Connecting the Dots

iChat at 75mph

Even though I'm probably coming across as a giddy little kid or some geek, think about the ramifications of this kind of access to high resolution communications.

Somewhere near Atlanta, GA -- as we sped along at 75mph -- my wife called my daughter on her cell phone from her office. So I fired up iChat and requested a video chat with her since, like yesterday, I was connected to Verizon Wireless via my Treo on my laptop. Not only did it connect, but we talked for several minutes. You can see the video quality which is incredibly good.

Again, I'm on the Interstate highway system where wireless coverage is usually pretty good and it drops off dramatically the further you migrate from these major arteries. However, unless you're completely aware of the continued build-out of wireless network footprints and the continued acceleration in speed of them, you might not bother to embrace technologies like these or even try 'em out to see if they might be of any benefit to you. Some day we'll all have rich, robust visual communications technologies like this at our fingertips and the wireless internet will be so seamless and so ubiquitous it'll seem like the air we breathe.

Then wait to see what Internet-centric applications appear!

Internet Access at 80MPH

My daughter has finished her work in Fort Lauderdale, FL and -- after shipping her car to her in January since it was far cheaper than renting one -- I flew down on Sunday to drive home with her this week.

As part of my experience on this trip (besides great quality time with my girl and client work I'll be performing) is to live with various technologies and assess first-hand the current ubiquity of Internet access (especailly Wifi) throughout the southern States.

For the last half hour I've been connected to the Internet while she's been driving 80mph (yeah I know...the speed limit is 70mph but people are going by us like we're standing still). I connected to my Treo 700p (I've got Verizon unlimited broadband on my account) via Bluetooth and it's amazingly rock solid. I've been averaging just over 300kbps download and 84kbps upload speed (I've checked it three times and averaged it). While slow by typical broadband speeds, this is still incredibly useful.

Besides just the usual productivity stuff I now have access to, we had no idea where we'd stay when we got to the northern part of Florida. I researched hotels, found one and proceeded to book the reservation online and it worked flawlessly! Using Google Maps, I now have PDF's I've printed in a folder on my computer desktop with detailed directions (though I also have Google Maps on my Treo...but this gives me A LOT more pixels to gaze at).

Granted we're on the Interstate highway and these corridors are typically saturated with connections but still, I can't help but be delightfully amazed that I'm sitting here typing this and on the 'net.

Web 2.0: A New Economic System?

Observers who study and research culture -- anthropologists and those that focus on cultural or social aspects of this discipline -- have a method and a rigor that help them to see what others don't. Howard Rheingold is just such a person and this Business Week interview (from August of 2004 I might add) hints at what I and others are talking about with Web 2.0: a new economic system is emerging.

From the interview:

Q: What will all those trends (open source, Wikipedia, Google page ranking, Amazon's recommendation engine and user reviews) produce ultimately?

A: All these could dramatically transform not only the way people do business, but economic production altogether. We had markets, then we had capitalism, and socialism was a reaction to industrial-era capitalism. There's been an assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant, therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic production.

But I think we're seeing hints, with all of these examples, that the technology of the Internet, reputation systems, online communities, mobile devices -- these are all like those technologies...that made capitalism possible. These may make some new economic system possible.

This is worth stopping and thinking about since it informs what I do for my work...and should inform everything you do regardless of your business or organizational bent. As you look at what you've made money at in the past -- especially if you've made really great gross margins opening yourself up to potentially be disrupted out of business -- this idea of mass collaborating with the connected world's free effort and energy is either disturbing or liberating. Depends on your view.

I'm not an economist nor an anthropologist. I'm not a meteorologist either but I don't need the weatherman to tell me the sun is shining. What *is* important to me is to tap into the observational knowledge of people with the skills and tools who can predict with some level of certainty what might happen (it's why satellite imagery, weather pattern measurements, modeling and Doppler radar have given meteorologists pretty damn good predictive analytical tools).

Howard Rheingold is one such observer. Another is Yochai Benkler, professor of Law at Yale and author of The Wealth of Networks and the paper Coase's Penguin. A third is Don Tapscott who recently released his solid overview entitled, Wikinomics.  If you're a leader in your company or organization -- or want to be one -- I'd heartily recommend you get your head around the concepts and arguments these three (and others) have been seeing and bringing forth for some time. Your future depends on it.

Why I Continue to NOT use Yahoo

From the very early days of the Internet, there was something messy to me about Yahoo's approach with a directory of Web sites that felt inefficient and that the onus was on me to drill down until I finally discovered what I was looking for on their site. Their home page also always seemed incredibly cluttered...as though an accountant was in charge of design and efficiently using up every pixel of white space.

There are useful services like Yahoo Finance that I use daily. Yahoo News often is either sent to me by a friend or colleague and I frequently end up at a Yahoo page following a link. But sometimes I just want to be entertained or catch up on the news without any technology getting in the way.

This morning I'm up early and decided to find the video of the rats caught scurrying about a Taco Bell in New York City. Yahoo has the Associate Press story with associated video footage.

I click to open the video in Firefox on the Mac and wait....and wait...and wait. Just the commercial for NetFlix...no video of rats running around (and it never does play, by the way). Next I open Safari in case there's a hiccup with the dozens of plug-ins I have running in Firefox. I wait...and wait...and wait...no video...ever.

Sigh...

I launch Parallels and fire up WindowsXP and go to the story. The NetFlix commercial plays and within seconds the video plays. I get to enjoy the appalling spectacle of rats in a restaurant and get to reminisce about the cockroaches I've watched climbing walls while trying to swallow my fast food in Manhattan.

Everything is current on the Mac including the Flip4Mac plugin that allows Windows Media to play in Mac's Quicktime player. I used to have issues with CNN's site playing video as well as my local CBS affiliate (which has just bypassed the issue altogether as their parent Viacom has chosen Flash video as its format) but they have taken a strategic, non-vendor-centric media delivery method that works and makes it easy for us, the user.

I'm not sure what Yahoo is or is trying to be. Buying Flickr; creating Yahoo Pipes; embracing virtually all the Internet-as-a-platform standards without trying to control them all like other media-wannabee tech companies we know; these are all incredibly smart moves. But if they can't get drop-dead-basic stuff like video to play on ALL platforms without ANY hiccups, they have to stop pretending they're a media company.

An Embarrassment of Riches in Digital Content

As I get ready for a trip, I found myself in front of my computer this evening picking-n-choosing podcasts to subscribe to and load on my iPod. Since I'm so busy and have so much content to prioritize and consume -- and generate myself with my blog and podcast -- that it's been a few months since I really took the time to poke around iTunes and see what's there.

Holy Schnikey! I hadn't realized that there was such an enormous wealth of new stuff. TV news, public radio and more has flooded the iTunes podcast section. Though I should probably pay closer attention, I hadn't and was a bit stunned.

Since I usually like thought provoking podcasts, public radio is more to my taste than alot of other content. IT Conversations is another favorite as is the Social Innovation network.

This reminded me of my post from January of last year entitled, "Information Overload: Can You See What's Coming?" that said in part:

The river of content is flowing faster and faster. This river of content available on the internet is reaching flood stage and is in a variey of media types. As newspapers, magazines, radio and television lose eyeballs to the internet and become ever more desperate to cling to their advertisers, they are finding increasingly garish and dumbed down methods of getting the attention of the eyeball owners back (which, in my view, will only push people away faster).

As broadband continues its adoption and more people get on the internet and attempt to connect their own dots, it's becoming exponentially more difficult to see or tap in to the collective consciousness and stay on top of changes in an industry, area of interest, or even to stay relevant in the workplace. Primarily it's more difficult to understand change and to see disruptive technologies or business models coming...and having time to act.

Even entertainment options are accelerating. There are more DirecTV channels than I could ever watch. I've pared down the number of shows I TiVo since I could barely keep up with what I really wanted to watch. I recently took out a machete to my RSS aggregator to cut down the number of blogs I track (currently over 200) and news sources (35). It was becoming too much and I just felt anxiety over all of it.

In his book "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less", Barry Schwartz argues that the proliferation of choices essentially causes us to be paralyzed with indecision.

Why You Should Care About the Open Solutions Alliance

Just came across the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), "a nonprofit, vendor-neutral consortium dedicated to driving adoption of comprehensive open source business solutions" and am so pleased to see SpikeSource and CollabNet -- along with Sourceforge and others -- playing such an integral role.

Why should you care?

There are over 140,000 open source projects listed on Sourceforge. Some are incredibly active...others less so...but there is such a wealth of useful software available that it's creating a baseline of information technology products that the world is leveraging. The result is that all of us can then strive for ever higher possibilities in efficiency, creativity and innovation driven by technology and the Internet as a platform for the future.

I've personally installed and learned (albeit from a high level) a couple of dozen of the most popular projects in content management, blogging, ecommerce, forums, courseware and groupware as well as other categories. Here's the kicker: it's VERY difficult to coordinate and orchestrate (as an administrator) a deployment of these packages since every administration model and user interface is different...and forget about it if you're just a power user trying to deploy something for your non-profit or small-to-medium sized organization. You wanna make 'em present on a Web site like they're an integrated whole? Whaddya nuts! Better hire a bunch of really smart developers and keep your fingers crossed that you'll be able to upgrade any of these software offerings individually without breaking integrations and thus your Web asset/site/application.

Want to present them to your customers, prospects or constituents as a whole offering that looks-n-feels like one, holistic Web asset/site/application? Again, good luck and happy budgeting. Want to teach and train others on how to deploy and use all of them? Time and money is all you need and alot of hair 'cause you'll be pulling most of it out of your head.

Why else should you care?

The Possibilities of iReader by Syntactica (and its underlying engine)

Was delighted to spend time today at the Minnesota headquarters of Syntactica talking about today's release of iReader. Henry Neils CEO, Ward Johnson VP Sales and Fred Sweeny CEO of Assessment.com (a sister company) met with me to talk about the launch.

Instead of doing a review (since there's already a great one done by ReadWriteWeb), I'd instead like to do what I love to do best: toss out ideas and tell you why this company and their offering needs to be looked at very, very closely if you're a Web 2.0 developer or care about knowledge, innovation and ideas -- and why the timing couldn't be better for them to have leapt into the Web 2.0 game.

First off, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners Lee has been the top evangelist for his concept of the Semantic Web. Having data-wrapped-around-the-data you need to obtain -- so machines can help us decide what's relevant and contextual to what we're seeking and deliver it to us and be somewhat self-aware -- hasn't worked since no one seems to be participating.

The Semantic Web is a lofty and worthwhile goal, but just like a bunch of smart people trying to determine what the taxonomies need to be within which information should reside, the Web, blogosphere and sites like Flickr and TagWorld have instead embraced the much messier tagging concept and allowed people to create folksonomies instead...and it's exploded in use.

Guess what? People don't organize. We throw stuff in closets and kick stuff under the bed when company comes. We search for filing systems and buy millions of organizers that often go unused.

In today's tsunami of content that is accelerating because it can (storage costs falling, bandwidth increasing, computing horsepower growing more robust by the year) and coupled with (OH MY GOD!) even MORE coming with all the user generated content...there is no human way to gather, track or even hope to match data to data and stay abreast of some concept or create, innovate or invent new things.

Today I track hundreds of blogs and dozens of traditional news sites. I emptied my news aggregator this morning before breakfast by skimming articles and collecting the ones I choose to delve into later on...but there are now 596 articles there for me to read skim. But what if there are jewels in the areas I care about posted by a brand new blogger that I don't track? What if that blogger is a Professor at University of Oxford and is the world authority on a subject I care deeply about?

iReader is a web browser plug-in that can quickly abstract a hyperlink on a page and tell you what the concepts are on the linked-to page so you don't have to go there...or choose to leap out to it. Sounds simple and it's cool for certain, but what I learned about today was more about what's going on under-the-covers which, most interestingly, is available to developers via their API...

...and this is where it gets interesting.

Changing Nature of Work and Your Value Online

Two buddies of mine, serial entrepreneur George Johnson and business change agent, Jeff Staggs, started Entrevis and their "A Better Way to Live and Work" program. It's a very solid process to walk through with any of the 17-21%+ of workers dissatisfied with where they are and helping them walk down a path (e.g., see "20 Percent of Workers Plan on Changing Jobs in 2007" and "One in Five Government Workers to Leave Jobs in 2007". That path starts with a persons own vision, their values, what they think their purpose is, and the other dozen or so lessons coach them to partnering, negotiation, their business plan, execution, etc.

I've gone through the program with amazing results. Still...I've been kicking around ideas with both of them as they strategize over increasingly better ways to align with the macro trends in the world...namely that the lifetime corporate models of work, typical staffing models, opportunities to mass collaborate on the Internet all point the way to the changing nature of work AND that each of us need to find containers within which to put our personal value propositions. Let me go a little deeper on this...

Think about the modern corporate organization and its just over 100 years of existence. From this Wikipedia  article on the corporation comes this quote from Adam Smith's the "Wealth of Nations" which criticized the corporate form because of the separation of ownership and management.

The directors of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.

The modern corporate entity is, as Smith points out, an abstract one by its very nature. Remarkably complex and with numerous layers of specialized functionality, making it work as a whole is an ongoing challenge. With little true ownership by those that work within the corporate structure and loyalty (by both sides) fleeting, its no wonder that people are searching for meaning and aligned jobs while corporations are seeking human resources that provide a competitive advantage. Now throw in the explosion in instant and cheap communications, idea generation, knowledge transfer and social connections that the Internet has enabled and the corporation itself is undergoing massive shifts.

Now throw in the disruption of outsourcing, specializations that perish and retraining that takes years -- coupled with the masses that are working in jobs that pay the rent but are misaligned with what each view their mission, values and purpose to be, and you have a climate ripe for disruption and change.

So what does this have to do with you and what can you do about it?

Would you like RFID's with your burger?

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is becoming increasingly ubiquitous due to its advantages to allow physical goods to be tracked in a supply chain. This has enormous implications for manufacturers, shippers and resellers to wring out inefficiencies in the supply chain and thus reduce costs and increase product availability.

But what if this tracking extended to you?

By way the Institute of the Future comes this very good post that is at once exciting and at the same time deeply troubling...especially when it describes the Kodak patent for an edible RFID tag and the New Scientist sums that patent up thusly:

The tags would be covered with soft gelatin that takes a while to dissolve in the stomach. After swallowing a tag a patient need only sit next to a radio source and receiver.

They stop working when exposed to gastric acid for a specific period of time, providing a subtle way to monitor a patient's digestive tract.

Kodak says that similar radio tags could also be embedded in an artificial knee or hip joint in such a way that they disintegrate as the joint does, warning of the need for more surgery. Attaching tags to ordinary pills could also help nurses confirm that a patient has really taken their medicine as ordered.

Great benefits for health matters...but just like the governmental justification for tightened security (the war on terror) or accelerating surveillance on the Internet (we're combatting child porn...if you protest you must be FOR child porn, heh?) those of us with knowledge of the possible downsides, privacy and security implications of an ingestible tracking device -- which will eventually be incredibly small -- is indeed troubling.

If you don't think that tracking or even hacking an RFID tag -- and probably even one ingested -- is too tough and probably a non-issue, read this Wired article.

Using Mac, Windows and Linux

Tonight I finished the installation of Ubuntu Linux inside of Parallels running under Mac OS X...and spent some time goofing around with it, the Windows XP install I did last evening, and tweaking some stuff on the Mac OS on my new MacBook Pro. None of what I'm about to write (about using multiple OS'es on one computer) is new, but I've got one perspective you might find enlightening.

Having grown up in the personal computer business and used operating systems on microcomputers as well as workstations, minicomputers and from a teletype connected to a mainframe (back in high school), I've come to appreciate the expertise and artistry needed to pull off the virtualization needed to run mutliple operating systems on one computer.

But that's what the team at Parallels has done. While I won't play games on the Windows installation or do media work on either Windows or Linux, they nonetheless run fast enough that both are indistinguishable to me from what I experienced on the HP Pavilion laptop (a 3ghz, 1GB ram computer) that I recently gave to my niece. That alone is amazing.

But what astounds me is Coherence, a feature in their beta release that allows Windows applications to run like they were native Macintosh apps (see a screencast here). This is a big deal, since power users like me can run apps that are only available on other platforms on an as-needed basis. I've already found this to be *very* useful since I could now help a colleague troubleshoot a PC-version of Skype which is just different enough from the Mac version that having a copy on my own machine allowed me to help him.

Here's another example: there is a great little application for managing wireless networks that has no parallel (no pun intended) in the Mac or Linux worlds. At this moment and this version of Parallels, I have to click inside of the window running Windows and manage the application in that manner. In the next release, I can just fire up the application and Parallels, hide the running Parallels window (running Windows), and have just the application in the dock available to me.

Apple's Boot Camp is an inelegant solution since it forces you to reboot to use either operating system. Rumor has it that in Apple's new OS called Leopard, Boot Camp *may* allow Parallels to "point" to the Boot Camp Windows install instead of creating a virtual instance. That means that one could install Windows, boot an Intel Mac and run it as a Windows machine (for gaming or other CPU intensive activities) or run a virtual instance so all the Windows applications are available for day-to-day personal productivity.

Just like when my Dad and I went to Germany in 1997 for a trip to find our ancestry and just goof around, I smiled when he kept remarking on the plane ride over, "Geez....can you believe that Johann and Suzanna (my great, great grandparents) took one month to get to Minnesota when they emigrated...and we'll be to Frankfurt in a mere 8 hours?" Even though I am hyper-aware of all the changes that are coming so am rarely stunned by disruptive technological entries, I still am amazed that I'm typing this on my laptop, in my living room, connected to the Internet (a global network!) through the air, and have Windows running in the background and Linux just installed. Oh yeah....and I just got done watching a video and downloading some podcasts.

The next BIG leap forward...will our kids be ready?

If you've read a book that really hit you, made you think and informed what you were doing or one of your thought processes, wouldn't it be cool to interview that person? A blogger I've connected with, Christian Long at think:lab (a consultancy focused on "School 2.0"...the next generation of learning) has that exact opportunity with Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind.

I've written posts that included the impact that Pink's book has made on my thinking. Talked to dozens of people and encouraged them to read it. This post is one that sums up what I'm seeing and the dots I'm connecting with Pink's help. Here's a snippet:

If you've read Daniel Pink's book A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, you'll understand his argument that left brain, serial and linear thinking is of flat value and more prone to outsourcing (because it can be) and that the next phase of value creation and innovation will come from the right brained, parallel and associative thinkers among us. Higher order thinking, pattern matching and an ability to connect the dots (which can't be outsourced) will be highly prized and will be the intellectual fuel for tomorrow.

Disruption, creation and innovation spring forth from seeing unmet needs, patterns, mixing together elements from multiple sources, creating new and innovative products and services from unique combinations or methods and yes, accidents. According to Pink, high value innovation will be delivered by those who can see and think differently (needless to say that I found Pink's book pretty validating on how my brain is wired and that I'm not just some guy going off on tangents all the time...and with far too many Categories on his blog).

So what's my recommendation to Christian? If it were me, I'd ask Pink 100 questions...but if there was *one* thing that not only shapes the future design of a school and perhaps education itself that I'd ask him about....it's a concept that is already shifting value exchange, capitalism and the nature of work around the world....and certainly will change education. The concept I'd ask Pink about is this: how is learning affected when knowledge is at your fingertips and dozens, hundreds, thousands or even millions of minds connect and the future of work is mostly virtual?

The ROI of Personal Tech

I often try to discover hard return on investment (ROI) whenever I buy some new piece of technology. Investing in tech is a key part of my work -- staying up-to-speed on the latest-n-greatest stuff -- and another part is to personally experience products and services so I can gain an intuitive understanding of it.

Last night I went out and replaced my aging Apple Powerbook G4 and 22" Apple Cinema Display (their first LCD panel shipped) with a shiny new Macbook Pro and 23" Cinema HD. As it turned out, I was right smack dab in the middle of a project needing to be completed this morning, so my sense of internal urgency was coupled with the joy of new tech as I bought them. Part of me also stood back to observe my own reactions when I got back to my office and hooked them up.

Others have observed that huge LCD displays enhance productivity and Apple did a study last year to prove the point. I can attest to the truth in this perspective. Just one more diagonal inch and a few hundred pixels either way made a HUGE difference in my productivity on my project since I could have palettes on the side without bumping up to them and triggering my dock. The brightness of the display on both the big panel and the Macbook itself felt like a room fully illuminated vs. sliding a dimmer switch to the 50% mark. The room is still lit when dimmed, but damn is everything vibrant and crisp when fully lit!

My next purchase is Parallels and Windows Vista so I can run both OS'es applications on one box. More productivity awaits...

Do you love spam too?

Before you get the wrong idea, I do NOT love email, comment or trackback spam...or even the one made by Hormel. When it comes to the digital kind I wonder often, "Who are all the knuckleheads or newbies that actually click on the links in spam and/or buy stuff to keep the spammers interested?" I don't get it.

Just for grins, I took moment over lunch to look at just a few of the hundreds of spams per day that I get sent to my several email addresses:

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Now you can order Original Viagra directly from Pfizer.
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All prices are tax/vat free and free same-day worldwide shipping also included.

The Loosest Slots in the Midwest!
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...and on and on.  All of us get the "Bigger boobs today!" or "Male erection enhancement" or "Come see me naked" spams. Again, who clicks on these and if they do, why would they buy? Someone has to be falling for these or spammers wouldn't keep sending 'em.

I've had a couple of experiences in the past few years where I was able to track down an actual human associated with a spam email (he was advertising on a web site and was stupid enough not to buy the private setting for his domain name at Network Solutions...so I called him) but it didn't go anywhere. Most of these are sent from other countries so I suppose that if ANYONE bites on an email it's a positive reinforcement and -- for someone who probably earns little per month -- one transaction is probably a huge payoff.

Web 2.0 Start Pages: Where to invest your energy?

Here is a classic, Web 2.0 conundrum: which of the three most popular start pages should you invest significant time, energy and effort within?

Besides the usual Google, Yahoo, AOL and others,  there are -- in my opinion the top choices -- the new Web 2.0-ish ones like yourminis, Netvibes and Pageflakes. Directionally, these three are embracing the drag-n-drop, turn-a-module-into-a-widget for publishing anywhere on the Web and artfully allowing each of us to build our own 'dashboard' to aggregate and access all of our favorite Web stuff.

The kicker is that each one of them, regardless of how easy they are to use, require a fair amount of time to mold, shape, customize and play with in order to get 'em just right. I like what each of them are delivering A LOT and find the promise of an aggregated start page compelling.

What is even MORE compelling is the direction each is taking through the enabling tools and methods they're giving us to mashup or remix the Web. Pete Cashmore says it best in this post:

Widget Disruption - Two pieces of news make me think that the widget world is headed for major disruption in the coming weeks. First up, Netvibes plans to catch up with PageflakesYourMinis by making its widgets available to post on MySpace, hi5, Piczo, blogs and other sites. Netvibes is also set to launch a Universal Widget API, allowing widgets to share data back and forth and synchronize among themselves. Look out for the hotly-anticipated Netvibes social network to launch in April.

I still shudder to think about latency when pages have dozens of widgets on them and we all sit around drumming our fingers on our desks waiting for it to parse and load...but I'm loving the ability to assemble pieces-n-parts of my stuff on the Web into a new whole.

Are these start pages scalable and worth our effort? Are they similar to what big companies deliver inside their organizations? Pete's one sentence about Netvibes is an interesting one to consider when thinking about start pages and which one to pick "...allowing widgets to share data back and forth and synchronize among themselves."

Gorillapod: A useful tool for you content creators

Over my lunch hour I stopped at Best Buy and picked up a Gorillapod for $20. I normally don't play fanboy and gush about products on this blog, but this little product instantly met a need: steady low light photography with my new Lumix as well as being able to place the camera in places to snag video...and I've fallen for it.

The Joby Gorillapod firmly secures your camera to just about anything- anywhere and everywhere! Unlike traditional tripods, the gorillapod doesn't require an elevated surface for you to take the perfect shot.

On the way back to my office from Best Buy, I attached my camera and wrapped the Gorillapod around my rear view mirror and grabbed some video. It was shaking a bit and there was some rattle being picked up (I hadn't secured it very well) but I shot 10 minutes of video of me talking in the car. While not useful for anything but ridicule (which is why I'm *not* posting it), it did allow me to test a quick proof of concept and it worked!

It's so laughingly lightweight that it'll fit in my briefcase alongside the tiny Lumix camera and I'll be able to capture steady video and low light snapshots easily. They also have beefier models for prosumer and heavier SLR cameras if you need that capability. 

Print Publishing is Dead...Or is it?

Friday's post by IDG SVP of online, Colin Crawford, was one that hit my radar and I immediately forward his permalink to my bride (with whom I co-own a small publishing company) as well as several other senior level people in publishing I'm involved or acquainted with so they could see what he revealed...and think about this piece of evidence with respect to their own businesses.

Then Scott Karp posts about Colin's writing and goes further to discuss the rapid acceleration in the death of print publishing. When I posted back in October about one clear death rattle for the printing industry -- namely prepress behemoth Banta closing a big shop four minutes from my offices -- it was interesting to me that it had taken roughly eight years for their business to downtrend as prepress activities migrated to the desktop and online increasingly became more important to their customers delivering content.

Though I'm still a consumer of print newspapers (Minneapolis StarTribune, New York Times, Wall Street Journal) I've let most of my magazine subscriptions to Forbes, Fast Company, Fortune and others lapse, keeping only BusinessWeek and Wired. Most of the 60+ trade publications I used to receive in print (e.g., Computerworld, eWeek, CIO Insight, Information Week, et al) I now read skim through an RSS reader.

For me, I find that the #1 issue with print publications is cycle time and the inherent inefficiency and time lags this creates. The number of cycles it takes to gather, edit, and decide what should be published in the limited real estate on a printed page means that I've already exhausted the topic by the time the print version appears.

Case in point: When Steve Jobs put up his public manifesto entitled, "Thoughts on Music" discussing digital rights management (DRM) in the music industry,  there was an absolute explosion of conversation in the blogosphere which I watched unfold on Techmeme...and read several perspectives from blogger's I trust. By the time more traditional publications weighed in with their perspectives, I'd already formed my opinion and no longer cared what they thought. Instead I looked online for what reactions might emerge from the music industry which were forthcoming pretty quickly...and the story continued to unfold.

So is print publishing dead or not?

CTD Podcast: The good...and bad...of Skype

A brief podcast about Skype...the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) computer telephony software. In this show, I explain why I'm BOTH enthused and dismayed by Skype:

a)  Skype is a quiet and therefore tension-reducing product enhancing voice communications making them more intimate. It really enhances conference calls and simple voice calls in new and more important ways;

b) I tell a couple of personal stories of how Skype has provided meaningful communications for my family and one other with whom I've shared my Skype enthusiasm

c) Demonstrate Skype quality with a recording of a call with my bride who is on a Frankfurt, Germany hotel phone at the same time my daughter is racing through a shopping mall in Florida while on a cell phone

d) With a recording of using the Skype dialpad to get into interactive voice response systems, I demonstrate why Skype can't yet be trusted or fully utilized for business voice telephony since its DTMS (Dual Tone Multi Frequency or touch tones) implementation is flawed

e) Lastly, I want to test out Skype-to-Skype recording while we're both on decent microphones (vs. headsets) so I connect with fellow podcaster Tim Elliott of the Winecast podcast and we do an impromptu -- albeit NOT optimized quality -- discussion which I recorded.

Download the MP3

Video from digital cameras...

My new toy is the Panasonic DMC-FX50. Though I love my Nikon D70 digital SLR for 'serious' photography, this slim, small camera has allowed me to have it with me all the time. I toss it in my briefcase or in my pocket...no muss, no fuss.

Where I've developed a shine for this little wonder, however, is with its high quality, 30fps video capture. I bought a 4GB SDHD card for it and can snag about 44 minutes of 640x480 video and store it. As a Mac user, I appreciate the Quicktime formatted output as it helps streamline my personal workflow.

I've been in three situations where someone has demonstrated a technology, process or service and I *knew* that I needed to grab the demo in order to show it later to a client. Asking the person if snagging some video would be OK, I'd proceed to take out the camera and shoot. A little technique and a steady hand helps, but a moving picture is worth 100,000 words in many instances. As more and more of us collaborate on the Web and participate with our own generated content thus communicating in a richer and deeper way, the ability to quickly grab good quality videos is only going to increase in value.

My first night with the camera I grabbed the following in the car as I went to pick up my son at a local coffee shop where he was doing homework with others. The quality -- transcoded here to Flash and delivered via my Brightcove channel -- is pretty good but the original in Quicktime is, in fact, qualitatively better and Flash means virtually everyone can view it. The video this camera takes is certainly not high definition nor even digital video dimensions, but for most presentations or Web communications I do, it's absolutely perfect.

NOTE: for some reason in this video, there is a slight warping of my head making it look a bit convex. While my head probably is warped and that explains why my kids say "You don't get it Dad" fairly often, it's the fact that the camera is in my slightly outstretched left hand two feet from my head as I'm driving (and yes, I'm demonstrating a couple of the techniques taught at the "Steve Borsch School of Dangerous and Aggressive Driving" in this video).

Yahoo Pipes: Is the Promise the Reality?

Lots of buzz about Yahoo Pipes and the capability for non-developers to pull together disparate Web services, repackage and deliver them in new ways. One possible use-case is something I'm involved in right now with a client: they want to take seven blog feeds (yes...they have permission from each blogger), bring in a news service feed they've licensed and then deliver them -- properly formatted and with a look-n-feel that matches *theirs* -- into their online magazine.  This would've required people with propellers on their beanies to accomplish and it *appears* that Yahoo Pipes will enable this to happen without propeller intervention.

Here's the kicker though: after reading Tim O'Reilly's excellent post as well as Nik Cubrilovic's post at Techcrunch, I was eager to give it a whirl...but the site has been offline all morning! After my post yesterday regarding my growing cautious optimism about relying on Web apps, the irony is not lost on me.

Still, my enthusiasm for the tools that are here and ones I know are coming are going to continue to accelerate our ability to leverage the Web and the Internet-as-a-platform in new and compelling ways. I've written about this before when discussing assembling a rich, internet application and my gut belief that Apple will position iWeb as a mass market, desktop publishing-like application for Web applications that'll consume all of these new Web services remains as ones that fill me with hope.

Since Yahoo Pipes is a new deliverable and there's A LOT of excitement about it -- and thus everyone's bangin' on their servers probably causing my inability to get connected -- but if more of us leverage Web services and create our own mashups that we bet our businesses or mission critical projects on, the damn stuff has gotta work!

UPDATE: After reading some comments on a post just now, it's possible Yahoo did NOT launch last evening and this may yet be offline.

UPDATE 9 HOURS LATER:  Just got back from L.A., sat down at my computer and checked my email. For grins, I peeked at Yahoo Pipes and found this on the page:

Web 2.0: Relying on Web Apps a Problem?

As my reliance on Web based applications increases, my enthusiasm is giving way to cautious optimism.

I'm feeling this way since, in the last week, Gmail, Typepad and even Yahoo News on my Treo 700p have had outages. Today as I was preparing to head to Los Angeles, I wanted to upload an 88MB video to my new Brightcove 'channel' (they have a 100MB limit). but it "hung" at 64% for 20 minutes so I did it again. Same thing and I had to leave for the airport with my work incomplete.

My NetNewsWire and Newsgator sync'ing has hiccupped twice not displaying synchronized news feeds and showing ones I've already read. Skype has crashed on me four times...twice during calls. My Technorati watchlist sign-in has looped and never logged me in and the exact same thing has happened with my Feedburner account.

Again...all of this happened this week...and it's only Wednesday.

A buddy of mine who has run major development groups at several brand name software companies always explained to me the cumulative lag time of multiple Web browser refreshes and how they'd combine to make a Web app feel really sluggish to a user making them less than an optimal solution. It wouldn't just be the lag time from any single interaction...but rather the constant need to click "Save" in order to post any given input to a server or a retrieval from that server and consequent HTML page parsing which would take 10+ seconds. With 10 seconds here and 10 seconds there, pretty soon there'd be one frustrated user bangin' his head against the wall.

I remain wildly enthusiastic and optimistic about the future of the Internet-as-a-platform and the emergence of truly useful, powerful and coordinated Web technologies and applications. It's just that I've moved from big-grin-on-face-and-giddy about relying on them to being ever so slightly cautious about betting something mission critical on them without some sort of contingency plan.

Ironically, this turn-of-events is informing my work with clients whenever I'm shown new features or functionality they've built and are eager to show me.

Skype Recording easily...

As more and more of us engage in user-generated content in the form of podcasts, videos, and other media types, one thing that people ask me over-n-over again is, "So how do we record Skype calls?" While there are simple methods like Call Recorder for the Mac or HotRecorder for the PC, they're fairly modest in capability and the results lacking in quality (in my opinion).

On my desk right now is a studio quality microphone on a stand (that I've used for podcasts for a year and a half) as well as a mixing board and M-Audio Microtrack recorder, I wanted something drop-dead-simple, fast to setup, bulletproof and of pretty decent quality.

Though most know about Audio Hijack Pro and its ability to get geeky and deal with all the audio streams on a Macintosh, they came out awhile back with one, incredibly useful feature: instant recording. Though I've done alot of experiments with various headset/microphone combinations, I finally settled on using the Logitech Premium Notebook headset due to its comfort and quality (though I stuck a foam cover on the microphone to reduce its "tinny" sound).

Due to a client requirement, I performed several tests today recording Skype-to-phone calls, Skype-to-Skype and just did one with a colleague in San Francisco (Amy Lenzo from Clearlight Communications) using that instant recording feature. If you'd like to hear what a Skype-to-Skype call can sound like recorded over this here Internet thingy without a lot of muss-n-fuss, give it a listen: Click to hear the mp3

Web 2.0: Are you in the top 5-10%?

Why does it seem that -- regardless of the endeavor, employee base, or community -- such a small percentage of people seize opportunity?  A buddy of mine once said (horribly twisting a crass old adage) that "ideas are like a#&holes...everyone's got one."  Though this is a sweeping generalization, my experience has been that roughly 5-10% of any body of people will actually DO something about their ideas and the other 90-95% will come up with a million excuses as to why they cannot.

Macro-level excuses include "everyone is doing it" or "there are probably patents out there already."  Carl Jung, the eminent psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, was a proponent of the collective unconscious which, "refers to that part of a person's unconscious which is common to all human beings. It contains archetypes, which are forms or symbols that are manifested by all people in all cultures. They are said to exist prior to experience, and are in this sense instinctual."  It's been one explanation as to why ideas seem to popup simultaneously...sometimes in different parts of the world causing great consternation amongst venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.

Some are worried about the land-grab occurring in intellectual capital and use that as an excuse not to move forward on their idea. I've written about the acceleration in intellectual property capture by Intellectual Ventures (post here) and how even an exchange traded fund, Ocean Tomo, (post here) has recognized this momentum and is trading on it. Google is obviously taking steps to capitalize on this global trend too (post here). The kicker? It's easier than ever before to discover patents, applications and prior art of spontaneous and simultaneous ideas from those who've seen them early on and find your entry point that's relatively safe and secure.

So who is in the 5-10% of Web 2.0, what are they building and what should you do?

Who are you?

Almost on a daily basis I have people reach out to me to discuss topics I've written about on this blog. Fabulous and fun interactions result (and I learn quite a bit) and the friends and acquaintances I've made -- globally, I might add -- has been a benefit that makes it all worthwhile. Comments? Many people that read here don't feel compelled to leave them and instead email me directly while some are using the Skype message feature to send me an instant message.

Here's the deal though: depending on the day or the post, I have an average of 935 unique visits and RSS feeds to/from this blog (some days it's spiked to nearly 5,000 when the post has been a bit more provocative) and the free report Rise of the Participation Culture has enjoyed 6,500 unique visits to the Web version and close to 2,300 downloads of its PDF version in just three months...but for the most part I don't know who any of you are!

On average 87% of my visitors are new ones (though my RSS feed list continues to grow by a dozen or so per week) while only 43% of these new visits come in via Google. I read my stats multiple times per day and find referral addresses that come in from corporate intranet sites (e.g., IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Morgan Stanley, Proctor & Gamble, Oracle) and analyst groups (e.g., Gartner, IDG, Forrester) and I, of course, can't get to the origination pages but I'm incredibly intrigued about who is behind the click to iConnectDots.com.

Virtually every client I have had and currently have came in due to my blog or that free report. So the ROI of my effort and energy is valid, but it's the connection with people that is the fun part of writing these posts -- as well as the intellectually stimulating portion by connecting with really smart people.

But I wonder every single day: who are you? Why are you reading this blog and what sparked your interest in reading it? Are the posts too long? Too cerebral? Not deep enough? Are there not enough naked pics? (Or any!?!). So send me an email at sborsch (at) gmail (dot) com or leave a comment below and let me know who you are...I'd love to connect.

Googlezon: A possible vision of the future?

A guy I've connected with via my blog, Christian Long at Designshare, thought enough of our interactions to connect me up with a guy in the UK with whom I just talked for an hour.

DK at Mediasnackers runs a youth-centric new media group in Wales, UK. He and I covered dozens of subjects from podcasting, vodcasting, youth, participation, user generated media, creativity and too much more to list. It was a fabulous connection I'm convinced will only grow over time.

DK asked if I'd seen the "Epic...vision of the future" video. Nope...I hadn't so he Skype-IM'ed me the link and I just watched it. I'd recommend you do too if you're in the least bit interested in *one* possible scenario of a world rushing toward personalization of content, information, narrowcasting, every-blogger-as-editor and the feasibility of giving us what we might want vs. what we need.

It's a bit bleak but worth a peek and is here.