Sunday, December 25, 2005
"The Information Economy" by Carl Shapiro
Now that information is available so quickly, so ubiquitously, and so inexpensively, it is not surprising that everyone is complaining of information overload. Nobel prize winning economist Herbert Simon spoke for us all when he said that " a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention".
The real value of produced by an information provider comes in locating, filtering, and communicating what is useful to the consumer. It is no accieent that the most popular Webnsites belong to the search engines, those devices that allow people to find information they value and to avoid the rest. The Net allows information vendors to move from the conventional broadcase form of advertisisng to one-to0one marketing. Web servers can observe the behavious of millions of customers and immediately produce customised content, bundled with customised ads.
The faxct is, the web isn't all that impressive as an information resource. The static, publicly accessible HTML text on the web is roughly equivalent in size to 1.5 millions books,. If 10% of the material on the Web is "useful", there are about 150,000 useful books-queivalents on it, which is about the size ofa superstore. But the actual figure for " useful " is probably more like 1%, which is 15,000 books or half the size of an average mall bookstore. The value of the Web lies in its capacity to provide immediate access to information.
Amazon link for Carl Shapiro's book : " Information rules ; a strategic guide to net economy " here :
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000051X17/qid=1135526895/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-6198030-2943218?v=glance&s=books
The real value of produced by an information provider comes in locating, filtering, and communicating what is useful to the consumer. It is no accieent that the most popular Webnsites belong to the search engines, those devices that allow people to find information they value and to avoid the rest. The Net allows information vendors to move from the conventional broadcase form of advertisisng to one-to0one marketing. Web servers can observe the behavious of millions of customers and immediately produce customised content, bundled with customised ads.
The faxct is, the web isn't all that impressive as an information resource. The static, publicly accessible HTML text on the web is roughly equivalent in size to 1.5 millions books,. If 10% of the material on the Web is "useful", there are about 150,000 useful books-queivalents on it, which is about the size ofa superstore. But the actual figure for " useful " is probably more like 1%, which is 15,000 books or half the size of an average mall bookstore. The value of the Web lies in its capacity to provide immediate access to information.
Amazon link for Carl Shapiro's book : " Information rules ; a strategic guide to net economy " here :
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000051X17/qid=1135526895/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-6198030-2943218?v=glance&s=books
