This morning, I received an email from Andy Oram about a short article he wrote back in 1999. Andy is an editor at O’Reilly Press and I met him at the Reputation Economies symposium at Yale Law. Eight years ago, he wrote, The Ghosts of Internet Time.

In the email, Andy said, “I'm afraid that fewer and fewer people now will recognize my references to the Past, and I'm no longer as negative about the Future as I was, but I think the article still holds some relevance.”

So, I went and checked out the article. Near the beginning of the article, he talks about the Ghost of Internet Past. He observes that “99% of all newsgroups degenerated into philosophical spats between leftists and libertarians, and three-quarters of all the alerts circulated had been hoaxes.” Having briefly checked to see the discussions on DailyKos and Little Green Footballs, as well as deleting the spams, the scams and the phishing attempts that showed up in my email over night I was glad to be reminded of how far we’ve come.

Later on, Andy speaks with the Ghost of Internet Present. Remember this is the Internet Present of 1999 when Andy wrote his article. They listen to people debating Internet policy. The ghost observes, “I was not talking about physical bandwidth at all. I was referring to control. Who has the power to use the Internet? Will it have job postings for the underprivileged or only stock quotes for the affluent?” On Thursday, I listened to Tim Wu speak about similar things at Virtually Speaking in Second Life. We now call the debate ‘Net Neutrality’, and we’ve made incredible progress, being able to have the debate in Second Life instead of listening to RealPlayer streams the way Andy’s Ghost of Internet Present (1999) had to.

The Ghost of Internet Future talks of the Internet being gone. “The international financial institutions have a proprietary satellite-based network, imposing and impenetrable. The entertainment companies put out 6500 programs a week, all strictly metered by kilobyte and filtered to isolate controversial content.” Thank God Andy’s prediction was incorrect. The 6500 programs a week are strictly measured by the gigabyte, not the kilobyte.

Andy ends off his article with, “Finally, Ghost of Internet Future, I will always insist that the Internet is more than a means of transmitting data—it is a place for building community.” I guess it is in this light that I post this blog entries, building communities ties between myself, Andy, and anyone who reads and thinks about this post.