Open Waves

In the 90’s everyone was happy to be connected to this new thing called the Internet. Even though web sites took “forever” to load, people were willing to wait it out on the dial-up modems to get the latest news and information. Also, email started becoming the main way for people to communicate.

By the year 2000, after everyone stopped freaking out about Y2K, we saw the uprising of faster connections, known as broadband (DSL and cable). A few people hung on to their second phone line, but most upgraded and saw a pretty nice increase in speed. With that increase came an explosion of Flash web sites, where animation ruled and people were still willing to wait a few seconds for a site to load, especially if it had a spinning icon to keep them preoccupied. But, maybe ironically, Flash was truly a “flash in the pan” and has been demoted to serving up banner ads and sometimes even navigation.

As we head into the next decade, the accessing of information has reached breakneck speed. Thanks to free services like Twitter, you can post an update on your FREE web site and have it sent around the world instantly to anyone who is interested in what you have to say. So I ask, where do we go from here? It sure doesn’t seem like we can get information out to the world any faster. I have even had to cut back on the RSS feeds I read and the people I follow on Twitter, as it just became too unreasonable to digest all the content I was receiving. Will we ever see a decline in the amount of information, or will people continue to jump on the “next big thing” in technology to get their message out?

I’ve been reading up on a lot of web design blogs, and I’ve noticed there are some sites who refrain from writing certain kinds of posts like “The top 10 ways to…” or “How to do something really cool”. Others do not shy away from using such marketing schemes to try to get more visitors to their site. I wonder if it really makes a difference. So I’ve decided to start a category and begin posting a top ten list as often as I think about it. I will monitor the stats of these posts and see how they compare to my regular posts. I’ll probably do it for a year and post the results next January. Until then, enjoy my next post…

After about 1 year of blogging on this site, I just hit 1,500 total views.  Thanks to everyone who keeps hitting refresh to make my stats go up!  No really, thanks for reading and I hope the next year is just as good.

Change is good.  I was waiting for a clean and simple layout to come out that I thought would make sense for this blog.  I like this theme a lot and I think it looks very professional.  There was nothing wrong with the old one, I just felt the design was a bit outdated.  So here we are, using “The Journalist v1.9 by Lucian E. Marin“.  Let me know what you think, and feel free to look around.

Also, the reasons I have not been posting as often are plentiful.  I have been spending most of my blogging time writing about my Phillies since they are still in the race, and how bad the Eagles are over at “4 for 4“.  I am also finishing up school in the next few months, as well as a new addition to the family.  So needless to say, sleep is the priority right now.  For the next few months, I will continue to post relevant things I find online, but I probably won’t be writing too much.  To catch up on a long hiatus from “Blog of the Month”, I’m compiling my list of feeds I have been watching and I’ll probably post them all at once in a big list.  So, look for that in the next week or so.

Is Google becoming “evil”, or was it really just a copy & paste accident?  Should I uninstall Chrome?

Find out more here.