emergent/convergent technology: Thing 7

One of the many fascinating things about all this exciting new technology is how its uses emerge and converge. My first thought about flickr was that it was just like facebook, only less useful because it doesn't allow so much comment and is not as easy to use or quick to load. "Easy to use" comes with experience I guess, but I spent 10 minutes trying to get Wags' "bookr" thing to load, without success - well beyong my usual patience level. I solved one problem, my pop-up blocker, but it still didn't work. Call me old-fashioned but I believe that technology should be easy, simple and intuitive to use - I was incandescent with rage when the nongs who replaced our perfectly adequate email system with Lotus Notes brightly suggested we all go on a two-day course to learn how to use it. One could easily spend all one's time learning how to use technology and not actually doing anything productive with it. I don't want to use any basic device that needs two days of training. Even if I had two days to spare. I never needed two days of training to use a telephone...

Anyway, back to flickr, which is the focus of this week's activity - yes i did find some interesting stuff on it and can see that it is actually different from FB (facebook). Presumably it's an advertising-based business model - the old interruption marketing philosophy - but I guess it works, for the time being at least. Since I'm getting very tired of the silly applications on FB used by many students and kids which are pure time-wasters (gosh how old do i sound??) - quizzes and the like - perhaps flickr will converge with FB, or move in to the space that it originally occupied. (I think FB was founded for class photos for students at Harvard.) Interesting to watch, anyway.

Prediction

Apparently there's a football game on tomorrow. My prediction is for Geelong to win by 12 points. (Aren't I clever for getting this prediction perfectly right?)

Why this registration name?

I'm a good boy and I follow the rules. So when it said on the registration form

Name of Blog * Make it creative and meaningful, if you wish

that's what I called it.

Web 2.0

I'm looking forward to finding out more about Web 2.0. I don't really care about the technical differences between HTML and XML; I can cope with HTML and keep my Monash web page updated using that rather clumsy technology. but there are applications that make it easier to edit HTML, there's even one in Blackboard!

Most importantly, though, I have a horror of getting too involved in the mechanism of how this thing works. I don't actually want to know how it works, I just want to work it to my advantage and that of my colleagues and students. Until last week I would use the metaphor of a racing driver, who is very good at driving cars fast but is not a mechanic. But then the Piquet/Renault scandal broke so I'm not sure I want to relate myself to htem. And besides, Formula 1 racing is a stupid thing to be supporting, given the climate emergency.

Well, so much for my first post. Will anyone read it?