New Media

I like TED. I'd never heard of it before David pointed to Jeff Han's talk last year. Now Andrew is pointing to a really impressive presentation by Blaise Aguera y Arcas about the interactive multi-scale system called SeaDragon, and it's stunning integration into PhotoSynth. I believe that it's investments like this that will be the key to Microsoft's long term success, and not operating systems or internet search.

I showed this clip to Anne, and the next thing I hear is her listening to Josh Spear's presentation where he discusses New Media. A lot of the things I heard him talk about are vaguely familiar to me (emphasis on the word "vaguely") but Anne had never heard of them. I'd heard of things like micro-blogging and Twitter, but couldn't see myself spending the time on them.

(Actually, the one constant reminder I have of Twitter is someone subscribed to this blog who sets his GTalk status as "Twittering like a tit". This made me laugh.)

Meanwhile, Anne is learning about all these social networking sites and ideas which she had never heard of before. Some of them are just silly, but in others the potential is staggering - particularly with the teenage set. This isn't something to disregard if you have children of your own who will be an active part of this technology in years to come. She seems both fascinated and horrified. I guess it's interesting for me to observe this response, as I've been aware of it all as it's grown, but have taken the reliable stance of, "I'm going to bury my head in the sand because I'm way too busy to keep up with it all."

Her search tonight has had her sending me links to everything from Startup Search (looking at Krugle), through Pileus, and on to Vimeo, which we both agreed was our favorite. I'm humming the tune as I type. (Notice how the favorite site was one of social networking?)

The next thing I know, Anne is asking if I've heard of 37 Signals. So I had to explain what RoR is, and how it's a great framework for setting up interactive websites. This had her on Scriptaculous 5 minutes later, looking at the source code for the examples, and saying, "That all looks perfectly readable. I thought it would be hard."

(My home life may be about to get more complex.)

I'm always trying to "get things done", so I've avoided undirected surfing for a long while now. For a while now Anne has reminded me:
 a) How useful it can be.
 b) How much fun it is.
Maybe I should put time aside for it on occasion.