Category Archives: Communication

Berners-Lee for Net Neutrality

The inventor of the World Wide Web testified before the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet in the U.S. House of Representatives Thursday 1 March, summing it up in one sentence:
“We are a society only in as much as we are individuals communicating.”
Not that that’s all he said:
Berners-Lee didn’t endorse specific Net neutrality proposals largely supported by congressional Democrats, but he said the Web as a communications medium deserves “special treatment” to protect its nondiscriminatory approach to content.

While he was growing up in the U.K., there were high penalties for interfering with mail delivery, because mail was one of the main ways to communicate, Berners-Lee said. Now, the Web is a major communications medium worthy of protections, he said.

One company or country shouldn’t control access to the Web, he added.

Berners-Lee offers thoughts on Net neutrality, DRM, Legendary Web originator weighs in Grant Gross, IDG News Service, March 01, 2007

He didn’t get much opposition to his thoughts on net neutrality, but he did get some to his DRM comments. Continue reading →

Participation and Patterns

In a long post about why LibraryThing has 10 times as many tags per book as Amazon, Tim Spalding says this:
Take one example: LibraryThing users have applied over 3,900 tags to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, including “apples,” “office” and “quite boring.” With just a few tags, it might be thought a desert cookbook, a business book or—worst of all—a boring one. But these are all single-instance tags. With a larger number of tags, clear patterns emerge, with high-level descriptors like “history” (755 times) and “anthropology” (293 times) standing out clearly against the noise. Even lower-frequency tags, like “social evolution” (25 times) and “pulitzer prize” (20 times) can be trusted as relevant.
So if you can get people tagging their stuff, i.e., books they read, you can collect enough opinions to see relevant patterns.

This is participation, which the Internet does better than any other medium. It’s not broadcast centralized content, which too many big ISPs (telcos and cablecos) seem fixated upon. It also wouldn’t happen if LibraryThing had to pay for a premium channel to reach all those people. Participation is a big reason net neutrality matters.

-jsq

PS: Seen on Joho the Blog.

Who Was Gutenberg, Anyway?

Regarding exogenous technological change, it occured to me that I didn’t really know who Gutenberg was, nor whether he fit the profile.

I’m quoting a bio of him in full, because it doesn’t have a copyright on it and I can’t figure out where it came from originally, other than by the style of writing it is probably 19th century or earlier and probably a translation of a German original, and thus likely long out of copyright:

GUTENBERG, JOHANNES, or Henne, who is regarded as the inventor of the art of employing movable types in printing, was born near the close of the 14th century, at Mainz. He was sprung from a patrician family, which took the name of Gutenberg, or Gensfleisch, from two estates in its Possession. Of Gutenberg’s early life no particulars are known, but it seems probable that he devoted himself at an early age to mechanical arts.

Biography of Gutenberg

For “patrician family” then read “middle-class” now. He was apparently a tinker, who might have been tuning cars in the 1950s or computers in the late 20th century or early 21st. Continue reading →

Exogenous Technological Change

Here’s a good backgrounder video on where the Internet came from and where it may be going: Humanity Lobotomy. See especially the part by Larry Lessig about how printing presses in the early days cost about $10,000 in 2007 dollars, and lots of people had one and published books and pamphlets.

What did the telephone companies have to do with inventing the Internet?
Nothing.
The browser?
Nothing.
The World Wide Web?
Nothing.
What have they had to do with the Internet from the beginning of time?
Nothing.

–Bob Kahn

What did they invent? Continue reading →

Open, Fast, Among Peers

Peerflow is about open participation through a fast Internet.

While existing blogs promote pro or con positions on net neutrality, they don’t show enough of why it matters, how we got here, and what effects the Internet may have on everything else. Net neutrality isn’t some obscure technical issue: it’s about nothing less than control of the flow of information in society. Since a society is its communications, it’s about control of the society itself. Will a few large companies be able to control what everyone knows, or will there be an informed and participating populace?

I’ve looked for a blog that collates all this and haven’t found one, so I’m starting this one. Continue reading →