Parley-vous ''gopher''?

 posted Tuesday, July 18, 2006 at 12:33 pm MST

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I'm obviously going to have to add to this item ... I just stopped by ''Gopher still going strong'' on Kottke.org to post this comment:

"Gopher still hot? Dang right! I'm still getting hits in my blog from this post. Can we say that it (gopher) is paradigmatic of "long tail"?

K ... what's going on here? I know a) I get fed up with just how bloated FF is and b) it's sometimes a perk to use telnet and/or pine. Maybe some of us really appreciate sleek / parsimonious?

p.s. Thinking about the interface I'm cobbling together for my "Participatory Deliberation" is where sleek/parsimonious came up. When I slip into that mode I see Web2.0 as spring-loaded and self-evident. A series/collection/suite of single-page apps?"

X-posted to Togo at LiveJournal

You know about WWW-browsers (obviously), and you very likely know about FTP ... and maybe about IRC, too.

Do you know about "gopher"? Gopher pre-dates WWW, like IRC and newsgroups (NNTP), and email ... it was a way of allowing folk to access other people's files, kinda like a web browser, but it didn't rely on HTML pages.

Here's a blast from the past that's still appropriate today: " A Practical Guide to Defeating The Radical Right" and "Directory: Cyberpunk and Postmodern Culture"

Some of the documents in there date back to 1994 ... around the time I started publishing web pages.

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