A report from Lorenzo Hagerty

An Example of the Best the Internet has to Offer

Today I experienced one of those serendipitous events that make the Internet such a marvelous tool for human communication. At the suggestion of a friend, I took a look at a new blog some friends of his have created to bring us a live account of one of the world's oldest markets. This bold team of bloggers has ventured into the Arctic Circle to Jokkmokk in Lapland. The event is the 399th Jokkmokk Sami Winter Market.

What made the trip to that Web site so unusual is the little 'blob' floating in the bottom of the window. The blob indicated that this was a 'MeetingPage' and that nine other people were looking at that very page at that very moment. Wow!, I thought, it's so nice to know that some other human beings are reading this page with me. And when I realized that most likely someone in Lapland was one of those people. So I clicked on the text that indicated I could open a chat session with the other people who were on that page at that time.

After a couple of minutes alone in the chat room, a visitor from Arizona entered, and a moment later a third guest entered. After a bit of typing and changing our 'guest' handles to our real names, we clicked on the button offering a voice conference. That was when my moment of Zen happened. Almost as soon as I clicked the button to join the conference I heard this wonderful voice from Lapland saying he was a 'Jokkmokk man.' As we talked, I was also scrolling down their blog and discovered a picture of the person I was talking to. There was something about hearing a live human voice through the Internet (reporting a great story to just a few of us in the chat room) that seemed to bring the Net alive like never before.

Now I realize that this kind of tech has been around for a long time. But in the past I've always had to make plans to meet a friend at a certain time, and then we had to tweak the tech to make it work. What made this experience so different for me was the fact that I hadn't planned on speaking to anyone when I landed on their Web site. But within a few minutes of reading this great blog I was actually speaking to someone in Lapland! Now that's a really big deal for us California guys :-) . I plan on going back to that site several times a day while the market is going on. Maybe I'll meet you in their chat room in the next couple of days. I highly recommend that you check it out.

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