Again – just moving some items over from another blog – originally Posted by kiratt2 on December 5, 2010

There is an interesting article in yesterday’s Toronto Star (yes I’m a day behind in my reading).  Geoff Pevere is investigating seismic shifts — for both industries and consumers — in four erupting areas: film, music, books and TV.

I have copied a couple of quotes for you to read…with the hopes that it will intrigue you enough to click-through and read the whole article.

“Digital media have not only created a world starkly different from the world of a mere 15 years ago, they have changed the way people who live in the world think, behave, create and consume.”

“Digital media – what has this done to the industry, since so much control has shifted from producer to consumer?”

Consumer behaviour is shifting and giving the power to the people.  What do you think?  Has the time finally come where people can get what they want?  Or will the backlash of everyone doing what ever they want be so strong that in the end no one will get what they want?

Read the full article from the Toronto Star here – The Digital Revolution

I am moving some things over from another blog to this one – so this isn’t new content but something I wrote and posted last November.

I went to the mall today.  Now, this in itself is hardly exciting but it got me thinking about mall culture.  What makes a good mall experience?

I for one am not a regular fixture at the mall – I tend to stay as far away from them as possible and generally shoot in quickly on an off time when it’s not crowded, then shoot right back out again.  I cringe at the idea of going in one on a weekend and I deplore the idea of wasting my few precious weekend hours with a bunch of loud, obnoxious teenagers.  However, that being said, one of my daughter’s indoor school shoes were too tight and I had promised to buy her new ones.

Wandering around the mall on a Saturday afternoon with two six-year-old girls is probably someone’s idea of pure agony.  It was busy, hot and crowded but we had a grand time.

The first and foremost order of our trip was to buy school shoes.  Once that was out-of-the-way we hit the bookstore, toy store and picked up a couple of Poppy’s for Remembrance Day.  We stopped for the requisite coffee and apple juice and to rest our feet.  The girls walked the whole way with nary a complaint.  I noticed other kids, being dragged from grown up store to grown up store – these were not happy children.  They were not laughing and giggling and chattering away to their parents – rather there were a lot of tears and grumpy tantrums.  It occurred to me, when you go to the mall with children, if you want to enjoy yourself it has to be all about them.

There was however, something about the hustle and bustle of that mall that made me want to shop for myself.  My immediate thought was, “I’ll come back during the week on my own.”  But in reality I won’t and the reason is that during the week there’s no one there.  There is no hustle and bustle.  No winding in and out of foot traffic, no line ups at the cash and all the seating at the coffee shop you could ever want.  In fact there would be very little public interaction at all.

So what’s wrong with that you might ask?  Nothing really except the mall experience disappears.  Walking into a vacant store and suddenly becoming the centre of attention by bored staffers is a whole different experience.  It’s not the mall experience.  Think back to last Christmas – this is the ultimate mall experience.  The crowds, the shopping bags, the pushing and shoving trying to manoeuvre through narrow aisles.  What makes this mall experience unique is that everyone in there is doing the exact same thing as you – shopping for Christmas presents.  It is the only time of the year when this happens.

Yes, there are other holidays but none that generate the same frenzy as the week before Christmas.  After the first 30 minutes or so of being stood in line at the cash, you begin to commiserate with the person behind you – eyebrows raised, you joke around about the slowness of the cashier or the person who doesn’t even have their money out when they get up front (what were they doing for the last ½ hour?).  When it’s finally your turn however, the cashier becomes your friend and you begin to discuss how many people you have left to shop for – there are smiles all around and as you leave a hearty Merry Christmas follows you out.

This is the true mall experience – the crowds, the frenzy and the obnoxious teenagers.  There is an inherent excitement shopping this way and truthfully, my next trip to the mall will be on a weekend but I will leave the children at home!

There are some fascinating books out there dealing with technology and the internet today.  If you have the chance to pick up Hamlet’s BlackBerry by William Powers or Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch or his more recent Pulitzer Prize Finalist book, The Shallows, I highly recommend them.

These books don’t paint a dystopian view of the internet but rather seek to explain why and how technology is changing the way we process information similarly to the way that writing, the printing press and electricity globally altered civilization many moons ago.

Today’s internet has opened up the world to many new ideas and innovative solutions including smart phones, tablets, cloud computing and Kinect technology.  These last two items are advancing our sophistication with using the web on a ? basis.  While tech companies bridge gaps between Smartphones and Tablets, Kinect technology is being “hacked” into in a way that its developers probably didn’t imagine; 7 Mind-Blowing Xbox Kinect Hacks.

Cloud computing while being hailed as the force behind doing away with IT departments is in actuality, according to Nicholas Carr recreating the utility based phenomenon history witnessed with the advancement of electricity ? from power substations to cloud-like utility based providers – haven’t you ever wondered where the electricity comes from when you flip the switch in your kitchen?   Probably not as we are so used to it we don’t even question its source.

Our electricity is not located in a room down in the basement but at a mega power facility located somewhere far far away.  Cloud computing is effectively  moving us away from having to house our own server, store our own data or fix our own hardware.  As with any utility company we don’t really have to worry too much about upgrades or system failures; just like when the power goes out we can expect that someone at the power company will take care of it so too is the benefit of cloud computing.

Experts Predict We’ll Be Working in the Cloud by 2020 – What do you think?