Rev Mentor

When you consider cell phones, cable, internet access...who much do you think the average US family of four spends on what is now being called "bandwidth"? Several hundred dollars? A few hundred at least?

Monthly cost of bandwidth may actually compete with the monthly cost of heating oil and gasoline for vehicles. A thought-provoking NYTimes article entitled OPEC 2.0 seems to think so.

This is not surprising when you consider how it is that all that data gets pushed and pulled through the wireless and wired infrastructure. Electricity is still generated by coal and oil for the most part. So T. Boone Pickens and others like Al Gore who want radical reform in the electric utilities, definitely have the right idea. New products that make better, more effective use of bandwidth or reduces the need for it may be as important as alternate fuels in the near term.

The take-away thought here is: why is it that the cost of bandwidth has not skyrocketed along with gas and overall energy costs?

For one thing, server rooms across the globe have been, over the last five years, really focused on lowering their costs. Energy efficiency has been a big deal for hard drives, rack servers, CPU's, laptops...just about everything for years now. The tech sector is also very price conscious and competitive, as well. When you consider how little real innovation there is in the packet delivery system (cable, etc) to your home, the cost of bandwidth has been amazing stable, really.

Then why aren't the utility and car companies doing the same thing as tech and bandwidth companies?

This is really at the crux of Al Gore's 10 year challenge to have zero-carbon electricity. In the tech sector, when the number of users goes up, the price comes down because technology can almost always be optimized. The inverse is true of oil and gas.

The price for a barrel of crude just came down $24 because Americans stopped driving for the last month. Isn't that backwards?

Ok, so the oil, utilities and car companies don't want to change and become tech companies. Fine. You know what? People are going to stop driving.

Check out how many banner ads you see for GoToMeeting these days. How may companies are switching to a four day week with a day working from home? Folks are looking at making money from their home offices now. It's the new American dream.

Q: What do you want to be when you grow up, son?

A: An internet tycoon with a hot blog, dad.

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The Internet as defined in Zittrain's work here is by its nature "generative," in that the Internet allows its users to create something else out of itself. Bottomline: the direction that the 'net's generativity takes affects everything we do as application developers.

Quote/synopsis from Amazon:

My question is: should we regulate the course of innovation on the 'net to include only technologies that are "positive," and, if so, who defines "positive"? I like the way this book seems to frame the debate. I like the hard questions it asks and solutions it suggests. So, I am ordering it today. Expect to hear more from me on this subject after I read it.

Postscript

Yesterday (Sat, July 26, 2008) I had a chance to sit down in Barnes & Nobles with a copy of this well researched and written-with-detail book. The author is a mathematician and is no stranger to excruciating detail. This could have been a text book and probably is, in fact. If you want a reference or a long read, I recommend it.

In the book, Mr. Zittrain's fear of tethered appliances, proprietary technologies and anything not "open" seems overboard to me. Some of the best advances are made by closed technologies who allow entry, but control it. So I'm not as fearful of these seeming non-generative applicances. Neither am I afraid of malware that the open, generative nature of the 'net allows. I do think the marketplace will speak to the inventors involved and balance will prevail. The "right" combination of 'net standards, artifacts, appliances and breakthroughs will occur over the course of time.

As the case with many internet observers, there is moaning and groaning over common database access and standards for such. I don't think this will happen the way people think. I do not see anything other than web services for shared data access. What happens behind that service is the business of its creator, not a matter upon which a standards committee must rule. Balance must prevail. And perhaps, that's what you really get out of any speculation on the future of the internet.

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Since the road to buzz often goes through your blog, here are some great tips from Neil Patel—a guy who knows his way around a blog.

Neil Patel is the co-founder of 2 Internet companies: Crazy Egg, and KISSmetrics. Through these 2 companies he has helped large corporations such as AOL, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard and Viacom make more money from the web. By the age of 21 not only was Neil named a top 100 blogger by Technorati, but he was also one of the top influencers on the web according to the Wall Street Journal.

Read 15 things he'd do differently. Highlights:

1. Don’t blog about news
2. Pick a niche
3. Pick a big niche
4. Be passionate
5. Don’t burn yourself out
6. Make money
7. Don’t spend too much on a design
8. Have a unique design
9. Write detailed content
10. Respond to every commentor
11. Build relationships with other bloggers
12. Pick the right blogging platform
13. Don’t write for Digg
14. Tell your story
15. It’s not about you

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Pretty funny list...

• people who are just back from a really awesome run
• people who are involved with "computers"
• DJs
• DJs at the airport
• DJs who are drunk
• people who don't seem to have anyone else's email address
• people who are mad at the TV sets
• people who have forgotten how to use

Click for more. Thanks to Daring Fireball for the direct.

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