In 2010, Twitter will be the pulse of the planet

It's the end of year, a time of looking back, and ahead. A fun time to make predictions, and look back at predictions made earlier - although that usually is much less fun

I predict that everyone will have a Twitter account in 2010. Every company will also have one, and use it too. There will be Twitter boards in public places, public ones as well as private ones, some of which will be censored to a degree, much like the delay already present on US radio- and TV shows.
The private Tweet boards will also monitor Foursquare and BrightKite in order to see what the world is thinking about that particular place

On The Acquisition Of Knowledge 2/2

In my last blog post I talked about what to do with the information you get. This will be about how to get information

There's data, and there's information
Search engines like Google search and aggregate data thereby enabling it to become information, which is invaluable, but not too easy. Googling is an art, and requires skill
Human "engines" such as Wikipedia explicitly present information in the best possible and moderated way. Wiki is an absolute fantastic source of information for everyone in the entire world (I just can't stress that enough) where even the hottest debates are held

On The Acquisition Of Knowledge 1/2

The road to the acquisition of knowledge is a well-established path: we've always been supposed to get our knowledge from other people. Parents, teachers, preachers, masters, gurus, and the like, they are the intended intermediaries for us

Before the invention of writing information was handed down through people, from one to the other. The one possessing the information determined who would receive it, and who wouldn't. As such, it was a very effective way to control people

Even millennia after that, information used to be scarce. By 1424, Cambridge University library owned only 122 books. In 1440 the printing press was invented that sped up the speed of printing thus reducing the cost of books