The Lightnet Revisited

alexbarnett — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 04:35:00 GMT

At the end of 2005 I wrote a post messing around with some ideas on the future of the net.

One of the ideas was the counter concept to the Darknet, using the term 'Lightnet'. I didn't define 'Lightnet', Lucas Gonze did that (and soon after Lucas was good enough to acknowledge me with credit for the invention of the term in the Darknet context).

Over the next few days, Mike Linksvayer, Peter Van Dijck, Kenyatta, Richard MacManus and Jon Udell did their bit of meme-spreading, then J.D. Lasica, author of 'Darknet: Hollywoods War Against the Digitial Generation', picked up on the Lightnet too, where this pic turned up:

A few days later, Lucas and J.D. Lasica were both interviewed by Jason Boog for an article Jason published at Publish, where Clay Shirky was also asked to comment.

But it didn't end there. Prompted by Raymond's post today I was curious to see how the lightnet meme has been doing so I did some searching around.. Here are some samples of the Lightnet citations I found:

December 2005 - Lightnet becomes a del.icio.us tag
December 2005: J. LeRoy connects the Lightnet with Web 2.0
February 2006 - the above lightnet pic and lightnet concept is discussed by Joshua Kinsberg in the context of political free speech
February 2006 - Dave Tool contemplates 'lightnet services'
February 2006 - Chris Ritke confrims Lucas is adament: "one lightnet but many darknets"
March 2006 - Lightnet is discussed at South by Southwest (whether 'lightnet values' can work in a secure private network)
August 2006 - Soundblog considers Lightnet in a future of open media and social networks
October 2006 - the lightnet is the P2P place
December 2006 - lightnet mused in italian
January 2007 - the term Lightnet get its very own entry in Wikipedia (a bit light on content at the moment - I haven't and won't ;-)
February 2007 - Darknet! = Lightnet
February 2007 - DTLQ believes in lightnets. Raymond wrote that today, 15 months after lightnet's birth.

Long live the Lightnet.

Alex Barnett blog : lightnet

The Lightnet Revisited