Raw

Like Dare, I find Mark Cuban's The Internet is Dead and Boring post " too irritating to let pass", and generally agree with Dare's point about bandwidth/media being kind-of irrelevant. But I'll spare you the essay featuring words like 'network', 'ubiquitous', 'mobile', 'distributed' and ' linked data'...

Instead, here's a platform used in a really old medium:

It's a stonecarver's banker. The platform isn't too interesting in itself, but combined with a bunch of other tools, the end result can be amazing - take a trip to Chartres if you doubt me. (The essay would have mentioned the bazaar too).

I don't disagree with Richard MacManus's suggestion that there is a " digestion phase" happening for a swathe of technology (Web <= 2.0), but there's some incredibly exciting stuff appearing over the horizon.

Dare talks of billionaires and bad investments, which is kind of appropriate: money is a platform built on networks. I wonder if Cuban considers that dead and boring too...

Da Coda : a likely etymology for freemason is "free-stone mason", where free-stone is rock with a consistent structure, hence better for carving fiddly bits. Modern freemasons claim connections to the Knights Templar, who were probably the first international bankers. Is there a conspiracy? For sure. As any cockney will tell you, the freemasons are a right bunch of merchants.