Octavian

I was surfing on the web searching for ideas for making a website. I got on a commercial website where you had to pay for listening to some music. I found also a cool application in flash with which you can type in a band or a singer, and you would get as an result, a network of artists related to the one you are searching for, each artist in a circle (with a dimension accordingly his importance)  united through lines. I became curious to find out from where does this application get the data. I got to find out it was actually the same thing with a free flash application from somebody else, but with now references. That wasn’t enough for me, so after I decompiled the flash file, i actually saw that the request where made to amazon. From which i observed the application was building the artists network by finding things that people bought on amazon. I find it amazing what you can do if you have all the information you need under your nose.

I remember my grandmother saying that in her times not everybody could read or write, so they didn’t have access to much information or knowledge. Nowadays you cann access a lot of information from everywhere and about almoust anything.You could find out what Angelina Jolie was wearing at the awards gala yesterday, what car Elton John drives, the weather for the next 48 hours, where your car was yesterday (through GPS), what you have bought in the last 20 years using your credit card. It is amazing how the technology has evolved and that you can gather  personal information about other persons, possible also invading their privacy.

I think we are facing a new era, because it is  not so important to have the information but to know where to find it and what to do with it.  An other question would be, could you face it? What would you do if you know you will have one more week to live? Or you know every detail what the people think about you, or that your boyfriend/girlfriend is cheating on you. I think in these cases you should see what options you have and take a decision.

I find it also important to forecast things that might happen according to the things you know now. For example what if you knew before you bought the car, that they are going to be 10% cheaper in two months?

All in all, I think the value of raw information is much less than the informations gathered from more sources and on it build something new with inovating functions. And people are focused more on what decisions to take according to the information gathered.