I have mused a lot on Don Box's comment on the chilling effect on training that Google has had. Don calls it the “Google Effect”. (Search for 2004-06-17T07:06:38Z in June 2004. Looks like his posting links are still broken. Shame.) Seems I'm not the only one. As the author in the previous link ponders, tools are beginning to trump training. We might just as well add the “Reflector Effect” and the “FxCop Effect” to the mix. What's the old-fashioned human “expert” to do?
All of this, of course, is a good thing. But for those of us who ply in the expert information trade it has implications on what information we should bother on providing and how to organize it. My own blog benefits from the Google Effect as many of my hits come from from the likes of Google and Feedster. This makes my public weblog an excellent purveyance of my (admittedly borrowed) knowledge as well as solicitor of information I have not found or of corrections to my flawed understanding.
But wither the expert and private knowledge base? I remember a C|Net article stating that IT help desks should require users to first access Google before opening a ticket. I'm not yet sure what all the implications are, but one thing I do know is that the Google Effect and it's siblings have a big impact that alters the knowledge-sharing landscape.
Daniel Cazzulino shares five tips to high performance XML [Via Don Box who likes #3]
- Dynamic XPath expression compilation
- XPath execution tips & using XPathCache
- WebService XML sans XmlDocument
- Subtree transformations without re-parsing
- In-memory XML Schema validation without re-parsing