24
Sep
2009
cutting & bleeding edges
This has been bugging me for a while. People seem to think that it is fine to pick up phrases that ‘cool people on the telly’ use (people included other cool people on the telly) and then to use them for whatever they see fit.
The one that has been really getting on my nerves recently is the seeming disregard for the different levels of newness of technology.
It is probbaly easiest to talk about this in terms of software, as this is where it gets [mis]used most often.
The cutting edge of a blade is the sharp bit, it is the pointy end of technology. It is the place that you are most likely to get hurt if you play there, but also the place where you are most likely to find the cool stuff because there aren’t many other people playing on that edge.
I don’t know if you’ve ever stabbed someone, but if you have this is going to make heaps more sense. (If not, you should probbaly give it a go. I haven’t, but I’d imagine that it could be pretty rewarding in certain circumstances.)
The bit of the knife that does the cutting is usually pretty clean, the skin that it is being cut is busy being very pissed off. Given a bit of time, that skin will stop being grumpy, and just get sad. Then is cries blody tears, and these roll off the back of the blade – the bleeding edge.
So this means that if your technology is brand new, it is cutting edge, it is exciting, but you are likely to get hurt. If it is a bit older, safer and more established then it is bleeding edge, and if it has been around for ages then it has probably been sewn up and sent home.
Rant over.
If you are reading this on facebook, follow this link to read it in glorious technicolour.
I was considering this some more and thought I’d make a more sensible point than the rather rubbish joke I made on FB re Win7.
I have got more into technology podcasts in recent weeks, about 6 at last count, which has in turn led to an increase in ‘techie’ people that I follow on the twitters. This has the upshot of exposing me to the kind of cutting edge software of which you speak; Alphas, Betas etc. Apart from my experiments throughout the year with Win7 (what a joke that I used a beta as a more stable alternative to a two year old program) I haven’t much experience with the ‘CE’ let alone the ‘BE’.
So, in a concerted effort to get stuck into something new I have started today with a couple Mozilla utilities that are CE enough to require a warning box to be checked before Mozilla will let you download them.
Ubiquity is a web/mashup/command tool which is pushing for greater integration across the web; initial thoughts are it might be prtty good with some practice ‘watch this space’.
Snowl – crap name, good icon (http://tinyurl.com/yb5zfb3) is an RSS/Twitter feed tool built into the browser. As it’s in direct competition with Google reader i’m going to compare and contrast the two.
So if nothing else your rant has inspired me to better myself and hopefully my web-life.
Watch this space.
[...] talks were are fantastic, proper cutting edge stuff; I’ll post the videos later today so you can see for [...]