Archaeological Artifact
This showed up on our porch the other day. It’s still there. It’s not coming in the house, and I’ve been too lazy to take it to the trash. I suppose it’s still profitable given that the phone company (or whoever makes this thing) sent it to me. But I cannot remember the last time I actually used a printed phonebook. It must be years.
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david
November 27, 2006 at 10:14 pm
As I was packing up my kitchen, my girlfriend found a phone book from 2003 in the cupboard. We were both afraid to touch it and throw it in the trash.
What is most interesting about this artifact is that it is completely based on a salesforce and advertising. Some have big banner ads to get your attention while others have simple text listings. This is the Google of the 70’s and 80’s.
This lead me to think about Yahoo and AOL. These are two companies that are rooted in the “portal” business. In the new world, I simply Google something, it gives me a list and then I navigate. I no longer go to portal sites to be the collection of my information. Search has completely changed the paradigm in which I use the Internet.
Many people will point to RSS as the replacement of the portal (computers delivering information instead of people writing content). While I believe in RSS, what is interesting is that I don’t really use it that much. That is, the new IE7 feature and Firefox feature is useless because it takes too much effort on my part to look at articles. However, when using Safari, I created a folder on my bookmark bar called feeds and everyday I see how many unreads exist in the folder. Then I feel compelled to click on the items to get my count to zero. I want to be “up on all the latest info”. Without this simple “count” feature, I doubt that I would have used it or really wanted to create a list of feeds. However, with this simple feature, I acutally use RSS. Now I find myself using RSS feeds that I have collected to keep up on news, Gizmodo and Engadget and other random things that I want to look at. All of a sudden, I have stopped Googling for things and I turn to my RSS feeds first. Then, after that I Google for stuff.
Just some observations.
Hillel
November 28, 2006 at 9:05 pm
Good thoughts. I have been hot and cold on my RSS feeds I admit. Part of it is that I like seeing articles in the environment in which they were intended. I always worry that there are images or formatting that didn’t make it through the feed that are relevant to the content. The other part is that I’ve yet to find an RSS reader I love.