Given that I had the opportunity to travel this Thanksgiving week to my friend’s place in Los Angeles, I had a lot of time to think (and a lot of time to regret the decision to drive with my 3 little boys on a holiday weekend, but that’s another post in another blog ).  Anyway, as a result I have the following short list of things I am thankful for in things tech related.

• Engineering geniuses that understand that they don’t know everything and can find bits of truth anywhere
• Engineering humility that allows cooperation with designer genius
• Palm, for leading the way in smart phones with their PDA series so long ago
• Apple’s iPhone, for forcing the mobile phone industry to go ’sexy’
• the Internet and it’s creators, for enabling world-wide connection, information sharing and collaboration
• Google, for enabling the search of and usage so much useful and relevant information
• Google watchdogs for reminding us that so much power can also be easily abused
• Facebook, for allowing me to connect with so many of my old friends
• Twitter, for introducing microblogging and the “Continuous Partial Attention” concept
• Microsoft marketing, for making computers look easy to end users and their developer tools group for enabling such sophisticated development
• Many other companies for creating technology that actually makes computing easy

In all seriousness, there are plenty of other things I am thankful for related to tech.  I am more thankful to my family and friends for putting up with my incessant use of “Greek” language that tends to put them to sleep

It pains me that I have anybody on my list of Facebook friends that would even consider this chain-letter for a minute…  Today I (along with 14 of my other “closest” friends) received the following message:

Attention all Facebook users
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are active or not,If you’re active please send
to 15 other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
message to show me that your active and not deleted.

Founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerb

My reaction:  Ugh…  Do people really take this kind of thing seriously any more?  I mean seriously…  Reading the email and applying the smallest amount of commen sense would say that sending MORE messages would only serve to further burden the system, a bad idea if it were really having performance problems in the first place.

What it DID remind me of, however, is the willingness of people to believe anything without understanding where to go in order to “check the facts.”  This is a problem that the security industry is forever battling with end-users that are not very technically or security saavy.  I guess we will always still have work to do in educating our friends and neighbors.

I just ran across a post today that recommends people stop blogging and move on to other technology to communicate.  The article, linked here, comments that most blogs are relegated to the dark corners of the blogosphere because they just don’t have the traffic to get noticed anymore.  Also, what is mentioned is that those that do get comments, get hecklers more than anything.

To this I would say: “Bah”, you’re missing the point of blogging for a great number of people that actually use the technology these days.  The point about microblogging, countered appropriately by many in the comments, is invalid since most bloggers are out to either record their experiences for Google referencing on very specific topics, or are out to disseminate information to a very targeted crowd such as family or a close network of friends and colleagues anyway.

Furthering this point of view is the idea that blogs are no longer primarly “publicized” by means of Google or aggregation sites.  They are publicized by means of other bloggers, social network utilities and content aggregation sites like FriendFeed or MyBlogLog.

So, as I continue my exploration of blogging and it’s function in my life, I continue to see a lot of use for it.  I can’t imagine, for example, how I would post these thoughts in a Twitter style microblog.  Nor could I see creating the entries I put in my various blogs into the limited “notes/blogging” services of MySpace or Facebook.

Ah, I love Wordpress and it’s use of Ajax for it’s “Auto-Save Draft” feature.  I had put a bit of thought into a post last night, then I shut my computer off before thinking to finish the post and publish it.  I was grateful this evening when I logged back in, remembering I hadn’t posted the message, and the draft was sitting there, quite current, waiting for me to finish my thoughts and publish it.  More proof that I love this platform