The Hero with a Thousand Faces advances the theory of a monomyth. This is a prototypical structure which stories and myths have all grown up around for a thousand years. Obviously, this blog is unlikely to discuss comparative mythology, however I’m working on working out a reasonable monomyth for the web. Here’s what I have so far.
Successful web products don’t just grow, they grow explosively. If people love something about them, they’ll tell everyone they know about them, and they tell their friends, and before you know it, a product in stealth mode is getting used everywhere from Akron, Ohio to Harare, Zimbabwe. It’s around this time that just being on a couple of servers in a rack somewhere isn’t enough. It’s time for the next Big Step in the evolution of a web site’s scale. Today, I’m covering the “why” of Big Step 2, going multi-site. Read the rest of this entry »
Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition wrote an opinion piece in this Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle suggesting that the major print media (newspapers) should embargo their content for something like 24 hours before publishing it via online media sources. The thinking is that this would force people who wanted timely news to acquire it either via dead trees, or some sort of subscription service of the papers, which would bring them revenue and thus save the print establishment.
As products get successful, they grow. For client applications that run on someone’s computer, this doesn’t necessarily represent a huge challenge: just make more CDs. For network applications in general, and web products in specific, this presents a different challenge. There are two distinct points in the growth of a web application which represent step functions in the level of complexity. I call these points the Big Steps. Today, I’ll cover Big Step 1, going multi-server.
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AOL spent the better part of the last 10 years doing their best to answer every question about the growing influence of the web with “yes, but” answers. We did acquisitions large (Netscape) and small (Navisoft), invested in technologies, and otherwise built a path which ran in parallel to the rest of the web.
All forms of media — print, television, and internet — will likely dedicate coverage today in equal measures to reliving and rehashing the morning of September 11th, 2001. I will do no different, although there is always a temptation to let these somber anniversaries slip by unrecorded.
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Following Tibet, we spent two days in Lijiang and two days in Guilin. While after Tibet, it seems like anything else might be a disappointment, these two places were both interesting in their own way.
Part of the appeal of the particular trip I chose to join was that it included a trip to Tibet. Specifically, we flew to Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region. It’s a very different place from Beijing or Chengdu, and not without some challenges.
UPDATE: Photos from Tibet!
I’m taking off the second half of July to take a vacation to China. The internet access situation here isn’t too bad, so I’m posting what I can, when I can. Here’s an update for my first few days, complete with photos.
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