The latest version of Did You Know? has been released, titled Did you know? 4.0, this time created by The Economist Magazine for their annual Media Convergence Forum in partnership with the original creators of Did you know?/Shift happens. Read more about the process on The Fischbowl and enjoy the video.
Archive for the 'Information' category
Web Squared
John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly, founders of the Web 2.0 Conference, have coined a new term (and released a white paper) on what they believe is the next evolution of the internet – Web Squared (Web²).
The Web is no longer a collection of static pages of HTML that describe something in the world. Increasingly, the Web is the world – everything and everyone in the world casts an “information shadow,” an aura of data which, when captured and processed intelligently, offers extraordinary opportunity and mind bending implications. Web Squared is our way of exploring this phenomenon and giving it a name.
According to Battelle and O’Reilly, Web 2.0 + World = Web².
Information Overload Awareness Day
Tomorrow is Information Overload Awareness Day according to Basex, who are organizing a conference to call attention to a problem that, according to their research, costs the U.S. economy $900 billion per year in lowered productivity. While it seems strange to organize a conference to impart yet more information on Information Overload Awareness Day, they do seem to be trying to offset some of the problems…
Individual tickets for the Inaugural Event are $50 but individuals promising not to multi-task (IM, e-mail, Twitter, etc.) during the event receive a 50% discount
If you would like to learn about this issue, check out the Information Overload Research Group who provide an online Resource Center of articles.
To help do my part to lower the amount of “information pollution”, I will not be posting any information online via social networks for 24 hours, starting at midnight tonight. If you would like to join me, to try something similar, or have any ideas on how to lower information overload, plaese leave a comment.
Update August 18, 2009
Thanks to Bobbi Newman for finding the following important, educational video on the dangers of Information Overload.
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…and Wolfram Alpha is finally here
Stephen Wolfram is going live with his computational engine Wolfram Alpha this Friday, May 15, with an official launch on May 18. Tomorrow you can watch the launch live on Justin.tv but while you are waiting a screencast is available on the site.
Update May 15: Just spotted “Wolfram Alpha encounters ‘snag,’ launch could be delayed“
Wolfram Alpha update
As the release date for Wolfram Alpha draws closer, I thought it would be a good idea to update my earlier post.
Yesterday Stephen Wolfram offered a sneak preview at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Two interesting articles are also available, one by Frederic Lardinois on a demonstration given by Wolfram on April 25 and the other a response to the Berkman Center preview by Larry Dignan.
And the question everyone seem to be asking is, will this replace Google? Well…
Is Wolfram/Alpha a Google killer? Probably not. Wolfram/Alpha’s approach, however, is notable and it’s easy to picture it being used in the enterprise. Wolfram’s demonstration could be summed up as an intersection between analytics and generic Web search. Wolfram/Alpha gets you an answer instead of pointers to potential answers. “It tries to tell us useful information based on what it can compute,” said Wolfram. ”The goal is to provide expert level access to anyone at anytime.”
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