A Google search may or may not lead them to valuable resources online, but many students today clearly don’t know how to differentiate between what’s legitimate and what’s not. Being able to look at a piece of information online and challenge it in order to determine whether or not it is a fact is simply not a skill that many online users have. However, once this process is learned, students can apply it throughout their education - no matter what medium they use for research.
ReadWriteWeb on Information
23 June 2008
Twitter, FriendFeed, email, IM, and RSS take away our focus when we’re really concentrating and switching to and from each task can mess us up. Instead of pining away for the overstimulated sponge-like skills of Scoble, it may be time to embrace this quality about yourself and use it to your advantage. Just because you’re not able to write a great post while concurrently dealing with new email and IMs, that doesn’t mean there’s anything inherently wrong with you that needs fixing.
ReadWriteWeb on Information Overload
1 June 2008
Google should take note of Adobe’s use the web to maximize their core products. Instead of providing seamless integration amongst their web offerings (mail, calendaring, docs, etc), Google seems more caught up trying to build a simplified “Microsoft Office killer” in the cloud, and luring people into using it for its collaboration aspects. With every new announcement, the focus for Google has been on playing either a game of feature-by-feature matching or one-upping Microsoft instead of trying to solidify a brand experience for a collaborative suite of products. Even basic tasks, like making an email an calendar appointment, for example, are currently beyond Google’s reach.
ReadWriteWeb on Google
30 April 2008
Scores of bloggers, lots of video blogging and 198 employees on Twitter help keep the company’s profile high and humanize the folks behind the shoe sales. Of all the different types of social media the company uses, none are as interesting as its use of Twitter. Twitter may sound cliche, but it’s not just about Twitter as one single service. Twitter is symbolic of rapid, short, synchronous and public conversations. Zappos has bitten off a big chunk of that paradigm.
ReadWriteWeb on Zappos
13 April 2008
The Internet is very transient in nature, things often move at a breakneck pace. The main page of a blog like ReadWriteWeb might change 10-15 times in a day. The main page of CNN.com might change far more than that. How do we archive information when the technology to read it, and indeed the information itself, changes so fast?
ReadWriteWeb on Archiving
16 February 2008
Web 2.0 successes were mostly about a single feature (photos, bookmarks, video, phone, blogging, etc) where there was extremely rapid adoption by consumers. Semantic Web is inherently about integration and those plays tend to be different, longer and much bigger potential.
ReadWriteWeb on Semantic Web
8 February 2008
Our attention is stretched so thin these days that there are times when I have actually tried to register for what I thought was a new service only to realize later that I already had an account — it just got lost in the shuffle. With so many new web sites and services vying for our attention it is easy to feel the effects of social media fatigue.
ReadWriteWeb on Social Media Fatigue
4 February 2008
I love me some screenscaping and mashups and data portability, but when it comes to personal information things get a little more complicated.
ReadWriteWeb on Google Social Graph