I wish you a wonderful holiday season, and a superb new year! This last is certainly a
good idea, given how poorly 2009 had started as far as business is concerned; fortunately things are
clearly getting better in the last few months, a fact felt by most everyone I talk to, as well as by
myself.
Here we’re getting ready to take off on a family vacation in Europe, and I’m looking
forward to getting back and starting 2010 with new product offerings, new customers, and new
learning. I wish you and yours a similar start after your own holiday rest!
Cheers,
In this issue News:A new Social Networks lecture launches successfully. Reflection: Denying IO. From the Toolbox:
RSS Readers. What's New A new Social Networks lecture launches successfully
Social Networks are all the rage, and of course tie in
nicely with my long held belief that a key use of the Internet should be to connect people across
distance and culture barriers. So I went ahead and developed a new lecture that explains the
phenomenon of Online Social Networks, introduces the major ones, and shows an audience how they
might personally engage in this exuberant medium and apply it to their hobbies, leisure, family and
friend interactions, and plain fun.
Tested this lecture on a group of older people from
traditional industry – not your typical Internet whizzes – and they were fascinated. That validation
done, I’m adding it to my
repertoire
of public speaking.
Observations, reflections and opinions Why we DO care about Information Overload Tom Davenport, the author of “The
Attention Economy”, recently published a
post on the HBR blog titled “Why We Don't Care About Information Overload”. The basic idea is
that nobody is doing anything about information overload because people are OK with it, so nothing
will change and we might as well forget about it.
Of course many people are doing
something about IO, but that aside, I never cease to be amazed by the level of denial evident around
the subject. Various pundits try to prove that this universal problem is rooted deep in the past
(some push this back to Gutenberg), is here to stay (true, which is why we need to mitigate it), is
part of the natural order in the new millennium, and – the leap I disagree with – can therefore be
ignored.
To me this is like the
attempts
by those Greek philosophers to prove that Achilles will never overtake the tortoise, or that an arrow
will never reach its target. You can argue all you want, but the tortoise will still eat Achilles’s
dust. Likewise, Information Overload is a very real problem causing immense suffering to knowledge
workers worldwide. Mr. Davenport can argue all he wants, but for the victims, the problem is real
and solving it is highly desirable. Fortunately, like in Greece, there are those of us who address
the reality and do what we can to help... From the toolbox
RSS Readers RSS feed readers are one of the most useful innovations of recent
years, and should definitely be used by anyone reading blogs and online media. If you aren’t doing
it already, consider the convenience of getting all the latest posts from the blogs you follow in
one place, ready to scan at a glance and read those that catch your interest. This goes beyond
saving time: reading blogs any other way is so laborious that you could probably track a dozen at
most; with a feed reader you can keep an eye on ten times that many with ease (and some of my
nerdier friends tell me they follow hundreds). And if you use email subscriptions to follow
information sources, using RSS instead will help reduce your Inbox clutter while having better
access to that information.
There are many RSS readers out there, many of them free (of
course). Personally I use
Google Reader, because of the convenience of being able to access my feeds from any device – my
notebook, my Nokia smartphone, and any available computer when I travel.
Snapshots of Ingenuity Remember
Fantastic Voyage? Submarines in the bloodstream may never happen, but we do have the PillCam. Made by Given Imaging, this device
miraculously crams a Video camera, Light source, Radio transmitter and Battery into a capsule one
can swallow. This tiny TV station then transmits diagnostic images of one's intestinal tract
as it goes through! The only thing missing is Raquel Welch...
The Monthly Factoid Back in the sixties, a car might have had a radio or an
8-track stereo player. Today, it contains dozens of computer processors... and the total cost of the
software and electronics accounts for up to 40% of the cost of a car.
do have the PillCam. Made by Given Imaging, this device
miraculously crams a Video camera, Light source, Radio transmitter and Battery into a capsule one
can swallow. This tiny TV station then transmits diagnostic images of one's intestinal tract
as it goes through! The only thing missing is Raquel Welch...
