my passport photo

React Publish your own item

by Sheila Lennon
'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros

May 16, 2002 • Today's weblog

The Virgin and the Dynamo, Part 1:

"... he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new." -- The Education of Henry Adams.

Reports from blogging luminaries at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference include,

Doc Searls: "The last slide said blogs weren't a threat to the established journalistic order (or something like that), but that it was a threat to Google — but only if we come up with some kind of standards for something or other I wasn't listening to because f*ing with technology took up all my precious and declining cycle time."

Dave Winer: "I tried to live-blog some of the sessions, but by the time I had it all set up, my battery ran out."

If those with the knowledge, experience and tools to advance the frontier can't chaos-proof their connections, what hope is there for you and me?

In Amsterdam last month, I didn't have any Net access. I'd been advised to use AOL, but you can't just sign up with an all-your-waking-hours-for-a-month-for-free disk and use it -- you need to be a member for two months before you have global access. I couldn't sign up with a Dutch ISP for a week.

The spare projo laptop kept crashing, the most elementary memory management boggling its little chips. I would race to get the digital photos off the USB card reader onto the hard drive before a seizure, reboot, resize and optimize them, reboot, copy to floppy, reboot, write, reboot, code the blog entry, then walk the floppy to a $10-an-hour Internet cafe with a real computer and floppy drive, not merely EasyInternet's screen and keyboard setup. (Every word on the screen was in Dutch, but I didn't need to read much.)

Is it too much to ask for a globally wireless box, a sleek, $200 laptop designed for communication via satellite? No spreadsheets, no heavy crunching, not much giggery, just a browser, email and publishing software. Perhaps it is too much to ask, now.

When might this be something we routinely give each other for Christmas?
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