[ Sind Weblogs Monster? | Are Weblogs Monsters? ]

Of course, I should have known it. As an affectionate consumer of SF (film and books alike) quite some times I was fascinated by the work of hackers in search of the ultimate truth available in hidden and more or less secured databases which are restricted to some sort of adepts. The setting is very similar to these fictions dealing with holy circles, or sects belonging to both sites, the one of God and the one of the Devil. Actually, differentiating between the two is not easy most times. It's not even as obvious who belongs to which site in the popular mystery Club Dumas (film by Roman Polanski, 1999, by the title of The Ninth Gate).

This hermetic and somehow Neoplatonic quality of ambivalence arousing nets of dectective ambitions with all the required pertinacy appertains the seeker for knowledge within the Web, as well. The qualities s/he best needs are: tenacity, smartness, thirst for knowledge, the ability to solve puzzles.

All of that might be true, I did not test it so far - to be honest, my stubborness in detecting information in the net is shorthanded, I still prefer to browse through oldfashioned catalogues leading me to material books -, but nevertheless I wonder, if I help to write a new myth by having borrowed this subject title from Thomas Burg's article (who himself has borrowed the title, too). "Deep Web", "invisible web", even "gateway" might be appropriate names, but they nevertheless supply a myth or SF-like sense for mysteries: They belong to the sphere of ontology and demonology. Yeah, well, the Web is not only a monster of protean quality, it is magic cosmology.