It's a small, mad, mad, small, mad, small (wireless) world

Doc Searls is in London, wandering the streets, looking for a cafe close to an open 802.11b access-point. Having found one, he sits down, has a cup of coffee and starts to blog. A few minutes later, two British geeks sit nearby him, talking about "access." Wait a sec, sez Doc to himself — I know that guy! It's Ben Hammersley, the Guardian reporter/geek who's writing a book on RSS for O'Reilly.

So Doc says hi, and it turns out that the wireless LAN he's connected to is the one in Ben's house, around the corner from the cafe, and that Ben has only been running it for a couple days.

It's a small world, and for the bandwidth-tropic, it grows smaller by the day, bringing us into proximity with one another and fuelling serendipity. We know each-other by the signs of our secret passion: the wireless cards, the Apple mobile hardware, the tin-can antennae and the constant nattering about "access."

Doc also reports that Jabber has been ported to the Danger Hiptop, the phone/PDA device that gave me a technology boner that could cut glass back when I saw it in the spring at PC Forum. Funny old world.

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