Itchy

It's buzzing again, louder and louder, unmistakeable.

Symbolic, the Asera sign came down recently. I guess the lease they signed during the heyday is finally up.

Commute time has been inching up. Daylight savings time change makes people bad drivers... either that, or all of a sudden a whole lot of new people got employed in the Bay Area. It took over an hour each way today. I used to be able to make it in under 40 minutes sometimes.

The fact is we're back to 1995-1996 employment rates. The dawn of Yahoo! and the Web. And the momentum is similar, looking at the graph. 10 year cycles of the unemployment rate skyrocketing for 3 years and going down for 7.

Random attempt to categorize Internet communication:

E-mail...message boards
Instant messaging...chat rooms
Blogs...wikis

Synchronous...asynchronous
Private...public
One...many

What comes after wikis? Blogs are one person serving content to some public. Wikis are anyone in the public contributing to the content. The contributors find the content and volunteer themselves. Next, maybe a way to draw content from selected people and sources, instead of relying on the self-seekers. And real-time, being able to find and drop in on live people chatting.

And a whole lot of other stuff way beyond this.

Organic food. Taxing plastic bags.

Businesses perhaps starting to look more like the Internet. Network infrastructure allows smaller units to act more autonomously.

Who eats Wonder Bread anymore? I buy Real Bread now.

Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Amazon.com almost killed Kepler's, but people are willing to pay for personality, and will try to figure out a way. Another tug-of-war shifting from small to big to small...

Going to Draeger's and thinking it doesn't seem very expensive at all. This is normal for San Mateo. Trag's however is not doing so well. Probably didn't evolve fast enough. They had entire shelves full of expiring orange juice and milk, both. A grocery store in the U.S. cannot ever not have milk. The only people who seem to shop there are the old people in the retirement communities next door.

At work, people leaving the company.

I'm itching.