Four years of experience in most endeavors doesn’t add up to much authority and wisdom for the vast majority of students. It usually means a green and grinning graduate in a cap and gown nervously looking past a dangling tassle to a future of job interviews and resume polishing career maneuvers.
What it means online is very close to the same thing for those of us who were early adopters with AOL or Prodigy internet connections excitedly posting to bulletin boards. My old 1200 baud modem is now relegated to the garage gathering dust and mouse droppings, while the cable modem and iMac have become the latest and best tools in my home office. I’m sure that those tools will be gathering dust before long when new innovations make their way into my business life. But even though I dropped one career to start this new one on the web, I’m still green and grinning like a new graduate.
The web is evolving so fast that I’m starting to believe I’ll always be green and grinning. Just when I think I have it all down and mastered, a new development knocks me off of my overconfident feet and lands me on my bruised behind with more to learn and more to master as I attempt to wrap up the learning curve and call myself an “expert”. That’ll never happen.
I’ve been writing on small business ecommerce for two years now and keep looking back to chuckle at what seemed incredible last month or even last week on the web. What was new is now either commonplace or useless as internet innovation blows by like a laughing kid screaming on a roaring jet-ski past a fishing pier and soaking the elderly net veterans in the wake of the next innovation.
The most elderly of those net veterans have been working the web for ten years now so it hardly seems as though there could be many of them retired from this career as yet. I can’t wait to see how the web is compared to whatever will take it’s place in the not-too-distant future. I recently read a book called “The Victorian Internet” by Tom Standage, about the dramatic innovation of the telegraph and how it made the world much smaller and sped up the pace of life in the 1800’s. What will replace the web and how will long will that take to happen?
I subscribe to a wonderful ezine called “The Rapidly Changing Face of Computing” put out by Jeffrey R. Harrow of Compaq Computer Corporation. Each issue is loaded with the latest developments in technology and is overflowing with enthusiasm for technological change. Harrow reminds me of an excitable kid with a new toy who can’t wait to run out and show it to his playmates. He’s clearly in a position to be at the bleeding edge of change and innovation. An enviable position (to me at least) putting him at the precipice, peering over the ledge toward the canyon of technological volcanoes erupting down below. (subscribe or listen at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc )
I love this stuff and can’t get enough of it! As a kid I was always reading my dad’s subscription to “Popular Science” and “Popular Mechanics” before he got home from his job as a “programmer/analyst” and took them away from me. It was sort of inevitable that I’d end up working in technology in some fashion, even though web content development and web journal- ism are definitely just peeking in and reporting to the world.
I’m still green and grinning and I hope I always am. This stuff is just way too much fun!
“We are entering a digital renaissance. We are entering an era where ideas and inventions will be the most valued assets that a corporation has.
Successful companies will increasingly be predicated on the concept of constant change, and the pace of change is accelerating.”
Carley Fiorina CEO, HP World Economic Forum
http://www.earthtimes.org/jan/newsmassivechangesinjan28_01.htm
Mike Banks Valentine operates SEOptimism, Offering SEO training of
in-house content managers http://seoptimism.com/SEO_Staff_Training.htm
as well as the Small Business Ecommerce Tutorial at
http://WebSite101.com and blogs about SEO at http://RealitySEO.com
where this article appears with live links to SMO stories, buttons, blog posts and examples.
