With a nod to the recent Facebook phenomenon, I’ve compiled a list that provides a less formal–and perhaps more accurate–view of who I am, what I value, and what I know.
- Maybe it’s the way I was raised, but I feel a little silly using my name as a domain name.
- But, then again, I’m happy that it was still available to be registered this late in the game.
- I agree with Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody, the emergence of online social tools represents a tectonic shift in the way humans can communicate.
- But I also remain skeptical of the hype around Web 2.0 and think basic communication fundamentals are still important.
- Even during the dot com boom, I thought the Web could be more useful to humanity than helping us buy pet food more cheaply.
- Call me old-fashioned, but I still prefer email to chat.
- One of the nicest baby shower gifts we received when my eldest son was born in 2000 was a Webvan gift certificate.
- I have to admit, I once thought that Wikipedia was nothing more than a experiment in collaboration. I never expected it to so useful.
- OMG, The Elements of Style is more essential than ever.
- Although I enjoy my tech gadgets, I’m no early adopter. I happily used my Yashica T3 film camera for years until I felt that digital cameras were good enough.
- I don’t know how we ever made travel plans before the Web.
- I’ve read the article, Beyond Usability and Design: The Narrative Web, on A List Apart once a year since it was published in 2001. For every project I work on, it inspires me to look past the technology and remember the power of stories.
- I’m not trying to be over-dramatic, but I think the emergence of open source content management systems like Drupal and Wordpress really is a game-changing event for web development.
- Malcolm Gladwell’s theories don’t always hold up well under scrutiny but I’m addicted to his work. His most recent book, Outliers, has some particularly provocative ideas about the nature of success.
- I think it’s ironic that Twitter critics are recycling the same criticism that some people had of blogs in 2000 (i.e., they’re pointless and narcissistic). And like blogs, some useful purposes of Twitter have already emerged.
- I am still deeply impressed by Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford University in 2005.
- I threw away my archive of Zip disks last summer when I finally realized that I’ll never be able to recover what’s on them unless I had a computer running OS 9 with Quark 3.2.
- I’m not a big comics fan, but one of the most surprisingly insightful books I’ve ever read is Scott McCleod’s Understanding Comics.
- I just discovered The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks the other day while googling for web writing resources. Sites like that remind me why I love the randomness of web.
- I had to watch the film Helvetica when my wife was out of town. For some reason, she wasn’t as interested in a movie about a font as I was. It rocked!
- Steal this list! I support the Creative Commons.
- Baseball metaphors are often overused, but I like this one: Effective web design is like a good umpire – the less you notice it, the better.
- I’ve been asked to serve on my kids’ school’s iPod curriculum integration committee. I hope they plan to do more with the iPods than listen to digital audio books.
- I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I know how to ask good questions and go from there.
- An idea that keeps me awake at night: If Web 2.0 signifies the social web, and Web 3.0 marks the mobile web era, will Web 4.0 break down language barriers and actually bring us the world wide web?