For people who are not living in Canada, Boxing Day is the Canadian version of the Thanksgiving weekend in US. For people who are not living in US, basically these days in North America are the “best days for shopping because of the huge deals around” kind of shopping days. Of course, you usually get to enjoy these deals if only you wake up at 5 a.m. on the 26th of December and then line up in front of the store before it is open around 8 a.m. (let me remind you this is Canada, so we are talking about some serious minus something temperatures out there) and then when the doors are finally open, rushing in while racing with your competitors and then finally putting your hands on one of the limited quantity “doorcrasher” deals in the store. Sounds like a challenge? You bet.

Given the state of the economy, the looming recession and the worst financial crisis of the century in action, I was curious about how the shopping during the boxing day would turn out this year. So, I cruised around couple of retailers and shopping malls early afternoon. In one shopping mall, it took me 35 minutes to find a parking spot. In another one where I parked almost a mile away, all the good deals were already sold out by early morning.  By 7:30 pm, half an hour before all the malls closed down, everywhere people were still shopping like there was no 2009. I could not make sense of all this. With all the tight credit and job losses, companies shutting down, there had to be a reason I didn’t know. And then, I saw this:

Shop, damn it, shop. It is your patriotic duty.

Just when I thought the boxing day was all about boxing and returning the unwanted gifts from the Christmas day and getting new ones instead, I suddenly realized that it was all about patriotism and the love of the country. One can only appreciate the creativity of the capitalist system.

Happy Holidays to you all…

• Launch of iPhone 3G: Change has first come to America as a first generation iPhone in 2007 and then to the world as iPhone 3G this summer. Much has already been said on iPhone’s feature set, usability, itunes integration, application store and so on. However, it is never enough to remind one thing over again; Apple has managed to change the way we perceive a mobile phone and set the bar very high at their first attempt. If the strong iPhone sales numbers are not enough proof, just take a look at how iPhone’s feature set is now being copied by all the major moble handset manufacturers. Mobile phones will never be the same again and I am grateful to Apple for that.
• Election of Barack Obama: Against all odds, against all the mighty powers of American politics and adverse perceptions of the American public, change has come to America and hopefully to the rest of the world. Barack Obama and his team pulled off the election win in such a dramatic fashion that it is a modern day David vs. Goliath. I guess, after the 2004 election, when the Americans overwhelmingly elected W. Bush, nobody could have predicted such a change for the next election. Obama comes to the office at a much needed time and he has some monstrous tasks at hand. Yet, we are full of hope and that is one good thing.
• Accelarated growth and adoption of Facebook as a social networking platform: The tremendous global growth of Facebook user base and its emergence from a simple social networking tool to a massive social networking platform with significant community and commercial support very much resembles the iPhone story. Again, like iPhone 3G, Facebook neatly integrates so many complex social networking tasks and simplifies our daily web 2.0 life. Despite the question marks about its monetization possibilities and privacy concerns, its capability of bringing social networking to masses and creating an ecosystem around it is destined to prevail over any obstacle.  
• Peak Oil of Summer 2008 and the following Financial Crisis: 2008 is one of these years like 2001. In 2008, world as we know it has again changed and there is no going back. Extreme consumerism, irrational exubarence and the greed which took the world in the last 10 years got a nasty wake up call of 145$/barrel oil prices and near collapse of all the financial system in the world’s biggest free market economy. Thousands have lost their jobs. On the bright side, green is the new buzz world. Plug-in electric cars are as close as 2010. True, nobody knows what is yet to come but we all know that it was 2008 when it all started. 

Chinese are said to use “May you live in interesting times” as a curse, referring to the insecurities and difficulties one faces during the times of change. We might feel that way, sometimes for good and sometimes for the other way around. One thing is for certain though, if not us, our kids will live in a different world with different values. I sincerely hope, it is a better one.

Now, what is Spock? Spock is the new people search engine. Once logged in, you can search for a certain person and if this particular individual is already in the Spock database, you can tag him/her as you wish and even upload a photo which you think relates to her/him. The leveraged Web 2.0 concept is “wisdom of the crowds”. So, ideally, once there are enough voters and votes for a person on the same tag or photo, his/her most popular and true attributes will prevail over the others. And if the person you are looking for is not there, you can send an invitation and then start tagging.

When I first logged in, I found my name and all the tags were by the ”Spock Robot”. Spock team seems to have used the LinkedIn database for the ordinary folks like me. If you find your name in Spock and if the information source is LinkedIn, you can claim that is you by simply clicking on the “claim: This is me” link and entering your LinkedIn email and password. At that point, the system will merge your two profiles into one. This merging process sometimes takes forever. Good thing is you won’t need to keep your browser window open for it to be completed. Just start it and come back in couple of days, you might find yourself lucky.

While there are some hickups with it, I like the Spock concept. I would be happy to see these folks at Spock succeed. Spock is still in private beta. That means to be able to use it, you will need an invitation. I initially got an invitation through a close friend and since than I have been tinkering with it. Apparently, these guys at Spock might have noticed that I have been very active so they gave me more invitations to share. So, I have plenty of invitations to share for anyone who is interested. Just post a comment and I will be sending you one shortly. I would like to hear about your experience with Spock as well.

So, what is Web 2.0? The first Web 2.0 conference was held in 2004, so at least since four years, people are trying to define and refine the answer. Apparently, there are many answers to that question and they all seem to complement each other.

Tim O’Reilly briefly defines Web 2.0 as “Networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects”. This is quite a simple form of referring to user generated content, social software, syndication, participation, folksonomy and all other names and descriptors used to define Web 2.0. It covers a lot of ground, but does it cover all?    

The movie below was shown just before the keynotes of the first day.

And this one was shown on the second day, again, just before the keynotes.

Now, after watching these, I’d say Web 2.0 is all about “harnessing collective intelligence and enabling two way use of web”.

What is your pick?

Below is an example:

Photo taken with my sister on her wedding day…

From now on, I will be blogging and experimenting with WordPress on blog.soran.com about my personal stuff. I will use soran.com for professional purposes, primarily about my views on project management as a profession and its impact on telecommunication and IT industries.

As a consequence, I should be able to provide you more updates on both ends soon…