Must say I have been pleased with the efforts of Biblio.com in being an online DB for books from (some very small, some very large) booksellers in US & UK.

I think the idea of friendship and family has been fostered for a couple of generations in TV advertising. Thinking of the Kodak Moment (cue sappy music), or “the [add mega-auto dealer's name] family of dealerships”. As if they sit together at dinner instead of reliving Death of a Salesman every day.

@Chip: I’ve never seen “ebooker” used in this context before (neither has Google, apparently) and hope I never see it again.

WRT 3D, there is some very interesting stuff going on with WebGL and JavaScript. I expect to see lots of higher-level packages built on that.

It’s essentially still BASIC, but it includes functionality for game development, loading and displaying 3D meshes, etc. That makes it very easy to get a kid interested, because they’re no different than most of us were when we were kids – we learned to program because we wanted to create games, and so do today’s kids.

Now, what would really rock is if someone were to publish a weekly zine of some sort that had programs for the kids to type in, preferably with a few small bugs so they have to debug the program themselves. I think the magazines, like Compute (and its sister publications), had at least as much to do with it as the fact that the language was built into our computers.

We have all been taught something by folks who had no pretense of calling themselves teachers – janitors, gardeners, clerks. Any from whom I learned would be embarrassed to be singled out as a treasure, but many are the ones who should be awarded an H.C. robe and hood.

Whether corporations or individuals, adulation sounds better when it does not come from its own mouth.