WHAT is the Internet? To most people, it’s the Web and maybe e-mail. But to a
large extent, these are to the Net what filmed radio shows were to TV: new media
imitating older media until people figure out what the new ones are really good
at.
The peer-to-peer (p2p) and Web services conference last month in Washington
DC was a strong reminder that the Net is still a work in progress. Peer-to-peer
came to fame because hooking people’s computers together without any central
server enabled them to “share” music files (netspeak) or “steal” them
(recording-industry speak). Napster, p2p’s first…
