Everyone Comes Around At Their Own Pace

When you introduce a new idea or concept to someone, don't automatically expect them to share your enthusiasm. Everyone needs time to adjust to new ideas. If you're reading this you probably are someone who "comes around" to new tech ideas fairly quickly. On the other hand, most folks need time for things to really sink in. In fact, it is a common response for people to be defensive about their old way of doing things. When a person is heavily invested in something, change is difficult (and often expensive). If you doubt this concept applies to you...give it a little while to sink in. You'll come around.

Flickaday

I don't really want a picture a day of me, but if "I" were a plant or a termite or a garden...the tools could really be neat...

http://www.flickaday.com/

Random snippets from the day (2 from AA's twittering)

Interesting movie about learning in the future..."Shift Happens"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbI-363A2Q

'Nuther social networking site -- ning.com

How many social relationships can a person maintain?
Dunbar's Number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

Source code search tool http://www.krugle.com

MDM -- Master Data Management -- new buzzword. Rich Kochhar's advice "Don't start with the technology as the centerpiece of the solution. Start with the corporate strategy."

Funny...back to that question..."What is the strategic goal of the University?"

Newsfeeds

I was recently discussing with a colleague that RSS feeds and newsreaders weren't really anything new, since Usenet has been doing that since 1979. Why should I really care about RSS? The difference I was told, is that Usenet is now gone but RSS is still here. I'm not really sure which viewpoint was more obsurd.

Usenet news is as popular now as it ever has been. My organization abandoned our feed because we were unable to keep up with the volume. We kind of let it slip into oblivion without a second thought. When you are researching a technical problem and don't find the answer you need on google.com what do you do next? You click "google groups" of course, since there's as much up to date technical information (if not more) available there as archived on the web. Did you know that Google Groups searches a Usenet News archive? If you'd like to download audio books or other likely copyrighted works while "flying under the radar" where do you turn? Still Usenet News. Sites like "www.easynews.com" have nice interfaces to let you read or download news, since you've probably forgotten or never heard of the now ancient "nn" news reader and it's many counterparts. The interfaces may have changed, but Usenet News lives on.

That brings us to RSS feeds. 'Blogs, forums, and discussion boards all tend to have RSS built into their websites. RSS gives us a mechanism similar to Usenet News (syndication) for obtaining information. What's new is that this technology exists over the top of web pages. In other words, it is basically a way to subscribe to only the updated pages on web sites which cover topics of your interest. That's almost perfect, since it means you can use a newsreader (like Google Reader) to get new content without having to visit a list of websites. What's just as important is that the same content is also accessible from a web browser for those slow adopters not inclined to use a newsreader.

I say "that's almost perfect" because there's very little reason (ok, no reason at all) to keep an RSS feed on topic. This is my 'blog and even though I've posted relatively few times, the topics are all over the map. Eventually the tagging systems and filtering mechanisms will evolve to maximize the signal to noise ratio in RSS. Until then, I'm not terribly impressed with RSS, but will continue to use it just as my colleagues continue to use "Google Groups."

Incidentally, it seems quite simple to feed Usenet News to a website and syndicate it via RSS. Is that not being done? Seems like a great project for www.archive.org or google.