netzooid

Bob McWhirter pointed me to the book Think! – Why Crucial Decisions can’t be made in a Blink of an Eye.

If bestselling books are advising us to not think, LeGault argues, it comes as no surprise that sharp, incisive reasoning has become a lost art in the daily life of Americans.

He cites things like “America’s growing political polarization, which is a result of our reluctance to think outside our comfort zone.” I have to say there is some truth to this. And I am also happy to see some thinking applied to the Malcolm Gladwellesque hype.

Update: Linked to Bob’s new fnokd.com blog instead. Subscribe or else!

Three things people are starting to expect as part of the standard web site:

1. RSS/Atom
2. Tagging
3. Social interaction

• XML networking/gateways/routers will do even better this year.
• WS-* support will continue to move out of the realm of application developers and into mediators/gateways/routers.
• XFire 1.0 will ship.
• Google ad growth will slow, but it will still be well loved.
• Microsoft will really start moving again and start shipping products faster then Google. And their stock price will go up.
• Windows Mobile Smartphones will finally start to take off thanks to some ultra cool phones coming out.
• The new Powerbooks will be ultra successful.
• Open Source will spread further into vertical markets.

Hmm. Nothing too crazy there. Maybe I need get a little more wild. *sigh* – another day.

Ted Neward “prediction” #14: “My long-shot dream: JBoss goes out of business, the JBoss source code goes back to being maintained by developers whose principal interest is in maintaining open-source projects rather than making money, and it all gets folded together with what the Geronimo folks are doing. In other words, the open-source community stops the infighting and starts pulling oars in the same direction at the same time. For once.”

First of all, JBoss isn’t going out of business anytime soon. They happen to be quite successful and will continue to be so (check that prediction on 1/1/2007).

Second, we need to address the Open Source community hippie love going on here. Open-source is not synonymous with cooperation or community or distributed control or anything like that. Even at Apache MANY projects have a majority of committers which are all from the same company. Projects are out there because they benefit someone in some way. While there could be cooperation it is in none of the business’s best interests, even if it may be in the community’s best interest.

Note to self: make ridiculous predictions some time tomorrow.

If it isn’t worth someone’s time to write down I don’t want to listen.

Someone tell those hour long commuters with nothing to listen to to get a life.

This is slightly old, and has no doubt been commented on a gajillion types, but…. alarm:clock comments on the Web 2.0 hype:

The conclusion that we draw is that the blogosphere would be a lousy VC firm. A half-billion dollar buyout might go unremarked upon, but a consumer-facing Web 2.0 company sold to Yahoo! or Google at a $20M – $40M valuation will set the blog world on fire.

Not quite as funny as Hani, but much more to the point. The blogosphere is merely a popularity index. Just like the Dow Jones Industrial Average reflects how investors are “feeling” that day, citations and tags reflect how topics are perceived. Its like being in middle school all over again.

The irony of all this is that I’m blogging right now about this, probably unconciously trying to increase my popularity and have more influence (damn that Freudian ego). Maybe I should just be the crazy kid in the back that no one knows and then show up at the 20 year reunion wildly successful.