July 2003

Hello friends,

The format of the letter has changed. From now on you will be getting a link to my homepage whenever the next letter is ready. I realize that it makes some difference. Some people like to get paper letters, preferably handwritten (although with my handwriting everybody prefers it typed. See the logo at the top). Other people don't mind getting an email, but receiving letters in HTML is a new experience. The primary advantage is that you (and others) will be able to access them from anywhere. Another advantage is that I can make corrections after they have been sent...

So, I have decided to announce my existence to the virtual world. A birth certificate and even a physical appearance are not sufficient nowadays. We are approaching an era when people without homepages will be considered second class, almost like their never lived. Of course, there are important figures that don't have homepages, but they will be forgotten or speculated to be mythological figures.

In a way, homepages are like time capsules. There is always a tiny chance that teachers in the far future will show pupils your homepage in history lessons, as an example of a typical homepage from the beginning of the 21st century. There is also the possibility that the design template will be sold for high price as an antique, or that the homepage will become an exhibit in "the cyber-museum of the early internet age".

When archeologists 1000 years from now will study this era, they will do data-mining instead of real digging. I am not sure these people will be called archeologists, since the internet revolution, with the ability to record pictures and speech, is probably analog to the invention of writing. The same way we have archeologists who explore periods when documents were scarce, and historians that deal mostly with written documents, the internet research will require different skills that would make it a different profession. It doesn't mean that researches will actually look at ordinary homepages 1000 years from now. It is more likely that homepages will enter some future statistics. We can provide the evidences before changes have occurred, but we won't live to see what interesting conclusions will be drawn from this data. They could be interested in changes in language, changes in artistic design, social changes and other changes we can't predict at this time. Psychologists may be interested in questions such as what are the relationships between the ego and the cyber-ego? Are people as boring as their homepages?

All that is assuming homepages will survive. One thing I have noticed is that homepages from five years ago already look old today. My previous homepage from 1999 at Weizmann passed away naturally. Thus the life-expectancy of homepages is relatively short. But I guess there are intelligence agencies that take care of the backups...

That's about everything I had to say about homepages in my homepage. If you have followed to this point, thanks for being among the first visitors to my homepage.


Ady.