The term neo-nomad (aka neonomad, digital bedouin) is rather new. In fact, it still lacks a formal definition although the neologism itself is simple enough to understand. A new type of a nomad; a wanderer, someone without a fixed sense of belonging… The way it has been used thus far refers, very generally, to people who take their work with them. In America, this usually applies to the vast amount of web 2.0 startup execs and other self-employed tech workers roaming around in the Bay area. They are sometimes referred to as the Starbucks society, since that is the preferred meeting place of the neo-nomads. Quite aptly so – all major Starbucks locations have excellent wi-fi through a partnership with T-Mobile, and have a corporate feel to them – it is here that one can run into execs from Google, Flickr, or a dozen other hot, new startups.

Well, I’ve been away for almost a week, stuck on an unexpected contract. I must say that non-disclosure agreements are not as fun as they sound, especially for a blogger who’s just dying to share something this interesting. On signing the contract and the agreement I was subjugated to an IQ test, and while I have much less confidence in them than I used to years ago, I was happy to score 138. So was the client.

Let’s see. In that same week I managed to almost get sued by Beyonce Knowles’ lawyers, I lost a fair bit of my online portfolio due to sheer stupidity (for the first time ever I tried to play it safe – bad idea), I came down with an overdue illness, I got ideas for 200+ domains and some 10 sites, and wrote a research paper on why technology serves as empirical proof to the concept of Post-Modernism. At the same time I’ve ignored e-mail and my blog almost completely.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the long lost art of writing [part 1] [part 2] – or the problems with grammar kids and adolescents face nowadays. In case you missed it and don’t feel like rereading, my conclusion was that basically the end justifies the means in this case – language is organic and it how it should be used depends on the situation.

That was a few weeks ago, and since then I’ve been (proudly) accused of mild liberalism, which for many of my friends and readers was a bit of a surprise considering that my views on literature at large are rather traditional. However, then I came across this article and my blood almost boiled.

Frankly, I believe that that’s how all of the web 2.0 world should be categorized – into good mashups (slick and useful), bad mashups (eyecandy, but no value) and ugly (useful, but lacking in design). Here’s an example of three recent offerings which exemplify these categories.

klostu.com – one of the smartest recent start-ups, aiming to aggregate anything and everything to do with web forums – your presence, multiple identities across multiple forums, tracking friends’ activities, new posts and threads, etc. Wonderful idea, if only because they were the first to think about it and while we already have a number of early-stage social networking / RSS aggregators, forums are a large part of the net and they definitely deserve their own tracking engine. Judging by klostu’s blog, they still have quite a bit of features up their sleeve, so keep an eye out here. And whereas I am not convinced about their choice of a color-scheme, the website is definitely good looking by almost all Ajax standards. Clean, crisp, fast – thus easily falling into the good category.

Taking a small break from the world of technology… I have not written any reviews for a long time and while this isn’t really an attempt at one, I just felt like sharing this with you.

The Edukators (original title: Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei) is a slightly unusual movie. Form-wise, there is nothing to it. Yes, the camerawork can be a bit jarring, as the camera is almost constantly moving, the shots are sometimes a bit too rushed, almost impatient. But the main impetus lies with the actual body of work.

In a way, it’s both a coming-of-age story (mostly for the characters vis-a-vis their interpersonal issues) and a in-search-of-idealism-lost story (that is the least the implied message provided for the audience). What I particularly like about this seemingly plain plot is how those two main themes interplay in terms of accessibility – sometimes the issue is private to them, other times it becomes public – it affects the audience. Then another theme emerges and tries to take the centre, with a number of secondary themes always present in the background. It really is quite fluid.