I get a fair amount of useful information off of my twitter feed — in fact it is often more informative than the RSS newsfeeds I follow.  But Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and the rest of the live streaming applications share a common problem.  If you want to refer back to something that floated by several days, weeks or months ago you are pretty much out of luck.   The noise factor is not an issue when monitoring the stream live.  I mean sure, there is plenty of noise, but it is easy enough to filter it out as the garbage floats by.  But try to dig through items from the past and the noise quickly overwhelms.  Anyone got an answer?  Or is do we just need to accept that we must leave the past behind — even if it is digital?

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Starting sometime early next year the New York Times will start charging for content on its web site.  Is this the start of a new internet business model, or the last gasp of a dying industry?  Times will tell (pun intended).  But it seems to me that they are on the right track.  The charge will only affect more active site visitors, who presumably see value in the content and would be willing to pay for that.  Occasional site visitors won’t need to pay.  Makes sense, but how do you track this?  Will those casual visitors still need to log-in somehow?  Enter your email here?  Or maybe limit how many articles can be viewed from an IP address in a day?   It will be interesting to see how they pull this off without scaring users away.

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I attended an Apple sponsored presentation yesterday on using the Xcode IDE to build iPhone and iTouch apps.  It was a very well done presentation, and had me almost ready to rush out and buy a Macbook and iTouch to get started building cool apps — certainly easy to see why Apple App building has become such a popular past time (and big money maker for Apple).

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Today’s New York Times has an article on what programmers are doing with government data — it is great to see the value creativity can create out of something as mundane as reams of government data.  StumbleSafely suggests safe routes home for DC residents based on crime statistics — Routesy is an iPhone app for transit schedules in San Francisco.  Much of this data has been available publicly for years, but not in a format that was readily accessed.  But services like DataSF and Data.gov are changing that, and opening the door for creativity.  What about in your company?  Is it easy to get at various data sets, or are they locked up behind proprietary and departmental walls?  Unfortunately all too often I see more of the latter than the former.   Technology isn’t the problem here — making data should not require a lot of technical work.  What it takes is a committment to the process, and trust in the benefits of openness over the tradition of hording information.  Information = power?  How about openness = innovation?  And builds value many times more valuable than the old way.

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A recent Baseline article starts with the tag line “Global enterprises must develop a business process framework to ensure the success of collaboration technology implementations.”  Overall the article makes a number of good points — but it also left me feeling a little uneasy.  The whole social networking/collaboration workspace seems so dynamic I wonder if the typical time cycles of an enterprise decision process can keep pace with rapid technology growth and end-user expectations.

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In a recent post and at a session at last weekend’s WordCamp NYC Jim Groom questions how much commercialization belongs in the WordPress community.  A post on the WPMU.ORG blog, holds that WordPress’ future is in premium, purchased plug-ins, a point Jim takes great exception to.  He points out that the strength and quality of WordPress is a direct result of the active, sharing community, and if increased commercialization displaced this shared ethos, then WordPress might well suffer.  And while I agree with Jim, I also wonder if this isn’t an inevitable phase in the growth of WordPress and other active open source projects.

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