Internet Information!!!!!

Internet search engines ... and internet has long arrived! I use FireFox browser specifically because I can configure different search engines with it - Google, Lonely Planet Guide, Yahoo, Wikipedia, MSN, Amazon, BBC News, Creative Commons, Dictionary, EBay, Linked In, Market Watch, Webster, Technocrati, Infoseek etc. Just use a specific search engine for specific information, otherwise just use any generic one.

Since ages, whoever had the best(?) information, ruled. He was able to establish himself as someone knowing all, someone armed and powerful with knowhow! The psyche works this way– “if you do not know something, you do not understand something”. Has it happened to you where you have sat through, just listened, kept quiet, nodded your head because you haven’t had any clue what was being told and you just had to accept whatever was told? Otherwise you may appear as clueless!!! You doubt that the person is talking no sense but you do not have information enough to say anything convincing otherwise; you may still overpower a person with your personality, but he might have had the right info and you would be wrong completely, which you as a nice person would not want to!! In both the cases, as you see, info is vital!

Information can also be misleading and extremely erroneous and hence dangerous. People still have to understand that information available over the internet is subjected to scrutiny of being authentic and truthful. In online forums, it has become a common practice these days to give facts, information from Wikipedia –but people fail to read the very first page and the disclaimer of Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
“Because Wikipedia is an ongoing work to which in principle anybody can contribute, it differs from a paper-based reference source in some very important ways. In particular, older articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while newer articles may still contain significant misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism. Users need to be aware of this in order to obtain valid information and avoid misinformation …”

Whats it for intelligence .. link between Information and Knowledge? Can Intelligence be there without knowledge? Aren’t they always evolving, and is it same for Information as well? Carl Sagan in Broca's wrote: “Most organisms on Earth depend on their genetic information, which is 'prewired' into their nervous systems, to a much greater extent than they do on their extragenetic information, which is acquired during their lifetimes. For human beings, and indeed for all mammals, it is the other way around. While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, trough our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short time scales. We have made a kind of bargain with nature: our children will be difficult to rise, but their capacity for new learning will greatly enhance the capacity for survival of the human species. In addition, human beings have, in the most recent few tenths of a percent of our existence, invented not only extragenetic but also extrasomatic knowledge; information stored outside our bodies, of which writing is the most notable example.”


Internet has given us the near endless source of this extra ‘Extrasomatic knowledge’.


I think human inquisition, investigation, rationalization, helps decide whether the info is true or can hold true; and that’s when it is passed onto his brain as knowledge.

That’s what we need to understand, Internet is a great source for information but we still must validate the correctness of the information. Hmmm ... sure! Has it not encouraged plagiarism? Reminded me of one comic incident in my old organization….

While working for a client, we were working on Capacity planning for a particular software solution implementation. For that we needed to tell the client how much hard disk space, memory and CPU usage, network bandwidth etc will be required. I prepared the document as part of our mandatory review process sent it to my superior and also reminded him to fill in some of his parts. Next day I get a mail which would give Gilbert’s classics a run. I of course could not make head or tale about it; but I was pretty sure that he could not have written that bullshit, so took the first sentence and did a google search. Bingo! The first link was for a whitepaper on Capacity planning (a PDF File). I read the first page, and it was ditto copied from there. I breathed easy because I was feeling sort of guilty of ever doubting his English!!! I of course didn’t say a single word knowing that I will never hear of it again, I finished the document myself and sent to the client.

Oh! Wonder if there is a “Internet for dummies” book! Must be sent to whoever responsible for recent blog blocking in India – to authorities, ISPs, media.