Absolute Geek

Dan Ma

I’ll admit I’m a bit of a luddite when it comes to jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon. So it may come as a surprise to some that this is my first ever “Blog". Don’t get me wrong; I’m far from being a technophobe on any level, with the goal of producing somewhat delicious irony for my blog’s title. Over the years, I have written regular short articles about news and daily life, formulated opinions and vented my frustrations and put them online in a web-based journal.  Sound familiar?

But package that up with a cool name, wrap it up with an aura of “the little guy that could take on The New York Times” and immediately, everyone must have a “Blog”.

I’ll reiterate again, I love technology and live and breathe the t’interweb. But bearing the scars of a couple of dot-com booms and busts now, there’s one thing I can’t stand in my line of work: hype. And more precisely, how some marketing types go into a frenzy as soon as they latch on to the latest Web 2.0 buzzword du jour like it’s the latest must-have accessory.

Let me give you a recent example.

I love widgets. I have them all over my desktop and on my phone – they’re great for telling me the weather or the time of the train I just missed.  They just sit there, do what I need them to do, and nothing else.
 
A client of ours loves them as well, and wanted us to build one to broadcast messages to their agents. But without considering a purpose of what a widget is for, they ended up dismissing all sense of usability or usefulness. “Can we have background sound as well? That you can’t turn off so everyone can hear it? Oh! And can it take up half the screen on top of the other windows?  And display whole web pages? And can it automatically send emails back to base?”

Having all said and done, not all hype is bad, it drives the web forward in developing more cool stuff. But like many good things, they are best enjoyed in moderation.

Through this blog I hope I can provide some perspective from us techies on the coal-face of web development, demystifying some of the marketese and buzzwords where we can along the way. If we can also bring some level of common sense and consideration for the user, as we can be a little tunnel-visioned by marketing goals at times, then I will be a happy bunny.

P.S. Am I behind the times? I’ve heard from an Account Director that we’re up to Web 3.5 now. What that entails exactly is beyond me - I missed the release notes when Web 3.0 was in Beta.