John Pescatore

I was doing local travel yesterday, so missed making a “Twelve Word Tuesday” blog post. Its an interesting exercise, trying to be brief but not banal. It makes me realize that the bandwidth of a face to face conversation is amazingly large. There is a rapid reduction in actual information transfer per unit time when you go from f2f to telephone to email to text messaging. I think PC video conferencing is somewhere between telephone calls and email in that progression – that’s why it is always more talked about than actually used.

But my real point is that frequent and shallow never really results in as much actual information or energy transfer as less frequent but deeper – sprinkling your garden every day is not the way to get healthy vegetables.  Twitter is a pretty good example of this principle and yesterday there was an interesting Network World piece on hackers compromising Cligs, one of those URL shortening services (like TinyURL) that became popular as people tried to squeeze URLs into limited character-count SMS messages.

I generally never click on shortened links – like they used to say about the forward pass in football “there are multiple outcomes and most of them are bad.” It’s an example of reducing the bandwidth of communications in a manner that makes it harder to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. While this Cligs hack appears benign, a number of web sites have blocked or limited their use – not a bad idea.

* Apologies to Shakespeare for the title of this post.