August 31st, 2006
It was almost exactly ten years ago that I wrapped up a summertime writing project in Polson, Montana and began heading back to New York City; you can see the description of my cross-country drive in the September 1, 1996 entry in the “road-warrior journals” section of my website, entitled “Leaving Montana.” The writing project [...]
August 30th, 2006
One of the common themes that I heard from Web 2.0 vendors whom I visited last week was this: today’s generation uses the Internet differently, and has different expectations of technology, than the older generation. This led to such pronouncements as: college-age and high-school kids have never seen Microsoft Outlook, and would be horrified by [...]
August 29th, 2006
As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog posting, several of the Web 2.0 companies I visited last week told me, in no uncertain terms, that they believe that email is “broken” — with the implication that their company’s products and services would repair the damage, and make us all happy, productive people once again.
I’ve been doing [...]
August 28th, 2006
Surfing around the Web yesterday, I stumbled upon a blog posting by European Capital Partners (EUCAP), entitled “Is Google Hiring Hackers or Software Engineers?” which culminated with the statement that
“Ed Yourdon, one of the inventors of software engineering, visiting digg.com observes that web2.0 startups will need software engineers as the service grows. Hackers will not [...]
August 28th, 2006
I visited eight Web 2.0 companies in the San Francisco Bay area last week, and was intrigued by the range of products and services they’re offering; you can see the details in my blog entries for the past week.
But I was also intrigued by some common themes that I heard from almost every company I [...]
August 27th, 2006
When I arrived at Six Apart’s office a couple days ago for a meeting with its Chief Evangelist, Anil Dash (whose blog is here), I wasn’t sure quite what to expect. A sales pitch on why its Moveable Type blogging product is better than competitors like WordPress? Nope. An explanation of the differences between its [...]
August 26th, 2006
I was thinking of referring to Jigsaw as “MySpace for grownups,” (a site on which I am not registered, but on which I was intrigued to find that a guitar-playing, cigar-smoking gorilla named Redbendad had mentioned my Death March book) but after spending an hour meeting with Jigsaw’s Vice President of Marketing, Marc Parrish, I [...]
August 26th, 2006
Ian Delaney has written a nice layman’s overview of the semantic web (“the semantic lunch“), which I recommend to anyone who tends to get scared off by words like “ontology.” His blog posting is an interview with John Davies, who’s in charge of next-web research at BT (which, as an ignorant American, I can only [...]
August 25th, 2006
At this point, almost everyone on the planet has heard of Wikipedia, and people both inside and outside the IT profession appreciate that Wikipedia is an enormously large and popular example of an easily accessible infrastructure that supports sharing and collaboration of documents among a distributed group of individuals.
But fewer people understand how wikis are [...]
August 24th, 2006
Summary: digg’s presentations of top news stories epitomizes the grass-roots “wisdom of the crowd” philosophy, and I discuss below why I think Jaron Lanier’s critical characterization of this as a “hive mind” is irrelevant. In addition to a straightforward summary of news stories, digg also has some stunning visual displays you should check out, known [...]
