Sunday, May 11, 2003

Slashdot links to an article in the Economist arguing that information technology growth is going to flatten out as the growth of other technologies (railroads, say) did before. What these articles fail (there are in fashion) fail to appreciate is the universality of computing. Using the same argument, an observer a billion years ago might have concluded that the expansion of life on Earth was about to hit a plateau with unicellular life forms. Information technology amplifies every other technology. An article in today's New York Times wonders why New York, with its great medical research institutions, is not a hotbed of biotechnology like Cambridge or Palo Alto. Instead of asking about high taxes or other external factors, they might look instead at the critical importance of collocated computing expertise. 7:02:01 PM

'New Media': Ready for the Dustbin of History?. The digital age held out the potential for a genuinely "new media." But is the World Wide Web only good for shopping and searching? By Steve Lohr. [New York Times: Business] It is rather amusing that a newspaper that has a profitable free online edition publishes a story on the supposed failure of new media. What failed were the megalomaniac plans of big media, who like the music conglomerates seem unable to understand that customers are increasingly knowledgeable about what digital connectivity could do for them. Search and some e-commerce succeeded because they make it much easier to connect people to information and products they seek. The same is true of online news, weblogs, and discussion groups. After surveying the cluelessness of big media as if it were general belief, Steve Lohr finally arrives were he should have started, with Tim Berners-Lee's essential insight: It is a distributed system. You put tools out there and see what happens. You accept that things are going to be messy and somewhat unpredictable. He set out to improve access to scientific data, and succeeded beyond all expectation. The practice of science has been radically changed by his creation, from data sharing to publication. But the critical point is that it is happening bottom-up with only ad hoc coordination, not as the result of grand centralized projects. The same is likely to be true in every other sphere of social activity. 4:09:07 PM