The future has barely begun.

[Matthew X]

Confessions of an information junkie
By Graeme Philipson
August 20 2002
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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 at philipson.info
http://theage.com.au/articles/2002/08/17/1029114033294.html