This article was heard on the radio program "The Computer Report," which is broadcast live on WCAP in Lowell, Mass., and is syndicated on WBNW in Boston and WPLM in Plymouth, Mass.
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This week I flew to London and back just to talk for 15 minutes. AltaVista wanted me to represent them in a panel discussion at an Internet Librarian conference. I flew in on Tuesday night, spoke on Wednesday, and flew out on Thursday morning.
So what, if anything did I learn from this?
The last time I had been in London was two and a half years ago. Back then, one of the frustrating challenges of doing global business over the Internet was the slowness of connections across the oceans. We might be able to get reasonably good performance within a country or within a continent, but because of a combination of capacity and demand, connections across the Atlantic and the Pacific tended to be frustratingly slow. Yes, dialing the right numbers with my laptop from the hotel, I was able to telnet to my ISP (Acunet) in Marlboro, Mass., and read my email. But it was like trying to talk by radio to someone on Mars. And when I tried to connect to Web pages live for business presentations, there was always an uncomfortable delay, and sometimes the connection would time out. Soon after that, when someone from Lovely.net offered to set up a free mirror of my site in London, I jumped at the chance. That meant that people in Europe would be able to access my Web pages far more easily than in the past.
This time around, the Internet was everywhere and trans-atlantic connections were ridiculously fast. From public systems at the conference, I could telnet to Acunet with excellent response time -- it actually seemed faster than when I do it from home in Boston over DSL. And when doing my little 15-minute presentation, the live connection to Web sites in the US provided performance comparable to getting cached pages from my hard drive. Now I really wonder why I have that mirror site in London -- except as backup in case of disaster.
A couple years ago, Europe was lagging far behind the US in adoption of the Internet, due in large part to pricing. People in Europe typically pay by the minute for ordinary local phone calls, which could make connecting by modem quite expensive, even if the Internet service provider charged a low flat rate. But today, public systems were available everywhere for everyone, not just at the conference, but also at the hotel where I was staying and at cybercafes. The hotel had numerous email kiosks -- both free with awkward touch screen and for a fee with keyboard. The cybercafes typically charged a pound for access, with the length of time you bought for that varying depending on how busy they happened to be. And it looked like they were very busy often. The URLs on billboards, signs, and television advertising indicated that Internet use is common and pervasive.
Also, the conference itself was for Internet Librarians. That's a job category that didn't exist a few years ago, and now hundreds of these people not just from the UK and western Europe, but also from places like Russia and Nigeria, flock to such an event to keep up on technology and techniques that will help them in their profession. These are research specialists, some serving public audiences and some serving corporations with large intranets. Their customers tend to be Internet savvy, and able to find lots of information on their own, but need assistance with more complex searches.
In other words, the attendees were all Internet experts, as were the speakers and the exhibitors. But the entire event was face-to-face, entailing significant travel costs. (I wasn't the only one who dashed across the Atlantic just to deliver one short presentation.)
So while much has changed, and Europe -- at least London -- is now very well connected to the Internet, people haven't changed. Regardless of how well equipped and connected and Internet knowledgeable they may be, people still don't seem inclined to use the Internet itself for meetings -- despite the obvious benefits of cost and time savings.
Ironically, newbies might be more inclined to try live video and audio because of its novelty. But, for now at least, among Internet pros, face-to-face still wins for meetings, and it's hard to imagine what might change that in the near future.
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