unintended consequences for econtent

The law of unintended consequences, applied to electronic content and how it works for and against information professionals.

he creative info pro will look at any new information resource and think about how to hack, er, repurpose it for other uses. I use the search functionality of the Wayback Machine to track the emergence of a catch phrase or hot-button issue over time. eBay is a great source for images of virtually any object, as well as a way to find old (but often still useful) textbooks. And some of the Whois domain name registries can be used to glean information on emerging customer dissatisfaction by locating what are delicately called “sucks sites,” since many of the domain names are some form of ThisCompanySucks.com. [lisnews]

You do remember libraries, don’t you?

What if your search engine really worked like a librarian does?

If only the search engine could stop after a few tries and say, “hey, I’m guessing that you’re looking for something like…” You know, just like any reasonably bright librarian might. (You do remember libraries, don’t you?) Yeah, it’d probably freak some people out, but what if it actually was helpful? [thanks hanan]