What's up with blogging, and why should you care?

By Dan Farber,Tech Update
February 22, 2004

What's all the fuss about blogging? It looks and smells mostly like writing, self-expression conveyed in a chronological format that invites comments and the inclusion of a variety of media types and links, similar to a Web page or e-newsletter. In fact, blogs (weB LOG) provide a way for non-programmers or HTML jockeys to present their writings, ramblings, diaries, rants, marketing spiel, political advocacy, research or whatever online communication with simple, yet increasingly powerful tools.

Are blog tools and the art of blogging revolutionary? No, but they are clearly superior to antecedent tools for online expression. e a way for non-programmers or HTML jockeys to present their writings, ramblings, diaries, rants, marketing spiel, political advocacy, research or whatever online communication with simple, yet increasingly powerful tools.

Are blog tools and the art of blogging revolutionary? No, but they are clearly superior to antecedent tools for online expression. Radio Userland, TypePad, Moveable Type and Blogger, among others, continue to innovate with new features and presentation capabilities.

Many blogging advocates believe that blogs are the most significant democratizing force since the rise of the Internet itself. Who needs the New York Times if you have access to a mass of literate, informed bloggers. Combine blogs with social networks and presence services (such as instant messaging and global positioning), and you have a new person-to-person, information-sharing connection fabric.

Veteran blogger Glenn Reynolds, describes blogging as "universal publishing."

"Modern technology -- especially the combination of easy Web publishing, cheap Web hosting, and rapidly spreading access to broadband Internet -- means that a single individual can compete with Big Media organizations on a surprisingly equal footing, if he or she picks the area carefully," Reynolds wrote. "While there will be lots of attention given to warblogs and blogs focusing on national politics between now and the Presidential election in the fall, I think that over the long term it's blogs focused on other areas that have the most potential for growth, and for affecting the world on a day to day basis."

If individual blogs compete with established media outlets, so much the better. But, it's less about competition, and more about harnessing the content of blogs as a complement to established media and communications outlets. In fact, the more forward thinking media companies and corporations are integrating internal as well as external blogs into their mix as a way to leverage the immediacy and depth of the blogging world.

Steve Outing of the Poynter Institute says that blogging will bring media Web sites more personal, less institutional voices. "Strong new voices will emerge from the blogging world--they already are. Some will be coerced to take jobs with mainstream media companies; the 'blogosphere' is a great recruiting ground for journalistic talent." says that blogging will bring media Web sites more personal, less institutional voices. "Strong new voices will emerge from the blogging world--they already are. Some will be coerced to take jobs with mainstream media companies; the 'blogosphere' is a great recruiting ground for journalistic talent."

Blogging concepts are also finding their way into enterprise-class, collaborative applications. SilkRoad Technology's Silkblogs combines content management and security features with blog templates for applications such as real-time crisis management. For example, if a company had a fire or security problem, rather than e-mails flying back and forth, all the relevant information could be posted and accessible via a Silkblogs information space. It takes good advantage of the simplicity and journaling framework of blogs as a part of a communications portal.

In the "classic" sense, however, blogging is more personality than application driven. Outing cites personality as the most important attribute of a blogs, followed by insight, humor, serendipity, a narrow focus and great writing. He suggests that local newspapers, for example, could improve their online city guides by cranking up "the trendiness meter" with more edgy, raw, opinionated blogger talk.

Edgy and subjective are in opposition to the more staid, objective leanings of traditional journalism or the needs of corporate communications. It's a culture clash that will require some compromises on both ends of the spectrum.

"If a media conglomerate hires a blogger, then it needs to adjust its culture to accommodate that style of journalism," Outing says. "I think that can be done. Look at Dan Gillmor's tech blog for the SJ Mercury/SiliconValley.com. He gets very opinionated on politics, even though it's a tech feature. However, the tendency for media companies is to have all their journalists adhere to high standards of objectivity, which is antithetical to blogging. I suspect the two will find a way to meet in the middle when it comes to conglomerate-funded blogging."

Similarly, some corporations are supporting the practice of blogging among employees to provide an outlet for creativity, opinion, dialog, as well as propaganda. Microsoft's most well known blogger, Robert Scoble, is a technical evangelist for Longhorn, the next version of Windows. His popular blog is not vetted by Microsoft's guardians of the faith, but he admits to consulting occasionally with public relations to make sure he isn't leaking non-disclosure information.

Importantly, the millions of voices in the blog wilderness are becoming more accessible via RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds, RSS aggregators> and RSS search engines like Feedster and Technorati. With RSS feeds and trackers, a company can keep track of what the influential, blog-enabled world is saying about its product and services or about a competitor.

Technorati, which is in beta, provides a pulse of the blogging universe by listing links into pages, and ranks pages by freshness and authority. RSS aggregators and search engines offer trackers, or watchlists, which are custom queries updated on a regular basis.

The combination of blogs, RSS and intelligent searching--and future generations of those technologies and concepts-may not be the 21st century equivalent of the Gutenburg printing press, but they will play an increasing important role in forming the opinions that lead to decisions big and small across personal and professional spheres.

You can write to me at dan.farber@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check the archives.

Presentacion de la idea de negocio para Clasibienes2004

2004Clasibienes_Ideadenegocio.ppt

16 de febrero de 2004

"Tecnología ya no importa"

El analista económico Nicholas Carr opina que la omnipresencia del poder de cómputo hace que ya no ofrezca una ventaja competitiva a las compañías.


Nadie pensaría en Nicholas Carr como el 'enemigo público' número uno del mundo de la tecnología. Este editor de revistas y escritor independiente de 44 años, de modales suaves, trabajó durante cinco años en Harvard Business Review, que no es precisamente un semillero de tiradores de piedra. Pero ahora está siendo estigmatizado como un hereje y una amenaza para los fundamentos de la economía.

¿Su ofensa? Escribir un artículo de 12 páginas sobre las inversiones del mundo corporativo en tecnologías de la información (IT). Pero el título le da una idea de por qué esta nota subió la presión sanguínea de los ejecutivos de empresas de computadores de Armonk (Nueva York), Silicon Valley (California) y Redmond (Washington): "Las IT no importan".

¿No importan? Hay consultores de tecnología que han sido vetados de los campos de golf por menos de eso. Desde 1979, cuando Dan Bricklin y Bob Frankston inventaron la hoja de cálculo -y cambiaron la forma en que trabaja la gente en las oficinas-, la sabiduría de los negocios ha dicho que nada importa más que las IT.

Desde que los PC llegaron a cada escritorio, Internet conectó todo y un ejército de dispositivos móviles hizo que cada porción de información estuviera disponible en cualquier momento, no parecía haber razón para cuestionar la teoría de que un dólar gastado en tecnología se traducirá en ganancias poco después.

Pero Carr no está de acuerdo. Él opina que la omnipresencia del poder de cómputo hace que no tenga importancia y ya no ofrezca una ventaja competitiva a las empresas.

Él escribió que las grandes innovaciones se terminaron. Dice que tecnologías que antes parecían únicas se han convertido en productos de consumo masivo y se pueden comprar al por mayor como clips para papel. Y en una afirmación que dejó pasmada a una industria basada en adopciones pioneras y actualizaciones constantes, Carr aconsejó a las compañías que gasten menos. "Sigan, no lideren", les advirtió.

Cuando el artículo de Carr apareció hace unos meses, generó un gran rechazo. Peter Godfrey, director tecnológico de 3M, dijo que es "totalmente absurdo. Tan lejos de la verdad que produce risa".

"Tonterías", gritó Steve Ballmer, presidente de Microsoft. Pero los ejecutivos de la industria saben que no es ese artículo lo que debería preocuparles. Las quejas de Carr son apenas una señal de que una idea peligrosa está avanzando en lo que se refiere a tecnología. Los siguientes son algunos síntomas desalentadores:

Las inversiones están en picada. La crisis económica ha golpeado los presupuestos en todas partes, y los compradores de tecnología se las están arreglando con menos. Después de la caída de las punto com, hay una actitud de "no nos engañarán de nuevo", según Gary Beach, editor de la revista CIO.

Un reporte de la firma Forrester Research dice que esa tendencia sombría en el gasto no mejorará durante el 2004. Y la pregunta que aterra a las empresas de tecnología la hizo Bill Joy, uno de los fundadores de Sun Microsystems, en el pasado Foro Económico Mundial: "¿Y si la gente ya compró la mayoría de las cosas que quiere tener?".

Problemas en la tierra de los PC. Las compañías tienen menos incentivos que los usuarios comunes para comprar un nuevo PC. Ray Ozzie, presidente de Groove Networks, explica que en el mundo corporativo la idea es tratar de que la gente no instale o cambie nada en sus computadores.

Por el contrario, en los hogares, esos mismos usuarios pueden buscar nuevas aplicaciones para sus PC, como instalar cámaras y dispositivos de música. Y los fabricantes están tratando de vender dispositivos electrónicos más rentables, como televisores, cámaras y reproductores de música.

El lado oscuro de la tecnología. Nadie niega los beneficios de la tecnología, pero la gente aprendió que hay una parte negativa. Un reporte de Forrester Research dice que la seguridad y la recuperación ante un desastre son las principales preocupaciones de los departamentos de sistemas. Son labores costosas que no aportan nada a la productividad.

De hecho, nuestra dependencia de computadores propensos a los virus hace que uno se pregunte qué sucedería si se produjera un colapso en Internet. Y el correo basura está haciendo que se cuestione el valor del correo electrónico.

Pero eso no es todo. Nos han enseñado a amar el incremento en productividad que viene con la tecnología. Pero esta también ha permitido que las empresas eliminen trabajos o los contraten por fuera. Edward Tenner, autor del libro Why Things Bite Back, dice que "pese a la tecnología, la gente no está trabajando menos horas por más dinero". Y agrega: "Para mí, la productividad no significa un aumento en la felicidad".

Una teoría ridícula

Pero hay otra forma de ver las cosas. Cada oleada de innovación -el procesador, el auge del PC, el 'boom' de Internet- se construyó sobre la oleada anterior. Y en cada avance, la tecnología ha llegado a más gente y de manera más profunda. Por ello, es un poco ridículo decir que las grandes innovaciones están terminando. De hecho, ahora es más fácil que un acto de genialidad lo cambie todo.

Por ejemplo, la gran penetración de Internet, sumada al mayor poder de los PC y el exceso de espacio en los discos duros, abonó el terreno para que el estudiante universitario Shawn Fanning, a los 19 años de edad, conmocionara el mundo con su programa de intercambio de archivos Napster.

A su vez, la fiesta sin limitaciones que siguió contribuyó a difundir las conexiones a Internet de banda ancha, a incrementar las ventas de computadores, a impulsar el surgimiento de los reproductores de música... Y casi al colapso de la industria de la música.

Incluso, Mitch Kapor, cuya iniciativa de aplicaciones de código libre se basa en la premisa de que los costosos programas de hoy serán algún día muy baratos o gratuitos, considera absurdo imaginar que este sea el fin de las innovaciones. "¿Es tan bueno el software actual que no puede ser mejorado de forma radical?", pregunta Kapor.

Entonces, ¿cuáles son las grandes innovaciones que tienen emocionados a los gerentes de sistemas? Un ejemplo son los servicios web, que prometen acelerar el flujo de información dentro de las empresas y con sus socios y clientes; otro es la identificación por radiofrecuencia (RFID), que colocará sensores baratos en todos los productos para rastrearlos desde la fabricación hasta el cliente.

Otro desarrollo interesante está en las tecnologías de búsqueda. El éxito de Google muestra que un negocio se puede construir con base en la habilidad de localizar la información de forma instantánea. Ahora que una gran cantidad de datos está guardada en dispositivos de almacenamiento baratos, el software para extraerlos cambiará la forma en que los negocios trabajan y la manera en que aprendemos y archivamos información.

Es probable que en este momento un nerd desconocido esté creando un avance tecnológico que las empresas tendrán que aprender a usar. Y entonces sabremos que, sin duda, las IT sí importan.

STEVEN LEVY
Newsweek

Geospatial Information, Cybergeography, and Future Worlds

By M. Duane Nellis
(Feb 18, 2004)

Ed. Note: This article is part of an on-going series of updates from organizations addressing some aspect of the field of GIS. Dr. Nellis, immediate past president of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) offers comments on behalf of the AAG regarding the increasing importance of geospatial data in our every day lives.

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The U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Department of Education recently announced (at www.careervoyages.gov/whatshot.cfm), ‘what's hot’ in emerging and evolving fields. For those of us in the geography profession who use and appreciate the power of geographic information science (GIScience), it was no surprise that the three hottest occupations in the U.S. listed by these two government agencies included biotechnology, geospatial information, and nanotechnology.

I am reminded everyday of the tremendous explosion in use of geospatial information in every aspect of our lives. The invention of real-time, interactive, and mobile GPS/GIS technologies, for example, has created new real-time geographic analysis and real-time geography. Such developments have led to advances in the ways spatial information is collected, mapped, and used by an ever expanding user community. They are now at the heart of a vast array of real-time interactive mobile computing, geolocation applications and asset management, along with wireless geographic services that are revolutionizing the role of geography and geospatial information analysis in meeting the needs of everyday society. It is no wonder that geospatial information is seen as an emerging and evolving field.

Geospatial information is also at the heart of what many millennials, this new generation of young people, are demanding and which guide our changing values and expectations. Many millennials are involved in virtual worlds - digitally created worlds that are the focus of numerous videos and video computer games that are linked via the internet with others from throughout the world. Even geographies of these places are written and discussed, and surely such ‘new geographies’ are bound to have an impact on our sense of place and space. Using real world environments geographers are creating virtual reality landscapes to model and assist decision-makers in addressing the dynamics of change and potential alternative management decisions on our landscape.

In fact, what has happened in recent years is the fascinating evolution of the digital revolution and the internet through the creation of new spaces. A new sub-discipline of geography that focuses on the study of virtual spaces of the digital world, or cybergeography, is exploding on numerous fronts. Cybergeography encompasses a wide range of geographical phenomena, from studies of physical infrastructure, traffic flows, and the demographics of cyberspace communities, to the perception and visualization of these new digital spaces. Such understanding will be instrumental as we study our current world as well as future worlds. People like Martin Dodge, at the University College London, and Aharon Kellerman at the University of Haifa, are a couple of people doing innovative and important work in this area (see www.cybergeography.org, as one example that links you to this exciting new world of geospatial information). Kellerman has explored important internet geo-questions like understanding the relationship between centers of information production and leading areas of consumption.

Within my own interests linking remote sensing, GIScience, and rural geography, there are new sensors, new applications, new challenges in data integration, and new outreach opportunities that have substantially improved the types of questions, analysis, and modeling procedures one can develop for addressing rural systems issues. In my collaborative work with Tim Warner, Jim McGraw, and Rick Landenberger, for example, we have been able to link Lidar data here at West Virginia University with detailed terrain data using GIScience approaches to more fully understand the dynamics of change in a forest ecosystem at a level of spatial resolution that has allowed us to ask new questions.

Yet some geographers have dismissed the opportunities afforded by Geographic Information Science. They worry about too much focus on techniques and technologies versus the spatial sciences dimension. In my opinion, those who dismiss such new and emerging approaches to solving spatial questions are missing opportunities to ask new questions and understand the new geographies that are emerging through GIScience as well as cybergeography.

As we look to future geographies we must take advantage of pervasive computing to further the spatial sciences and analytical approaches associated with geospatial information. At the same time we need to play an active role in information management at all levels and related spatially related policy issues. And finally, we need to foster greater inter-disciplinary research and applications that keeps geospatial information and its value at the forefront as an emerging and evolving field.


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