The most valuable part of having a large social network (for me at least) isn’t visibility, it’s about reducing middlemen. The internet has destroyed many middlemen, and created countless new ones. I barely use the former, and when I don’t have to I avoid the latter. Examples Classifieds –> Craigslist and eBay Travel Agents –>… Continue Reading
Author Archives: LenKendall
A less lonely elderly
How will the internet dramatically change our lives as we march towards old age? It’s been just over a year since I lost my grandmother. She was virtually the only elderly person I’ve ever spent a significant amount of time with. One of the lasting memories I have from the final few months of… Continue Reading
Dealing with Duality
Narcissism is often considered to be the driver of a digital network’s success. Omitting certain details (whether unflattering or boring) and highlighting successes has become the unsurprising norm. And this duality of our existence continues to grow the more that the internet pervades our lives. This fissure also begins to develop earlier and earlier as… Continue Reading
This blog post isn’t free.
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” It’s a statement that many of us have uttered at some point, and also whole-heartedly believed. But for some reason when it comes to web content, we’ve all been trained into believing the exact opposite. The last decade or so has gone by and professional publishers haven’t… Continue Reading
The non-technical hacker
The term “hacker” has morphed in meaning over the years. It started off as a way to describe folks trying to circumvent computer security (and it still is), then it became more of a pop-culture reference to web developers in general (still is), and today a term that’s frequently appending other types of specialties and… Continue Reading
Connectivity isn’t the problem. You are.
A recent New York Times piece titled, “The Joy of Quiet” implies that Americans are too connected for our own good. Apparently we are constantly distracting ourselves with new information and that, “we have more and more ways to communicate, but less and less to say.” Author Pico Iyer makes a very solid point in… Continue Reading
The Death of Consumer Electronics is Near
TVs. Computers. Video game consoles. Consumer electronics with a screen or a speaker are inevitably going to disappear as products when the scenario illustrated in the above video becomes a reality. Augmented reality is still mostly constrained to our smartphones, but as wearable computing inches us closer to a fusion of man and machine, the famous brands we… Continue Reading
Minority Report Reading
Most of you will agree, the internet has trained us to read a lot more. And while the frequency has increased, you may also agree we’re not reading the entire article, we’re just skimming. This recent Onion satire got me thinking about that behavior. Is part of the reason we’re not reading articles through to the end… Continue Reading
Hierarchy of INTERNET needs
The famous… Continue Reading
Don’t tweet this without reading it.
We’ve all been there. We’re “surfing the web” looking for things to read, and it hits us. We see a story link, a tweet, or perhaps something that pops up on Facebook that makes us click. It’s not because the topic is of any particular relevance to us, it’s because the story lets us vilify… Continue Reading