Research and Scanning

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[Comment: This was knocked up at the last minute, and I didn't like the outline anyway: choose research and scanning sources both for general subjects and specific topics. The pre-set structure is far too, well, structured for how I organise such things. It repeats itself and a lot of what I wrote is nonsense.]

[ Research | Scanning ]

Domain: The Internet

Books

Burn Rate, Michael Wolff. A description of how Wolff attempted to find funding for his Internet enterprise in the early years of the Web. As vivid a description as one is likely to get of how quickly ideas shift, the attitudes of the industry, and how people have struggled to come to terms with doing business in a completely new form of media.

Neuromancer, William Gibson. Fiction, but essential for an image of a possible future for the Internet. The classic cyberpunk novel, Gibson's descriptions of characters immersing themselves in a shifting world of data colours many people's views of what the Net is and could be.

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson. Another fictional tale, Stephenson described virtual reality better than anyone. Characters have an alternate existence in the Metaverse where they exist as avatars in a 3D world.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon. This book describes the birth of the Internet thirty years ago, and how it all began to come together into the Net we know today. Few people know much of the history beyond a few years ago, but this fills all the gaps.

Journals

Fast Company. A business magazine of the Internet age, it has a strong emphasis on futures material.

Future Survey. A monthly round-up of books oriented to the future. Each month concentrates on one or more fields.

The Futurist. The magazine of the World Future Society, is rarely as interesting as one hopes, considering the potential.

MIT Technology Review. "MIT's Magazine of Innovation" concentrates on new inventions and the development of ideas. Good for seeing technologies make their way slowly into the mainstream.

Wired. The magazine that saw the "digital revolution" coming has lost its edge now that everyone has caught up with it, but still comes up with interesting, in depth articles and names to watch (even if they¹re increasingly involved in setting up revolutionary online brokerages).

Indexes

Google. You can search the Web. What more do you want here?!?

AltaVista. ditto.

Hotbot. ditto.

Yahoo! The Web in directory format.

Web gateways/portals

All Net Devices. A daily selection of news stories related to anything which can pick up IP tone. From WAP phones to Internet refrigerators.

Moreover. A customisable aggregator of news headlines, scanning 1,500 titles in over 170 selectable categories. Set up your own page of headlines, just how you want it.

Scripting News. Filter out some of Dave Winer's nonsense and the reports on his company¹s new products and you have a useful, up-to-the-minute log of Net happenings. If something worthwhile happens, it'll turn up here.

Slashdot. "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." A hugely popular site oriented towards open source software, cryptography, and anything else technology-related. A dozen or so items appear every day, submitted by its faithful readership. Every item has a discussion board attached, and thankfully customisation means you can filter out everything but the comments rated as worthwhile by readers.

Weblogs. A whole slew of weblogs (of which Scripting News and Slashdot could also be examples), sites generally updated at least once a day with interesting links. www.robotwisdom.com was one of the first, and www.eatonweb.com/portal/ lists more than you will ever need.

Web authorities/destinations

Need to Know. "*The* weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the UK." Invaluable weekly newsletter and website oriented towards British geeks. News stories, URLs, events, memes, reviews. And it's funny, too.

Risks Digest. Full of reports on the downside of technology, it's a "forum on the risks to the public in computers and related systems." News on bugs, failures, hacks, virii and other such delights.

Tasty Bits from the Technology Front. An irregular email from Keith Dawson, full of Net-oriented news and insightful analysis. He recently gave in to the pressures of timeliness and started a weblog.

The Well. An old online community based in San Francisco. Full of interesting discussions, pointless arguments, utter nonsense and all the usual Net community phenomena.

Wired News. Now a different company than its hard-copy relative, this is a regularly updated news site oriented towards all things technology.

Experts

Carl Steadman. Carl's your pal. Carl's everyone's pal. Started www.suck.com with Joey Anuff while working at Wired, and now writes a column for The Industry Standard. You can buy cookies with his face on.

Clay Shirky. Always has something interesting to say about everything to do with the Internet, culture, media, you name it.

Nicholas Negroponte. Helped fund Wired which entitled him to a back page column every month in which to talk nonsense about tomorrow's technology. Has plenty of interesting ideas but also seems to believe developing countries need satellite networks and paper-thin computers rather than food, water or debt relief.

Philip Greenspun. Purveyor of much-needed sense about building websites and how to make things happen on the Net.

Robert Cringely. Writes a weekly column for PBS which I never get round to reading, but his books and TV shows were fun and informative.

Searching

[The task was to perform a search which returned a few dozen relevant links.] I don't believe it matters whether your search turns up hundreds of results, as long as the results listed first are relevant. For example, if I'm looking for information about developing content for mobile phones I'll type "wap wml developing" into Google and get back 180 pages, but the first few pages will contain more than enough worthwhile links. On the other hand, entering "+wap +wml +developing" into AltaVista returns only 98 pages, but those listed first aren't all as useful as those returned by Google.

[ Research | Scanning ]