Tweet: the Ramifications
On the oempoweb (ha), I have advanced the theory (despite a wise rebuttal from Paul Musgrave) that maybe the web isn't the best model:

We're all accustomed to thinking of a spider creating this elaborate structure, but what if Al Gore had decided to use a different model - say, a bird's nest? All of the twigs in the bird's nest are tangled together, and mama bird constantly flies away from the nest to go to other places while the newbie birds just sit around and deal with worms....

(And yes, Paul, I was joking when I referenced Al Gore as the implied inventor of the Internet.)

Well, let's pretend for a moment that my idea has merit. (After that, we'll pretend that William Hung can sing.) We would need to rewrite all of our references to webs, spiders, and the like to conform to the new model. For example, here is how I would rewrite learnthenet.com's page entitled
"What Is the Web?"

What Is the Forest?

The World Wide Forest is a collection of collections of documents (bird's nests) that are either tightly coupled together (like the twigs in a bird's nest) or loosely coupled (by adult birds flying from nest to nest).

These documents are stored on computers called servers located around the world.

The Forest has evolved into a global electronic publishing medium and increasingly, a medium for conducting electronic commerce.

While some users are able to fly through the entire Forest, other users (baby birds) remain within specific locations (nests) and only receive locally available information services (worms).

Uh oh...this is starting to make sense to me.