2010 Blogs to Watch
Just a short list of 3 blogs that I’ll be watching this year:
- Zen Habits (Life Skills)
- The Sartorialist (Fashion & Photography)
- Ma.tt (WP)
They are in no particular order.
Addicted to tabs!
This particular habit of mine begin when I installed and started to use Firefox about 5 years ago. The tabbed browsing revolutionised how I visited websites, and how I filtered and searched for information. Each link would be opened into a new tab and until a page had been exhausted of possible sources of information it wasn’t closed. I soon discovered a wonderful Add-on, ‘Save Session’ so that when I powered down my computer at night I didn’t have to close my tabs. I could often be seen to have 50-odd tabs open, indeed a few times while doing research I had over 100 tabs open at a time!
After such a long time of using Firefox, I still have trouble closing tabs either because I haven’t quite finished with them, or keeping them open is a reminder that I need to do something with it, sort of like a todo list. It was only today that I realised I am addicted to tabs, it was the only basis for being so reluctant to close each tab. And I won’t change, tabs are just too useful, I don’t think (at this point) I could browse the net without them.
Am I dumber now?
I feel like it. I feel like age is taking over, but that may be in part to a very short nights sleep last night as well, it’s making me morose.
But in all seriousness, am I dumber now? In high school the internet was starting to become a big thing, not yet but getting there you still had to do research in books and wikipedia wasn’t a valid reference tool, but it was slowly coming onboard. Now I find that the internet is a massive part of my life, for 2007-2008 I worked at a web design and development company, so it was literally a huge part of my life. I wasn’t just that I was working on projects to design and build websites but also that we had access to the internet at work because the WWW was our work. I also had the internet available to me at home as well. The internet was truly available to me 24/7. Maybe you have a similar story, with the addition of an smart phone to keep the internet in your pocket maybe.
It’s an interesting thing, to have the internet available 24/7, it’s not that I feel the need to be on it all the time, nor do I feel the need to go on the net on my smart phone, but that it is available to me none-the-less, whenever I want to (limitations of my mobile coverage not withstanding). It is because the internet is so available that I feel in may respects that I am relying on the Internet as a knowledge base such that I no longer have to develop my own. Like the mobile phone means I don’t need to remember friends’ phone numbers, email addresses and the like. I no longer feel the need to memorise details and really learn information. (Conversely I also think that I can learn a whole lot more meaningless information because I can readily find it on the www.)
Information is provided in short bursts on the web so that it is scannable. It is a well known fact in the web content writing world that website usability is largely tied into the content provided, and one of the best ways of keeping your users reading is to write content at an 8th graders level rather than a 12th graders.
- use bulleted and numbered lists,
- highlight keywords
- write numbers as numerals (because they can be picked out from the crowd of text easier)
- meaningful headings and sub-headings
Users scan text, they don’t read.
In many ways I think this is making us all dumber as well, the limited attention spans and inability to read university level writing, or anything higher than 8th grade.
It is interesting to note that I am not the only one thinking about this (well hello, of course not), Nicholas Carr is losing concentration too as he explains in his post ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’ that
They [the media] supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.
It makes me think more about Dr M Scott Peck’s discussion in The Road Less Travelled and Beyond about Thinking and the possible remifications of the internet, and our thought behaviours that are biult from our interaction with this medium. It’s something to keep pondering on.
I can’t wait until IE6 is basically obsolete
It may not be a big deal for you, but in the world of web development IE6 (aka Internet Explorer 6) gives everyone a number of headaches, actually it is more the fact that there are multiple IE versions being used simultaneously. It’s a blessing that IE5 is now fully obsolete.
It’s awesome to look at the statistics of browser usage put out by W3C each month the progression over the year has been interesting to follow. Some big highlights is that IE5 is now obsolete, and taken out of statistics, and Google Chrome has been added.
| Date | IE7 | IE6 | Chr | Fx |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 08 | 26.9% | 20.2% | 3.0% | 44.0% |
| Sept 08 | 26.3% | 22.3% | 3.1% | 42.6% |
NB: Chr – Google Chrome.
| Date | IE7 | IE6 | IE5 | Fx |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 08 | 26.0% | 24.5% | 0.1% | 43.7% |
| Jul 08 | 26.4% | 25.3% | 0.3% | 42.6% |
| Jun 08 | 27.0% | 26.5% | 0.5% | 41.0% |
| May 08 | 26.5% | 27.3% | 0.7% | 39.8% |
| Apr 08 | 24.9% | 28.9% | 1.0% | 39.1% |
| Mar 08 | 23.3% | 29.5% | 1.1% | 37.0% |
| Feb 08 | 22.7% | 30.7% | 1.3% | 36.5% |
| Jan 08 | 21.2% | 32.0% | 1.5% | 36.4% |
Source: W3C Browser Statistics
Email == snail-mail?
I’ve started reading this book about future trends, it’s called Future Files by Richard Watson. I got halted mid-introduction while looking at a diagrammatic representation of the next 50 years, both in innovation and extinction of current innovations, and I had a total light-bulb moment after seeing the prediction of the extinction of email in the next 10 years. Whether it is in the next 10 years or not, I’m not too concerned about that, but by seeing that I realised that while email has replaced snail-mail in the last 10 years, it in turn has become snail-mail!
In the last couple of years with the rise of the use of instant messaging and the use of PDAs/smart phones at work (and home), comes the ever increasing availability to the masses (e.g. your boss and other such persons). It is because we are so accessible (and that we often receive too many emails, many of which are just notifications or what I like to call ‘legitimate spam’) that email is often too slow. It is the slowest of communication mediums at the moment, and currently one of the most formal. I call it formal as I believe it has replaced traditional means of communication for things such as bills and other important communications.
What will be the next step in communication, is it the total replacement of telephones, the removal of land-line networks? How will the telecommunication industry counteract the increasing trend of getting rid of the home phone? Will plan prices drop? Or will mobile communication and IP telephony increase? I’m hanging out for the time when no one has a home phone, but maybe that will never happen. I know I number of people that have replaced their land-line for an IP phone over a naked connection.
I can’t wait for the future, it’s all so exciting!
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