I'm living not far away from a pretty busy road. Every morning on my way to my car
I have to cross that street. Often I have to spent some time waiting for
a gap in the continous flowing traffic. Later in the evening when I come
back from work traffic is much lighter but still I have to
be careful when crossing it again.
This week something happened that changed this totally. A construction site
was erected and the road has been closed for
any traffic. Back from work I enjoyed wandering along the road. I was
walking right in the midddle of the street. No sound of any
motors. No smell of exhaust gases. No amateur "Schumachers" you have to take cover from.
A really quiete and peaceful atmosphere .
While I was balancing on the white middle lines I started thinking of "homes"
in the Internet. Whenever somebody creates a personal homepage in the Web
she or he usually expects, wishes and hopes that as many people as possible
drop by his digital door. So the traffic right outside your virtual
windows
can't be thick enough. Pretty opposite compared to the "real world" where
everybody seeks to find a "quite neigbourhood" when hunting for
a new appartment or house: You can be sure to be gratfied with lots
of "OHs" and "AHs" when you tell friends you live at the end of a dead end street.
In the Internet people want the big pack! Busloads of people! Heavy and fast cable
modems or LAN connections that bring thousends and thousends of users to their
driveways.
Will this ever change? Will there be personal homepages intentionally placed
in subnets so far away from any backbone that alomost no web-surfer will ever drop by?
And will the owners of these pages be happy about it and lean back in their
cyber deck-chair on their virtual front porch and sip on a digital