Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory Of The Web by David Weinberger

Author:David Weinberger [Weinberger, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2008-11-04T14:00:00+00:00

Bob Metcalfe presents himself as the ostensive definition of “curmudgeon,” belying a decency and personal kindness that surfaces even in one’s first interactions with him. Metcalfe, now a gentleman farmer in the surprisingly wired little seaport of Camden, Maine, was the inventor of the Ethernet networking standard and was a founder of 3Com, a leading networking hardware company. But Metcalfe may be best known for the “law” named after him that says the usefulness of a network grows with the square of the number of people that it connects. For example, if there are a hundred people on the telephone network and Fred signs up for a telephone, the usefulness of the telephone system doesn’t go up just by one, for now all one hundred current users have one more person they can call. The usefulness, a measure of value, increases exponentially while the number of users increases linearly.

Metcalfe’s Law is often cited to remind an audience that increasing the size of a network dramatically increases its value. It’s even given us a way to quantify the importance of the Internet. But in assessing the Internet’s value, Metcalfe’s Law can obscure the Internet’s nature, for the law’s mathematics assumes that all points are of equal value and that the connections are made from point to point. This describes the telephone system, but seems to be missing something when it comes to the Web.

Enter David Reed. If you read his personal home page quickly, you’ll get the wrong impression of him. It begins: “Dr. David P. Reed enjoys architecting the information space in which people, groups and organizations interact” and it ends with the following description of his “Avocations”: “Dr. Reed continues to build and prototype home LANs and portable computer technology in his home laboratory.”

Who has heard of a scientist since Dr. Frankenstein who has a “home laboratory”? David is, in fact, a socially conscious, genius-level technologist who has participated in some of the founding events of the personal computer and Internet revolutions. He was there at the beginning when the Net’s first wires were connected with duct tape. He was a professor at MIT; later, he was the chief scientist at Software Arts, the company that developed the VisiCalc spreadsheet, the killer app that made PCs worth owning. He went to Lotus as chief scientist where he helped Lotus expand beyond its first spreadsheet, 1–2–3. He’s currently an “independent entrepreneur” and consultant. And if you read his home page more carefully, you will see that Reed understands the social relevance of the computing environment he has helped to create. For example, his home page says:

His consulting practice focuses on businesses that want to capture or create value resulting from disruptive dispersion of network and computing technology into the spaces in which people and companies collaborate and partner.

This is Net Geek talk for recognizing that the Internet is the opposite of a hand grenade thrown into a market; it’s almost as disruptive, but brings people together rather than tearing them apart.

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