As capitalism begins to emerge as the predominant force devouring the Internet, which essentially equates to cannibalism in many instances, we find that like in other industries where capitalism has previously flourished that the young and emergent new innovations are very often simply copied, plagiarized, and blatantly stolen, in many cases those committing theft simply abuse / use the legal institution as their protection, rather than it serving to protect the victims, it aids the wrongdoers.

The main reason that the Internet has witnessed such innovation thus far is in large part because of the FREE philosophy that has been widely adopted by the hobbyists who have already developed much of it. The hobbyists have literally paved the way for almost all of the innovation that has been witnessed. But as we start to see capitalism and it's cronies take a stake online, we also simultaneously see the stifling of innovation and a monopolization of players which in turn standardizes the one-size-fits all model.

Going side by side with the above, the danger any new industry faces is that instead of the powerful companies or parents and guardians for want of an analogy, looking after the young, supporting them with their wealth and helping them grow from acorns into a wild symbiotic forest, they cannibalize them, treating them as cattle that they feed from, inevitably leaving a baron desert in their wake.

For the hobbyists survival and innovation to continue, we as a community need to recognize the fallacies that are evident and that have already seen the destruction of many previous revolutions that have come and gone. Namely that instead of large muscle men being able to bully their way into dominance, at the same time shutting out those very people who paved their way, that instead the road builders are rewarded for their part of the construction.

This brings us onto the nurturing that companies such as Google who are now predominant and leading exploiters of this terrine (farmers) have to provide back into the land and forest in order to foster the continuance of speciation and innovation that we all so enjoy.

PHASE 1 : The Google scam

Much of the ground work for the hobbyist's survival has been already been laid (unintentionally), but unfortunately the accountants are now in charge at Google, and while they started as company with good intentions, they recently made a huge attack on the community at large by reducing the PageRank of companies that linked to others (they believed were doing so for profit) and as a consequence, the buyers of links who did so to enjoy better natural search engine ranking positions, have been intimidated and threatened with loss of business and a stern warning.

Googles motivation is simple, they want the only one's to profit from search to use Adsense and Adwords (their own products). However, they have overstepped the mark in a number of ways while at the same time missing an opportunity.

Google should have absolutely no say what-so-ever as to who links to who and for what motive. "After all, Google itself, that harbinger of the Web2.0 era, thrives on info that could be said to "belong" to others — the links, keywords, and metadata that reside on other Web sites and that Google harvests and repositions into search results" Wired. We the community allow them to scrape our Web sites with their robots, that use bandwidth, resources, and our propriety information. For them to later (after their dominance has been attained) insinuate that we should be barred from linking to others for profit or any other reason is a crime, albeit not illegal like so many other inadequacies where capitalism's law is impotent.

Further the Google PageRank which is a currency for those that sell-on the respect that they have earned, should be updated on a regular basis, and at minimum 4 times a year (currently we have witnessed the toolbar update being as sporadic as once every 8 months or so).

By allowing Google to scrape our sites and data in order that they can build an index of natural authorities, and thus build one of the most profitable companies in the world from that index, in return we unrelinquishly should have absolutely no interference as to who and how we decide to share our own earned respect (page-rank).

By leaving this industry that was just flourishing to continue with their support is the right thing for Google to do, and in doing so would allow content creators, developers and anyone with something to offer free of charge, on their own Web sites a much needed source of revenue that would keep the bailiffs from the door and thus allow them to continue to create and innovate and build new roads for us all to travel down.

Unfortunately Adsense revenue does not bring in enough revenue (despite the success stories that get paraded about) to cover the hosting charges for many creators let-alone provide them a living wage. Not to mention it is an unfair way of supporting content creators, traffic is not the only indicator of value! Lastly least not forget that the share of revenue that Adsense publishers receive is a closely guarded secret and if the truth was known there would most likely be an outcry at the injustice of the profit split.

PHASE 2 : GNU Lesser General Public Licensing Scam

Content creators (hobbyists) have widely adopted the give it away free philosophy, with good intentions that in hindsight have allowed anyone including muscle men, to use their content free and without so much as a link in return, but the muscle men and everyone else should pay (in some way) for the use of material that they exploit for their profit.

As an application developer myself, I know full well that there is absolutely no way whatsoever that I would have been able to create the applications I have, without the prior work of the many whose shoulders upon whom I stand. I have recently contacted some of those who upon I stand asking them about their work and efforts and what if anything it has given them in return.

To provide just one example is all that is necessary as the story is a widely universal one. In an application I developed recently I used a free piece of code called PHPFlickr by Dan Coulter. This is essentially an interface between the Flickr API and PHP users, allowing PHP developers to create applications and interact with the Flickr API very elegantly. As such this class probably saved me alone 1 week of development to achieve my intended goals. In return I made a very small donation of 20 Euros to Dan as a small gesture of good will and I linked to him from the about page of the application that I built, as I did with all the other pieces of code from third parties that I used.

Now thats not much I know, but when I contacted Dan to ask him for input for this article, I was UNastonished to hear that not more than 100 USD in total had been donated to him for this work. And while it is true that he had had a few other opportunities as result from that work, it in no part satisfies or equals his efforts IMO. But the bigger story is that this exact same story is repeated by hundreds of thousands of others that have the same story to tell.

The solution I propose involves the creation of a new license that creators can use to give away their work free of charge to third parties but in return for a quality link. I have called this the Full Attribution License and the essence of it is that third parties can use the material, linking back to the creator, who would thus gain further respect within the search engines that they could then pass off onto their own other commercial projects or if they wish sell on to others who could gain better placements within the search engines.

The argument that the likes of Google and maybe others would make against this initiative is that the natural search results would be subject to manipulating and this would lower the quality of the results. This is absolutely a red herring. 1) The SERPs are already being widely manipulated. 2) It does not equate that the results would be worse than they are now. It's simply competition after all. 3) The main motive Google have in stopping this trade is simply to further their own.

More to come.

In the beginning, it was the hobbyists who sat glued to their desks in their bedrooms with copies of the electronic 'Softdisk', with their soldering irons cobbling together the earliest remnants of this revolution, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak although slightly nerdy were fundamentally hobbyists, passionate about their nerdy little world of IC's and building software that made dots move about on the screen.

Well haven't we all come a long way since those early days. We have enjoyed one of the greatest revolutions to ever confront mankind. In just 25 years a single generation has witnessed the emergence of a force that essentially embodies opportunities and tools that could and will no doubt play a significant role in the continuation of the human race, as it battles against the threats posed by rises in population, shortening of supplies, climate change, and man made pollution (in all its disguises).

So is it all about business? NO. It never was and never has been. Yet somehow when you read the latest tech blogs and tech articles in the media, they are obsessed with profits, takeovers, buyouts, venture capital rounds of investment, growth rates, page views, unique visitors, advertising revenues, sell outs, and then follows the emulators of the latest killer application, generally rehash's of someone else's idea with with a twaddle of ajax thrown in and a whopping 6 million USD to pay for the 'brightest' ninja coders Stanford just chucked out.

It's when it gets to this point that you just know it's going to go 'pop snap' once again. The first bubble was a ridiculous hostile takeover bid where the internet (long ignored by the mainstream) suddenly showed signs of making profit. Ignorant 'reporters' wrote double page spreads in popular newspapers blessing overinflated virtues for the likes of 'Last Minute.com' claiming they were threatening to take out the travel industry, paving the way for their later headlines which made all the worlds media as they sold out for a whopping 850 Million UKP (valuing the company on a par with WH Smith). Utter madness.

I was an early visitor to the Lastminute.com offices, housed on a floor above a retail chain on Oxford street, (London), 3 stories up in an open plan office, desks scattered about haphazardly, with about 20 ninjas busy at work, not even so much as a receptionist. Great little cottage industry yes, but company worth 850 Million clearly not by about a million miles.

So sure it all followed thereafter, the geeky little nerd world was thrusted into the limelight as the quickest place to get rich, and with it came the abandoning of the essential elements that fueled this force. Not that the hobbyists ever went away, rather their platform and hobby was hijacked by the city corporations who muscled their way into every conceivable crevice they could, like crazies buying up virtual real-estate in Second Life.

When someone got wise that these so-called companies essentially amounted to little more than online brochures that were NOT going to be taking over anything let-alone the world, rapidly we saw their demise. It was a sobering time, the money left the scene disgusted with its losses and I for one hoped they would never forget that lynching and forever leave the hobbyists in peace to continue their little hobby without the fanfare of these get rich fortune tellers.

Alas that was not to be, first we had Google, then Myspace, next up Youtube, then Facebook, all creating the buzz and hype that of-course could not go unnoticed. Now attention is back in full swing from all those sleazy cooperate masterminds that are back to corrupt the terrain once again. With them came yet another year of distortion and delinquency. The buzz and hype surrounding every penny made and lost in the race for the latest me-too, 'I got a social network too' has frankly been ridiculous.

So its the end of the year and quite obviously it's the end of many a wannabe billionaires dreams. As they slowly come to the last page of their cheque books, and without a dime in sight, they have no choice but to close the doors once again in a fashion we (hobbyists) are starting to get used too. They come and go like speculators in the great gold rush, and leave in their wake desolate buildings and give the auction companies fodder to peddle.

You see, a little word of advise to the speculators and bullies waiting in the wings ready to pounce on the next big thing. What drives this thing we refer to as the Interweb is a creative collective of hobbyists, who do not awake an night with the excitement from dreams of billions passing through their fingers, but instead with nerdy solutions to coding problems that might allow us to make a feature easier to use (for example) and thus more user friendly.

It's the hobbyists that are the brain power behind the big advancements here, and who rarely ever get any credit for their efforts. A case in point is the likes of the Thomas Fuchs the creator of script.aculo.us who has a little donate now button on the home-page of his site where he offers probably one of the most widely adopted Ajax libraries to-date which has been incorporated by many of the top 100 movers and shakers in the latest gold rush. All of which is offered open source and licensed under the MIT License. Yet you wont hear the slightest mention of him by the likes of TechCrunch totally oblivious as to who's shoulders upon their cronies stand.

As we all know donations are few and far between in the over saturated world of "who can give it away the quickest is the winner". So unlikely so, that I would be extremely surprised if more that 5K USD has passed through that little donate now button (thought of course I don't know). And yet all the while we read non-stop dribble about these valuations and investments into copy-cat 'social networks' (or what have you) that utilize the AJAX scriptaculous library.

It is only natural to copy, plagiarize, emulate, and be inspired by others success, why that is one of the fundamental forces that drives creation itself, and my problem is not with entities that are inspired by others, that use ideas others developed, or necessarily copy parts of systems for their own projects. However that generosity does NOT extend to the parasites who for want of nothing other than to make profit do all of the above, with millions in investment backing behind them and with the sole intention being to take out a potential market and long since will be forgotten those that paved the way with their ideas, creations, mistakes, and efforts.

more to come.