The Internet will teach people very quickly what Marc Bell has already learned: If you are not the world's leading specialist in what you do, don't even bother to hang out your shingle. The information revolution will show you up as second-rate. Some people will look at this trend and say it's bad news -- that only the elite will have work. They forget that technology is growing so rapidly that every person will be able to find a unique niche, valued by enough other people in contact through the World Wide Web to make a living doing what they find really interesting. Your clients may be Indonesian or South African, but they will value your work, because they know they can't find anyone better at what you do.

Mark White
White & Associates
white@profmexis.sar.net
http://www.oocities.org/wallstreet/7891

Dear Dr. White:

Those are most encouraging ideas, and I hope you are right. It's rare, of course, that information becomes perfectly distributed through a human system -- let alone the entire world -- but if anything can come close to accomplishing that it's on-line technology. Your note reminded me of one of the sites I noticed in the "Web farm" at Bell Technology. It was www.sixdegrees.com, which is trying to network people according to the principle that any two people on the planet are no more than six times removed from one another.

And speaking of interesting Web sites, I was delighted to visit yours at http://www.oocities.org/wallstreet/7891 and see not only your work on complexity theory (a topic of great interest to me), but also your fan page for The Front Lines Forum! Thanks for clueing me in.

See you next week.

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