In any case, it certainly has relevance today. New-media technologies pop up faster than weeds, and there’s an army of bloggers out there embracing,writing and hyperventilating about them; little analysis of the potential; lots of bad adjectives heaped on the cool factor. Hey, I admit to feeling that way myself. Mindmeister was one such technology I heard about at Web 2.0 this spring. Haven’t looked at it until now, even though I signed up. If you read Steve Rubel and others, they’re all over new technologies for a nano-second and then on to the next thing. So the informational popcorn has a certain value, but there’s little analysis. It leaves us all feeling so very…. empty.
As with so much of technology development, these offerings come and go. Some will morph into something useful that their creators never envisioned. But most will end up having little value –certainly less than the short-lived Pony Express. And they certainly won’t live on in the history books the way the express riders have.