Ebay and Me: The Things We Learn That We Didn't Mean to Learn

This is an anecdote about how much we learn by doing things on the computer that we did not intend to learn. Let me digress here just a little and tell you that every time I use the word anecdote I'm reminded of the Ron White joke that goes: "If I knew the difference between anecdote and antidote my best friend, Billy, would still be alive. Billy was bitten by a poisonous snake and I thought the best thing for him was to use an anecdote. I was reading sections out of Reader's Digest and Billy, as he was dying, kept yelling, 'Read faster, Read faster'"

So my anecdote is this: Before I returned to school--for the third time--I was an antique dealer for 15 years. My early years in the antiques business were in the mid 80's. I had colleagues in the business; people I bought from, sold to, or traded with that told me about the "bazillions" of dollars that they were making on a site called Ebay. They told me that rich buyers on the West and East coast were buying up antiques at prices that "us hicks," here in the Ozarks would find ridiculous. It peaked my interest.

The first time I tried to sell anything on Ebay, I learned that there was a learning curve to it. I'm not talking about a minor curve, but a MAJOR curve existed in order for me to post anything. In those days there was no such thing as Web authoring tools. If you wanted to post an item on Ebay you had to code your ad by hand using their template, but everything else was pure html coding. I have to give Ebay credit, they had an outstanding tutorial for how to code a posting and make it look attractive. But still, it had to be coded the hard way and if you messed up by missing one key stroke such as misplacing an opening or end tag (for those of you who have used code, you know what I'm talking about), then nothing would appear right. Pictures, text, and headings had to be placed without the benefit of WYSIWYG, or "what you see is what you get." It was strictly html code.

It's amazing to think that Ebay survived at all. An entire nation was jumping on the Ebay wagon, and at the same time learning how to do html code. People who had never owned a computer before were jumping into the deep end of the pool and doing html coding! Me included.

Coding is a lot like learning Spanish. If your immersed in it everyday then it comes natural to you. You can learn the basics, just enough to get you by, but the minute you no longer need it then it slips from your mind and is replaced by other data. My coding experiences have started to erode, and I wish they wouldn't.

As I prepare to give a presentation on PBWiki, I am reminded of the fact that we learn from the software we use, and at the same time are limited by the functions that are presented to us. The nice thing about the old Ebay environment was that it taught me something useful, and at the same time taught me that there were no limits to what I could do. With the new Web authoring tools that we have, we are strictly limited to what the Web authors have decided we can do. They may be easier to fly, but the sky is no longer the limit.