#7 Create a Blog Post About Anything Technology-Related

Well isn't this one easy?

For me an "anything technology related" topic for this week is a game. "Oh! How frivolous!" you may say. So what do you think I do in my spare time? Read wiring diagrams? (Actually, I've been known to do things like that too.)

However in this day and age games, while often frivolous, do not necessarily need to be.

That wasn't always the case. Early electronic games (anyone remember Space Invaders?) were little more than exercises in hand/eye coordination. From what I can see, most still are.

Needless to say, I'm lousy at them.

The particular game I like to play is called Civilization. I've been playing it off and on for years and, interestingly enough, getting worse and worse at it.

What the game is about is, literally, building a world wide civilization - starting with the first settlement of a nomadic tribe in 4,000 B.C. and ending with an advanced civilization in the Twenty First Century. You start by building cities. You need to connect them with road and, ultimately, rail lines. You also need to grow your economy by building farms and factories, libraries and research institutes. All the time you are doing this you also have to keep the neighboring countries from attacking you. They will, if you let your guard down. Sometimes, of course, there are reasons why you may feel a need to attack them. If you do, though, you better win. This game is merciless to losers.

So why am I getting worse at the game? Well, it happens that each successive version of it has gotten increasingly complex. Nowadays, it's a bear just to survive the assorted challenges it throws at you.

So why should any adult care?

They should care because games of this sort have a huge, and mostly untapped, educational potential. Not too many of us, of course, will ever be called upon to spend six thousand years developing our own personal civilization but there are other problem solving skills we can develop while playing "simulation" type games such as Civilization. To take an example look at a fairly old game - SimCity.

What was SimCity about? Urban planning and zoning. The planning and zoning policies it had a player implement were a bit on the simple side but computers are getting more and more powerful and programmers and getting more and more adept at what they do. The ability to create and run much more sophisticated simulations will do nothing but grow.

Even now, fairly specialized computer modeling and gaming is heavily used in disciplines like science and engineering. The focus is pretty narrow, though. The potential isn't. Looking at the increasing ability of computers to create whole worlds for people's amusement, it doesn't take a genius to realize that we are not too far away from a time when computers will be able to create other, even more realistic worlds, for people's education.

#6 Flickr Mash-ups & Third Party Sites

I discovered that I had done half of this task before I learned what a mashup might be.

A while back I was playing around with Flickr and clicked on the Map link at the top of the page. I placed some pictures I had snapped around the house on the map and then forgot about it. Then I found out what a mashup is and discovered that I had done one. So to do this assignment, just for forms sake, I added a few more pictures, one of me in California and a pair of others in New York. To see them, go to the map attached to my Flickr account.

On a roll now, I fiddled around a bit with the Flickr Color Pickr mashup. This mashup was both fun, fascinating, worthwhile and (ultimately) kind of depressing.

The fun is pretty obvious. Play with it for a bit and you will know what I mean.

Fascinating and worthwhile are also obvious. Imagine being able to search by color and shape. Not only is this one a new one on me, it does lay some serious portion of the groundwork for combining text, shape and color in online searching. For someone who spent the first two decades or more of his online search career (did I just indicate how old I am?) doing text only searches - since this was all that the computers we had in olden times could do - this is truly revolutionary.

Then there's the depressing aspect of it all. This kicks in because this particular mashup reminds us (me anyway) that, even though we may not glow in the dark, there actually are people out there who are so brilliant that they do. How do they think up of this stuff and who needs to be reminded that the rest of us can't?

Finally, I played a bit with montagr, which made me feel a little better. I didn't have great luck with it but I didn't care much, since I'm not particularly fond of photo montages. After all, there's enough clutter in life as it is. Why take perfectly harmless photos just to make more of it?