David Hazskin is arguing that mobile devices have reached the limits of their convergence. There was a time when all the talk was of a single device that could be your phone, camera, PDA, media player and even wallet. But they are big, expensive and just too complex for consumers. The techie few love them but most people want something simple, that looks good – like an ipod.
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The Christian Science Monitor has a nice overview of the the world’s most intriguing company. It tries to define Google and offers a cultural insight while discussing some of its services: Print, its advertising model, Gmail, and the rumoured Wallet. It also mentions the growing concerns about privacy. It concludes that the search giant combines a casual, fun attitude with heavy secrecy, though it doesn’t mention that the elements of its search algorithm have just been published following a patent application.
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If you can make some time to watch videos of the latest thinking from some of the world’s smartest people on a really broad range of issues, MIT World, is a fantastic resource. I came across this fascinating lecture from Hal Abelson (skip to 6m20s) who sees commercial publishing as a threat and exhorts universities to promote free and open publishing. Of which MIT World is a great example.
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Ouch. Google Scholar doesn’t get a favourable review by Peter’s Digital Reference Shelf when compared to Scopus and WoS. Well, Google’s academic search tool is free and still in beta while Elsevier’s/ ISI’s flagships are costly and well developed so that’s not unexpected. The concern is that lots of academics will already be relying on Google Scholar.
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A few people are raving about Apple head Steve Jobs’ speech to Stanford Uni students. It probably reveals why he has been such a success.
He offers some guidelines for living:
- trust your instinct
- do what you love
- and remember that, one day, you will die.
And he tells a good story.
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The unhappy coincidence of a hungry rat chewing through one cable and a workman damaging another crashed their mobile phone and internet services in New Zealand. For 5 hours. Don’t say it couldn’t happen here and make sure your business continuity plan actually works.
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The obvious success of wikipedia didn’t translate so well to the LA Times which had to withdraw its ‘wikitorial’ because of all the inappropriate content being posted. Where issues are contested, people will delete others’ opinions to impose their own but the LA Times lacks the army of editors to keep on top of it. Some people will also try to undermine a high profile brand so no wonder they tried to post porn.
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This article from D-Lib Magazine reviews the emerging technologies that individuals are using to manage their own personal digital information such as online back-up, web-hosting, sharing. It also quite rightly points to the challenges:
how to physically secure such material sometimes over decades; how to protect privacy; how to organize and extract information and to use it effectively; and for material intended to be shared, how to effectively present and control access by different groups of users.
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Much more needs to be done to attract women into the male dominated technology world. It’s rare to find a female IT manager, so many have moved up to that position from techie jobs that have always seemed to suit men, and the proportion of women employed in IT has actually gone down over the last decade. At first glance the UK govt initiative to attract girls by focusing on music, fashion and design and a pinky-purple website seems to play to the stereotype but the programme has been rolled out nationally after achieving some success in the South-East.
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How often do you use other Search Engines? Google dominates but Yahoo, having bought up Inktomi, Altavista and Alltheweb when they acquired Overture often returns better results. Teoma looks nicer. MSN launched to great fanfare earlier this year with its own database, as did Amazon’s A9 that includes images and allows some personalisation.
I’m impressed with the clustering search engines: Killerinfo has quick links to where a hit is ranked on other popular search engines. Vivisimo allows you to filter by topic.
For something different and which is sure to be the future of search, try KartOO. The site can be cluttered but it uses visualisation to display sites and links. Another good example is the highly enjoyable (but slow) Grokker that is driven by Yahoo but groups the hits into multi-coloured circles and squares you can then drill down on.
Then there are the subject specific search engines such as the science and technology Scirus and market research find.com.
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