Joe Moody’s Web Adventures

Wow, that’s news. Every Gen X’er remembers Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 charting out the course of mainstream pop music in the 80s. After the digital revolution of the following 2 decades, I didn’t even know AT40 still existed.

With iTunes, internet and satellite radio offering countless choices of musical genres, there no longer is a playlist of mainstream music recognizable by the general masses as there was in the 1980s.

AT40 and MTV kept the nation humming the same songs (whether they liked it or not).

Everyone remembers when Madonna’s Material Girl came out, or Michael Jackson’s Beat It.

Turns out Ryan Seacrest is hosting the new AT40, of course he’s also the host of the closest thing there is to a pop mainstream in the 21st century: American Idol.

There’s one big difference between American Idol and AT40, and it sheds light on the nature of Gen X and Gen Y. Idol is like the internet: it’s interactive and it places everyone (contestants) on a level playing field. Of course it’s usually the 13-year-old-girl demographic who votes most frequently to determine the winners.

Wonder if Kasey ever surfs AT40.com…

A couple thought-provoking comments to my last column got me thinking where I stand as to the birth years of Generation X.

Some say X begins in 1961, some say 1966.

There’s no better example of a person born during this time than our own President Obama.

Is he Generation X?

Gut reaction: There are as many similarities as differences, so for me the jury is still out.

While he has the technical savvy of Gen X, he has the idealism of a Boomer.

Obama believes that government is the answer to many of the problems in the world, while Xers believe that they change the world by transforming themselves.

However Gen X much more easily identifies with Obama than a true Boomer like Hillary Clinton. Obama knows YouTube, he’s looking for similarities more than differences and he was a kid in the 70s.

Some say Obama is part of a mini-generation between Boomers and Xers called Generation Jones that runs until 1965.

It may take awhile for a consensus to form.

Here’s a brand new online poll where you can see how others are voting on the definitino of Gen X.

This all brings up a larger question: Are generations more defined by time, ie 20-year spans, or by the personality traits of people within them?

The Internet is defining a new multifaceted culture, and Google is defining the Internet.

Google is just a search engine, meaning a place to find indexed content online. But it is the way it ranks content that influences the content itself.

Google was created by two Generation Xers, Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, in their Stanford dorm room.

For a pair of Generation X’ers who came of age amid a confusing post-modern landscape, their philosophies are far from postmodern. They told ABC: “We have a mantra: ‘Don’t be evil,’ which is to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone,” Page said. “So I think if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing.” (ABCnews.com 2-14-04)

Brin added: “Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted and ethical and ultimately making a big difference in the world.”

These innovators took a minimalist approach to their website. Google’s home page had but one function: to search, while other search engines turned into shopping centers and news sites.

Google stood in stark contrast to this growing trend, keeping an almost Zen-like simplistic interface with no advertising and only a few relevant links to other internal pages.

But if simplicity was the allure, the Google algorithm was the magic that made it famous. Google uses a special, constantly updated algorithm to determine which what sites to list at the top of each search.

When a website appears at the top, it means people are much more likely to visit it.

Google is secret about the exact algorithm they used to compute their search results, like a restaurant hiding its secret ingredient.

However, the basic premise of the Google algorithm is simple: display pages in order of popularity.

Popularity is measured by how many other relevant Web pages reference a certain page. The more Web pages that link to Page A, the more popular Page A is.

Google also takes into consideration the popularity of the linking pages, as well as a host of other unknown factors that can change daily, keeping Web developers spinning in circles trying to figure it out.

So why does this matter? Because search engines are where Internet users turn when seeking help or services on endless amounts of online offerings.

Market research has shown that the highest conversion rates, where online visitors become buyers, are achieved through high placement in search engine results.

Unlike passively watching a television ad, people who go to Google are actively seeking out specific products or services.

That means the search engines are controlling the money.

So if you’re website is not popular, meaning that not many other websites link to it, then your website will barely be noticed on Google.

So webmasters wanting their sites to be ranked high by Google began creating free content and distributing as widely as possible, Doing this would naturally lead to people linking back to if it were good content, which in turn means more popularity, which mean higher ranking in Google.

This has also led some news organizations to publish their news online free to the public because every single page links back to their home page and therefore gains popularity. It has helped encourage companies to publish more documentation, its inspired Internet providers to host free online services such as discussion boards on a variety of topics, all to increase their ranking with Google.

So in effect, Google has become not only a catalyst for growth on the Internet, but a promoter of information sharing and openness.

Rebellion is to resist authority, to go against the grain.

Rebellion has a negative connotation, but just like the film Star Wars, rebels can be the good guys if the ruling authority is the Dark Side.

In the 1960’s the young people of that day rebelled against traditional authority and created what was dubbed the counter-culture.

By the early 21st century, this generation became the authorities they once resisted, and changed culture so much that the counter-culture became mainstream society. What was once deemed rebellion became the establishment.

This generation, known as the Baby Boomers, exerted its power by sheer numbers. All children of the “Greatest Generation” who weathered the Depression, won World War II, then produced the most populous and privileged generation in American history: A Baby Boom.

Advances in technology empowered and enlightened this generation even further, new tools doing most the work meant new freedoms and much more time only previously enjoyed by the wealthy. Combined with the turbulence of the times, this generation questioned its own values and existence to the point that anything resembling authority was suspect: government, church, academia, police, military, anyone over 30.

The questioning continued until a counter-culture solidified. But then this generation grew up, they had to move out of the home and fend for their own like their parents before them. They became parents, bought houses, took a government jobs, became professors, of ministers and all of them exceeded the age of 30.

But they did not leave their counter-culture behind, soon all aspects of their rebellion assimilated into mainstream culture. The counter-culture became just plain old culture.

And as the children of the baby boomers grew, like all children they also sought rebellion to establish identity and distinguish themselves from their aging parents.

To be a hippie of the hippie parent would be a conformist.

To become a priest of a hippie parent would be true rebellion, or reverse rebellion.

As our world becomes more digital, the greater our yearning will grow for the natural.

This is already seen in the rising property values of homes near the natural wonders: lakes, oceans, mountains, forests and open landscapes.

Just as opposites attract, we gravitate more toward the natural to balance our increasingly digital existence:

• Extreme sports, most of which interact with nature, like rock climbing, snowboarding, off-road mountain-biking and many others, all re-connect us with the physical universe from which our bodies derived. They take us out of man’s creations, and into God’s original canvass.

•  New digital clocks now play back sounds some urban people never hear, like streams, birds, crickets at night, and wind in the trees

• Model trains sets, growinging in sales and popularity, replicate an old-school technology that stood the test of time. Like most old technologies, they have a physical charisma not as prevalent in our computer age.

• Car manufacturers have brought back classic car designs from an age when no computers ran the engine

•  Turntables, also known as record players, recently outsold electric guitars in Europe, not just from DJs scatching samples, but from new listeners discovering rare tracks, cover art and the warmer sound of an old technology.

• Reality TV shows replacing the canned laughter of sitcoms, as if our own reality is already too canned.