Tag Archives: search

Should we send work email to the trash?

TheConversation published my article on email overload.

Email has moved from being the internet’s first killer app to being a productivity killer. You can make news by claiming to hate it, ban it or kill it. But the problem with email is not the technology – we’re simply using it to do too many things.

Read the full article @

Should we send work email to the trash?

Rintel, S. (2011, December 8). Should we send work email to the trash? The Conversation (Online).

Read the syndicated versions @

Email's Slow Death March @ Technology Spectator

Should we send work email to the trash @ BigPond News

 

The piece was also commented on in another Technology Spectator post:

Adhikari, S. (2011, December 9). Still life in email. Technology Spectator (Online).

Unmotivated graphing shows that the Internet is important!

My new fun is unmotivated graphing: Randomly drawing graphs into Google Drawn Series as a way of finding out about and then retrospectively explaining Internet trends.

Googledrawnseries-howtostop

This randomly-drawn classic growth curve turns out to illustrate two things that Google (and other search companies) are probably very pleased about: 

  • First, since 2003 people have increasingly turned to the Internet for information/advice about how to do or not do things, how to stop things from happening, or how to change things.
  • Second, since 2006, the Internet has been turned to for information/advice on these things either by more people or more often.
The Internet is important!

This is not really news, rather it is confirmation of the importance of Internet search as a driver for Internet use. It helps explain the success of search companies such as Google itself, and the constant spur to improving algorithms. It also helps explain why the search engine space is still evolving: from search engines, to discovery engines (StumbleUpon), to decision engines (Bing), to computational knowledge engines (Wolfram Alpha), to personalised search via Facebook, Google+ etc. And given the news from August about StumbleUpon beating other sites as a traffic driver, this battle is far from over.

(If you’re not sure how to read the correlates, think of these as beginning or part of a search, e.g.: ”how to stop cats from clawing furniture”.)

 

Is StumbleUpon trumping Facebook in the internet attention wars?

Rintel, S. (2011, August 30). Is StumbleUpon trumping Facebook in the internet attention wars? The Conversation (Online).

Wirehead - Source: AndYaDontStop

Wirehead – Source: AndYaDontStop

The latest salvo in the internet attention wars has come in the form of figures from StatCounter. A relatively small content driving service called StumbleUpon drove more than 50% of all social media referral traffic in the US [...] The StumbleUpon figures represent a new front in the debate over content freedom versus focus. But they do not offer an easy solution.

Read the full article @  Is StumbleUpon trumping Facebook in the internet attention wars? @ TheConversation

Read the syndicated full article @ The Greatest Social Click-Catcher @ Technology Spectator