Journal: News & Comment

Sevilla

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My friend, colleague, and boss Bill is in Seville, Spain today to talk to a Big Important Meeting of representatives from some Very Big Very Important Companies. I'll be collaborating with him tomorrow on his presentation. We're constructing it using Eric Meyer's S5 presentation tool, which runs entirely inside a web browser from a single HTML page.

If anyone doubts that the Internet has changed things, think about what efforts such Canada-Europe collaboration would have taken even 10 years ago. And if you doubt how ubiquitous it has become, well, even the people who want to ban the Internet itself are putting their petitions online.

UPDATE: Bill called me just before midnight my time on Monday (9 a.m. Tuesday in Seville), but not on the phone—it was an iChat audio conversation, which cost us nothing, so we left the line open while we discussed the presentation, and then worked on it, exchanging e-mail attachments and viewing files uploaded to a server as we went. Much of the time was spent transmitting the sound of us clacking away on our keyboards without saying a word. I'm sure those who grew up with, "Just say hello, no time to chat, it's LONG DISTANCE!" would be horrified.

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