[Sigia-l] Product for "automated information qualification"?!

[Steven Champeon]

on Fri, Sep 06, 2002 at 10:02:26AM -0400, Louis Rosenfeld wrote:
> I'm with Fred: these sort of claims annoy the hell out of me. But in
> the long run, tool vendors are actually helping IAs by investing
> marketing dollars in the same problem space that we are trying to
> reach. The rising tide of information overload awareness should raise
> our boat, especially if we can combine our human input with these cool
> new tools.

I wish I could be as optimistic as Lou is here, but don't forget the
other risk - backlash from people who've been sold a bill of goods by
unscrupulous thieves and who will then associate any such claims with
deceit, rather than waste time differentiating between the thieves and
the honest folks.

Remember how "push technology" (a misleading term from the beginning, as
it was just scheduled pull) was supposed to help us manage information
overload? And how once sysadmins noticed all it did was flood networks
with redundant crud and advertising, and it was pointed out to executives
that stuff like Pointcast only ran on /idle/ machines, thereby assuring
that their employees would only use it when they /weren't working/, it
died a quiet death?

Well, except for email, of course. The spammers seem to enjoy push.

Steve,
back to lurking now

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