The Webmaster is dead - Long live the webmaster!

The Webmaster is dead - Long live the webmaster!

For twenty years, my perspective on information technology has been one of individual empowerment. I have always thought of computers and the Internet (once I discovered it) as the lever Archimedes was asking for, the one long enough to move the world. Likewise, I have always been interested in "publishing". At one time I thought I might become a writer. I may yet one day, but it may have to wait until my old age, should I reach it alive. Then again, if a writer is one who writes, then I am a writer already. I tried my hand at running my own personal publishing business, and learned the important lesson that I am not a salesman. Failure is good for the soul.

I made my first web site in 1997. This means I was not one of those edgy, ahead of his time kind of guys. Never really was ahead of my time, just trying to keep up. But I loved the web from the beginning, because I felt it gave me a voice. In 1997 I was an avid movie-goer, and I was a bit miffed because the 1996 Oscar nominations made no sense to me. I knew I had seen tons of movies that I had liked that year, and none of them had been nominated for anything. So I resolved that in 1997 I would rate and review every movie I saw, tracking them all through the end of the year, so that next year, I would know exactly which movies deserved to get awards and which did not. Amazingly, I reviewed 75 theatrical release movies that year, not counting theatrical re-releases of older films (Das Boot, Bridge on the River Kwai, Star Wars). Did I say "avid"? Perhaps "obsessive" would be more accurate.

Because I had fallen in love with the web, I decided to post all my reviews on a web site. I didn't have a domain name then, I just posted the page to the space provided with my AOL account. I taught myself to code HTML with the help of a thin book and a web browser. I got a little thrill when I received an email from Hollywood movie director Michael Caton Jones, who complimented me on my insightful (though brief) review of his film, The Jackal. That was when I knew that the web was cool!

In those days there was a job title known as "Webmaster". The webmaster was the guy (or gal) who ran the web site. Usually it was some geeky college kid. The webmaster did everything for the web site. He managed the server, administered the web server software, wrote the content, coded the pages "by hand" in emacs (or vi if he was less dexterous or more masochistic), and wrote CGI scripts in Perl (or, God bless him, in C).

As the web commercialized and the bubble inflated, the job of webmaster fractured and divided. A commercial web site needed a system administrator, a graphic designer, a copywriter, a programmer, a usability expert; basically, the webmaster was dead, replaced by a whole corporate department.

Now, I'm okay with the web being commercialized. Hey, I like money myself, I'm not going to begrudge anyone else trying to make their own. Especially if it means I can get my books and DVDs delivered to me at a discount. But something got lost here. I liked the idea of the webmaster, the one man band, the person who is writer, programmer, designer, and system administrator, all at the same time.

Back on technology and the empowerment of the individual, the beauty of our swank new computers and our shiny Internet is that, yes, you can do it all. Using the technology and our own knowledge as leverage we can move the world. Each of us can be a webmaster, if we are crazy enough to want to be. That's what I'm doing, and that's what I'll try to help others do by publishing as much as I can of my knowledge and experiences here on Control-Escape. Long live the webmaster in all of us!