Friday, September 22, 2006

Web Hangouts

Facebook is the ‘talk of the Net’, so to say. Everyone is writing about Facebook’s possible sale for over a billion dollars. And it’s not just Facebook. ‘Social Networking’ seems to be the most exciting thing happening on the Internet today.

Wall Street Journal’s article on Facebook talks about the popularity of such sites and refers to them as ‘Web Hangouts’. That’s an interesting term to use. I understand that creating virtual work environments could increase productivity by removing geographical and time constraints. But, where does online social networking take you (except for billions in advertising revenue for companies)? What happened to all those concerns about kids spending more time in front of TVs and computers? Now they are going to stay away from ‘real’ friends and create virtual friends.

Are we moving towards a virtual society, where nothing is real and everything is online and virtual. Soon there will be web families with a web dad, web mom, web sister, web brother and every other web relation.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Virtual Culture

Just read, Tony Conrad’s post on webworkerdaily.com. He talks about how his company works around a virtual work environment. Teleconferencing, IM, blogs, wikis and other online tools allow employees to communicate with each other and work on the same projects from remote locations.

Tony Conrad also talks about steps they’ve taken to manage ‘culture’. What concerns me is that they use the same online tools to manage culture that they use to work. To me, that would only create a ‘virtual culture’ and there’s nothing wrong about that. I think virtual companies should focus on developing virtual cultures and not even try building traditional cultures. Eating pizza, while on a conference call, does not constitute a pizza party. That’s a ‘Virtual Pizza Party’.



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Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Web 2.0 Logos

Go2Web20 is a great place of start exploring the Web 2.0 world. There were several that I recognized and a lot more that were new to me. Two things caught my attention, the site names and their logos. Somehow, they had a distinctive Web 2.0 touch to them.

Here's another amazing collection of logos on Flickr.

For an analysis of the fonts used in some popular logos, visit FontShop, which declares lime green as the Official Color of Web 2.0.


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Monday, September 18, 2006

Life Ticker

In the several months since my last post, there have been vast changes in the 'Web World'. Web 2.0, online communities, AJAX, mashups, telecommuting and more, have become the buzzwords. Life ticks by so quickly and every new moment presents us with newer technologies, concepts and ideas. Staleness has been replaced by anticipation, enthusiasm and excitement.

To keep in pace with this ever-changing world, I've re-christened this blog, Life Ticker. I've also introduced a live ticker, that shows my life ticking away. The Life Ticker, should make you realize that the difference between the past, the present and the future is so small, that it is almost non-existent. The future effortlessly becomes the present and the present slides into the past. What is 'in' today, is 'out' tomorrow. And this applies to society, the economy, technology and everything on this planet.

In the end, only the past will remain, to be looked upon by the generations to come. We can only hope, that what we do in these fleeting moments of our 'present', will make our 'past' a memorable one.

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