Speed the Day

You may not have noticed, but the world of the web taken as a whole, kind of--now how shall I put this?--sucks. It rants and beeps and pops. It flashes funky parts of its anatomy. It's badly-written, misspelled, ugly and erroneous. It costs too much, takes too long, talks too loud, and seizes up when you look at it cross-eyed.

One of the best things to come out of my web conference in Toronto was a renewed determination to stake out a reliable, well-defined, useful and useable public place within the hallucinogenic maelstrom that is the Internet. A place that, in the words of CBC.ca's Claude Galipeau, will address the visitor "as a citizen, and not as a consumer." NCPR plans to work with PBS, NPR and others on a search engine tool that will treat this public space as a unified whole. Users will be able to search sources they trust without wading through pages of results from the Raelian Space Academy, anonymous Transylvanian bloggers, MTV chatroom transcripts, and Bangkok porn sites. Soon Lord, make it soon.