Ye Gods was it wet here yesterday?  the rain fell unrelenting from dawn to dusk, a drenching fine rain that penetrates even the most protective outer layers and leaves one feeling cold and thoroughly brassed off.  By evening the river was in full spate for the first time in weeks.  No bad thing as this volume of water will clear out all the accumulated algae and other dross that's built up over the past month or so.  It's wet again this morning with the promise of a damp and grey day.

I have said before that the Internet is a remarkable tool with almost boundless potential to enable the sharing of information and knowledge even between folk who would otherwise have absolutely no contact whatsoever. 

I started these ramblings to keep members of the MAA in touch with daily life on their fishery and to share with them the broad knowledge collected within the club.  But others have found their way to this site not just UK based but from around the world.  I opened an email this morning from a member of the Wildlife Service in the USA who had read my comments following the crayfish seminar at Grassington last year and wants to learn more about the plans to eliminate alien crayfish species. 

Before the advent of the World Wide Web sharing knowledge in this way would have been virtually impossible.  Why would a scientist working in America be aware of a small project on an insignificant beck in a remote corner of Yorkshire in the UK?  The answer is that they probably wouldn't to the potential detriment of both parties. 

It's been said that we live in an information age.  I think we are at just the beginning of that age.  We will see an explosion of ideas over the next decade facilitated by this wonderful invention that enables us to sit at a computer anywhere in the world and share ideas with anyone else on the planet who is similarly equipped.  The beauty is that for now its refreshingly free of state control and interference (at least in the western world). The challenge for us all is to keep it this way, but most important of all to also ensure that we do not create an underclass of the knowledge poor.

We have the technological means to equip every community with Internet access.  What prevents this is a lack of political will and finance.  Here at Horton we took matters into our own hands and with grant assistance built our own highly successful wireless broadband network to serve our scattered remote communities.  We have just rebuilt it at our own expense and it cost us about £25k to equip 80 households with up to the minute wireless equipment providing 6 meg connections to properties over 25 kilometres from the nearest telephone exchange.  A small price for such a remarkable tool.

Here's to the future!

Ian