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E-Books Win
Amazon passed a milestone this week. More e-books (specifically Kindle editions) are sold than hardback and paperback books combined. Trees everywhere were heard to sigh in relief. In the near future, you’ll be able to hold up a book and proudly proclaim that you participated in the tree genocide. People younger than you will stare and wonder what you were thinking.
BBC News – Amazon selling more Kindle ebooks than print books
Dead-tree format’s demise is slow, steady | Business Tech – CNET News
Is There an App for That?
I’ve often described technology in terms of a pendulum. For example, sometimes the hardware is farther ahead of the software. This can be seen when screaming fast new computers come out with massive graphics capabilities. This usually means everything looks better, and runs faster. In reality, things actually look about the same, and the increase in speed can be almost unrecognizable for most tasks. Once the software is rewritten to take advantage of these new capabilities, things get more interesting. The graphics do look better with the new version of the software, and slowly but surely the new features start to bog down the machine to the point where we are ready for updated hardware. What goes around comes around.
Another example is happening now with apps. Once upon a time software was king. Everyone needed a software application to get things done on a computer. With the advent of the Internet, and the whole web 2.0 thing, the ability to get things done was less dependent on what software you had, and moved to which services you subscribed. Anyone using Google Apps? Life was grand as we all moved to a world of device independence.
Then along came the iPad (and other mobile devices), and the world changes again. Everyone is downloading apps, 3 billion and counting, just for iPad apps. So we are all back to the world of software, and device dependence again. Of course, if you stick around long enough, that too will change. HTML5 brings us the promise of device independence again. We’ll see. I suppose apps (or applications) have their place, just as well as web services. If you aren’t an app fan, just wait a bit. What goes around comes around.
Edublogs Awards Awarded – 2011
As always, a very impressive list. If you are looking for quality educational blogs, check out some of these winners:
http://edublogawards.com/announcing-the-2011-winners-congrats-to-all/
Delicious News
Great news for Delicious users. The social bookmarking site was purchased by two founding members of YouTube. Details in the link below.
2010 in Review
So many ways to look back at this time of year when we move from one calendar to the next. This strikes me as arbitrary since my calendar is centered around the school year which starts in August. In any case, if you didn’t know what happened this year, here is a short retrospective collection to peruse.
First up, the best videos for Educators, according to Larry Ferlazzo:
- The Ten Best Videos For Educators — 2010 | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…
- Part Two Of The Best Videos For Educators — 2010 | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…
Significant technology events in the eyes of TechCrunch from 2010:
2010 brought the end to many significant web services (and a few that were insignificant)
- 15 services that met their end in 2010 | Webware – CNET
- U.S. News & World Report Joins The Print Deadpool
- BBC News – R.I.P. Sony Walkman (Snr)
Here’s hoping that Delicious.com isn’t one of them, but if it is…
Many new technology toys were introduced in 2010, which may be seen as the Year of Touch Computing:
- iPad – The Top 10 Everything of 2010 – TIME
- Tips & Tricks: More options for mobile editing on the the iPad – Official Google Docs Blog
- Is the optical drive going the way of the floppy? | Optical Drives | Macworld
2010 also brought us a great resource for introducing other educators to the current state of the Internet. I wonder how long before this publication is out of date?