Trends

I am a semi-recent college graduate: I have been out of school for almost 2 years now. After I left school, all of my friends got into this social networking site called the Facebook. The facebook has been featured in several technical and business publications, and that kid Mark Zuckerburg is worth millions of dollars now. It's a nice tool, but I noticed something very interesting about it today: any student can post a bulletin, but here's the kicker - you have to PAY for them.

If you haven't yet visited Carlton Draught's Big Ad Website, you should check it out. You will be asked to trust a Java Applet that helps play the ad in full screen. Then you see thousands of people in colored robes running across an Australian valley a la Lord of the Rings. People in primarily yellow robes led by a man on horseback running toward another group of people mostly in red robes. At least hundreds of people are really there in the camera shot. I don't doubt that computer graphics was used at some point to fill in the rest.

Posted from Yahoo! News (October 2, 2005):

Digg.com, for those of you who don’t know, is a social technology news website where users digg (vote) stories to promote them to the homepage. I believe 75 diggs will earn you coveted homepage status. Just for fun, go there and read 3 or 4 stories. Some are really geeky or funny, others are real news.

John Furrier of PodTech.net is a computer science guy from back in the 80's, and while he doesn't think of himself as special, he really is. His incredibly popular batch of InfoTalk Podcasts consists of short 15-minute segments, each one covering a different topic somehow related to current and future trends in the internet, or Web 2.0 as John calls it. Guests have included Adam Curry, one of the people known as 'Podfather', employees of Microsoft, WordPress developers, lawyers, marketers, computer scientists, you name it, he's got it.