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Wednesday, July 9, 2003
B'dinner tonight 
| | We're talking about a blogger's dinner (open to anybody interested) tonight. If you're here and want to join us, look for Britt, Mitch and/or myself in the lobby of the Marriott by the waterfront here in Portland around 6:30pm. |
| | [Later...] We seem to have all gone down to Salon F, where there's a BOF (bird of a feather session) on Open Source in the Enterprise. Should end at 8. Then we'll eat. Unless some of us leave first. It's not like we're organized or anything. |
| | Now I've been told "we're going to The Patio." This is a restaurant? Or a feature of the Marriott? I dunno. |
Open Scores
| | DIY-IT: How Open Source is turning IT into a Do-It-Yourself marketplace. (11:30am) |
| | The old market map for software ran from vendors to customers. Now it also goes the other way around — thanks to Open Source. Doc Searls, senior editor of Linux JournaL and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, shares recent discoveries the mainstream press doesn't want to talk about: Namely, how Linux and Open Source seem to be what happened when the demand side started supplying itself. |
Governance and beyond
| | In another context, dig what Tom is up to here and here. |
But nearly 100% watch television
| | A third of the American public believes U.S. forces have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a recent poll. Twenty-two percent said Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons. |
| | But such weapons have not been found in Iraq and were not used. |
| | Before the war, half of those polled in a survey said Iraqis were among the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. But most of the Sept. 11 terrorists were Saudis; none was an Iraqi... |
| | "It's a striking finding," said Steve Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which asked the weapons questions during a May 14-18 poll of 1,256 respondents. |
| | He added: "Given the intensive news coverage and high levels of public attention, this level of misinformation suggests some Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance." |
| | That is, of having their beliefs conflict with the facts. Kull noted that the mistaken belief that weapons had been found "is substantially greater among those who favored the war." |
| | Pollsters and political analysts offer several reasons for the gaps between facts and beliefs: the public's short attention span on foreign news, fragmentary or conflicting media reports that lacked depth or skepticism, and Bush administration efforts to sell a war by oversimplifying the threat... |
| | Several analysts said they were troubled by the lack of knowledge about the Sept. 11 hijackers, shown in the January survey conducted for Knight Ridder newspapers. Only 17 percent correctly said that none of the hijackers was Iraqi. |
| | Draw your own conclusions. |
Other hands
| | Some of my best nonblogging friends were surprised by my trashing of Matt Richtel's The Lure of Data: Is It Addictive? in the Sunday New York Times. Excellent replies, methinks. Here's how one says I got it wrong: |
| | It is not that by being wired we are somehow missing what's available via the other (big) media outlets, but that there is a danger of losing ourselves in the constant stream of new and everchanging information that is now available. Not because curiosity is evil (or the pursuit of knowledge is trivial). But because it is way too easy for some of us to get distracted from the important by the interesting or the urgent... |
| | The meta-message isn't that information sucks. It is that distraction is easy when that which is distracting you appears quite as, if not more, interesting, than what you would otherwise be focused on accomplishing in that moment. And those moments, for the perpetually wired, don't end. |
| | I didn't see the article as a "threat" to the Net, or a call for it's dismantlement. I saw it as holding up a mirror to those who may be using it to avoid doing what needs to be done, and I saw my reflection in that mirror. |
| | If anything, I get that Richtel is actually respectful of data(regardless of quantity) but concerned by the diminishing returns evidenced to researchers by people trying to handle too much of it allat once by excessive multitasking: |
| | "ACCORDING to research compiled by David E. Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, multitaskers actually hinder their productivity by trying to accomplish two things at once. Mr. Meyer has found that people who switch back and forth between two tasks, like exchanging e-mail and writing a report, may spend 50 percent more time on those tasks than if they work on them separately, completing one before starting the other." |
| | And, although he doesn't explicitly make the distinction, I personally find it interesting that he refers to "The Lure of Data" rather than, say, "The Lure of Information." I suspect that he realizes and distinguishes, whether analytically or intuitively, that "information" is the net result of effective processing of "data," and that the rush of collecting increasing amounts of data (I'm reminded of the little robot, Number Five, in the movie "Short Circuit" imploring, "more input... need more input...!!") may ironically decrease the real information one obtains from an onslaught of data, like trying to fill a bucket with a fire hose. |
| | It's interesting to me that Richtel interviewed someone as technically savvy and pro-gadget as Walt Mossberg, who explained a decision not to provide wireless Internet access inside a recent WSJ conference featuring Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Steve Case: |
| | "We wanted people to absorb what the speakers were saying," said Walt Mossberg, a technology columnist at The Journal. |
| | "We decided that if you have Wi-Fi, it would be destructive," he added. |
| | "If you have the Internet, it will win out. People imagine they can multitask, but sometimes people overestimate the extent to which they can do it." |
| | Can Unca Walt be losing it? I think not. |
| | You also seem to have ignored the equally authoritative (although arguably not entirely objective) quotes further on in the article from present and past execs at Intel and Cisco dismissing any criticism (or even suspicion) of excessive multitasking as nonsense. For a piece that's exploring a strong central premise of data addiction, I think that's fairly balanced reporting. |
| | I'd like to reply, but I've got a conference to cover. Thanks to wi-fi, you'll be reading about it. |
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