Confessions of an information junkie By Graeme Philipson August 20 2002 Next Nearly a decade after the Internet entered my life, it continues to amaze me. I remain astonished at the sheer volume of information it contains and the ease with which that information can be accessed. I am an information junkie. It has got to the stage where I cannot imagine life without the Web. People sometimes e-mail me and ask me where they can find out information on various things. I invariably tell them just to do an Internet search, usually with Google, which is the best of the search engines, but there are lots of others too. My second favourite is Anzwers, because I often need to know specifically Australian things. Engines that aggregate the results of other engines, such as Dogpile, are also useful. We all have our favourite websites. Mine is AnalystViews. It is run by a fellow in Connecticut called Jim Zimmermann, and it has only been going a few months. It aggregates and provides pointers to all the free content from more than a hundred IT analyst groups around the world. All these companies give away a bit of their information in the hope it will entice you to buy some of the stuff they charge for. Much of the free stuff is very useful. When you add it all together, it's invaluable. Zimmermann's site, which includes a free weekly newsletter, is an amazing resource for anyone interested in trends in the IT industry. Another good site with an astounding amount of free IT information is ITpapers, which was recently bought by CNet. ITpapers is a portal to so-called "white papers", which are semi-technical documents published by computer suppliers to explain the background to their products. White papers are marketing tools but are usually written in a style that is meant to be objective, and they often contain extremely useful material. I get quite a few e-mailed newsletters about various aspects of the IT industry. Some are free, some I pay for. But I also get some outside of IT. I devour my daily cricket news from Cric Info. I get my word a day from Wordsmith.org. Because I am such a surfer, I get spammed relentlessly. It is a small price to pay for the benefits of e-mail, truly the Web's killer application. E-mail suits my way of working to a T. I work from home and venture into the city only occasionally, and it is the main way I keep in touch with clients and associates around the world. I have really noticed in the past year or two how the telephone has dropped off in importance for many business functions. I get a lot of e-mails as author of this column, but before e-mail was common, I was lucky to get one letter a week. I got a note they other day from a reader suggesting that the benefits of the Internet age were overrated. I asked him why he had e-mailed his letter instead of posting it. The amazing thing about all this is that we have barely scratched the surface. We are still at the very early stage of the Internet. We will look back in 10 years and think how primitive all this was. High bandwidth will introduce many new applications. So will the Semantic Web. And Web services. And wireless. The future has barely begun. graeme@philipson.info http://theage.com.au/articles/2002/08/17/1029114033294.html