May 19, 2006
Africa being left out by high bandwidth costs
Cat: | Time: 9:19 am (UTC+8) Comments (0)
I was wound up like a top and my head nearly exploded. A tough day on the battlefields of Iraq or Afghanistan you ask? A rare meningitis that resulted in massive brain-swelling? Nope, I simply had a bad case of web 2.0.
The trauma was due at least in part to attending the Mesh Conference in Toronto this week. While I did enjoy the conference, I couldn’t help but walk away from it feeling like the online world is out of control and I’m in the backseat.
The pace of change and development on the web feels like it’s outpacing my ability to keep on top of it. And no doubt it is. Before the online world, man inhabited the physical world only. There is only so much expansion that can take place in the physical world, and its growth is limited by factors such as the forces of nature, access to food and resources, war and disease.
The online world on the other hand seems only limited by the number gigabyte capacity on the grid and man’s creative desire. Research from 2002 estimated the size of the entire web at 533,000 terabytes. That’s for the entire web, the “surface web” was estimated at 7,500 terabytes. Compare that with estimates of 10 terabytes for the entire net from 1996. I don’t know if these stats are anywhere near accurate of close to today’s figures. (Personally, I have a terabyte in my living room on the grid and I have trouble believing I’m 1/500,000 of the web.)
There are other developments on the web today that help to leave one feeling a little overwhelmed:
* The video game market is embracing new virtual worlds and their virtual economies are growing very quickly. Moreover, these economies are spilling out into the real world. And this has been going on for some time as a Wired article from 2002 shows. What’s scary for me, is that these are largely economies and worlds I’m not a part of.
* The amount of time spent online by the average net user is 14 hours per week. I imagine this number is between 60-80 for most of hard-core netophiles. Some of us spend more time on the web than anything else, including sleeping.
* There are reportedly 14M blogs online and growing quickly. Who’s reading all of this blog stuff? Who’s writing all of this stuff? At Mesh, someone asked for a show of hands “how many people had a blog?” About 90% raised their hands. Then they asked, “how many people have multiple blogs?” About 70% kept their hands up. Wow. I can’t seem to find time to do laundry. At what expense is all this extra time being spent blogging — dirty underwear? The world The Matrix painted — a world where we substitute a virtual world in place of the natural world — seems eerily possible.
* There used to be 57 channels and nothing on. Now’s there’s 14 billion channels, and still nothing on. Or at least it seems like that. The problem is less likely lack of the right information, and more likely the abundance of the information I have to sift through to find the good stuff. Increasingly I cannot find the information I’m looking for online. I would assert that we need a new paradigm in search — Google (and to a greater degree, the web in general) simply cannot deliver on the demands of today’s search requirements using the web’s current technologies and information model.
* There are also just too many competing (and I would argue as a result sub-standard) standards, platforms, products, services, search engines, etc. The web thrives off of lack of order, but the web also suffers for lack of order. It’s that freedom and openness that makes it revolutionary and beautiful, but also what makes it innavigable and chaotic.
Some would term this “beautiful chaos”. I would too most days. But this week it’s just giving me a headache.
…but only because I tivo it. Well, technically (and I realize I’m relying on technicals a lot these days) I’m not really “tivo-ing” it. I use Windows XP Media Center edition (which btw crashes all the time).
