I was struck by this thought recently. I must have hundreds of sites bookmarked, most of them from the early days of my Internet surfing. Recently, I only visit a handful of sites regularly, and another few occasionally. I could probably delete all of my bookmarks and not miss them.
So, is it just me, or have other people experienced this?
Mine was, until I started using an RSS reader regularly. Made it much more convenient and easy to “explore”.
Yes, it is much smaller. I used to have hundreds of bookmarks, and hundreds of “chat” buddies on a bunch of different programs.
I now use about 6 bookmarks daily, and a few dozen periodically.
And my chat lists have been pared down to mostly family and about 20 people tops.
I don’t have time for all the chatting and surfing anymore. And the newness of it all has worn off too, I suppose.
Yup. After discovering my browser’s homepage could be a number of tabs, I set them to the top 5 or 6 I usually go to and rarely drift from them. It’s nice because I can see everything there in short order, claim I’ve reached the end of the Internet and step away from the computer once in awhile.
Yeah, me too. Four or five boards, three e-mail reading groups, a couple of news sites, one shopping site, and one place for weather. I don’t have to ask myself “Where did I see that?” anymore. Makes me feel young again. 
Some on-line friendships have dropped away as well. I blame the recent election unpleasantness for that though.
Funny that. I’ve been on a car mailing list for 12 years. When I joined it had more than 1400 members. It’s now got about 400 members and the same 3 or 4 old farts going on about America turning into New France have got me seriously considering signing off.
It got so bad right after the election that the usually amazingly laid-back moderator stated that if it didn’t end he’d disband the group.
Yes. Part of it is because of the strong blocking at work. Part of it has been how so many message boards have just become filled with the last version of Obama/Democrats are the end of the world and they’re coming to boil your babies.
Nope. I joined Ravelry recently and began reading knitting blogs so I think my world has grown a lot.
I saved links as bookmarks from early on, but apart from a handful of regularly used ones, I hardly ever went back to those I’d saved, except to give friends some choice links, so that hasn’t really changed. The focus these days has shifted from association with messageboards to email – I have way more contacts these days, most concerning local history, but a lot of those are also very good friends of mine. I’ve expanded online interests into blogging just recently, so – all in all, I think I’m more of a 'Net fanatic than I was.
Yeah, I’ve noticed this myself. Visiting fewer sites. Recently upgraded my browser (Opera 9) and went thru and cleaned up my bookmarks. A lot of old stuff went away or was moved to secondary menus.
Part of it is that some sites are dead/dying. (Dr. Fun, Memepool, The Sneeze) Part of it is that some useful sites are now crowded with junk making it hard to find the good stuff.
The Internet was more interesting 10 years ago.
When I first started surfing the Web, there were literally just hundreds of sites; many imaginative, quirky student home pages at the handful of colleges and universities that gave their students some Web hosting space. If I went through 20 sites in a day, I felt like I saw a large portion of “good stuff” on the Web; I left the PC feeling satisfied. Now, there’s millions of sites, and I feel overwhelmed. I could spend all day surfing, and not feel like I experienced the best the Web has to offer. It’s hard to explain, really.
I’ve got a thousand bookmarks or more, but I visit maybe 20 sites on a regular basis, and about five to ten on a daily basis.