Download - Future of the Internet – And how to stop it.

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Solutions
time concedes that there are other times beside it: there are backwaters that are
accessible to masses of people so long as they are willing to surf to an unfamiliar
channel or stay up a little later than usual.
To be sure, while the barriers to getting a show on an obscure network were
less than those to landing a show on a major one, they were still high. And with
only a handful of networks that people watched in prime time, the definitions
of what was worthy of prime time ended up a devastatingly rough aggregation
of preferences. There was not much room for programs finely honed to niche
markets. TV’s metaphor is powerful in the Internet space. As we have seen, the
generative Internet allows experimentation from all corners, and it used to be
all backwater and no prime time.
Now that the generative PC is so ubiquitous and its functions so central to
both leisure and commerce, much of what it offers happens in prime time: a set
of core applications and services that people are anxious to maintain. Links between
backwater and prime time are legion; today’s obscure but useful backwater
application can find itself wildly popular and relied upon overnight. No
intervention is needed from network executives running some prime time
portion of the Internet, and realizing that there is something good going on
among the farm teams that deserves promotion to the major league. The Net
was built without programming executives, and its users have wide latitude to
decide for themselves where they would like to go that day.
The first major challenge in preserving the generative Net, then, is to reconcile
its role as a boisterous laboratory with its role as a purveyor of prime time,
ensuring that inventions can continue to move easily from one to the other. Today
our prime time applications and data share space with new, probationary
ones, and they do not always sit well together. There are some technical inspirations
we can take from successes like Wikipedia that, with enough alert users,
can help.
THE RED AND THE GREEN
Wikis are designed so that anyone can edit them. This entails a risk that people
will make bad edits, through either incompetence or malice. The damage that
can be done, however, is minimized by the wiki technology, because it allows
bad changes to be quickly reverted. All previous versions of a page are kept, and
a few clicks by another user can restore a page to the way it was before later
changes were made. Our PCs can be similarly equipped. For years Windows
XP (and now Vista) has had a system restore feature, where snapshots are taken