been dispensed with, users can populate a personalized homepage with "modules" that might contain syndication feeds (those little omnipresent RSS or Atom buttons), podcasts, ready-made basketball calendars, and a teeming plethora of other candy-colored delights. View the latest toe-curlingly cute entries of www.stuffonmycat.com, indulge your linguistic fetish with Grammar Girl’s quick ‘n’ dirty grammar podcast (http://grammar.qdnow.com/), view a randomized www.wikipedia.org article or pre-organized stock quotes from dozens of financial indices. Further, even the absolute freshest fruits from the Web 2.0 tree can be effortlessly plucked and situated on top of whatever personalizes your backdrop since the ridiculously friendly "add a new module" function allows individual users to add sites, feeds and functionality or have them vetted for the community at large via the NetVibes ecosystem. Once the groundwork has been properly laid, you can access your homey, familiar new abode on the web from any connected machine from here to Mumbai.

What, however, is one to do when what needs getting at isn’t a carefully curated collection of electronic ephemera, but something of a more substantial size? Though a decade ago our former baggy-jeaned, Titanic-loving selves might have stood drop-jawed at the staggering enormity of a gigabyte of space, the disenchanted creatures we’ve since become can get that amount of space utterly free of charge at www.box.net. Rather than fretting the entire commute to work or school over whether that slide-presentation was successfully saved on some fragile fragment of plastic and foil, save it in its swollen, unnecessary entirety to your account and make blaming the inevitable technical glitches on the crappy office machines all the more plausible. Further, savvy friends can also gain access to predetermined caches of info if they’ve been previously named as friendly. Regardless of how far flung these computer-canny compatriots might be, they could thereby easily access video of Mr. Murray Sparkles the poodle viciously attacking shafts of afternoon sunshine or a several-hours-long party playlist from their home machines in Manila, Managua or Mozambique without waiting for the international mail to deliver the goods.

Yet when these constantly mutating, vast quantities of newness make the forehead itch for the foil fedora, the simple remedies of a bygone era are only a click away at www.etchy.org. The worrying variety of genitalia inscribed onto electronic mock-ups of the beloved Etch-a-Sketch and saved to the site’s archive aside, a few brief moments engaged with this ancient form of creative technology can be remarkably therapeutic. Email your heartfelt, abstracted (using the arrow keys rather than the white plastic wheels of old) representation to a friend for a slightly less confrontational way to say, “You’ve let me down again and again.”

Finally, it has been brought to the attention of yours truly here at the Monkeyhouse that in my zeal to regularly churn up and regurgitate the finest detritus of the web in which we live, I may have inadvertently neglected locally-grown cyberproduce. Consider my cheeks red. Hence, from this moment on, each ensuing iteration of this column will include at least one Athens-based webventure. Thanks for opening my simian eyes to this whole new world are due to some masked avenger going under the clearly fictitious name of Jason Mallory at www.scenemissingmagazine.com. In addition to regular snarfle-worthy blog entries, plenty of gorgeous photos (available bound on actual paper via links on the site), interviews, audio, et cetera ad infinitum, the “lists forever” section of Scene Missing Mag contains Top 5 and Top 10 lists well worth wasting company time reading. With the right chemical inducements and a punched ticket to the imagination station, the listed figurative battle between Count Chocula and Ben Franklin, for instance, is seriously epic and the implied regularity of zombie dreams in another list is bound to stir genuine sympathy. As a token of goodwill, Scene Missing is now a part of my NetVibes page, though, by way of full disclosure, the module has been placed in the teeth of the menacing sperm whale that serves as my rad backdrop.

Brandon Waddell

I need a lover with soul power. Will you hook me up? Links warmly welcomed at outthere@flagpole.com so long as the Monkey gets his due in the subject line.