Lark Birdsong's List: Information

"In the realm of public policy, we live in an age of numbers. To hold teachers accountable, we examine their students' test scores. To improve medical care, we quantify the effectiveness of different treatments. There is much to be said for such efforts, which are often backed by cutting-edge reformers. But do wehold an outsize belief in our ability to gauge complex phenomena, measure outcomes and come up with compelling numerical evidence? A well-known quotation usually attributed to Einstein is "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." I'd amend it to a less eloquent, more prosaic statement: Unless we know how things are counted, we don't know if it's wise to count on the numbers."

"President Obama has been taking some heat in techie circles over comments he made at a commencement address over the weekend about iPods and iPads and other digital distractions. Because of these things, he said, "information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation." To his critics, it made him sound, well, like a Luddite, not the cool, tech-friendly, BlackBerry-carrying president they thought he was.\nSUBSCRIBE Click Here to subscribe to NEWSWEEK and save up to 88% >>\n\nI hate to say this, but he's right. In fact I'd expand his list of distractions to include Web sites like Facebook and Twitter. And I'd go further on the notion of emancipation and say that in many ways our digital tools serve only to enslave us. This may sound like heresy coming from a technology editor but hear me out."

"I did a study of what kind of information managers need and how quickly they need it delivered. We interviewed both senior executives (15 current or former CEOs and business unit heads) as well as managers who are charged with information delivery. We also surveyed 302 senior executives at large U.S. companies about the speed with which they get the information they need and their desires for faster information delivery.

Not surprisingly, many (but hardly all) said they wanted their information faster. But there were major variations in which specific types of information they wanted at a faster pace and under what business conditions it was essential to have more speed. And because every executive interviewed had different needs and desires for information type and frequency, there is an obvious need for greater flexibility. "

"How do we make information available more quickly? There are, of course, technical advances that can help with this problem. They include "in-memory" technology (SAP just announced some new capabilities in this regard), which means that information and systems are stored in memory, rather than on a hard drive, for quick retrieval and manipulation. Companies are also developing new forms of databases (e.g., those that store data in columns rather than rows) that allow faster data retrieval and analysis. Companies such as Intel are creating faster microprocessors in PCs and servers that have been created for the purpose of data analysis. There is also easy-to-use software that allows executives to do their own queries and analyses with a few clicks of a mouse."

This article argues for the following: 1. Information is a thing to be handled and controlled; knowledge is not. 2. Knowledge can be managed only indirectly, through the management of information. 3. Personal knowledge management (PKM) is, therefore, best regarded as a subset of personal information management (PIM) — but a very useful subset addressing important issues that otherwise might be overlooked.

"These books may be out of print – but they still have plenty of readers. "

"adding value – the business of independent information professionals"

"If you have not already spotted the links on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc to the various presentations I gave at “Online” in London earlier this month here they are all in one place. I gave two talks as part of the free seminar programme that was part of the exhibition, a conference presentation and a pre-conference workshop. They all have a Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license assigned to them (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ for further information on the license)."

"What happened with the Internet in 2010?

How many websites were added? How many emails were sent? How many Internet users were there? This post will answer all of those questions and many, many more. If it’s stats you want, you’ve come to the right place.

We used a wide variety of sources from around the Web to put this post together. You can find the full list of source references at the bottom of the post if you’re interested. We here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get you even more numbers to chew on.

Prepare for a good kind of information overload. ;)"

"While his job is to focus on big products such as Factiva in the enterprise, there are other corporate-focused products in specialized vertical sectors, including risk and compliance, PR and corporate communications, energy and commodities, and enterprise solutions, which include other offerings broadly focused on the corporate customer.

As the print and digital markets evolve, Schulman says he keeps his eye on the big picture and on multichannel delivery options. “First and foremost is the information,” he says. “We want to make sure that we are delivering the right content to users in whatever format they want.” While some people want their data as digital-only for mobile devices from iPads to Androids, others are still finding comfort in the printed page. Schulman says The Wall Street Journal is thriving in the digital space, especially via the reach of WSJ’s mobile apps. But WSJ is also thriving in print with the addition of more sections and more journalists. “We think print is going to be around [for] years to come,” he says, “and in the corporate space for us, it’s all about delivering the important content that people need, though some of it originates in print, some of it originates on the web, some of it originates in premium databases or newswires, and some of it as blogs.”

He sees increasing activity across the board in the mobile arena. For customers in sales or partners in professional services, making sure the service works well on mobile devices is the bigger issue, he says. Many publishers are now discovering that tablets are opening up new ways to reach customers along with plenty of new business opportunities. “We want to do everything we can to help them succeed to reach their customers,” he says, “and these new devices are good ways for them to expand their offerings and, hopefully, thrive in the new world.” "

"The cloud is, finally, about to change our lives—and it will all start with content.

A couple of weeks ago I dragged some of my favorite super-large hardcover books out of the attic and placed them on a shelf in my living room. I may read them again, but it's more likely they'll live out their golden years as decorative objects. Interestingly, I think most of my old VHS, CDs, and even DVDs and Blu-rays may soon be joining these books as objects d'art instead of useful content objects.

Until recently, I derided "the cloud," insisting that it's simply an airy label for "the Internet." When you store stuff or access anything from the cloud, you're simply tapping into the Internet and touching a far-flung server. Nothing lives above you in the stratus or cirrus vapors over our heads. No, it's just terrestrial miles and miles (hundreds or even thousands) away and speeding to you at the speed of an electron or, in the case of fiber, light. "

" “From an awareness standpoint, from an educational standpoint and by positioning the charity in the marketplace as one that engages and shares in an authentic way what our story is… social media allows us to do that in very effective way.”"

"Act Now! Pledge your support to eliminate the demeaning use of the R-word. Tell us what you think. "

"Columbia and others collect and archive papers that NGOs publish and distribute, but the Web-only stuff has been largely ignored: at a recent conference presentation, the Columbia librarians noted that of 40 documents published on the website of Refugees International — a group that regularly publishes papers and field reports on displaced populations in 27 countries — none had been archived by Columbia’s Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research. Only 10 were listed by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), an international library cooperative. No library in the OCLC network held more than three of those 40 documents in its collection.

At Columbia the goal is to build a search interface that allows researchers to search its print catalog and its website archive at the same time, says Wolven.

Apart from preservation and discovery, website archiving is also crucial to making sure scholars can trace the Web-based evidence cited in scholarly papers back to their original sources, says Wolven. Websites are harder to pin down than journal-bound articles: Web addresses cited in footnotes sometimes point to a website that has expired, changed, or moved. A 2004 University of Illinois study examined website citations in three top online journals and found that about half of the URLs cited in their articles no longer pointed to the authors’ source material.

Web addresses have become so unreliable that the Modern Language Association recently stopped requiring scholars to include URLs when citing websites, instructing them instead to include information that might help readers hunt down the site with search engines. It would be simpler, of course, if they could just cite a library archive where the relevant version of the website is preserved in suspended animation, Wolven says."