I listened to the soft hush of the cooling fan, watched the small intense green, red and yellow lights, A bright 20-inch monitor that keeps changing, flickering, and drawing me closer. Strange high pitched sounds appear quickly, become insistent and then grow silent. Sound familiar? It's the Web and it seems like magic.

I’m looking for some data, some information that I can blend into intelligence and then present, hopefully looking wise. Intelligence is a sometime thing and when you hear other people talk about the Web out of context it is really strange.

“My buddy Ruben at http://www.pcmall.com has the most memory for your laptop at the best price.”

Hmmm....

“You can get free demographics at http://www.easidemographics.com.”

“Comprehensive research on Real Estate is available at http://www.pikenet.com. The contacts are vast. It has become - a portal”.

“A Portal. Wow!”

Hokus Pokus, Dominokus

“Russian imagery can be obtained from http://www.terraserver.microsoft.com.”

“We can register them with the GIS”

“Are they Geo tifs?”

“ I don’t know”

Abbra Kadrabbra

Weird or not, the stuff you can find on the Web often is amazing. But you always feel like something is missing. You find what you are looking for, but it isn’t exactly what you want. What you want you can’t define until you see it. The problem is, you just never see it. Web magic is great but it's 10 degrees off. It is like the magician who pulls a rabbit out of the hat and the hat disappears. Right idea; wrong delivery.

I think this situation may exist because what we end up with are scattered parts. These parts are pretty neat and they let us build something like a market survey, a temporal map, or some impressive imagery. But somehow they are always in the wrong color or wrong flavor. The parts don’t quite leave you dissatisfied, just not satisfied. You feel like you do when you have been working down to the last bite of dessert and someone else eats it.

Here's the recipe: One part map, 3 parts demographics (one part for each ring), a dash of image (if it is fresh), flavor it with some research (real or created) and put it all into Word. Then mix slowly. Since not everybody knows how to make it, the formula is secret. And just like magic, where the ingredients come from is not important as long as there is a cloud of smoke. Like all magic you want to see more.

I think part of the delivery problem is that the Web is based on 1 and 0. You are connected or not, the link is or isn’t, the choice is either/or and there is no middle ground. You are committed, just like the fact that you can’t be a little bit pregnant.

Magic places us in a world that is between reality and make-believe, and the Web almost brings us there. We need a middle. We need something that is tunable. Something that lets us shape the parts for a better fit. I don’t want to connect just to 1990 or 1998 demographics. Why can’t I have 1998 and a half or 3/4 or 7/8s? Why can’t I take my demographics and slide them into the thematic tunable link and make the colors appear as I would like them? Tune, fit, adjust.

Sure, I can adjust the contrast of an image I got off the Web in a graphics program on my PC, but how about doing it on the Web using something with really high horsepower? Can I tune it? Maybe I could get a little more data just a tiny bit to the right.

I want the virtual assembler too. If I could tell it to got get the ingredients for my secret formula and then tune the links, that would really be magic. Of course, I could put the finishing touches on my PC, but wouldn’t it be more fun to see it in real time on the Web where you could tune, shape, reconfigure, add and subtract parts?

The Web is really just a mass of interlocking imaginations doing a million unrelated things. If I have begun to want it to be more interactive, so have others.

It is just a matter of time.

Eye of Newt, and wing of bat, dynamic servers are where it’s at.
URL mountain, Visual Sea, much more alive the Web must be.