Today's my birthday.
Yup. I've turned the ripe old age of 52.
I'm proud to have been an early adopter of the web starting with my first exposure to its potential when I was introduced to AOL in ~1993 and when I later worked on a first generation corporate website in 1996. It is amazing to see how far things have come since that day. At the time, I worked for Ohmeda, a medical equipment company, long since gone, after first being acquired by Instrumentarium, a Finnish company and later by behemoth GE Healthcare. While working on that first generation web site, with a Washington, DC-based vendor, I took the time to learn the basics of html. I can remember having to beg for a second phone line in my cublicle so that I could dial in to the Internet. At the time, this was a rare request and considered somewhat unorthodox within the organization.
I can also remember how we took a novel approach to organizing our information assets. Instead of presenting the overall multi-divisional organization by its legal boundaries and component parts, we organized the web site by looking at the products and services and allocating them based on the audiences that they served - pharmacists, anesthesiologists, nurse anesthetists, neonatalogists, hospital administrators, etc. This re-engineering of the content was quite a struggle given the divisional barriers that were based on product technologies rather than customer type. Needless to say the web site was launched and was considered to be a success for its time.
Fast forward to today - I've continued to learn and share my perspectives on the continuing evolution of the Internet through this blog, as a teacher, as a consultant, as a professional speaker and as a frequent columnist. I hope that these insights and resources provide you with additional tools to continue your development.
