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IP: Japan Watches Olympics and Wonders About Internet Demise
From: Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 06:31:49 -0400
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 16:39:45 +0900 To: farber () central cis upenn edu From: sja () glocom ac jp (Stephen J. Anderson) In an effort to measure impacts of the Olympics, staff here at Tokyo's Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM) have been watching the main servers for the Atlanta Games and using traceroute software to test the impact on cross- Pacific Internet connections. Are there any systematic studies on-going? We are trying to pool efforts, and our various attempts to enter the main servers of IBM (http://www.atlanta.olympic.org/) as well as CNN (http://www.cnn.com/) were sometimes timed out because the servers appeared busy. As for other sites, we saw no major differences in gaining access to the White House, UCLA, Georgia Tech, or MIT which our staff used to see if broad differences in speed of connections might appear. One researcher here, Tad Kimura, worked up a table from Monday 6 AM JST (which is 2 PM PDT or 5 PM EDT) and found difficulties only with the sites in Atlanta--IBM and CNN. However, I personally have had no trouble all weekend, and watched various sites such as the opening ceremony images in the gallery of CNN. MSNBC seems to have some startup problems, and dislikes browsers other than Microsoft Explorer--I stopped watching--but my big surprises were the good local paper coverage by the Atlanta Constitution (http://atlantagames.com) among other papers--my Pennsylvania roots also led me to find that the Philadelphia Inquirer is supporting a page with links to other contributing papers (http://wh002.infi.net/phillynews/olympics/). My question to others--what systematic studies are on-going to watch the impact of the Atlanta Olympics? At the moment, I think all the concerns were much over-blown, and the Web is making my combination of televised events and personal interest in details about the soccer venues (US-Argentina with 80,000 and Japan's shocking win over Brazil) all the more convenient. Rather than a demise, I think the Olympics will be a boost to the compelling evidence that the Web is here to stay. **************************************** Stephen J. Anderson URL http://www.glocom.ac.jp/staff/anderson.e.html Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM) International University of Japan ****************************************
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- IP: Japan Watches Olympics and Wonders About Internet Demise Dave Farber (Jul 22)