A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog 
 > Michael Helfrich's Radio Weblog

A very good book and a nice synopsis.

For those of us that only manage to read the first 100 pages of important books, Robert Paterson's weblog has a FANTASTIC overview of the Tipping Point. 

I agree. And the applications are many, so this is an important work.

For example, Marc Canter asks why newsQuakes don't show any Asian news.

Aside from operational questions, like the scale and reach of the news crawler or mis-weighting of algorithms, I can think of a few reasons.

1. Too few original sources. How many news sources are online in Africa? What density creates a network bursting with news? 
   
2. Too few cross-language bridges.  Language barriers are huge. Largely independent social networks have just a fringe of overlap. A fractional percent of the population bridges these communities, translating, filtering news. When was the last time you read a news story about something in Poland? Some language/culture-pairs are more open to each other, often driven by proximity and population exchange; think Western Europe. Why no Asian news? Probably quantity.
   
3. Network Diffusion. Unless a meme is reinforced with each telling, stories die out. A fire killing 50 school children in Beijing may be local or even regional news. It may not have the staying power to survive translation.  
   
4. Delay. Translation delays cools off hot stories, stopping their propagation.  

Do you want more news from other worlds? From Africa, Latin America, the subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and China?

1. Promote literacy, so more people write.
2. Second and third language training: English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Hindi reach billions.
3. Get your sources online and syndicate their content.

[a klog apart community]

  The Science Craving Channel  
  is experiencing  
  Some Technical Difficulty 

  Please Stay Tuned 

End of a technology life cycle.

IT systems change all the time. It's like upgrading an airplane engine in flight. Part of the fun, the challenge, the opportunity.

What does your IT department have? What gear, software, data? How do they fit together? When can we retire this old stuff? How will this system change affect the rest of the infrastructure?  

CIOs turn to their IT architects for the inventory and the answers.

IT architects monitor life cycles, among other things, to anticipate changes to the IT environment.  

• Technology Life Cycles
• Product Family Life Cycles
• Make-Model Life Cycles

There is too much to track, even with Gartner and similar services.

So this becomes a collective effort. All of IT and concerned power users.

Sysadmins take leadership for tracking Operating Systems, Postmasters for messaging systems, NetAdmins for connectivity. There are plenty of IT components to go around.

IT architects can distribute this role with tools for:

• Managing lists of things to track.
• Automation of the data update task.
• Sharing, organizing, finding, and prioritizing news.
• Letting experts compose their observations and commentary, in both structured and narrative ways.
• Subscription to updates on specific technologies, vendors, product families, and product models.
• Succession and transition planning.

The IT architect becomes:

• evangelist for the life cycle management process and
• editor in chief for contributing experts.

Hmmm. IT architect v.3.5.6 is on its way out, to be replaced by v.3.5.7. Let's get the word out and start shopping for vendors...