Information is what you want; data is what you get.
The Internet contains a vast amount of data, but often, very little information. There is a special shortage of nontechnical (or even semi-technical) data on Internet related subjects. Here are a few sources of information (as opposed to data) that we've found useful:
The New York Times. The Times has the best technology section we've found. It's not too technical (and it's definately not "dumbed down" in any sense), and the stories are accurate. The technology writers for most newspapers are woefully ignorant and generally limit themselves to repeating press releases or quoting each other. The folks at the Times actually seem to know what's what. Note -- the Times requires that you register. It's free, and we have not gotten any junk e-mail that we can trace to the Times.
| Be sure to check out their section "Voices from the Hellmouth" on their feedback on the Columbine tragedy. You won't get this view in the mainstream media, I guarantee. |
Slashdot. This may be in the category of "if you need it, you already know about it". "News for nerds." Or anybody wanting to watch what's going on in the Open Source/Linux world. It's pretty raw by mainstream standards, but watching history as it really happens is never pretty.
Here's an interesting article on Slashdot and how its model of news gathering bypasses some of the biases of the more conventional media.
Note that I find Slashdot useful for the pointers to other articles. The First Monday article above raves about the comments on the articles by other Slashdot readers; I find the drivel coefficient even higher here than in the friendly average Usenet newsgroup.
As the battle for advertising revenue heats up, and the stockholders of those high-flying Internet startups start making noises about this odd thing called "profit", most search engines are selling enough banner ads to make themselves almost totally useless. Lately, we've found ourselves using only three:
It still has bugs; don't bother searching for a phrase containing a number or a phrase with a lot of commoin words. A search for "I am that I am" produces nothing useful after Google eliminates the "common words". If you have a query like that, it's back to AltaVista.
There ain't none.
| Look up the magazine reviews of Microsoft "Bob", for example. This is one program that Microsoft would really like to forget about. The reviews were rather favorable. |
Magazines are paid for by advertising, and it shows. I don't remember ever seeing an article about some piece of hardware or software from a major manufacturer that said "This is a piece or garbage. Don't waste your money." Yeah, I've seen bad reviews -- of stuff from small outfits that nobody's ever head of. But a bad review of a product from Microsoft? Or Compaq? Don't be silly!
In addition, most writers for the magazines do not seem to have either technical or journalistic backgrounds. On the technical side, this means that they can't tell when they're being flimflammed by somebody's PR department. On the journalistic side, this means that they don't know about "primary sources" or ethics.
A couple of years ago there was a particularly bad example of this. One of the big glossies ran a review of a piece of software and rated it "excellent". Neither the author nor the editors saw anything amiss in the fact that the reviewer was one of the programmers who had written the software ....
The action is on the Web. The Web runs on "Internet time". You can watch it as it happens. Paper magazines have a publishing lead time of anywhere up to four months. This means that they are up to four months out of date the minute they hit the newsstand.
Copyright © 1999, Agincourt Computing.
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