{"id":5965,"date":"2014-03-31T00:01:19","date_gmt":"2014-03-31T07:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=5965"},"modified":"2014-03-30T08:58:35","modified_gmt":"2014-03-30T15:58:35","slug":"surely-youve-heard-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=5965","title":{"rendered":"Surely You’ve Heard Of . . . ?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once people get over the fact that I’m still<\/em> writing books, they want to know what’s happening on the bleeding edge of technology. To be frank, I have no idea.
\n
\nMy ability to be clueless is typically expressed this way:<\/p>\n

Me:<\/strong> “I’m using Dingus 3.1 and I love it!”<\/p>\n

Random person (probably one of my kids):<\/strong> “Have you heard of Blorfus?”<\/p>\n

Me:<\/strong> Hmmm<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Random Person:<\/strong> “What! Where have you been? All the cool kids are using Blorfus! They even mentioned it on an episode of South Park<\/em> last night.”<\/p>\n

As a more realistic example, I know of several cloud-based services. Dropbox is my favorite. In fact, I learned about Dropbox from someone else. Again: I’m not on the Super Cool New Products Mailing List that a lot of people think I subscribe to.<\/p>\n

So if I were to cite cloud storage systems, I could say Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft Onedrive or Skydrive or whatever they had to name it.<\/p>\n

Oh, and there’s Apple’s iCloud.<\/p>\n

Any more?<\/p>\n

None that I can name off the top of my head, so I’d have to go to Google or Wikipedia and look up whatever other services are out there — and I’m certain I’ll find a lot of them, including the “My God, you’ve never heard of Blorfus?” service that all the cool kids know about.<\/p>\n

It’s just impossible for me — or anyone — to know instantly what’s available, what’s cool, and what’s hot coming up. Anyone who says they do, really doesn’t know. They’re most likely reading press releases.<\/p>\n

A long time ago, back when I was the editor of a local computer magazine<\/a>, I too was the victim of the press release. We got a ton of them. They didn’t send products, of course; you had to request the products. My co-worker, Wally Wang, would get products for testing all the time. “Most of it is junk,” he would say. Rarely, if ever, did we get anything that went viral.<\/p>\n

Today there are so many services, so many apps, so many everything that it’s near impossible to consume all that information and know all the cool, nifty, and must-have tools and toys. In fact, even the pundits who get the toys and appear on TV or write articles about these things know what’s going to be hot and new.<\/p>\n

I remember seeing a report on “cool stuff” from the Consumer Electronics Show a few years back. Nothing presented had any lasting value or went viral. These must-have, haven’t-you-heard things normally just pop up out of nowhere. That’s most likely the only way such things become successful. Catching them early is purely happenstance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No, I’m not always on the cutting edge of technology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5965"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5973,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5965\/revisions\/5973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}