Matsu’s World: The One Less Traveled

I have been blogging for just under two years (yes, I’m still new at this). I’ve noticed from reading many other blogs that it is natural for the level of blogging to recede over time, then it can pick up again. The frequency of blogging, or lack of blog posts, is often indicative of what is happening in the life of that blogger. When their work or personal life demands more of their time and attention, the level of blogging goes down. As the stress of life increases and the level of fatigue goes up, the number of days between posts also goes up. That’s expected.

If I tell you the past few months have been especially stressful and difficult you will not be surprised as I have not been very active on this blog site. Both my work and personal lives have been occupying all of my time and energy. I am hopeful that sometime this fall (or winter) things will settle in enough that I will once again have time to invest in this site. I do not plan to blog about personal things, so you won’t read about my personal life here, but you can expect me to post a lot more about things that interest me professionally — primarily related information technology management.

One thing that’s new in my life which I look forward to writing about is a class I’m teaching this fall. I’m teaching a management of information systems (MIS) class to college students majoring in business. I’ve only been teaching it for a few weeks, so we are still covering the foundational material, but as it progresses I’m certain it will spark more than a few thoughts that I will share with you all through a blog post or two.

I would be interested in graphing the highs and lows in the life of the blogger and see if the number of blog posts correspond to that graph line. I suppose in some cases it could be the exact opposite — as the stresses of life go up or as one’s work and personal lives get to be more challenging the number of blog posts could go up because of the therapeutic nature of writing. Hmmm. Maybe I should see if I could get a research grant to properly look into this potential phenomenon. I’m sure the U.S. government would be glad to fund such research.

What is 'informational timing,' you ask? Well, it's simply the recognition that information has value that increases and decreases over time. You might even call this the temporal value of information.

For instance, let's look at the newspaper. If you could get tomorrow's news today, then that would be extremely valuable. And, getting today's newspaper tomorrow is a lot less valuable. This may be a bad example because I am not talking about looking into the future.

Let me use a different example. Let’s say you had a professional event (like a meeting for a group of managers or technical staff) and you used a web site to announce the event. You will probably have a large demand for that information soon after it gets posted and people notice it. Then, as the event approaches, the demand (as measured by web traffic) would go up until the day of the meeting when people are doing their last minute verification of the time, place, and possibility getting directions.

Believe it or not, even after the event people will still need that information and there is still value in it. They may have attended the meeting and forgot the sponsor's name or wanted to get contact information for the next meeting or event. Or, they were unable to attend the meeting and wanted to know what the purpose was after the fact. So, in this case, you should not remove the information from the web site the day of the event, or even the day after the event. Ideally, it would be accessible for a long time after the event took place, even though the value of that information and number of hits would eventually diminish to zero.

Since some information like announcements will drop in value over time. It would be nice if Information like that had a TTL (time to live) setting or tag. Other information, such as information on how to do something or factual data or historic information would all have a much longer TTL. There may even be a need for some information to have the TTL set to infinity.

Finally, information like the phone number for a business or the hours of a store that should have a TTL that extends to the point when that information is changed. Then, the old phone number or business hours should no longer exist, because it would no longer be accurate. That kind of factual data has a TTL equal to the moment it changes. In that example, the TTL would be a conditional statement. If new data then TTL=0, else TTL=infinity.