Saturday, November 30, 2002

WSJ: New way to surf the web gives cell carriers static. In a page one article in this morning's Wall St. Journal, Jesse Drucker and Julia Angwin report on how Wi-Fi's rapid expansion is slowing success for wireless data services from cellular carriers. While Wi-Fi poses problems for cable companies and conventional phone carriers selling high-speed Internet access, it has the potential to be a major headache for the cellphone business. Cellular carriers have spent billions of dollars over the past two years upgrading their networks to accommodate higher data speeds, and they are betting that consumers will send e-mail, browse the web and make use of other applications from their new phones, laptops and hand-held devices. But now an insurgent technology has come along to threaten that strategy -- just as Napster and the Internet itself sprang up from grass-roots followings to challenge the economic models of giant media and technology companies. The 802.11b technology is becoming more widely available. Too bad the security issues associated with using this technology haven't been dealt with. [Scott Loftesness] 7:15:22 AM

Scale-free networks and mirror worlds. I visited my local den of piracy in order to read Linked sooner than Amazon could ship it to me. Now I know more precisely what Clay Shirky means when he talks about "power law distributions" and "scale-free networks." An example of a power law distribution, as Clay noted in his ETCON talk on LiveJournal, is the way in which such networks display a "rich-get-richer" pattern of clustering. This is something Tim O'Reilly has often called attention to, as well. There is a kind of naive egalitarian notion that because links are free and everything is connected, all nodes are created equal. In fact, although it apparently never occurred to early network theorists, nothing could be further from the truth. As networks grow, new nodes don't attach themselves randomly. They prefer to connect to the nodes that are already the best-connected. ... [Jon's Radio] 7:12:41 AM

...what the article pointed out was that information in general was being shifted now that it was digital. Take that to its logical conclusion, and you realize that people aren't going out to get information anymore. Instead, it's coming to them. Think about that for a second and you'll recognize the truth in it. After all, don't you feel information overload in your own life? That's because information is coming to you from everywhere now. Most of it may be noise, but focused information can come to you in new and more efficient ways than ever before. What Is a Shifted Librarian? A Shifted Reading List 6:22:46 AM

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