Last blog of the year Let's get retro today, on what will probably be the last blog of the year, and go back to July 99 and read this feedmag piece on how the growth of the Internet is expanding the value of knowing English. Language is obviously something where network economies are valuable, and as this article points out,

as information increasingly becomes the good that nations trade, the definition of proximity changes from geographic to linguistic: two countries border one another if and only if they have a language they can use in common.

I suppose my one disagreement would be that people can know more than one language, and just as there is a network effect in speaking something many other people can understand, there is also value in speaking something that only a few others can understand.