i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

I know we’ll spend a lot of time talking about privacy next spring in INFO 205, but over the course of this semester I’ve been reminded several times of this piece from NPR’s On The Media: http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/12/18/06. Aired about a year ago, it does a nice job of addressing the personal implications of a world where the line between information organization and retrieval is continually blurring.

StatSheet recently launched a network of websites devoted to individual college basketball teams. All the content and articles on these individual sites are apparently written by software not humans. The founder of StatSheet, Robbie Allen, refers to these sites as "Robot Army" and this type of writing activity as "robo journalism."

It is interesting how different cultures classify incomprehensible concepts. In almost every language there is an expression that is used when a concept is not well understood. For example, English speakers say: "This is Greek to me". While in Spanish, when something is not understood, they say "esto me suena a chino" (this sounds Chinese to me). Furthermore, Germans tend to say that it sounds Spanish to them; "Das kommt mir Spanisch vor".

I recently wrote (with Karen Nomorosa, Ischool 2010 grad) a  paper called "Substituting Information for Interaction" that some of you have talked to me about so I thought I'd share it with everyone.  (The paper has some relevance to the "tradeoffs" we've talked about a lot in 202 but is more relevant to the other course I teach this semester on "Information Systems and Service Design.")  The big idea in the paper is to reframe a lot of design decisions in information systems and services as tradeoffs between interacting with a user/customer to obtain needed information or us

Anyone ever had experience organizing information into the synthesized format of a wikipedia article?

Do you know read-it-later applications? If you don’t, you have to try it. With it, “One reading list, everywhere you are” (from Read it Later). Read It Later and Instapaper are the most used applications. They

There are many reasons to use them.

The real and the digital worlds are converging, bringing much greater efficiency and lots of new opportunities, says Ludwig Siegele. But is it what people want?