The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same

My father has lived during a very interesting period in history. Born in 1918, he has seen many revolutionary changes in his lifetime. When my Dad was a boy on the farm in upstate N.Y., there were almost no cars around. Horses pulled equipment and the few internal combustion engines on the farm were single-cylinder devices with large flywheels to maintain momentum until the cylinder could fire again after the exhaust, intake, and compression cycles. This simple four-stroke process was the order of the day and powered machinery of various types through the use of wide flat belts.

Electricity had not made it to many rural areas either. One of the first things my Dad learned to spell was "lantern." His mother made a little tune of the letters so he could remember: "l-a-n-t-e-r-n, that spells lantern."

Water was pumped by hand from a well, pond, or stream. To heat it, one had to get it near a fire either in the kitchen stove, round oak heater or fireplace.

Food was chilled in the icebox back in the days before that term was a nostalgic reference. Chunks of ice were harvested from local ponds and lakes in winter and kept packed in sawdust in icehouses. The ice was then chipped down to a manageable size using an ice pick and placed into the little box in the house where food could be stored for short periods.

Horses were useful, to be sure, but slowly success-ful farmers like my grandfather, who had around 1,000 acres to manage, replaced them with tractors and trucks. Single-cylinder engines were superseded by those with three, four, six and, eventually, eight or more cylinders. These engines did not require a large flywheel and ran much more smoothly while delivering more "horsepower."

Lanterns were portable and gave more light than candles, but they were supplanted by Edison's electric light bulb with even more "candle" power, even in the countryside. The availability of electricity led to innovations in communica-tion such as the radio and, later, the television.

Pumping cold water by hand and heating it on the fire also went the way of the dinosaur in favor of water heaters that could keep a supply of heated water on hand at all times. Hot and cold running water became a given without which no one would think of buying a house today. It's now so ubiquitous we don't even bother to list it when selling property.

Today our refrigerators have built-in zero-degree freezers that keep foods usable for a very long time. We never think about whether the milk is cold unless there is an extended power outage. We raid the "icebox" in the middle of the night when we can stand our diet no more and ice picks are the stuff of horror movies.

The Internet has changed our lives just as profoundly. Think back a few years to the days before e-mail when the memorandum ruled and interoffice mail was the main communication vehicle for written correspondence. Even more recently we had to go to the library to find information on a topic of interest. Vendors sent so much printed documentation for their products that it often consumed an entire book case.

Today we can hardly imagine life without instant communication. Even e-mail isn't fast enough, so we use Instant Messages instead. Need informa-tion on some arcane technology or a map to your client's offices? Open your browser and it's there!

In this issue of the WebFOCUS Newsletter you will find a survey asking your opinion about the publication. One of the things we want to learn is whether you would find electronic delivery acceptable. Our thinking is to leverage some Web 2.0 technologies such as a blog to provide the content currently found in this paper periodical.

From where I sit there are many benefits to a blog, including the ability to search all of the issues for a topic, the ability to highlight discussions on Focal Point, our online discussion forum, and the ability for us to provide the information in smaller bites and much more frequently. Other ideas are rattling around in my mostly-empty head as well, but those would mostly follow this proposed first step.

There are literally millions of blogs on the Internet today. Many are the ramblings of individual people like me (see LarryEiss.com for an example), but many others are provided by industry publications such as eWeek, Information Week, and a host of others. The New York Times has a blog, as does Google.

This new media way of providing information is a lot like an online magazine. Content can be pushed to readers via RSS (really Simple Syndication) feeds, or even via e-mail. That way it isn't incumbent on you to figure out whether or not we added anything new since the last time you happened to think of looking.

Let us know what you think.