Working in marketing, a huge part of your job is to stay on top of what's going on in our clients' industries, innovations and what people are talking about. Around the office, I'm always hearing tidbits of someone fired up about a new service that just launched, a really cool new Web site that's making life easier, or on something they're just plain excited about.
Here are a few of things that have got our attention lately:
Dapper: Dapper allows you to take data from a Web site and put it into a given format (RSS feeds, Google Maps, e-mail, HMTL, etc). Personally, I use it to turn keyword searches on The New York Times Web site into RSS feeds. For instance, you can learn every time The New York Times reports on a company you're investing in, your town, your client—whatever you're interested in! For me, it's a great way to keep tabs on when top-tier journalists are writing on stuff I care about.
Greenprint: Why print pages you don't have to—or want to? Greenprint makes it easy for you, saves money and helps the environment.
Semantify: ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick just wrote about Semantify yesterday and we're eager to try it ourselves. From the same folks who bring you Dapper, it makes Web sites readable by semantic search engines.
Found anything really cool lately you want to share? I'd love to hear about it.
All of us in the office have hopped on the bandwagon and are now using Twitter, a social networking service where you publish micro pieces of information up to 140 words long. What does this look like? Well, look at my Twitter page for an example.
Lately I've been thinking about the implication of the type of information Twitter provides—what I have been referring to (at least in my own head) as microknowledge.
Essentially what Twitter is...is microknowledge. How much context can be added in 140 words? Not much. Like so much out there in our lives today, we are all losing our patience. We want it faster, briefer. But if we get it faster and briefer, what do we lose in the process?
In the bigger picture of things, I say we may be losing our ability to analyze, draw conclusions, and think about things deeply and meaningfully.
This is not to say I think microknowledge has no value. It absolutely does. And I've come across some really interesting things thanks to it.
I just wonder the implications microknowledge has in the scheme of our intelligence and its effect on our ability to most effectively find our personal reality and truth as human beings. Without context, can ever have meaning?
Truth be told, we are all are experiencing major info bloat! And not much of the info is relevant.
I'd like your input. How do you think microknowledge has affected you and how you learn and process information? My take: There is a big difference between intelligent and intelligence.
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