Cool emerging technologies

I love this stuff! Check out this article on “7 Technologies Shaping the Future of Social Media“.

User-generated mashups by Mozilla labs – Ubiquity. This is brilliant.

And now, I gotta stop distracting myself and focus on learning Objective-C. Sigh…so much to learn, not enough time.

I want to avoid having to work in a vacuum

Here’s an interesting article about the “benefits of distraction”: http://nymag.com/news/features/56793/.

It is very long though, I found I didn’t have the patience to read more than a paragraph on a page before I started scanning the rest. Hah…wasn’t I talking about information overload earlier? Still, it made some good points. I’m pretty conflicted about the issue — are all our distractions these days (twitter, blogs, rss feeds, emails, etc) truly destroying our synaptic pathways (I’m joking, but not quite), or are they simply keeping us from being more productive in our lives without the major side effects?

The whole multitasking thing probably is a myth, but then again I have faith in my brain’s ability to adapt at least a little. If you watch kids IM multiple people and play video games at the same time, I am not only amazed at how they can simultaneously juggle these activities, but how they don’t seem to suffer a great loss of concentration in any one ‘channel’. That said, I’m really curious to see how they fare in the workplace when they get older.

Perhaps the price you pay for the ability to multitask is the increasing inability to focus for long periods of time on a SINGLE task when it’s actually needed. Have you ever spent time talking to a teenager, one on one? And noticed that they can’t seem to look at you in the eyes for more than a split second before they start looking around? And not be able to follow what you’re saying? You might tell me that it’s because what I’m saying to them is typical adult stuff and they’re just not interested in the discussion (I usually try to talk about topics that are more relevant to them), but something tells me that’s not the only reason. And another thing — ask a kid these days if they like reading books. Some actually do, for those who are snickering as they read this. But they can’t seem to finish what they’re reading, and they certainly seem to be avoiding the longer titles. In fact, most of them seem to gravitate towards graphic novels. God I hate that term, ‘graphic novels’. It’s a bloody comic book, ok?

Testing out the Posterous service

If this works, I will be a happy camper. I think what they do at Posterous is brilliant – it’s so much easier to write up my blog posts and tweets through email. Or maybe it’s because I’m lazy and I just want everything to be even easier than it already is.

Testing out a youtube video here (and to celebrate the fact that the new Star Trek movie will be premiering here in one week!):

(Note: After posting with Posterous, the video didn’t show up here so I had to edit the post to make it work)

I have no idea where the photo I attached will end up in relation to the text, it’s me in my dream car (don’t I look happy?) 

(Note: After posting with Posterous, the photo showed up at the beginning of the post)

Posted via email from cchoy’s posterous

Using PBworks (PBwiki)

I’ve always believed in using web 2.0 tools for collaboration and communication. It’s just so much more efficient and effective than traditional tools like whiteboards and email.

Just yesterday I was explaining to a friend how wikis work. It’s weird how the concept of the wiki has been out for a very long time now, and yet it seems there are still a lot of people that have not yet heard of it. Originally I think it was just a way for people to access, create, and update a bunch of web pages as a group, but I think the founder of PBworks explains really well on the PBworks blog how this concept has really evolved: “The product has evolved well beyond the definition of a ‘wiki’. What we have now is not just some user-friendly generic wiki; it’s an increasingly full-featured hosted collaboration environment, used by tens of thousands of companies around the world to get their work done.”

And that’s why I love wikis. I recently set up a couple of wikis using PBworks and have found it was a really great place to asynchronously collaborate with my cohorts. At work, we’ve used other wiki services that have worked almost as well (I still like PBworks best so far). I can upload files, organize files and pages in my own folder structure, and track changes to any of the content using RSS feeds.

I wish I had this tool when I was a student. I wonder just how much further I could have gone in my learning if I could have used a wiki to share my notes and ideas with fellow students. But why wish? As adults we’re constantly learning, and certainly in the world that I’m in (web, media, and elearning development), it can be an invaluable tool for sharing information between like-minded peeps.

Twittering

Lately I’ve been really hooked on Twitter.

My first impression of Twitter, before I tried it out, was that it would be a complete waste of time for people that have a strange need to air out their personal lives, and for voyeurs who have a need to know what others are doing on a daily basis. I was proven wrong when I realized that it could be used instead as a social learning tool.

As a person that is generally curious in nature with a huge appetite for learning and a desire to contribute to the overall knowledge pool on the web, I am finding Twitter to be an invaluable source of new tidbits of info. Unlike blogging on the usual blog sites, which can take a lot of time and thoughtful writing, Twitter is an excellent alternative that frees you up from having to think too hard about your posts and allows you to just get to the point in 140 characters or less. I love it!

As soon as I created my account, I downloaded Twhirl to use as a desktop (AIR) app for twittering, and so far it’s worked out really well. For the first few days, I enjoyed seeing new tweets popping up in the corner of my screen — it wasn’t too much of a distraction, and in a way I felt like I was multi-tasking because I was working and staying up-to-date with new information at the same time. It’s starting to get to be a bit much though, the links that people are sharing are becoming a little TOO inviting, so I think I’m going to back off for a bit.

Twhirl

I just downloaded TweetDeck (also an AIR app) on a recommendation by Nick Floro in his really informative webinar on social media today. It’s a little more usable than Twhirl, at first glance anyways, as it allows you to switch from a single-column view of the latest tweets to a three-column view that also displays replies and direct messages. The notifications are much smaller and appear in the top right corner of your screen, which I like.

TweetDeck