I’ve been sitting on a goldmine. Turns out this internet thing is chock full of great stuff. Like this: the O’Reilly Network is a treasure chest of fabulous essayists exihibiting their essay-writing skills. Granted, the topic is mostly the internet and computers and stuff but think of it as a haiku – it’s even more impressive that people manage to write such epic tender passionate statements given the apparent limitations of their form.

Apart from essay after essay after essay from Cory Doctorow on matters of intellectual property and human appropriation of technology, there is for instance this gem of a conference talk transcript from Bruce Sterling:

A Contrarian View of Open Source

Let’s ignore for a second just how valuable it is to have a person speaking with caution about Open Source (oh yes, there are lots of primates grunting cautionary grunts about it, but no amount of monkeys with typewriters is worth a Shakespeare). In fact, ignore the content entirely. It’s still worth reading because it’s so just damn funny.

Normally this is where I would quote some portion of the linked document which I felt was the best part or captured the spirit of it. But about 60% of all of it is good enough to re-qoute so I can’t pick.

But actually forget all about that. To be honest, I’m not sure exactly what Mr. Sterling’s highly entertaining point is, and anyway the real meat is in the Cory Doctorow essays, and if anybody wants to have a conversation with me for the next week they’re going to have to read all those because it’s all I’m going to be talking about for a while. This may be a tedious week for my housemates.

Wow, the Internet is so cool.

(question for the world: does anyone remember who it was that tried to trademark the word Internet a few years back?)