I was reading Michael Wolff's hilarious column in New York Magazine about his evening with Rupert Murdoch. The pen-portrait of Pam Alexander, the PR uberwoman, is particularly wicked. There's a throwaway line: "[Walt] Mossberg lectured Rupert about a new sort of viral connectivity (it was the same lecture Rupert had gotten from Negroponte at lunch). And Rupert listened patiently ("I'm interested in this," he kept saying, although, probably, not very)."
   The mystery is solved. Sputnik, a San Francisco software company, has a very clever idea. If it succeeds, Sputnik will turn every house into a mobile internet base station. The deal is this: buy a Wi-Fi antenna, install Sputnik software, and share the connection with other people within reach of the signal. In exchange, get free internet access courtesy of your fellow Sputnik users. It's as if you offer a room in your house, in exchange for the same hospitality anywhere in the network. Without the annoyance, cost, or need to clean the sheets.
   Presumably, also, when you try to catch a Sputnik signal, it tells you to share your own connection before permitting access. The possibility: a wireless internet that grows as virally as did the use of email. Virally, hmmm. It's a long time since I used that word.
· Sputnik
· Boingo
· Michael Wolff