This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Information overload?
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
What has been new is information overload. Email long ago became a curse. Blogreaders only exacerbate the problem. I can't even imagine the video or audio equivalent because it will be so much harder to filter through. What will be new is people coming together to rate, to review, to discuss, to analyze, and to provide 100,000 Zagat's, models of trust for information, for goods, and for services. Who gives the best buzz cut in Flushing' We see it already in eBay. We see it in the importance of the number of deals and the ratings for people selling used books on Amazon. As I said in my blog, My mother never complains that she needs a better client for Amazon. Instead, her interest is in better community tools, better book lists, easier ways to see the book lists, more trust in the reviewers, librarian discussions since she is a librarian, and so on. This is what will be new. In fact it already is. You want to see the future. Don't look at Longhorn. Look at Slashdot. 500,000 nerds coming together everyday just to manage information overload. Look at BlogLines. What will be the big enabler' Will it be Attention.XML as Steve Gillmor and Dave Sifry hope' Or something else less formal and more organic' It doesn't matter. The currency of reputation and judgment is the answer to the tragedy of the commons and it will find a way. This is where the action will be. Learning Avalon or Swing isn't going to matter. Machine learning and inference and data mining will. For the first time since computers came along, AI is the mainstream.
There's a difference between the flood from email and the flood from syndicated content. For the most part, I have no control over how much email I get - it comes at me whether I like it or not. With RSS/Atom, I have complete control - I can cut back or increase the flood anytime I feel like it.
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