Copyright ©1997-2008 Glenn Fleishman except as noted otherwise. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, contact Glenn Fleishman at glenn at glennf.com. Photo © 2008 Laurence Chen; used with permission.
Copyright ©1997-2008 Glenn Fleishman except as noted otherwise. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, contact Glenn Fleishman at glenn at glennf.com. Photo © 2008 Laurence Chen; used with permission.
Turning technology from mumbo-jumbo into rich tasty gumbo
� Open Letter to NPR Affiliate KUOW about NPR's Linking Policy | Main | Boring People �Axiom No. 1: Everything new appears monolithic.
Axiom No. 2: Nothing is ever monolithic.
Axiom No. 3: Time doesn't break monoliths down; understanding does.
Axiom No. 4: Journalists write about monoliths when they first appear, 2001-like, looming on the horizon because they lack the time to learn and the sophistication to understand, and predict their audiences won't understand either.
Axiom No. 5: If it's business or financial market related, Axioms 1 to 4 go out the window.
I've been troubled for years that fellow journalists tend towards writing about each new technology as if it's first incomprehensible (picture the apes in 2001), then monolithic (ah, it's a big rock), then, and only then - often much later - the subtletly emerges, much of which was there the day the rock started to glow.
In 1994 and into 1996, from when the commercial Internet began in earnest to when ecommerce became a commonplace word, I spoke to many, many journalists who couldn't mentally break the Internet down into its constituent parts to better describe it. Rather, the Internet had a capital I: it was one being, one entity, one group of long-time users (academics), one group of new users (newbies), one group of sophisticated newer users building businesses (dotcommers).
Of course, it was much more complicated than that in 1994, and it took a couple years before mainstream journalists would stop making howlers like claiming 1,000,000 hits meant a million people visiting a site, or that DNS propagates (that last one still comes up...hmm).
Meanwhile, of course, the subtlest new business point gets analyzed, reanalyzed, reported on, synthesized, suggested, editorialized. Axiom No. 5 should probably read: Business news is always worth figuring out the technical details of, while technology news can be wallpapered over, no matter how lumpy the wall.
This monolithic reporting comes up all the time with blogging. There are a few, very few, journalists who, without becoming bloggers themselves, have managed to express the breadth of the communities that blog: individuals with no connection, groups, sparking points, pundits, technolgoists, egoists, etc. There is little connection between most bloggers in terms of what they do or why they do it; the connections between bloggers are social and business links, which don't imply an actual relationship. (Take that, NPR!)
The reporters who get it right often focus on one aspect of blogging, like warbloggers or journalist bloggers, but they make it clear that they might be talking about a pool of tens or dozens of bloggers out of hundreds of thousands of blogs.
The ones who get it wrong see the monolith sending its scary signals into space, and they start smashing heads with thigh bones. You know the bones: Sullivan, Kaus, InstaPundit, etc.
Others see the monolith and become early rejecters: oh, yes, a monolith. Well, I'm sure it's a fad, and I'm sure that serious newspapers and books are much more interesting than the real voices of a hundred thousand people talking about what's important to them which tens of millions of people are reading. Yawn.
Lucas may have borrowed from Campbell in generating his Star Wars mythos, but The Force is still out here: the interlinkedness of all things on the Net, every day becoming more so, drawing us into a multilithic universe.
Posted by Glennf at June 23, 2002 4:47 PM
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I always say, it will take a week for the old settings to expire in DNS servers around the Internet.
That's why I and my buddies keep our DNS vaues very very low. It adds a tiny bit of load, but it means that you can change DNS on a dime.
Posted by: Glenn Fleishman at June 26, 2002 4:15 PM
So with that in mind, what would be a better word than "propogate"? I.e. It will be a week or so before the new DNS information ___ (does what -- spreads? percolates? gets un-cached?).
Posted by: Mark Burgess at June 26, 2002 4:11 PM
DNS is precisely opposite to propagation except in one limited way.
When you update a DNS record on a DNS server, such as the ones I run in my office, the information doesn't get sent anywhere. Rather, it is each individual other DNS server on the Internet which, the next time it needs to perform a lookup on a domain name managed here, pulls from my DNS server the latest information.
Calling DNS propagation is like calling Web page updates propagation. DNS is decentralized, like the Web.
The only aspect of DNS that propagates is in the very top level. When a domain registrar updates information about the start of authority (SOA) -- the details about which domain naming system servers have the information for a given domain -- those top-level SOA records are propagated to a few other top-level name servers.
The process is like thus:
1. Visit easyDNS (my favorite).
2. Register a domain name: blooworld.com.
3. easyDNS transmits the DNS information I provide for that domain
4. That information is distributed among the top-level name servers.
5. Those nameservers are rebooted frequently.
6. The next query that any DNS server anywhere on the Net issues for that domain name retrieves the latest SOA from the top-level nameserver and then on down the list.
When I change the IP number in a local DNS record for a domain I manage, only the next query retrieves that change. Previous information is cached for a period of tiem defined for each domain by the DNS administrator for the DNS serve. By default., it's a week for complete flush and shorter durations for other behavior.
Posted by: Glenn Fleishman at June 25, 2002 2:51 PM
it took a couple years before mainstream journalists would stop making howlers like claiming 1,000,000 hits meant a million people visiting a site, or that DNS propagates (that last one still comes up...hmm).
Equating hits with visitors is plain wrong, but using propagation as a metaphor for updating a distributed database doesn't seem so crazy. Unless my understanding of DNS is a good deal shallower than I thought.
Posted by: Nat Irons at June 25, 2002 2:39 PM
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