By way of an introduction to this phlog, I recently
discovered that people are still using gopher. So I started
exploring gopherholes and phlogs. So far, I really enjoy the
following characteristics of gopherspace:

  * the general absence of hyperlinks in documents. The
  reading experience is so much more calm, since once you
  start a document, no further interaction is typically
  required. 

  * gopher works with lynx! I have been a lynx (and pine)
  user since 1997. Over the years, the headers and links that
  populate the beginning of web pages have grown, making the
  entire experience of reading pages on a text browser quite
  onerous. There's a lot of scrolling and of course,
  significant portions of sites don't render at all owing to
  the widespread use of javascript. But gopher pages still
  render beautifully on lynx. 

  * the community feeling. Gopher brings me back to my first
  experiences with networking/internet (dial up into Bulletin
  Board Systems, the local Freenet, and then my university's
  UNIX server). I loved the creativity and personal nature of
  what people were doing on those BBS's and the web. The web
  today is commercialized and populated by a different type of
  person. Gopherspace looks to me to be a lot like the
  internet of the 1990s. That's a compliment to all of you.

Next time, I'll write about my interests, which will likely
guide the direction of my little piece of gopherspace.