The first post is the easiest. After all, nobody bothers to create a page and fuss over a design (like the décor for a new apartment) without having something to say. So here I am, after the world’s easiest registration process, with a funky Web2.0 web page and a stack of mental analogies between the web and pulpits, or possibly lecturns, or maybe the little household stepladder of the crazy guy in Hyde Park. Of course, given that this is the giz-illionith blog, finding imagery less tired and used than my favourite “I’ve been to Asia and her’s a t-shirt to prove it” t-shirt will be something of a challenge.
Returning to the point, everyone knows that the web page maintenance curve resembles most people on diets, or exercise kicks, or just about any New Year’s resolution. Frantic activity followed by maintenance that becomes tedious followed by “it won’t matter if I miss one” followed by:
“I have a webpage, but it’s been the same since 1994″
“1994?”
“Yes, 1994. The important thing is that I was first. Plus I had all those ideas before those Google guys (etc…)”
So what is the secret to deciding to adhere to a practice, custom, habit or conscious change of any kind?
No answers today, but that’s question number one that I would like to think about. The second question (and as of today there are only two) has to do with the title of the blog. It comes from a textbook that I read during my undergrad course, which talked about a frequently seen phenomenon in new IT products. First, the product is successful. But then there is a lull, when nobody buys it (and at this point I guess a whole lot of products go away for good). However, for the lucky few, widespread acceptance finally arrives, and the product’s popularity takes off – until it reaches its end of life of transmutes into something else.
If you plot this pattern on a graph, with time on the horizontal and popularity on the vertical, there are two big bumps, and a big trough in between. This is the “death of two elephants”, and it always makes me think about two huge, ancient beasts that died next to each other, and then as the years passed the only thing that remained was two smooth hills. For me, though, the interesting thing about this image, and my mental picture, is not the elephants.
Rather, the interesting thing is the gap between the two passed pachyderms. The most obvious example of why this is the case is a consumer product. For this kind of product, the gap is the best time to buy, since you are likely get a bargain price for a product that has already been tested enough not to be too buggy.
So I started to think about the elephants, and a number of things came to mind. For starters, there is the concept that I have turned into a tagline (look up, if you haven’t already). I will dig into this a bit next time, but for now I will end by just stating the second question (you thought I had forgotten, right?):
How can we use the obvious to identify the important?
Posted by anteleph 