Author: andrewcareaga

Former higher ed PR and marketing guy at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) now focused on freelance writing and editing and creative writing, fiction and non-fiction.

The next-gen web: like a Swiss Army knife

Steve Rubel (Micro Persuasion) has been thinking a lot about the future of the web, and web widgets in particular. He writes that these widgets — chunks of code that can be easily installed on a web page — make it “possible to add so many collapsible modules to your tabs/pages, that you rarely need to go anywhere else.” Thus, with apps like the Google Reader widget, anything and everything you need — from news briefs to meeting notices — will be accessible from your start page.

Rubel shares screen shots of a couple of widgets that “are indicative of what the widgetized web will look like in the years ahead” and adds, “You can see a future where these pages become as essential as a Swiss Army Knife is to a camper.” He concludes that “The future of the web (dare I say Web 3.0?) will look just like a Swiss Army Knife and it’s going to be extremely disruptive.”

I just hope web 3.0 comes with a corkscrew and bottle opener.

Notes from the National Association of Science Writers conference

If you missed the National Association of Science Writers‘ conference in Baltimore last weekend, you can read about many of the sessions on a conference blog of sorts. Lots of well written posts there. (Personal favorite: Adventures in Alternative Science Communication, which described a session on why talking about science need not be stodgy.) But what else should we expect from a writers conference?

You can also read the views of UMR staffer Lance Feyh, who posted about killer wasps, zombie cockroaches and other things he learned about at the conference on our science blog, Visions.