randomosity

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Wonderful paradigm shifting technologies are supposed to streamline our lives and allow us to rise to new creative heights. The promise of the paperless office was to provide electronic communications to free us from distractions and the minutiae of the deskbound cubicled-existence. Mobile technologies were to unchain us from the physical offices to let us quickly complete necessary tasks while simultaneously participating in those pasttimes that we want to. You could ’seal the deal’ while watching your son’s soccer game for example. But, for all the promise, we now deal with more information and have to find ways to cope with greater engagement in more tasks than we have ever faced.
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Web2.0 seems to be a lot about invite-only betas. We hear about them through a variety of media and we patiently wait and often salivate. We sign up to receive invites or even just sign up to be notified when a service becomes more mature. Invites create a buzz and certainly the whole GMail launch strategy made an art out of this marketing strategy. I will admit to being a victim of much marketing. I like my toys. There’s a new service that I stumbled across the other day that allows you to ask for, receive and then share invites to these sacred sites: Mashable Invites.
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I am a big fan of wikis for note-taking, research material collation and organization. There are a wide variety of easy to use, free wiki services online and an increasing number of small footprint, simple standalone wikis. I probably should have blogged about this earlier and shared some of my experiences, but an excellent article by Dustin Wax at lifehack.org does a superb job of explaining the rationale and gives some great how to tips.
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Tangler offers an innovative approach to open testing of online products. A combination of instant messaging and real-time forums, Tangler provides a repository of joinable discussions and archives discussions for reference. The site seems geared towards testing of new products in an interactive environment, but nothing precludes discussion around any topic from the esoteric to the deeply philosophical. The interface allows for convenient mix-media embedding of objects and a pop-up widget to allow for you to be notified of activity in the groups you participate in.
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This is one thoughtful piece of webart…if we are considering beautiful evidence…this short video by Michael Wesch gets it very right. Its absolutely brilliant. I am sure its going to start to get some attention over the next few days. It is perhaps best paired with this wonderfully creative , but a little more fanciful, web2.0 video that won a First Post Award Competition a few months back. Wesch’s video gives you a brilliantly logical progression through the latest buzzwords actually using technologies themselves to demonstrate themselves. What better place to throw it up for comment than YouTube?

A few weeks ago I blogged about Swivel, a cool place for kids to play with data and comment on others datasets and visualisations. Today Geoffrey blogged about an IBM Alphaworks site that takes this concept in a different direction.

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We had a short spate of conversation at the TAPoR meeting on forms of disaggregation (and I guess corollorarily demand aggregation) when looking at online swap/consolidation sites. I cam across a further swap site this morning that illustrated this concept…and is one more example of the way in which internet collectivization is changing normal modes of economic exchange through contractual intermediation and introducing another layer of rentier behaviour. CellSwapper, is a P2P exchange that connects people wanting to get out of long term cell phone plans with those looking to pick up a shorter term plan without the costs of activation of of cancellation. That is they are trading on that thin layer of administrative costs that carriers demand. The site is unfortunately for me only available to the US, but they are promising broader geographic coverage shorty. A further form of aggregation is demonstrated by the microlending sites such as the two that I mentioned in an earlier post, Zopa and Prosper.

Another interesting list I came across during the season of listing. This one comes from a bit of a site of paranoia…but maybe we should be afraid :-0. On the upside, this is a list of 13 Easy Ways to Safeguard Your Privacy in 2007 which seem like some very prudent steps. Although I don’t advocate running screaming in the streets, these seem to be some concrete simple things one can be aware of or practise to safeguard one’s identity. Its real and after I had those 15 laptops shipped to my Quebec address a few years back, am certainly more on the watch. Things such as avoiding the use of your middle initial is something that I wouldn’t have thought of but you know…it makes some sense.

It’s that time of the year when we are bombarded with these, and like all of us I am trying to develop the appropriate strategies for winnowing out the chaff. The list of Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without is one that kept my interest. Michael Arrington has compiled an intriguing list of service-based companies that you may or may not have tried before. Some such as blue dot are providing a new spin on existing services, in this case the social bookmarking model of del.icio.us.
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