Some of their concerns were valid ones – concerns that I have in fact myself raised about the state of content. All of them, though, lacked context – or any basis in the reality of what it takes to keep hundreds of people from tech savvy IT student to 60 year old administrative assistants writing web pages in Microsoft Word pointing in the same direction.

I work very hard at my job. No one asks me to put in the extra effort that I put in. I do it partly because I want to do the best job I can, but also because I love the school and want to do whatever it takes to help it and the people who work there.

In exchange, I don’t expect to not be criticized. Criticism is a part of growth and improvement, and without it we grow stagnant. I don’t expect constant affirmation. I realize you do what you do, the best you can with what you have, and that’s that.

What I don’t appreciate, though, is being asked to respond to criticisms that weren’t shared with me directly. To answer questions raised at a closed door meeting I wasn’t a part of about work I’ve done. If you really cared what I had to say, you would have asked me.

The entire experience is one in a series that are teaching me that the extra effort really is largely ignored, and in fact reevaluation of where I am and where I’m going is probably in order. Here I am. You know me. I have been here, giving you everything I have for more than two years, You’re either happy with that or you’re not. Make up your god damned mind. I’m tired of spinning my wheels having the same conversations and explaining the same decisions over and over.

You may have also heard about a few of the shortcomings of the device in it's current form. One of these shortcomings, multitasking, I believe Apple knows has to be addressed in both the iPad and the iPhone. As both devices continue to evolve, I would expect this capability to be pushed out to users with a new generation of hardware.

The other shortcoming that nearly every list includes is the lack of Flash support in the browser. Here, I don't think there's any chance that Apple will ever turn around. They've drawn their line in the sand, and as the initial shock of not having support for such a core web component has worn off, much of the argument for Flash being a core web component has started to lose momentum.

Adobe Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow published a now infamous blog post about the iPad's lack of Flash support that prompted Wired to declare that Adobe had resorted to "playing the porn card" in an effort to put pressure on Apple to revisit their decision.

It's worth noting that Lee has since updated the original post to include the disclaimer that the blog post was his own, and not an official "Adobe" blog.   I would imagine that this update itself was prompted by Lee's own desire for self preservation within Adobe.   Having been a member of the Adobe team for 8 years myself, I can assure you it's not a freewheeling corporate culture.

All this aside, the real issue in play is the continued relevance of Flash on the web, particularly in an HTML5 world, and the desire that Apple has to maintain strict control of their ecosystem.    Let's look at these two issues independently for a few minutes.

Where does Flash fit?

You can remember a time, I'm sure, when the temptation existed to develop content in Flash for the web because it allowed you to eliminate inconsistencies in behavior and display caused by lack of adherence to standards by the major browser vendors.   Like them or not, Microsoft was always the worst offender in this area, choosing to attempt to define their own standards and attempt to "lock in" users once they were hooked.   It's smart business – but horrible for the overall well being of the web.    That's not Microsoft's fault – but rather it's the fault of their customers (corporate customers in particular) who allowed themselves to be sold solutions that offered no vendor independence.    This is the very reason why IE6 still continues to exist today.    There are too many legacy systems deployed in large corporate environments where it's simply not cost effective to migrate away from these non standard solutions.

Now, though, even Microsoft is trying to encourage their customers to move toward standards based technologies and away from IE6.    The continued support of this legacy technology has started to burden the company that once championed it, and it's no longer good business to ignore that there are better solutions available.

Instead, now it's Adobe who is in the position of trying to keep users locked in to a proprietary solution for something that can more easily and effectively be done via video encoding/embedding standards available to any browser that wants to adhere to them.    All without the need of a separate plugin, within the browser itself.     Make no mistake that Adobe sees this as a huge threat to the dominance that Flash has enjoyed in the "video on the web" space for so long, at a time when "video on the web as a replacement for traditional content" as a concept is really just starting to click for the average user.    

Where Adobe has leverage with Flash is (in my opinion) the desktop application space.   Adobe AIR   is a fabulous technology that, through the use of Flash, allows developers to build desktop class applications for deployment across multiple systems, eliminating the need to worry about what client OS is being used.   There is a tremendous built in development community who have spent years developing Flash applications for the web, and there is already solid user familiarity with the technology.    The transition makes sense, and it's one that Adobe would be wise to embrace, and put more marketing muscle behind pushing.    

Apple's Role

For Apple, the motivation behind ignoring Flash on these devices has little to do with being so magnanimous as wanting to champion open standards video on the web.    For Apple, it's the sheer terror of allowing that very same application style development that I just mentioned in to their very closed iPhone/iPad ecosystem.    If you've seen the quality of HTML5 based web applications in mobile safari (see the recently launched Google Voice app as a great example) then you know that Apple already has their hands full fighting off an App Store threat that is going to continue to grow as developers tire of the restrictiveness of the App Store submission process.    Add to this the potential of increasing that rouge developer base AND providing access to essentially an already built app catalog via Flash and it's easy to see that there's no way it's ever coming to either device.

Where do they go from here?

For Adobe, Flash as a source of video on the web will continue to stick around for a while to come.   It has upwards of 80% of the web video market now, and those kinds of huge numbers are unlikely to take a nosedive quickly.    Still, as Robert Scoble himself illustrated, this shot across the Flash bow by Apple has only served to remind content producers that Flash simply isn't the only game in town (nor even the best game in town) anymore.    Adobe would be wise to start thinking long term about where the platform is headed.    Most technologists would agree that eventually (there would be disagreement on timing, but eventually) the idea of requiring a plugin to play video from your site/source is going to have to go away.    Take video away from Flash, and Flash is still an awesome product – it just needs to be repositioned/reframed to developers.

For Apple, the very real threat of HTML5 is probably going to be a much bigger nightmare for them than the thought of Flash apps running on their devices ever would have been.    Now is the time to start considering opening up the iPhone SDK and removing some of the silly limitations that sandbox apps in and prevent them from doing things like running in the background, so as to offer a compelling reason to developers to want to develop natively for the device.     Eventually, they'll have no choice but to do this if they want to keep that App Store gravy train running.

Ok Adobe friends, tear me apart.    Cheers.

Since joining the world of higher education in February of 2008, I must have heard someone, somewhere talk about Second Life as the “next big thing” at least 30 or 40 times.

Guess what – it’s not. Second Life has been the next big thing since it launched in 2003. Next big things don’t have to talk about why their moment is just around the corner. Next big things are too busy having their moment.

Don’t get me wrong – if your thing is creating an avatar, digitizing your surroundings, and figuring out how to drive around in a golf-cart and run in to other people you meet there, more power to you. However, if you’re intention is that you’re going to try to make Second Life part of your business plan, I can save you the time and link you to FailBlog right now.

Why? Well, number one, the usage in Second Life is way overestimated. The number you hear thrown out is “10 million users”. Second Life has “10 million users” the same way Vanilla Ice sold 11 million copies of To the Extreme.

Registrations does not, in any way, represent active usage. Even by the most generous estimates, there are only about 1.2 to 1.5 million active second life users. Worldwide. In 5 years. To put that in perspective, when the iPhone App Store opened up, Apple reported about 60 million applications downloaded in one month, and some of those you had to pay for. Why? Because it was the next big thing – it wasn’t just talking about how it was the next big thing.

But hey, don’t take my word for it – here are some nuggets from around the web. Ken Wheaton, of Advertising Age was told when he dismissed Second Life as an also-ran that he “just didn’t get it”. His response: “There’s a big difference between not getting it and simply thinking something is a waste of time and money.” Bravo, Mr. Wheaton.

PC World cited Second Life as one of its Top 10 biggest web annoyances in 2007, complaining about the clunky interface, steep learning curve for new users, and general lack of anything interesting to do once you get the controls and interface figured out.

Google, which bought in to the hype a bit and jumped on the virtual world bandwagon this summer with Lively just shut the site down after internal examination during a belt-tightening period determined that the demand just wasn’t there. This is Google – the company who keeps “Beer Googles” in as a feature of Gmail – I love them, but they’re not the most discriminating organization when it comes to letting a product hang around and catch on.

That’s not to say that the concept of virtual worlds isn’t an interesting, potentially compelling one – but it is my belief that Second Life as a specific virtual world has missed its window. Just like Friendster during the infancy of the Social Networking boom, it may be a site that just got in a little too early.

The reality is that people just aren’t as interested in Second Life as the hypers seem to believe. One way to determine the popularity of something on the web is to look at the chatter that something demonstrates – across blogs, article mentions, etc. Let’s let a simple picture tell a story.

Don’t tell me – show me. And until you do, if you’re going to spend money on Second Life, send it to me. I have some nice virtual swampland in Florida that I’ll sell you real cheap. I’ll even pay your closing costs for you in “CummingsBucks”.

Unless you sit with each individual user and ask them exactly what they want on a page, what color they’d like it to be, and what font they want you to use, they won’t be happy. When they’re not happy, they won’t be particularly constructive when they share their opinion.

A sampling of some of the comments I have received from users:

• “There is no link to “X” on the page anywhere!” – There were no less than “3″ separate links to the item in question at various places on the page.
• “I can’t find “X” – This is almost always because what they’re looking for isn’t where they are looking, and it never was. Any site change is an excuse for you to get the blame for that.
• “You didn’t include a link to “insert pet group here”, always said with a tone that implies that I absolutely hate this persons cause, and have excluded it solely because I wanted to anger them personally.
• Change X to Y. After you make the change….”why did you change X to Y?”
• A slew of this helpful gem….”I keep running in to bugs” with absolutely no further information. Thanks.

These are actually some of the nicer ones I have heard. I had a call on my voicemail from a kid who was absolutely belligerent because he couldn’t find the link to his particular group.

I say all this not to whine, though I’m sure it will come off that way, but only to caution anyone who might be thinking of jumping back in to the management of public web content. Don’t do it.

This mood, I’m sure, is due largely to lack of sleep, too much caffeine, and trying to do too much at once.

There is the pressure that any job puts on you to perform. That’s never been a problem for me. Where I fall down is with the added pressure that you put on yourself. The pressure that comes from internalizing too much of what you do, and feeling like if you’re going to associate your name with something, it has to be perfect.

The problem there is, who defines what’s perfect? My definition and someone elses can be miles apart. This week has taught me that burning the midnight oil to “make it perfect” isn’t getting me anywhere but frustrated.

Hopefully I’ll remember this lesson as I head in to next week, and stop taking things so seriously.