Welcome to The Amsterdam Post,
he Amsterdam Post originates from the desire to have an independent communication channel.
The emergence of the internet gave the opportunity to realise this dream.
By its nature, the internet is the new medium to publish and deliver content cheaply on a world wide scale.
Getting online seemed logic. But the very nature of the internet complicated matters enormously.
My discovery of the internet was a constant amazement of all the crap and interesting stuff that is out there in cyberspace.
I simply got lost in the enormous
information overload.
As my first task I assigned myself to creating some order on a simple HTML page. I assembled the nice, good, interesting, surprising, handy sites and after a while called it The Amsterdam Post Intellectual Link Exchange (
apilex
)
apilex
) .
This page got out of control. There were so many links crammed onto it, that it was in the end hardly accessible for myself, let alone for a stranger.
I started to tear this page apart and divided the material in sections and reviewed the look multiple times. A lot of the older material are the witnesses of it.
In time and through experience the pages and the navigation improved.
The Internet Dream
The internet is a new medium, and was, by the time I started to discover it, an unexplored medium. Its force and weaknesses were not yet apparent.
The possibilities seemed endless. In innocence of the character of the internet a complete new Cyber religion started, that turned out to be really virtual. It drew hard currency, moulded it into very soft money and after its collapse into a blur of unfulfilled dreams.
The world would change through the internet. The Internet idea promised a giant memory accessible for anyone, an endless encyclopaedia, an archive of human deeds and knowledge unimagined in history.
Above all, the New Economy believers saw great profits, which turned out to be great losses. But one dream
has come true.
Every one their own newspaper, under complete self-control, world wide available.
This is the
crystalline pure publicists dream.
Anyone who is reasonably educated and who has the dedication and the time, can upheld a good site in any subject and grade of speciality.
A commercial mind may make a living out of it. As long as one has not the idea that the internet will make you rich.
All this, thanks to a telephone connection and a PC.
With these cheap instruments anyone can start communicating his/her ideas and showing its interest to the world.
Dangerous Medium
Knowing the right sources means that the pulse of the day, the flow of history is right on your desktop, or laptop (if you are lucky).
Especially for 'news junkies' it is a dangerous medium. There is so much every day, from every continent, from every kind of view, of all beliefs, that one could get the idea that through the internet one could suck all that its happening in, even before it is reported in regular newspapers, and thereby be the master of all of it.
It takes some time to get over this godlike feeling.
A good remedy is building a site and discovering after a while, that the average number of visitors isn't any higher than a close ten a day.
However the drawings of my virtual cathedral were spooking my head. Letting it unfinished would have been an existential impossibility.
So here it is,
The Amsterdam Post. The slowly tugging train. Tugging tucked along an unknown track into the future. Being the smallest niche, in the biggest network ever in history thought possible.
On choice of name
Further text in progress
On language choice
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