And a dash of travel thrown in on the side...

Next week I’ll be travelling to Research Triangle Park, NC to visit my corporate benefactor’s other home base outside the Valley. The funny thing is that I have been to our sites in London, Sydney, and Amsterdam: all the sites that are > 10 hours, by air, from SJ, but never the one that’s roughly half that.

Well that era ends clap next week. I’m catching a mid-morning flight out to the East coast. A conference is being hosted internally on uhm, well, Web 2.0 in IT. Wait, wait, before you start thinking that I’m talking vaporware nonsense ( “Hey Steven, didn’t you mock this ‘Web 2.0’ term just a few posts ago?” ) let me say that there are real differences in the conceptual framework.

Here’s a few:

Death of singular iconic data sources ( Web-old: cnn.com, Web-new reddit.com )
Folksonomony ( del.icio.us versus taxonomy ( Yahoo Directory ) )
Multi-path conversations
Liberation of the Dark Internet

So, even if you’re catchphrase-cynical, it’s a very progressive step for an enterprise to be weighing these decisions at this time.

Unfortunately, this falls right in the middle of the final 2 weeks of my classes, so I’ve got to work double-time on being ready to turn everything in, take all the tests, etc. the week after my return. Not really ideal, but I’ve sandbagged enough points in the semester to not really be worried. This also, lamentably, puts me out of having any chance to hang out over on that side of the country and doing any exploring.