CircleID

Well if you've been following tech news today, you probably already know — after month (years, really) of work, the MeasurementLab.net (M-Lab) initiative has now officially launched. Given how many people have been working on this project, I'm amazed it didn't leak. Having just launched, I've been stunned by the immediate outpouring of interest — not only did it peg our servers, taking a couple of the research tools momentarily offline, but my inbox has been entirely flooded by correspondences.

The news coverage has been pretty phenomenal:

Washington Post, Slashdot, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Associated Press, Wired, ArsTechnica, USA Today, PC Magazine, CBC, CNet News, PC World, Network World, Information Week, eWeek, Techdirt, Techcrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, and a whole host of locales around the globe: Japan, Austria, Poland, Netherlands, Australia, South Africa.

But it's the stories that didn't make the press that intrigue me the most. So here's three quick bits of info that you won't read that's part of the real history and success of the M-Lab project:

1. Derek Slater — my colleague and co-conspirator on the M-Lab project. Without his organizing skill, dedication, and all-around fantastic leadership, M-Lab wouldn't have gotten off the ground. Derek's kept a low profile on this project, but deserves to be publicly outed as the Wizard of M-Lab who kept everything on the rails. My hat's off to him.

2. kc claffy runs the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), who I consulted with for a couple years before moving to Washington, DC. Her freakishly and frenetically brilliant assessments of how much we don't know made me (and many others) a true believer in the need for maximum network research as soon as humanly possible. When things go awry with the Internet, people are going to be saying, "Didn't kc write a paper predicting this problem about ten or twelve years back?"

3. Awesomely cool researchers! M-Lab's afforded me with an opportunity to work with some remarkably cool folks whose life work is to help ensure that you're able to read this praise of their research. But two dozen folks have come forward to provide the brains behind M-Lab and they've been unbelievably helpful — cramming to get servers set up, troubleshooting when the inevitable ghosts in the machine pop up, and keeping the back end of M-Lab humming along.

More when I get caught up a bit more…

By Sascha Meinrath, Research Director, New America Foundation; Principal, The Ethos Group. Visit the blog maintained by Sascha Meinrath here.

Related topics: Access Providers, Broadband, Net Neutrality