The Web Is Getting Smaller

Bell Expressvu has hundreds of channels. I only watch a few of them. According to the latest numbers from Netcraft there were 273,301,445 websites in January 2011. Give or take a few. And lately, I have been finding the web is getting smaller even as the number of websites continues to grow.

I regularly hit a list of sites on a daily basis for information about technology, business, investments, music, photography, cycling, guitar and news. That list is really quite small and it has not changed much at all over the past several years. When doing research or preparing for presentations, the web gets wider and less focused. And I usually search for several things over the course of a day and I invariably stumble upon a new and interesting site.

Let’s pick an example. Photography. On a regular basis I hit the same set of sites: Luminous Landscape, Ken Rockwell, bythom, Nikonians. And every so often I will stumble upon sites like Thorsten Overgaard. Terrific content. But for whatever reason, it does not make the regular rotation of daily hits. The only reason I found Thorsten’s site is because of Daring Fireball — I hit Gruber’s site every day. More and more, I go wide on the web from a very narrow set of sites.

I have no idea whether that is a good thing or bad.