Clay Shirky on information overload, etc.

The Columbia Journalism Review recently conducted an interview with Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications program and author of the book Here Comes Everybody.  The interview is “part of the online supplement to the November/December print issue of the Columbia Journalism Review,” whose cover story is entitled Overload!: Journalism’s battle for relevance...

Clay Shirky, twitter, and The Ultimate Question

Author and social media expert Clay Shirky was on NPR recently discussing his latest book and other social/internet technologies, and while talking about changes in marketing approaches driven by new internet tools, happened to mention an idea that an author had recently put forward regarding customer satisfaction data.  Shirky couldn’t remember the author’s name, but he summarized his basic thesis as...

Scientific journals exploring “open access” model

Every so often I read another article or blog post about how scientific journals are about to embrace open access publishing, making research more easily available to researchers and others who can’t afford the thousand dollar plus subscription fees to top science journals, or aren’t employed by a university that can. (Newspapers are also apparently discovering the advantages of providing more and...

“Wasting time” vs. “I just need a break”

In an article called “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus,” author Clay Shirky, a consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies, comments on what he considers to be the “critical technology” of the 20th century: the sitcom. He describes a recent conversation he had with a television producer in which he happened to mention the Wikipedia entry for Pluto,...

Businesses Unhappy With Google for Making Their Customers Happy

A recent NY Times article reports on a number of companies who are unhappy with a new search feature being offered by Google. This new feature, called search within search or search within a site, is similar to the Site Search feature that’s been a part of Google for a while. Site Search allows Google users to search for terms on one particular website (e.g., nytimes.com) rather than across the entire...