Internet Advances and Gaps

Writing from the road, I've had several occasions to think about how rapidly the Internet has advanced--and to notice where it hasn't.

Let's start with the observation: A decade ago, Google did not exist. That's how far and how fast things have come.

I just spent a week with my aunt. She used to manage a Circuit City store. She has a home theater system. She could not find an extender cable she needed, and the salesman told her it didn't exist. I found it and bought it online in ten minutes.

I am writing this online at 65 miles an hour, connected with near-broadband speed. (Don't worry, I'm a passenger.) (Between cities, I usually only get dialup speed. But it's still an impressive system.)

According to this story, scientists have spent the last decade trying and failing to assemble merely a list of all species names. But now, thanks to Google-like search technology, they are assembling a "mashup" of information on each species that will just need editing, and they plan to be done with a 300-million-page website in ten years.

On the other hand, the Internet is not yet ubiquitous or omniscient. I spent over four hours earlier today parked on the I-40 freeway with 1000 or so cars and trucks, waiting for a multi-truck accident to be cleared. I know it was a multi-truck accident because we talked to truckers who had CB radios. And yet, at least five hours after the accident happened, there was not a single whisper of it online--not in Google News, not in blogs, not in Google Maps Traffic feature, not in local news websites from nearby cities, nowhere we could find. As far as the Internet knows, it didn't happen. (We finally managed to find a very brief mention buried in the Arkansas Highways website.)

It seems like a no-brainer that a massive accident with multi-hour closures of an interstate highway would be described online somewhere. Surely, out of the (I'm guessing) thousand people sitting there bored and frustrated, at least one would have posted a blog entry or news item over their Internet-enabled whatever. But if it happened, the search engines were too slow to find it.

What does this all have to do with molecular manufacturing? We should expect that, when manufacturing becomes as programmable and automated and high-performance as computers, applications and technologies will advance with astonishing rapidity - and will leave frustrating gaps.

Chris Phoenix

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog

Comments

Did you try www.traffic.com?

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

No, didn't know about it. But it seems to focus on cities, and this was on an interstate far from any city.

We were searching for I-40 accidents on blogs and news, not starting with traffic sites and searching them. I guess I'm so used to finding *everything* with Google that I hardly ever use onsite search tools anymore. Even if I know what site I want, I usually use Google's site: tag to search it.

(Today, I used Google to learn how to say "excuse me" in Korean - with a recording of a native speaker - in less than 30 seconds. I'd have had no clue which site to look for.)

Chris