It is with no small bit of wonder that I recently realized my participation in fantasy sports began 20 years ago, in 1991. Originally "Rotisserie Baseball", within a couple of years I was also playing fantasy football and it was not long before fantasy baseball fell off and I just enjoyed playing the football equivalent. So it was that I am realizing how little I enjoy fantasy football today, and spent a few minutes trying to figure out why. My answer? Playing fantasy football today requires little-to-no thought. It has been reduced to a near-Zynga-like game, which for my money is the ultimate condemnation. Let's take a look at the evolution of the game that has reduced it to zombie-like button-pressing.

We are proud to present our first - prototype! - episode of The Digital Life: adventures in design and technology.

I'm perplexed how common inhumane customer service is among large companies. While I'm raising the issue to generally encourage people to design their systems and policies to be human-friendly there are two specific contexts that compelled me to write this today.

The widely-circulated story today that Google fired an employee for reviewing the "private" files and information of users, and even harassed a user based on their "private" information might seem shocking, but it's really only illustrating something that those of us in the industry have known for years: anything we say, type or otherwise create that goes thru a pipe or a satellite or an antenna is fully accessible by every touchpoint in the process. It is kind of like being spied on by someone looking thru a peephole: we think it is private and "ours" but in reality we are buck naked for any prying eye to see.

Remember Classmates.com? Arguably the first-ever social networking website it "connected" each of us to the people we went to school with over the years. Plagued by clumsy and poorly executed "Web 1.0" thinking, and an absolutely atrocious pay-to-play business model, Classmates.com could have been Facebook. Instead, it unintentionally ushered in many thousands of social networking start-ups that, as the market shook out, have become "Facebook and everyone-else-who-doesn't-matter-much-anymore." Still, there were plenty of steps between here and there.

I don't use the moniker "IT" very often, typically only to talk about the internal stuff at my company that has to do with computing technology in the vaguest way. Under "IT" falls our hardware and software that runs the gamut of business technology: computers, phones, Internet connection, printers, other peripherals...everything. However, with the recent wave of unexpected and in many cases surprising mergers, it appears we may start talking more about giant "IT" conglomerates that seem to be in any and every technology related to computing and communication.