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METAFORIX MAIL Volume 1, Issue 19 December 5, 2000 CONTENTS AT A GLANCE: ON MY MIND: Technology
Glitches
ON MY MIND [From the Editor] Technology Glitches "Glitch" is a generous euphemism for the technology hell I've experienced over the past two weeks. . Apart from the occasional respite in airport lounges and jam-packed coach compartments, it feels as though I've spent my entire life on tech support lines. I've listened to classical piano concertos, heavy metal, and 1940s jazz while waiting to be transferred to the next cheery but completely clueless support representative, only to be transferred again. Suffice it to say that the brevity of this column reflects the severity of the curses inflicted most recently by the technology gods. More next time. Cordially, Lois C.
Ambash, Editor
IN THE MEDIA [a recent news article, feature, or opinion piece] "My Fake
Job," by Rodney Rothman We usually limit "In the Media" to items that can be located online -- either in their original incarnation or as replications of text or programming from other media. This time, we can't resist a story that can be found only in your local library. The November 27 issue of The New Yorker -- one of a very few popular magazines that resists posting its content online -- features a series of articles on "The Digital Age." Rodney Rothman's article is the true story of how he went to work at dotcom company without ever having been hired. He just showed up one day, concocted a fake identity and parked himself at an empty desk. He appeared at the office daily for three weeks, until the sight of his name in the office phone directory told him it was time to move on. I hope you'll seek out this very amusing take on the surreal world of work in at least some outposts of the New Economy. But remember, it exists only in an old medium and you'll have to stay in the world of bricks and mortar if you want to find it. INFORMATICON Malcolm Gladwell's "Biography of an Idea" "The Tipping Point" is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do. . . . "Three characteristics -- one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment -- are the same three principles that define how measles moves through a grade-school classroom or the flu attacks every winter. Of the three, the third trait -- the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment -- is the most important, because it is the principle that makes sense of the first two and that permits the greatest insight into why modern change happens the way it does. The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point." Cyberspeak
"Web Bugs" Pixel tags are tiny pieces of code that can be embedded in e-mail messages to tell the sender when (or whether) the message is retrived and how many times the message is reopened. Marketers call these of code "pixel tags" -- but privacy advocates refer to them as web bugs and predict that they will inevitably be used to track the recipient's other Web activities. According to Richard M. Smith of the Privacy Foundation, "You can buy 50,000 addresses of people who subscribe to The New Yorker. But you don't know what articles they've been reading in it, or what books they've bought or what medical problems they've been researching lately. That's very much a possibility within this technology." Others liken web bugs to a notification system that would alert someone who leaves a message on your answering machine as soon as you listen to the message. Source: The New York Times, 11/22/00. SITE OF THE DAY [a nice place to visit] A Great New Search Tool Whatever your favorite search engine, it can be frustrating to enter a search query and retrieve a long, unsorted list of results. Vivisimo, a free search tool still in beta testing (still being fine tuned before its formal release), goes a long way toward resolving the problem. Vivisimo lets you select one or more favorites among several popular search engines. The results of your search are returned in two forms: the typical list, along with a sorted list organized into folders. The folders greatly speed the process of locating the specific information you need. Vivisimo has an attractive, customizable page layout. It's free, fast, and fun. To try it, go to www.vivisimo.com.
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Volume 1, Issue 18 November
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