Message from the Web
If you haven't read Tim Bray's "Message from the Web", take a few minutes to do so now. He spoke at a conference working on an XML schema for accountants, and must have shaken things up with his brief but eloquent description of the web's sensibilities. It's already being cited by the likes of Sam Ruby, deservedly so. I need it on a playing card to hand out to the many people I meet who haven't absorbed the way things work now.
Getting started should be free. ยท Also, it shouldn't take more than a few days.
How much did it cost you to start using Google or Flickr or Facebook or YouTube? The answer is always the same. If you want people to adopt anything in any scale, you have to remove barriers, and money is one.
Let's imagine a scenario: There's a smart young-ish person who has a basic understanding of business realities and accounting fiction oops methodology. Let's call her "Emma". Emma decides that people are underestimating the importance of collecting receivables in Value-Investment portfolios, and figures out a better way to compute a number that reflects that. She lives in Manitoba and doesn't work for Goldman Sachs, but she can write CGI scripts. She has the idea on Wednesday and gets the script working next Monday, and one quarter later, either gives up on the idea or is incredibly rich. Both are good outcomes.
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Tim O'Reilly [12.17.07 07:44 AM]
Nice indeed. But it's important not to assume that the web will always remain the way it is. Larry Lessig sounded this warning in his first book: Code and other Laws of Cyberspace.
The early PC software market felt a lot like the way Tim describes here too, and we ended up with Microsoft. One of the hidden lessons of open systems is that they are fertile ground for new closed systems on top of them.
The re-centralization of the internet is already going on all around us, and when he makes statements like "Google has been the best at turning this inside out; making it effortless to go away, so they come back," it's important to make note of the verb tense: "has been." Google is bending most of its new product efforts towards making people stay, and in fact competing with the people to whom it used to deliver traffic. (e.g. knols vs wikipedia.)