commbasics

Wow.  The past few weeks have been pretty intense as I complete a white paper on Media in the 21st Century (gotta get it done because lots of people are aksing for it.) But in the past week, the conversation, from my audio interview with Kevin Morris of EE Journal has started to get a little heated.  It sort of reminds me of a scene from the movie " The Man Who Would Be King ."  As Michael Caine and Sean Connery are recruiting followers, every tribe has the same thing to say about the tribe that harrasses them. ""We don't like the people who live upstream; they keep pissing down the river on us." Nobody likes their closest competitor and it seems to be required that you blame them for serious moral turpitude .  Only the guy on top has the requirement to be magnanimous. I'm not really a competitive guy.  I have a basic moral code that makes me try to see the good in everyone and everything.  Most of the time it works...

A few weeks ago I sat down with engineers over coffee and different times and talked with them about the issue of searching for information on the internet. I discovered that, universally, they were frustrated by the process but didn't really know what could be done.  What they said ties into things I've heard about engineers and how they process information and explains a lot. They start with a question about a particular topic, so they type in a search term.  The term brings up hundreds of links, most of which are press releases or contributed articles trying to get them to buy a particular product and only tangentially addressing their question. They click on link after link; inputting new search terms and finding more links, until they finally find enough information to get started.  "It's time consuming and, more often than not, counter productive," one state emphatically.  It is also they only option they have. The traditional media do...