Alan Cooper's About Face: Essentials of Interaction Design is pretty timely and gives a lot of insights on different types of platforms and applications. Start there, and with Krug.

Are we Emergents, or are we Qeng Ho?

Wasn't Web 2.0 a 2004 thing? Aren't we supposed to call it Cloud Computing now, or something?

I'm actually surprised the parent hasn't been modded flamebait.

It has always struck me as an intellectually dishonest argument that "Farmer Joe in Rural Wisconsin doesn't want or need broadband, so we shouldn't expand our infrastructure for him." Uh... sorry, but the era of farmers in rural America who don't need (didn't grow up with) the internet is drawing to a rather rapid close. And even now, why should we not expand the infrastructure to those rural areas when there are obviously people, minority or not, who do want it? Nobody is going to force Farmer Joe to give up his telephone or his dialup, and the quality of life for everyone else goes up -- and yeah, I do think everyone here would agree that the internet does have an overwhelmingly positive impact on daily life.

Blaming it for the US being a nation of couch potatoes is just beyond the pale, especially here.

I TOLD my company to wait a couple months, but noooo, they just HAD to go and buy CS4 last week...

Orson Welles, really? How was he tied to War of the Worlds? Am I the only one here who ever read H.G. Wells? I mean, I assume that's who everyone means...?

Meh, there's also the physical medium to consider. I suspect more people buy games than buy music because many come on proprietary cartridges, which end up being a lot harder to clone than CDs. This may not be true of some of the newer systems if they use standard DVDs, but it used to be that you had to invest quite a bit of time and/or money to rig up a cartridge writer.

***SPOILERS*** I have to disagree. Card's treatment of Zdorab later in the series was clearly intended to portray his (Zdorab's) homosexuality as a choice. He has Zdorab agree--for breeding purposes--to mate with one of the female characters and accept a patriarchal role in the new society they set up after leaving a city run by women. Family values my ass. Read the book a little closer, and you'll see it's essentially a retelling of part of the Book of Mormon, egads. The guy used to be good. I'm actually really sad that he's a total douche irl; I can't bring myself to read his stuff anymore. Too much of what he proselytizes makes it into his books, however subtly. Can't support it.