Midwinter Top Tech Musings
Jan 12th, 2008 by Karen
Top Tech Trends in tomorrow and I’ve been bouncing ideas off of several colleagues trying to decide what topics exactly would be the most interesting to discuss. The last 6 months haven’t really produced any killer insights for me but maybe that is because I’ve been spending huge amounts of time implementing new systems at UH.
So what I’ve picked up on my radar since Annual that I think is worth considering…
- Ultra-light and small PCs (eeePC and competitors) - This whole concept is relatively new on my radar, but is pretty interesting. The idea of having a small, cost effective ($300 -$400) efficient computer that has a limited amount of storage (flash memory for a hard drive) and relies heavily on the network and open source software to meet users needs is one that has both appeal (Hey maybe theses are the laptops we should be loaning) and raises questions about how libraries will provide services in the future.
- New uses of wireless - Probably the coolest moment at Internet Librarian this year was the guys from DOK, Delft Public Library demonstrating the hardware which allows them to push content to people’s wireless phones via bluetooth when the phones get within a certain proximity of said hardware. I immediately thought “gosh libraries could use this to tell people about new books, or that they have a fine they need to pay or book to pick up”. I also thought about things like this to transfer data from library computers to a users mobile devices. Combine this with GPS and things start to get really interesting. I’d love it if my Prius would not only help me find the restaurant via GPS navigation but show be possible restaurant options in the area and let me read reviews of them on the web. This is now technically possible.
- Blogging ceases to exist as blogging - Writing the blogging book, I came to the realization that blogs and blogging have reached a point that people don’t recognize that as what they are doing anymore. Social networking sites which offer blog-like features have clouded the issues as have microblogging technologies like Twitter and the ability to create feeds of media such as photos and video. For many blogging has simply become the way in which content is being created, rather than its own genre or methodology.
- On the Go Applications and Data - I and many of my colleagues do 90% of their business using web applications today. We expect applications to be available from wherever, whenever. We are starting to expect the same of our data. Furthermore we don’t want to carry a heavy laptop around with us. Instead we’d prefer to use the smallest device possible for comfortably (what is comfortable is a personal preference) accomplishing our tasks. Increasingly library users are expecting the same things. Therefore we need to make sure our systems interact well with these technologies that support portable applications and data.
[...] Ultra-light and small PCs (Referenced from Karen Coombs)Karen is one of a number of folks that has taken note of a wide range of low-cost computers currently being made available to the general public. These machines, which run between $189-$400, provide low-cost, portable machines that have the potential to bring computers to a wider audience. I’ll have to admit, I’m personally not sold on these machines, in part because of the customer-base that they are aiming for. Companies such as EeePC note that these machines are primarily targeted to users that are looking for a portable second machine and kids/elderly looking for a machine simply to surf the web. A look at the specifications for many of these low cost machines are celerion class processors with 512 MB of RAM with poor graphics processing. Is this good enough for web surfing or browsing the web? I’d argue, no. The current and future web is a rich environment, built on CSS, XML, XSLT, flash, java, etc. I think what people seem to forget is that this rich content takes a number of resources to simply view. Case in point — I setup a copy of Centos on a 1.2 MHz Centrino with 512 MB RAM and a generic graphics card (8 Mb of shared memory) and while I could use this machine to browse the web and doing office work with Open office, I certainly wouldn’t want to. Just running the Linux shell was painful, but web browsing is clunky and office work is basically unusable — essentially, surpassing the machine’s capabilities right out of the box. Is this the type of resource I’d want to be lending to my patrons…probably not since I wouldn’t want my patrons to associate my library’s technical expertise with sub-standard resources. Does this mean that ultra-portables will not be in vogue this year and the next? Well, I didn’t say that. A look at the success the IPhone is having (a pocket PC retailing for close to $1500 without a contract) seems to indicate that users are wanting to and willing to pay a premium price for portability — so long as that portability doesn’t come at too high of a price. [...]
Your comments about blogging ceasing to be blogging are smart — the same might be said of wiki, too, in the sense that both are collaborative, Web-based content management systems, that, more and more, are standard web publishing platforms. This is a welcome development in moving beyond the novelty (and FUD) associated with buzzwords.
portable gps devices…
Basically, what blue tooth gps does is take the gps device and sends a signal to your blue tooth wireless laptop or your PDA….