Like the web’s initial triad of end-user tools, lowered barriers, and server protocols, the new triad of web services, weblogs, and WiFi are energizing the net at a grassroots level, according to Kevin Werbach in “The new WWW.”
Here’s Werbach’s overview:
- Web services are “the Legos of software;” components that can be combined in interesting ways to build things.
- Weblogs are personal content management systems.
- WiFi allows individuals or small groups to subversively connect via unlicensed wireless services.
Werbach observes that the common denominator between all three developments is that they lower barriers to communication. “The power of people using technology to connect to one another cannot be overestimated,” writes Werbach. Too bad that the technology industry is only now beginning to grasp this concept and the entertainment industry will perish if it doesn’t.
Werbach also points to the NEC web modeling study that indicates a relatively flat traffic distribution among websites in some topic categories. Publications and entertainment topic categories, for example, have relatively few sites attracting the bulk of web traffic while the traffic among the sites of photographers is more evenly distributed.
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