To Talk of Many Things

Knowledge Management, Meta Data, and the Organization. Quote: “My last piece on this subject tried to cover the whole topic of knowledge management in a single page. We'll call that the overview, or the introduction, but it's time to explain a few things in a little more detail.”

Comment: Seth Dillingham follows up on Knowledge Management.  Since he's the major author of a KM-related product, he knows of what he speaks. [Serious Instructional Technology]

Methods to Design Information Architecture. The goal of this project is to develop methods for designing information architecture of content heavy interfaces… [xBlog: Visual thinking linking | XPLANE]

How Linux saved Amazon millions - Tech News - CNET.com. Quote: “Online retailer Amazon.com shaved millions of dollars from its technology costs last quarter by switching to the Linux operating system, a disclosure that could provide some guidance for other companies seeking to cut expenses in a stagnant economy” [Serious Instructional Technology]

An empirical comparison of the usability for novice and expert searchers of a textual and a graphic interface to an art-resource database. Quote: “Differences between novices and experts approached significance . . . “

Comment: The article is interesting, but I believe that any statistician would tell you that such a statement is bunk.  Something is either significant or it is not - that's the whole nature of significance tests. [Serious Instructional Technology]

Linking Poor Performance to Working After School. Quote: “The Third International Mathematics and Science Survey, where low exam scores of American students stir such great concern, found that 55 percent of American 12th graders work three hours or more on a normal school day. The proportion for other nations is 18 percent, on average. To improve achievement, we have either got to cut back on after-school employment or transform adolescent jobs so they contribute more to learning”

Comment: This has always surprised me about the U.S..  When I was in school, I didn't have time to work. [Serious Instructional Technology]

News Industry Text Format. News Industry Text Format (NITF) is a XML language for news articles. The body of the article is a free-format using HTML-like tags for markup. NITF's main contribution is a format for article metadata. [More Like This WebLog]

Adam Curry is on to something.   George Gilder claimed that bandwidth would become the least expensive computing resource through a doubling rate of 12 months (mostly focused on advances in Fiber optics) as compared with Moore's 18 month doubling rate.  Everything would be centralized George said.  Java would rule.  Sun would emerge dominant with its “network as the computer” mantra.

Wrong on two counts:

1) Last mile bandwidth growth has been halted in its tracks by recalcitrant telephone monopolies.

2) Magnetic storage now doubles every nine months (it shifted to this rate in 1998).  Also, there is reason to believe the Moore's law has shifted to a 12 month doubling rate, down from its previous 18 month pace.

What this means is that the PC and not centralized services will win.  A smart bet:  desktop Websites and Webapps that provide a contextual environment for rich content delivery.

Note:  Why a desktop Website instead of a rich client?  Simplicity.  Ease of editing.  Low costs. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Internet World: Deconstructing Cisco.com. Louis Rosenfeld. There really is no way for someone like me to complete a purchase using the Cisco.com Web site and no explanation as to why this was the case. But there were lots of special cases and distinctions to confuse me. [Tomalak's Realm]

Fortune: Techies vs. Telcos. There's no question something is wrong. The phone and cable companies are gatekeepers of Internet service now because they own the pipes coming into most of our businesses and homes. But they've done a poor job of turning those pipes into pipelines. [Tomalak's Realm]

Doc Searls notes that MORE, a fourteen-year-old program (roughly) runs quite a bit faster on today's hardware. That of course is a demo of Moore's Law, our friend, as is the other big law that drives all computer and software development (it also begins with a M.)

MORE has one of the more flexible product names. It's not an acronym, although you would be forgiven for guessing that it is. It was chosen because we didn't know which of a myriad of features we threw into the product in 1986 would gain traction. It's a grab-bag for sure. It turned out to be slide shows. It also was quite popular in France where its name is a homonym of the word for death, mort. And it of course is also a homonym for the law that makes it run so fast in 2001. # [Scripting News]