It’s crisis communications time at UMR, where most of the campus is without power. I work in one of the few buildings on campus that still have electricity and web access.
The outage occurred last night — ironically, during a campus celebration of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. I got the call from our facilities director around 1 a.m.
Classes are cancelled this morning, and likely will be this afternoon.
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.
Andrew Careaga 