Dave Sabol

To quote the Grateful Dead’s song “Truckin”, What a long strange trip it’s been. I guess it’s not completely accurate in this case, but it seems appropo…

“Today marks the 16th anniversary of the World Wide Web. According to the timeline on the W3.org site: ‘The first web page [was] http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. Unfortunately CERN no longer supports the historical site. Note from this era too, the least recently modified web page we know of, last changed Tue, 13 Nov 1990 15:17:00 GMT (though the URI changed.)’ A lot has happened in 16 years and this little ‘baby’ has grown into quite the teenager.”

Slashdot | The Web Is 16 Today

I can’t believe it’s only been 16 years since the first pieces of hypertext have graced the Web. In some ways it feels like a lifetime (at least most of mine) but at the same time it’s a relative blip on the radar screen of history. If we have come this far in a relatively short period of time, I can’t wait to see what the future holds.I’d love to know what others think about this…

This could prove to be a pretty interesting online educational tool. Imagine teachers being able to post a discussion question or assignment on their blog. Or as a corporate trainer with a dispersed training audience beign able to combine WBT with ILT. At a predetermined time participants / students could Skype into an online synchronous discussion on the topic.

SAN FRANCISCO–Internet telephony provider Skype plans to offer bloggers and others the ability to hold audio chats in the next version of its Net telephone product, co-founder Niklas Zennström said Tuesday night at the Web 2.0 Summit here.The next version of Skype will enable people to post a link on a blog or Web site that will take people to a public chat room when clicked on, he said during a question-and-answer session during dinner.The live chats would be “Skypecasts,” which Zennström described as public conversations or audio conferences that people can moderate. He would not provide a timeline for the features except to say it would be “soon.”

‘Skypecasts’ coming to your blog soon | Tech News on ZDNet

While it is more of an evolution of technology than a revolution, this looks like it could hold a lot of promise. Again it’s all about bringing the learning to the learners. This is just another example of that.

Well, after hearing the news a few weeks ago that Google was going to halt new development to focus on improving their already vast array of products and services (Features not Products), I thought that they finally gained the focus needed to evolve, mature and round-out their already dizzying array of products. So I was really shocked to see the second of two announcements of an acquisition in a period of about two weeks. The first announcement was made a few weeks ago when they announced the acquisition of YouTube. That didn’t surprise me as it was an obvious hole in their product portfolio and also represented a sizable boost of traffic and a potential foothold in the explosive video market. I thought that would take them a while to digest and there would be little, if any, news from Google until the end of the year. However, today’s announcement that they were acquiring JotSpot took me by surprise (although it shouldn’t have).

As we built the business over the past three years Google consistently attracted our attention. We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online. Then when we had conversations with people at Google we found ourselves completing each other’s sentences. Joining Google allows us to plug into the resources that only a company of Google’s scale can offer, like a huge audience, access to world-class data centers and a team of incredibly smart people.

Official Google Blog: Spot on

It’s no surprise that Google is trying to get a full online office sweet out the door before Microsoft has a chance to. Based on my observations, it looks as though they are one step closer. I don’t see the YouTube acquisiton contributing to the accomplishment of that end, but JotSpot will play a big part. With gmail, google docs and spreadsheets, google calendar, google chat, Reader (still in development) and now JotSpot (google wiki???), it would appear all that they need to round out their online offering is a a good presentation tool (Thumbstacks?) and perhaps some type of database tool they will be good to go.

My bet is by late-winter / early-spring, they will have built / bought their way to a dominant position in the online office / productivity space.

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