We are in the information age -
million of people get paid millions of dollars to collect millions of pieces of information
The information age will get faster and faster, bigger and bigger, one ever increasing self inflating balloon until ....
one day it will end in a giant dot.com type burst when millions of people realise they don't need millions of peices of useless information and certainly don't want to pay millions of dollars for it.
I am going to make millions collecting data on how much data is collected and selling it to people who are collecting data on how much data is collected about how much data is being collected.
Now, to start - anybody know anything they found out in the internet ?
interesting book I just finished by Chris Anderson called Free.
There's lots in it but one of the main points he makes is that as one thing becomes free or ubiquitous, then others become more valuable.
Information has become free but trusted information is now rarer than ever. Websites like the FT, BBC, ABC etc become more valuable (please note absence of News international sources). Wikipedia is valued but only in places and only when it points at proper peer reviewed research.
I was talking to some mates who have teenage children and the biggest skill they now have to learn is not finding information, but assessing the credibility of sources.
There's negatives. In the past, a voice in the wilderness with a decent message stood a chance of getting through. Now the vast amount of bull**** on most media channels (especially youtube) means that the messages are totally lost.
Ginger Pom i don't need 'a peer reviewed credible source' to tell me that building 7
was anything but a controlled demolition!!!
this is not rocket science for ..... sake.
the link you posted in another thread to popular mechanics regarding building 7
went something like this.....
25 percent of building 7 was scooped out!!!!!
that is a complete 100 percent MONSTROUS LIE and you know it.
there is not a scrap of evidence to support this outlandish claim, no photos or
video.
further if this was true the building would have fallen to the side.
another major point; the huge increase in acceleration of fall of building 7 proves it
was a controlled demolition
with each individual floor providing massive resistance the speed of collapse could
not possibly have been so great
unless of course it was a controlled demo.
Useless?
Big call.
Perhaps if all you use the net for is surfing for pr0n... err hang on then it's not useless at all. Only checking the seabreeze graphs? Hmmm not useless then either. I'm struggling to think of one thing that the net is useless at.
Making coffee? Cleaning the house?
If those are your criteria then I guess it is useless, but I'd like to see someone try to figure out where the nearest vet is, using nothing but a vacuum cleaner 
^^
No no, I wasn't saying that, that is way off my point.
I wasn't saying obtaining direct information that you use to make a decision is useless or will explode, but that 'information' as an entity will come to be an entity with no real purpose.
For example, there are many companies out there whose sole business is collecting and collating statistcal data to be sold to other companies.
Such things like the average age of a person who buys size 6 shoes, or the number of people who drive yellow cars and also wear suits, or distribution of hits on facebook vs time of day, or 10 million names and addresses.
Now, it may seem like that info is good and helps refine an advertising campaign or something, but I am predicting that it is getting, and will get so riduculos, that the information will become a tradable commodity, whilst the information itself is actually useless.
If you think somebody will buy something for $2 and you can get it for $1 you will buy it to sell it right ?, no matter what it is, in fact what it is isn't important.
That is OK and will keep happening whilst the person sepnding $2 thinks he can get $4, until one day people will realise they just spent $4 on something of no value.
Not a hard prediction really when there are so many other markets in the world like that.
^^
Again, I see logic in Google collecting such data and then using it to directly determine which ad to run.
But, if Google collect it and sell it to somebody other than a dog food advertiser, who purchases it as an investment to on-sell in the future then it eventually makes the data itself useless and thus worthless, but the commodity is tradeble as an investment.
I am seeing an information futures exchange, where you can by the right to purchase data that has yet to be gathered. Why not, it is done with everything else ?
Now, you say that is ridiculous but ....... I can think of more ridiculous investment schemes that have existed, in fact the futures share market is not far off, the re-insurance market is even a bit closer.
I am predicting :
one day 'information packages' will be a tradeable commodity (not the information itself per-see, but the existance of the information), and then one day the information market will collapse.
Get in and out before the collapse and you could make it big.
Select to expand quotepetermac33 said...
Ginger Pom i don't need 'a peer reviewed credible source' to tell me that building 7
was anything but a controlled demolition!!!
this is not rocket science for ..... sake.
I hate to say it but I agree with you on that one Peter..........
Select to expand quoteginger pom said...
interesting book I just finished by Chris Anderson called Free.
There's lots in it but one of the main points he makes is that as one thing becomes free or ubiquitous, then others become more valuable.
Just lost me right there Air is free but there is hardly anything more valuable to us
(groan)
I read this thread thinking it was another one on the NBN. I got my soapbox out and everything! Boy was I wrong. Must be time for boobs.
Hello. I have worked in I.T. for 10 years now.
The examples above are not the normal type of information we deal with and exchange on a daily basis. The data are really boring. Trust me.
The idea of buying/selling packets of information is retarded. This idea is not dissimilar to buying/selling pages of books.
The closest thing to this idea is perhaps Data Mining:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining
To give you an idea of how we transact large volumes of information, in the real world, most of the work I do with terabytes of information, sometimes processes that take 24+hrs to run, are estimating future pay runs for large organisations (commitments), crunching swathes of data down to a few numbers for reporting to govt. departments, or interfaces that do high volume/low data transactions like payments.
Again, really boring stuff that has been done throughout history, just not to the same extent or speed. That's where I.T. fits in.
P.S. there's some nut who's popular right now in some circles raving about how we'll be able to simulate the brain in the near future because it only contains x bytes of information, yada yada. We're not even remotely close.
Sweet electric dreams y'all.
Ginger Pom i don't need 'a peer reviewed credible source' to tell me that building 7 was anything but a controlled demolition!!! I have voices in my head that do a much better job
