Describe the Web as an
online magazine, or an undeveloped global marketplace, or the latest trend,
and you've missed its essence. The word web sprouts from the same
Indo-European root as weave -- to connect. What we do here is
significant only insofar as it connects us to a kid building her first home
page in Manitoba, who gets excited realizing that she can use her skills
and imagination to reach out from where she is, so that others can see
through her eyes, and so that she too might see through the eyes of others.
The great Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke praised the human soul for
its ability to distill the honey of insight from the pollen of experience.
At HotWired we are, as Rilke put it, "the bees of the invisible,"
building a hive of connection.
The energy in this room is essentially
collaborative. Working at HotWired is more like jamming in a band than
being a solitary minstrel. It's not accurate to speak of Web
"writing" alone, unless your text is destined to reside on the
Net as bare ASCII on a gray background. The interweaving of words,
graphics, sound, and interface means the writers, designers, audio experts,
and engineers must pool their intelligences to nourish a beauty greater
than the sum of its parts.
The only fame that outlasts the fickle hype
of the digital world comes from adding something to the commonwealth that
is subtly useful.
Is what you're doing making everyone's participation
in the community of humankind a little easier, a little richer -- whether
they're wired or not? It's a tribute to the vitality of our evolving medium
that such a question simply appears before us one day, in the course of our
taxing labors, as something green and unexpected, sprouting from what
looked like bare concrete and wires.