So I went on that hidden web today on the Tor network. I quickly discovered a top secret banjo playing internet radio station and listened to it for what turned out to be the next several hours of exploration. There were a few interesting blogs and social networks, and what appeared to be a massive network of grey to black marketplace sites mixed with the requisite pornography. I added a few of the blogs to my list of RSS feeds, not because I had a great deal of interest in the content, but mainly because I may someday have a need to anony-blog myself. Other than that, what kept me on for so long was really the not-knowing what I’d find mixed with the difficulty of finding anything. There is no Google there. It reminded me of surfing the dial-tone internet back when search engines were still working out the algorithms and the paucity of content providers made it hard to find anything. In that sense, the Tor network is like a second, nascent internet.
