This is the beginning of the first weekend following a week that will, like Pearl Harbor, live in infamy.
Yes, it is the Saturday following the Tuesday bombing — there is no other single word for it — of New York’s World Trade Towers, the Pentagon and a failed attempt to steer another hijacked plane into another Washington, D.C. site.
This is a tech blog, yet let’s face it: No one — on TV, on stage, on the Web — can write/talk/think about much except this. Half of Slashdot was the bombings for day — and that’s geek central. Says something.
I personally escaped the personnel impact of the terrorist attacks — I did not lose anyone or my own life in these acts.
I did lose a job, however.
I was supposed to receive a job offer on about Tuesday from a large corporation. Due to the bombings and the uncertainty of what lies ahead, this corporation established a hiring freeze. So I was frozen out.
As I explained to the corporation, I don’t like it, but I certainly fully understand. Things have changed, and no one is quite certain of what way they have changed.
And I have this totally in perspective: Yes, I lost a job opportunity. Thousands lost their lives; many thousands more will be forever impacted by this day in ways that go WAY beyond my piddly job opportunity.
‘Nuff said.
One of the debates going on right now — actually, it all began shortly after the bombings — was that this is either:
- The first true Internet war (people say Kosovo, but the columnists scoff)
- The day the Internet failed
Realistically, it’s probably a little bit of both.
To a large degree, I think the Web did fail in so many ways for people, especially on Tuesday, as the bombing were occurring.
I was online early Tuesday morning, checking/answering e-mail, hitting this and that site (mainly working on a freelance project). I finally hit CNN just after the first plane hit. I remember wondering — as the page was taking forever to load — if anything was up, because CNN is usually snappy at this time.
I saw the picture, wrote an e-mail to Romy and told her I was going to watch TV.
Which I did, for 15 straight hours. I didn’t even shower until about 3pm. I just watched.
I would occassionally check CNN — and saw it go into the worst crisis mode I have ever seen: Logo and HTML text. That’s it.
Obviously, they were getting pounded.
I couldn’t even reach msnbc.com or abcnews.com. I’m sure AOL was nailed.
The Net failed a lot of people.
In a Wired.com article shortly afterwards, author Leander Kahney said that the Web didn’t fail, you just had to know where to look.
Uh, my Mom doesn’t know about Slashdot and the mirrors many folks scrambled to put up to help get the word out.
The Net failed — it did not operate in the fashion people expected. Most could not get information. Yes, the geeks could. My mom couldn’t.
It failed them.
On the other hand, there was a lot of great first-hand information out there — yes, if you knew where to look — and many people took the time and bandwidth to get the info out to people. It was great in that respect.
To me, the coolest thing that happened on the Web was the way everyone did band together to help. Some attempts were misguided to a degree — I have seen at least a half-dozen sites offering to be the clearinghouse for missing persons information (this should be consolidated in one place so people, again, don’t “have to know where to look”), but for the most part excellent efforts. Amazon, in particular, should be commended. For this entire week, the top page of Amazon — that e-commerce jugganaut — has looked like the image on the right. Totally devoted to getting donations — which they will process at their expense — to the Red Cross. To date, $5.4 million has been raised through this one effort.
That rocks.
Let’s be honest: Amazon will reap a lot of positive publicity for it, but I don’t think that will make up the lost income from people who would have gone to the site and made an impulse buy. But even if they DO end up making money off this effort, what’s the down side? Money was sent to the Red Cross, people had a place — a highly visible place — to go and help out in some way. I don’t see the downside.
What a great concept. This is the Web at its best.