http://www.economist.com/daily/diary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8343221
Silicon Valley - The Bay bridge takes its toll Nov 27th 2006 From Economist.com Our West Coast correspondent scales a silicon summit Monday MY HEART sank as I looked at my Google Calendar for the week ahead. I was sitting in my office, which consists of a tatami mat, a low Japanese table and an Apple PowerBook, in the damp basement of my house in Berkeley. From here I write about Silicon Valley―which is not really a valley at all, but a long peninsular suburb to the south of San Francisco. Getting from here to there means crossing San Francisco Bay. And, this week, my calendar was telling me, I would be spending a lot of time doing just that―driving across one of the most tedious bridges in America, the Bay bridge, and over a toll plaza that must levy a ferocious tax on America’s productivity, given the number of entrepreneurs and innovators who sit idling in its traffic jams not only at rush hour but at far less forgivable times of day. Sitting now in my Beetle at this particular bottleneck I have time to ponder the strange topography of Silicon Valley, both physical and metaphorical. Like other titular centres—Wall Street, the City, Madison Avenue, Hollywood, the Beltway, Whitehall, Fleet Street—the Valley is defined less by geography than by industry. In each, the social circle and the state of mind extends far beyond the literal place. Morgan Stanley may be a pillar of Wall Street, for example, but to get to the Street its bankers have to hail taxis from their offices in mid-town. Silicon Valley types have it worse. They practically live in their cars, whiling away the hours on dreary highways or on the Bay Area’s Meccano-kit of bridges. The original and actual Valley encompasses an area around Stanford University, and around Hewlett-Packard―which, having been founded in a garage, supplies the Valley’s creation myth. But, for all its fame and imagined glamour, the Valley is going to seem shockingly dull to anybody who happens not to be a computer geek. The hills are pretty, but not to compare with those in Marin County north of the Golden Gate. The intellectual climate, such as it is save for discussions of computer code, pales against that of the East Bay hills around Berkeley, home to the other big university in the Bay Area. A lot of Valley people, and Valley firms, are choosing those places as home. But they still consider themselves part of the Valley. Which means a lot of driving. The Valley is shockingly dull to anybody who happens not to be a computer geek Two such Valley people are Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle, for whom I will be crossing the Bay bridge this week. Tim is a publisher of computer books and a Valley guru of sorts. In conversation with a friend he coined the phrase “Web 2.0” in 2003, and he is now putting out ever thicker papers explaining what this term means. John is a blogger, an author, a former lecturer at Berkeley’s Journalism School (where I am a lecturer now) and a former publisher of the Industry Standard and of Wired. Tim and John are the forces behind an annual Web 2.0 conference that is celebrating its third anniversary this year and has become the hottest show in town. So hot, that Tim and John turned down 5,000 would-be participants this year for lack of space, and said as much proudly in their opening remarks. So hot, that they have changed the official name of this event from “conference” to “summit,” with a view to staging another, separate, Web 2.0 “conference” later for a bigger but less exclusive audience. I’ll have more to say about the “summit” in the coming days. But right now the point is the following: Tim and John know what they’re doing. Tim lives in Sebastopol, a charming and bohemian town in Sonoma County, better known for its Pinots, Zins and Cabs than for its HTML and XML, and about two hours north of Stanford by car. John lives in Marin County, between the redwoods of Muir Woods and the seals at Point Reyes. All three of us, apparently, have concluded that Silicon Valley is best observed from the other side of a moat. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ TELECOM-CITIES Current searchable archives (Feb. 1, 2006 to present) at http://www.mail-archive.com/telecom-cities@forums.nyu.edu/ Old searchble archives at http://www.mail-archive.com/telecom-cities@googlegroups.com/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
