LIVEdigitally

Monthly Archives: July 2009

Auditing my technology dependencies

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I am in the process of signing up for Google Voice (my number ends with CALLJT, now how cool is that??) and had this minor freak-out moment realizing how much I depend on Google.  So I got to thinking about all the places where I really do rely on tech for my day-to-day living. I was wondering on my risk/exposure in the event that the given tech or service provider were to instantly stop working in a very permanent way.

Here’s my “audit”:

Technology/Provider How I Use It How Easily I’d Replace It Risk Factor (10=high)
Web site hosting: GoDaddy This blog, Stage Two’s website, my Dad’s website. Moving to another provider is easy, but I haven’t backed up the blog in a long time. Weekend project. 7 (with likely data loss)
Email serving: Gmail Gmail hosted apps holds email for all my domains (including Legacy Locker and Triv140) Switching is easy, but since I use IMAP I would have to “freeze” my existing email folders. 3 (but goes to 9 in case not all my emails are actually locally stored)
Contacts backup: Plaxo Been using Plaxo for years to backup and synch contacts (and calendaring). No equivalent service that I am aware of. 4 (it would only be problematic if I abandoned OS X, which is unlikely. but see below…)
Data backup: Time Machine/OS X Dual backups (1 at home, 1 at office) Would need to start doing manual backups, might consider Mozy or other paid service. 2
Photo backup: Flickr (paid for) Copies of all my photos are on Flickr (minus some of the early years) Would definitely seek an alternate online backup provider (4 backups of my photo library is still not enough) 1 (no vested value other than the new initial backup would be very tedious)
Communications: Cell phone Uhm, it’s a cell phone Buy a new phone. 1 (yet another example of why not spending a lot on a cell phone lowers my dependencies in this arena – even my contacts are automatically backed up by Verizon)
TV: DVR What is this thing you call “live” TV? Cut the cord. Seriously, if there were no DVR in my world I’d get a Mac Mini and hook up boxee. 9 (would’ve scored it about a 4, but there’s no hockey streaming on boxee yet)
Operating System: OS X Reliable computing (note that I’m implying all OS X computers simply disappear) Not entirely sure on this, but my hunch is I’d go with the lightest PC laptop I could find that still ships with Windows XP. Might even try Ubuntu if that wasn’t possible. 4 (I might be miserable about it, but in all reality I use so many web services that my true OS X dependency is fairly low and I’d have virtually no data loss)
Whole home music: Sonos Whole home music (including my deck!) All I can say is “yuck”. The good thing is when I wired the home I did both centralized AND decentralized speaker wiring.  But I’d have to buy a lot of way-too expensive gear to power my 8 zones, and it would have a significantly worse UI than Sonos. 8 (pretty much it’s my wife’s house with the minor exceptions of my Sonos, grill, deck, and manroom. losing any one of these components would be devastating)
Twitter Discussing the most important issues the world has ever faced.  Or something to that effect. I guess I’d lose the ability to inform random people as to my thoughts and actions. Oh, well, other than by using my blog that is. Either a 1 or a 10 depending on your perspective.  It’s either irreplaceable or you can argue I can accomplish the same thing through my blog (reach random people) and Facebook (reach people I know)
Facebook Poke my friends and occasionally throw sheep at them. I have no idea, maybe pick up the phone from time to time? Or send an email? 2.5 (we all had plenty of relationships work plenty well long before Facebook, and I’m sure humanity will figure out how to stay in touch without it.  though throwing sheep will become more challenging)
Digital Cameras (yeah, all of them become permanently gone and we all move back to film) Take way too many pix of my kids. This is such an unrealistic scenario, but it did get me thinking about how I’d cope without digital cameras (yes, this includes my Flip). It would’ve been an annoyance pre-daddyness, but now it’d be a catastrophe. 9.5 (with thousands of photos of my kids in 2 years, I am clearly “one of those dads”. and i like it)

Thanks to this site’s HTML table generator!

I’m pretty sure that’s the sum of the list of high tech products and services I feel fairly dependent on.  Sure I could include stuff like a microwave or my car stereo, but I feel these are too commonplace to really be considered “high” tech.  I also didn’t include anything that was only about a specific company (for example if Verizon or Comcast ceased to exist, since their competition offers near-identical replacement services.  ditto for things like GCal, my email client or even office software, as they are so interchangeable).

Potential soon-to-be-added services:

  • Jajah (we are considering dropping our US+Canada cell phone package and using Jajah for our calls to the Great White North)
  • Google Voice (might use my new number as my primary number from now on, with forwarding rules to cell/office as needed)
  • GPS (after my last Nuvi was stolen we went ~6 months before picking up a new one)

Anything you feel dependent on that you’d like to share with the group?

More Thoughts on Ethics

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I blogged about “twittergate” yesterday, and it seems like the topic of “was this ethical” continues to rear its head across blogs and publications. LewisPR put up a poll asking “Was TechCrunch right to publish Twitter’s business plans?” – the overwhelming majority as I write this says “no”.  So this post is dedicated to all the “yes”es out there.  I’ll outline parallel “ethical dilemmas” and we’ll see how easy this really is to boil down.

Scenario 1:
You walk into a pawn shop (for whatever reason).  While in the shop you see a car stereo selling for $10.  It’s brand new (clearly) and you pull out your iPhone, google the product number, and learn it retails for $399.  But here it is, in front of you, without a box or instructions, for only $10.  You inquire to the store manager as to its origin, he merely responds that someone sold it to him (along with a briefcase and laptop).  As you inspect the unit for damage, you see some scratches around the edges and some of the wires on the back are broken, implying it was previously mounted into a car dashboard and hastily removed. In hushed tones, the pawn broker says it was almost definitely stolen. Do you buy it?

If you said “yes”, congratulations, you are contributing to the country’s crime problem.  Well done. Scumbag.

A quick analysis of the above scenario should reveal the overall answer to why you shouldn’t buy or otherwise endorse stolen things.  Even emails.

Scenario 2:
The person closest to you in the whole world (old friend, spouse, parent, sibling – you pick) accidentally CC’s you on an internal company email with lots of important sensitive documents.  You run a top media outlet and frequently make/break news.  The documents contain many company secrets. Your friend/spouse/etc informs you that publishing the documents would cost them their job, and possibly hurt their business in a massive way (and probably end your relationship).  Do you publish them (and knowingly cause a person you love to become unemployed based on your direct actions)?

If you said “yes”, my hunch is you’ve formed no close relationships in your life and probably need some help.  Seriously, you’d do something that would cause your kid brother to lose his job? Wha???

A quick analysis of the above scenario should reveal that when your actions can hurt those you love, you think quite carefully about them.  And if that’s true, shouldn’t we have the same respect for those who aren’t necessarily as close to us?

So back to “twittergate”.  We’ve asserted that endorsing theft is wrong.  We’ve asserted that there are times when we shouldn’t reveal secrets, regardless of the means by which we learned them.  So by the transitive property…

Publishing Twitter's stolen docs: the prisoner's dilemma in action

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The backstory – some hacker broke into some Twitter employee’s email, grabbed a bunch of docs, and sent them to some bloggers. This guy is clearly a grade-A jerk, no debate there.

Lots of juicy tidbits in the emails, ranging from personal stuff to revenue forecasts.  Now since these were stolen it’s pretty obvious the guys at Twitter didn’t want them out in the open. This of course didn’t matter to a variety of “news-breaking” bloggers, who just “couldn’t resist” putting them up while throwing up a series of rationales like “if we didn’t, someone else would’ve.”

Actually, no, they wouldn’t necessarily have unless y’all didn’t pave the way.  You just got caught playing a classic little prisoner’s dilemma game, and you all failed, head directly to jail, do not pass go.  Here’s the visualization for you…

The Prisoner’s Dilemma of Being Ethical in the News-Breaking Blogging Industry

Blogger B respects privacy Blogger B endorses theft
Blogger A respects privacy Bloggers contribute to culture with high standards Blogger A gets scoop, traffic spike, short term revenue through ads, no long term benefits

Blogger B holds head high, but probably rues the day
Blogger A endorses theft Blogger B gets scoop, traffic spike, short term revenue through ads, no long term benefits

Blogger A holds head high, but probably rues the day

 Bloggers contribute to culture that rewards “bad” behaviors

But this is par for the course if your job is breaking news as fast as possible, as there is no reward for being late nor is there a penalty for being inaccurate.

In my opinion the race to be first is full of nothing but losers, as it is utterly unsustainable as there is no loyalty being built by readers who will simply follow a trail to the news, rapidly forgetting who was first yesterday or the day before.  While the publishing industry has never exactly rewarded accuracy, modern technology and communications tools are clearly worsening the problem for us poor souls who simply want to be informed.

Incidentally, regarding the ethics of publishing stolen documents, I think it pretty well speaks for itself.  It’s not about how “easy” a hack was to steal something (despite the funny as shown here). If anyone feels the need to “justify” the actions, well then they are doing just that, aren’t they?  Funny how rarely you need to justify actions that are obviously ethical…

Hello Yello! (Jawbone Prime headset review)

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Despite the ridiculousness of the headset laws in California, I have bigger fights to fight, and condone to use a headset while driving.  Until a week ago my headset of choice was the SoundID 100.  I love how easily it slips into my ear and the sound quality is great.  My three complaints were unimpressive battery life, a not-so-great pairing with my phone (which I don’t blame on SoundID, but it simply didn’t sound good with my Samsung phone), and a tendency to occasionally make screeching noises directly into my eardrum.  The latter probably being the biggest detriment to the headset.

Now loathe I am to replace a working product, when I had the opportunity to try out the newest Jawbone Primes, I was intrigued.  After all, while I’ve never had a great experience in the past (I think it was a facial hair thing), everyone else seems to love them.  I decided to try the bright yellow model (in the office it’s affectionately referred to as a banana on my head).  The pink and red ones were a little too… pink and red.  The black, silver, and brown ones were all too drab.  Leavining banana yellow as just right!  Plus it adds that touch of panache that I could only otherwise pull off by accumulating a collection of very interesting hats. Here’s a quick vid of it:


Sporting a Yello Jawbone prime. on 12seconds.tv

The Jawbone Prime is the third generation of headsets from Aliph, and this time I think they’ve got a real winner.  Others have looked good, and they’ve generally been accepted as the premium headset (I’d once have said the Cadillac of Headsets, but really, in today’s world does anyone actually want the Cadillac of Anything???), but I’ve felt they’ve lacked on performance.  Not anymore.  The unit pairs extremely well with my phone (your mileage may vary), and the sound quality is excellent.  These are obviously the top factors in considering any headset, but I’ll continue with more.

My favorite physical improvement to the Jawbone is the in-ear loops, which function quite similarly to the SoundID unit.  No more trying to wrap weird things around my ears (which I never do well and makes me feel even more uncoordinated than I am).  I haven’t yet given it the “can I leave it in my ear all day” test, but it’s definitely not uncomfortable. My only issue is I feel I’m somewhere between the medium and large earbuds.

I have no real comment yet on the battery life.  The specs claim 4.5 hrs talk time, 8 days standby, I haven’t yet had the battery die, so I would guess it’s probably slightly lower (since I’ve *never* seen an accurate battery life assessment from a company) – regardless, I keep the USB charging cable in my laptop bag now.  The packaging for the unit is truly beautiful, possibly the best-designed I’ve ever seen.  And now for the zinger – but I wish they weren’t using so much plastic and other unsustainable materials to accomplish such beauty.

Finally, my only real product complaints – the buttons.  While putting the unit in my ear, I tend to push the button that disconnects a call (while the phone is ringing).  Further, there are so many button combinations (push one of them 5 times in a row to activate a feature) that as a result I can’t remember any of them.  Now there’s an obvious, necessitated tradeoff between incorporating so much functionality and only having two buttons, but I have to think there is a better way to handle it.  That said, since I am definitely adopting the Jawbone Prime as my default headset, this is more in the “annoyance” category than anything else.

So there you have it. Definite thumbs-up for the Jawbone Prime.  Get your own not-so-mellow Yello here at Amazon for $129.

Not all PR people (nor bloggers) are alike

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Another week, another set of nonsense about how PR people are bad, don’t know anything about new media, etc etc etc.  I’ve seen this so much I was about to shut the lid of my laptop and ignore, but instead felt I should say something.  In summary:

I’ll make it quite simple to understand: this industry is simply too vast to generalize.  There are PR firms and individuals who understand influence, social media, and bloggers.  There are firms who don’t.  There are those who know how to leverage all the changing media to benefit their clients.  And there are those who don’t.

…

Maybe we can stop with the generalizations while we let the good continue to separate from the bad

read the rest here…

Inspired by the NY Times, Scobleizer, and TechCrunch.

Why I'm disconnecting Twitter from Facebook

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About a week ago I decided to hook my twitter stream up to my facebook status updates. I figured it’d be an easy way to get the same messages out to more people, and with more places for conversation/interactivity.  But I pretty much completely forgot about the following attributes of my Tweets™:

  • Much of the time I am “re-tweeting”, passing along something someone else says, typically in an effort to seem cool or more knowledgeable than I am.
  • Many of my other tweets are responses to tweets, which inherently include virtually no context whatsoever about the conversation when shown in isolation on Facebook.
  • Often I tweet about new blog posts, which are automatically included in my Facebook content stream.

Here’s a snapshot:

twitter-boring

This leaves about 2% of my actual tweets as “interesting content” (at best).  They look more like this:

twitter-interesting

Now on twitter, the whole concept that many of a user’s tweets are uninteresting to many of their followers is, for the most part, irrelevant.  Few-to-none of a twitterer’s followers are real-world friends, and there are so many other tweets flying by, the majority of Twitter users do not see the majority of tweets from the people they follow. And in the twitterverse, that’s just plain twitterfabulous!

But in Facebook it’s not.  By and large, the vast majority of Facebook users (in other words – people who use Facebook and don’t live in the SF Bay Area) are friends with people they know from real-life.  They rarely boast about quantity of Facebook friends because it’s mostly meaningless.  As a result, while a tremendous amount of content is still lost in the stream, the majority of Facebook users see much of the content from their friends.

Further, since these are more likely to be people we encounter in a medium beyond Facebook, we are discouraged from sharing, for lack of a better word, crap.  And hence, my crapstream will be discontinued from boring my friends on Facebook.  Sorry about that.  I’ll go back to boring you through other updates.

Welcome GDGT!

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I just wanted to take a second to congratulate my friends Ryan Block and Peter Rojas for launching gdgt.com.  It’s a new site/resource/blog/community/social network/thing… words don’t describe… they should’ve sent… a… poet!  Ok, just kidding.  It’s a new site designed to really help people get the most out of their gadgets, whether by finding peer-based support, new uses, or other recommendations.  Here’s a link to their introduction, and I wish the guys the best – they’ve worked pretty hard to get here!

Here’s my personal gdgt profile (I manage to snag “jeremy” as my username there!):