Brooders

Stumbled accross Wikipatterns recently. Nicely sponsored by and created with Confluence Wiki (Australian Software company too).

The site is worth a look into, it has many “adoption patterns” and anti-patterns (things that will kill your wiki idea!)

Another article of note is “Why People don’t use collaboration tools“. Interestingly, two things that stuck out ..

1. Most of the issues are social and communication related
2. If people are poor listeners and communicators, then an online solution may make this worse

This follows on nicely from Wikis go mainstream in Australia, which takes a look at where things have worked.

While watching a pretty cool demo of DabbleDB it occured to me that the words we use for consuming information differ on our senses. It illustrates using many sources of information, and correlating them in a more useful (to the user) context.

Some descriptions of information use bother me, services like Reddit.com, don’t really sounds right when you’ve listened to a podcast, or viewed a video.

For example:

• You’ve read a post or article
• You’ve watched a video
• You’ve listened to a podcast

I think “consumed” is a better word.

I am not saying this is the catchall which will solve all problems, but hopefully you get the idea.

How much does linguistics really count when you use a service?

When people talk about using Google they say “did you google it?”, “I googled that and found” etc etc. That works. I guess in this case, Google is both Noun and a Verb, can be used in past, present and future tense. All good.

“Email” also fits into the good service/tool name category.

• I am writing that email now
• I emailed Bob yesterday?
• Can you email me your contact details?

So, how much does the name play when you consume information? Does it change the way you think about what you’re doing?

Even the word Feeds (ala RSS, Atom, etc) conjures up the biological consumption metaphor.

Do we break down our information consumption even further:

• Skim (not necessarily consuming thoroughly)
• Consume (Item given the once over, afterthoughts, assessment and summary to follow
• Absorb (deep assessment?)
• Assess (Critically analyse?)

We have observed through Idea Virus folk like Seth Godin, that there are new rules to naming products and services. I think once they move past the what is “Google” (or any other newly named thing) to actually using it, the name becomes active. Both in it’s awareness sense in common speech, as well as how you view that service or function.

But you need to be able to say it without it sounding funny, clumsy or just stupid.

So, back to consuming information.

I think most of what we do is consume and process information.

Now this process of consuming, occurs through a tool, sometimes more than one:

E.g. You use Gmail, through firefox ,
or you read email via outlook

So how important is the name?

Not sure. It seams we are consuming through more than one sense now, so it’s no longer read, but listened or watched as well.

Cyberpunk review has posted a review of one of my favourite movies “Sneakers”.

I went to town commenting, and am including it here as well:

This is one of my favourite movies (up there with Bladerunner).

I saw this gem when I was in high school. It made a pretty good mark on me then, and when I revisited years later (about 10 or so) it was still a great film. I also struggle with the “is it cyberpunk”, but I really like yor analysis .. ubiquitous access to information, underground (maybe underdog) focus.

Interestingly, looking at this now I think the cryptographic stuff is talking about RSA encryption algorithm (Public Key, used in SSL when you log in to secure websites and other things). In the movie, it talks about only being able to crack US government crypto and not russian. The Russians do have their own crypto algorithms (GOST standard, Russian ISO equivalent) because they didn’t trust the USA ciphers during the cold war.

This rates in my book as the most realistic hacker movie out there. It encompasses the social engineering, physical and cryptographic aspects of security. They did their homework on this before making it. I guess this is a “modern day cyberpunk” .. and not a distant future, high tech dystopia .. that’s what makes it so good.

I definitely put it in the 8-9 /10 category.

Having studied cryptography at university and working for a company thay provides cryptographic software and services, I really dig the believability of what this movie is talking about. Mathematics is at the core of cryptography, but without talking too much math, they have eluded to a breakthrough in what would seem to be number factorisation. That’s the holy grail, fast large number factorisation .. because RSA is based on two prime numbers multiplied together. It’s computationaly expensive to work backwards to try and factorise it, like 100s of years. Read RSA encryption algorithm for more, better explained information about the algorithm.

Anyway .. back to the movie. The mentioned technology above just makes this believable. It was a funny movie with good dialogue, and (I think) is still watchable today. I am curious to see what someone thinks of the movie if they’ve never seen it before .. am I just remembering nostalgia?

A quote from the movie (as noted on Cyberpunk review as well):

“… I learned that everything in this world, including money, operates not on reality. — But the perception of reality.”

If you like hacker movies or conspiracy theories, this movie is defintively for you, but it still a good movie that even a non-geek can enjoy.

Rating: 8.5/10