March 10, 2003
Meeting proxies?
Seeing as how uplinks and web sites often fail just when you need them most (like during a live presentation) why isn't there a way to do a meeting room proxy?
Something that would let you ask your fellow attendees that are bringing laptops to cache the pages in advance.
This is a bit of a twist on web crawlers or other proxies. With a site proxy you can usually get it to have a copy online by visiting the pages. Trouble is this requires there being one already installed. I'm suggesting that the laptops themselves be used as cooperative caches. That way no one machine is required.
There are, of course, several issues to consider regarding freshness of the content and whether it's really the same content. But for most situations just having some faint approximation of the pages would save what would otherwise be a presentation disaster.
