Every once in a while, I come across a device or peripheral that makes me wonder - why would anyone think of making this? And the 6x zoom lens for the iPhone made me ask just that.

I tend to classify photo takers into three groups: the professional types who carry around bulky cameras worth 2-5 grand; the casual types, who carry a small-form camera worth a few hundred for candid shots; and the cell-phone types, who can’t be bothered to buy an actual camera and choose to settle for their almost always sub-standard camera on their cell phone.

The question I pose is this: will anyone that fits into that last category (and uses only their iPhone for picture-taking) actually want to carry around a lens in their pocket?

More glorious pictures here.

So I downloaded the Digg Firefox Toolbar a few days ago, and I’m pretty impressed. Every 15 minutes or so, the next hot story will pop up in the corner of my screen - it’s definitely a good way to keep on top of Digg without visiting the website several times an hour.

An added bonus of the toolbar is that, while visiting websites, you can see at-a-glance how many diggs a particular URL has.

This got me thinking - now that’s is so easy to see how many diggs a page has, are there any pages out there that people digg just for the heck of it? The answer: an unequivocal Yes. So here are some of the pages I’ve found that get dugg a lot for very little reason at all.

• Target.com: 11 Diggs, 4 comments - Comparatively, not that many. But seriously now, who would Digg Target.com???
• Best Buy: 268 Diggs, 2 comments - See above. But apparently Best Buy is better than Target.
• Google.com: 493 Diggs, 118 comments - Now I can understand why a bunch of geeks that have nothing better to do then Digg pages and already visit Google 200 times a day would Digg Google.com. But still.
• Amazon.com: 1777 Diggs, 653 comments - The sheer number of Diggs disturbs me. How much news can Amazon.com’s homepage really generate?
• My Gmail Inbox: 59 Diggs, 37 comments - no comment.

So the big Web 3.0 buzz lately has centered around the Mozilla Labs Concept Series - an attempt by the creators of everyone’s favorite web browser to drum up brainstorming for how Web 3.0 will work. And certainly the most intriguing [read: the concept with the most expensively produced concept video] is Adaptive Path’s Aurora. Although the system resources required for such a concept are still a ways away, the concept itself seems very well thought-out, and definitely possible in the near-future. Worth it to check it out.

I definitely applaud Mozilla’s outreach to the public to design their next concepts. But despite all the pomp and circumstance surrounding their “hear from the little guy” campaign, I’m a little disappointed there isn’t an organized contribution system which allows equal exposure of ideas from those little guys. As it stands, you’re supposed to “use your favorite method of sharing an concept with the world“. Basically, blog about it.

Awesome, but until they actually help the “little guy” showcase their concepts to the world, isn’t Mozilla being a little hypocritical?

The internet’s come a long way in the past few years. Sites like YouTube, Facebook, and all the other Web 2.0 advances have created an internet almost unrecognizable to what it looked like five years ago. Many would say for the better; they’d at least try to convince you that the internet is a more social place than it was back in 2000.

After all, just from your news feed on Facebook’s homepage, you can see the status updates of five of your friends, view thumbnails of John’s trip to Hawaii, and see what two of your friends are writing on each others’ walls. Now, this may seem like social interaction to the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds who got their first cell phone in the 6th grade. But is it really?

I remember an interesting statistic from my Government class: The average “sound bite” from a politician that would be shown on the evening news used to be something like 47 seconds back in the 60s. Over time, that number went down until eventually, the average clip became only a few seconds long. Honestly, how much information can you really get out of a few seconds? And yet we still call it news.

Same thing goes for online social interaction. What did you do on Facebook today? Left a comment on someone’s photo? Replied to a wall post? Updated your status? It’s like sending the world a voicemail to keep in touch, when you don’t want to have an actual conversation with it.

In some mediums, the social element has been removed altogether. Back in the late 90s you’d have thriving message boards – you’d make friends, and have long, in-depth conversations about topics (leave your computer for a bathroom break, and you were likely to find four pages of new posts). This is how you’d find funny videos – someone would post a link to an avi file on someone’s server, and you’d all have a laugh and talk about it. It was special, because you’d found it yourself.

These days, you might look at a few videos on YouTube from the front page. Videos made popular from pageviews by people you don’t know and will never talk to. And the only discussion that will ensue comes in the form of “comments” that are a third the size of discussions that used to happen on message boards, and are too shallow for anyone to really read or care about.

This “social interaction” is the online equivalent of those two-second sound bites. The difference is that, while most people have an excuse for not remembering the sixties (and thus holding modern broadcast journalism to the same standards), these changes in the internet have happened in just a few years. We still remember what it was like to actually be social online. Do we have a responsibility to fight this depersonalization? Or, as with the evening news, is the internet destined for a future of 2-second soundbites?

The internet’s what we make it. What do you want your contribution to be?

What do I do when I’m bored out of my mind? I design Wordpress themes and start new websites. I was quite bored this week. Guess what I did!

It’s with a little sadness and a little excitement that I split this blog in two. 540 Mbps will continue on (with a new look), and I’ll keep posting my cynical quips on the degradation of popular technology. On the other hand, I’ll be moving my - shall we call it, “personal life” - over to a new blog called F1lm Sch00l, where I’ll talk about my life as a film student, college student, etc. You can find that one at http://www.f1lmsch00l.com/.

Read one, read both, read a book… Regardless, I’ll keep writing :).