i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/technology/19digg.html

Strategic Content Management - Jonathan Kahn

Taking us back to the old ways of gathering information, web search companies are now tapping the power of immediate social circles instead of social networks to suggest answers to any question we might have. With virtually endless information available to us on the internet, companies have been trying to hone in on how best to present us with information that interests us, and how to make money from it.

In this article, Intel’s Chief Technology officer Justin Rattner talks about context-aware devices that can “learn about who you are, how you live, work and play”. He suggests that future handheld devices will use a variety of sensory technology in order to collect and analyze information about their human user. For example, last Wednesday at IDF, Rattner demoed “a television remote control that figures out who is holding it based on how it is held and learns the viewer’s entertainment preferences”.

Devin Coldewey of UX Magazine recently wrote a piece entitled "Making the URL Bar Useful Again", where he proposes a new metadata tag that would create a breadcrumb trail within a browser's URL bar based on the web page you are currently on. Instead of seeing a long, indecipherable URL address, this space would present users with enhanced information on where they are within the navigation structure of the web site.

The New York Times recently wrote this piece about PeopleSmart: a web-based company that offers searchable profiles for every citizen of the United States.  

 Info 202 Blog Post 1, "Google Social Search Screws Up"
2010Sep11
Walter Koning

Google Social Search launched near the close of 2009.  Since then the features have been refined but one feature is causing grief for users.

New York Times (NYT) published a very interesting article asking the question about the potential future of the social objects. (In case you don’t know what social objects are, here is the article called “Social Objects for Beginners”.) In brief, social objects are essentially the physical objects which embody social stories or social data.

Even a legendary visionary like Vannevar Bush might have been taken aback had he visited the VMworld conference held last week.
 Three ideas that will enable the seamless flow of information, that integrate humans with the world of digital data. There are no definite boundaries anymore. Are we becoming like human  computers , or are they becoming computer humans!

While the whole world is going crazy over social networking, how can Apple be behind? Steve Jobs has taken it upon himself to make people think of Apple, as a Social networking company, on the lines of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and others. But will Apple succeed in changing people's mindsets? Only time will tell, meanwhile, check out the powerful list of social media offerings by Apple: