infoplumber’s blog

1. Check the most common causes first.
2. If it is not one of the most common causes, check the lowest level causes that do not require more than moderate effort to test, in descending order of commonness.
3. If you have not found the cause by following the first and second laws, then check the one thing that could break everything, and work backwards.
   

How do we take networked information systems to another level?  How do we deal with the scale of data becoming available in a far flung global, and eventually extraterestrial network?  Information systems need to be "smarter."  That's easy.  Harder is what does smarter mean?

One thing it means is being aware to changes in the information environment and reacting to those changes, especially without human intervention.  That's the only way to deal with the scale of what we are building.

So this conference looks like the thing:  Inaugural International Conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems.

In an in interview on IT Conversations titled, The big zero, Doc Searls made a fascinating point.  In the midst of this unprecedented explosion of connectivity, when more people can connect with more other people than ever before, its still small groups that work.  You hear talk about aggregation and the wisdom of the crowd, but small groups remain the most enjoyable and productive.  What the Internet changes is that the members of that group can be geographically distributated in a way that wasn't possible before.  You can find the best 10 or 20 people in the world, rather than in your city or state or country.

In my personal experience, beyond bare information gathering, the most useful Internet thing for me has been an email list.  It was originally a group of friends from college, and has expanded over the years to include their spouses.  It's still less than 20 people.  The next primary use is for keeping in touch with my family.  Again, small group. 

The possibility of finding the right 10 ro 20 people is huge on today's Internet.  What needs a lot of work is how to find them.