One third of the traffic referrers to the Washington Post web site is from blogs. Blog that, says Jeff Jarvis.
So, I am blogging it. And it is pretty important, actually.
Update: See comment from Jeff below.
Author Archives: Espen
EBSLG talk
I gave a talk today at the European Business Schools Librarians’ Group Annual Conference. The title was "Get on the Net so I can link to you: Academic search and findability in the age of Google," the slides are here (PDF. 2.8Mb), and the (17Mb, 37 minutes, mp3) podcast is available here.
New essay in Ubiquity
My latest essay in ACM Ubiquity is called "The waning importance of categorization" – and deals with the impact on those who categorize when information becomes infinitely searchable. Not unlike Kevin Kelly’s latest article in New York Magazine, though I deal more with the near-term changes. The main point is that, just as mobile phones made us substitute communication for planning, digitally searchable information will make us search rather than categorize.
Apple is just Microsoft with a sense of style
You have to like Bob Cringely – if nothing else, he is colorful and direct. So also in his latest column, with gems like
Apple is just Microsoft with a sense of style.
and
IBM is a disaster-in-the-making. Big Blue as a total enterprise is running primarily on customer inertia and clever advertising, which definitely isn’t enough.
His point is that IBM and Microsoft have increasingly obsolete business models which will be disrupted as Google comes along and basically organizes the Internet by slicing off the important part of the infrastructure package (that is, the one that is changing) and monetizing it by lots of small ads rather than large and rather opaque licensing and service contracts.
And there, of course, he has a point. Except, of course, that Microsoft and IBM have changed in response to external pressures before, and should by no means be counted out yet.
Fun, though. Interesting times.
Wal-Mart spread
Great video of how Wal-Mart has spread – showing the economics of geography and logistics. Via Tyler Cowen, who also links to explanations for the growth pattern.
Hanging exports
The BBC report about a UK farmer exporting gallows to Africa is making the rounds in the blogosphere. I personally find this a little hard to believe – not from the concept itself, but the pricing: Isn’t £12k a little much to pay for a few beams of oak and some metal? Especially if you are a cash-strapped African country (though the regime may have the money) with occasionally inadequate transportation? I would think that if anything could be manufactured locally, this could.
As for £100,000 portable "execution systems", I suspect a hoax here….even though this is from BBC.
(Via BoingBoing and others)
Innovation as an ongoing process
It can’t be said too often, but Techdirt sums it up yet again: Innovation is an ongoing process, and companies compete by creating a series of fleeting competitive advantages.
When I worked for CSC Research, we used to joke that you could always, during a presentation or in a report, make the point that "X is a process, not an event", and get away with it. Chiefly because, for most values of X, it is true.
Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing
…can be found here, and are thoroughly recommendable. And he likes Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, too.
Birds of a feather..
Here is a great little video of Fedex planes being routed around a Memphis thunderstorm. Note the change first to shorter approaches and then to holding patterns as the storm moves in over the airport. And more importantly – note how many planes go in and out of that place…
Firefox extensions
Paul Kedrosky has a great list of his Firefox extensions. But the most interesting news to me was synching of bookmarks via Foxmarks. I use FolderShare and love it, synching bookmarks will also be useful. Eventually, I assume, we will move it all to the net.
In the meantime, more tweaking to do. Now, where did my time go?
South America’s left turn, as seen by Becker and Posner
The Becker-Posner blog is a delight, something I have come to appreciate even more after my eldest daughter started studying international politics and economy and Dad needs access to rapid and pointed analysis to hold his own around the dinner table.
Their latest discussion is about leftism in South and Latin America, with Becker starting and Posner adding a few points, primarily about the cultural and even religious angle.
I particularly liked Posner’s take on how democracy works:
Democracy is not a deliberative process (as many academics believe), in the sense that voters examine and discuss issues and so formulate a thoughtful, knowledgeable opinion on what policies are right for the nation or for them. Voters have neither the time, the education, nor the inclination for such an activity, as intellectuals imagine. All they know is results. So if the Right fails to deliver on its promises, the Left takes over, whether or not it has better or even different policies.
Blogging is a conversation, and Becker and Posner’s conversations are better than most.
The proto-media center PC…
Boingboing points at the Computer History’s collection of old sales brochures for computers, which is a treasure trove of inflated language and not quite so inflated computers. I will refrain from citing the nerdier items such as brochures for mainframes and acoustic modems, but the "Going to work with your Osborne" (at 24 pounds/11kg) brochure and especially the sales brochure for the (even at the time) extremely underwhelming IBM PCjr are great fun.
The PCjr was IBM’s foray into home computing, but in order not to threaten their profitable line of business PCs the PCjr was crippled so severly that it flopped, big time. (Part of the reason may be that it had the worst "chiclet" keyboard in computing history, though, as the picture shows, it was wireless.).
IBM was fairly early into home computing, but hadn’t yet cottoned on to the real market for home computers, which at that time (in the absense of online peer interaction) was based on guilt: Buy your child a computer, or he/she will do poorly in school and go downward from there. Note the picture, which bears an uncanny resemblance to certain home-oriented products I have been thinking about getting for my own living room lately. I know things have moved on, but can’t help getting that uncomfortable feeling that in about 20 years time I will look at these things and wonder what the hell I was thinking….
But it takes a special kind of thinking to produce something as bad as the PCjr. According to a friend of mine, the then-current explanation inside IBM was that the sales force (ever the upper hand at IBM) had boasted "We can sell anything!", whereupon the product development guys handed over the PCjr, saying "Oh yeah? Try this!"
Monthly password change considered harmful, or at least unnecessary
Spaf has a good argument for why we ended up with the dreaded monthly password change and why it may not be such a good idea in practice.
Security is always dynamic, so I agree. Plus, I hate all these dratted password things for everything.
Free shipping preferred
Techdirt has a little article talking about how people prefer free shipping over price discounts, even thought the final price may be higher. I don’t find that so hard to understand – free shipping offers flexibility in that you don’t feel you need to bunch orders together, enables price comparisons with local stored directly, and just makes life easier. The cost of processing may go down, but human information processing – actually having to figure out what the total price might be – becomes relatively more expensive. Free shipping is worth more because it simplifies your life and your shopping.
That’s all.
Perpendicular
The next technological breakthrough to hit the market in hard disk technology is perpendicular recording. As I understand it, this means that the magnetic field is flipped 90 degrees up from the disk surface, increasing the storage capacity per areal unit as much as ten times. This Flash video from Hitachi (which includes ceiling pointing dance steps from Saturday Night Fever) should give a technically correct, though rather hokey explanation.
The upshot is somewhat thicker but ten times as powerful hard disks. The initial market seems to be iPods and similar devices (where the density premium is higher, I assume, but maybe also because smaller disks vibrate less just because they are smaller), but 3.5 inch disks are already announced. Today’s top-of-the-line disks have about 500GB capacity, so get ready for 5TB on your laptop within a year to three….
That is rather amazing. I like disk technology – not just because it is the perennial example of continuously disruptive innovation, but also because every time you think it has reached its technological limit and we will finally switch to solid state memory, a new dimension opens up (this time by using an old technology previously thought too complex to be worth it.)
5TB on a laptop…. I used to say that you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much hard disk space, but now I begin to wonder. This means simple scanning of all your digital content, including music and videos, and carrying all your information with you at all times. Which new applications will we get that will take advantage of, eventually outstrip this capacity and thus drive the technology forward?
Furthermore, were will disks go once the compression-on-a-single layer dimension is exhausted? Following what happened in computer design, I suspect we will see some architectural innovation (a la Seymour Cray creating supercomputers by creatively combining – and packing – known technology) or just techniques for increasing the number of disks attached to each device. Or perhaps increases in communications technology, especially wireless, will allow us to, once more, go back to centralized data storage.
Ahhh, the march of technology. Don’t we love it.
(Via Engadget.)
Computer book market according to Tim O’Reilly
Distributed coordination in practice
This video from a busy street crossing in India shows what happens when you have truly decentralized coordination – from a distance, it looks like chaos, from the viewpoint of each individual entity, it looks logical, at least based on the limited information they have.
(Via BoingBoing, of course.)
Podcast: Sinks and technology
Here is another podcast: Sinks and technology (MP3, about 9MB), a version of my essay "The S-curves of Sinks, and Technology" in ACM Ubiquity.
Podcast: Attendre le suitcase
I am experimenting with podcasting – here is my first English podcast, a reading (MP3, 7:30 min, 6.9MB) of my Ubiquity essay Attendre le Suitcase. Comments invited, have fun.
Best transatlantic political analysis so far…
From a web page about how to sell things (courtesy of Pick me up):
For two summers, I worked in the UK. My third year I transferred to
the States. It wasn’t a success, but it did teach me something about
the difference between Britain and America.
Americans tend to buy stuff when it makes them feel warm inside.
Brits tend to buy stuff when it makes us feel smart.
I reckon this is why we find George Bush so mystifying.
Via Dragos.
Applied Abstractions 