Sherry Turkle writes in Forbes this week about the tradeoffs incurred in our technologically-facilitated multi-tasking approach to the world. She observes: The self that grows up with multitasking and rapid response measures success by calls made, e-mails answered and messages responded to. Self-esteem is calibrated by what the technology proposes, by what it makes easy.
There’s an image, a map of online communities, making the rounds this week, developed by Randall Munroe, whose sweet, romantic, yet inexorably geeky comics at xkcd are a favorite part of my blog-reading routine. Regular xkcd readers know that Munroe buries little mouseover “easter eggs” in his images. The map one reads, “ I’m waiting
Jacqui Cheng over at Ars Technica notes that voyeurism still rules the web 2.0 world. She refers to a speech this week by Hitwise analyst Bill Tancer at the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco: According to the report, only 0.16 percent of YouTube’s total traffic is made up of users who upload videos. Similarly,
The current flurry of interest in the idea of a code of conduct for bloggers is a bit amusing to veterans of community building on the Internet. The issues being raised now about the costs freedom of expression exacts have been well-known since the days when Usenet News first gave anyone with an Internet connection
One of the things I like about the computer is that when I acquire software for it that I decide later I don’t really need, the clutter the unneeded stuff creates is totally hidden away once I turn off the box. This is not the case for dresses or household appliances which seemed like a
To hear some Web 2.0 enthusiasts tell it, “training” is becoming an outmoded concept. These days, anybody who needs to know anything can find it on the web. It is a new dawn for the autonomous learner. It is true that the read-write web has brought us an unprecedented avalanche of instantly available information. If
We’re having a planning meeting at Q2 this week. For a team which does most of its work together on the phone and in team discussion spaces, its a real treat to have the luxury of meeting face-to-face, of being able to riff back and forth and have that energy that people together bring to
We’ve all had experience working on an important project. Maybe it was one which was going to have the attention of the movers and shakers, or one which was going to decide whether we get the business. Or maybe, it was one which was going to decide our grade for the semester. If we’ve been