Pew Internet & American Life Project Report: Search engine use
"Search engine use shoots up in the past year and edges towards email as the primary internet application."
Thanks to Ulla McGee and Bruce McCurdy at PCWorld.com for the pointer. While there may be a bit of a "duh!" reaction to the insight that search engine usage is soaring — up 23% year to year — the takeaway is that email is no longer the vaunted "killer app."
Ross Mayfield’s Weblog: The End of Process
A brilliant post on the pernicious P-word, Process, which yields the wonderful quote from Clay Shirky: "Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity."
I offer my own, cribbed from a column from the old Industry Standard, author unknown as the @#$^@$% archives are nowhere to be found and are probably moldering somewhere on a server, unspidered and lost. Anyway, that column had the line: "Process is for people who get out of the shower to take a piss."
"A process is like a standard. It provides a common definition for others to build upon. This is generally a good thing. In technical systems it helps resolve complexity so higher order abstractions can keep things simple. But even in technical systems, efficiency comes at a cost of adaptation. In social systems, especially where not everyone helps design what they participate in, the constraints against adaptation are compounded."
