In a Guardian article dated Saturday July 8 2006, Pico Iyer talks about how Google and other search engines have distorted the literary interview. He describes how interviewers prepare themselves by researching their subjects online and how search results tend to artificially highlight and emphasize interesting, but effectively trivial information about the interviewee.

I was recently pondering the characteristics of so-called “cult fiction” and was trying to remember how it was that I learned about certain cult authors back before this thing called the Internet existed. How did I learn about Vonnegut, Pynchon, Roth? As I dredged through my memories I realized that I most probably ran across these authors whilst using an early analog social bookmarking system- the library checkout card.

I was relatively late in learning of the term “backchannel”. It describes a phenomena that I have been fumbling to explain to people as being *one* of several reasons for them to use instant messaging (IM) as a regular tool in the office.

The “My Rating” feature on iTunes has always felt a little clumsy. First of all, I hardly ever listen to music on iTunes itself- I listen to most of my music on my iPod. Secondly, I don’t want to have to *do* anything convoluted or extra in order to register that I like or dislike a song.

I am afraid that the Wikipedia is a classic case of what I’ve come to term “the internet trust anti-patttern”. It goes something like this: A communication/collaboration system is started by self-selecting core group of high-trust technologists (or specialists of some sort). Said system is touted as authority-less, non-hierarchical, etc. But this is not true (see 1). The general population starts using the system.

The following, from Jorge Luis Borges, reminds me of some software projects I’ve seen… “.. In that Empire, the Art of Cartography reached such Perfection that the map of one Province alone took up the whole of a City, and the map of the empire, the whole of a Province.

Abulafia Way back in 1990, when I worked at Brown University, I wrote a hypertext application for the Macintosh called “Abulafia.” (named after the computer in Umberto Eco’s book, Foucault’s Pendulum. Recently I found some old Zip disks onto which I archived my Brown work when I left the university in 1995. I asked a hardware magpie friend of mine if he had a way of reading old 100MB Zip cartridges and he did.

In Part I, I described two graphs that I think help explain much IT dysfunction.

Inspired by reading about other people’s blogging weaknesses, I’ve decided to finally get this one off the back burner and post it. I’m pretty sure that this isn’t original, but I started thinking about this way back in 1996 (pre-social-bookmarking) and I’ve lost my pointer to whatever influenced it. Anybody who can set me straight- I’d appreciate it. So here goes.

The other day I was talking to a former colleague and I was trying to explain how I have gradually switched to using an assortment of social content tools as my primary mechanism for finding relevant and authoritative information on the web. With these tools, I can subscribe to an assortment of RSS feeds produced by people who I trust and think of as authorities in their respective subjects.