Archive for October, 2011

Can’t they read?!

Posted on October 28th, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

The intent of email is to facilitate communication. Right? So – someone mails me to ask to meet Tuesday. I send a reply: I can’t meet  Face to Face that day, so let’s do it by phone – can you do it at 3 PM? The reply I get says: If it’s FTF I can’t, can we do it on the phone? This happens all the time: you explicitly write something – and your correspondent acts as if it weren’t there. Can’t they read?! Truth is, they can read all right, but they have so many emails, so little time,.. Read more

Happy Information Overload Awareness Day!

Posted on October 19th, 2011 · Posted in Uncategorized

Every year in October Basex, a New York based analyst company that is very active in the war on Info Overload, announces the observance of the worldwide Information Overload Awareness Day. This holiday, which is sponsored by our Information Overload Research Group, may not cure the problem that is exacting a growing toll on the effectiveness and sanity of knowledge workers worldwide, but it is a way to give some reach to the message that something needs to be done about it! This year the day is Thursday, Oct. 20, and I urge you to devote some time during that.. Read more

Bye bye, E!

Posted on October 12th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

The letter “e” has become a central symbol of the internet age, along with the once obscure “@” glyph. We have it prefixed to all sorts of old words, from Commerce to Bay, from Business to Book… and of course, to Mail, giving us what remains possibly the most  useful online tool yet devised: email. But things change, and the venerable “e” is beginning to slip. I notice that more and more young people drop the “e” and just say “mail”  without even realizing the ambiguity this introduces – their generation’s experience with paper-in-envelope mail is so scanty that they.. Read more

They’re taking over! (In a good way)

Posted on October 3rd, 2011 · Posted in Off-topic

So we’ve made the switch back from Daylight Saving Time yesterday at 2AM, and like every year I got up in the morning and made the round of the house to set all clocks, watches, computers and other devices one hour back. This is always a bore – there are so many time-aware contraptions in a typical home… But this time I noticed one new thing – about half of these contraptions did not need resetting. The computers changed their time on their own (seems trivial to you folks elsewhere, but in Israel the changeover date follows the Jewish calendar.. Read more