The Internet is the new Xerox

This is kind of old now (in Internet time -- it is less than two months old in actual time) but some of the concepts it introduced me to popped into my head today. I think the author discusses some powerful concepts in it; concepts that, should the Internet retain its current level of popularity or see continued growth, will be important for anyone who honestly wants to share things of value using it.

The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.

Read more here: Better Than Free, by Kevin Kelly
(Great summary and synthesis of the 8 main points by Seth Godin here)