Mar 18
Mar 18
I just finished The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman and have to say its a bit of a mixed bag. First, I found the book to be over-long, especially since the entire premise of the book in presented in the rather verbose introduction and then slowly tortured for the next four hundred pages or so.
Granted, some of what follows serves to expound on some of his introductory points but frequently it ranges into breathless, almost infomercial prose about certain big corporations that the author loves to name drop again and again and again.
In later chapters he starts ranging more into politics and this is were he starts to get both annoying and contradictory.
First he posits that no two countries participating in a global supply chain would dare go to war with each other. Really. I guess he missed the part where the US attacked Iraq, nominally over oil supplies (that the US wants to control). It seems the current (US) thinking is to go to war in order to control a global supply chain and not to protect it.
Next he spends an inordinate amount of time slagging off Islamic countries and enumerating their perceived shortcomings with various economic figures and assertions. Thomas, I’d be interested to hear those same numbers for Israel, as well. How many new patents are created there per year? What is their GDP growth? How does it compare to other countries in the region? With Europe? If the constant loans from the US are any indication, probably not well. My point is that he needs to be careful about where he shines his spotlight and to do it evenly and without bias.
It is also curious in this discussion that there is no mention of Turkey and the reforms that Attaturk put into place after the second world war. Granted, Turkey is not exactly a world economic powerhouse, but they have gone a long way toward separating religion from the government and economy. Also, I note that toward the end of the book he’s back to swooning over the high tech situation in Malaysia (an Islamic country), where is laptop coincidently was built.
And speaking of the laptop, did we really need the tedious two page recounting of where every part in his laptop might have come from? I could have done without it.
Finally, the assertion that anyone who is concerned about the side effects of globalization (pollution, natural resource over-consumption, etc) is a ‘socialist’, ‘communist’ or ‘Trotskyist’ is gratuitous and something that I would expect more from Fox News than an even handed discussion regarding globalization.
Overall, I found this book overly long and ponderously presented. It would have made a very nice short essay (preferably without the race-baiting and political posturing).
technorati tags: books, globalization, technology, economics
Mar 18
There has been a lot of discussion about some new features that have been added to Rojo, an online feed reader. One feature getting the most buzz is the ‘new’ relevance feature.
I don’t get it. For one, I have been a Rojo user since the shuttering of the excellent Searchfox, and I have had a ‘by relevance’ option for months. It was never clear exactly how ‘relevance’ was being determined, if at all. In response to a comment that I posted on techcrunch someone pointed me to this write up on readwriteweb that includes the following:
First, the purpose of “relevance” is to do for feed reading what smart search engines (like Google) do for search results — figure out what to put on the front page. Many readers are overwhelmed by the number of new stories coming from their feeds every day. So Rojo Relevance is about sorting those by “relevance” rather than date, to put the good stuff on top.
So basically, as Rojo defines it, relevance is absolutely useless to me and should more accurately be called ‘popularity’. I want it to be relevant to what I am interested in, not the beauty contest/what-everybody-else-is-reading dogpile. That represents value to me.
I’ll say it again: that was the beauty of Searchfox: it paid attention to what I read and ordered my river of news according to that, so that everytime I sat down to read, I was greeted with what I wanted to read first. Searchfox also was smart enough to mark a page of links as read as I advanced pages; this way, if I was interrupted in reading, I could simply hit refresh and get any new postings as well as the unread ones from my previous session. Apparently this is a very difficult concept for Rojo and others to understand and implement.
Can someone please implement a real relevance ranking in a feed reader and not another implementation of digg?
technorati tags: rojo, feedreader, searchfox, relevance, attention
