My little sandbox on the Web
Today, I finally setup WordPress on my personal homepage and imported old posts from my dormant Blogger site. This has been on my to-do list for a long time, but marriage, home ownership and parenthood came along, among other things. So hear I am, quite a few years later!
Yikes, seems i’ve completely ignored my humble blog for well over a year. Ironic, or perhaps expected, that the immediacy and simplicity of twitter tweets and facebook updates pushed blogging to the sidelines for me. Still need this though, as a simple way to test stuff like site instrumentation tags.
lyndonwong
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Originally uploaded by The Official White House Photostream
Oddly, I just discovered that the White House now has a flickr feed with high-resolution photos available for public viewing and civic use. Duh, of course a social media enabled campaign leads naturally to a social media enabled White House. Our political discourse takes a leap forward permanently (unless the next American President deletes all these social media accounts, or these social media services cease operations).
Wow, elementary school SHOULD be awesome now, assuming kids get to use digital media tools and the Internet to assemble commentaries and reflections with all this great material available for mashup (somehow, I fear we’re not even close to this at the moment).
This is the desk of Zappo’s CEO/founder Tony Hsieh. It may be a humorous jab at old-school images of CEO desks. But maybe it reflects the realities of the modern Internet-enabled organization and executive. Heck, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings doesn’t even have a desk/office/cube… just walks around to his meetings or sits in an empty meeting room with his laptop on the wireless network.
Kent Libbey and Adam Wolff: ShareGrove DEMOgods
Originally uploaded by ShareGrove
Well deserved recognition at Demo 09 for a lot of hard work on a very innovative communications app called Sharegrove.
Back around 1991, at the dawn of the interactive media “revolution”, I made a silly vow that the largest video display in my home would always be a computer monitor. The line of reasoning was “everthing worthwhile would emit from a computer screen rather than a television screen”.
Now, 18 years later, the vow seems silly, but I actually kept it, and my thinking proved essentially correct. Because today, the largest and best screen in many of our homes is a flat-panel screen with a multitude of connectors for various video, computing and gaming (e.g. specialized computing) devices. Yeah, we can call it an LCD or plasma TV if we want, but we know it’s much more that that.
So I found it rather odd that this recent New York Times piece on why we no longer need TVs came so close to reaching a similar conclusion, yet unnecessarily backed off at the end.
Interesting essay by Bruce Schneier in the Wall Street Journal about Barack Obama’s right to use a personal PDA. The essay closes with an astute observation:
The Internet is the greatest generation gap since rock and roll. We’re now witnessing one aspect of that generation gap: the younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. Until our CEOs blog, our Congressmen Twitter, and our world leaders send each other LOLcats – until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers– we aren’t fully an information age society.
When everyone leaves a public digital trail of their personal thoughts since birth, no one will think twice about it being there. Obama might be on the younger side of the generation gap, but the rules he’s operating under were written by the older side. It will take another generation before society’s tolerance for digital ephemera changes.
Now I recall mulling over this same issue a couple of years ago…framed at the time as the “transparent versus opaque generation gap“.
… something I am surprised has not been more widely expressed. Colin Powell concludes his endorsement of Barack Obama with the observation that conjecture about whether Obama was ever a Muslim is wrong-headed. What ever happened to the principle of religious freedom in America?
The above video clip made me swell with emotion and pride in the vibrancy of the American experiment. Two truly remarkable individuals exhibiting immense grace.
Spotted in this New York Times blog post.
Handling a Netflix outage
Originally uploaded by Lyndon Wong
For much of this week, I witnessed first-hand Netflix’s integrity in dealing with a major service outage. Colleagues worked round the clock. Throughout the ranks, there was resolve rather than fear, and always a determination to do the right thing.