See Simon’s comment. I may be wrong about the level of collapse of Soviet era stuff. I don’t know the extent to which the “Russian Internet” of today is Russian in culture, as opposed to tied to the main Internet economically (via good and bad hackers etc. etc…)

But definitely the overall “sphere of influence” of the old Soviet empire has completely collapsed, so the extended cultural impact has vanished.

And it was an implosion rather than the victors writing the history. The point is, NOBODY is writing the history really. The attention vacuum has simply been taken over by other matters. “Russia” used to mean a LOT in 1985. Now it means “botnets, mail-order brides and mafia” to most people. Probably unfair and wrong, but that’s the number of bits allotted to “Russia” these days. Back then it loomed as large as China does today.

Venkat

I don’t know if this will be of much help to you, but Russian internet isn’t a dark void, it’s just … well… Russian and a bit awkward to navigate it without solid knowledge of the language. Since it’s mostly disconnected from the internet “mainland” (at least link-wise, the protocols are the same ) you might want to try Rambler.ru as your search engine. It also has translation features, I think. I’m not sure you’ll find your Vanya out there, but I’m certain you’ll find a few other gems out there.

I wish you the best of luck on your journey.

My report is the standard one that I got from SF 2.0 (book AND test).

Seems like it would be cheap enough to ask all your audience members to personally buy a copy?

Venkat

First off, Silicon Valley wasn’t going to solve global warming or AIDS anyway. Exhibit A: the OLPC project.

I also see no indication that the intellectual elite is, in fact, Twitter-addicted; e.g. scientists, by and large, ignore Web 2.0. I know a bit about mathematics and cryptography: Terence Tao and Bruce Schneier have well-known blogs, but are definitely the exception (and it’s debatable whether Schneier still counts as a true cryptographer). And note that mathematician and cryptographers are pretty good with computers when compared to, say, most biologists. (Computer scientists do appear to blog more often, but even those don’t Twitter all that much, do they?)

It *is* true that the technologists of Silicon Valley are Twitter-obsessed; but I see no real reason to suspect that this obsession will spread to non-technologist “elites”, or even to the technologists of, say, London or Delhi.

I’m sorry, but I must be off now, so I’ll cut this short here.

“Everyone in Silicon Valley” may be a different matter, and I did enjoy your perspective – but never forget that Joe Sixpack has never heard of TechCrunch, and never will.

So, in these interesting times, how does one (1) prioritize what to consume (2) consume in a manner that one can recall and use it in an appropriate context.

You mentioned that you read 5 or 6 books a month and consume about 80 RSS feeds. When you read these books, do you ever feel the need to take notes? I have this almost compulsive obsession to take notes and I cannot proceed without doing so. I also read carefully and this is a real handicap in this world of information overload we live in today. I am unable to consume information at the rate I want to.

How do you decide which RSS feeds to consume? To me RSS feeds have this junk-food quality where there is variety in every post but little or no nutrition. The signal/noise ratio analogy comes to mind. If you zero-in, it may not be worth spending time in accordance with your long term goals. Time flies and before you know it, you are surfing 10 hyperlinks away from the RSS post that got you started. Also, this browsing may not be contextual at all, it could just be mindless drifting. It is this nature of browsing that I feel is most detrimental or useless.

Do you happen to know or are there studies done on how many links a normal person browses as he/she searches for information before he/she is satiated with the amount of information that answers the question one started with in the first place? How many browsed links were tangents? How many were related to the question at hand?

Google’s technique to search for information may be too tempting for humans as we procure information. Machines are probably more efficient at procuring information even though they may not be able to decipher as well as humans do. They stray less than we do, they aren’t as curious as we are.

(sorry for the re-post in case this appears twice)

http://www.deanbavington.org/

—Michael B.