Ramblings

Bloviating: to you, from me. Chide me if you will. algot@runeman.org

All photos in this blog are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, unless specifically stated otherwise. If something written seems worth your time and effort, use it under the same license.

Sat, 07 Feb 2009

Speed of the Internet

This isn't a comment about the backbone or my own "last mile" wire.

Instead, it is about the real speed of information that the WWW has given us. One of my favorite routine haunts is the Internet Book Database of Fiction (IBDoF) where there is a wonderful forum about books. IBDoF also has a great list of authors and books with ratings and reviews by regular folks.

What's fast about that?
Well, at 2:54 on a Saturday afternoon, I left a comment in the appropriate forum topic that Ken Follett's last name was misspelled and by 3:01 there was a reply that the correction had been made.

Remember, this IBDoF isn't a big commercial thing, just a bunch of book lovers. That's the thing about the speed of the Internet. It is a real people's tool. I know there are more important examples of up-to-the-minute news reporting, and, for speed, Tweets on Twitter happen every second or so, but IBDoF-style social networking really does work for me.

Thanks, Brad (administrator at IBDoF who made the "instant" update).