May 2008

Take responsibility for your information stream

Yesterday I inxtalled CentOS on once of my laptops alongside WinXP. No big deal, it was a simple procedure, I just overlaid my old Fedora installation with it. But, as it was going on, I realized that I could no longer call to mind exactly how I would get myself out of any one of a hundred jams I could get myself into should something go wrong. Me, an avid techhound! What the heck happened to me? I work in the tech sector and have for years, I read all the blogs and do my best to stay current with trends and new technologies. So, I began looking at what I read on a daily basis. I looked through the RSS feeds and the folks I follow on Twitter … and that’s where I stopped. I’m reading so much, I don’t have time to DO anymore!

So, what do I cut out? Well, that’s another problem. I’m reading product reviews written by people who don’t really USE the product they’re reviewing. They give it a quick once-over and call it a review and seem to be in such a big hurry to get the review out that they don’t do anything useful with it nor give give me any real useful information about it (you know who you are). And I’m reading more from people who produce the technological equivalent of celebrity gossip. You know what I mean — they go to lunch with the technological glitterati and get email from insiders about upcoming “big things” and then dribble it out over the course of a day (and you know who you are). Does that help me in any way? No, not really, it just serves to distract me from the technological heart of things.

What did I conclude from this? It comes in two parts. I wish they were profound but they’re not. They’re not even new … far from it! Ready? Here they are:

1) I need to be take more responsibility for what I read. I must weed out the useful from the not-useful. Lots of things catch my interest but will it help me?

2) The industry is generally directed by the loudest mouths, not necessarily the most knowledgeable.

That’s all. Rant over.

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Scooped again!

TechCrunch has just announced that WashingtonPost.com will be carrying their stories. That’s great news for TechCrunch. Like a lot of newspapers, our own local newsrag, The San Jose Mercury News, is struggling. Why didn’t they think of it? Or, for that matter, why didn’t the (sometimes more tech savvy) San Francisco Chronicle? It’s sad when the local newspapers of Silly-con Valley don’t know enough to make use of local resources and talent. I hear lots of companies make noise about “eating their own dogfood”. Rather than whine about loss of advertising revenue, downsize staff and shave paper and ink costs, wouldn’t it make sense to take advantage of what’s going on in your own locality? Grrrrrr …

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