While I’m not a pure web designer (anymore) I thought this video was great.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral
Just watched a bbc video about Caral. It is the oldest major city in the America’s, yet it is so far south. If people crossed the Siberian/Alaskan ice bridge during the last ice age, why is the largest oldest city so far south in Peru? Shouldn’t there be bigger cities either closer to the equator (warmer during ice age) or at least more north than peru (closer to the crossing point).
Sometimes I almost feel like we should be devoting more money to Archaeology. I just keep feeling like our world view of humanity is messed up. Just this week, they found stone tools that push back modern human behavior 100,000 more years. It was currently 80,000-120,000 years. So if modern humans were around for 220,000 years, what the heck were we doing for 220,000 years? Just chillin I guess 
Then all at once we decided to build cities and in the span of a few thousand years landed on the moon. Yeah right… 
I guess there might many theories that might match the new data, like:
1. Modern human behavior was present in earlier monkey-like ancestors to us. So stone tools, etc.., were being used by not by humans, but by some pre-cursor to us that later evolved into humans.
2. “Something” kicked our minds up a notch. Discovery of pyschadelics leading to abstract thought and writing, aliens, a new evolutionary trait in the brain, etc..
3. Some critical population mass was reached that exponentially allowed the sharing of ideas: like either pure numbers of humana, or climate changes that forced people to form larger groups to survive.
4. Others…
At any rate, I find our origins very interesting to speculate about. I hope we learn much more in my lifetime.
Its good to here that luminis is moving away from the portal development arena, and focusing more on the middleware.
The luminis 5 plans are to support multiple portal front ends, oracle, liferay, etc… sticking to standards, like struts and spring frameworks. soap, wsdl, etc..
One of the biggest improvements should be faster development time, more current tech, and much greater improvement. Portlets will not exist in the luminis web container, so a slow portlet won’t slow the entire luminis middleware down.
I’m in the middle of Xavier’s presentation about web 2.0.
A few things that are becoming apparent, is that technology won’t answer every need. Xavier redesigned their internal business flow, help desks, IT structure, and more. 24×7, receptive, personal, web 2.0 content, becomes meaningful and accurate when the business structure behind it is also organized in a “business 2.0″ way.
You want more online? You want it meaningful and up to date? Xavier did, but they couldn’t use their 2005 web team. It was one person.
In 2008, Xavier’s web team:
Director, web designer, project manager, web producer, web developer, portal admin, portal content coordinator, intranet developer, admin assistant. Now that is a team that could get alot done:)
I was also impressed, not just with the web staffing, but with how Xavier’s help desk, library, and av/media, and more, converged into one central help desk. Just like a portal attempting to combine everything in one place, the actual information and help producing centers (tech support, library circulation/renewals, etcc) also merged into one physical place.
Xavier is also in the process of changing their actual IT and business department chart. Admin services, web services, app services, content management, discovery services, decision support, registration services, and tech support are now all in the same department!! Now that is business 2.0!
Just went to “Doing more with Luminis IV”. It turned out to be pretty good, as I learned that its possible to deploy more targeted announcement channels. Yet another way to segregate the floods of targeted announcements. I put a new one on our test server, classannounce.
Overview mostly. Creating new announcement channels.
The custom targeted announcement channels looks nice, if I could make it work:)
