Thursday, January 17, 2002

Why Weeds? [Technology Review - Managazine - January 2002] -- A great little article by Michael Schrage why, sometimes, innovation isn't the missing link in turning technology into a business.  5:50:01 PM

Take two. On a related note to the previous post, some folks at Xerox Parc have analyzed information consumption as a form foraging. What makes this interesting is that there are well-established mathematical models of foraging. When you apply the model, it allows you to make interesting predictions about sources of information and tools for processing them (like Tivo). 5:33:00 PM

whoops. apologies. apparently you can't send attachment on email submissions to your blog. 5:30:29 PM

So, as an information consumer, you spend a lot of time just partitioning information into two categories -- interesting and not interesting. A hundred years ago, this was a trivial problem, because you just didn't have that much information to partition. 10 year ago, after the rise of mass media, the problem was harder, but mostly solvable -- you could get enough accuracy by partitioning by commercial information source (e.g. favorite magazines, news shows, etc) that you could do the rest by hand. With the advent of the web, though, seems like the problem has gone pretty severe. Too many high-volume information sources with insufficient accuracy in their partitioning for you to even feel like you've effectively sampled the interesting set of information. Radio Userland gives you the option of adding a couple rounds of partitioning -- it allows people to create low-bandwidth, highly-focused information sources; it gives you a way to quickly and easily subscribe to them. You get higher quality information. You can spend more time consuming and less time partitioning. And, because the yield is better, you can justify spending more time on the source than you would on others. Seems like there are still a couple rounds of paritioning you could do, before you have to parition by hand, but I'm not sure I'd trust those rounds to relative strangers. The other interesting thing about it is that it makes the internet a real web. In the past, the World Wide Web was more like a star with information radiating from a handful of commercial sites. With Radio, you can make connections at the edge of the web. 4:02:49 PM