Alex Wright on Informatica

The Informed Life

Alex Wright is the Head of User Experience at Google News. He’s also an author, and his most recent book, Informatica, is the second edition of Glut, his deep history of the information age. In this conversation, we discuss the history of information technologies and why learning about it matters to people who work in tech.

Show notes

• Alex Wright
• Alex Wright (@alexgrantwright) / X
• Alex Wright - LinkedIn
• Informatica: Mastering Information through the Ages by Alex Wright
• Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age by Alex Wright
• Paul Otlet - Wikipedia
• S. R. Ranganathan - Wikipedia
• Charles Ammi Cutter - Wikipedia
• Melvil Dewey - Wikipedia
• Anthony Panizzi - Wikipedia
• Universal Decimal Classification - Wikipedia
• Vannevar Bush - Wikipedia
• The Printing Press as an Agent of Change by Elizabeth Eisenstein book
• The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook by Niall Ferguson
• Carl Linnaeus - Wikipedia
• Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon - Wikipedia
• Betamax - Wikipedia
• Walkman - Wikipedia
• Apple II - Wikipedia
• The Futures Cone, use and history – The Voroscope
• Institute for the Future
• Claude Shannon - Wikipedia

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Chapter

1. Alex Wright on Informatica (00:00:00)

2. About Alex (00:01:38)

3. About Informatica (00:06:44)

4. Otlet's prescient vision (00:12:09)

5. Networks and hierarchies (00:19:33)

6. Jefferson, a dead moose, and hierarchical information (00:25:04)

7. Where are things heading? (00:30:11)

8. Looking backward to look forward (00:34:26)

9. Closing (00:38:32)