Re: Peer-to-Peer Economy Proposal - Revision of A Distributed Economy - A blog involving Linked Data

"I'm sorry if these are challenging questions"

can offer examples of what not to do, as a contrarian-indicator, a beacon of anti-success?

was fortunate enough to grow up in Columbus OH, a center of information-service-provider activity. CompuServ, a large commercial entity's HQ was nearby, as well as OCLC, who are still around running a database of books for .edu. OSU was extraodinarily large and between all these and other institutions like Battelle and friends parents working w/ them, there were plentiful opportunities to both tour the facilities, talk w/ people what they were working on, and of course get on "the internet" via SLIP/PPP or just walking into one of OSU's computer labs. a product of 1980, saw a swift progression from 2400 baud modems and boxy text-UIs thru 14.4/28.2 to ResNet (ethernet in every dorm!)

so of course i was reading manuals, sifting thru gopher & lynx (viola/mosaic always seemed to crash) and genrally poking around all this stuff, even silly sequential reverse-DNS lookups to see WIRED or Stanford's amusing hostnames. i distinctly recall one scrolling past 'akebono.stanford.edu' and suddenly a passerby catching a glance who was apparently quite into sumo-wrestling asked if i knew how awesome Akebono was. I'd instantly agreed he was more awesome than the website, a plain old telephone-book style heirarchical directory of websites. at the top of the page was a sum, "Yet Another Heirarchical Officious Oracle.  now cataloguing 179 websites!". a few months later checked it again, and it said something like 419 links. clearly growing, and given the NCSA what's new page was healthily bubbling i wondered how they proposed to keep up. i forgot about Yahoo after this

by 1995-6 there were *many* decent searchengines, from Lycos to Altavista to Inktomi to Hotbot to venerable ftp/gopher classics like Veronica/Archie, that it would not surprise me of Page/Brin experienced skepticism from investors on account of the "Crowded" marketplace. 

so if you need evidence of early-observer failing to translate knowledge and ideas of where things are going to market-success, i can ramble all day, on nuclear physicist dads of school best-friends logging into UNIX shells at CMU and MIT and oh hey - the files are on that machine too - the mail/news system has some wizard-level faceted-query text-UI which allows input of arbitrary expressions that look like line-noise

Received on Wednesday, 5 February 2014 13:50:22 UTC