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Weblog Archive Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo








Creative Commons License

Copyright © 2003-2012
Bernard Teo
Some Rights Reserved.

Fri 25 Apr 2003

Information Anxiety

Category : Commentary/infoanxiety.txt

In the field of marketing, there is a saying attributed to Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon, who said, "In the factory Revlon manufactures cosmetics, but in the store Revlon sells hope." This is often taken to mean that we ought to know what business we are in.

Ask anyone in the IT industry and they'll say they're working with computers. Very seldom do they say they're working with information, or trying to understand the nature of information, so that they can choose the right tools to shape, channel, and marshall it.

But if you're willing to understand the distinction, if only to refute that there's a distinction, try reading Richard Saul Wurman. Ten years ago, he coined the term "Information Anxiety" and described a business he calls "The Understanding Business". That helped me build a context around the work I was doing with computers and the kind of business I wanted to be building.

That book is out of print but I see from Amazon that he has a follow-up called Information Anxiety 2 which appears to be just as good. I hope to read that too. I see people reading ".Net" or "C#" or "Oracle" and all these stuff on the MRT. It may be easy to miss the forest for the trees.

Posted at 3:49PM UTC | permalink

Linking Back

Category : Commentary/linkingback.txt

I've created a weblog monitor so that I can see who's been coming over to this weblog. Since having it, I've been surprised that quite a few visitors are Windows users. So, hey welcome there. My interest in the Mac is as a serious business machine; so you may get a different viewpoint from what is usually associated with the Mac. Hope it's been worth your time reading this.

Also, where I can see links being made to this weblog (from the Referer information in the access log) I'll make a link back to that site, as you can see from the left side-bar. Just paying back the compliments. Not only that; I'm learning something new, like a new piece of music at sooundingblue.

Finally, I've improved the weblog code further and I'm going to release it for anyone to use over the weekend. It doesn't yet have comments and trackbacks, but other than that, the other stuff works smoothly. I just wanted to show how we could create a system that allows the artist and the technician (it could be the same person) to work together to build something useful.

So, with an Internet line and a Mac that you're willing to leave on all the time, you can have a web server, a mail server, a weblog system, a calendar system (more about this in future), and a database system, most of them free, on which you can build a business around. Remember an old Apple saying, "The Power to be Your Best"?

Posted at 10:09AM UTC | permalink

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