Wednesday, September 10, 2003
We're all journalists now
I was aggrieved by one paragraph in Jane Black's recent VOIP article in Business Week that *used to* say:
I wrote to Jane and suggested that it would be a great chance to educate Business Week's readers about end-to-end. She agreed, asked me to craft a better paragraph, and used my words verbatim. (She says that she usually doesn't do this, and it is certainly not Business Week's policy, but in this case, she agreed with my issue and felt that she could "own" it and stand behind it as if it were her own.)
The paragraph now reads:
The Internet has changed all that. Since information now travels digitally -- a sequence of 1s and 0s -- no distinction remains between a voice call, an e-mail, or a video stream, and it costs no more if that information goes cross-town or cross-country.I didn't think that digital transport has anything to do with it. After all, the telephone network uses digital transport, and this changes nothing. The thing that changes the Internet is the end-to-end principle (aka the stupid network), Moore's Law, and freedom from the legacy of obsolete regulations.
I wrote to Jane and suggested that it would be a great chance to educate Business Week's readers about end-to-end. She agreed, asked me to craft a better paragraph, and used my words verbatim. (She says that she usually doesn't do this, and it is certainly not Business Week's policy, but in this case, she agreed with my issue and felt that she could "own" it and stand behind it as if it were her own.)
The paragraph now reads:
The Internet has changed all that because it makes no distinction between a voice call, an e-mail, or a video stream. Digital technology improvements mean that it costs no more if that information goes cross-town or cross-country. Moreover, because the Internet is new, it isn't hobbled by regulations that were established when long distance meant higher costs.Thanks to the Internet, articles can be corrected after they're released. I s'pose this could be a blessing or a curse. In this case, it seems to have worked out well.
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