[Air-l] new technologies: diffusion comparison diagram

[elijah wright]

> >http://alex.halavais.net/research/rate.png
>
> I find it curious that they attribute the "start" of the Internet to
> 1991. One of the Internet time lines suggest that 1990 was when dialup
> service was first commercially available (see
> http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/), so perhaps that's the
> rationale?

the rationale is probably that it became legal to route commercial traffic
over the mainstream internet at around that date.  ;)

> I'm not familiar enough with these other diffusions to know for sure,
> but it seems iffy that the others had the same kind of non-commercial
> incubation that the Internet did, so a straight comparison may be
> misleading.

right - most of those things had commercial sponsors pushing them along.

i just did a little googling and found this paper, specifically relating
diffusion of innovations methods to the early internet's development:

http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/innovation/adoptiondiffusion.htm


elijah