Group items tagged

Last year, Google created a site called Teach Parents Tech, which allows you to put together a customized email–ostensibly for your parents–with pre-fab explanations of how to accomplish certain things. It’s a pretty useful service, frankly, and not just for parents.

1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain—"Super Thursday," last October 1—800 new works were published.

2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time.

3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less digitized. Most judicial decisions and legislation, both state and federal, have never appeared on the Web. The vast output of regulations and reports by public bodies remains largely inaccessible to the citizens it affects. Google estimates that 129,864,880 different books exist in the world, and it claims to have digitized 15 million of them—or about 12 percent.

your “social graph” could help to make sense of the web again, to access not only content, but what is relevant to you. Ben Parr asked if Google+ was a new social media platform that was bringing a innovative way to share clusters of interests.

The debate around the need of filters, and how to be sure to find the “right” information

if we can be all creators, can we all be curators? Who should be the ones in charge of it? Journalists and educators were both examples of natural curators according to Burt Herman and Guillaume Decugis.