Before there were search engines, there were directories. The biggest and best-known was Yahoo. On the first graphical browser (Mosaic), it looked like this:

The directory idea made sense, because the Web is laid out like the directory in your computer. There is a “domain” with a “location” or a “site,” containing something after the last / in a path of /something/something/something. Geeks call these directories too, and the string of somethings a path. Directories in computing also follow an outline format: heads, subheads, and subheads of subheads.

While this design is boundlessly flexible, it also suggests durability, if not permanence, because it’s good to find stuff where it rightly goes and to find it in the same place over and over again.

That was what Yahoo assumed in the early days of the Web—as did everyone who bought a domain name. I’ve had searls.com since 1995. Dave Winer (father of outlining and progenitor of much else) has had Scripting.com for even longer (and has a lot more in that domain).

But we don’t own domain names. We rent them. And the World Wide Web isn’t a library. It’s a whiteboard with stuff written on it. Some of that stuff is located on directory paths. A lot more is coughed up by database systems on an as-needed basis.

The Yahoo directory failed. In its place search engines appeared. Search engines don’t catalog the Web like a library might. They index it. That means they send crawlers down the Web’s directory paths, recording everything they see into a searchable index. I explain here how that works and where this went:

The Web is a haystack.

This isn’t what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he invented the Web. Nor is it what Jerry Yang and David Filo had in mind when they invented Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web, which later became Yahoo. Jerry and David’s model for the Web was a library, and Yahoo was to be the first catalog for it. This made sense, given the prevailing conceptual frames for the Web at the time: real estate and publishing.

Both of those are still with us today. We frame the Web as real estate when we speak of “sites” with “locations” in “domains” with “addresses” you can “visit” and “browse”—then shift to publishing when we speak of “files” and “pages,” that we “author,” “edit,” “post,” “publish,” “syndicate” and store in “folders” within a “directory.” Both frames suggest durability if not permanence. Again, kind of like a library.

But once we added personal movement (“surf,” “browse”) and a vehicle for it (the browser), the Web became a World Wide Free-for-all. Literally. Anyone could publish, change and remove whatever they pleased, whenever they pleased. The same went for organizations of every kind, all over the world. And everyone with a browser could find their way to and through all of those spaces and places, and enjoy whatever “content” publishers chose to put there. Thus the Web grew into billions of sites, pages, images, databases, videos, and other stuff, with most of it changing constantly.

The result was a heaving heap of fuck-all.*

Back in 2005, I wrote in Linux Journal about a split between the “static” Web that was like a library (with its “locations,” “sites,” and “domains” you could “visit” and “browse”), and the “live” Web of blogs and posts. Then social media came along, and the live branch of the Web outgrew the static Web’s trunk.

Last week came news that a leak revealed lots of interesting poop about how Google actually ranks search results. Here are two things I don’t need those leaked documents to tell me:

1. Google favors the present over the past, the current over the archival.
2. Google no longer indexes, or ranks very old Web pages.

I speak from experience here, because I have some old pages that are on the Web but don’t seem to be indexed, meaning searches don’t find them. I also have Easter eggs on a couple of those pages: words that exist in no language but made those pages easy to find when I did keyword searches for them. Now I get “No results found for _____.” (I won’t reveal the word because I want to keep testing Google.)

Countless publications have also come and gone on the Web without leaving a trace. Upside was a gigantic publication from the Nineties through the dotcom boom. Not a trace of it remains. Far as I know, nothing remains of Fast Company‘s early issues.

But hey, God bless the Internet Archive. Here’s a piece I wrote for PC Magazine in December 1982 about a PC application that taught card counting in blackjack:

As the evanescence of “content” increases, so does the importance of archives.

So maybe stop reading here and start reading here. We have a lot of work to do.

We can all agree that humans must live in a “nature positive” way in order to continue to live well on this rare of all planets, one that sustains life. To assert the opposite, and deliberately live in a “nature negative” way, is to invite ecocide on a massive scale.

We can also all agree that the protection of biodiversity (the variety of life) is crucial to living in a nature positive way. However, the fact that the world (especially Australia) is still losing biodiversity at an alarming rate is an indication that we have indeed moved in the direction of a “nature negative” global culture.

To arrest the decline in biodiversity requires more than a focus of saving individual species or even whole ecosystems, it requires the application of leading-edge knowledge of symbiosis in bioscience.

While it is appreciated that in Nature, ‘everything is connected to everything else’, not many understand that it is the symbiotic bonds between unlike organisms that hold ecosystems together. For example, in coral reefs, the coral colony is formed by a relationship between many species of polyp and algae. If the mutualistic relationship between the algae and the polyp is disturbed by warming water or pollution, the algae is expelled from the polyp and the health of the reef declines or, in extreme circumstances, completely dies.

The symbiotic relationship of obligate mutualism in corals and algae is replicated in untold other relationships in life. Plant and fungus networks in forests (mycorrhizae) and the human gut and symbiont bacteria nexus (the gut microbiome) are just two such examples of mutually beneficial relationships between very different species. Even more profound discoveries have been made in the domain of endosymbiosis with the knowledge that chloroplasts in plants and mitochondria in complex animals are a union of different organisms forming new and inheritable structures.

A major reason why most human communities are continuing to move in a nature negative direction is the failure to understand and support symbiotic relationships in nature. That failure is connected to the fact that many of these relationships were simply invisible to normal human perception. With the extension of our visual sense in the form of microscopes, we can now see the micro-world and how it works. Our latest findings in this process of discovery include the surprising fact that retrovirus genetic material makes up 8-10% of the human genome and has been crucial for our evolutionary development, including the way the human embryo develops.

If we are to engage in a nature positive way with what remains of the biodiversity of the planet, especially in biodiverse continents such as Australia, then a way of thinking that incorporates the very best of symbiotic science is needed. In addition to the symbioscience and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), humans need the ethical and creative correlates that match that understanding. In other words, the anthropocentric thinking of the Anthropocene needs to be supplanted by symbiocentric thinking in the Symbiocene.

The Symbiocene is a meta-meme that is needed to guide our thinking into the future. To outline this future era or ‘cene’ is critical for the future of all humanity and most complex life on Earth. Before we can even think about being nature positive and creating a nature – based economy, or what I call the sumbonomy, first we must clarify the principles of symbiotic relationships within the rest of life.

We can all agree that humans must live in a “nature positive” way in order to continue to live well on this rare of all planets, one that sustains life. To assert the opposite, and deliberately live in a “nature negative” way, is to invite ecocide on a massive scale.

We can also all agree that the protection of biodiversity (the variety of life) is crucial to living in a nature positive way. However, the fact that the world (especially Australia) is still losing biodiversity at an alarming rate is an indication that we have indeed moved in the direction of a “nature negative” global culture.

To arrest the decline in biodiversity requires more than a focus of saving individual species or even whole ecosystems, it requires the application of leading-edge knowledge of symbiosis in bioscience.

While it is appreciated that in Nature, ‘everything is connected to everything else’, not many understand that it is the symbiotic bonds between unlike organisms that hold ecosystems together. For example, in coral reefs, the coral colony is formed by a relationship between many species of polyp and algae. If the mutualistic relationship between the algae and the polyp is disturbed by warming water or pollution, the algae is expelled from the polyp and the health of the reef declines or, in extreme circumstances, completely dies.

The symbiotic relationship of obligate mutualism in corals and algae is replicated in untold other relationships in life. Plant and fungus networks in forests (mycorrhizae) and the human gut and symbiont bacteria nexus (the gut microbiome) are just two such examples of mutually beneficial relationships between very different species. Even more profound discoveries have been made in the domain of endosymbiosis with the knowledge that chloroplasts in plants and mitochondria in complex animals are a union of different organisms forming new and inheritable structures.

A major reason why most human communities are continuing to move in a nature negative direction is the failure to understand and support symbiotic relationships in nature. That failure is connected to the fact that many of these relationships were simply invisible to normal human perception. With the extension of our visual sense in the form of microscopes, we can now see the micro-world and how it works. Our latest findings in this process of discovery include the surprising fact that retrovirus genetic material makes up 8-10% of the human genome and has been crucial for our evolutionary development, including the way the human embryo develops.

If we are to engage in a nature positive way with what remains of the biodiversity of the planet, especially in biodiverse continents such as Australia, then a way of thinking that incorporates the very best of symbiotic science is needed. In addition to the symbioscience and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), humans need the ethical and creative correlates that match that understanding. In other words, the anthropocentric thinking of the Anthropocene needs to be supplanted by symbiocentric thinking in the Symbiocene.

The Symbiocene is a meta-meme that is needed to guide our thinking into the future. To outline this future era or ‘cene’ is critical for the future of all humanity and most complex life on Earth. Before we can even think about being nature positive and creating a nature – based economy, or what I call the sumbonomy, first we must clarify the principles of symbiotic relationships within the rest of life.

I asked ChatGPT and Bard to “List all Christmas holiday tunes in chronological order, by the year they were written, running from oldest at the top to the newest at the bottom.” ChatGPT gave me a lame list. Bard gave me a much better one, improved by my follow-ups. Here ya go:

While creating a definitive chronological list of every Christmas tune throughout history is near impossible, I can offer you a comprehensive, categorized timeline of notable Christmas music spanning centuries, from ancient hymns to modern-day pop hits. Keep in mind this is not an exhaustive list, and some dates may be approximate:

Pre-Renaissance Era (Before 1450)

• 4th Century: “Hymnus ad Natales Domine Jesu” (attributed to Hilary of Poitiers) – One of the earliest known Latin hymns referencing Jesus’ birth.
• 13th Century: “In dulci jubilo” – Traditional German carol celebrating the joy of Christmas.
• 14th Century: “O Come, All Ye Faithful” – Latin hymn, believed to be of English origin, later translated into many languages.

Renaissance Era (1450-1600)

• 15th Century: “There Is No Rose” – Traditional English carol referencing Mary as a “spotless rose.”
• 15th Century: “Deck the Halls” – Welsh carol with pagan roots, originally a celebration of the winter solstice.

Baroque Era (1600-1750)

• 1642: “What Child Is This?” – English carol based on a poem by William Chatterton Dix.
• 1678: “Silent Night” – German carol written by Franz Xaver Gruber and Joseph Mohr.

Classical Era (1750-1830)

• 1818: “O Holy Night” – French carol originally titled “Cantique de Noël” with lyrics by Placide Cappeau and music by Adolphe Adam.

Romantic Era (1830-1900)

• 1865: “Jingle Bells” – American song originally written by James Lord Pierpont with lyrics unrelated to Christmas.
• 1874: “O Little Town of Bethlehem” – American carol written by Phillips Brooks.

20th Century and Beyond

• 1934: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” – American song written by Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin for the Judy Garland film “Meet Me in St. Louis.”
• 1942: “White Christmas” – American song written by Irving Berlin for the film “Holiday Inn.”
• 1953: “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” – American rock and roll song written by Johnny Marks.
• 1964: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” – American song written by Johnny Marks, based on the poem by Robert L. May.
• 1973: “All I Want for Christmas Is You” – American pop song written and performed by Mariah Carey.
• 1984: “Last Christmas” – English song written by George Michael for Wham!
• 1994: “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” – American song written by J.C. Sprink and Haven Gillespie.
• 2019: “All Is Well” – British song written and performed by James Arthur.

This list showcases the evolution of Christmas music through various eras and genres. Remember, Christmas music is constantly evolving, with new carols and songs emerging every year.

Happy Holidays!

Then, “What about A Chrismas Song, by Mel Tormé? Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas? Frosty the Snowman? Mary’s Boy Child?”

You’re absolutely right! I apologize for omitting those wonderful Christmas classics from my previous response. Here’s where they fit into the timeline:

• 1946: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” – As mentioned previously, this beloved song by Judy Garland was written in 1934 by Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin.
• 1951: “A Christmas Song” – This charming and introspective tune by Mel Tormé perfectly captures the bittersweet sentiment of Christmas.
• 1950: “Frosty the Snowman” – Jack Rollins and Steve Nelson penned this playful Christmas carol about a jolly snowman in 1950.
• 1956: “Mary’s Boy Child” – This moving gospel carol was written by Jester Hairston in 1956, based on an African American spiritual.

My apologies for the earlier oversight. These songs undoubtedly deserve their place among the cherished Christmas tunes throughout history.

Do you have any other Christmas music questions for me? I’m happy to delve deeper into the fascinating world of holiday melodies.

Then, “Oh, and Rockin Around the Christmas Tree?”

Ah, you’re absolutely right! How could I forget the infectious energy of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”? It definitely belongs on the list. In fact, it was written earlier than some of the others I mentioned:

• 1958: “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” – This rock n’ roll Christmas classic, penned by Johnny Marks, brought a vibrant and playful edge to holiday music.

Thank you for reminding me! Your keen eye for festive tunes is impressive. Merry Christmas and keep the musical celebration going!

I stopped there. But I assume you can keep going here: https://bard.google.com/chat/5623a530dcc35251

Journalism is in trouble because journals are going away. So are broadcasters that do journalism rather than opinionism.*

Basically, they are either drowning in digital muck or adapting to it—and many have. Also in that muck are a zillion new journalists, born native to digital life. Those zillions include everybody with something to say, for example with blogs or podcasts. As Clay Shirky put it in the title of a very relevant book about our topic, Here Comes Everybody.

An odd fact about digital life is that its world is the Internet, which works by eliminating the functional distance between everybody and everything. Think of this habitat as a giant three-dimensional zero: a hollow sphere with an interior that is as close to zero as possible in both distance and cost for everything on it. This is a very weird space that isn’t one, even though we call it one because space works as a metaphor.

Still, we are all embodied creatures operating in a natural world with plenty of distance and lots of costs. This is why we form communities, towns, cities, organizations, institutions, and social networks of people who see and talk to each other in the flesh.

For more than a century, the information center that held a town or a city together was its newspaper. This is no longer the case. The Monroe Country History Center and the Herald-Times (our local paper) explain the situation in an outstanding exhibit at the Center’s museum called Breaking the News:

If you’re reading this on something small, click on it to see the full-size original.

But hey! There are still plenty of journals, journalists, and news sources here in town, including the Herald-Times. That’s some of their logos, gathered at the top of this page. I also listed them in my last post, calling them all, together, wide news. If their work is well-archived we’ll also have what I call deep news in the prior post.

I suggest that the answer to the question asked by that exhibit—where will it go now?— is whole news. That’s what you get when all these media cohere into both a commons and a market.

And, as it happens, we have some resources for creating both.

One is the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, where my wife Joyce and I are both visiting scholars. The workshop carries forward the pioneering work of Elinor Ostrom, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for her work on commons of many kinds. If we’re going to make a whole news commons, the Workshop can be hugely helpful. (So can other folks we know, such as Clay Shirky. Note that the subtitle of Here Comes Everybody is The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Clay will be here to speak in our salon series at IU in December.)

Another is Customer Commons, a nonprofit that Joyce and I started as part of ProjectVRM, which we launched when I started a fellowship at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center in 2006. Customer Commons (says here) is “a public-facing organization focused on emerging issues at the intersection of empowered individuals and the public good,” while ProjectVRM is a community with hundreds of developers and others working on new business models that start with self-empowered customers. Within both are business model ideas for journalism that have been waiting for the right time and place to try out. (Examples are intentcasting listenlog and emancipay.)

But the first step for us is getting to know the people and organizations on the supply side of news here in Bloomington, where Joyce and have now lived for two years. We know some local journalists already, and would love to know the rest. If I don’t reach you first, email me at doc at searls dot com.

And, as always, everything I’ve written above is subject to corrections and improvements, so I invite those too.

*Put simply, journalism’s mission is to get stories right, while opinionism’s mission is to get and keep an audience. But it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference, because the same labels can apply to both, and even the best journalism rests to some degree on opinions—of experts and eyewitnesses, for example.

You can see how blurry this can get by looking at Nielsen’s ratings for radio stations. Here is a table of Nielsen’s top twenty-five markets, with links to each station with a measurable audience, and labels for each station’s format. As you look at each market, click on the station link to see what’s behind its “News/Talk,” “News,” or “All News” label:

For example, in Dallas-Fort Worth, KERA and WBAP are both “News/Talk.” But KERA’s schedule is built around NPR programs while WBAP’s schedule is built around conservative talkers. Listen to both to draw or re-draw your own conclusions.

News/Talk, however, is at most a very small part of whole news, which is about how no one source of good information owns the whole space, as newspapers used to do. We haven’t yet defined this space, which is why we need to talk about it.