infoarch

There are lots of good bloggers and blogposts out there. But every now and then I run into a post that is just great. This is one of them: A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100 by Venkatesh Rao. It's a long post! So, make sure you have some time to read and process it. Why do I think this post is so interesting? Well, there's been lots of debate about what social media means for traditional business. Will it change or is it changing the way we do business? Is the traditional, hierarchical way of organizing companies sustainable? Is social media correcting the industrial revolution? Or should we say 'the industrial interruption', like 'The Cluetrain Manifesto'  says. Is this enterprise 2.0 or social business? Much has been and is being written about this topic. Just think of the books 'Wikinomics' , 'Macrowikinomics' and 'The Cluetrain Manifesto' itself. So, what is this post about. In it's own words: The Age ...

It's been 4 years now since I started this blog . 4 years! That seems like a very long time. All I can say is I really enjoyed blogging and will continue to do so in the future. I hope and plan to do more blogging. Some of them will be short (but not as short as my tweets ...). And some will be longer. I really want to share some of my deeper thinking with you and would like to hear what you think about them. I'm also looking for ways to reshare older posts. I don't want to push them at you, but my readership has grown and I'd like to hear from them what their views are on those posts. If you have any ideas on this, please let me know. I still collect bookmarks and comment on them in Diigo. I don't share them here anymore, but you can find them easily . Finally I want to thank you for reading my blog, commenting on posts and sharing them with others. Thanks a bunch, it really means a lot to me! And if you have any comments about my blog or blogging, e.g. tips to im...

Nice video by Michel Cartier titled "Are you ready for the 21st century?" (Found via Luis Suarez on his blog - thx!) Are You Ready for the 21st Century ? from Michel Cartier on Vimeo .

Not much has changed , eh? (Thanks Boing Boing for the pointer !)

Wired has a thought-provoking and interesting article by Chris Anderson, titled "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete" . This article has spurred a lot of discussion on the internet. I'm still thinking it over. But I'll put my two cents in: I wonder if Anderson's take is true for all of science. If so, everything is data and can be described by data. I know that lots of people think this is true (e.g. singularity theory). However I think reality can not only be described by data. For instance, can someones soul be described by data? And, doesn't Anderson's article itself show we always (or often?) need theory (hypothesis, believe, convictions) to say something about practice? Anyway, large parts of reality can be described by data. And for this Anderson's theory is very interesting indeed, just ponder on the examples that he gives. Some highlights from the article: About the Petabyte Age: "It forces us to view...

Interesting post about the (need for a) changing IT department/employee on ReadWriteWeb . Some highlights: A good I.T. person, though, knows how to interpret "user-speak" and present them with the tools they need even if they didn't know how to ask for them in our language. (...) The I.T. 2.0 guy will need to know not just what software is best for the company, but whether or not it should run behind the firewall, in the cloud, or a combination of both. (...) The I.T. department, though, will have to adapt their current solutions to fit this new workforce - one that's not always connected to the company network, but surfing unprotected Wi-Fi from their local coffee shop or their own home wireless network. I.T. will need to find ways to push through the security updates and patches their users need, even if they're never remoting in to the company network. I.T. also needs to be more wary of lost and stolen company laptops filled with company data. I.T. will be dea...

The University College Lond (UCL) CIBER group recently published an interesting and strange report on "information behavior of the researcher of the future" . The study was "was commissioned by the British Library and JISC to identify how the specialist researchers of the future, currently in their school or pre-school years, are likely to access and interact with digital resources in five to ten years' time. This is to help library and information services to anticipate and react to any new or emerging behaviors in the most effective way." So they focus on the " Google generation" which they define as "those born after 1993 and explore the world of a cohort of young people with little or no recollection of life before the web." The goal of the study is to find out if they "are searching for and researching content in new ways and whether this is likely to shape their future behavior as mature researchers?" And "whether or n...

This is kind of old, but interesting anyway. At the Web 2.0 Summit, on October 18, 2007 Mary Meeker (from Morgan Stanley Global Technology Team) gave their yearly presentation on ‘Technology/Internet Trends’. This presentation is packed with interesting data, analysis, etc. You can find a post on this presentation and the slide at ReadWriteWeb . Some of my highlights from the presentation: Sheet 3: 3 Decades of Tech - Now = 2 Cycles We’ve moved from Desktop > LAN > Internet > Cloud (broadband + wireless). Sheet 6: Consumer Demand for New Internet-Enabled Services/Products is Strong - Technology is evolving faster than most enterprises’ ability to deploy new products/services. Sheet 12: Web 2.0 Driving Enterprise Growth? - Next wave of corporate productivity gains should be paced by Web 2.0 driven collaboration tools that use the network as the platform to enable users to connect ‘any device to any content over any combination of networks’ (John Chamber...

Is email disappearing? Yes, says Accenture’s Chief Technology Architect . In twenty years from now, e-mail could be defunct. A combination of social networking and text messaging will replace electronic mails. Twenty years from now… What’s the use of such a prediction in the fast-paced Internet development? (And the article does not mentioned what arguments there are to contend this. I wonder if email will disappear in the near future, say in 5 years. Yes, email is morphing. Just take a look at your email practice and you will see that emailing is not the equivalent of a paper letter you sent in the past. Lots of young people mostly use messaging technology ( MSN , Google Talk, etc) to communicate. I say “mostly” because messaging doesn’t substitute emailing fully. Gmail / Google Talk show that there is just a thin line between mailing en messaging. My prediction is that this is the future: we will have one email/messaging (web)client and will easily switch between them depending on w...

Read/WriteWeb posted about an interesting video they titled the "Future of Media Video: Google Takes Over the World by 2050". As comments of that post mentioned, it also reminds me of the Epic video . But Epic had a different (more realistic?) scope: it didn't look further that 2015.