For as long as I’ve been a professional writer (almost 20 years now), and with all the writers I’ve known and spoken with, one thing that surprises me is that I don’t recall ever having a conversation with another writer about writing. I mean the writing itself.
Any time you do something creative, be it writing or painting or poetry or comedy or whatever you do, you always get someone who will say, “I wish I could do XYZ like you do.” Well guess what? Nobody was born with it. Nobody.
Me? I believe I am quite good at what I do, but nothing comes for free. I think I am different from many of the writers that I’ve met, in that I consciously work at self-development all the time. Writing can be an art, but it is also a craft, like carpentry or ship building. When you’re doing business writing, it’s almost all craft. This means you can consciously choose to get better at it, through practice and study. » More... »
I just love this. 
Welcome to 2012! Once again, I’ve been remiss in keeping this blog updated, but I’ll try to do better this year. Remember you can always follow the latest from my Fatal Exception blog for InfoWorld in the box to the right!
With the rise of HTML5, a lot of folks wonder whether it might displace plug-ins such as Adobe Flash for rich Internet Application development. Adobe doesn’t see it quite that way. It sees the two technologies as complementary, and it’s putting its money where its mouth is. Adobe Edge is a new technology from Adobe Labs that aims to make it as easy to build complex animations in HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript as it is to do the same in Flash. It’s still rough around the edges, but it does make it possible to do some pretty remarkable things, especially if your goal is to develop banner ads, infographics, or other short animated sequences to be embedded in Web pages. Read on for more of 
Seven years after its IPO, Google is entering the next phase of its growth as a company. It’s impressively large by anyone’s standards, with $29.3 billion in revenue in 2010, nearly 30,000 full-time employees, and offices in 42 countries. And yet Larry Page, now Google’s CEO for the first time since 2001, still seems to view the company as a cross between a startup and his old Stanford University grad project. It’s neither, and it faces difficult challenges. The legal environment around Google is tightening even as it goes head-to-head with the industry’s largest companies, and the changes it must make to remain competitive may mean tomorrow’s Google little resembles the fun-loving Silicon Valley darling of yesteryear. Read on for the rest of my analysis of