Thursday, March 13, 2008
New York Times Headline Misdirects
Steve Lohr has written a great article about how the Internet is doing, but Steve's editors got the headline wrong. The headline screams,
Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam
and the article opens quoting Jonah Johna Till Johnson, author of a badly spun recent study, and citing "Industry Groups" singing "a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet."
But the story should have bean headlined,
Internet Experts Debunk "Road Hog" Fears
At the core of the article, sanity prevails.
Internet Experts Fear Lost Opportunities
UPDATE: Thanks to anonymous commenter for catching the misspelling of Johna Till Johnson's name. Duh. I know her, and how to spell her name. Blush.
Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam
and the article opens quoting Jonah Johna Till Johnson, author of a badly spun recent study, and citing "Industry Groups" singing "a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet."
But the story should have bean headlined,
Internet Experts Debunk "Road Hog" Fears
At the core of the article, sanity prevails.
Others [that is, those other than Jonah Johna Till Johnson and "industry groups"] are less worried — at least in the short term. Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota, estimates that digital traffic on the global network is growing about 50 percent a year, in line with a recent analysis by Cisco Systems, the big network equipment maker.*snip*
“The long-term issue is where innovation happens,” Professor Odlyzko said. “Where will the next Google, YouTube, eBay or Amazon come from?”Reporter Lohr goes on to explain that country-to-country differences are shaped by . . .
. . . local patterns of corporate investment and government subsidy. Frederick J. Baker, a research fellow at Cisco, was attending a professional conference last month in Taiwan where Internet access is more than twice as fast and costs far less than his premium “high speed” service in California.The article ends with a quote from Bob Metcalfe, who famously predicted the Internet's catastrophic collapse under the weight of too much traffic way back in 1996. Today Metcalfe says,
"The Internet has proven to be wonderfully resilient,” said Mr. Metcalfe, who is now a venture capitalist. “But the Internet is vulnerable today. It’s not that it will collapse, but that opportunities will be lost.”That's the real threat, opportunities lost. But that's an abstract fear that's demonstrably hard for the American Public -- maybe even for New York Times editors -- to grasp. How about,
Internet Experts Fear Lost Opportunities
UPDATE: Thanks to anonymous commenter for catching the misspelling of Johna Till Johnson's name. Duh. I know her, and how to spell her name. Blush.
Technorati Tags: AndrewOdlyzko, Infrastructure, NationalBroadbandStrategy, NetworkNeutrality, NewYorkTimes, Press, USLosingLead, video
Comments:
Just for the record, you have misspelled the first name of the person quoted in the NYT piece: The name is "Johna Till Johnson", not "Jonah Till Johnson." Johnson is a she, not a he.
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# posted by 
: 3/18/2008 4:07 PM
: 3/18/2008 4:07 PM
