As a result of last night’s 5033 seminar, I’m still contemplating Bill Inman’s vision of the Corporate Information Factory and the Government Information Factory (and, especially, the potential ramifications of “The Single Version of The Truth” concept popularized in data warehousing literature.) Interestingly, it now has immense implications for me in the context of broader societal interests in the corporate (and governmental) information life cycle, mostly because someone asked about the “value” axis as I had adapted it from Inman’s original information life cycle curves. Whose values, indeed! Thanks, Dennis, for the query, and for suffering death by Powerpoint on this a second time!
. . . that Homeland Security will be setting up a National Applications Office to administer the use of spy satellite data from all over the U.S for a variety of purposes. I can hardly wait to see Mark Monmonier’s take on this one. Meanwhile, it kinds of makes you want to go and spell out “Civil Liberties” in a crop circle, doesn’t it?
Of course we worry a lot about the “digital divide,” but that’s really not much of a gap compared to the distance between even the poorest students here and these students in Guinea, who feel privileged to live within walking distance of an airport or gas station where they can study at night.
I always like to live near streetlights, but I never realized before why I felt it was important, simply taking our infrastructure for granted. Now I think I know why it matters.
For some reason, this, this, and this immediately made me think of this.
I feel better already.
Very interesting preliminary findings from Search Engine Land on possible differences in how Westerners and Chinese view (and value) presentation of Internet search results. If, in fact, the Chinese prefer “hot and noisy” in their Internet search engines (which is suggested as one of the reasons as to why they choose Baidu over Google), does the same hold true for relevance in their OPACs and other library applications? And, if so, how is it possible that this research isn’t being done and published in journals like JASIST, I wonder?
What America apparently needs now is:
Financial information magnate and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg as a presidential candidate, and
Billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch as the arbiter of editorial for the Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, danah Boyd seems to have hit a national nerve with her observations on “hegemonic teens” and “subaltern teens” and their choice of social networking sites.
Information warfare in a variety of theaters?
