So what do the three topics listed in the title have in common? In a nutshell: there is a whole lot going on with each. Beijing appears to be prepared to host the Games of the 29th Olympiad. For a great slideshow on Beijing and China in general, take a look at this:

The Olympic opening ceremonies have already begun and here in the states we will get a chance to see them tonight at 7:30 PM (EDT). For a sneak peek take a look at the photo gallery on NBC. I’m not normally a huge Olympics fan, but I do enjoy watching the events and hearing about the competitors and what they had to do to reach this elite position in the sporting world. Of particular note I am keeping a very close watch on Dara Torres, the 41 year old swimmer (50m free, 4×100m free relay) who is making a comeback after shoulder surgery. Torres is already the oldest swimming gold medalist, and she could raise that record from 33 to 41 by winning gold again in Beijing. She is also the oldest American swimmer to qualify for the Olympics and the first to make five teams. Pretty amazing story.

For those of you who are really “into” the Olympics, here are a few video sites worth keeping an eye on:

• The Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games - Videos
• CCTV.com - Official Internet/mobile phone broadcaster of the Beijing Olympic Games
• NBCOlympics - Official US online broadcaster of the Beijing Olympics
• International Olympic Committee’s cahnnel on YouTube™
• Universal Sports YouTube™ Channel

I will also be watching cycling a bit more closely than usual - road, track, mountain, and BMX - and pulling for some hometown favorites: Bobby Lea of Topton, PA and Giddeon Massie of Bethlehem, PA, both of whom are track cyclists. I wish the two of them and all of Team USA the best of success in bringing home the gold for the US.

Internet

A rather obscure fact but nonetheless worth mentioning, the idea of networking computers is 40 years old this week, marking the delivery of the technical paper which coined the phrase “packet switching”.

Donald Davies was working at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex when he delivered a paper in August 1968 which detailed how distinct packets of data could be sent over public telephone and later dedicated networks. Davies then set about actually building what is claimed to be the world’s first local area network (LAN) at the NPL, which consisted of approximately half a dozen nodes each with three or four machines attached.

Additionally, 17 years ago, on this week (August 6) in 1991, Englishman Tim Berners-Lee, an independent researcher at the CERN institute in Switzerland, published a summary of the World Wide Web project and this date was taken as the day when commercial Internet (WWW) became available to the public. The project started out as a philosophy stating that scientific information should be available to everyone. The goal was “to enable the exchange of information between internationally dissipated groups and spread information among support groups”, Berners-Lee wrote in his summary.

Pretty exciting stuff, especially considering how entrenched the Internet has become in our daily lives.

Me

Finally, with regard to where I have been and what I have been doing, all I can say is that I have been exceptionally busy and in the midst of some significant changes. Many of you saw my tweet stating that I had left PMI and begun a new gig this week. That’s part of the story and I will dedicate a full post to where I have moved to and what I am doing. As for the rest of my activity, most of it is related to Jeff DeCagna’s recent blog post. If you haven’t see it, you can read it here: Ready or not….

More to come soon. I promise. Until then. Happy Friday!

A thought provoking article written by the venerable Nicholas Carr in July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly explores how the Internet and by connection Google is changing human cognition:

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

After reading the article I know exactly what he is talking about. While I consider myself a true netizen and advocate for all of the positive aspects of the net, I am also an scholar, educator and parent and can’t help but wonder what the long term implications of the cognitive rewiring that’s going on. It seems innocent enough; it begins with adapting the way we read which in turn impacts the way we think. Over a long enough period of time this could have pretty significant consequences. I’m not about to give up the medium that I have grown so dependent on and proficient with, but it really makes you wonder if we are really programming the Internet or if it actually programming us. Something to think about.

Read the whole article here: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Photo by Dr. Pat

Heraclitus said that the only thing that is constant is change. With everything that has happened in my life over the course of the past 8 months, I would have to say that it’s a truism. Some change is good, other not so much. Regardless, change happens and ultimately your perspective on change has more to do with what you do with it as opposed to the actual change itself.

It’s not breaking news to share that I haven’t been posting at levels consistent with what I had been doing prior to the period I mentioned above and I definitely hadn’t been posting at a level I consider effective or essential to maintain a consistent level of readership or even really consider myself a blogger. It wasn’t for a lack of desire, interesting stories and experiences to share or new learning and worthwhile finds, rather I found myself at a bit conflicted.

A lot of my absence has been due to trying to find a new normal after Laura’s car accident back in September. I was, and continue to be touched by the outreach of my friends and fellow blogger, but I make no apologies or excuses for that period of time. I simply did what I felt that I had to do. We all have those experiences in life…something, large or small, that fundamentally alters the fabric of our lives and causes us to stop and rethink everything that we had done previously.

However, the one thing that I have learned in life and it’s especially applicable to blogging, is that anything worth doing is worth doing well and it takes discipline, persistence and perseverance. Some days are easier than others but in the end what you get out of it is directly proportional to what you put into it. I simply fell out of my daily blogging routine and I really struggled to find my footing. I made one attempt to get back into the saddle a few months ago but the confluence of my new position at work that was (and still is) taking more than its share of my time and the fact that I made a decision that I was going to narrow the focus of my blog, left me without a whole lot of time, and more importantly very short on inspiration.

My original goal was to provide a fresh perspective on working at an association as someone who was brand new to the association world. I thought I could combine 10 years working doing technology work in corporate America with my thoughts and experiences as I progressed with my passion for learning, social media and technology. As I reconsidered my purpose I thought I would limit my focus to social media as it applies to the association world. My restated purpose was far too narrow and my excitement for writing waned largely because my finding my focus led me to feel like I lost my voice.

For the past few weeks I have really been contemplating how best to proceed I made the conscious decision to persevere and yet again refocus. I also came to the conclusion that in order for me to get as much out of my writing as I put into it I would have to broaden my focus and instead of being razor sharp with what I write about, I would inject more of myself back into the mix. Finally, I decided that I would continue talking about social media and technology but also pepper in other areas that I am involved in on a daily basis such as virtual communities, knowledge management and creating, innovating and maximizing my own use of the web at work and for fun.

It’s a new beginning of sorts, but really it’s a return to who I am and what I am most interested in. I’ll be able to be well rounded, well read, and generally enamored with all of the potential and possibilities that lie in this thing we call the Interwebs and share all of my thoughts, feelings and opinions in a much easier manner.

As part of this refocusing exercise I also decided to “reboot” my blog and give it a brand new look and feel. That is yet another reason why it’s taken me so long to get back up and running. For those of you who know me well, you know that I am a passionate Ubuntu Linux user. I made the jump almost 6 months ago and have been learning my way through the whole process. My goal with my new site design was to not only give my blog a new aesthetic but also in doing so use only open source and free tools to accomplish that end. I have come a long way in what I know about Ubuntu and probably even further in developing both on a Linux system and at this level for WordPress. I will definitely be sharing all of that learning too.

The long and short of it is I am back, and hopefully this time for good. I do ask for your patience and support as I get back into a regular routine and iron out any inconsistencies with my blog. For now things look good, but I also know that life has a way of throwing you a curve from time to time. All of you can help me along: what are some topics you’d like to see? What is intriguing you? What is driving you crazy. This is a great chance for you to help me get going again while at the same time get some insight into areas that you are interested in.