Over on the Mozilla Webmaker site, James Bridle wrote a brilliant piece that explains in very simple terms how to get a better understanding of the web at the most basic level – where the cables and buildings are located, and where our data travels: How to see through the cloud. It’s fantastic!
And since the whole point of the Webmaker project is to allow for quick and easy remixing – and the learning process associated with it – I took the liberty to translate it to German.
We talk about the cloud all the time, the seemingly ephemeral, almost magical place where our data lives and thrives. But only when the system fails and something doesn’t work do we notice that there’s a brick-and-mortar infrastructure that everything runs on. Cables, servers, concrete buildings. Heck, even my mom asked me about the cloud a few weeks ago, and what it looks like.
Well, thanks to James everyone can now just poke around the web and get a better understanding on where the cloud really lives, and how our data travels down the cables hopping from data center to data center.
You can find my translation over on the Webmaker site: Die Cloud durchschauen.
As a side note, if you want to learn in a playful, really not threatening way about how the web works, please go check out Mozilla Webmaker. It’s a fantastic resource and very, very simple to get into.
2 Comments
I did a similar thing 19 years ago in my talk “Adventures on the Information Red Clay Road” at a conference of systems librarians. I showed them slides (alas long since disappeared slides) of the route data took from the little webserver in our office out to the building, over the electric poles to the server and so on.
You can read the text, minus the slides, at http://ruk.ca/content/adventures-information-red-clay-road-redux
Ah, excellent! Thanks for the pointer!