Op-Ed Columnist - The Protocol Society. The Attention Economy: An Overview. Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus It is no secret that we live in an information overload age.
The explosion of new types of information online is a double-edged sword. We both enjoy and drown in news, blogs, podcasts, photos, videos and cool MySpace pages. And the problem is only going to get worse, as more and more people discover the new web. Consider the two charts below, illustrating the growth of the Blogosphere at large and also in number of posts published by tech news blog TechCrunch: Switching vs. Routing. The same old networking question is constantly being addressed as network managers assess the speed, simplicity and lower cost of Layer 2 switching (bridging) against the greater network control afforded by routing technology.
The cost and management burdens of routers is justified in WANs due to the high recurring costs and relatively low speeds of these links. Typically general purpose routers were adopted in the campus, but in recent years LAN switches have replaced such routers providing significant price/performance and density advantages. The networking requirements are constantly changing and this justifies a new look at an age-old question. Networks have grown-in both size and importance and responses to familiar problems like broadcast containment, security and support for complex topologies have changed since routers first appeared. And of course there's the introduction of LAN technologies, such as Gigabit Ethernet.