Tom Evslin writes:

WISP means wireless ISP, an Internet Service Provider to which you connect through radio rather than through a wire or fiber last mile. WISPs MAY be part of the competitive answer to the uncompetitive duopoly of telecom and cable which make Internet access slower AND more expensive in the US than in many other countries. A WISP DID pull me out of a connectivity vacuum left by the duopoly in South Hero, Vermont where we have a vacation camp.

Although technically satellite ISPs are a form of WISP, they don’t meet today’s connectivity needs except in desperate circumstance and it is impossible (not a word an entrepreneur uses lightly) to see how they will. The problem is the speed of light. It takes so long for a signal to get to a geostationary satellite and back that the service is absolutely unusable for VoIP, gaming, or watching video and ranges from incredibly frustrating to unusable for browsing complex web sites.

Forbes writes:

Most mashups cash in with Google's advertising engine on their sites, splitting the take with Google. If you have just one page, you don't make much, but some have many more. (Yahoo! has a similar service, called publisher's network, which is less broadly used.) Google also wants to grow the Internet as much as possible--the more interesting things there are, the more people will need Google to find them. And the better it understands what users are doing with a mashup--something that only the owners of the original data see best--the better its search results.

The term "mashup" comes from music, when two or more songs are mixed together to build a new sound. In software, they arise when someone develops a company's online maps, calendars, photos, search engines and other products, usually through relatively small amounts of code that is posted on the Internet. These outside developers take the application to new uses, usually through combining the data of several sites.

Paul Golding writes:

With all the various networking tools (e.g. Linked In) and other ways to interact with each other via the Web, it seems an obvious idea to extend this to the mobile. It would be great to allow swapping of "business cards" via Bluetooth, which is already possible, but to allow Web services to tag themselves on to the card. For example, if I'm in Linked In, then by swapping a business card with another Linked In user, the Linked In service would be able to detect this swap and make a link. An app on the phone could detect business cards and pass this up to a network service which does the necessary "registration" with Linked In.

The idea need not be limited to swapping via Bluetooth. Users who connect via any means, such as IM, could swap cards.

Little Springs Design has an essay:

Desktop applications and web sites have since the 1980’s been designed assuming multiple windows. If you want to get information from another application, just open it. Browsers can have multiple windows open. This is particularly important in our current world of online applications: I can have my email window open, my business networking site open to research somebody in my email, and my calendar open - all in separate windows. Mobile phones do not support this cross-site fertilization. Instead, only one “window” can be viewed at a time.

For “one web” can become a reality, browsers must become adept at handling multiple tasks. This, by itself, is inadequate. High-end phones (variously called “smart phones” and “PDA phones”, usually with an operating system like Symbian, Windows, or Palm) have rudimentary multi-tasking - but on an application level. Multiple browser tasks must become easy; switching between pages must become easy; split-window viewing must become possible.

Browsers must become adept at handling multiple simultaneous tasks in the same way that messaging applications are adept at handling multiple conversation threads, except that users will want the information either simultaneously or with rapid switching. The browser will have to be re-engineered, from the ground up, to truly embrace the mobile environment rather than being a miniature desktop browser.

DIY Media Weblog has a post on a talk by Mizuko Ito on "Amateur Cultural Production in the New Networked Age."

As part of last year's Networked Publics program at the Annenberg Center, Ito and her research colleagues have been examining the changing relationship between cultural production and consumption. They have looked at the ways that many-to-many distribution, peer-to-peer social organization, and the availability of low-cost digital authoring tools have lowered thresholds to cultural production "manifest in public culture as increased visibility and mobilization of those actors traditionally associated with cultural consumption." They see three domains "growing in salience with the turn toward networked public culture: 1) amateur and non-market production, 2) networked collectivities for producing and sharing culture, 3) niche and special-interest groups, and 4) aesthetics of parody, remix, and appropriation."

A number of other developments are helping bring the Near Web to life. Internet Yellow Pages are making yellow pages much more accessible. Google Earth brought us satellite pictures of the world around us. People then started tagging places. Flickr added geotagging support so that now photos could be linked with locations. In some parts of the world, webcams and sensors are already providing real-time information of the world around us.

The Near Web is important because that is where we live and do a lot of our socialising and spending. Yet, there is so little that we know of that world. To find out about the specials in restaurants or bookshops, one has to walk to the place to find out what is happening. We hear on radio and watch on TV about events in far-flung corners of the world – in real-time. Yet, we have very limited knowledge of what is happening a few hundred metres around us. What we have is a discovery problem.

Businesses have to start thinking of a new world – a world in which all of their customers have access to a mobile phone. How does one rethink local marketing? Can one use the mobile phone to create relationships with customers? Customers, too, are keen to know what's happening around them. TV, radio and their newspapers do not necessarily cover the world near them. How can this chasm be bridged?

This is where we need to think of the new digital infrastructure that is being put in place and the far-reaching implications it will have on life and commerce. Here is a quote by Ashby M. Foote II which captures the essence: “One of the most insightful commentators on the changes at work in the economy is Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of a brilliant new book, The Long Tail. He cites three forces that are transforming the economy and creating vast new opportunities at the grassroots level for small and boutique businesses. Force 1: The democratization of the tools of production. (The obvious example is the PC as a tool for publishing and multimedia.) Force 2: The democratization of the tools of distribution. (For instance, the combination of the PC and the Internet makes everyone a distributor). Force 3: Connecting supply and demand. (Search filters and feedback loops like those found on Google, iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix help niche content find interested buyers and users.)”

Tomorrow: Leapfrogging