Takahashi: A Filter for the Tech World
By Dean Takahashi, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.
Nov. 15–We all have ways of filtering out information.
For years, I haven’t followed professional sports. I would watch the Super Bowl on TiVo to see the ads, or look at who won the World Series just to avoid embarrassment. But beyond stealing sports analogies on occasion (a Hail Mary play), I deleted pro sports from my brain.
It was one way of coping with the flood of information that I have had to track over more than a decade as a chip, hardware and video games writer. When I first came to Silicon Valley 12 years ago, our now-former columnist Mike Langberg warned me about the “news fire hose.”
Technology and information have exploded. In 1994, there were only a few million Internet users. Now there are a billion. Back then, I bought a $2,000 personal computer to run cool shooting games like “Doom.” Today, I play Doom on a cell phone. Visionaries talked about “intelligent agent” software that could understand what you wanted and effortlessly find it. Today, search engines such as Google can instantly sift through billions of Web pages.
But those engines don’t always deliver what you want.
The new vision is the semantic Web, a filtered Internet where you ask a question in plain language and it delivers the answer, just as a faithful servant could do. Technologies such as the Web Fountain data-mining tool — developed at the IBM Almaden Research Center amid the rolling hills of San Jose — are extracting meaning from data, whether it comes from blogs, chat rooms, or Web pages. (By the way, this is a good place to remind everyone that the initials for HAL, the rogue computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” precede the letters IBM in the alphabet).
Before racks of computers in IBM’s basement replace me altogether, I’d like to play the role of a human filter. As a columnist, my aim is to help you navigate the dizzying changes in technology, expose you to emerging technologies, and provide useful information about the technology that pervades daily life.
So much is changing that it’s hard to keep up. The pace of change. The amount of information. It’s still on overload. If you filter out too much, you may be blinding yourself to something really important. Peripheral vision can be vital.
Every now and then, some creative person helped me remove my own filters and introduced me to something new.
Shedding my skin as an objective news reporter and becoming a columnist voicing opinions is a big change for me. It’s a little like taking off a pair of black sunglasses and being blinded by the flood of light. And then putting on a pair of green sunglasses to see the same thing in a different way.
On Mondays, I’ll be reviewing gadgets and tech services aimed at consumers. That will help me unlock my inner geek. I hope to write these columns in a way that helps you filter out the dreck and become a good consumer. I’ll try to focus on what is useful as well as cool.
On Thursdays, I’ll write commentary on subjects that span technology. And online, I’ll continue with my Dean & Nooch gaming blog and podcast, which I do in conjunction with my colleague Mike Antonucci. And later I plan to start a blog that lets us discuss general column and product review topics in a more interactive fashion.
I’m counting on your feedback to make these columns better. I took to heart an observation from David Kelley, the head of the design school at Stanford University and co-founder of Ideo. The flaw in journalism, he thought, is that so few people read a story and offer feedback on it before it gets published. I hope to solicit ideas on topics I plan to write about, like whether video formats Blu-ray or HD-DVD — or the old fashioned VCR — will prevail.
If you have feedback on my columns or suggestions for future topics, send me an e-mail at dtakahashi@mercurynews.com. If I do my job right, as have some of the columnists that have come before me like Mike Langberg and Dan Gillmor, I’ll help you filter out the chaff and we’ll learn together. But first, please tell me what you’d like me to write about. And no, I’m not going to write about sports.
Contact Dean Takahashi at dtakahashi@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5739.
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Copyright (c) 2006, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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