Flow My Thoughts, The IT Professor Said

All The UseNet News That Fits

http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065298.html

An absorbing interview with a resident sociologist at Microsoft, which has as its main focus the utility and value of what must be the largest 'niche' operation in the world: news groups. It is a queen bee in my overstocked bonnet that the development of effective tools for managing this buzzing blooming cornucopia of data and extracting information from it could provide a major competitive advantage for the instiution so deploying such tools. This man has some ideas about how to go about it.

Tangentally, the interview also covers a related topic which buzzes boomingly -- "making the world smart" by providing easily read data tags creating a public information metasphere -- a concept explored to some extent in Science Fiction [for a good recent example look at Technogenesis by Syne Mitchell {Roc; (January 2002) ISBN: 0451458648}]. This is a concept simply crawling with festering issues, having the potential to remake the world we experience -- whether for better or worse should be a debatable question, one not receiving sufficient attention for my taste.

However fascinating this all may be, two dark questions circle in the depths of this article, like brooding sharks forever on the feed:
1) If such tools are developed, and demand any sophistication in their use [and I would argue that the sophistication such tools require is so subtile that we may be too sophisticated to see it, though William Gibson has some pointers here], aren't we facing another have/have not gap, with immense implications?
2) Is everyone else in the room really comfortable with the idea that such a powerful, deep line of research is being driven by Microsoft?