Dissemination of Information

This was a response to a post I read on Business Evolutionist

I see two issues here: The Movies/Music on demand and the organization and dissemination of information.

Movies and Music

Recently I got a wild hair and bought a small 250 Gig hard drive to store all my media files on. This included my digital photography, my music, videos, DVD movies and backup files. I encoded all my DVD using the DIVX and XIVD codec’s. After copying everything onto the new hard drive, I installed it in my computer.. So how often do I watch the movies? How about never.. Even though I have full length good quality movies at my fingertips I don’t watch them.

Maybe it’s because I can watch them anytime I want, so I never watch them. Are movies on demand going to work? Maybe, but I won’t watch movies because they are available.

The point of the movie theater is the movie show for a limited time. So people race down to see the movie before they are replaced with new ones..

Organization and Dissemination of Information

MPV is a good idea, but it has a couple flaws.. adding database like attributes to the file is a great idea, Microsoft is doing something similar with the next version of WinFS. But who is going to maintain this data? Is there going to be a master registry like CDDC?

I was reading an article http://boxesandarrows.com/ about CMS’s (Content Management System). It talks about the flow of information and how to design a website to align with your business processes. This way the information stays inline with the company’s goals. Otherwise information, becomes redundant unorganized and drifts apart from what the organization is doing and what the website is saying.

A thread at Sitepoint talks about using “I” and “b” tags verses “em” and “strong” tags. Both offer the same visual effect: bold and italics – these designers in the discussion were missing the big picture. Their main focus is on presentation, not dissemination of information. The point of markup is to add structure and meaning to an otherwise non-structured document. Visual presentation is secondary to this!

Information overload has recently become a huge problem. How does one optimize their search to find exactly what they want without missing any of the best possibilities? Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search are battling to do this with the internet.

Dissemination of Information all starts with the layout and flow of the information. If all the proper tags are used in a HTML document, it brings a lot of meaning to the document. If not it’s just another mess of words posted on the internet that will be lost to information overload. The same applies to my music collection; I could have dumped a couple thousand music files all in one folder. Or by creating a folder called “Music” and then creating sub-folders according to genre I can index my music and know what I have without listening to each song.