Occam's Razor

Mapping technologies

Interesting mapping technologies can be found here . Smart waysto map complex data-sets into geographic representations illustrated in the following two examples:

• future global polution in 2300:

By 2300 the United Nations forecasts that the global population will be just under 9 billion. World population is expected to rise, peak and then decline slightly between 2050 and 2300. The highest long term population growth is predicted for Africa. Africa is currently underpopulated and has the lowest life expectancies. Other regions' populations are predicted to stay level or decline. Between 2050 and 2300 the areas currently known as India, China, the United States and Pakistan maintain their ranked order as having the world's highest populations. The numbers shown here are estimates - based on predicted future behaviours.

• current royalites and licence fee export :

Only 18 (out of 200) territories are net exporters of license fees and royalties. This means that a few people living in less than a tenth of the territories in the world between them receive the US$30 billion of net export earnings for these services.

The International Monetary Fund explained that royalties and license fees include "international payments and receipts for the authorised use of intangible, non-produced, non-financial assets and proprietary rights ... and with the use, through licensing agreements, of produced originals or prototypes ...". Thus these export earnings are payments for past ideas.

[Source B Giussani]

Media Disruption

Interesting panel discussion IT conversation podcast from Supernova 2005 with Dan Gillmor, Jeremy Allaire, Suranga Chandratillake, Lawrence Gelburd on "Reinventing Media" with good point of view from Blinks and Brightcoves

More and more people are turning to the internet as a place to find, share, and create media of all kinds. From the origins of the world wide web in text and graphics, more and more audio and video content is making its way to the web from both large-scale producers and individuals, legitimately or illegitimately.  This growing platform for the distribution of media is forcing changes within our use of media and the producers ability to control over their creations.

The section on how in a world of infinite choice, value is shifting to those that offer search and aggreation services to allow people to locate and structure relevant content is perticularely relvant in a long-tail world, and resonates with some recent posting from David Hornik on business opportunities created by such a wealth of content...

Meme echo chamber ?

Judging by the noise yesterday on memeorandum, everybody was talking about the Alexa API opening.  Jeff Nolan and Brad Fled have two interesting posts on this new echo chamber effect where one (important but not unique) subject get's ALL the attention (ie more noise and less information).

This brings up another issue that blogs need to come to grips with, how to bring order and differentiation to the "room full of noise".

ALEXA (MAKE THAT AMAZON) LOOKS TO CHANGE THE GAME  —  (This will be updated when the service goes live, I was briefed and the embargo was 9 pm PST...)  —  Every so often an idea comes along that has the potential to change the game.  When it does, you find yourself saying - "Sheesh, of course that was going to happen.

Link Search: Google, Bloglines, Technorati, and IceRocket

Discussion: Social Patterns, ZDNet.com, Om Malik on Broadband, Lorcan Dempsey's weblog, Due Diligence, Web 2.0 Explorer, Rough Type, michael parekh on IT, Good Morning Silicon Valley, Search Engine Lowdown, Google Blogoscoped, pc4media, A VC, The Stalwart, The Glass is Too Big, Conversion Rater, Ho John Lee's Weblog, Things That, Between the Lines, Guardian Unlimited, Marketing Pilgrim, Incremental Blogger, TechBeat, business2blog, Boing Boing, PaidContent.org, Paul Kedrosky's …, RatcliffeBlog, Smalltalk Tidbits …, Toni Schneider's Blog, Mashable*, Susan Mernit's Blog, The Voice of Online …, Lost Remote TV Blog and PodTech Comments …

I'm also wondering what this will mean for the deep-web search players, and how this  opening  of the open-web index capability might help some of the european players (Exalead, Fast, Autonomy etc...).

Findability

I was not searching for it, but just stubble on  findability.org and found what i was looking for...

How do you find your way in an age of information overload? How can you filter streams of complex information to pull out only what you want? What does it mean to be "findable" in this day and age?

(you can pre-order the book here)