internet

How casually we take it all

Writing for the Observer, Britain's Sunday newspaper, author John Naughton reminds us how Gutenberg's invention of movable type had unanticipated side effects. It would "undermine the authority of the Catholic church, power the Renaissance and the Reformation, enable the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science, create new social classes and even change our concept of childhood." But who knew?

And today we have Tim Berners-Lee's gift to humanity, the World Wide Web. As Naughton writes:

Back from Russia

I flew back from St. Petersburg, Russia, yesterday -- a long day that began at 5 a.m. Russian time and ended around 5 p.m. EDT.

In my absence my ISP had broken my Internet setup -- Murphy dictates that technology will go haywire when you have no access to fix it. The first order of business today was to get things untangled so that I can resume getting my daily dose of drug, stock and mortgage spam.

It was surprising how few Internet access cafes I found in Moscow and St. Petersburg. By contrast, mobile phone usage (especially SMS text) is extremely high.

48 million content creators

The latest from Pew: 48 million Americans have posted content to the Internet. The majority of them are broadband users, and broadband penetration jumped by 40 percent between March 2005 and March 2006. Significantly, broadband penetration in households with income between $40,000 and $50,000 grew by 68 percent.

Editors, please listen. If you're not rethinking your entire content strategy around participative principles, you're placing your future at risk.

Power-hungry telecoms learn the art of astroturfing

Writing for PBS, Mark Glaser examines just who's been posting pro-telecom comments on his weblog item titled "Should the government regulate Net neutrality?"

I don't know anybody who has warm, fuzzy feelings for their telephone and cable TV providers, so naturally my bullshit detector goes on red alert whenever I see "citizens" going to bat for them.