Joho the Blog
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December 17, 2002
Jane Black deconstructs the Cometa story for Businessweek. Cometa made a splash last week by announcing that AT&T, Intel and IBM had joined to provide nationwide wifi access. On a closer reading of the press materials (first suggested by Peter Kaminski), it turns out that the Big Three have very little skin in this game. Further, it's not clear that the game is about putting up 20,000 hotspots; it could just be an announcement that Cometa is available if you're a telco or an ISP looking to outsource your WiFi construction project. (Jane's take is more detailed and fact-based than mine.) Jane also draws an interesting parallel to ZapMail, FedEx's plan to put them new-fangled fax machines in their offices so that they could fax business's documents. That way individual businesses wouldn't have to buy the expensive contraptions. But this centralized approach failed as prices dropped and every business installed its own. In the same way, centralized provisioning of WiFi may (should!) give way to the bottom-up installation of neighborhood networks. ( Do I sense Clay Shirky's hand in the inclusion of the ZapMail story? I know it's something he's interested in.) Dehyphenated WiFi I'm annoying Dewayne Hendricks — cited in Jane's article — by refusing to spell WiFi as "Wi-Fi," which is the official spelling. I figure I'm already too stiff in my spelling because I capitalilze the interior "F." Hell, I think it really ought to be spelled "wifi." I also spell "e-mail" as "email." Suppose I compromise by agreeing to put the hyphens I save into "co-operation" and "margin-of-error." Win-win! Posted
by D. Weinberger at December 17, 2002 11:13 AM
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Comments
Nah, you want a diaeresis for coöperation.
Anyway, 'wifi' is spelled 'Airport'.
Posted by: Kevin Marks | December 17, 2002 01:23 PM
If you used Activewords you could set it to spell E-mail like I just did when you type "email" or Wi-Fi when you type "wifi". That and many other cool things are possible with ActiveWords. The coolest thing being that it works in all contexts. Even in dialogue boxes that are from the operating system.
Posted by: Ernest Svenson | December 17, 2002 02:10 PM
Ernie, I don't *want* to spell "email" with a hyphen. It's not some degraded form of "real" mail; it's its own thing.
ActiveWords is a fine product that many people love. I recommend it heartily even though I have tried it several times and never got in the habit of using it, even though it would have made my life easier.
Posted by: David Weinberger | December 17, 2002 03:13 PM
Gotta go with Kevin on that one: the proper spelling of "Wi-Fi" is "AirPort".
Either that or "802.11b".
Posted by: Frankenstein | December 17, 2002 03:24 PM
We could argue about this until we were blue in the tooth, and still not agree!
Posted by: Vergil Iliescu | December 18, 2002 02:12 AM