My local ISP buys ADSL service from Sprint and sells it to me for $50 per month (512K up/128K down). If I sign-up directly with Sprint, I can get 1.5M up/384K down, for $60 per month. This must change.
Tag Archives: Early Net Culture
US broadband penetration
US broadband penetration Jumps to 45.2% – US Internet penetration nearly 75%.
22% of Americans 65 and older use the Internet
From the Pew Internet Project: ” 22% of Americans 65 and older use the Internet. The percent of seniors who go online has jumped by 47% between 2000 and 2004. In a February 2004 survey, 22% of Americans age 65 or older reported having access to the Internet, up from 15% in 2000. That translates to about 8 million Americans age 65 or older who use the Internet. By contrast, 58% of Americans age 50-64, 75% of 30-49 year-olds, and 77% of 18-29 year-olds currently go online.” That last one is interesting. Would love to know what % of 18-29 year-olds listen to the radio.
CNN to stream live on mobile phones.
“CNN International is going to be streamed live on mobile phones in Austria starting in March. This is the first streaming mobile deal for CNN; other channels such as CNBC have been experimenting with streaming video clips.” CyberJournalist.net has some links and sample audio. Is this sort of “radio” that I can get anywhere, anytime I want?
NYTimes editorial on Google
What Google also reflects is our changing sense of the dynamism of the Web. Nothing captures how statically we used to see the Internet as well as “information highway,” an old phrase that embodies pure linearity and the smell of asphalt. That stasis is also captured in the increasingly outmoded notion of an Internet portal like AOL, much of whose dynamism comes from offering a Google search bar. The fact is that many of us have grown comfortable within the amorphousness of the Web. We no longer need a breakwater like AOL when a good search engine promises to make the sea itself our home.
— NY Times editorial
Eastern Standard Tribe (Amazon summary)
“Art is a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, a secret society bound together by a sleep schedule. Around the world, those who wake and sleep on East Coast time find common cause with one another, cooperating, conspiring, to help each other out, coordinated by a global network of Wi-Fi, instant messaging, ubiquitous computing, and a shared love of Manhattan-style bagels. Or perhaps not. Art is, after all, in the nuthouse. He was put there by a conspiracy of his friends and loved ones, fellow travelers from EST hidden in the bowels of Greenwich Mean Time, spies masquerading as management consultants who strive to mire Europe in oatmeal-thick bureaucracy. Eastern Standard Tribe is a story of madness and betrayal, of society after the End of Geography, of the intangible factors that define us as a species, as a tribe, as individuals.” — Amazon review of Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow. Or you can read it for free.
“Our longing for the Web
“Our longing for the Web is rooted in the deep resentment we feel toward being managed.” — David Weinberger, The Cluetrain Manifesto. I’m not sure why this feels so true but it does. I’m rereading Cluetrain and find it more…relevant than the first time. You’re going to have to wade through more quotes (that I might have posted the first time).
What the Internet Is
“World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else”
There are mistakes and there are mistakes.
Some mistakes we learn from. For example: Thinking that selling toys for pets on the Web is a great way to get rich. We’re not going to do that again.
Other mistakes we insist on making over and over. For example, thinking that:
…the Web, like television, is a way to hold eyeballs still while advertisers spray them with messages.
…the Net is something that telcos and cable companies should filter, control and otherwise “improve.”
… it’s a bad thing for users to communicate between different kinds of instant messaging systems on the Net.
…the Net suffers from a lack of regulation to protect industries that feel threatened by it.
–Doc Searls and David Weinberger
101 Ways to Save the Internet
Paul Boutin offers 101 Ways to Save the Internet. A few of my favaorites:
* Upgrade phone booths to Wi-Fi
* Death to fax machines. Send us an attachment instead
* Stop with the jokes
* Turn off your HTML email It makes you vulnerable to viruses – and bugs us.
Pre-order DVD and get it same day film in theaters?
Mark Cuban thinks he’s ready to turn filmmaking on its ear: “Why can’t I preorder a DVD and receive it the day the film is released in theaters? Or buy it on my way out of the theater if I liked what I saw? One thing I learned from the Mavs is that you can watch the game on TV, but you’ll still go to the game, because it’s a different experience.” [Wired via Boing Boing]