Lovely Wired profile of Tim O’Reilly. It prompted me to dig out my picture of him — taken at EuroFOO ’04 in Holland.
Daily Archives: October 2, 2005
The world’s first web page
Yep. Archive copy here. You can see why the suits didn’t get it.
The Web
Er, but not as Tim Berners-Lee intended it. Photographed yesterday in a friend’s garden.
The real impact of broadband
Yesterday I was trying to remember how to adjust something on my venerable Hasselblad 6×6 camera. I knew I had the manual which came with it when I bought the camera many years ago, but it lay entombed somewhere in the chaos of my study. So instead of spending ages searching for it, I looked for a copy on the Web. Even though the Hasselblad site denied all knowledge of the publication, Google found it — buried deep in the site’s archives. So I downloaded the document, located the pages I needed and solved the problem. In minutes. This is kind of simple thing was was inconceivable before the Web (and Google?).
Later… When putting the camera away later in the evening, I found the missing manual — exactly where it should be!
Is Microsoft’s enemy our friend?
My Observer article about the long term significance of Google…
A few months ago Bill Gates let slip an interesting thought about Google in an interview. It reminded him, he said, of Microsoft in its honeymoon period – ie. the decade 1985-95. This is the first time in recorded history that Gates has dignified a competitor by actually naming it in public: generally, he speaks only in paranoid generalities. But the Microsoft chairman knows trouble when he sees it, and Google does indeed pose a long-term threat to his profitable monopoly.
That’s par for the course in the capitalist jungle. A more important question is whether Google spells trouble for the rest of us in the long run. And the answer to that could well be yes…
My colleague Conal Walsh goes into more detail on the privacy front.
The end of telephony as we know it?
This morning’s Observer column…
You know the scenario. For years, nothing much seems to be happening. There’s a lot of excited muttering among geeks about a particular technology, but no evidence that would compel a sensible man in a suit to pay attention. Standard market research, for example, fails to detect any important trend. Consumers profess complete ignorance when approached by persons with clipboards. The graphs meander along, hovering just above the X-axis like the Donegal mountains seen from a distance – sometimes rising slightly, sometimes falling a little, but essentially not going anywhere.
Then suddenly one day all hell breaks loose. What looked like the silhouette of foothills has abruptly turned into the vapour trail of a rocket. The graphs – of take-up, media column inches, consumer adoption – have gone through the roof. Now the aforementioned suits are hollering from the same hymn sheet: ‘What the hell is going on?’
Bespoke blogging
Now here’s something unexpected — a Blog by a Savile Row tailor. Even gives his prices. (Memo for the curious: if you have to ask how much, then you can’t afford it.)
Computing and global warming
Wow! Fascinating post by Martin Varsavsky. Excerpt:
Computing also requires enormous amounts of electricity. Every new chip developed requires more and more energy to function. If present trends continue computing and computing use and interconnection will soon make up 20% of all our electricity needs up from a current 7%. The person who brought this to my attention was Larry Page. During a session at CGI I asked Larry what he thought were Google´s limit to growth. His surprising reply was: electricity. Google he explained to me is by now the world´s largest owner of computers and therefore the internet´s biggest electricity user. This Larry said was of great concern to him and he was looking of ways to make Google carbon neutral.