I’ve never lived on a farm, but I’ve lived near them.  I’ve inspected farms - dairy farms – because that’s where my work as an environmental public health specialist took me.  The kernels of grain in a farm silo, because of the huge amount of surface area associated with every particle of grain, emit a volatile organic vapor that explodes the whole silo under the right conditions.  If the farmer lights a match at just wrong time, standing next to a silo full of “unstirred” grain, the silo WILL blow up!

Farms aren’t the only places that have silos, of course.  There are all kinds of industrial silos and then there are the metaphorical silos that politicians and pundits talk about.

Dairy plants have silos too - very large, tall ones!  Depending on what’s inside them, the vapor at the top can make you dizzier than just being that high off the ground with a case of vertigo. 

So what do the hazards with farm and industrial silos have to do with the metaphorical silos we often talk about?  Not much, maybe, because metaphors are often be stretched until they are broken and no longer apply.  On the other hand, information silos have been blamed for the tragedy of 9/ll, Katrina, and a whole lot of other things.  Perhaps there is something to be said for the application of the silo metaphore to information.

At this point, I am not so sure.  I really don’t believe that information silos are such a bad thing when it comes to internet activity.  There are certain places where I communicate with some of my relatives and some long-standing friends.  On twitter and identi.ca, I comminicate with whoever cares to talk to me as well as anyone on those networks who don’t. 

There is always the risk of misinterpretation with the written word.  That’s true with twitter and the other one-to-many networks, as well as with more traditional, long-form writing.

Right now I have a real problem with misinterpretation in emails with a very dear relative.  Perhaps it just points to the lack of clarity in what I write, but I believe that’s only a small part of it.  The dilemma has even spread to our telephone conversations to the point where, as of recently, we just don’t even bother trying to speak.

Much of what I perceive of misinterpretation, in my estimation, is a reflection of what readers are thinking about or preoccupied with at the time they absorb what’s being said.  Even more than that is whether the information is really “absorbed,” or just glanced at with a positive or negative frame of mind at the time.

Communication is not an easy feat under a lot of circumstances.   Even face-to-face, we all bring SOME preconceived notions to the table.  So silos or no silos, I think just about any kind of information transfer (communication) presents the opportunity to just blow-up or explode.  So what!  The alternative is silence and anyone over a certain age knows the danger of that!

Can infomation silos exist wth cloud computing?  That is something way beyond my well of knowledge today, but it’s certainly something worth thinking about…at least to me!