[906] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
internet consumer reports on state-wide IP networks
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Barry Shein)
Wed Jul 3 22:19:54 1991
Date: Wed, 3 Jul 91 22:18:40 -0400
From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
To: jsq@tic.com
Cc: Steven.Grimm@Eng.Sun.COM, com-priv@uu.psi.com
In-Reply-To: John S. Quarterman's message of Wed, 03 Jul 91 18:59:55 -0500 <9107040000.AA04078@longway.tic.com>
>From: jsq@tic.com (John S. Quarterman)
>As others have been asking lately, why haven't we seen a map of the
>whole net yet? I don't mean just the Internet, even though that's
>an increasingly large part of it. I mean the Matrix.
[PART 1]
One problem is that the net doesn't exist in a geographic space, at
least that's not a useful view to end-users (I assume we're not
talking about wire junkies here.)
It might well be that no one has really come up with a useful
abstraction that conveys interesting information. Just because we can
all say "maps, yeah, I want maps" doesn't mean we actually know what
we want.
Telephone systems have area codes, exchanges and country codes,
they've been designed geographically in many ways. Some of that
information is useful graphically, some is just as useful in textual
lists (country codes.) Nets seem to tend to lose their geographicity
as they grow and mature.
One could tessellate the globe with a representation of regionals and
international subdivisions, but it's a minor piece of information.
We need to generate better questions before we start trying to
generate answers. What question are we answering?
[PART 2]
As to better "maps" of resources (someone mentioned the difficulty of
finding a particular piece of software "out there" as a typical
problem) there is nothing interesting in the problem, there just isn't
much motivation to do this kind of thing because no one seems willing
to pay for any of it (either directly or via grant etc.) So we get
these little voluntary efforts that tend to die out as quickly as they
arise, often useful while they're active.
I suppose the govt might suddenly get interested in a "network census"
and decide to measure what's out there just because it's there, but
it's a moving target (at least now) in much more fundamental ways than
a demographical or industrial census might be. We can tolerate lots of
quantitative error, but the net lends itself to lots of qualitative
error.
[PART 3]
Several weeks ago I spoke in front of a group of librarians, along
with two other speakers, about the Internet. One of the other speakers
was a librarian who was fairly knowledgeable about the net (mostly
Internet proper, tho BITNET is a big thing in their world, as well as
all the big pay-for services like Dialog, Lexis and BRS.)
After a brief introduction she pulled out a sheet of pre-printed
paper, a form she had designed, which looked something like:
RESOURCE:______________________
HOST:__________________________
DATE:__________________________
DESCRIPTION OF RESOURCE:
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
USAGE NOTES:
LOGIN:___________________________________________
EXIT:____________________________________________
COMMANDS:
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
_________________________________________________
CONTACT PERSON:__________________________________
And so on, I may have botched it a bit but you get the idea. It was
three-hole punched.
She waved it in front of the audience and told them in an
authoritative voice that what they must do is develop a form like this
immediately, xerox a couple of hundred copies, and give out piles of
blanks to all their fellow librarians who use the net at their
organization.
They should then get a sturdy 3-inch binder to put these in and
develop an indexing scheme (yeah, those yellow sheets with the colored
plastic tabs) and begin developing a shared reference index of network
resources IMMEDIATELY, or else they were all wasting their time.
What can I say? The audience was rapt.
I thought it was a bit quixotic myself, but then again so is the idea
that you're going to catalog every piece of printed matter...
The most amusing comment by her, and perhaps I shouldn't repeat it but
what the heck we're adults, was a Q&A that went like this:
Audience member: But a lot of these resources you find out
there seem to want passwords, or at least passwords to get
into the, you know, interesting areas...
Speaker: Absolutely correct, and that's a problem, but I find
I can usually guess the passwords, they're usually pretty
obvious, you just have to play around...next question?
[needless to say the audience must have wondered why I was sitting at
the dais barely concealing hysterical laughter.]
-Barry Shein
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