Reintermediation
March 14th, 2003Ross certainly gets it about the World of Ends. Providing services on a network is all about being an endpoint yourself, but acting as a middleman between the consumer of your service and the value they seek. Tucows isn’t so much a place IN the net that is a source of downloadable files as one ON the net that acts as a proxy whereby a seeker of files can be matched up with a producer of files – an enabler of the two-way conversation.
Since, as David Weinberger discusses, a world of ends means Spam filtering must be done at the ends, that doesn’t mean it has to be done at the terminus of the conversation – interlocutors play an essential role.
