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I'm a late adopter....

Time was when I would jump in and muck with the newest and most untested hardware and software in order to be on the bleeding edge of the technological curve. Those days have passed; I'm far more content to have a computer that does everything well than to have the newest, fastest, and most likely to crash machine out there.

The hardware and home software market has come to reflect my apathy. Most computers now are incrementally better than they were a year or two ago, but the six-month cycle of amazing new graphics cards and the like is over.

But the one place innovation keeps pushing forward every day is web-based software, particularly when it comes to blogging. That's where my tendency towards laziness keeps me way behind the curve.

I've found the cycle goes something like this.....

-somebody invents a new, obscure and potentially useful program for use on the web. Usually the software connects some aspect of the web with some other aspect of the web.

-Joi Ito and/or Cory Doctorow expound about how good the software is, usually in some crazy language only the blogerati understand. Here's a (completely made up and exaggerated for the sake of comedy) example:

"Technoblogzer takes your bookmarklets and trackbacks them directly into the wiki. This is AMAZING. IT CHANGES EVERYTHING."

at which point I usually say "Zuh?" and forget about it.

-Then several months later enough people are using the Technoblogzer bookmarklet that some neat stuff that's actually useful comes out. Still I ignore it.

-Finally, some friend of mine will say "check out my Technoblogzer!" and send me a link, and I'll succumb.

This has happened to me with Flickr, del.ici.ous, and a few other services that are probably pretty neat, but which I'm just too lazy to try out just yet.

What's my point? None really, other than I'm starting to see how the older you get, the more crotchety you are about the newfangled technology. Plus I finally got to check out the "extended text" feature on Movable Type. :)