i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

 http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/08/the-laws-of-information-chemis.html

Last week, NYT featured Julius Eulberg, a German who loves collecting antiques, especially porcelain birds. This piece made me think of Kimra's chapter-- especially the part about retrieving the chair. Can you imagine having to fetch one of his 300 + birds? How would he describe it in order for you know which porcelain bird he was talking about?

Google recently revealed an overhaul of its back-end web indexing infrastructure, called Caffeine, making search results “50 percent fresher”. The old system was split into layers that did a series of batch processes on new Web content.

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.  

This week's New Yorker recently featured an interesting article about phone books. Once a source for information retrieval, "its legitimacy as a reference tool was undermined long ago-- first by 411, then by the Internet and smartphones."

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.

In an attempt to reduce spam, scams, and the spread of pornography via cell phone, the Chinese government is requiring citizens and visitors to provide identification when purchasing a SIM card. Working with government-control telecom companies, convenience store owners and street vendors, China hopes to organize a system in which all cell phone numbers and SIM cards can be linked to an individual.

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:

Haven’t you run across images online where you’ve wondered what a particular item in the image was? And then read the image caption to discover that it told you nothing about what you were wondering about. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could describe parts of an image that may or may not contribute to the overall message in the name of the file or the image caption? Well, now you can.

Collecting information is not the same everywhere. This article by The Economist reveals different methods used to collect information for digital maps: from using sophisticated GPS systems in England, to note-taking in India and voluntary contributions in Nigeria. There is no single way to get data from every place, and different information is needed by different users in a variety of contexts. The following questions arise: How do we standarize all these different data-collections?