Dave Winer quotes today’s New York Times to the effect that, "Companies are embracing the potential of networked computing to let workers share their knowledge more efficiently as they nurture new ideas, new products and new ways to digitally automate all sorts of tasks."
I thought it must be a joke, maybe an anachronistic sentiment used to launch an investigation into how far we’ve come in the networked data services biz since 1980 or so when that was true. Sadly, no. The stodgy sentiment is placed smack in the center of an article that deserves a good Fisking, had one the time.
There are nine such articles, and if one were to read them all, one would undoubtedly glean a little collection of factoids sufficient to stimulate the intellectual appetite if not actually to nourish. To cast a sunnier, less jaded, light - anyone with an interest in web tech and life on the current global network will find something relevant. But take it with a large shaker of salt. The superficial look at "darknets," for example, is fairly one dimensional, and descriptive of peer-to-peer stuff. It conflates private networks with social networks, implies that all darknets are about file sharing, and ignores the technical and sociological issues that make the dark net interesting (to me). The NYT article by it’s nature describes a handful of peer to peer apps and communities that reflect light on the concept of dark-networking and make it not so dark at all. For a sense of other dimensions of "darknet," see these links: Team Cymru, Paul Boutin, Search Engine Watch.
What did I like best about the wealth of NYT tech reporting? I liked the picture of Bill St. Arnaud in Markoff’s piece. And I loved the phrase "a free-enterprise zone where English will be the lingua franca…."
What gave me paws (meow)? In all those thousands of words, most of which are manifestly directed at the emergence of what we are coming to know as Web 2.0, published on the day that the Web 2.0 conference opens, the tag, the label, the cognomen "Web 2.0" does not appear once.
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