The Coming Wave Page #2
Page #2
(2007 Article Continued)
THE OLD PARADIGM
As the concept of the "Discussion Forum" caught on across the growing Internet, a couple of standard formulas became the norm.
The first was a single poster copying and pasting a news article from the Main Stream Media and then adding his/her comments. This early Blog form still exists today.
The second formula developed largely during the "Clinton Scandals".
Liberals and conservatives separated and started their own discussion forums where they would post an article from the Drudge Report or the New York Times and then proceed to beat it to death with everyone making comments.
There were a few science centered Blogs, but they also followed these same two formats. And they were out in the periphery - with few members and very few visitors.
No it was the mega sites where the action was - a huge group of diverse members, lots of visitor traffic and a stable infrastructure.
The elements were now all in place for the perfect storm.
THE TRANSFORMATION
This is the way the world ends Not with a bang, but a whimper
-T. S. Eliot-
It was the Ides of March, late in the night - on the hottest conservative forum on the Internet - that she appeared.
In an obscure section of that web site she posted a cryptically titled thread, made a comment about Ebola, a comment about God and then posted an advisory about a "worldwide health threat."
In a section that had seen only seven threads in the past seven days, she wove a strange, exotic and haunting thread for two days.
Then on the 17th of March she posted the first of 20 highly technical medical threads about the SARS outbreak - and over the next eleven days guided both lay and professionals, transformed the web site, crushed the paradigm and changed the way we interface with breaking news forever.
Oh, and there is that strange aspect of her name.
Every literate person on the Web knew and understood, not only what it meant, but the endless nuances that lay associated with that name, in this context.
She signed on as Mother Abigail.