ALM Chicago: Venkatesh Rao - YouTube

If you are an engineer or engineering manager, and like to step back once in a while to think about your work, you will love this talk. If you are not an engineering type, you may not particularly enjoy the talk, but the ideas mentioned here will end up affecting your life anyway. :-)

Venktesh Rao has this incredible ability to digest huge amount of information from many different sources and integrating them into a great narrative. (He saves you a tremendous amount of time you would have to spend reading all that stuff.) You will hear a synthesis of many ideas from:
- Alan Kay
- Neal Stephenson (Kryptonomicon)
- Joel Spolsky
- James Scott (Seeing like a State)
- Mark Andreessen (Software is eating the world)
- David Kirkpatrick (Every company is now a software company)

Comparing frequencies of some standard question types

Pretty interesting chart comparing the frequencies of some standard types of questions. "How" searches are way above all the others, and increasing. Followed by "what". Everything else fades by comparison. Kind of makes sense when you think about what people may really be looking for most and what they believe could really be answered by Google.

Also interesting to see how the ranking changes for news reference volumes.


http://www.google.com/trends/?q=how%2C+what%2C+who%2C+why%2C+when

Google Trends: how, what, who, why, when

www.google.com