At an event held by TechCafe at the 10 floor of one of the many office buildings in down town Seattle I was so lucky to watch a short introduction for Zebigo by Jonathan Wolff and few of his colleagues.

After a longer break than initially planned I am back again to write about some of the things I come across on my travels on the Web.
The initial hiatus was due to me packing up my stuff and moving from Tokyo to Seattle. Here several months of getting papers, apartment, transportation and other not so interesting but necessary things have been keeping my life pretty busy and filled it with irregularity. Visitors from Iceland and Japan have also spent big parts of the summer here and kept me occupied along with some travelling I've done exploring Washington state.

If you are anything like me you have signed up for several different networks that you end up never really visiting. In my case I use Facebook on daily basis, Twitter on and off, Plaxo regularly and Flickr weekly or so. Other networks I seem to sign up for and hardly ever do anything with them.

It is interesting to think about how the world has changed with advancement in computer technology, even just in the last 5 years and mostly in the way it has affected our communications.

It is fascinating how we throughout our inventions get stuck in almost single minded way of doing things. We seem so sure that we have found the best solutions to things. For example keyboards, which hurt people all over the world, are all flat! There have been invention with rounded keyboards (possibly not very practical), which are much better for your hands, but it didn't catch on. Many examples are of us, the users, sticking to inferior ways of doing things. Why? Because we like what we know, and to change it takes something spectacular!

If it wasn't for my love of films I might not have decided to write about this new little cute website called Short Reviews.  Not because they don't deserve it, because they do as this is a fantastic site, but rather because we have so many other sites out there doing the same.  Most notable for movie reviews would of course be IMDB which is one of my top 10 visit sites, while on Facebook we have rather unfortunately Flixter as the dominant site.  Similarly for books, shows (tv.com) and music there are countless sites out there.

As I am writing this the Haiti earthquake news are all over the Internet and CNN is on in the background with somewhat more honest news reporting than expected. Catastrophic events such as those unfolding in Haiti show us the best and the worst of human kind as we hear of people lying and stealing in the mist of the shattered city of Port-au-Prince, while others travel thousands of miles to help out as the global community struggles to give a helping hand.

Tracks On A Map is as brilliant as it is simple! It combines Google Maps and music uploaded to SoundCloud.com to portray a visual image of music around the globe. 

I predict that 2010-11 will see surge of tools on the Internet that combine several services into one simple to use interface. The fact is that we must all be getting tired of having countless services such as Facebook, Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, Digg, MySpace (anyone still using that?), Gmail, LinkedIn etc. Even with our massive brains and capacity for multitasking, keeping all these services up to date is a daunting task, left only for the most devoted Internet surfers.

Finding myself in China over the holidays has severely limited my blogging options.  With all the restrictions to such sites as Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, along with Internet connection slower than a snail, makes it difficult indeed to blog.  Therefore I have decided to take few days off while enjoying the hospitality of my in-laws.