Just in case you didn't notice, IT is an employment ghetto. All of the gains of the labor movement 40 hour work weeks, 5 day work weeks, overtime pay, vacation have disappeared in IT. IT is a cost center so nobody wants to dump money into it unless there is some crisis. Add in to that the fact that most organizations are solely focused on cost reductions, forcing IT to make unpopular changes to service levels and technology that generally leaves everyone pissed off.

I used to work for a subsidiary of Elsevier, working on some of their trade magazines and newsletters. Advertising and editorial are deeply intertwined.

For example, if an ad was botched (typo, image messed up) the response was we would provide editorial as a make good.

You can even work out editorial deals with some magazines based on the ad dollars spent.

I used to be in the business of producing school textbooks K-12, both for another company and my own. Textbooks go through an adoption process, where they are evaluated by a board and, if approved, made available for purchase with state funds.

In some markets the process really dumbed down the material. We used to have to produce special editions for places like Texas and Florida. There was a lot of material changed or removed. Fig leaves were placed over pieces of fine art, cross-curricular activities involving the Alamo were added in, etc.

It is a big deal to get your books adopted, and it was disturbing to watch the compromises made throughout the whole process. I would say it would be difficult to get a worthwhile education from books produced for Texas, Florida and some of the other conservative markets.

I think what we are seeing is that it has always been the delivery vehicle that was scarce and expensive not the creative content. As the cost of distribution comes down it is revealing the true value of the creative content.

Some artists have figured this out. They distribute their music to promote other things that generate income like live performances which have genuine scarcity.

Steps like this are going to drive the encryption of all traffic, which is going to increase the utilization of the network. besides the overhead of encryption, it eliminates the possibility of compression and caching, which are very important aspects to WAN acceleration.

The question remains is this something that will have a greater financial impact on the consumers or AT&T. It certainly make thing much more difficult for organizations that are sniffing traffic.