Like I know no one here cares, but I’m still happy to report that my laptop should arrive back home this afternoon. The Apple web site is cryptic about what was repaired; I’m curious to see if there will be any more details with the paperwork they send me.
Obviously, I’m very pleased with its pending return, and it has me thinking right now about some of the assumptions/ideas behind the term “Web 2.0.” Now, as I understand it, the whole concept with this is to make web applications/sites more like desktop applications, in part in an effort for people to be able to share and collaborate and stuff like that. You could put various social networking software into this category, but I’m also thinking about sites where you can share bookmarks or store files or even word processing files– I can’t remember the site for that software right now.
This is all fine and good, and I’ve been making use of delicious lately, I think I want to figure out CiteULike, and I’ve found the Google RSS Reader to be very useful. As someone commented earlier, it isn’t exactly a “feature rich” RSS Reader, but the fact that it is a web-based (e.g., Web 2.0) app means I can get to my feeds from anywhere. And I do use two or three different computers on a regular basis.
But still, as this experience with my laptop has taught me, I want to use my computer. Oh sure, I’m not lacking from access, I’ve gotten by. But the PC doesn’t have any of the software I want to use, and my wife’s iBook (which also lacks some software) has a keyboard that feels, well, wrong. Plus her computer doesn’t have my “stuff” on it, doesn’t have the desktop configured the way I like it, doesn’t have the same default colors, etc. I certainly haven’t been able to do any writing of any meaning on these foreign machines. In other words, I guess I still have a physical attachment to my computer, not just any anonymous and universally accessible computer (e.g., Web 2.0).
BTW, the painting at the top comes from “The Playful Painter” blog, which I discovered via boing-boing.