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It’s a map of Post Roads, roads built and maintained for the primary purpose of giving mail carriers access to the country, as required by the constitution. This map is from 1804, and shows a surprisingly well-developed network of roads. What we’re really looking at here, aside from being the great-grandfather of our national highway system, is the Internet of the early 1800s. The post road network was how almost all information was exchanged in the US at the time. Like today, you could send an email, though the “e” then stood for “equine” and it was just mail and I’ve exhausted the possibilities of that stupid bit of wordplay. But you get the idea. If we go along with the now/then speed computations I did with travel with information, and really, we may as well, the numbers get nice and ridiculous. Let’s say a fresh, well-trained postal horse could run at 20 MPH, which means that’s how fast one page of information (say, a one-kilobyte letter) could travel. A one kilobyte email travels at, oh, the speed of light, basically, so that’s close to 670 million MPH. So, that means information now travels at 33,480,000 times as fast.
— Information In America Moves 33,480,000 Times Faster Than It Did 200 Years Ago (via myserendipities)

5 months ago

January 14, 2013
post roads maps networks information
reblogged via infoneer-pulse
quote
I think that people seem less and less concerned about where their information comes from at a time when I think they should be more and more concerned about it.
—

The New York Times’ David Carr on curation, crowdsourcing, and the future of journalism – a must-read.

For a related read, see Clay Johnson’s excellent The Information Diet.

(via explore-blog)

1 year ago

April 3, 2012
information data trust
reblogged via explore-blog
video

Network (by Michael Rigley)

visualization of network data

1 year ago

January 9, 2012
internet data visualization information
quote

it is a fallacy to think that if the quantity of information increases, the quality of information increases as well. This is pretty obviously false, and, in fact, the reverse might be true.

From an aid worker’s perspective, our bandwidth is extremely limited, both literally and metaphorically. Those working in emergency response – official or unofficial, paid or unpaid, community-based or institution-based, governmental or non-governmental – don’t need more information, they need better information.

— “If all You Have is a Hammer” - How Useful is Humanitarian Crowdsourcing? | MobileActive.org (via interestingsnippets)

2 years ago

November 1, 2010
crowdsourcing information humanitarian aid
reblogged via interestingsnippets
link “New shit has come to light”: Information seeking behavior in The Big Lebowski

The methods employed when a person seeks information and incorporates it into her existing knowledge base often determine how well she will grow in her understanding of a specific information need, or more broadly, in life itself.  Put another way, the self-defined process of seeking meaning is the very basis of the human condition, and one that is a central fixture in The Big Lebowski. As Ethan Coen related, watching a seemingly inept person struggle with a complex situation was ‚the conceit‛ of the film (‚Making‛ 1:47). This paper analyzes the information seeking behaviors of Donny Kerabatsos, Walter Sobchak, The Dude, and Maude Lebowski through the lenses of a variety of information seeking theories and models. This analysis of The Big Lebowski illustrates the concept of sense-making as a richer, more contextualized process than simply collecting facts. 

2 years ago

August 27, 2010
the big lebowski information search information seeking behavior
video

hiten:

mind the information gap

3 years ago

March 15, 2010
information information gap geometry
reblogged via hiten
photo mary1in: Geek & Poke’s Encyclopedia Of Computer Science - Part 1: The “Bit”

mary1in:

Geek & Poke’s Encyclopedia Of Computer Science - Part 1: The “Bit”

3 years ago

January 18, 2010
comics the bit twitter information
reblogged via mary1in
photo infoneernet: The American Diet: 34 Gigabytes a Day The report suggests the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information in a single day. (Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” is only 460,000 words long.) This doesn’t mean we read 100,000 words a day — it means that 100,000 words cross our eyes and ears in a single 24-hour period. That information comes through various channels, including the television, radio, the Web, text messages and video games. The report also describes our voracious appetite for information and entertainment. In addition to the amount of information we consume, the researchers looked at how much time we devote to each medium. The study suggests that, on average, most Americans consume 11.8 hours of information a day. Most of this time is spent in front of some sort of screen watching TV-related content, taking up a little over four and a half hours of our daily information consumption. Then there’s the computer, which we interact with for about two hours a day. There’s also the phone, radio, music, and print. Most of these experiences happen simultaneously, too, such as talking on the phone while checking our e-mail, or instant messaging while watching TV. » via The New York Times

infoneernet:

The American Diet: 34 Gigabytes a Day

The report suggests the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information in a single day. (Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” is only 460,000 words long.) This doesn’t mean we read 100,000 words a day — it means that 100,000 words cross our eyes and ears in a single 24-hour period. That information comes through various channels, including the television, radio, the Web, text messages and video games.

The report also describes our voracious appetite for information and entertainment. In addition to the amount of information we consume, the researchers looked at how much time we devote to each medium. The study suggests that, on average, most Americans consume 11.8 hours of information a day. Most of this time is spent in front of some sort of screen watching TV-related content, taking up a little over four and a half hours of our daily information consumption. Then there’s the computer, which we interact with for about two hours a day. There’s also the phone, radio, music, and print. Most of these experiences happen simultaneously, too, such as talking on the phone while checking our e-mail, or instant messaging while watching TV.

» via The New York Times

3 years ago

December 9, 2009
pie chart information
reblogged via infoneer-pulse
video

Information on Vimeo (via Vimeo)

4 years ago

June 7, 2009
information