If I say "Mr. PC" most people would know who I’m talking about immediately. If you don’t know who I’m talking about then you probably don’t watch TV or keep in touch with the Apple vs. PC. commercials.
Mr. John Hodgman is more than just the PC guy in the commercials. He’s actually quite the intellectual and comedy writer. If you visit his site you can read lots of his opinions on everything you can imagine.
Before he went on television, JOHN HODGMAN was a humble writer, expert, and Former Professional Literary Agent living in New York City. In this capacity, he has served as the Humor Editor for the New York Times Magazine, Occasional Flight vs. Invisibility Consultant on “This American Life,” Advice Columnist for McSweeney’s, Comic Book Reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and a Freelance Journalist specializing in Food, Non-Wine Alcohol, “Battlestar Galactica,” and most other subjects.
John shares interesting videos, thoughts on various technology news and developments and general current event thoughts and ideas.
If you’re on twitter, you can also follow John at twitter.com/Hodgman.
So, quite your stereotypical thinking and listen up to someone who’s interesting, funny and down right famous!
Visit Mr. Hodgman and read the areas of his expertise today.
As a follow-up to my earlier post; I’m beginning to think that the government, and specifically the United States Postal Service should take over the management and support of our Internet infrastructure.
Here’s some of the reasons I think this might be a good idea. Let’s look at the functions of the United States Postal Service:
- delivery of mail (connecting people)
- delivery of packages
- official endorsement of dated materials (think tax returns being postmarked)
- official government documents (issuing of passports, etc.)
- economic exchange (delivery of paychecks, tax returns, invoices)
These are the basic functions that I believe are provided by the postal service. As I stated in my earlier post, thinking about the Internet being considered more of a utility, what would the impact of the USPS being the entity responsible for the management and protection of that infrastructure.
- delivery of mail ultimate function is to connect to people. The functionality of the Internet in this capacity is obvious.
- delivery of packages is more of a challenge. I think this could easily be completely taken over by FedEx, UPS, DHL and other delivery companies
- official endorsement of documents could be enabled with more development on digital signatures
- the issuance of official government documents could either be continued to be down by the USPS, or perhaps distributed out to local BMV’s
- economic exchange could be pushed more to electronic distribution with more development and enforcement of secure transactions
I think I may have completely changed my mind on something that I completely disagreed with not too long ago. The idea of Internet access being considered in the same lines as a utility like water, electric and perhaps phone service or sewage made absolutely no sense to me.
I’ve always considered Internet access more of a luxury item than something like a utility. If you didn’t have Internet access you could still get by with life.
My decision may have changed though as I started to think about another government service that has been visibly getting replaced by the Internet, and specifically e-mail. That’s right, the United States Postal Service.
Similar to my last post about phone books and yellow pages, I begin to question why we still need and keep the post office around all of our towns and communities. Although we don’t always think about the other services and functions that the United States Postal Service provides to us and our communities, they do a lot more than just deliver envelopes and junk mail to our doors.
Stay tuned as I’ll share more of my thoughts on exactly what the USPS does and how I think the standardization and infrastructure responsibility of the Internet could potentially become the postal service’s next life efforts.
Later we’ll talk about how I really think the infrastructure of the Internet could be a good effort for government involvement.
Image: Gregory Jordan on flickr
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