[editor's note: Phooey on Digg. Sorry that this post is a bit of a repeat, but I used their "blog this" link and all it ended up doing was truncating what I wrote and didn't put any links in the body of the post (which is just my style). So I'm posting this again with some additional information]

So Gen X were slackers and Gen Y are kickin’ it? There are some nice statistics on Steven Johnson’s blog that show that our new Web medium is encouraging participation and entrepreneurship. Kids rule! —give them video games. And maybe Johnson is right in his tome “Everything Bad is Good For You” that this development has more to do with a generation that has grown up with interactive mediums (i.e. video games and the web) than a generation that grew up with a passive medium (i.e. television).

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Wow. I found an article over at pcmag.com titled “Five Ideas That Will Reinvent Modern Computing.” I thought, maybe two out of five wouldn’t be bad. But not one? Not one of the ideas they cite will change modern computing. It really made me wonder, do the editors at PCmag.com use computers? I’m serious, not one of the items that they mention will have an impact on modern computing. And let me stress that: modern computing—meaning computing in the next five to ten years. The one technology that might have an impact that they cite (which, really, is a gimme) is quantum computing. No doubt, quantum computing (which is theoretical and still might not happen on a manufacturing scale) could change computing. But it won’t change anything for twenty years. That’s not modern computing. But the other technologies they cite are irrelevant or just banal.

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I posted my thoughts about user expectations regarding search over on The GUI designer’s coffee break. Here’s what I said:

“It’s interesting to note that several of these expectations stem from searches being based on loaded results from another server and the necessity of typing in a full query before seeing any results. “Live” searches such as the one in Apple spotlight and some being implemented via AJAX on the web change this. Here’s one example. On my blog, I’ve made the argument several times that search engines should also be capable of chatbot behavior. It should engage this behavior when an intelligible phrase would allow it to walk users through to more accurate information. Google’s “Did you mean?” functionality is a good start but lots more could be done with it. Combine that functionality with live search and I think the result would be very powerful.

Powerful is maybe even an understatement. A well-thought out chat/search bot with live results and recommendation capabilities could be insanely great. I’ve learned enough about web services that it may be time I start thinking about building this concept in Flash.