Monday, April 01, 2002

Google - Useful for Phone Numbers Okay, I'm sure everyone knows this and I'm just really behind the curve.  I just found out that if you want to lookup a phone number with Google you just type in the person's name and the two letter state abbreviation (e.g.  "Ernest Svenson LA") and it will pull up their name and phone number.  Amazing!!!!  It doesn't work for more common names, but when you're looking for Swedes in Louisiana it works fine.  [Read more Google Features] 8:18:09 PM

A Simple Story - The Monkees in the Cage This is a simple story that I believe has made its rounds in Internet email.  It contains a profound truth.  It's about researchers who studied monkees.  They put five monkees in a cage and hung a bunch of bananas from the ceiling, which would be too high for the monkees except there was a chair in the cage.  Naturally, the monkees quickly figured out that they could position the chair under the cage and get to the bananas. But when they did. The "researchers" hosed down the monkees with a high pressure hose.  And not just the monkees that were trying to reach the bananas, but all of the monkees in the cage.  After the monkees had been conditioned not to go for the bananas, they replaced one of the monkees with a new monkee.  When he would try to get to the bananas the other "veterans" of the hose-down would beat him until he gave up.  At intervals the researchers would replace a monkee.  Eventually, all of the monkees were replaced and none of the replacement monkees would try for the bananas, even though none of them had been hosed down. The profound truth of this story is obvious, and I think it is equally obvious that the story is more than just a story about monkees. 7:54:12 PM

Instant Messaging - The New New Thing My earlier post on Instant Messaging brought this comment, which is from a good friend of mine, and I'm sure represents a normal state of affairs these days- "Over the last two years IM has become the preferred means of communication for kids (jr. high schoolers, that is). My 7th grader gets on the computer and begins communicating with his "group" as soon as he gets in from school. He's certainly no computer geek but this continues late into the night. It's a very large and diverse group, both male and female. Their lingo is quite fascinating. If he's got a question he finds the answer at the computer. As far as he's concerned, the home telephone and study groups at the library have become obsolete... " I wonder if we adults really understand the IM phenomenon?  The Yahoo article that I read gave an example of an Asian girl whose parents strictly controlled her social life (screening phone calls from boys etc).  The girl used IM and was able to have a social life that was fairly normal (perhaps even more normal than we might imagine if the above comments reflect the norm--which I'm sure they do).  The thing that keeps surfacing about IM is the fact that it creates "presence" and a sense of immediate contact that other web applications (i.e. E-mail) do not have.  I underlined one part of her comment that suggests that  IM is used by kids for useful things like "online study groups."   It is the "useful" part of IM that intrigues me (I think that we adults tend to think that it is frivolous...which is of course what people thought about the telephone when it was first deployed).  So how will IM be useful? I have used IM in a limited way at work, but I can see how it allows for a different form of communication.  It is a hard thing to grasp, which Steven Vore recognizes in this interesting post.  He suggests that IM is helpful in his work where people that he has to collaborate with are in different offices in different cities.  The need to share ideas in real time among groups is the strength of IM.  [Link]  No doubt synchronous collabortive tools are going to have increasing importance, and this is not just because of the fear of travel in the wake of 9/11.  Finding new ways to work together for certain projects (where the cost, in money and time, of travel) is increasingly necessary.  To me the IM phenomenon is something worth thinking about.... 6:39:27 PM

© Copyright 2002 Ernest Svenson.