Hello again, everyone (all three of you by the best estimates.) Hopefully you all have noticed the pretty shinebuttons at the foot of this post next to the fullpost link. You'll also notice that ALL my posts have them. That's because I didn't do the lazy thing and add their code to my new post addin text.
Nope, I did it the Super Heroic Coder way and edited them directly into the layout with the other bootstraps I've put into this blog's code. It was very troublesome because the Shiny Buttons' snippet code was notoriously not-blogger-ready in at least half the cases (I improvised the Simpy link from two different sources.)
So what are these Pretty Colored Buttons, really? Well, they're my ingeniously nefarious solution on how to democratize my blog's bid for world domination! (muahaha!)
Simply put, they're links to add my site to your social bookmarking system of choice. What's social bookmarking? Why, it's part of the magic of web 2.0 (doesn't that sound spiffy! Go ahead and say it with me again, web 2.0.) Of course, seeing as there is no prevalent standard system of social bookmarking, you have to submit to the grotesque comemrcial-client hodgepodge below. Hopefully you've already enroleld with one of the services or more. If you have, the buttons make it PAINFULLY easy to add this site into your bookmarks for that service or give it a vote.
That was informative but boring, entertain us! For we are the unwashed masses@
Fine, fine, dwellers of the intertubes. Well, actually, I'll keep assailing you with walls of text, because that's what I know how to do.
Anyway, I suppose this site is now plugged into web 2.0 because of those little, innocuous looking icons at the bottom of this post. "Funny, though, things don't feel very different," you say. At which point I realize you are actually a burglar looking over my shoulder as I write this, prompting me to scream like a schoolgirl.
Anyway, yes, the difference is fairly minimal. That's because web 2.0 is a very contradictory term. The 2.0 makes it sound like a complete overhaul that makes everything sleek, sexy and chrome (because chrome, as we know, doubles sexiness, in the same way the color red makes cars go faster.) In reality, web 2.0 is more like a full realization of existing technology. You could say we're filling out the shoes of the internet - the intershoes, if you will.
Much like MAckai's armament in chapter 3, web 2.0 is mostly old tech, just glossed up with new, advanced control systems under the hood. Web 2.0 describes intelligent, machine content delivery and syndication systems, liek the RSS feeds at the top right of this page and the aforementioned social bookmarks. They essentially make the internet a true network of active links via search utilities, hot topics, socially voted on sites, intelligent aggregators, et cetera.
Of course, it's no real surprise this is happening, and the change will likely be seamless. But in a good decade, we may soon find this isn't our grampappy's internet anymore.
Blah, blah, shut up! What about that book signing with Charles Stross?
Don't yell at me, us anonymous writers have feelings, too! (I'm sad that you never snuggle, what happened to the blog patron I fell in love with ih so long ago... okay nevermind, this joke was old before the dinosaurs went extinct.)
Anyway, it was a real joy to be there. Stross is my idol as far as modern SF writing goes. So, I was distinctly nervous as hell, nerdvous, one might say, when I got to the book shop he was signing in (early, of course, it's a true geek tradition.) But he turned out to be a fairly down to earth guy (aside from the fact that the stuff he writes is all flavors of weird at once, but that tends to be a very good thing.)
I also purchased glasshouse and got it signed by His Royal Scottishness: Stross himself. And... bloody hell! He beat me to the punch! A long, long time ago (say in a galaxy far away, I friggin dare you) I wrote a story about beings living outside of known reality in an aggregate manifold of continuities, effectively immortal and operating outside of time. It focused on a character in late stages of rehabilitation, a graft of three broken conciousnesses trying to find his own island of sanity in a world that was merely a series of cleverly crafted illusions of reality. And, dammit, Storss already wrote such a story... of course, with interdimensionality replaced with wormhole entangled multi-spaces. Argh, sometimes I wonder if ANY of my ideas are original.
*ahem*
Well, that's it, off with you! And please try out my shineybuttons below this post. Help Sunrise dominate the intertubes!
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