Saturday, April 30, 2005
11:12 AM

I am an information glutton, and so are you.: "They say we're living in the Information Age. I think they're right - whoever 'they' are. Before the Information Age, we had the Computer Age, and a long time before that was the Ice Age. Anyway, the term has really come into its own in the last couple of years, especially, I would say, with the advent of Google and with it, the requisite improvement in the retrieval of information. I am a Google fanboy, but this piece isn't about Google or any other singular entity because they are just small players in the part of a much larger game, though I do refer to them quite a lot.Google didn't invent web search, but they re-invented it by extracting more relevant results for a given search query by re-examining the way relevance works. The result was that almost anyone could find information about almost anything so long as they had a computer and could access the Internet. The term 'information age' was applied before it was entirely true. Since the term became common in the late 1970s, the world has slowly moved toward ubiquitous information permeation. Since then, the things that we have information on have multiplied. We now have information about information, often to several layers of abstraction so that a more useful picture can be seen."

(Via Kuro5hin.org.)