MinneWebCon 2008

I spent a great day at MinneWebCon yesterday talking with and meeting other folks in the industry at The Big U where I work and elsewhere.
It was really a good event for those of us in Minneapolis who are interested in current and emerging web technology. The interesting this to me is how much Twitter [...]

Transparency

A thought struck me yesterday as I was toying with drop.io. Terms like cellular, mobile, and web 2.0 are slowly going to fade. The key to new social media is transparency. Usability is going to be a barrier to overcome so that the user doesn’t feel like they are taking a series of steps on [...]

Go Mobile Young Man!

I’ve previously commented that mobile technology is the next frontier in the technology sphere. It seems that Mike Arrington at TechCrunch agrees. Look for the next tech boom to be in mobile technology. It’s going to connect us in ways we never dreamed possible.
In the mid nineties when what we know as the web was [...]

Will Twitter Get Benched?

The Industry Standard put Twitter on it’s “predicted to fail” list.
Failings: There’s no compelling reason for most people to use it, and many existing services — ranging from AIM to FriendFeed to social networks — have overlapping functionality. And how is it supposed to make money?
That’s the $10,000 question isn’t it? (Pun intended.) Where’s the [...]

Amazon.com Announces TextBuyIt

Cell phones are quickly becoming the new frontier in emerging technology. I’m told that smart phone adoption rates are much higher in Japan and Europe. Here in the U.S., things are just heating up. Yesterday Amazon.com announced TextBuyIt, a service that will allow you to compare prices by sending a text message. Amazon sends a [...]

Using Social Networking Sites for Research

Is there anyone out there who is leveraging social networking technology for research? It seems like there’s a lot of research out there on it, but who’s taking advantage of it? With a little imagination, it doesn’t seem hard to find some uses. Let’s start with an easy one: Twitter.
Where I work, we’re doing a [...]

I Was There

On a geological scale, I’m just a nanosecond. Smaller probably. By internet standards, I guess I’m an old man. For a while I was worried that I’d missed the boat. You know, came along too late. But as I look back, I’ve been on the internet for 14 years. Ever since I installed a Gopher [...]