Archive for the ‘Meta’ Category

Adventures in Social Networking

Saturday, April 24th, 2010

Unlike Moliere’s middle class gentleman, who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, I’ve only been networking online since 1993 without knowing it. I was a regular in the salad days of Compuserve forums, then a regular in other groups, a frequent blog commenter, and in due course started a blog of my own, Rocketpunk Manifesto.

When I started hearing about ’social networking,’ I had only a vague notion what it meant, and what I knew of it seemed fairly irrelevant. You don’t really care what music I listen to, the same old MOR I was listening to when rockosaurs roamed the earth.

My wake up call came last June, when my blog readership abruptly jumped from a couple of hundred monthly unique visitors to a thousand. Google Analytics told me why: The guy who runs a respected space and science fiction site linked a blog post of mine on his site’s Twitter feed and Facebook presence.

In the cattle rancher’s language of marketing, Twitter and Facebook were driving readers to my site.

This tipped me off to the power of social media, but at the time gave me no reason to follow suit. The Atomic Rockets Twitter feed was bringing me more attention than any feed I could put up, since only people reading my blog would know or care about it.

Anyway, my first job was to keep the content coming, so the people ‘driven’ to my site would come back on their own. That went double for TecTrends Monitor, only launched last summer and in need of a proper archive of content.

Now both blogs have matured to the point where adding more channels to reach potential readers seems like a productive idea. And I will duly be exploring Twitter and Facebook to see how to make best use of them.

Yes, this is going boldly where millions have gone before. But I’ll provide some travelogue along the way, on the chance it will be helpful to any of you who, like me, wonder how to get the most use out of this technology.

Posted in Meta, Social Media | 58 Comments »

Tech Geeks Lending a Hand in Haiti

Monday, January 18th, 2010

An article by Bob Pool in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times brings one small bit of positive news about Haiti. Groups of volunteer ‘techies and geo-geeks’ from San Diego to London are building quick, simple mapping tools that can be used from cellphones, to help rescue and recovery workers make their way around Port au-Prince.

This is the flip side, so to speak, of all those news stories about 100,000 apps in the Apple App Store. Most of them are no doubt pretty frivolous, and those of us involved in the tech industry in whatever way must sometimes feel as if we are in the toy business. And not infrequently we are.

So, from more then one perspective, it is good to see how this technology and the people who create it can make a real difference in one corner of the world.

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Posted in Meta, Mobile Internet | 2 Comments »

TecTrends Reporter on Innovation: Everything Old is New Again

Monday, December 7th, 2009

The latest search technology innovation? Human intelligence. Last month I noted this article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a growing trend: Human filtering to improve information quality. The theme comes up again in an article that just crossed my desk, ‘Bing or Bust,’ by Benjamin Johnson in November’s Computers in Libraries.

Bing, says Johnson, has rediscovered categories. But his real point is not Bing versus Google. It is the continuing – and growing – relevance of traditional library skills such as classification and cataloging in cutting through the clutter to make sense of information. This is why at Information Sources a trained librarian assigns subject headings and maintains our proprietary thesaurus of metadata.

Now, on to November’s TecTrends Reporter on Innovations in Science and Technology. It covers the waterfront, as they used to say, summarizing 57 articles across the gamut of technologies. A few highlights:

  • Much to Apple’s dismay, technically sophisticated Mac fans are making ‘Hackintosh’ computers by adapting cheap netbooks to run the Mac operating system. Apple may not be happy, reports Fast Company, but firms such as the major social sites have profited by letting their customers take the lead and following where they go.
  • If you are like me, you take steel for granted as a mature, even ‘old’ technology. But I was wrong, says Industry Week. Innovations in materials science, from advanced steels to carbon fibers, have made lightweight vehicles 163 pounds lighter in just the last two years. It’s not your father’s Oldsmobile anymore, or even his steel.
  • Quantum computing has weird properties, rooted in fundamental physics, that allow quantum computers to crack a code in minutes that would take a powerful conventional computer 50 million years. (!) And, reports Baseline, they are already being tested in the laboratory, with basic models to be offered for sale in the next year.
  • Invisible ink has a long history, but according to The Economist there could be a big future for the opposite – ink that fades out after a set period of time. Potential applications would include transportation tickets, but no word on whether you can jot notes on your expired, and faded, bus transfer.
  • Carbon nanotubes could bring back spring-powered devices, according to EE World. Nanotube springs may be competitive with batteries, storing 1000 times more power for their weight than steel springs like the one in a traditional wind-up clock.

You could Google “innovations in technology” and take your chances with the first few pages of 250,000 hits. Or you can let TecTrends Reporters be your wilderness guide. At Information Sources, we read the tech press because you don’t have time.

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Posted in Meta | 3 Comments »

We Resemble That Remark!

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

We review hundreds of articles every month for TecTrends, and occasionally one strikes close to home. That happened with a recent piece by James Temple for the online San Francisco Chronicle, ‘Personalization moves into the screening spotlight.’

Search is not enough. For all the improvements in the algorithms used by Google and other search engines, robots still have their limits. Savvy online researchers, reports Temple, are finding out that they still need good old fashioned human intelligence to separate the gold from the dross online.

This is no news to us. At Information Sources we have two decades of experience in guiding our customers through the tech industry wilderness to the information they are seeking. We filter out the press releases and speculation, and identify the articles that will tell you where the action is.

TecTrends Reporters summarize this content and – just as important – give you complete cross reference keywords for industry verticals, companies, and products.

These keywords and phrases also go into a proprietary heirarchical thesaurus. As of this year the TecTrends thesaurus provides a relationship taxonomy stocked with over 52,000 individual records.

So we were pleased to come across Mr. Temple’s little nugget of information gold. If you are getting lost in the information wilderness, let us be your guide.

We read the tech press because you don’t have time.

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Posted in Meta, Search | 3 Comments »

TecTrends and Meta-Trends

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Why are corporate execs nervous about social networking, but adopting it for their firms anyway? What is small interfering RNA, and why has it sent Big Pharma scooping up startups in a costly hunt for a ‘magic bullet?’ If you are in the global tech industry, or interested in technology, these are things you’d like to know – and may be things you need to know. But finding out about them isn’t always easy.

When it comes to the tech industry, Google can be a hall of mirrors. A few big stories break through into the mass media for a day or two, but blink and you’ve missed them. Some stories fascinate the media – Twitter comes to mind – but you won’t find out what is going on behind the scenes. Most of the real tech news is covered in the trade and tech press, and covered in greater depth, but keeping track of it all is hard.

To make it easier, we at TecTrends / Information Sources follow more than 175 magazines and journals, from Business Week and Scientific American to specialist publications such as Internet Retailer and Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology. We go through them and pick out the most important and interesting articles to highlight and summarize, so you won’t have to. (TecTrends Reporter provides in-depth coverage for professionals, at a pretty modest charge.)

Now we are launching a new service, TecTrends Monitor. In reading the tech press I see patterns, trends that run through multiple articles and publications. When half a dozen articles on the same topic show up on my desk, that’s a story in its own right. Is it just a fad? Maybe. Or maybe it’s a tipoff to the Next Big Thing. My goal, as the Official TecTrends Blogger, is to give you a running view of these trends as I see them – what the trade press is talking about, and why.

Like the tech press, blogs are a fast moving target, and this one will evolve as it goes along. That is part of the beauty of blogging (as I have found out with my personal blog). Another beauty of blogging is comments, and your comments and observations are invited here. I hope that TecTrends Monitor will foster an online community of people interested in technology and the tech industry, and become a gathering place for ongoing discussion.

Although this blog is supported by TecTrends, like any blog it is something of a personal adventure. All opinions here are my own (or those of other bloggers and commenters), and do not represent the views of Information Sources and TecTrends.

And with that, welcome to TecTrends Monitor. Watch this space!

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Posted in Meta | 2 Comments »