In Paul Graham’s famous essay Cities and Ambition, there’s this idea that some cities are centers for some type of ambition, and when you come to one of those cities, you can feel the message the city is sending to you. For example, the message that you can feel in New York is “You should be richer,” while Berkeley’s is “You should live better,”... See more

I think the internet is more like land. In this metaphor:URLs ~= PlacesLinks ~= RoadsNetworks ~= City-states

a great experiment that sums up today’s Internet in a nutshell.