Aplus.net Blog

By way of introduction, I’m pleased to be one of the newest members of the Aplus.net team. Like millions of others, my life and my livelihood depends on staying connected – wired or wireless – to the world around me: for news, weather, banking, shopping, entertainment, education, you name it. It’s how I express myself and how I stay in touch. I use Twitter. I sometimes sell on eBay, I have Facebook and LinkedIn pages, and I regularly upload photos to Flickr and video to YouTube. I have two blogs, and I write for two others – no, make that three others now.

Yes, I do remember a time before the World Wide Web – a time before MMORPG, SSL, RSS, CMS, FTP and even IM. Before ‘google’ was a verb. Before podcasting and wikis and streaming video so good that you wonder why TV and high speed Internet didn’t merge sooner.It’s true, while in college I relied on my trusty portable Smith-Corona manual typewriter while pursuing studies in journalism, English and creative writing. The 15-inch, widescreen ultralight laptop with Intel® dual core processor and 320GB hard drive, loaded with wi-fi, webcam, Blu-ray DVD player and full multimedia capabilities I use now – it didn’t exist yet. At the risk of dating myself, this was also around time that Gates and Allen founded Microsoft and then Jobs and Wozniak started Apple. I remember dial-up, the rapid rise of desktop publishing, DOS, the popularity of online bulletin boards, the very first crude Web sites, and a time before email and Blackberry and iPhones were so much a part of our everyday life.

Through the 1980s, 1990s and into the 2000s, I’ve been both an early adopter and a late adopter when it comes to technology. I’ve owned one PDA, four cell phones and seven computers, four of them laptops. I’ve never been a programmer, but I can edit video, audio and photos pretty competently; I know enough CSS and HTML to get by; and I understand that my success today and tomorrow may be measured in uptime, complimentary links and how many quality search results I can get.

Computer technology – and absolutely everything associated with it – is growing exponentially. Futurist Ray Kurzweil often talks about how it’s transforming us and our world, as in The Law of Accelerating Returns:

“…the future will be far more surprising than most observers realize: few have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating.”

Ditto, MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte, one of the founders of Wired Magazine, who nearly 15 years ago was predicting the digital convergence of the interactive, entertainment and information worlds. New delivery models, advances in dedicated and shared server technology, virtualization, and hosting infrastructure services never seen before – the rate of change: it’s all happening, and happening yet again before we can blink.

I look forward to exploring with you the exciting times ahead.