AOL and Stephen Colbert's Elephant

I guess I should blog something about AOL going all-free to broadband subscribers.

Play it, Jon:

Ooh can you feel the same
Ooh ya gotta love the pain
Ooh it looks like rain
again
Yeah feel it comin' in
The mountains win again 

It has been more than a decade since I had an AOL account. I had to have one then in order to post stuff from NetGuide, a magazine I was writing for at the time.

NetGuide and AOL had a lot in common. Both were based on the idea that the Internet would be something like TV. They assumed that "brands" would dominate, the same old brands. And the same old celebrities.

Eventually, those concerns do bubble to the top of the stack. Paris Hilton, for instance, has 10 times the number of hits as DailyKos. But traffic and even links are not the be-all and end-all of Internet influence.

This is something Big Media has yet to understand. It's something, in fact, they continue to make fun of.

Consider Stephen Colbert's word for yesterday, wikiality. This is reality as defined by Wikipedia. Colbert seized on the idea that Wikipedia entries are democratic -- anyone can make them, and anyone can edit them. Thus, he told his audience, they could go to the Wikipedia entry for the word elephant, write that their numbers in Africa were increasing (they're actually down 90% in 10 years) and that would change reality.

Well, it didn't. Wikipedia has long had protections in place to prevent this kind of vandalism. Yes, anyone can get in and write. No, not everything you write will stay. No, not everyone who writes can keep writing -- vandals are detected and stopped.

This is just one example of the kind of reality denial AOL has always gone through. It was a great set of Internet training wheels 10 years ago, but no one needs training wheels anymore -- the Web is now 17.  In terms of real popularity, I began working on this medium almost 12 years ago. Folks are experienced enough with this medium to deal with its problems. They don't need big brother watching over them.

Not that big brother is ever going to be convinced. But we just don't need AOL.