The End of Paper.

As a news consumer I believe we are witnessing the end of printed-paper both in journalism and in published books. In 50 years time I think there will be a major decline in printed material and the vast majority will consume news on the Internet.

Why?

First of all updated data is more accessible today. According to the latest sales estimates made by the technology analysts at Gartner, 25% of sold cellphones in Q2 of 2011 were smartphones, which is an increase of 8% from last year. This indicates that very soon most of the society will own a smartphone and will be within a reach of Internet, receiving news directly to their phones. The Internet will always be more up-to-date than any printed-paper – once you print it, it becomes old news. Add tablets to the equation, which become more and more popular, it becomes even more convenient to consume news in other forms different than paper. These devices have one more advantage over paper – they digest the news for the consumer. It’s true that newspaper can adopt this feature and change their way of thinking about printing. But, why would you print something that at the minute you print it becomes irrelevant?

Second, with the environmental movement people are less keen to print paper and prefer reading online. When you hear that there is limited amount of resources in this world, you feel obligated to preserve trees and forests and think twice before you buy a newspaper.

Third, our society has changed. The end user is accustomed to reacts and responds to what he reads. It is much harder to respond to a newspaper than it is to news online. “The Web is the ultimate marketplace where ideas as well as goods and services are exchanged.” Said Lewis DVorkin (the Chief Product Officer of Forbes Media). On the web the reader can easily connect with the author, while in the newspaper you cannot.

Does it mean it’s the end of journalism?

I believe that it’s not the end of journalism. People still look for credible and authoritative data. It’s true that blogs by “common” people have become a real competition to journalists, but in my opinion there’s room for everyone on the web. I know that most journalists won’t agree with me, but I think it’s a healthy competition. Journalists have skills, which give them an advantage when trying to look more appealing to the mass. In addition, there is still added value to investigative journalism, that will very unlikely be replaced by unskilled bloggers.

What is there to do?

Like Dave Winer mentioned in his blog post “Readings from news execs”, I think most news executives are only just starting to understand that if they don’t do something quick, they will lose money. Uploading a webpage with the name of your newspaper is simply not enough to save this industry from dying.

Newspaper should start thinking about business model that will allow them to make profit from publishing content online, like the WSJ that charges a fee for every article. AdSense by Google is a great example of how to make money online with customized advertisement.

More and more journalists are starting a blog – we saw an example with Sharesleuth – understanding the advantages of web2.0 and embracing them to attract more traffic to their sites. Forbes has recently launched a new website, recognizing the importance of embracing the web advantages and the society needs instead of ignoring it. Forbes.com incentivizes experienced and knowledgeable content creators to build audiences around their own individually branded pages.

I hope more and more newspapers will change their perception regarding the Internet and either follow Forbes or find new ways to attract people to their website while making profit.

I leave you with this video that foresee a very scary future to newspapers in case they will not change their way of thinking: http://idorosen.com/mirrors/robinsloan.com/epic/

Materialized Views – My First Wikipedia Evaluation

Introduction:

When I finished my BA, I started working as a DBA. I hated it at first. Dealing with the infrastructure wasn’t for me. But then I got familiar with PL/SQL (the programming language in Oracle Database) and I fell in love. I enjoyed writing queries, finding why they take too much time and manipulating data using the PL/SQL. After 3 years being a DBA, I became the head of the department. 2 years later I left the department and became a head of a development department, managing IT projects end-to-end. Years after I left the database department, people still came to me to receive advices regarding queries and tables structure. I always found time to answer their questions and give advice.

When I got the assignment of evaluating a Wikipedia article my husband reminded me how much I love it and I decided to evaluate the “database” article. But reviewing it, I understood this subject is too broad and looked for something more specific in the database world. I came across “Materialized Views”, which is poorly written and doesn’t give enough information on the subject.

The evaluation:

▪   Comprehensiveness:
If I wasn’t familiar with the concept of Materialized Views, I don’t know if this article would have helped me get a better understating of the concepts behind it and what is the mechanism of this feature.
This article doesn’t explain what’s the primary use of materialized views, when to use it and doesn’t elaborate on the pros and cons of it.

▪   Sourcing:
The references in this article are not up-to-date. While Oracle had released Oracle 11i a few years ago, the only reference from it relates to its 8i documentation. The same applies to SQL Server that its latest version is 2008 R2 and the article refers to the 2005 documentation.
In addition to the current of the references, I feel that because the origin of the references is mainly commercial (Documentations from Oracle, Microsoft and Sybase), it lacks some intellectual perspective. There are some great books that relate to this subject, like: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=4157&ttype=2 that could be added to the list and will give it the necessary credibility.

▪   Neutrality:
The article does state all the main database products that are on the market, which implement materialized views. But it only gives the syntax in Oracle database. Since the article doesn’t say much on materialized views, I find it hard to estimate its neutrality.

▪   Readability:
I felt the article is readable, but not very organized as some other articles in Wikipedia. I couldn’t follow the train of thought of this article and it feels unprofessional. It’s as if the person who wrote it hoped that this would be a trigger for someone else to expand it and organize it.

▪   Formatting:
The article is mostly well formatted. However, in the article there is a syntax example of how to create a materialized view in Oracle Database that is not in accordance to the Wikipedia Manual of Style. The syntax is written in capital letters, which is the convention in Oracle Documentation. From what I read in the Wikipedia Manual of Style, it should have been written in Italic letters, because this is a citation. The manual is specifically asks to avoid writing with all capitals. In addition, since this is a citation from Oracle Documentation it should be stated and refer to the documentation link, which it doesn’t.

▪   Illustrations:
The article is not illustrated at all. There is no picture/diagram attached to this article. A short search on the web drew a large amount of pictures that illustrate the mechanism behind materialized views and what happens behind the scenes in the sense of query rewrites.

Conclusion:

The article is not as good as most of the articles in Wikipedia. “Materialized Views” is part of the WikiProject Computing and it is rated as “Stub-Class” on the project’s quality scale, which means it provides very little meaningful content. The low standard of this article made me think maybe I should take the leap and rewrite it….

This is my user page on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Doritlz

Is Google the right workplace for me?

“Aim high, get higher results” is the key point to every successful negotiation. I think that’s the essence of Google. Steven Levy writes in his book “In the Plex” about Larry Page “Ask him to consider a toothpick, and right away, he was thinking about a forest”. This motif rises in every decision the company had to make in the last decade. The book “In the Plex” tells the story of Google and it’s founders: Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It starts in the early days at Stanford, continues to the short period at the garage having 5 employees and ends up in recent time employing 25,000 workers worldwide. In this book Steven Levy discusses the conflicts the company had to deal with in the last decade and which decisions, both technological (which hardware to use, the birth of Gmail and android) and financial (how to make money, how to sell ads, Google’s IPO and the attempt to conquer the Chinese search market), did it take.

Every computer engineer wants to work for Google.  Google is the pantheon of the computer engineers. Google, up until recently, was considered anti-institutional, young, creative, light and “want to make the world a better place” workplace. Google is the opposite of Microsoft, which is considered evil, institutional and very old-fashioned. If you get into Google it means you’re special. It means you’re not only very smart, it also means you have some kind of special quality that made them choose you. Being accepted to Google lets you work with the elite of the industry. The benefits that come with working in Google are also making it a very desirable place to work. With great restaurants inside Google campus, the amazing workplace with videogames, a gym and of course getting one day a week to explore your creativity. In addition to all that you get to work with people in the scale of Amit Patel and Urs Hölzle. Working in Google you can really make a difference, or at least this is the axiom. Your ideas are being heard at Google (if you stalk Page or Brin) and Google, with the search engine and the ads, is shaping people’s opinion.

However, from reading this book I couldn’t help thinking that this company is a little immature in the way it is being managed. It seems as if decisions are being taken arbitrary and that there’s no agenda behind this company. They started as a company obsessed with data but then went and bought Android, which I really didn’t understand why. I got the sense that it’s a bit chaotic over there. A bottom-up management style is a very positive thing, which keeps Google relevant brining new and fresh ideas, but I believe it has to be combined with top-level guidance, which is a little more specific than “Don’t be evil”. Spreading all over is making Google a lot of enemies in the industry. I think that having 25000 workers and shifting rapidly from a not profitable company to the most successful Internet company in the world changed Google’s features and made it less desirable for computer engineers to come and work for it. Now it’s not about the data, it’s about the ads. As for the benefits, it seems like a golden cage – we’ll give you all these benefits so you wouldn’t have to get outside the Google campus. Google is the center of your life and there’s nothing that you really need on the outside world.

Do I still want to work at Google? Yes.
Do I want to work there as much as before? No.

Blogs. A waste of time?

I think social tools are a waste of time. I’m a computer science undergrad. I have a Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts, but I consider myself as a consumer of these tools and rarely contribute something, never even thought about writing a blog.  I find most of these tools to be filled with drivel. The book “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky made me doubt this observation. This book summarizes the effect social tools, like e-mails, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc., has on us as a society and shows how these tools changes the way we react, the way we communicate with one another and most important it decreases the transaction cost, helping us do things we couldn’t have done not so long ago. The book demonstrates how social tools make it easier to coordinate individuals, which leads to sharing, collaborations and collective actions.

I was extremely amazed by the amount and variety of examples in this book exhibiting how ordinary people managed to make a difference and actually change the course of events. Two examples that astonished me the most were those when people managed to fight bureaucracy and big institutions, even though they didn’t study at the Harvard Kennedy School.  The first example is The Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) case, who managed to convince the church to reform itself. The second example is the one, in which Trent Lott, a senior senator and the majority leader has resigned from his positions due to amateur bloggers and commentators who criticized his racist remarks. These examples could only happen since the social tools lowered the transaction cost of aggregating and managing individuals. In addition, most of these individuals only had to make a small contribution to get the wanted effect.

As an IT software project manager, I had to deal with some of the questions that are mentioned in this book – What is the right promise to my customers? What are the most effective tools that approach that promise? What bargain should I offer them?  The questions I asked myself are the same questions that arise when trying to assess which social tool will succeed and will affect our culture. Reading this book I realized I was bound to the concepts of the old technology world, where the interactions between people were limited – I didn’t want to consider using an open source application server, I didn’t introduced enough collaboration and sharing between my software’s users and I didn’t take advantage of the online tools.

As the world is evolving, I now understand I can’t stand aside. After being exposed to the advantages of using social tools, I came to the conclusion I need to change my way of thinking, open up to these new technologies and learn how to implement them for the benefit of my customers. I realize that even though not many people will read this blog and it probably won’t change the world, it is my small contribution to this community.