Changing with the times

by LiebeDich.
Science blogging versus journalism:
[Via Bad Astronomy]

I recently gave a talk at the National Academy of Sciences about science blogging, social networking, and communication in general. I had a lot of fun, and the NAS has posted a podcast about the meeting with some excerpts of what I said (they have a list of older ‘casts …

[More]

This is a continuing discussion between those who see what the technology does (i.e. allow the rapid dissemination of unfiltered information) and those whose livelihood depends on doing the filtering of information (i.e. newsmedia, book and music publishers).

For the last few hundred years, information was hard to find, publish, disseminate and use, requiring the creation of experts to help filter it and properly present it. Filtering had to happen before publishing. Only the ‘best’ could be published.

Now, information is easy to find. It is cheap to publish and disseminate. Filtering happens after it is created or published. The best sites now have people who help provide better ‘post-publication’ filtering.

In the old style, the important aspects of filtering were analytical – the reporters, etc. had to take information and distill it into a simpler form, which could then be published. The costs of publishing forced this model.

Now, publishing is trivial and has little cost. The analytical approach, while still very valuable, is no longer the only mode. Synthetic approaches, where information from many different areas is brought together , where whole systems are examined at once, are now possible.

Blogs and aggregation sites are a part of this new approach. They are able to do things that no industrial age organization can do. They connect and filter the vast amount of information now available, allowing both analytical and synthetic approaches to be used in order to create knowledge.

The organizations that get this, that can see the benefit of not only analysis but synthesis of information, will be very successful. Those that do not, that do not really understand what is going on, will have to adapt or die.

Technorati Tags: Science, Social media, Web 2.0

Weird Internet today

The internet has not been it reliable self recently. I was without Internet service on Friday due to a fire in a datacenter in downtown Seattle. Of course, trying to find out what was going on WITHOUT internet service was quite a chore.

I mean first I had to check my system, since the Verison modem was all green, indicating that it was connected fine. Everything checked out fine on my end.

I tried accessing Verizon via my iPhone. That worked but there was nothing at the Verizon site to explain the service outage, not even at the page called System Service.

So, after digging out an old bill, I found a number for the DSL service. After a fun phone tree, I got a recorded message that service in my area code was out and was expected back online in a few hours.

Which it was, saving me the worry of a July 4th weekend without internet.

Then today, accessing pages using several different browsers was really slow. Some sites would load fine (such as Amazon). Others would load very slowly or timeout before they were loaded. But email worked just fine. And my newsreader (NewsNetWire) was able to get the news feeds from sites that I could not get to directly from my browser!

I figured that perhaps email, using a different protocol, might be able to access the 4 different mail servers I use for different accounts but doesn’t the newsreader was using the same HTTP protocol that the browsers do. Well I’m self-educated so I might be missing something. (I tried playing around with changing DNS servers in case Verizon’s had been hosed but this did not help).

I was able to get Goggle News and see that there were a lot of government servers under a DDOS attack so I made the leap that that might be having some effect. Call it Internet magic.

So, with no real explanation, things have returned to normal. But I hate not knowing why.

Technorati Tags: Technology