new tech

I've had a play with flickr, mashups like spell (hmm, I did go overboard with this slightly!), montagr, magazine cover, the colour wheel thing, plus found lots more I will go back to and play with some more.

I've been reading TechCrunch, a blog about new technologies. I read a few interesting posts this week, one today about Amazon developing Dynamo, a new type of Web operating system that treats all of those connected servers (applications that have moved to massive grids of computers on the Web, like the ones that power Amazon’s e-commerce site or Google’s search engine and online apps) as one big computer. Sounds pretty amazing or perhaps I should say amaz-on!!
And they offer this quote:
"At the start of the last century, the great engineering project was the creation of an electric grid that could deliver power to millions of users with a reliability and an efficiency that were previously unthinkable. Today’s great engineering project, of which Amazon’s Dynamo is but one manifestation, is to build a computing grid that can achieve similar breakthroughs in the processing and delivery of information." This is from somebody called Nick Carr - quite a guy!

There was also a new social network called Wixi - I signed up to it's beta invite. Here's what it is:
"Wixi users get 3GB of free storage that they can use to share photos, videos, and music with their friends and family. While the service is browser-based, Wixi designed the interface to feel like a desktop environment with drag-n-drop functionality. Files hosted on Wixi can be accessed through the Wixi website or displayed on users’ websites using an embeddable Flash Player."
There is so much going on, a blog like TechCrunch makes you realize how much there is to keep up to speed with.

I discovered some new names the other day too - Jeffery Zeldman and Howard Rheingold and Virtual Dave Lankes. Must read more about them.

Oh, and I heard back from Laurel Papworth who I had contacted about her social networking workshop. She suggested a few options, one of which was running an inhouse course for us. Might be a good way to do this.