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…It’s How You Use It

Not A Pretty Librarian has kicked things off well with a first post titled “It Is Not A Tool,” covering an argument about which has more value to a teenager: a car or a computer.

On one side is the notion that “She can’t drive herself to work with a computer.” While, on the other side is the growing likelihood that she won’t drive to work at all, but instead simply work at whatever computer she has available. But then, this is a teenager, and maybe practical matters like work don’t top the list. And that’s where Not A Pretty Librarian (who are you?) asks:

Can you imagine being nineteen right now without computer access?

Indeed, when college students are spending so much time on AIM and logging into Facebook daily, is a car really as important as a computer in a teenager’s social life? When 89 percent of students start their research in a search engine, isn’t the computer more important than a car to get to the library?

The Google Economy Will Beat You With A Stick

Call it a law, or dictum, or just a big stick, but it goes like this:

The value and influence of an idea or piece of information is limited by the extent that the information provider has embraced the Google Economy; unavailable or unfindable information buried on the second or tenth page of search results might as well be hidden in a cave.

The Google Economy — The Wikipedia Entry

I’m rather passionate about the Google Economy, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to learn that I just wrote about it in my first ever Wikipedia entry. Here it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_economy “Google Economy” identifies the concept that the value of a resource can be determined by the way that resource is linked […] » about 600 words

The Google Economy

I’ve been talking about it a lot lately, most recently in a comment at LibDev. In the old world, information companies could create value by limiting access to their content. Most of us have so internalized this scarcity = value theory that we do little more than grumble about the New York Times’ authwall or […] » about 400 words