The meteorological phenomenon known as snow occurred last night near my house, around my house on top of my house. For some reason, and in 2020 and 2021, we had the always frustrating combination of snow and rain in at least this particular printer. An inch or so of snowfalls and in the rain falls control freezes together into a mass. You end up with a frozen cringing that makes walking difficult because the sidewalks all freeze into sheets of ice. I walk outdoors and walking in the crunchy I see the mess that was left in the DC area yesterday take my normally 16 minute times and make them easily 22 minutes or 23 and a lot more physical exertion completes the same distance.
I had a treadmill for days like this in Indiana, but we just haven’t had that many days like this since moving to DC. So I got rid of the treadmill. In retrospect, I should have kept it. But today’s technology blog is about the reality of snow falling or the slipperiness of ice on roads. Today I want to talk about the reality of the information age. I know most analysts call where worry is now technologically the information age I understand that. I don’t mind being the lone voice in the wilderness on this one. Sometimes I don’t want to be the lone voice, but I do on this particular problem. I have spent years chasing intellectual property and intellectual capital in every organization I’ve been a part of. I have built and managed to run and organize IP management systems. Both regional and international.
That’s why I do not think we preach the information age. There’s far too much information that exists on the hard drives of professionals as they go about their day-to-day business. There’s a reason why hard drives keep getting bigger. And it’s not to do with the fact the operating system is growing that quickly. People need a place to store information if hard drive search were better than it is today. You will find ten times the amount of IP on hard drives that you do today. But the reality is there is still more information on people’s hard drives, and in people’s heads, there is in all the world’s IP systems combined. One of the coolest technology projects that I’ve watched his project, Gutenberg. Gutenberg is the inventor of the printing press. Project Gutenberg is taking all those printed books that exist in the public domain. In other words, the copyright has expired. And it is converting them into digital assets. There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of books there probably a third of the way through the world’s library if that.
When the project Gutenberg is done, we’re on the cusp of the information age, but it’s not done for now. It’s nowhere near done and was nowhere near the information age. A wise man once said, if I can find information, I can solve your problem. The reality is they can’t solve your problem. They can’t find the information because too much of it exists in human beings’ heads or on laptops or desktops or servers within organizations. Yes, the information age will be Nirvana. And I don’t mean Kurt Cobain’s band. The information age will allow us to quickly utilizing whatever device we choose to find information that we need. It will also deliver information to us so that we can consume it not one way for all to consume but many ways for all to consume. You see, information consumption is the hallmark in the bellwether of the information age!
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