How do you define mainstream?

Lately I’ve been thinking about the word “mainstream” and what it means. Princeton’s WordNet defines mainstream as “the prevailing current of thought” while Merriam-Webster defines mainstream as “a prevailing current or direction of activity or influence”. I think many people have a different definition however, something more akin to the one at UrbanDictionary:

Mainstream is what’s the new trend. When one "style" gets old, a new one is reborn; a mainstream person is someone who jumps from trend to trend so that they fit in with the rest of the crowd.

That definition has 514 positive votes and only 51 negative votes. There are a few others there too, but that one is the most popular. The definition at Wiktionary is similar.

Two recent articles got me thinking about this. On October 27th, the Wall Street Journal said that Twitter is going mainstream:

When the service first appeared a couple of years ago, its appeal seemed largely limited to narcissists who wanted to let everybody know what they were doing in real time. But, like blogs and social-networking sites, Twitter is starting to cross into the mainstream, as a wide range of people find interesting uses for the brief notes.

Is the WSJ right? Has Twitter crossed into the mainstream? I think that depends on which definition you use. Based on the one in the dictionary, I’d say they’re wrong.

The second article was from The Economist. They say blogging is mainstream now too:

Blogging has entered the mainstream, which—as with every new medium in history—looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death.

Hold on a sec – blogging has only just entered the mainstream? If that’s true, how can Twitter possibly be considered mainstream? Seems the “mainstream” media have different definitions for the word too!

Maybe everyone has a different definition for the word? I think it all depends on what your litmus test is. For instance:

  • Has Twitter been mentioned on TV and in the newspaper? Yes, it’s mainstream.
  • Does anyone make money using Twitter? Yes, it’s mainstream.
  • Do my parents use Twitter regularly? No, it’s not mainstream.
  • Do all of my friends use Twitter? No, it’s not mainstream.
  • Will a random person on the street know what Twitter is? No, it’s not mainstream.

I think that’s pretty close to what my litmus test is. Replace “Twitter” with “Google” or “Facebook” and all of the answers are yes.

What’s your test? How do you define mainstream?

WebKit inside Internet Explorer? No thanks

webkit Inside every web browser is something called a rendering engine. The browsers get most of the glory, but it’s actually the rendering engines that do the heavy lifting. Firefox uses Gecko, Opera uses Presto, Chrome and Safari use WebKit, and Internet Explorer uses Trident. There are a few others as well, but those are the main ones. Gecko and WebKit are open source, Presto and Trident are proprietary.

Much was made of the fact that Google decided to use WebKit inside Chrome instead of building yet another rendering engine. I agree that it was the right move. Should Microsoft follow suit and replace Trident with WebKit? Steve Ballmer made some interesting comments today on the topic:

"There will still be a lot of proprietary innovation in the browser itself so we may need to have a rendering service," Ballmer said, adding, "Open source is interesting. Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8."

That prompted more than a few people to wish for Ballmer’s comments to come true, including Steve Hodson who said:

This idea of IE switching over to using the WebKit engine is interesting on a couple levels. First this would put two main browsers on an equal footing as far as rendering ability which would make for a much easier development cycle. It would also make for a better browsing experience for the users as developers would no longer be forced to program against the vagaries of IE.

I hear that last point all the time and it drives me nuts. Yes, Internet Explorer 6 was a nightmare to code for. But that’s simply not the case for Internet Explorer 7 or the recent Internet Explorer 8 beta. At least not in my experience.

I’d hate to see Microsoft adopt WebKit, for a few reasons:

  • Competition is good, and WebKit needs worthy competitors to continue to push the boundaries.
  • There’s nothing wrong with Trident. Why throw away something that works well and is continually improving? And I’m not just talking about the version of Trident in IE8. Microsoft has had full support for things like contentEditable since IE6, something Mozilla/Gecko still hasn’t gotten right.
  • It’s not like the existing versions of Internet Explorer would magically disappear! This would be yet another browser/rendering engine combo that developers would need to test against.

And there are good reasons that Microsoft won’t adopt WebKit too, not the least of which is licensing. Backwards compatibility is a concern also.

It might sound appealing at first, but I don’t think it would be a good thing if all the major browsers used the same rendering engine.

Talk Sex with Sue Johanson in Edmonton

sue johanson Last night Sharon and I went to see Sue Johanson speak at the University of Alberta. She was brought to Edmonton by the Students’ Union as part of their Revolutionary Speakers’ Series. We decided to eat at SUB before the event, to ensure we had plenty of time. It’s a good thing we did, because the line was probably 100 people deep over an hour before it was set to start! I guess we shouldn’t have been that surprised – I’m sure everyone has seen her show at least once!

Sue spent most of the two hours lecturing. Unlike most of the lectures I attended during my time at the U of A however, I wasn’t bored to tears. Quite the opposite in fact – Sue is really funny! She manages to bring all the humor from her show onto the stage. And it wasn’t so much a lecture as a story. Sue essentially told us the story of how we grew up without learning about sex. She’s fond of saying, “there’s so much to learn!”

Some highlights:

  • She wasn’t afraid to act out the things she was talking about – very entertaining!
  • As expected she was very honest about everything. I particularly liked that she admitted that talking to her own kids about sex was incredibly difficult!
  • Sue said that most girls are told “nice girls don’t do that” when they are little, and that’s the main reason they don’t learn about sex and their own bodies as well as boys do. She repeated that quote many times as much of what she talked about related more to females than to males.
  • Another expression Sue repeated over and over was “but nobody told you that” or “we never told you that”. Really good for dramatic effect! She’s kind of like a motivational speaker in that regard.
  • Sue’s favorite sex toy is “the bullet” – she shared a bunch of them and listed the pros and cons of each.
  • She talked about fantasizing and said she likes Richard Gere and firemen!
  • By popular request, she demonstrated how to use a condom at the end of the event.

She didn’t talk much about homosexuality, only making reference to it once or twice. Though she did save time before the question period to express her concerns about anal sex (not specific to homosexuality of course). She called it “high risk” behavior and encouraged everyone to get properly informed before making a decision. That was the only topic that she got a little preachy about.

Sharon remarked that the talk wasn’t quite what she was expecting. Instead of a lecture, she anticipated something more like Sue’s show on TV (more question and answer). That would indeed have been entertaining, and it would have been good to have more time for questions. Still, I thought Sue did a great job of making everyone laugh while learning.

I thoroughly enjoyed the talk and I’m glad I went. If I could do yesterday over again however, I think I would have stayed home to watch the election results. It was pretty cool when someone yelled out “Obama won!” and the entire Horowitz Theatre erupted into applause and cheers, but I still feel like I missed something (though I was constantly refreshing the NYTimes on my iPod).

At least I’ll never forget where I was – listening to Sue Johanson talk about sex toys!

UPDATE: There’s an article on the event in the latest issue of The Gateway.

Barack Obama wins the election!

I’m so happy that Barack Obama is the president-elect! He will be sworn in on January 20th, 2009. I’m very much looking forward to the governing phase of things, and was glad to hear Obama talk about tonight being just the first step. The real work can now begin.


Photo by Ozier Muhammad, The New York Times

Here’s the story from the New York Times: Racial Barrier Falls as Voters Embrace Call for Change. And from CNN: Obama inspires historic victory.

For more information in the coming days and weeks, be sure to check Wikipedia.

Congratulations Barack Obama!

How I plan to track the election online

barack obama Finally, it’s election time! Tomorrow evening either Barack Obama or John McCain will become the next President of the United States. Like most of you, I’ll be watching the results closely. Exactly four months ago Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, and I hope tomorrow is the day his campaign comes to a victorious end. I’m so excited! And also a little glad that it’ll finally be over, to be honest.

Here are a few of the places I’ll be watching tomorrow:

Know of any great resources I’ve missed? Let me know. Go Obama!

UPDATE: As expected, Mashable has a giant list of election resources. Check it out.

Notes for 11/2/2008

Here are my weekly notes:

  • I did another guest review on Sharon’s blog, this time of Devlin’s.
  • The controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) turned ten years old this week. Hard to believe it has been so long already.
  • Earlier this week, many websites published news that Apple had rejected Opera Mini from the iPhone AppStore, apparently for competitive reasons. Turns out the truth is quite a bit different and more interesting than that.
  • As a huge fan of the show, Sharon has been telling me about this for a quite a while: the parallels between the final two seasons of The West Wing and the current election are uncanny. Or maybe deliberate, depending on how you look at it. Let’s hope the result is the same also.
  • Two major OpenID announcements were made this week. Windows Live is now an OpenID provider, as is Google.
  • FriendFeed launched a new feature that I really don’t like – the ability to share your FriendFeed activity on Twitter.
  • Lewis Hamilton became the youngest ever Formula 1 world champion this morning in an incredibly dramatic race. It literally came down to the last ten seconds of the season. Massa won the race and was so close to making the upset happen, but Glock inexplicably lost 18 seconds on the last lap which enabled Hamilton to pass him to secure the necessary points. Ferrari won the constructor’s championship.
  • I can’t believe how close we are to the end of the US election (well, assuming we don’t have a repeat of 2000). If you’re an American reading this, please vote for Obama!

Edmonton Notes for 11/1/2008

Here are some Edmonton-related things I found interesting this week:

Netbooks are trendy

dell inspiron mini What kind of computer do you use? Most of my work is done at a desktop or workstation; a tower attached to three monitors. The rest of the time I’m using either my laptop or tablet. I’ve also got a little Sony UMPC but it doesn’t get used much. It was kinda cool for a while, but it’s not all that fast. And once I got my iPod touch, that pretty much fulfilled my small device needs.

My favorite to use is probably my tablet, even though it’s the slowest of the bunch. I think I like it mostly because of the form factor – it’s pretty small for a laptop (at 12 inches) but large enough that I don’t sacrifice a keyboard or full operating system.

A couple years from now though, my tablet might seem rather large thanks to the netbook trend. What’s a netbook? From Wikipedia:

A netbook is a small to medium sized, light-weight, low-cost, energy-efficient laptop, generally optimized for internet based services such as web browsing and e-mailing. Netbooks are also sometimes, but rarely referred to as a sub-subnotebook.

The form factor of a netbook is smaller than that of a notebook and they are very light in weight (usually 2 to 3 pounds). Common features include a small screen (usually around 7-inches to 10-inches diagonal), wireless connectivity, but no optical disc drive, and a smaller sized keyboard (usually 80 percent to 95 percent of normal size). There is also a trend of using solid-state drives instead of traditional hard disk drives.

Maybe it’s just me, but every second article on technology these days seems to mention netbooks! The blogosphere made a big deal this week out of the fact that Windows boss Steven Sinofsky demonstrated Windows 7 running on a netbook. And today, PC World declares that netbooks will soon cost just $99:

Subnotebooks like the Asus Eee PC, the Dell Mini 9 and the HP 2133 Mini-note will soon cost as little as $99. The catch? You’ll need to commit to a two-year mobile broadband contract. The low cost will come courtesy of a subsidy identical to the one you already get with your cell phone.

A monthly service fee for mobile broadband doesn’t appeal to me at all, but a $99 netbook certainly does. Heck, I’m already tempted by the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (pictured above) and it’s nearly $500! If the cost of components fell enough so that a netbook was about half that price, I’d have no hesitations about picking one up and I doubt anyone else would either.

Netbooks are definitely trendy, but I think this is one trend that will last. A small device to check email, read and post blogs, and update Twitter is something that appeals to lots of people. Okay maybe not that last part 🙂

Recap: EdmontonTweetup3

edmontontweetup I had a great time tonight at EdmontonTweetup3 – our third meetup for Twitter users in the Edmonton area! We had just over 20 people come out to Devlin’s on Whyte Avenue, with a nice mixture of familiar and new faces! I thought the restaurant did a nice job of accommodating our group, and it was good to hear so many people say they’d never been there before. We might as well experience a bit more of the city at these events!

I only snapped a few simple shots tonight, but @bruceclarke, @tonyratcliffe, and @fusedlogic all took nice sets of photos: here and here and here. Thanks guys!

EdmontonTweetup3

As our community continues to grow, I think there will be increasing demand for these face-to-face meetups. It’s nice to be able to get away from the computer for a few minutes to meet the people you chat with on a daily basis!

Once again I’ve done my best to add all of tonight’s attendees to the wiki page, but please add yourself if I missed you. Feel free to add links to your photos, blog posts, and other bits of social media too.

Thanks again to everyone who came out tonight – see you at EdmontonTweetup4!

Recap: DemoCampEdmonton4

Tonight was without a doubt our best DemoCamp ever here in Edmonton. With six fairly solid demos, nearly 150 people in attendance, and no technical glitches in sight, it’ll be hard to top DemoCampEdmonton4 but we’re certainly going to try! It’s just amazing to see the community grow like this – thanks to everyone who came out.

Tonight we had six demos:

  • Sean from Orange Door Idealab showed us Surveyor, a mobile tool for conducting surveys using the iPhone or iPod touch.
  • Reg showed us Edistorm, a social brainstorming platform.
  • Brady showed us ElectionBuddy, a service that helps you run polls and elections via email.
  • Aaron came all the way from Regina to show us The History Books, a sort of social networking site.
  • Sam showed us PureInbox, an online email management system.
  • Grant Skinner showed us a bunch of Flash projects, including Adobe Kuler.

It wasn’t planned at all, but all of the products that were demoed tonight seemed really polished. The interfaces were all slick and professional looking!

DemoCampEdmonton4

I think my “demo of the night” goes to ODIL’s Surveyor. I really like the interface, and the application itself seems pretty solid for something so early-stage. ElectionBuddy and Edistorm also had great demos, and have lots of potential. I think PureInbox could have been a great demo, but unfortunately we didn’t get to see much of the app itself. The History Books was entertaining, but as I said on Twitter, it seemed like something that came out of a few late night domain name purchases. Grant did a wicked presentation, showing us eight different projects that his Flash design firm has been involved with. He was definitely the most captivating presenter.

Tonight was also the first public announcement for Edmonton Code Camp! It’s going to take place on Saturday, November 29th at the MacEwan campus downtown. You can find more information here, and the domain will be http://www.edmontoncodecamp.com (working through some DNS issues currently). We’ll share more details soon.

The venue worked well again this time, and once again I had Free Wifi going (though it could have been a bit more reliable). I live-twittered the demos, which you can find at Twitter Search along with updates from others in attendance.

I think lots of people like DemoCamp just for the networking opportunity afterward, and again we had a full house at The Windsor Pub. Was great to see a bunch of new faces in the crowd too! Thanks to Smibs for sponsoring tonight’s event.

If you’d like to be notified about future DemoCamp and BarCamp events in Edmonton, sign up for the mailing list here.

See you at DemoCampEdmonton5!