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Monthly Archives: January 2009

What not to build

Sunday, January 4, 2009

I met with an individual today who is creating a virtual world for young teens. The project is conceived as serving a niche market. Of course, we all feel our ideas are unique or our particular circumstance is different from others. I left the meeting with a sense of “why are people still building these [...]

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Year of the cloud

Friday, January 2, 2009

Cloud computing has been a common, but somewhat subdued, topic on technology sites. The cloud metaphor is appealing, though what it exactly means is still somewhat unsettled. In a technological sense, cloud computing refers to a service-view of computing, where technical details are largely hidden from end users. Which means, it is driven by financial [...]

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What will change everything?

Friday, January 2, 2009

Every year, The Edge asks prominent individuals a big question. This year, with the humble introduction of “New tools equal new perceptions. Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves” (sounds like McLuhan’s “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us”), The [...]

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Top 10 future tools

Friday, January 2, 2009

Jane Hart has served the elearning field well this year, taking a Techcrunch role for learning technologies. In her recent post, she turns her attention from looking at the most popular tools today and focuses on what she feels will be the top tools of 2009. Most of the tools listed assume traditional desktop/laptop access [...]

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This thing called depth

Friday, January 2, 2009

End of the year/start of the new year reflections always seem to centre on meaning and depth. We desire to eliminate meaningless and shallow pursuits in favor of more substantial ones. John Connell asks how to best move to greater depth: “Do we need the bloggers’ equivalent of the Slow Movement? Authentic blogging? Critical blogging? [...]

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Twitter, Networks, and “following” people

Friday, January 2, 2009

The popularity of Facebook, Twitter, and other social software has resulted in a popularization of network terminology. How networks work and how information flows is understood experientially by anyone who has used the software. As a result, the networking concepts long explored by sociologists and mathematicians are now being explored by Twitter users: How am [...]

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NY Times and Visualizations

Thursday, January 1, 2009

We have hit our scale limit in managing information. We need new processes to make sense of abundance. One approach is found in the use of social networks for filtering important ideas and concepts. A technical approach is found in data visualization. Bill Ives links to the NY Times Visualization Lab. The site is based [...]

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