Dept. of Good Ideas

While preparing for next week's presentation on Responsive Design, I tried to recall my original uneasiness over the phone app frenzy. You remember -- that short painful period only a few months ago when either you were developing a phone app version of your site or you just weren't serious. You thought it silly? So did I. But it took me a second to remember why. I mean, this was before Responsive Web Design had sunk in as a possible solution. So why the initial uneasiness? And then of course I remembered: the notion that your average user was going to download a separate app for every site -- the equivalent of taking your collection of bookmarks and downloading a separate program for each -- was a complete absurdity. Thank God, we're beyond that. It's history.

Gearing up for a presentation on 'Responsive Web Design' that I'll be giving at the UIC Webmaster Brownbag next week. From the official announcement:

UIC Web Professionals,

Join us for a discussion about Responsive Web Design on Thursday, February 2, noon - 1 p.m. Leo Klein, Coordinator for Web Communications in the Office of Admissions and Records, will discuss Responsive Web Design as a significant development in how we approach web design -- what's got us to this point, the need to design for various platforms from PCs to tablets and smartphones. The session will include discussion of key topics including Media Queries and Mobile First.

Audience: all levels. Also, experience and thoughts from others on this subject is encouraged and highly appreciated.

I'm a bit late to the party on this one but it's always important to acknowledge a triumph of sanity over pedantry when it comes to the English language. The AP Stylebook, the self-proclaimed 'journalist's bible', has announced it's changing 'Web site' to 'website' both online and in its stylebook for next year.

You'll be able to wave your smart phone at a product in a store and buy it if this article in the New York Times is to be believed.

Of course, the notion that people will be willing to turn their phones into a delivery device for retail marketing based on their every GPS move, called "aggressive merchandising" in the article, is a complete absurdity.

This however sounds more promising:

Nice quote from an article in this month's American Libraries:

Winner Carolyn Wheeler told the audience of well-wishers [at the 2009 I Love My Librarian Award Ceremony in NYC] that she has a poster in her library that reads" "Did you ask a good question today?" That, Wheeler noted, sums up the best way to learn to love your librarian.

Enough already with the fetishism about eReaders! It's the market for Smartphones and Netbooks that's advancing in leaps and bounds.

I liked the article in BusinessWeek on the 'Real-Time Web'. It being BusinessWeek, they naturally devoted a significant portion to speculation on how to make money from this emerging trend and I had to laugh at the illusive precision of there being "at least $5 billion to be made on the real-time Web". What, just $5 billion?

Anyway, to give them their due, they correctly identify the trend:

I put up the Google Friend Connect widget on the far right column. It kind of duplicates what the MyBlogLog widget does though in a more dynamic way.

In any case, sign up today!

I find it amusing that there's so much buzz (some of it manufactured?) about the Amazon Kindle. The real revolution is all around us (which is what you'd expect for a revolution): it's people using smart-phones or netbooks to text each other, send email and photos, and otherwise access the Internet.

Now we have a report by the Pew Research Center which reflects pretty much what anyone taking a train or bus home can observe every day: