Social Networking - Thank You and What's Next?

All of us our internet consumers. We carry on daily without working knowledge about the products we consume. It's nice to learn what you thought you knew.

So, what's next? The explosive growth of social networking sites tempered. Blogging is mainstream, old technology. We know custom niche networks are popular. What will web 3.0 have in store?

How about a recent article about futurist Ray Kurzweil and how Video Games will create "new forms of intelligence."

UGC - A Democratic Proving Ground

Did you know that governments have the power to censor the entire internet coming into their country?? This should not be a shocking truth but the pervading internet is watered down to people living in China and Iran. How about Turkey blocking YouTube? Big pipes come into the country and run through government proxy servers. The internet is filtered by every big company in America. China and Iran just run bigger proxy servers to get the job done. It should not be shocking that our fine government friends in these countries don't care for American style openness.

In what is likened to a cold war cat and mouse game, sites like The Voice of America find ways around proxy filtering, get blocked and then take on yet another identity only to eventually be detected, ad infinitum.

Here is another test to UGC freedom. Here is an interesting, recent article from Israel. What if the government held UGC sites liabel for misinformation or slander like they can with most established newspapers? Certain blogs want to become recognized as an "established news organization" on par with the New York Times. Litigation concerns should make these bloggers be careful for what they wish for in case they get it.

Dancing the ChaCha Before Shotgun Wedding

Right now my fiance and I are planning a wedding. We just got engaged January 19th. The date of the wedding is already set for April 12th. We are having a shotgun wedding!

The only problem is, the shotgun is not wielded by her angry father pointed at me because she's pregnant! She is not and even if you suspect this just wait 9 months and the truth will come out (or not come out). The shotgun is the limited time we have to pull it all together by April 12th.

Thankfully, my wife to be is a working, fantastic dynamo who does not do what she can do today tomorrow, she's already done today's tasks yesterday. She Christmas shops in January, not for belated gifts but for next Christmas. God Bless Her!

However, Planning a wedding in two months has put her tasky skill set to the test. Here is a calculation for everyone that has planned a wedding during the internet age. How much time did you spend searching the web planning it? Countless hours, much of it fruitlessly weeding through lists of vendors that don't match your price target or geography.

So, why not hire chacha.com guides to do the searching for you? Or could you somehow crowdsource the wedding plans? Afterall, planning a wedding is a hard solution. Pleasing a bride to be (known as bridezilla) is even harder? The point is, you know time is tight when it would be better to pay someone $5 an hour to search the internet for you. That is, I advise doing the ChaCha before the wedding.

DC Forecast - It's Snow, Wait.... Damn Cold Rain!

One out of five years Washington DC has a "real winter". The other four years are sad winter experiences. Nothing like cold rain! Yet, TV prognosticators are usually hopeful. "Looks like we could get significant snow out of this storm! However, if it's too warm we will get cold rain."

Thanks for that insight my weather friends. DC winter weather lesson number 1, please repeat after me:

"If it's too warm we will get cold rain."