SatireWire
STUDY FINDS YOU REALLY DON'T MAKE A DIFFERENCE"In an unprecedented study, British and American researchers have concluded that despite what you've been told at work, you really don't make a difference, and are not remotely integral to your company's success.
"In our research, we found that you've been encouraged to believe that your hard work and contributions are substantial, and that you are a significant member of the team. But what we discovered is that in your particular case, there's no way," said Neil Romsby of the London School of Economics." 9:45 PM
The New York Times
Hype and Anti-Hype[requires 'free' registration]
"The Gartner Group consultants have developed a useful concept to describe the hype around new technologies, which they call the "hype cycle." As a new technology — like the Internet — is triggered, the hype curve soars upward until it reaches a peak of inflated expectations. Then it sinks almost straight down into a trough of disillusionment, as the less successful players drop out. And finally it climbs steadily upward again to a new stable plateau, as clear winners emerge and the new technology is absorbed, integrated and made profitable by people and industries that understand it."
12:17 AM
"The wireless Web has arrived, making it possible to get vast quantities of Internet content over the tiniest portable devices, but most consumers do not seem too impressed, an international survey released Thursday showed.
For all the hype over the cutting-edge technology that provides "any time, anywhere" connections to the Internet, the survey found that adoption rates have been slow, even among the most wired people."
"Less than 1 percent of those surveyed were shopping online with their wireless devices, one of the biggest expected uses for the Web-enabled gadgets."
redux [06.17.00]
"Anyone planning to make a fortune in mobile e-commerce — the new-millennium version of last year's dot-com frenzy — should think twice about where to invest their money, according to a hype-busting report from Ovum Inc., a Boston-based consulting firm."
"The report discounts consumer interest in new mobile wireless services, warning wireless-wannabes to focus on business users and "genuinely unique" consumer services. Dennis Brown, co-author of the Ovum report, said that even business users "won't pay a premium for existing (wireless) services, which are easier and cheaper to access using their phone or PC . . . if suppliers are to survive and prosper in the long term, their early offerings will have to be very targeted and very compelling.""
"Stop and ask yourself: "Just because we're developing the capability of purchasing via mobile systems, does that really mean people are going to develop a sudden and inexplicable Pavlovian desire to buy all the time?" Do we really expect the world to be gripped by the same fever that drives the Home Shopping Network? My bank account just happens to be a few orders of magnitude smaller than Bill Gates', so I actually don't want to spend money all the time."
"M-commerce -- no, make that successful m-commerce -- will not be about purchases. M-commerce will be about providing information which facilitates a purchase. Don't think commerce, think communication. There's a Grand Canyon-sized gap between those two ideas. It's the difference between offering a gadget for sale via handheld and giving access to information about that gadget -- the reviews, who's put it on their Christmas list, etc. -- and the ability to make a note to one's self: "Check this out, I might want it.""
Feed
Gift for the Gab""INTELLIGENT AGENTS," that venerable CompSci concept, has long been something of an oxymoron. We've had a decade's worth of promises that an army of self-contained electronic processes would soon be scouring the network on our behalf, ferreting out information and finding the lowest price for everything from CDs to airline tickets. The reality, of course, is that agents have never yet found any practical application. Dr. Lee Giles and Dr. Kam-Chuen Jim, researchers at NEC, may have found the secret to transforming experimental agents into practical tools: talking helps."
redux [08.27.00]10:12 PM
"For a leading researcher at one of the United States' top universities, Pattie Maes is surprisingly uninterested in the technological underpinnings of her own work. That's not to say that her basic research in artificial intelligence (AI) isn't impressive. The 38-year-old associate professor at the Massachusetts engineered major breakthroughs in software agents, programs that are changing the face of Internet shopping and are on the verge of turning retailing on its head. But to Dr. Maes (pronounced "Mahs"), it's not the technology but its effect that is important. She is the prototype of the New Economy scholar/entrepreneur: a scientist in academia committed to seeing her ideas become commercial successes."
""I realized that computers could augment people," Dr. Maes says. "That's what all of my research is really about. Our lives are so busy and there are so many choices to make, so many opportunities to keep track of, and so much accessible information; we end up feeling overwhelmed. If we could make computers smarter and better serve people, we'd be on to something. I think of this as intelligence augmentation - IA rather than AI."The New York Times In Online Auctions of the Future, It'll Be Bot vs. Bot vs. Bot
[requires 'free' registration]
"THEY are called shopbots, buybots, pricebots or just plain bots -- the "bot" is short for robot. The name is playful, but the reality is all business because shopbots are meant to roam the Web all by themselves one day, efficiently buying and selling goods and services for people and companies."
"Right now, bots that simply go out and fetch price lists from the Web do not make intelligent decisions about matching a buyer's needs with a combination of offerings.
"That will change," Mr. Bryan said.
"And businesses need to be prepared.""
First Monday Intelligent Agents, Markets and Competition: Consumers' Interests and Functionality of Destination Sites
"Intelligent agents are first and foremost tools which can be applied in numerous and different ways. However, Intelligent agents, in the true sense of attributed functions such as autonomy and pro-activity, do not yet exist. There are agent-like applications like Web crawlers and search engines which sometimes include collaborative filtering; in spite of these advances a software entity that combines all of these functions into an intelligent agent has yet to be developed. Still, it is only a matter of time when intelligent agents will play a decisive role in the electronic marketplace and therefore in competition. This paper explores the boundaries of what might happen in markets when intelligent agents are introduced and used by market participants. It discusses existing commercial agent-like applications and treats models on how different functions of agents could affect different market stages. Two types of markets - travel and bookselling - are examined, focusing on consumers' interests and the functionality of destination sites."
"The vision of such intelligent agents is quite compelling and many people now believe they will be necessary if we are ever to tame the increasing complexities caused by the accelerating and virtually uncontrolled growth of the World Wide Web."
"The most basic need in interacting with an agent is a language in which to communicate. While it is possible to 'fake' these semantics (with the program reacting appropriately to keywords, for example), an agent that is truly useful must have a lot of knowledge about the problem being solved. If the travel agent doesn't know about geography (Where is the Caribbean?), transportation (What airlines go there?), lodging (Is that a good hotel?), economics (Can I afford to stay there?), etc. then we cannot easily communicate our needs. If the internet agent doesn't understand the area in which it must work (molecular biology, particle physics, etc.), it is not able to find appropriate resources any better than current keyword based approaches."
[note: this is an archived html version residing on the umbc agentweb server. the original zipped, postscript document can be found at BT Laboratories' Intelligent Systems Research (ISR) Group's publications page ]
"This paper sets out, ambitiously, to present a brief reappraisal of software agents research. Evidently, software agent technology has promised much. However some five years after the word ?agent? came into vogue in the popular computing press, it is perhaps time the efforts in this fledgling area are thoroughly evaluated with a view to refocusing future efforts. We do not pretend to have done this in this paper - but we hope we have sown the first seeds towards a thorough first 5-year report of the software agents area. The paper contains some strong views not necessarily widely accepted by the agent community."
BusinessWeek
AOL Time Warner: Newsstand or Publisher?"From the Web's beginning, in 1995, a debate has simmered over the ethics of online journalism. Most established media have maintained as clear a distinction online as they do in print between news and commerce. Pure dot-coms, by contrast -- and so-called portals, in particular -- have been willing, even eager, to pair editorial and sales in ways that aren't entirely transparent to readers.
"AOL's purchase of Time Warner and its Time Inc. publishing unit -- a prominent ASME member -- has, overnight, transformed the world's largest and most profitable dot-com company into the world's largest and most prestigious magazine publisher as well. It has thus moved the debate over the Web's journalistic ethics from the realm of the theoretical to the intensely practical. The issue is: Whose standards should prevail -- those of AOL Time Warner the publisher or those of AOL Time Warner the newsstand aggregator? "
redux [04.11.00]10:48 PM
"America Online's president sees home entertainment and communications as a collection of boxes. The TV set is the ''tell-me-a-story box.'' The personal computer - ''the manage-your-life box.'' The CD player? ''The give-me-a-mood box.''
The roles for those machines may be quickly evolving and the lines between them blurring. But Bob Pittman still sees plenty of room in American life for the newspaper out in the mailbox."
"In remarks that were part pep talk, part cautionary tale, he said practitioners of the written page can thrive in the new communications age if they are aggressive about getting their content online and don't defy a consumer-driven Internet culture that wants more and more at little or no cost."
redux [03.21.00]
"The choice of Sacks as primary attraction of a journalism seminar -- he's senior vice president and general manager of America Online -- was controversial enough to make one editor of Online Journalism stay home in protest. Yet it was strangely invigorating to hear this smug megacorporation executive lecture on his own importance, and how all journalists will play by AOL/Time-Warner's rules from now on, because, as Sacks said, "We're the biggest guys. We're big, and we're bad."
""If our goal was to publish bad magazines, by the way, we could have done that without a $120 billion merger." Before Sacks finished, he had happily proclaimed, "We do no original news," and described the new world of reporting as "an integrated consumer experience." Gives you an idea about how AOL might cover a famine."
“AOL has been ethically challenged throughout its existence,” wrote Mercury News technology columnist Dan Gillmor... “I hate to see Time Warner, which has had its own ethical troubles but generally shows high journalistic standards, fall into such hands."
"“[W]hen the biggest online company controls the biggest traditional media company, you'd be wise to turn to other sources for reliable information on, for example, e-commerce and its biggest players,” wrote Gillmor."
Online Journalism Review
Racing Past the Truth"Misinformation magnifies over time. This is a law of journalism.
For an example of how the law works, visit the sixth floor of the old Texas Book Depository building in Dallas. It's a tourist shrine now. You can gaze over Dealey Plaza, imagining a Lincoln Continental cruising past, presidential occupants waving. And when you do, just about every Kennedy conspiracy theory will vanish from your mind.
The road is so damn close and the view from the sixth floor so clear that Oswald could've hit President Kennedy with a baseball, if he'd had a half-decent arm. But a few reported misunderstandings about ballistics gave rise to the second gunman theory, which snowballed into a notion of Cuban/Mafia intrigue, which ultimately led us to a terrible Oliver Stone movie. Misinformation not only magnifies, it coarsens.
This week we may be seeing the beginnings of another misinformation explosion, again arising from a death in the South: Dale Earnhardt's, in Florida on Sunday during the Daytona 500." 9:08 PM
The Third Culture
The Globalization Debate"Though the notion that we live in an era of unprecedented globalization is becoming increasingly evident, that change is more often than not attributed exclusively to the convergence of technology with the financial markets. But too often in these discussions, the larger point is missed: that we have a historic opportunity. As Anthony Giddens, director of the London School of Economics, writes, "we have the chance to take over where the 20th century failed, and a key project for us is to drag the history of the 21st century away from that of the 20th."
According to Giddens, "the driving force of the new globalization is the communications revolution," and beyond its effects on the individual, this revolution is fundamentally altering the way public institutions interact."
redux [02.14.00]9:34 PM
""Knowledge and information are the common property of humanity as a whole: they cannot be transformed into merchandise" – this was one of the many slogans of the WSF, and one which, like the rest, was little examined for its practicality and its financial sustainability.
But it expressed an ideal: that corporations should not be allowed to monopolise the creation or ownership of the data on which public life depend. It was, for the first time, a drawing of the battle lines of the information age."
redux [10.10.00]
"When the Moscow television tower burst into flames at the end of August, the fire blacked out 10 million TV screens and made news all over the world. And so did President Vladimir Putin's sinister comment: The fire at the Ostankino tower is a metaphor for the state of the nation.
Metaphors, symbols and sayings are mighty mind-setters. They captivate our minds and focus our attention to one main point, effectively excluding others. Putin used the burning of the Ostankino television tower, once hailed as a symbol of Soviet supremacy, as a metaphor for the desperate economic need of Russia. The global media played along with this tune, once again showcasing images of Russia's decay. But there is another largely untold story to be extracted from Putin's metaphor: TV towers are more than symbols — indeed they are very concrete centers of mind control, distributing the flow of information and entertainment. "
"Who chose the crumbling Berlin Wall as the icon and metaphor for the breakdown of communism and the end of the Cold War? Wouldn't a TV tower in flames be more accurate? It wasn't about the free flow of capital. It was about the free flow of information."redux [03.24.00]
"Information science operates with a binary logic of reflection which results in multiple paths, but these paths are always circumscribed by laws of combination (Deleuze, & Guattari, 1987). In this manner the fragmented space and time of information flows is reordered and directed toward specific objectives. But the objectives of information processing within the capitalist dynamic are not end points-- they are aimed at an accumulation of knowledge that is always an impetus for further accumulation, for multiplying the flow, opening out into every horizon. But this flow is at the same time stored up in a central memory which traces the exact paths of this flow, connecting geographic spaces and matching up the temporal locations of dispersed market centers. This central memory system functions through command trees, centered systems and hierarchical structures that attempt to fix possible pathways of the network and thus to limit the possible variations immanent in the network. The definitions of information formulated within information science and information economics derive from and serve this modeling of the system. As we have seen, information defined as nonsemantic discrete bits flowing across space and then directed and stored substantiates information as the object of control. Thus, the enemy of the information scientists and economists is heterogeneity, disorganization, noise, chaos. They want an uninterrupted flow, but at the same time a destruction of the unnecessary. This encloses or territorializes information; it becomes a part of capitalism’s mapping of space and time. But what we have found is that information’s function is precisely to disorganize, interrupt, to remain itself and at the same time to disperse. Information may, in fact, be a keyword connecting the phenomenon we have examined, but not as an element, nor as a content, but as a heterogeneous remapping of space and time. If the information society is to be our society, let it be disorganized."
"A profound shift of geopolitical power lies ahead, one that will dominate the century to come--and it has hardly been noticed, let alone analyzed. This massive change will trigger turbulence around the globe, with a high potential for violence. To prevent or mitigate such effects, we need to understand the framework of geopolitical power as it takes shape in the 21st century. Think of it as a master conflict of supercivilizations.
A civilization is an entire, all-encompassing way of life; a supercivilization might be described as a way of life that is shared widely across cultures, languages, religions, ethnic groups, and states. And while many civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history, there have, so far, been only two supercivilizations.
Today a new supercivilization is pushing, elbowing, swaggering --some would say bullying--its way onto the world stage, threatening both the agrarian and industrial supercivilizations.
This third supercivilization will soon give billions of people the power to communicate with one another, whether to buy and sell goods, create art, organize political protests, invent new religions and ideologies, engage in terrorism, learn how to make biological or chemical weapons, or create or alter life-forms.
How should the fast-emerging knowledge-based supercivilization of tomorrow interface with the lifeways of yesterday? How might we minimize the conflicts that face us? This question, still largely unasked, will find its way onto the screen of every world leader--indeed, every alert human being--in the decades to come. The answer will determine just how much turbulence and bloodshed the world experiences in the century ahead as we make the transition from a bisected to a trisected geopolitical system on the planet."
“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"
Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.
...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”
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