Electronic mail is as old as the Internet (actually more) and still going strong as one of its most useful and popular applications.  Lately however bloggers are claiming it is inherently broken and perhaps even nearing end of life. Check out Jeff Atwood’s and Tantek Çelik’s excellent posts on this subject.  Even if you disagree with the conclusion (Email = Efail) you may be in agreement with the reasoning behind it.

The main claim against email is that it doesn’t scale. If you get lots of email you know what this is about – email dominates your life.  You spend every free moment clearing your inbox. A week-long no-email vacation invariably leaves you with an insurmountable mountain of unread messages. You have no time or patience for messages longer than 4 sentences – often those end up being flagged ‘For Follow-up’ or stored in a To-Do folder just to never be touched again.  Perhaps you gave up entirely on reading all your email, in which case you are probably missing important information and aggravating those who write to you. [read more...]

If the Internet was a car it’d be a 1974 pickup fitted with a 900 horse-power engine, 40″ tires and state-of-the-art suspension.  No airbags, anti-lock breaking system, cruise control or satellite navigation, though. In fact none of the conveniences and safety features you’d expect in a modern-day car.  Yeah, it goes extremely fast and is great fun to ride, but it’s not really modern or safe and you just never know when it will choke-up on you. 

TCP/IP, the core technology of the Internet, was developed in the mid 1970s and early 1980s when the world of computer communications was orders of magnitude simpler.  The first wide-area-network to connect Internet computers ran at speeds of 56kilobit/second, roughly 1/30 of an entry-level home broadband connection today.  It serviced a closed community of computers and users that were all fully trustworthy.  Opening the Internet to commercial use in the late 80s signaled a dramatic change [read more...]

An odd question, right? How can anyone not know what the Internet is?

Well, I encourage you to go ahead and ask people around you.  You’ll find that pretty much everyone is confident they know, but surprisingly few even come close. The Internet is very accessible and deceptively easy to use. So much so that we just intuitively “know” what it is, even when we don’t.

Here are some of the common answers I encountered:

1. The thing you surf – this is by far the most popular perception of the Internet. I even heard this from people with Internet-related jobs. Still, it is plain wrong.  If there was such a thing as an Internet Drivers License this answer would undoubtedly make you flunk the test. The thing you surf is the Web, which is completely different from the Internet (more on this below).
2. A huge network – Closer, but still dead wrong.  The Internet is not a type of network. 
3. A series of tubes – I didn’t personally hear this gem – a US senator said it in a 2006 debate over network neutrality. This may have been just an analogy, but that doesn’t make it any more correct.  It just goes to show that even the people passing laws about the Internet don’t always understand it.
4. A network of networks – this is kind of the common “trivia answer” which puzzle-solvers and alike pull out.  It’s right in a very general sense, but in my opinion it’s pretty far from actually capturing the essence of the Internet.

So here’s how I would explain what is the Internet.  I’m going to do it in two parts.
[read more...]

In the midst of this gradual decline one medium stands out as different and more resilient – the Internet.  In my opinion it’s shaping up to be the stronghold of good, solid info.   Here’s why:
[read more...]