Archive for category Editorial
Reference: An Enterprise Near to Collapse ?
Posted by admin in Editorial, Library World on August 11th, 2009
The following is an excerpt from a conversation between:
Charlie Stross (CS) – Hugo Award winning author and
Paul Krugman (PK) – Nobel Prize winning economist and columnist for the New York Times
at the 2009 World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal
“…
PK: We still haven’t figured out the economics of easy information dissemination. Even though the Internet is all old hat, we still haven’t seen the economics of it play out. One of the big problems is we don’t know how do people get compensated for producing information when it can be …
CS: This is a personal preoccupation of mine, shall we say.
PK: It’s to some extent mine, although more of one of my employers. The New York Times has got enormous web presence, four million or so people read it online and yield the corporation very little in the way of revenue in the process. Whereas the dwindling number of people who want the dead tree paper are the source of … and the thing survives to some extent because people still like a piece of paper with their breakfast coffee but also to a large extent because you still can’t online get quite the visual quality of color advertisements for luxury goods that you can get in the New York Times Magazine. But you’re relying upon a very thin lag in technology to make the whole enterprise of creating and disseminating information viable. And if that starts to apply to lots of physical goods as well, we’re going to see whole sectors just implode.
CS: Oh, yeah. On the other hand, with physical goods, you’re still going to need mass and energy to assemble the frames. As for the intellectual property, I try not to get too worked up about it. There’s a lot of people angsting about piracy and copying of stuff on the Internet, publishers who are very, very worried about the whole idea of ebook piracy. I like to get a little bit of perspective on it by remembering that back before the Internet came along, we had a very special term for the people who buy a single copy of a book and then allow all their friends to read it for free. We called them librarians.
PK: Which is why … we used to work the professional journals, something I do know something about, professional journals sold about a couple of thousand copies worldwide, at an enormous price because every university library felt it had to have them and still does to some extent, but that’s an enterprise near to collapse because everybody reads the things online now.
Major Search Providers All Pursuing Semantic Search
Although this article from PCWorld magazine largely focuses on the notion that Google’s share of the US search market is so far ahead of everyone else that providing new features may hardly even matter to its dominance, the author still offers the following perspective on common interest in semantic search.
“The search wars are heating up again, as the three major search engines–Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft–are launching new features.
… While all three companies are presenting somewhat different ways to search, they are all going after the same thing: semantic search or the ability for a computer to understand what you’re looking for based on your query and not just return a list of results based on keywords. No one has done it yet, but search companies are closer than before.”
Universities can survive only with radical reform
See full essay“…we must fundamentally reinvent our institutions. We must become more agile, more responsive, less insular, and less bureaucratic. In so doing, we will save ourselves from slouching into irrelevance.
To accomplish the wholesale change that is needed for our students, our nation, and our world, universities must break out of the silo structures – of departments and budgets and mind sets – that have calcified over time.” – Gordon Gee (President of Ohio State University)
A version of this essay was given as the keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education in February.
Future Quotes
The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet. – William Gibson
Plan for the future because that’s where you are going to spend the rest of your life. – Mark Twain
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. – Alan Kay
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind. – Sir Winston Churchill
The problem with the future is that it isn’t here yet. – unknown
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. – Neils Bohr
As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Show me someone who doesn’t dream about the future and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t know where they are going. – unknown
Telling the future by looking at the past assumes that conditions remain constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror. – unknown
He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future. – George Orwell
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