Weblogs Connect People.

An http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/computing/personaltech/20031013-9999_mz1b13blog.html">interesting piece on weblogs fostering community:

"Blogs were originally solitary endeavors, free digital soapboxes for anyone to rant or publicly wallow in angst or sorrow."

"Now, they're connecting people. For a decade, Net observers have talked and written about how electronic communications could foster meaningful social connections, or virtual communities. Blogs seem to be fulfilling that role."

[Library Stuff]
3:59:48 PM    

Information Pollution.

The BBC has this article on dealing with "Information Pollution", an extreme form of information overload.

"The entire ideology of information technology for the last 50 years has been that more information is better, that mass producing information is better," he says."

"But the net is now so much an machine with all the answers instantly, it has mutated into a "procrastination apparatus", which spews information without much prioritisation Dr Nielsen argues."

The article mostly deals with e-mail, and e-mail is a deterrent to keeping current, one issue that I will probably start addressing more on LS. One comment: Dealing with e-mail is more than just getting a spam filter.

[Library Stuff]
9:34:13 AM    

Google Stumbles?. BizReport.com Oct 12 2003 6:09AM ET [Moreover - Online search engines news]
8:06:19 AM    

Publishers Grudgingly Cooperate With Amazon Database Effort. Ender spotted This Publishers Weekly Piece on Publishers are keeping a wary eye on Amazon.com's new initiative: digitizing nonfiction titles to create an online database that can be searched by keywords. The plan, first reported about in the New York Times in July, is seen as a way to draw more traffic to the Amazon site as it competes with search engines such as Google and Yahoo. [LISNews.com]
8:05:05 AM