January 29, 2003
Every Ant Needs a Crumb

The Open Content Network is a project to help overburdened Web servers by spreading content around the network in a kind of global cloud, from which requests can be served. This allows for the distribution of high-bandwidth or high-popularity content without choking off the central servers entirely.

This is interesting from more than just a technical perspective — there’s a social dynamic here as well. Currently, the only way that’s practical for the average citizen to publish on the Web is to use text — distributing audio, video, or other rich media quickly exceeds the bandwidth and server-resources caps typically set on inexpensive hosting accounts. These rich media are thus, in effect, reserved for the rich — for the big corporations and wealthy individuals who can afford to foot the bill for redundant servers and T-3 lines. If OCN were to succeed, it would shatter this barrier and open the road to multimedia publishing to many more people, leading to a richer Web and, hopefully, a richer society along with it. [From Scripting News]

Posted by Jason Lefkowitz at January 29, 2003
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Ant's Eye View is edited by Jason Lefkowitz, a consultant and Web developer in Alexandria, Virginia. Got a question, comment, or concern? Let me hear it!

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