Over the years, Barbie has tried her hand at many different occupations: rock star, race car driver, astronaut... the list goes on.
This year, Barbie has a chance to be a computer engineer.
You can vote for your favorite occupation on Barbie.com
True story that happened to me today: someone asked me to snail mail them a copy of one of my blog entires and gave me their home address.
The first question that comes to mind is how they figured out how to get to my blog and leave a comment on it without figuring out how to save a web page or print it. Furthermore, what made them think I would honour their request to mail them a copy of my blog entry? (I'm not going to.)
Is this type of user representative of an average web user or a less-than-average web user? How many people like this are out there and do they matter?
Being a computer engineer, I really take computer literacy for granted. This type of encounter with lay people gives me an interesting perspective on the type of audience my products may attract when building the Internet.
I love Flickr and I use it to back up all of my photos. With today's announcement of Microsoft's offer to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion, I can't help but wonder what the fate of my vast photo collection may be.
If the acquisition goes through, some of Yahoo's services will inevitably get shut down or merged into MSN's similar offerings. Microsoft doesn't have an existing product that is as cool or popular as Flickr yet, but I don't think Flickr is a particularly profitable operation.
I'm not the only one who is concerned about the future of Flickr:
Latest FlickrCentral discussion thread
Wired article about Flickr and Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo!
Flickr pool by concerned Flickr users
What are your favourite Yahoo! products and which ones are you most concerned about?