Internet

Keith Dawson was walking on Cape Cod when he found a roll of film abandoned on a wooden bench. One of the small, innumerable sadnesses of modern life: someone would never know what had happened on their holidays. So he decided to undertake an experiment. He had the film developed, found a picture that seemed to show the owners, and scanned it into his website. He has several: the best-named is http://nowedonthaveawebsite.com/ - a slogan that is spreading across America among self-consciously arty types. Expect it to turn up in English small businesses next year.

It's a characteristic Internet joke to seize this name and make it real. But the website on which Dawson placed the picture was http://www.tbtf.com, the home of his wonderful newsletter Tasty Bits from the Technology Front. If Salon, which I wrote about last week, is the best example of a magazine on the web, TBTF is my favourite newsletter. It is quirky, well-informed and wastes no time. Though it contains hyperlinked source material, this is relegated to footnotes, which is exactly the way to convey information. It appears irregularly in my mailbox about once every ten days and usually contains three or four things worth writing about and at least one dry little joke to send round my geeky friends. For those who can't wait for their fix, on Dawson's website there is also a Tasty Bit of the Day, and that is where he placed the photograph he had scanned in.

Within a couple of days, 146 people had looked at it, and one recognised the people in the picture and wrote to tell him whose the film was. This was a most impressive demonstration of networking, since the owners of the film live in Idaho, several thousand miles west of where it had been lost. The odds against finding the owner of any particular abandoned film in the US would appear to be, at first sight, something like 200 million to one.

In fact, of course, they are very much smaller, because of the way in which almost everyone in the world is linked up socially. If I know 100 people, and each of them knows 100 people, and each of them etc, then there are hundreds of thousands of friends of friends of mine out there. Most are probably friends of friends of yours, too.

The web, with its extraordinary fractionating quality, makes it easy to distil these tenuous relationships into something solid. That is one reason why it is infested with amateur genealogists (who are almost as numerous there as amateur gynaecologists). Now Dawson is thinking of setting up a single global clearing house for found rolls of exposed film, where scanned pictures could be displayed and anyone who knew they had lost a roll of film could search. It will, I'm sure, be really useful for a few years, until it is either swamped by traffic or bought by Microsoft.

It is stories like this that remind me of the time when it really did seem that the Internet promoted only benevolent interaction. Of course, this had far less to do with technology than with the sociology of the early Internet, which was used, as it had been designed, by educated, articulate people with time on their hands. Now that all human life is there, the main use of Internet connections is to sell people things or, in extreme cases, to rent people people.

A really striking example of this last trade came my way on the risks list of another newsletter this week. A businessman with a slightly unusual surname was complaining that he had made a reservation for a hotel room in a distant city. He had done this by telephone, without any fancy technology. None the less, within 12 hours he had an e-mail at home advertising an escort service in the city in question.

Presumably the brothel had been passed a list of new reservations, and checked this out against one of the many publicly accessible e-mail directories: it took me five minutes to check the businessman's e-mail address - it would have taken less time had I not taken a diversion to get the phone numbers of five people who share his surname across the USA from a site maintained by AT&T, which also, sweetly, offered maps showing where each lived.

Of course, hotel porters have been offering selected guests girls for as long as there have been hotels. But there is something new and nastier about these sales methods. They certainly seem a much greater invasion of privacy than having your holiday snaps developed by a stranger and posted on the web to see who knows you.

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