“Please to call it… research”

Man, I love Google.  It’s fabulous to live in an era where just about any silly question I want to ask can be answered in moments.

• Who was that amazing, skinny-waisted, tap-dancing sister who played opposite Rosemary Clooney in White Christmas?
  
• How do HTML table styles work, again?
  
• What could I make for lunch with kale and tahini?
  
• Are there any new virus removal programs?
  
• Who wrote Le Grande Maunes?
  
• What good shielded outdoor lights are available?

Of course, there’s a downside.  If you’ve got the discipline to find your answer and then get off the web and move on, you’re good.   I don’t seem to have it.  So many of my Google searches turn up all sorts of interesting things that I want to explore.  Often they spawn more Google searches (I’d love to blame this all on a nefarious plot by Google).  Articles have links to other articles.  

I mostly ignore videos on the grounds that they take too long (unless I’m trying to learn something and so far the written answers aren’t helping). But that's probably a false economy.  I can get lost for big chunks of time reading stuff that, eventually, is not even related to my original question.  Is it fun? Sure.  Does it help me get my work done?  Well…

In this age of infinite information, it’s very easy to get lost in it, especially if you enjoy reading and the process of learning like I do.  How do you decide when you’ve had enough?  For me, it depends – on how black-and-white the question is, how comfortable I am that I know what I’m doing right now and don’t need much input from an expert.  And how much I’m enjoying the task at hand.  If I’d really rather not be doing what I’m doing, it’s easy to rationalize that a differently-worded search might come up with better info, or that these 4 related articles might be useful before I get back to work.  All in the name of …research, of course.  

I already set a timer for Facebook because aside from keeping in touch with friends, the thing’s a time sink.  Maybe I should do that before I type something into that search box, too.  

What do you do to keep from endlessly wandering around in all that delicious information out there?

My favorite information sources

I’m one of those obnoxious facebook friends who tends to look things up before I repost, and when I discover something is incorrect, or only partially correct, I don’t hesitate to post additional information in a comment.  I’d say about 70% of my friends are glad to learn more.  The rest, well….have you ever heard of “don’t confuse me with the facts”?  It’s really more like “don’t annoy me with the facts”.  

I find facts to be very handy things.  They are, however, tough to find on the internet sometimes.  The web is the ultimate democracy – anyone can post anything.   There is no Fact Police.  There can be plenty of pushback for a post, but there’s no guarantee the pushback has anything to do with actual facts.  

I tend to stay away from most news sites, especially the ones connected to television stations.  The ones with obvious political biases – BOTH left and right – are, to me, pretty transparently off base.  The only newspaper I read regularly is The Economist.  If you usually get your news from a US source of any kind, I encourage you to give it a try.  It’s very enlightening to read about us from a point of view outside the country.  And I also like learning about other parts of the world.  One of the things I really hate about American media is the apparent assumption that if it didn’t happen in the US or directly affect Americans, it isn’t really important.  The other source I trust for news is NPR.  Folks on the far right seem to think it’s very left leaning, but I find it pretty balanced, and it often has the detail I crave on a topic that interests me.  

For many other things, I might read them but unless an article feels solid and I can corroborate it with other sources, I usually won’t repost it.  Snopes.com and Politifact.com are good friends.  I love that Politifact pulls no punches: you’ll find “pants-on-fire” labels on untrue statements no matter who made them.

As a geek, I do my best to keep up with what’s happening in IT.  It’s tough. There are so many subspecialties that no one person can possibly stay current on everything.  Fortunately, there are lots of good blogs and news sites.  Here are some of my favorites:

• Sophos’ NakedSecurity keeps me up to date on what to watch and I find them mostly written in English rather than tech-ese.  I repost their articles a lot. 
• InfoWorld has several interesting blogs, especially Tech Watch
• TechRepublic’s multi-topic site
• Gizmo’s reviews of freeware, known as techsupportalert.com
• Wall Street Journal’s CIO Report
• My friend John Ahlberg’s blog at Waident.com, which also tends to cover many IT-related topics.  

Then there are the sites for cycling, for knitting, for gardening, for fun, and for inspiration.  Just having that list might make you think I couldn’t keep up with them ALL, all the time.  And you’d be right.  Still, I imagine there are good ones out there that I don’t know anything about.  What are some of your favorite sources? 

Cloud Computing

I attended an AITP group meeting this week on the two hot topics of the moment: Cloud Computing and Social Media Marketing.  The speakers are known, respected representatives of their fields, but on the Cloud Computing side I have to say I was less than impressed.

The message was: this is the next big thing and I’m on the forefront of it and you need to pay attention to it.  But what, exactly, are we talking about? 

Several of my colleagues in the audience asked excellent if pointed questions, like: how is this different that what we are doing now?  Is this not still just a make/buy decision with different parameters?  How do I safeguard my proprietary and customer data if I don’t know exactly where it resides and what my Cloud provider’s processes are?  Whose fault is it if my data is compromised or I can’t get at it to do business?

This last one is easy to answer, since the advent of Cloud Computing doesn’t change things: you are.  If you’re the CIO of a corporation, you are responsible for the safety and sanctity of the company’s data.  It does not matter whether you decide to keep it in house on a server you can see or farm it out to Amazon or Force.com or whatever, or something in between. 

It seems to me that though we have new technologies every month to consider as tools to do business, the fundamental issues don’t change.  Perhaps my negative reaction to the presentations stems more from the idea that the term “game change” equates to a complete overhaul of everything. 

Cloud Computing  clearly has some excellent opportunities and potential cost-savings.  It is also, as one of the presenters pointed out, the beginning of the realization, finally, of the true promise of the Internet.  It’s very exciting to consider the kinds of gains we can make in our ability to scale, to react to business needs and changes quickly, and enable new ways to collaborate in a global marketplace.  But my colleague who asked if things really are the same is right.  We still need to look at the costs, benefits and risks of the alternatives for performing every business process we execute.  Some things lend themselves very well to being put in the cloud.  For others it will make sense to keep them in-house.  And of course it’s not a yes/no decision, there is a range of possibilities.  Don’t throw away your common sense, IT professionals.  That is still very much in demand no matter what “game changing” new thing is being hyped.

Social Media Marketing next.