Yes, My Good Lady, What News May I Serve You Today?

It occurred to me that by starting this blog, I have become your news butler, serving up tasty little tidbits of news to please you. That’s just what Nicholas Negroponte predicted would happen, but he was thinking of a robot, not a professor. “Don’t squirt more bits at me,” said the M.I.T. computer scientist and Internet visionary way back in the 90s. You gobble up millions of bits every day, by the way. Bits are the basic unit of information in this digital age.

Negroponte could already see that we would all soon be overwhelmed by the information coming at us through the Internet. What he wanted was not more bandwidth but “intelligence in the network and in my receiver to filter and extract relevant information.” That’s where the news butler or “interface agent” would come in. “Image a future where your interface agent can read every newspaper and catch every broadcast on the planet, and then, from this, construct a personalized summary.”

Writing inWired magazine, he contended that we really don’t want more “info grazing” and “channel surfing.” We want help, help in making sense of it all. Maybe he’s not talking about a news butler but a blogger.

PS: Squirt me some more bits.