Online Lactivism

I'm getting a jump on my new year's resolution to keep up with this blog with something from the truly bizarre category. Apparently, Facebook is banning photos of breastfeeding that contain "a fully exposed breast, as defined by showing the nipple or areola."

A protest of over 80,000 new mothers has been initiated by the Mothers International Lactation Campaign (MILC). You can click here to join their Facebook petition. But first, can someone please tell me: why would you post breastfeeding pictures in the first place?

I agree that breastfeeding is not obscene, but there are some aspects of my classmates' lives that are best left unseen!

Stormy Weather

I was one of those technophilic Verizon customers who refused to switch to AT&T despite the almost insuppressible lure of the iPhone. So of course, I waited in line to get the Storm.

I had a traumatic first day with it (but I should mention it was also the day I found out I passed the CA bar). I've never owned a BlackBerry, so I had to get used to the BB thinking too - the logic behind navigating it. Also, I'm no stranger to the iPhone, (which YouAreYou has), and I had certain preconceptions and expectations as a result.

There was a lot of frustration that first day. The accelerometer often fails to flip the screen upon turning the device. There are often lags when you select things or open menus.

But after a bit, I've grown to appreciate my BB. I learned a million tricks off the BB forums and crackberry.com. These tricks are not documented anywhere officially - it's like getting infinite lives in Nintendo's Contra (A-B-A-B-up-down, etc., you remember!). They make using the device not only easier, it's also like knowing a secret code.

I was not the only one who wanted to return it that first day. David Pogue of the NY Times gave it a scathing review. Today he posted some messages in response to that post. Here's my response to that:

A lot of the complaints are actually due to ignorance about how to use the device. One user complains, for example, that there's no way to get to a contact by entering a letter. This is untrue - you just need to set your contacts list as the default view and it has a Find box. There are several other complaints that are a result of people not knowing the tricks and tips, like sliding your finger down to make the keyboard go away. Many of those complaints indicate the people had had the device for only several days or even hours - they just didn't take the time to learn it. That's a huge factor in the complaints about the press-screen: you have to get used to it. People had to get used to iPhone touch-screen typing too.

Unfortunately, this is all BB's fault: their device is not nearly as intuitive and dumb-person-accessible as the iPhone. Verizon customers looked at this as their iPhone, but it just isn't. It's still a BlackBerry, geared towards professionals. (I can cut-and-paste, edit Word and Excel docs, transfer files with Bluetooth, remove the battery, add more memory, take video, etc, none of which the iPhone can do.) Its inelegance will remind you of Microsoft Windows: smart but stodgy, powerful but buggy. (A friend of mine called it the Hillary to the iPhone/Obama.)

While I don't love the Storm, I do like it. I know most of the problems are bugs that will eventually get fixed. And this, after all, is the price you pay for being an early adopter.

The Squeaky Wheel

This is an older feedback adventure. I sent an email to the San Francisco parking and transit authority about a dangerous intersection near my law school. A few weeks later, I received this:

Thank you for your inquiry regarding the intersection of Fulton, Parker, and Shrader. We are pleased to inform you that this intersection has been included as part of a traffic signal upgrade project that will install pedestrian countdown signals and also modify the signal timing. As part of the signal timing change, we can also implement the “all red” signal timing phase that you mentioned in your e-mail.

We do not have a schedule yet on when the construction will begin at this intersection but it will most likely be later this summer or early Fall. Assuming no unforeseen delays, activation of the new countdown signals and revised timing should occur by the end of this year or early next year.

The Squeaky Wheel

I'd like to introduce a new blogging segment here on Webbed Footprint. I'm calling it The Squeaky Wheel because these posts will be about successful feedback.

Here's my latest adventure. YouAreYou and I are recent converts to composting. Here in San Francisco we have one option for bags that are compostable, allowing you to throw you kitchen waste into them before transferring them to the large bin for pick-up. These are BioBags. Several things about these bags irked me, including: 1) they compost too fast, 2) they aren't tall enough, and 3) you have to pull out the whole roll to unravel one bag. So, I went on the company website and sent a Contact-Us email. Just a few days later, I got this response:

[Sansserif], Thank you for your feedback. If we put some elastic on the top of the bag, that would not biodegrade, defeating the purpose of the bag. There is a product called the "gripper" which is more or less a large rubber band to hold your bag in place. Our bags have a standard(ASTM D6400) that in order to comply with have to biodegrade within a specified time. Your best suggestion is the more user-friendly box. Why didn't we think of that? I will pass that along to the powers that be. Thank you for your support!

I'll let you know when it happens...

A friendly conversation with 22,250 Obama supporters

UPDATE: It seems somebody at Daily Kos got pretty upset at the email chain, raising questions about a "dirty trick" from the McCain campaign. Fortunately, the comment section came to the rescue (however bluntly).

---

Yesterday, I casually checked mail on my iPhone and did a double-take when the screen message reported that over 50 messages were being downloaded. After all, I'm pretty neurotic about checking my messages, and it had only been an hour or so since my last fix. What could possibly be spamming my inbox like this on a Saturday morning?

That's when I was introduced to "CANeighborhoodTeam5."

I watched the listserv name scroll across my screen 57 times before my phone buzzed to inform me that I had new messages. I punched open one of the messages and started reading:

"Okay, folks,

Please, take a deep breath and relax. Someone made a mistake in how they addressed the original email and that's why 20,000+ of us got it."

Some mistake, indeed! As it turned out, 56 of the 57 emails were "unsubscribe" requests that were inadvertently blasted to the entire listserv. As the thread progressed, the requests became increasingly urgent and sometimes angry: "Please remove me," gradually gave way to a chorus of "TAKE ME OFF OF YOUR STUPID LIST. I ALREADY VOTED FOR OBAMA, OKAY?"

The increased temperature of the responses prompted another wave of messages from helpful people (about 20 of them, to be exact) with detailed instructions on how to unsubscribe from the list, and specific requests to NOT reply all to the message, as it would only generate more spam for everyone. The problem is, the unsubscribe link was broken, provoking another wave of emails reporting on that latest development. "This is not some kind of nefarious spam tactic by McCain," one message promised. "It's just a little glitch, so don't let it affect your enthusiasm. VOTE!"

This did not stop the conspiracy theorists or angry "unsubscribe" requesters from furthering the breech of netiquette with more and more messages. As the day wore on, Sansserif and I took turns announcing the arrival of new messages. Our favorite:



Another responded:

"This is fun! Barack on!"

We concur. Barack on, everyone, and get out the vote!

Digi Art

Below is my first piece of Photoshop digital art, created from photos I took for the band Bloomsday Rising.

 

Technological Leaps

I was amused and proud recently by a distinctly Gen Y moment on the part of my Gen X co-writer.

YouAreYou was trying to purchase some software, and the company wanted him to fax in the order form. After multiple attempts at trying to work the fax machine, he gave up in frustration, cursing it as an archaic form of communication.

He took a photo of the completed form with his iPhone and emailed it to the company. The order went through.

Anachronisms

 

Not too long ago, YouAreYou and I watched the sci-fi flick "Sunshine." It takes place in the future, and I chortled out loud when I saw this scene. My Kindle was on the coffee table in front of me; it amused me to no end thinking about people reading analog books on a spaceship in the year 2057.

News Feed Head Fake

I was shocked to sign on to Facebook the other day and find that two of my friends from school were no longer in a relationship. I actually did a double-take and blinked dumbly at the screen as I re-read the words: "...ended their relationship."

Could it be? I thought. But they seemed to be so good for each other.

Well, today I got the full story:



It was just another news feed head fake. Granted, my friends must have changed their "in a relationship" status to "single" prior to correcting the error. But a moment's lapse in status is all it takes for Facebook to broadcast hot relationship gossip across seven continents.

So let this be a lesson to all you status changing readers out there...save your friends and family the emotional roller coaster and type carefully when you perform this highly sensitive operation! I'm torn between giving Facebook some direct feedback about this or simply penning a new entry into the Book of Netiquette, 9th Edition (revised). They should really do something about these head fakes, but then again it does make such good blog fodder!

The Old and the New

YouAreYou decided to clean out his CD collection. We spend an afternoon recycling CDs he didn't want and the cases of all of them. We were both astounded by the amount of waste generated by CDs. The multitude of cracked and unhinged jewel cases made us curse the inventor of such an inferior product.

I couldn't resist taking a few shots while we listened to my iPod.

 
 

Auto Uncheck

I was mighty pleased to stumble across a long-awaited solution to long-bemoaned Gmail feature: a contact auto-add checkbox. As I've whined about in previous posts, Gmail automatically adds an email address to your contacts if you email someone once or twice. This gets annoying, especially when mixed with the auto-add feature of Gchat.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but the long and short of it is that Gmail finally gives us the option of choosing not to auto-add. It still keeps a list of the contacts it wants to add in the "Suggested Contacts" groups, seen below on the left.

 

Anatomy of an Addiction: Confessions of an iPhone 3G Early Adopter

**A Webbed Footprint Special Report**



Friday, July 11 – 5:00pm

After spending most of the day convincing myself that I was not going to succumb to the widespread iPhone mania, my willpower finally cracked. Before I knew what was happening, I told my roommate I’d be back in an hour and headed out the door. My plan was simple: I’d walk to the quiet, unassuming AT&T store nearby and avoid all the hoopla at the Apple stores in Union Square and the Marina. It was going to be brilliant. It was going to be mine, all mine.

I walked briskly. After six or seven blocks I wondered if I had passed the store, so I pulled out my first generation iPhone and waited for the EDGE network to load the map. As I stood and watched the spinning wheel grind its gears at 48 kilobytes per second, I thought about how much better my life would be when I could finally shave 5 to 12 seconds off the wait time for these darn pages to load. I barely noticed the Google map finally flicker to life. Yes, I thought. I’m on the right track.

Two blocks later, I strolled into the store with a swagger and walked right up to one of the many clerks wearing a black t-shirt that read: “It’s here…the iPhone 3G.”

“Can I help you?”

“Yes,” I said pointing to the young man’s chest. “I’d like one of those 3G’s, please.”

He laughed at me in the way one might laugh at a child who announces loudly to a room full of adults that he wants to be an astronaut when he grows up so that he can fly to Jupiter.

“Riiiight,” he said in his best attempt to not sound condescending. He might as well have patted me on the head. “Unfortunately, we’re all out of those today. But you can come back tomorrow and we’ll have some more.”

“How many more?”

“Well…” he said as his eyes grew distant. “I can’t say exactly, but it will be more than fifty and less than a hundred.”

His coyness irked me, but I managed to ask one final question under the guise of politeness: “What time do you open?”

“Ten o’clock,” he replied. “But I’d get here early because there’s probably going to be a line.”

I pretended to ignore him and turned for the door.

Saturday, July 12 – 9:47am

I had debated over cereal and coffee whether I would actually stand in line for it. In the shower later, I decided that I would just casually stroll by and see how crazy the scene was. And yet, as I grabbed my jacket and headed out the door I found myself announcing to the room, “I’m coming back with an iPhone.”

“You might want to bring a magazine or something,” my roommate suggested. “Just in case you have to wait in line.”

“That’s why I have this,” I said, waving my first generation iPhone at her.

Moments later I was out the door. Again, I walked briskly, but this time not out of enthusiasm. I really didn’t want to stand in line. To my way of thinking, being an early adopter of the iPhone should be like going out to a swanky party on Saturday night and looking good. See, I don’t care if you’re a model or an actor or just an average Shmoe --nobody wants to see all the work that goes into looking good. They just want to see the final product. With the iPhone, standing in line is the equivalent of plucking your eyebrows, picking the corns off your toes, exfoliating, trimming your nose hairs, wearing Crest white strips for an hour, and then finally sucking in your gut to squeeze into that pair of pants that used to fit back in the day when you were actually in shape. It takes all the magic out of it.

Instead, you want to give the impression that the beautiful black and silver microcomputer fell out of the sky and into your waiting hand. You want to pull it out of your pocket in a crowded room and say, “Oh, this old thing? Well, you know, Steve [Jobs] asked me to test drive it back when it was in Beta testing. I just decided not to upgrade to the 16GB model out of nostalgia.”

Suffice it to say, I was practically jogging by the time I got to Geary.

10:05am

Two blocks away, and though I couldn’t see the line, per se, I did detect an unusual gathering of people on the sidewalk ahead. I stopped to grab a copy of the Onion from the newsstand—not because I was in the mood for humorous news parody and social commentary, but so I could hide my face in case anyone I knew happened to pass by. I began to get the sickening feeling that I would be standing in line after all.

10:07am

Yes, it was quite a line. I started counting off in two’s as I passed by. Some had brought their own lawn chairs. Others drank coffee and chatted up their neighbors, while still others touched and tapped away at their first generation iPhones. There was something grotesque about this, kind of like playing fetch with Old Yeller before taking him behind the barn to put him down. I don’t know. It just bothered me.



10:10am

…78…80…82…84…86 people ahead of me in line. The words of the store clerk echoed in my mind. Being number 87 was precariously close to being one hundred, which was precariously close to being S.O.L. The worst part was being at the very end of the line. I can barely describe how relieved I was when 88 and 89 finally approached. But after only a few minutes, 88 muttered to 89 about how he heard they were only letting four people in the store at a time, and how it was taking half an hour to activate each phone. For a moment, I thought he was just trying to dishearten the rest of us so they could move ahead.

“Hell with it,” 89 said after a moment’s consideration. “Let’s get out of here.”

And so, to my dismay, I was at the end of the line again.

10:25am

I was halfway through my paper when a bright faced sales associate named Jeremy came out to greet those of us towards the end of the line. He offered us a one page stat sheet about the 3G touting its features and benefits—as though we’d really be standing in this line if we didn’t already have an inclination that it was the shiz-nit.

A new 88 and 89 have arrived with their daughter, 90, who is playing a never ending game of paper/rock/scissors with dear old dad (“one-two-three! Hahaha. one-two-three! Hahaha. one-two-three!”). Though it sounded like they could go all day, the mother finally said something about an appointment at 11:30, gathered up the daughter’s belongings, and grabbed her hand as they headed out of line.

“Okay, see you later,” 88 said.

The line shifted forward another two paces, and a new 89 and 90 took their place.

10:55am

Having emailed several updates to Sansserif with pictures of the line and my rants about the tribulations of an early adopter, I returned to reading my paper (though very slowly so that I wouldn’t finish too quickly). Jeremy has returned. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him silently counting the remaining crowd, and I breathed a sigh of relief when he passed by me. He stopped around 110 and announced the bad news. They’d have to come back tomorrow, or get on the waiting list for sometime next week.

“You mean, I made it?” 109 exclaimed as though she had won the lottery.

“It looks like it,” Jeremy said. There was something in his voice that I interpreted as being not very reassuring—a hesitancy, perhaps—but the woman nonetheless pumped her fist in a subdued and respectful ceremony of joy.

11:01am

Number 88 answering a call on his flip-up clamshell phone:

"Well, no, I'm still standing in line. Honey... Honey... There's only about ten people ahead of me. Well, Honey... Honey... Look, even if I leave right now, I won't make it by 11:30."

He closed his phone with a slow snap. No goodbye's, or love-you-too's were uttered. He stood perfectly still for a moment, and I could sense my linemates shifting their attention to him. 86 was peering out of the corner of her eyes. 91 and 92 stopped their conversation in mid-sentence and waited. A moment later, 88 sighed heavily and left the line, speedwalking down the sidewalk and around the corner.

The line shifted another pace behind me.

11:22am

After carefully examining the showtimes of movies I had no intention of seeing, I finally gave up on the paper and tucked it in my back pocket. I focused my attention now on peering through the window and sizing up the situation. All was very orderly, but the nervous energy was palpable.

Suddenly a car pulled up to the curb. Two curly haired kids jumped out, plopped a couple of quarters in the meter, and headed for the entrance. Jeremy extended his clipboard to stop them and gave them the bad news. I’m not sure if they had pretended not to notice the line outside the door or if, in their early adopter exuberance, the iPhone had given them tunnel vision to the point where they had zoned everything else out. It’s been known to do that from time to time.

Dejected, they returned to their car and drove off. Many of those who’d stood in line for over an hour shook their heads in amusement, and I began to understand full extent of my naiveté the day before. Theirs had already cost them fifty cents.

11:35am

Jeremy has returned with more bad news. There’s only four black 8GB iPhones left. Everyone else will have to settle for the white 16GB model. We began eyeing each other suspiciously. All was quiet until…



11:41am

I made my way to the counter and spoke with the very same clerk as before. I don’t know if he recognized me, but I wasn’t in the mood to make small talk. I dropped my fist generation iPhone on the counter and told him what I wanted. He asked for my digits and got the transfer account set up for me.

“And how many text messages would you like? You can have two hundred, fifteen hundred, or unlimited.”

“Text messages?” I wondered out loud why anyone would pay for unlimited text messages on a phone that sends emails, but then I told him to just sign me up for two hundred. We were wasting valuable time.

He went to the back room, and moments later came back with a little black box.

“You’re lucky,” he said waving it to me. “You got the last one.”

Feedback, Feedback

I'm very excited about a new change on Facebook. I discussed this problem previously here in December. Basically:

Facebook allows you to set the type of news you broadcast. I propose something more nuanced: we should be allowed to explain ourselves.

I just noticed that Facebook now lets you do just that! See below.

The Great Wall

As Sansserif and others attend BarBri classes in preparation for the California bar, rumor has it that the Wall is near...as in, the kind of wall you hit when you study for twice as many hours as you sleep.

All this talk of walls got me thinking about Facebook again. Not that I wouldn't have anyway, mind you, but that's another story.

I've blogged before about some of the amusing exchanges displayed for all to see, but the most recent wall-to-wall experience beats them all.

It all started after my cousin announced to the world that she had gotten married simply by changing her status from "single" to "married" and waiting for the news feed to hit the airwaves. I looked at her profile's mini-feed that morning and saw that, in addition to having been "offered a pet Hottie" at 2:36am and changing her status message to announce that she was "going swimming" at 6:13am, she had also become "listed as married." Subsequently, I received an email from my uncle formally announcing that the event had taken place, and that a formal ceremony would occur next year in Mongolia. I'm not making this up.

So I figured it would be perfectly natural for me to congratulate her via wall posting and, facing the familiar impulse to be witty and/or sarcastic in the semi-public forum, I mentioned that I happen to visit Mongolia every other week or so, and I might make it by for the wedding. Little did I know this would set off a chain of wall post rumors and misunderstandings among her online friends, not unlike that game of "operator" we all played as kids. Here's a visual representation of the end result (the red line is the Great Wall of China):

Can't...fight...early...adopter...syndrome...

I'm trying, I swear.

Really, I am. I even wrote a post about how unimpressed I was with the second generation iPhone on AT&T's 3G network. Look, it's not my fault, okay? I've been diagnosed with early adopter syndrome.

I was doing just fine, you see, until my friend dropped his stupid phone into the ocean. When it became clear he'd need a replacement, he asked me if I knew when the next iPhone release was going to be. And that's when I relapsed.

See, the thing is, it doesn't even matter to me that I could care less about 90% of the new applications on the phone. Nor am I really affected by the advent of the 3G network, because I spend most of my time in a free wireless cloud anyway. But none of that matters.

I have to have it. Oh yes, I will be in Union Square on July 11, I can guarantee you that much. I'm not asking for your sympathy. Just please understand that it's hard for me to say "no."

And if you really want to know the truth, the hardest part was when Sansserif casually asked me when I was going to get the new phone, as if it were a matter of course that I'd eventually buy it. I mean, when you put it like that--it just seems so obvious. I have to accept who I am.

Unfortunately, it is by its very nature a contagious condition. Don't worry. I will keep myself in isolation while I play with my new smart phone. If you need to reach me, you know my number. Or just send me an email, or post a comment to this blog for that matter because I'll be checking on the connection speeds pretty regularly. Just please remember that it's hands free in California after July 1, so if I'm driving you may just want to text me and I'll ping you back.

So if the first step to recovery really is admitting that you have a problem, then let me proclaim far and wide: My name is Youareyou. And I am an early adopter.

My Kindle Feedback

For graduation I was ecstatic to receive the Amazon Kindle from a certain beloved friend. I've had it for about a month, so I'm finally ready to give my review. (Despite studying for the bar this summer, I've probably read my Kindle 5 days a week since I got it.)

Likes:
Wireless downloading. The e-books cost a few dollars less than the print versions. The Whispernet network is "free;" like a GPS navigator, you basically pay for it in the price of the device. Every book I've searched for, Amazon has available as an e-book. Getting a book immediately fulfills all my Gen-Y instant gratification needs. I'm reading a fantasy series by Robin Hobb at the moment, and it's delicious being able to download the next book instantly.

The scroll wheel selector. The scroll wheel controls the selector, which runs along a channel on the right side. It's a beautiful cluster of 4 giant, shiny silver pixels that bubble around in a circle when it's 'thinking.' I adore it.

Quality of the print. Brilliant. It gets clearer in bright light, which is fantastically eerie in this laptop-screen age. Personally I'm completely comfortable reading on my computer screen, but it's undeniably wonderful. I wish they would backlight it with a green glow for the darkness. Understandably, they were trying to make it as book-like as possible, but a backlight would be sweet.

Issues:
Buttons. Speaking of book-like, they erred with the page turning buttons. Like a real book, the Kindle has page turners (next page and previous page) along both edges of the device. I'm constantly bumping these buttons (which have a soft 'snick' type click) and accidentally turning the page. I'd like to see buttons that are inlaid, preferably with a sharp and definite click, and which don't extend the entire edge.

Relatedly, the space to actually hold the device while reading is very limited because of the page turners and keyboard. The page turners also contribute to a certain awkwardness in the device. It doesn't rest well in my hands because the edges are sharp and beveled, so that they press uncomfortably against the webbing between my thumb and pointer finger.

DRMS. The Kindle uses its own file format, which functions as a DRM system. The idea that such a system will last is laughable to me. That's what iTunes has, and it's gotten them into device/format wars and is easy to decode. E-books are in their infancy but I think that like MP3s, there will soon be a brisk market of free e-books. Until then the price will be high. It's like ringtones: absurdly priced now ($2.99 for a 30 second snippet of a song I already own?!), but when the markets mature they won't be able to charge that much.

You can also get subscriptions to blogs and newspapers, delivered automatically. That's nice, but I get those free online, so I don't feel a need to pay even 99 cents a month for them.

You can get a document sent to your Kindle in the Kindle format for 10 cents, which is ok, but really, I should be able to do that myself, for free. If Amazon were smart they'd launch a subscription model: pay X dollars a month to download X number of books, at varying levels.

What I love about the Kindle is the software, and most of what I dislike is about the physical aesthetics. Rather than make it a palatable crossover from a book, they should redesign it with the actual needs of a e-book reader in mind.

Other Comments:
The Kindle has "experimental" features, such as the ability to listen to music (in a continuous playlist, like a Shuffle) and a clumsy sort of internet access. I think they should abandon these projects. The audio feature might be OK for audio books, but personally if I want music or an audio book I'll use my iPod. (Speaking of which, only MP3s can be added, not iTunes' AAC format, which has led me to flirt, for the very first time, with other music player possibilities. But that's another post unto itself.)

While it would be awesome to check my email, it's definitely not practical to write an email on the Kindle. If you want a computer in your pocket, use your smart phone, which is made for those purposes. The Kindle's scroll wheel is extraordinarily ill-suited to browsing the internet (you can only select a line of type, not an individual word or link).

I think Amazon would do better to stop trying to make the Kindle satisfy every need, and focus on what the Kindle really is: a good read.

A Slight Margin of Error

After once being wooed by both Microsoft and News Corp, it looked like Yahoo was going to be the big winner in a tale of two futures. But their algorithm for playing one bid off the other was apparently a bit flawed (they thought they could get $37 per share out of Microsoft's initial $33 offer).

Today, Yahoo faced a 13 percent drop in share price over the news that Microsoft "unequivocally" wants nothing to do with the company. Ironically, Yahoo now finds itself paired up with an unlikely partner for ad revenue sharing--Google.

It may not be the dream deal they were hoping for, but at least it should help improve their algorithm.

Mixed Messages

YouAreYou and I had an odd experience the other day. We were heading to dinner at rush hour to a place we'd never been, so we both checked directions on Google Maps. I looked it up on my laptop, while he searched on his iPhone. Both had the same destination and origin. We were given different directions!

YouAreYou: "Maybe they're trying to protect their trade secret algorithm by confusing us?"

Mine said to take Van Ness, while his said to take Divisadero. If you live in San Francisco, you'd probably do what we did: obviously, take Divis.

It's all about the apps

The Mac Developer Conference is happening just a few miles away from me, and yet I'm not important enough to get my foot in the door (rumor has it that Al Gore's in attendance), so I must get my iPhone fix from MacRumors like everyone else. It's kind of like sipping a milkshake through a ten thousand foot straw...lots of anticipation, but not much substance.

I am still hoping that there's a big, tasty chunk of cookie dough or something (like the much anticipated 3G network) waiting at the end of the line, but here's all the news that has trickled in so far:

-they're opening the doors for developers to create new apps and user interfaces
-Loopt, the location-aware social network, will be an integrated app that works with the phone's GPS
-an eBay integrated app will allow users to participate in auctions (and spend money we don't have)
-there will be lots of new games and a 3-D fantasy adventure app (for all that free time we don't have)
-lots of web 2.0 apps to synch calendars, mail, transfer docs, and do pretty much everything you would normally do through a .mac account (too bad I use Google for all that)

And now, the moment we've all been waiting for:

(drum roll)
11:32 am - Introducing the iPhone 3G.

Yes, coming in at speeds 2.8 times faster than the EDGE network, the 3G is still slightly slower than a WiFi connection...but not much. The biggest development is in battery life (which had inhibited the introduction of 3G on the first iPhone release), which is a whopping 300 hours of standby and 5 hours of continual talk time.

Well, it turns out that my anticipation for something delicious was not in vain. Though I wasn't there to actually see the demo, the pictures on MacRumors tell me it was probably pretty cool. But ultimately, until they decide to unlock it and rid themselves of AT&T once and for all, there's nothing here to make me feel like my iPhone version 1.0 is approaching obsolescence.

It is, however, getting rather beat up after many months in my pocket. So while it may not be time to replace the phone, it's definitely time to get myself some gelaskins.

Even as a Mac guy...

...I gotta admit this is pretty sweet.



Hat tip to Tapan (and congratulations!).

A King of Infinite Space

I just got one of those text messages that you save forever--or, at least, for the life of your existing cellphone. The problem is that this particular phone happens to be an iPhone, which means that I automatically save all of my messages, regardless of how trivial or profound they may be.

This got me thinking that, perhaps, unlimited storage is not always a good thing. After all, there used to be a time when my SMS mailbox would fill up and the decision was thrust upon me whether a particular message was worthy of salvation. A select few would progress through multiple mailbox cleanings, but it required the most genuinely sincere expression from a friend or loved one to make it for the long haul.

And now I have one that fits the bill, but it is part of a never ending chain of messages including such deep thoughts as "Don't forget street cleaning," "Come over when u can," "Getting hungry?'"and my personal favorite, "K."

The same holds true for sent messages as well. Back when I had my $30 Samsung clamshell, I chose my words carefully. No predictive text. No QWERTY keyboard layout. Just the impassioned punching of 444 (space) 555 666 888 33 (space) 999 666 88 (exclamation point). These days, I'm nearly as wordy on my phone as I am in this blog. Punctuation is a must. I even capitalize proper nouns. And forget about abbreviations (excepting "WTF" and "OMG," which I've been known to use in ordinary conversation).

Eventually, we will all become kings of infinite space, though I suspect I won't be the only one who remembers back fondly to the time when we were bounded in our nutshells and our inboxes were nice and tidy.

Searching for Cash

Apparently I'm not the only one who has no idea about Microsoft's "Live Search" search engine. SiliconValley.com reports that MS is offering cash back rewards for using their search engine, redeemable for items like cameras.

One expert said, "The issue for Microsoft still remains in that will they be able to deliver enough scale in clicks for the top lucrative keywords, since that's a function of search market share which they have a very small share of right now."

SF Musictech Redux

It's been a long week of music and technology conferences in San Francisco. It began Sunday with a meet-and-greet "speed dating" session at NARM, and has not let up for three days of action packed panel after action packed panel assessing the state of the music industry in 2008. Well, that's not entirely true...there were a few low spots in the action, but more on that later. In any event, I will fight through the conference fatigue to bring you the latest from SF MusicTech (back by popular demand).




Morning Sessions: Digital Thought Leaders, Online Video, Artist Activism, and Copyright Issues in Music Law

The great thing about version 2.0 of MusicTech is that this time around I brought a colleague with me, which means that I get to be two places at once.

I was introduced to an interesting start-up called Plugged In, which provides high definition video streams for musicians. While YouTube offers an average of 700kbps streaming speeds, Plugged In claims to provide 1.5mbps which, for the uninitiated, is staggeringly fast. The most compelling aspect of what Plugged In offers, however, is an adaptive streaming technology that (in theory) sidesteps the frustrations of buffering and packet loss by automatically adjusting the quality of video based on the fluctuations in bandwidth in the user's endpoint. I haven't tested this theory yet on my own, but the prospects are tantalizing.

In short, I can summarize everything else we've heard over five days of music industry conferences in one sentence: any revenue model that relies on the sale of little round plastic disks will soon be completely, unequivocally, 100% worthless.

Nobody is actually saying this, of course, but it is easy enough to read between the lines. As the commoditzation of recorded music pushes prices closer and closer to zero, the old school players in the music industry are being motivated primarily by fear.

Everyone has a different way of expressing this truth, and in the case of the major labels this expression comes in the form of transparent denial. And that's a-okay with me. The most commonly asked question in terms of digital and other so-called 'alternative' revenue streams is, "How do we monetize this?" If you work for a major label, the short answer is: you don't. The second most frequently asked question is, "How to we stop people from stealing our music on P2P sites?" And to that the answer is the same: you don't.

The major labels all have eloquent representatives who are very good at framing the debate around the types of questions they want to ask and answer. But ultimately this amounts to arguing over the best way to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

This is not to say that you can't make money anymore in the music industry. But lifeboats tend to be much more maneuverable than sinking ships.

Three Reasons I Use LinkedIn

A professor of mine recently asked me if I think LinkedIn is useful. Here's why I like LinkedIn:

Resume distributor. I use it to look up people I'm going to meet (for an interview, for example). It's a subtle way of essentially giving someone my resume, and seeing someone else's resume. If I meet someone at a networking event and exchange emails, by becoming my contact on LinkedIn they look at my profile - which has the same content as my resume.

Rolodex. After I meet someone, connecting to them on LinkedIn gives me a chance to reinforce the connection and keep the connection alive ("It was nice meeting you the other day..."). Down the road, if I ever want to contact that person, we each have enough information about each other to remember one another. It's an automatic rolodex in that way as well - I have someone's contact info immediately instead of having to hunt around for a business card. It's Facebook for professionals, and it looks impressive to have a bulging rolodex.

Connecting. Last reason - it actually is useful for it's core purpose, which is to connect you to the people who are two and three degrees away. Here's an example: a friend of mine wanted to talk to an attorney at a law firm to see what firm life was like. But he didn't know anyone at that firm. I looked up the firm on LinkedIn and discovered that a LinkedIn contact of mine had a LinkedIn contact at the firm. I asked my contact to email his contact at the firm, and my friend got connected. Don't get me wrong - I'd never use the LinkedIn "In Mail" to connect to someone through the site. But I definitely use it to connect to people in more traditional off-site ways.

Inblognito

Last month Cubans won the right to own personal computers. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Only foreigners (at hotels) and government officials and academics are allowed to access the internet, as the Washington Post reports.

But people are blogging about their experiences and criticisms of the government in Cuba; this blogger dresses like a tourist and sneaks into hotels to blog.

The government is blogging too - to improve Cuba's image worldwide, naturally.

Searching

I recently attended a conference on online advertising. A woman from Microsoft was seated at my table and we made friendly conversation. Around lunchtime, she asked if I knew of any local coffee shops. I didn't, but I had my laptop open so I offered, "Do you want me to Google it for you?" She let out a strained laugh and said, "Or you could Live Search it."
I laughed too, but I was confused. I'm pretty plugged in, but it took me a full two seconds to have any idea what she was talking about. Finally it clicked: Live Search is Microsoft's search engine.

When I got home that night, I decided to compare Live Search to Google. (And I had to Google it to get the URL...) I was looking for a Thai restaurant, so I entered "Thai near 94118." Here are the screen shots of the results:




To be fair, they're both similar content-wise. Google's was more helpful primarily because the map was provided on the search results page. When I clicked into Live Search's results, the map they provided didn't have zoom functionality, a real disadvantage if you live in a city and need a cross street.

Off The Wall

Every once in a while, I hear about one of those phone calls that goes something like this:

"Hello, Joe? Hi, it's me, Jim. You remember...from high school? Well I just wanted to call because I'm feeling really bad about that mean trick I played on you at the tailgate party senior year. That was really dumb of me, and even though it's been fifteen years I can't stop thinking about what an jerk I was. I hope you'll accept my apology."

But these days, the mea culpa doesn't even need to come by way of telephone. Consider this recent Facebook wall post from one high school friend to another:


Now, when I saw this in my news feed the other day I naturally wondered what my friend could have possibly done to her that was so bad before homecoming in '93. After all, we went to the same school and I hadn't remembered hearing about any earth-shaking drama surrounding that particular dance.

The answer came a couple days later:



It's good to see that Facebook can not only reunite friends from the past, but also atone for the sins of youth--and publicly at that!

A Modern Take on Mass-Emails

After being on the receiving end of a recent mass-emailing, I got into a discussion with a good friend of mine about mass-email etiquette. YouAreYou's comment to this was: "How quaint!" It does seem a bit quaint to have an email etiquette conversation; after all, everyone is claiming email is old-school. But I soon realized that my reluctance over being included on a mass-email was actually fairly modern:

With Gmail, the other people on the email will end up in your contact list. That causes trouble when you use sites that scan your contacts for friends (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) or when Gchat updates your buddy list. You end up having all these people in your contact and buddy list that you don't actually know.

Of course I also feel a little hesitant when people I don't know have my email. Who knows how careful strangers are with their data?

However, my biggest beef with mass-emailing is actually pretty old-school: Snarky comments, inside jokes, people trying to be funny...who wants to get tangled in a reply-all thread like that?

Time Travel

All my prayers have been answered. Once again, those clever folks at Google have defied the laws of the universe to bring a top notch product to market: custom time. Just make sure you don't read their terms of use.

Okay, so maybe they aren't quite up to the standards of The Onion, but I give them a grudging smile for the effort.

The Loop Grows

It looks like I was a little hasty in referring to Loopt as an "early adopter" technology in my last post because the company just signed a deal with Verizon, which opens the GPS-enabled social networking device to approximately 65 million customers.

Naturally, we should prepare ourselves for the next round of discussions about our dwindling privacy and how this surely must be the end of the world (again). A fellow blogger, Ben Wright, made an interesting comment about the possibility of end-users publishing their own terms of service that impose privacy rules. I'm not sure how this would work in practice, especially in cases of lost or stolen cell phones where legal notices are not likely to deter stalkers and other such bad guys, but it's good to see innovative ideas applied to the question of privacy.

I just hope we don't have to endure a new era of commercials featuring the Verizon Wireless Guy: "Can you see where I'm at now? Good!"

OMG ...1GB!?!

Just got back from a trip to the Midwest with Sansserif, and I finally got around to downloading Picasa's web album uploader software on my home computer so that I could share the photos. As I waited for the program to download, I browsed some of the new Google products under development and found a new YouTube video uploader (along with an interesting 3D drawing program called SketchUp, but that's the subject of an entirely different post).

Coincidentally, I had spent much of the flight home making a "to do" list, and one of the items on said list had been to find the best software for compressing large video files to meet the 100MB file size limit on YouTube. I wondered if they had finally developed an application to automatically restrict video file size to meet these meager limits.

But what I found out was so, so much better: they didn't need to.

I blinked and looked again at the words written in bold. Could there really be a full gigabyte of delicious storage space available for each video I upload? Had I missed a memo or something? Granted, being on a ranch in Nebraska isn't exactly the best way to stay on top of the latest tech news, but I felt like I'd emerged from a black hole or something.

I really have to tip my (cowboy) hat to Google on this one. As Sansserif says, the best part of making a "to do" list is being able to cross off the completed tasks when you finish them. But the best part of my discovery is that I got to cross something off my list and I didn't have to do anything at all.

Divide

YouAreYou is only a few years older than me, but he technically falls under Generation X while I technically fall under the Gen-Y age bracket. While there is much teasing along these lines, occasionally the divide does indeed become evident, as the following example demonstrates:

YouAreYou is currently working on the interior design of his new office. He drew a floor plan of the space dimensions on graph paper. (As an aside, the software for that purpose that I found online didn't seem to capture his interest.) He scanned the floor plan and sent me a PDF copy to look at.

A few days later he said, "I'll make a bunch of photocopies so we can sketch out ideas." I looked at him quizzically and with perfect Gen-Y innocence asked, "Why don't you just print the PDF?"

In the Loop

I recently added the Loopt application to my Facebook account after a friend got a new cell phone featuring the GPS tracking software. Essentially, the lines between social networking and mobile devices are getting blurred. This, in turn, blurs a more important line between our semi-anonymous online personas and our so-called "real world" identities.

Now, before anyone gets all paranoid about their privacy, don't worry. This is nothing like that pesky illegal government wiretapping and/or other undisclosed terrorist surveillance activities that the telecoms can neither confirm nor deny the existence of. No, no, no. This much simpler.

Having Loopt on a cell phone just eliminates the need for the most commonly texted question in the world: where u at? You only invite your friends to be able to see your location, and you can always lie about where you really are if you want to go off the radar for a bit.

I am here, btw: (or am I???)



Of course, I could zoom the Google map to my exact location but, frankly, I don't know you that well.

While this type of technology is certainly the trend of the future, it does not necessarily simplify the social nuances of online living. Consider, for instance, a house party that starts at 9pm. You have ten friends who are going, and none of you wants to be the first one to show up. It's easy to see how staring at your Loopt phone all night could result in a stalemate while everyone waits for someone else to make the first move.

For now, anyway, there is time to puzzle over this newest chapter in the Book of Netiquette (7th Edition) as Loopt is currently an early adopter technology. But don't be surprised if you someday find yourself in a social network that involves interacting in the so-called "real world" we're hearing so much about these days. I know...scary, right?

Landscapes, pt. 2

Per Sansserif's recent post on the landscape along the Pacific Coast Highway, I couldn't resist looking up the google earth image of our approximate location. Had I paid for the full version, I'm sure the two photos would be all but indistinguishable. Of course, they haven't yet figured out how to digitally replicate the sea breeze, or the sun.


Yes, I know...it's so Gen-X of me to tout the merits of the "real" world, but I can't help it. I guess you just had to be there.

Landscapes

 

When I was at my childhood home this winter, my father encouraged me to take a book about cameras home with me. The book is from the 1970s and explains f-stops, aperture values, etc. I resisted at first, insisting I could find all that information online, but to please him I took it with me. I finally cracked it open and found it very accessible. The other day I told this story to YouAreYou, inviting him to sample the old book smell.

"You can't get that on the internet!" He teased. I had to agree.

***************************

Driving along the Pacific Coast Highway this week, I admired the terrain of the land.
"It looks like a topographical map," I said. YouAreYou glanced at me sideways.
"That's very Gen-X of you," he commented, meaning not techospeak, Gen-Y.
"Sorry!" I said. "I meant, 'It looks like Google Terrain View.'" We laughed.

But still - you just can't get that on the internet.

(Nearly) Live Blog - SF Music Tech 2008

Two things you learn early on at an event with over 50 panelists: first, you will have to make decisions about which events to attend (I'm still torn between the 10:30am presentations of "Artists, Copyrights & Technologies" and "Issues in Music - Tech Licensing"); and secondly, anyone who seems overly friendly at the reception breakfast is probably going to hand you a glossy pamphlet introducing their business after about 2 minutes of idle chatter (and will be off to the next target before the 5 minute mark). Click here for the Twitter feed.

Session 1: Recommendation and Discovery

The central topic of this first panel was the question of how to discover new music in an era of almost overwhelming choices, a discussion quickly framed as a battle of “man vs. machine.” On one side, there were the techies in search of that magical formula that would make the process of collaborative filtering on the internet more accurate and useful for the end user. On the other side were the humanists who lamented the digitization and automation of subjective musical tastes.

I have a friend who recommends good music to me almost weekly, and we joke that my responses to her selections will be entered into her algorithm for future picks. So far, so good. I’ve found myself exposed to an increasingly diverse and sometimes challenging palate of music, with only a few misses here and there.

The real issue of recommendation seems to be one of trust—regardless of whether you are inclined to listen to a computer or human algorithm for selecting “good” music, there must be a high level of credibility from the source. Personally, I’ve had enough off the wall recommendations from amazon.com that my policy is to never take advice from any machine that wants to sell me something. Besides, my human recommender burns me the songs I want for free. (Note for our friends out there at Sony BMG, EMI, Universal, Warner, ASCAP and BMI...I'm just kidding!! Sheesh...take a joke, will you?)

Session 2 – Licensing (or, "How To Slice the Royalty Pie Into 1000 Worthless Pieces")

Listening to representatives from Real Networks and Sony Computer Entertainment lament the difficulties of licensing and computing royalty payments for digital downloads, on-demand streams and internet radio did not immediately evoke my sympathies. After all, it’s supposed to be difficult. They’re applying 20th century business metrics to 21st century technologies.

In most cases, the copyright owners and distribution companies have tenuous agreements not to sue each other until the CRB finally makes a determination of the appropriate royalty rates for new technologies. Originally, the determination was set to come out in 2001, but has been delayed indefinitely as more and more special interests enter the discussion of who is to be paid what, and when. Of course, there is one group of people that has been cut out of the debate entirely: the artist.

Apparently, the best way to slice the royalty pie is by inviting too many cooks in the kitchen.

Session 3 - The History of Everything - John Perry Barlow

The highlight of my day so far was definitely shaking hands with John Perry Barlow and telling him that his discussion was a breath of fresh air. His response was too colorful for print, but here are some of the most quoteworthy highlights from his presentation:

On becoming a songwriter:

“You just have to find yourself in the middle of an argument at the right time.”

On the value of recorded music:

“If I have a diamond the size of a softball, it is no less valuable if nobody knows about it. But if I have a song that is the equivalent of a softball-sized diamond, it is valueless unless other people know about it.”

On bootleg taping of live shows:

“It’s bad for your karma to be mean to a Deadhead.”

On the value of art:

“The value lies in the relationship between the creator and the audience. Art for me is a verb, not a noun.”

On co-founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

“At this stage, I’m like John the Baptist. In the beginning Mitch and I didn’t think we needed an organization at all, but we didn’t realize that in cyberspace the first amendment was a local ordinance.“

On the value of copyright:

“The first thing that we have to get rid of is this idea that we own ideas.”

On change:

“Most of the people who feel the same way about these things are younger than me. Most of the people who disagree with me are about my age. And some day, the people my age will die. That’s pretty much how change happens.”

Well Said

From someecards.com, hat tip to my friend B.

I don't want to play Scrabulous with you.

Look, we’re friends, right? And not just on Facebook. I mean, we’re pretty tight in real life, you and I, aren’t we? So there’s something I’ve been meaning to say, and it’s kind of gotten to the point where we should talk it out. You see, I really don’t want to play Scrabulous with you. Not even a little bit.

And yet you keep inviting me to add the application to my profile in spite of the fact that I continually ignore your requests. At first I thought you might have forgotten you had already sent the invitation multiple times. But now I realize that you just really want to play Scrabulous with me, and I feel it’s my duty to tell you right here and now that it’s never going to happen. I hope this doesn’t affect our friendship.

Now, listen—don’t get all pouty on me. I’m not saying that I support Hasbro’s attempts to remove Scrabulous from Facebook. In my opinion, that’s just another example of big corporations trying to limit the definitions of “fair use” on the net in order to put more money in their pockets. And for the record, I did notice that you’ve already joined the Facebook petition to save Scrabulous, and I totally respect that. It’s your right to free speech and, really, it’s beside the point.

I just don’t want to play Scrabulous with you. Period.

If you must know, my objections are twofold. First, I already have enough internet-based addictions, and I see no need to stoke the fires with yet another Facebook app. But the deeper issue for me is that it just doesn’t look very fun. No offense, but I’ve played a little Scrabble in my day, and the only thing that made that any fun was the competition derived from having to come up with good words under extreme time constraints without the use of a dictionary. I mean, what’s the point of wondering if “quixotry” is a word if you can simply google it on your lunch break? Where’s the sport in that?

Anyway, not to belabor the point, but I just want to say that I really am firm on this. I know that Scrabulous is all the rage these days, and that it has even spawned music videos touting its penetration into popular culture. Fair enough. But sometimes, you’ve just got to sit one out.

I’m glad we had this talk. There was this other friend of mine once who always wanted to post Super Poke messages to me. I didn’t say anything at first, until sometime around Halloween when this person started throwing vampires, ghosts and goblins at me like every day. I knew then that it would never end until I said something, but I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t handle it very well. We still keep in touch, but somehow I feel that things will never be quite the same.

So I hope you know it’s only because I value our friendship so much that I tell you, once again, that I will never play Scrabulous with you. Ever. But don’t worry, we can still test our movie knowledge together sometimes, and maybe even write on each other’s Super Walls from time to time. But unfortunately, that’s where I’m going to have to draw the line. I hope you understand.

Scents and Subtle Sounds

Much fuss has been made of the seriousness or frivolty or inadequacy of Facebook relationship status changes.

Commentators ignore, however, other more subtle signs of the intertwining of two people that fall short of status changes. Examples:

1. Wall writing. Writing on someone's Wall is probably the simplest way to publicly flirt. One can even quietly mark one's territory, such as by referring to time spent together ("The show last night was awesome, it was fun hanging out").

2. Friending the Friends. Spending time with someone leads to the inevitable intermixing of social groups in RL. Eventually, you become FB Friends with his/her Friends. This can even lead to friending the boyfriend/girlfriend of the Friends, in addition to writing on the Walls of Friends, often with references to the targeted person that s/he is bound to see.

3. Friending the family. Becoming Friends with siblings is a high indicator of a budding relationship, especially if those siblings live out of town.

4. Status removal. Changing one's status to "In a relationship" and linking to another person requires approval by the other person. As many have noted, going Facebook Official is a big and often intimidating step. A more subtle move is simply removing your status from your profile, so that nothing appears. Facebook needs to work on the News Feed for removal of the field. Currently your Feed will broadcast "Jane D. is no longer listed as single," (with the full heart icon!) when it would more properly read "Jane D. is no longer listing her relationship status." Facebook robs status removal of some of its subtlety, but perhaps it also forces more honesty?

Nevertheless, it should be noted that removing one's status can also be a polite and elegant way of avoiding unwanted advances from other Facebook Friends.

On Paper

I recently attended at a show at a small San Francisco venue. After purchasing the tickets online, I received this confirmation email:

You have bought ticket(s) to an event at Rickshaw Stop. There are no physical tickets; your name will simply be on the prepaid list. If you are the sort of person who likes to print things out, you may print this confirmation. But it is not necessary.

YouAreYou commented that this was kindness on the part of a Type B person for the needs of a Type A person.
On further thought, however, I think it's actually kindness on the part of a digital person for the needs of a hardcopy person...


The band, Bedouin Soundclash, from Canada:
 

Continental Drift

Follow me here:

Plate tectonics is based on the notion that the Earth is composed of seven or so large masses of crust floating atop layers of magma. Over time, the various points of tension between the land masses change due to the degree of volatility in the layers below, until at last the tension is released through a kind of awkward sputtering forward of the plates (better known as earthquakes). Then the process of gradual accumulation and release begins anew. We refer to this process politely as "continental drift" because, frankly, we don't know where or when or how it's going to happen next. In spite of all our knowledge and understanding, we're just drifting.

Now, by analogy:

The business world has its own version of "continental drift," specifically among large, multinational, public companies. To illustrate this, we could look at companies such as...hmm, let's say...Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and News Corp. The magma in this scenario is the volatility of market forces, and the tension is created by the need for these companies to not only "stay afloat" amid changing conditions, but also to deliver reliable, recurring profits to shareholders every quarter of every year into supposed perpetuity. Mergers and acquisitions tend to be one way that large public companies sustain this growth, often with unfortunate results. But every so often, the "continental drift" focuses into a highly acute tension that is intricate, fascinating and totally unpredictable. Consider our four case studies.

A tale of two futures:

The tech economy was rocked by Microsoft's announcement of an unsolicited (a.k.a. "hostile") bid to acquire Yahoo on February 1. As Google's shares fell, the company released this statement to argue (not unreasonably) that the Microsoft/Yahoo merger would raise "troubling questions" about the openness of internet search engines and the ability of users to make a choice. Rumors began to circulate that Google would make its own bid just to raise the stakes on Microsoft. Amid this tension, Yahoo watched its stock price appreciate dramatically, making the February 1 bid by Microsoft (which was locked into the end-of-day trading price on January 31) seem less and less attractive.

Enter News Corp. We now have a situation in which Yahoo's future could go either way, and each of the potential alternatives (though radically different) would make a lot of sense. On the one hand, a strong bid by News Corp may simply encourage Microsoft to make a more charitable offer to Yahoo in pushing the deal forward. Assuming that the regulators allowed the deal to pass, we would see the first real competitor to Google, and competition tends to spur innovation. On the other hand, it might make a lot of sense for Rupert Murdoch to merge his Myspace assets with Yahoo's search and infrastructure assets to form a truly dynamic information and content distribution portal. You can bet that something big is brewing beneath the surface. Behind the closed doors of boardrooms, there are numbers being crunched, scenarios gamed, meetings scheduled, announcements leaked to the press. These geysers serve as the prelude to a big finish.

So what does it all mean?

I know that I'm not qualified to know, and that's enough. But the bigger question is, Who cares? To me, this is the kind of drama that makes business fascinating. Ultimately, it will come down to a simple number, but that number will represent the dueling of ideologies about what the future of the internet will look like. So, as the WGA writers finally put down their picket signs and dust off their pencils, this real world drama is a safe alternative to reality TV. For my money, I'd take "continental drift" over Celebrity Apprentice anytime.

Warrantless wiretapping? What warrantless wiretapping?

We don't got no stinking warrantless wiretapping!

iReuse

A friend of mine gutted his second gen iPod and turned it into a cigarette case:

 

If you see me wearing this shirt...

...please don't take my picture. And if you do take my picture, please don't post it on Facebook.

September 16, 2007

I currently have 36 pictures in my profile, and I am wearing this shirt in no less than 20 of them. I kid you not. I mean, it's not like I only wear this shirt when I go out. I've got lots of shirts, and I also have a rotation method that has served me very well over the years, thank you very much. But somehow I've gotten into this weird spin cycle where all my friends post pictures of me on nights when I happened to wear this particular shirt.

Sometime in October, 2007

I wonder, is it proper netiquette to request photo removal on the grounds of creating the false impression that I only wear one shirt when I go out? Or, if I simply remove my name from the tags, will that remove the offending photos from my profile? But which ones to remove? This could get political.

November 17, 2007

Look--I mean, seriously--it's not my fault it's a comfortable shirt. It's 100% polyester, form fitting, and an actual vintage store find that's not one of those semi-replicated trying to be vintage sorts of things.

January 26, 2008

Please...I'm begging you. The only conclusion that a reasonable person can draw from my profile is that a) I went on one hell of a bender one night, or b) I don't change and/or wash my clothes all that often. So if you see me wearing this shirt--and especially if you see me wearing this shirt and the brown jacket--do not, I repeat, do not take my picture. And if you do, for godsakes keep it off of Facebook, okay?

Inherent Ettiquette

I had a strange experience with a robot the other day. I called UPS to have them hold a package for me instead of trying to deliver it. Like most large corporations these days, they have an automated voice-recognition system when you call. (Eg., "If you would like to check the location of your package, say, 'Location.'") I obediently spoke my tracking number for the female robot, but I was pleasantly surprised when she didn't repeat it back to me for confirmation.

In fact, during the entire transaction, she understood my words perfectly at every stage, never repeated anything, and was unfailingly polite. She flawlessly guided me through setting up my will-call pick up. The process went so smoothly ("Is there anything else I can help you with?"), and her personality and (dare I say?) etiquette were so well-designed that, when the conversation completed, I actually had to suppress the urge to thank her!

But to the designers and engineers of voice-recognition software, I don't need to suppress it: Thanks!