Bert the turtle, link courtesy of Woods Lot.
Richard Bennett offers his assessment of Net Neutrality advocates as members of a cargo cult led by those charismatic Davids, Weinberger and Isenberg. Since meeting DW for the first time in 2024 and DI a year or so later, I’ve sat at their feet, signed over the farm to them, gone on a pilgrimage to Haight Ashbury and I have to admit that I am no closer to understanding why the Telco monopolists should be allowed to operate as if this were a free market than I was before I met them and still believed in QoS as the mystical method by which streaming traffic would ride in the fast lane while print jobs and FTP transfers would be shuttled off to a siding so the video could go through!
I was raised in the church of switched voice, paid homage to the gods of scarcity, mumbled prayerfully regarding the avoidance of contention on the thin copper strands. However the gurus David have shaken my faith in QoS as a meaningful concept in a network with abundant bandwidth. BigCo, the corporate outfit that buys a chunk of VPN throughput sweetly parsed via MPLS may be interested in chopping up its traffic using a QoS model, but us hippies just want access to a big pipe that’s always on and the stinking telcos can just get out of the way.
“limerick: (1) [to limerick, v. trans.] the act of writing a limerick about someone. (2) [noun] a relatively large sometimes thatched outdoor pile of limes (see ‘hayrick’)”
Norm Jenson of One Good Move is honored as Madeline Begun Kane’s “Blogger-verse Blogger of the Week.“
Jimbo Wales launches “a new Wikia website aimed at being a central meeting ground for people on all sides of the political spectrum who think that it is time for politics to become more participatory, and more intelligent.”
For more than 50 years now, we have been living in the era of television politics. In the 1950s television first began to have a major impact on politics, and the results were overwhelming.
Broadcast media brought us broadcast politics. And let’s be simple and bluntly honest about it, left or right, conservative or liberal, broadcast politics are dumb, dumb, dumb.
Campaigns have been more about getting the television messaging right, the image, the soundbite, than about engaging ordinary people in understanding and caring how political issues really affect their lives.
Blog and wiki authors are now inventing a new era of media, and it is my belief that this new media is going to invent a new era of politics. If broadcast media brought us broadcast politics, then participatory media will bring us participatory politics.
I’ll be interested to hear what my friends at UFOB think about the effort.
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