Talk: “The Web Browser is a Transitional Technology”

Allen Wirfs-Brock, a Mozilla Research Fellow, at YOW 2011, defined what he considers the current era of computing, and some exciting elements of where we are and where we are going in his talk “The Web Browser is a Transitional Technology”.

It looks like YOW 2011 had some fantastic talks to check out.

Steve Klabnik: Nobody Understands REST or HTTP

Steve Klabnik outlines some best practices in API design in “Nobody Understands REST or HTTP”, some of which I admit I need to follow more consistently. As he states in the end:

Seriously, most of the problems that you’re solving are social, not technical. The web is decades old at this point, most people have considered these kinds of problems in the past. That doesn’t mean that they always have the right answer, but they usually do have an answer, and it’d behoove you to know what it is before you invent something on your own.

Good article with clear to use tips.

The Web is 20

I’d like to say thank you to Tim Berners-Lee and all those who were part of making the Web happen.

The original announcement (where? on Usenet of course!)

W3C

Design Issues for the World Wide Web

World Wide Web Foundation

Weaving the Web

See also: Dan Gillmor’s thank you

Two questioning reports on social networking and culture

Jeffrey Rosen in the NYTimes reports on the effects social networking will have on our efforts to redefine ourselves:

It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

Tom Meltzer in the Guardian reports on the strange paradox of loneliness among the most connected generation seemingly ever:

This is not just a teenage problem. In May, the Mental Health Foundation released a report called The Lonely Society? Its survey found that 53% of 18-34-year-olds had felt depressed because of loneliness, compared with just 32% of people over 55. The question of why was, in part, answered by another of the report’s findings: nearly a third of young people said they spent too much time communicating online and not enough in person.

In a YouGov poll published by Samaritans last December, 21% of young people aged 18-24 identified loneliness as one of their major concerns. Young people worried more than any other age group about feeling alone, being single, about the quality of their relationships with friends and family. Such figures have led newspapers to dub us the “Eleanor Rigby generation”; better connected than any in history, yet strangely alone.

Afraid you’ll miss Firebug if you move to Chrome?

Probably not. Check out the screencasts at Chromium Projects: “Google Chrome Developer Tools”.

I haven’t abandoned Firefox yet. But it is important to experiment and keep your toolbox open.

Since Chrome has recently gone stable on the OS X, I’m finding it a capable browser. Haven’t switched yet however.

Online heroes – David and Barbara Mikkelson

NPR.org profiles the hosts of Snopes.com in “Mom-And-Pop Site Busts The Web’s Biggest Myths”.

Two obits at NPR: one worthy, one not

NPR: In Memoriam: Sweet, Sad Rocker Vic Chesnutt

NPR: The Man Is Gone, But Long Live The Blogosphere (via Garret Vreeland). Jeff Jarvis knows blogging as well as anybody, but NPR should have talked to people who knew Brad Graham, or, as Garret suggests, were at least among his contemporaries in that first wave of blogging. He offered way more than the word ‘blogosphere’ to the history of blogging and way more to the world other than blogging. Check out this related Metafilter thread.