Telepocalypse

Bird feeder

I note that Feedburner is creating a service to intermediate RSS feeds (hat tip: Marc Canter). This service takes your existing RSS feed, and re-purposes it by gathering various statistics and modifying it in prescribed ways.

Perhaps we're seeing the slow return of the smart network. Just this time it comes as a pick-your-own form, where you select the chain of clever things to be done with your bitstream. Indeed, maybe the whole "smart" vs "stupid" is barking up the wrong tree. The only thing that matters is whether you are free and unconstrained in your choice of services and intermediaries; or shackled and forced to pay perpetual tributes to your connectivity provider.

As a thought experiment, imagine a world of routers where you could run your own software agents at every node. This would be a very "smart" network, but a totally uncontrolled one by the node operator. What does this do to the end-to-end argument? Answers of the back of an RSS feed, please.