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Traveling on the Living Web: Which Line Do You Take?

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A Bicycle or a Subway?

The Living Web

A few months ago, I was inspired by a conversation with Doc Searls to write a piece for the Blog Herald. I wrote about the two Internets in which we live — the one of information and the one of relationships.

A few months later, Doc quoted a discussion at IS2K7 at the Harvard Law School.

We’re building a new bicycle while we’re riding it here.

That metaphor explains beautifully what we do every day.

Recently, I encountered this visual that shows the 200 top sites on the Internet as of last summer.
You might enjoy seeing how to get around this new civilization we’re creating. Thank you, Michael’s Blog, for finding it. Click to go to the source at information architects.

Web Trend Map

This place we meet every day . . .

It’s our thoughts; it’s our dreams; it’s our reality shared in a virtual space.
It’s our business to know how it works. It’s the bicycle, or the subway, that we’re buidling while we’re riding it here. It’s time to start exploring the Living Web.

On which line do you spend more your time?
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Change the World: The Power of Conversation

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Hey Lisa and Doc, How Can We Change the World?

Change the World!

In the last two days, two people I respect, Doc Searls and Lisa Gates, have written about a subject we all care about — People talking to people. — conversations and relationships.

Can you have a meaningful conversation when only one person is talking?

Isn’t every conversation a relationship?

Conversations and Relationships

Words by Doc Searls and Lisa Gates

These were the kinds of conversations people have been having since they started to talk. Social. Based on intersecting interests. Open to many resolutions. Essentially unpredictable. Spoken from the center of the self. “Markets were conversations” doesn¹t mean “markets were noisy.” It means markets were places where people met to see and talk about each other¹s work.

Conversation is a profound act of humanity. So once were markets.

For businesses that require no live communication with customers in the course of everyday work, markets are conversations means simply that the company still shouldn’t isolate itself either from talk within their marketplace or from talk with customers when the need arises. In other words, it should still be ready to Get Real when the time comes for real conversation. —Doc Searls

Doc Searls and Robert Scoble and Shel Israel told us that markets are conversations. So we all started blogging. Then, Seth Godin told us to be remarkable. So we all started showing up with a unique, inspired footprint. Along came Liz Strauss who told us that it’s all about relationships and relationship blogging. So we all started talking, showing up for each other, and supporting each other’s remarkable, outstanding work.

Remarkable, outstanding, conversations happen inside [TADAAA] RELATIONSHIPS! . . . . What you get from going, participating is–like life–entirely up to you and what you put into it. —Lisa Gates

Conversation IS profoundly human. Boy, Doc, do I agree.

It’s that profoundly human conversation that starts a relationship.

A conversation is potential energy — if I talk to you, you might listen and talk back to me.

We can change the world — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
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If you’re ready to change the world, send me your thoughts in a guest post. Feel free to take the gorgeous Change the World image up there that Sandy designed back to your blog. Or help yourself to this one.

Change the World!.

Email me about what you’re doing or what we might do. Let’s change the world one bit at a time together. Together it can’t take forever.

Net Neutrality 11-02–2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

Net Neutrality: Doc Searls : Saying What and How

I’ll cop to giving more weight to the future than to the present (because I prefer growth and dynamism over stasis). And to having a personal agenda: wanting the Net to be more than gravy on telephony or cable TV from the local duopoly. In both cases I want the marketplace to be free and open and not your-choice-of-silo.

How do we get that? I think we need something other than a choice between carrier regulation and carrier protectionism, which is how the two sides seem to line up right now.

As for evidence of harm, I’d cite the carrier’s asymmetrical bandwidth provisioning (not to mention port blockages) and tendentious arguments — “It’s what the market wants” — when the market has no other choice. The Net needs to enable and support production as well as consumption. It needs to support and not just prevent (or make difficult) new business in small and home offices. To name just two pro-market moves.

Want to know what you can do?
MA Bell Monopoly Versus the Free Internet — Tell the FCC Net Neutrality Is Not Negotiable

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 7-26-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

No, it’s “In the Beginning…”

. . . The Net, as Bob Frankston puts it, is the real infrastructure. It’s the superset, not the subset. It’s the ultimate context. TV, phone, radio, publishing, commerce and everything else will eventually come to you over the Net, if it doesn’t already.
The problem is, the Net is really nothing more than the shortest data path between two devices. You want fast and free Internet for the same reason you want a fast and free connection between your computer and your keyboard and your screen.
Think of the Net as a giant three dimensional zero. Everything across it is zero distance from everything else. The cost of using it isn’t zero, but once it’s built, that’s what it rounds to. (As I explained here a few days ago.)
How do we build that out, and who do we trust to do it, without screwing it up? There is plenty of business in building it out, as there is in all forms of construction. But maintenance shouldn’t look like the cable TV or phone businesses, any more than highway maintenance should look like a theme park.
More to the point, why trust building the “first mile” of the Net to people who never wanted it in the first place, who have always felt threatened by it, who can imagine their customers as nothing other than “consumers” of one-way “content”, and who want to create scarcities and insert billing valves everywhere they can? Because they’re the only ones in a position to do it? That’s not a good enough reason. It’s also not true. . . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

Net Neutrality 6-13-2006

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Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

Out Of Control!

The discussion, debate, battle, whatever, over Net Neutrality is completely out of control! And those who favor anti-Net Neutrality (yeah, figure that out) still haven’t answered the question – Where’s the $200 BILLION??? Or – why aren’t 86 million households which should have been rewired by 2006 with a fiber optic wire, capable of 45 Mbps, in both directions, wired that way now??? Which leads to – what did the Telco’s do with that money??? And follows with – why won’t anyone open up about it?

Net neutrality

Nothwithstanding all of the above, net neutrality legislation is not the answer – it is more like ‘casting out a devil with the devil’. There is no fundamental understanding of the internet as a space, marketplace, world or a frontier (for more on this see Doc Searls’ article on Saving the Net). The debate should not be about the internet as a sum of pipelines and wires and content and packets delivered across an infrastructure. It should be in terms of protecting the space in which the individual has been empowered and the emergent benefits of interactions among those individuals that are having an increasingly sociall impact.

Net neutrality debate to carry on

Alan Davidson, Washington counsel for Google, said that the House vote should be taken as “a wake-up call” by the public and businesses about how the internet could be regulated in the future. “As more consumers and small businesses learn about this, I think we’ll see more concern,” he said.

Jeannine Kenney, senior policy analyst for Yonkers, N.Y.-based Consumers Union, said that the “grass-roots campaign is only gaining steam” and that the telecommunications and cable companies still have a fight on their hands.

“I think that in the Senate there is a better understanding of the idea of net neutrality,” although many members are still on the fence on the issue, she said.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE