One click away...

Some residual dust from Burning Man still clings to my car, despite regular trips through the automatic car wash these past few months. I get a tiny thrill every time I feel the conveyor belt moving my vehicle (and me) into the vortex of soap, water, rubber and whirling dervishes. We get soaked, slapped, sprayed, rubbed, coated and uncoated -- all to the sound of the Beach Boys (today's track), or whatever CD the kids have left in the slot.


My distrust of strange technologies is so deep-seated that I always expect something to go wrong, like the conveyor belt suddenly freezing right in the middle of the operation, so that me and my car get pummeled repeatedly, with no end in sight. I wonder how long this might go on before somebody noticed and extracted us from the nightmare. But, so far, that has not occurred. My car is cleaner (just the pixie dust remains), and I have one more piece of empirical evidence in favor of technology.

This matters because for the past decade I have been one of the many beneficiaries of new technologies. This very platform for blogging didn't exist ten years ago. There was as yet no Google AdSense, let alone Google. It can be easy to forget how rapidly these forces have engulfed us, much like the auto-washing unit engulfed my vehicle this morning.

Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle contains an excellent summary of Web 2.0 by one of the paper's best reporters, Dan Fost.

An index to the package of five stories by Dan can be found at:

Link to headlines , but I'll also list them below.


What exactly does Web 2.0 mean? Well...
Dan Fost, San Francisco Chronicle, 11/05/06
Like it or not, the name Web 2.0 has stuck. But the defining term behind the latest Internet boom has different meanings to different people. And some have even tried changing the name. Newsweek, in a cover story, referred to it as the Live Web. Nobody...
DIGITAL UTOPIA - Web 2.0 words -- from ajax to wiki
Dan Fost, San Francisco Chronicle, 11/05/06
Ajax: A programming platform that enables Web sites to work more interactively because features can load one at a time. It lets Web sites have the power and feel of a desktop software program, rather than a slow-loading Internet application. The ability to...
DIGITAL UTOPIA - A new breed of technologists envisions a democratic world improved by the Internet
Dan Fost, San Francisco Chronicle, 11/05/06
Behind the random silliness of YouTube videos and the juvenile frivolity of MySpace Web sites lies a powerful idea: Everyday people are using technology to gain control of the media and change the world. At least that's what a new breed of Internet...
The people who populate Web 2.0
Dan Fost, San Francisco Chronicle, 11/05/06
Some of the key people in the Digital Utopian and Web 2.0 movements. Where possible, the list includes links to their blogs. Chris Anderson, Wired magazine editor who published a seminal piece in Wired in 2004, "The Long Tail," that showed how the Web is...
Key Web 2.0 sites
Dan Fost, San Francisco Chronicle, 11/05/06
Blogger: A site owned by Google that makes it easy to start and maintain a blog. Competitors include Typepad, from San Francisco's Six Apart, and the open source WordPress. The key site for searching blogs is San Francisco's Technorati. www.blogger.com...

***

It is understandable if to most people this just sounds like a lot of the same old hype that accompanied the first Web boom. But it would be a mistake to write it off as the excessive rhetoric of enthusiasts. The changes we are experiencing all over the Internet right now amount to a second revolutionary wave of change.

Think back to your pre-Internet days. You used to have to pay for phone calls. You had to buy stamps and mail letters to friends and relatives. You had to ship documents back and forth across the country or across the oceans, and wait days or weeks for a reply.

Life back then now appears to have been in slow motion.

All of these functions, plus so many more, now lie merely one click away. Ask not for whom the mouse clicks...it clicks for you.

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