mediajunk

I'm posting this entry from the lobby of a hotel in Milan, where I got five hours of access for €5.95.

That's not bad in comparison with charges in Ireland, where wi-fi prices fall under the same "rip-off" heading as so many other consumer goods and services at the moment.

In San Francisco, wireless access will soon be provided free. The San Fran mayor has declared that wi-fi internet access is a "right".

That's probably an overstatement, but let's hope that other cities follow San Fran's lead and that, in the relatively near future, free wireless internet access will be the norm in major urban centres.

A post on the Socialtext blog claims that Google's dominance as the web's number one jumping-off point may be threatened not by another search engine, but by a wiki -- Wikipedia, no less.

Over time, Wikipedia has been slowly eating the entire Web's knowledge base until it becomes itself a faster, better, and--most critically--unspammed reference matter of what are the relevant and valuable resources. And unlike mere link directories, it doesn't simply list links, it tells a story about them.

Incidentally, a lot of search-engine watchers have noted that Wikipedia is dominating the SERPs. One says:

Personally I love it when I enter a query and a wikipedia entry appears in the results - I know, or at least believe, I have at least one good result. Which is precisely the opposite to how I feel when an About result appears, and both are often there together. In fact I often append the word 'wikipedia' to the end of a search if the original results don't look too promising.

Is this the sound of rumbling in the undergrowth? Probably not, but I continually remind myself that the Internet is still growing, and its change often comes from an unanticipated source.