Musings on law, tech, chess & other topics by a geek

I just finished attending a Masters of Information Management (MSIM) book group that read Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business out at Third Place Books. It was a great conversation about both the MSIM program generally and the future of information systems.

Here are a few of the topic we covered.

Q: What is Pull?

Metadata, Personal Data Lockers, Automation (several of the examples are mere automation but the idea of pull is more then automation)

Q: Is David Siegel a visionary or an Andy Rowney? No answer was agreed upon here.

Q: What are the strong points of the book?

Great ideas, several little slices of what the future could look like.  Several interesting conversation starters, it gives people enough information about topics to launch them into heated discussions over the future.

Q: What are the weakest parts of the book?

Privacy concerns were glossed over with no real solutions presented.
Other books talked about:

Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

Cool ideas from the discussion group:

• UW Toastmasters we need an iSchool specific chapter that focuses on teaching people how to explain what MSIM is in a short compelling elevator speech
• Blogs we mentioned: Chris Messina’s he is a board member of OpenID and Open Web Foundations; Nate Silver’s 538,
• Wordnick Social media integration in a dictionary try Copyfight or Fop which was popular in the 1800′ and then again in the 1980′s
• InfoCamp Seattle 2010 will be on October 2 & 3 at Seattle University in the First Hill/Capitol Hill area of Seattle.

Video on Designing a Stop Sign:

Bonus Photo: While I was at, Third Place Books, I could not help but drool over the Espresso: