Read-Write Web has a characteristically well-thought-out post about the new world of thinking digitally instead of physically. You can particularly appreciate the part about computer-phobia.

Who among us, working in a tech-related field, has not had an acquaintance who waved away our computer-jargon with the retort “I don’t understand computers!” Or gotten a phone call from a relative late at night, who needed help with their home computer?

At the same time, software engineers, web designers, and graphics artists seem to be at a loss when it comes to dealing with the physical world. A great programmer is stumped when their car stalls, a brilliant web designer will have their website in perfect order while their desk is buried under three feet of junk, and many IT professionals tend to let their health go, developing the expanding waistline and fluorescent-lighting complexion that goes with spending all your time in a cubicle or a server room.

We have to remember that the first microprocessors emerged in the early 1970s, which makes them about 40 years old. That’s an extremely short time, when you consider how used we are to the digital age. In all of human history, we’ve only had the span of two generations to adapt to a world with computers in them, and yet they are everywhere in our world. No wonder some of us have a hard time dealing with them!

Compare things like cars and phones. We’ve had those around for nearly a century, and as a result we’ve gotten more of a handle on them. The average person may not have mechanic knowledge, but they at least understand that a car needs gas, oil, a battery, and coolant. They understand how to do simple maintenance tasks like changing a flat tire or replacing an air filter.

And telephones make sense to people on a level where computers do not. The average citizen – excluding the tech-savvy reader we expect you are – is still fuzzy on the concept of the Internet; how can that web page be across the country and yet right in front of them at the same time? Yet they have no problem understanding that the voice on their telephone is coming from a person very far away.

Peter Brittain

So, the back-story: In the United States, Barack Obama just got elected President… yes, you know that, but let’s move along… so he’ll be vacating his US Senate seat, and the responsibility to find his replacement falls to Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Whom, you might not have heard, blatantly solicited for a bribe to appoint somebody, effectively putting the seat up for sale to the highest bidder.

Now you understand the newspaper ad published by Leather Creations Furniture. Smart, and timely! And it’s not at all controversial like most political humor, since Blagojevich has been arrested and is not only admitting to it, but is rather, ah… non-repentant about it.

Just a tip for you savvy web marketers – look around you, pay attention to what’s on the public’s mind, and pounce on it for your marketing strategy.

Peter Brittain

But when most people think of the fairy-tale dream start-up story, they think of YouTube. Founded in February of 2005, sold to Google in November of 2006 for $1.65 billion USD. Start your site, and twenty-one months later, you’re a millionaire. Wouldn’t that be nice?

The difference is, it takes an innovative, forward-thinking company to recognize and acquire an innovative start-up. Google itself was an overnight success story, pushed through to greatness mostly by the sheer stubbornness of its founders. Having run that gauntlet themselves, they know how to recognize a good idea headed by a tough entrepreneur. This is a skill that Old Guard companies like Microsoft fail to grasp – so much so that bloggers all over the web are asking whether Microsoft is doomed, and has prompted Paul Graham himself to pronounce Microsoft dead.

Microsoft… dead. Imagine what a huge gap that would leave. Like the huge multinational banks in the United States which are getting bailed out during their economic turmoil, Microsoft seems almost too big to fail. If they did, there would not be another Microsoft. Their niche instead would rapidly be filled with the New Guard: smart, innovative, small companies that think fast and take risks… and know how to cooperate with the competition!

Peter Brittain

Now Cyan has announced their plans to open-source Myst-Online. This is becoming a cliche for projects that take too long to finish and lose momentum. Sometimes it’s the project’s salvation; getting the community involved and letting users take part in the process of shaping it takes care of those blind spots that the company missed, when they didn’t know what the users wanted. Sometimes it’s also the kiss of death; open source projects are harder to monetize and tend to die off after giving birth to their own successor.

3D gaming remains out of reach for the web. The best you can hope for is pre-rendered ray-traced scenes; a 3D first-person shooter even on the level of Half-Life just isn’t doable from a web browser. Even our best Flash, AJAX, and Java technology seems to be incapable of doing more than puzzle games and flat-map games. And before anybody says “Second Life” or “Spore” – that’s running on your PC, with a web connection to a server, same as any MMORPG. And it doesn’t have near the polygons.

We have to wait for computers to get more powerful, but whoops, right at the peak time for the market, computers are slimming down, into notebooks and UMPCs. So when, if ever?

Peter Brittain

The basic method is that you search Technoratti or Google BlogSearch to find blogs in your topic space or niche. Then go there and hopefully leave a comment that won’t get deleted, with a link back to your site.

The important thing is that you make participating in that blog’s community your first priority. Helpfully point out a mistake, add a note and a link pointing out some other aspect of the subject of the post, answer a question posed by another commenter, or even just mention that you also covered another view of this topic on your own blog.

One important strategy that is often overlooked: the sites that already link to you! Whenever a blogger links your site as a reference and you notice some traffic coming from it, go there and leave a comment thanking them for the link… and also fill in your site’s URL in the appropriate field. There, now you have two links, from a site that likes you already! You can also add a link back on your own site, thanking the blogger for mentioning you and pointing your readers to that site for commentary on your subject.

This is how the blogosphere builds friendships.

The important thing is to be a good web citizen above all else. Spam your link to irrelevant sites, or worse yet, hire a third-world freelancer to do it, and you’re heading for trouble and ill will all around. Further tips on blog comment marketing here.

Peter Brittain

It is so because we have had SVG way back in 2001, and have had vector graphics since almost the dawn of the computer era. We could have been building web pages out of pure SVG, and never would have had to worry about image resolution, JPG artifacts, or GIF patents. Even bandwidth would have been less of a concern.

Unfortunately, a certain large corporation which controls a major share of the web browser market didn’t want it that way.

So we live in a world where many give up in hopeless frustration at the various half-way measures we have to put up with, in this jackstraw tumble of patchwork technologies and methods. For many designers, the only sensible course is to draw the web page in a raster graphics editor, save it as a flat image, then manually cut it up into chunks and use a maze of browser-specific hacks to try to get the page to render coherently.

Just think what an SVG standard across browsers would have been like:

- Seamless with Javascript, XHTML, CSS, and XML.

- Scalable graphics would ensure that anybody using anything to view the page anywhere would see the exact same thing, with no extra effort from the developer.

- Open source and free, so there’s never a question of licenses.

- Inexpensive. There are about a dozen free SVG editors out there, and they all have features that blow away anything we currently us to lay out web pages.

- Gradients, rounded corners, transparency, perfect fonts, text along a path, shaped envelopes, textures, patterns… The web could have looked so much better for so little effort.

Tim Berners-Lee, patriarch of the World Wide Web, has shaken his finger at Microsoft as recently as a 2008 interview, for not supporting SVG in IE and thus holding the rest of us back. Perhaps, someday…

The new WWW model, however, with the advent of the social web, has modeled itself more on the prosumer model. “Prosumers”, as defined in Wikipedia, are the mixture of the two concepts of the word professional or producer and the word consumer. The social web is interactive; it beckons visitors to not only be an audience, but to get up on stage and act themselves.

This fun little video goes into a nice presentation of the subject, and also makes some bold – but nevertheless sensible – predictions on where this is all going.

If you’d never heard of this model in the first place, you might have a hard time imagining it. It sounds like you’d pay for cable TV, only to end up watching your neighbor. Then you remember the “reality TV show” wave that’s swept televised media in the past decade! Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

It is wise for both the web designer and the Internet marketer to be aware of this new world they inhabit. The thing that we have to do is, do not build walls. Walls separate consumers and producers, preventing them from merging into prosumers. We have to let the customers be salespersons. We have to let the employees shop at the company store. We have to let the amateurs be experts, and not let the experts hold themselves in higher regard than the amateurs.

The businesses that are adapting to this new world are flourishing. The ones that don’t aren’t doing very well. Maybe the producer/consumer model of media won’t die off as fast as that video predicts (Lawrence Lessig becoming the US Secretary of Justice in 2020! Ha!), but almost certainly some time soon.

Peter Brittain