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Sunday, June 1, 2003
Maybe "startnet" 
| | That's in response to an unlinked question by Bill Thompson (whose latest is the subject of the item below). Bill is looking for a better word for a fairly-fast, always-on connection. |
| | I want a word for the Net that's exactly what it was supposed to be in the first place: symmetrical, unfiltered, always-on and as wide as it needs to be. No blocked Port 80s. No DRM or other forms of filtration. |
| | One of the big lessons I learned from readers after Cluetrain came out was that real markets are places where the demand side also has the power to supply — and that amazing thing can happen, fast, when marketplaces aren't rigged to favor big suppliers. |
| | Think what it would do for entrepreneurship if the cable and DSL folks provided symmetrical connections, opened up Port 80 (so it would be easy for anybody to put a server on the Net), and otherwise allowed the Net to do what it was built to do, which is support both supply and demand from any point in the World of Ends it comprises. |
| | It would be good for all business. Not just the big boys. |
The bigger picture
| | ...it is now possible to have a serious debate about the social impact of the internet without mentioning protocols, packets or programming, and that in itself is significant progress. |
| | But I am very doubtful about whether the ongoing debate, in the blogs and mailing lists and conferences, is actually taking us anywhere interesting. |
| | Bill¹s point — and who am I to say he doesn¹t have one — seems to be that while we¹ve moved beyond talking about the technical aspects of the Internet and into the more esoteric social ramifications, we¹re not serious enough about it. It¹s users (and "caffeine-fuelled" ones, at that) talking about users, as opposed to academicians talking about users. |
| | Bill also posits that ³Fire, agriculture and the wheel are probably the only three transforming technologies that have been around long enough to have observable consequences for basic human physiology and psychologyŠ.² Well. I might suggest that Messrs. Graham and Bell, among others, would take issue with that assertion. |
| | Well, we might recall the fracas Bill started when he blasted ETCon a couple weeks back. I responded, followed by Michael Hall, who thoughtfully carried the polylogue into new and helpful directions. So did Jed Baer. We moved to the Bigger Picture on that one. This time Bill gets us there by a shorter route. |
| | Because later in this new piece Bill brings up a very important point — one that was the subject of some very helpful and heated meet-space conversations (among and between both bloggers and non-bloggers) in New York last week: |
| | It is easy to be dismissed as a reactionary traditionalist for believing that it is useful - vital, even - to look at the academic research. |
| | The serious bloggers prefer to write up their caffeine-fuelled insights the morning after an evening of 'serious chat' with their online and offline friends. |
| | It is so much easier, and faster, than spending hours in a library reading research done 14 years ago about the importance of treating a user interface as a communications medium. |
| | This lack of awareness about what has been done before means that, by and large, the ongoing debate about social software is generally uninteresting, intellectually shallow and largely irrelevant. |
| | It is a shame, because the people having the discussions are intelligent and write well, and they are struggling with real issues. |
| | However the easy availability of online publishing tools, the drive to cross-link every discussion and comment to everyone else's, and the almost complete lack of any historical or research-based perspective means that the result is no more interesting than an overheard coffee-shop conversation. |
| | He's right. And I beleive one answer is to find more ways to get more academic stuff on line as well as in libraries. We need AND logic here, not OR. And some very creative thinking about how to do it. Not just more arguments about which way is better, or why it can't be done. |
All rise
| | Scoble: Try using your laptop while standing up. I can. |
Primary research
| | Today I got a call from a NYT reporter who is looking to find people who have started weblogs, written for a while, and had a hard time finding an audience. |
| | One suggestion for the Times reporter: Switch the metaphorical framework. This isn't TV here. We don't have audiences. |
| | Blogs are journals. They have readers. Just like newspapers do. |
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