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Changing Online Channels

Yesterday, while prepping the Thanksgiving meal, I began thinking about how I interact online has changed over the years. In the early days, it was primarily read-only consumption of Usenet groups and BBS forums (this was before spammers made these outlet unusable). Then AOL opened up its walled garden version of the Internet with slightly easier, but in many ways more-cumbersome access. AOL also served much the same function that Facebook does today – a place where everyone went to find/connect with people.

I quickly grew tired of AOL spam and set out to get my own dial up Internet connection through one.net. This made FTP and gopher much more workable and provided my first non-corporate Internet email address. At some point the guys who were running one.net lost their minds and got greedy so I dumped them an went with a national provider. Things then evolved from dialup to ISDN (!) and eventually to DSL.

Well, that is the connectivity side of the story. Now for the interaction side. In the beginning, I was also very careful to keep my name off of the Internet. Around 2005, I decided to try out this ‘blogging’ thing that had been going on for a few years.

The original intent of the blog site was to answer the question that I was getting more frequently regarding what I was doing, reading, listening to, etc. The Blogger site had very limited customization, but I customized it as best as I could. Then one day Google decided that to lock my blog for no reason and with no explanation. Shortly thereafter, I when with the self-hosted site that I use now.

As is typical, I suppose, blog postings were a mix of re-posted links with commentary and longer essays and/or rants on various topics of interest (to me anyway). I created a Facebook account about five years ago and didn’t do much with it until the last 18 months or so. Most of my online ‘presence’ was via the blog. I created a Twitter account in 2007 and experimented a bit with that off and on. I also had a Jaiku account and tended to use that more as it had a better interface (and a mobile client).

Of late, I have noticed that my online channels have begun to shift (or at least stratify). Links that I would normally post on the blog, I put into Facebook. Links that I would normally share via email, I began putting into Twitter. Email is for much more directed communications. I have never been much of an IM person. The blog is seeing fewer updates as a consequence – which may be for the better. My plan going forward is to create longer ‘essay’ posts for the blog and shift more of the straight link sharing via Facebook and Twitter.

I have been toying with the idea of using things like Pixelpipe to update multiple channels at one time but that almost seems a bit too indiscriminate, like a form of spamming. Rockmelt promises to make it easer to share on Facebook and Twitter in particular, but I haven’t gotten my hands on it yet to know what it can do.

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Media Fail

One of the things I find most annoying in the run up to the elections is the constant polls foisted by the media. They don’t seem to realize that the only poll that counts is the one that happens in the voting booth. The rest of it is the media trying to influence the outcome of the election rather than reporting on the issues and candidates.

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Google Earth – Now With Weather

Google Earth is a fascinating and useful tool for learning about places and even just taking virtual tours of places you would like to visit. With the 5.2 release, you can now get a sense of what the weather is like in those locations as well. For most locations you can enable the ‘cloud layer’ and in some places you can actually get a weather radar overlay.

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Slow Reading

As the internet has become more and more mainstream, I often wondered if there my be some sort of impact to the way that people absorb data. Apparently, there are some that are of the opinion that the internet is having a pronounced impact on reading habits. The reaction to this is a ‘slow reading’ movement.

So are we getting stupider? Is that what this is about? Sort of. According to The Shallows, a new book by technology sage Nicholas Carr, our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information. Round-the-clock news feeds leave us hyperlinking from one article to the next – without necessarily engaging fully with any of the content; our reading is frequently interrupted by the ping of the latest email; and we are now absorbing short bursts of words on Twitter and Facebook more regularly than longer texts.

Which all means that although, because of the internet, we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual tidbits, we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, contemplate, and relate all these facts to each other. And so, as Carr writes, “we’re losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we’re in perpetual locomotion”.

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Easy Fix For Postal Woes

I was listening to a report on the radio the other morning about how postal rates in the US are going to increase and how this was going to cause issues for some people. I had to laugh. To me it seemed that if they did it right, they could solve two problems at once.

The obvious solution to me was to eliminate the ridiculously cheap ‘bulk rate’ (aka corporate welfare) that businesses have enjoyed and abused for years. Bring this to parity with the ‘first class’ postage rate that the private citizens that fund the postal service have to pay. The net effect of this should be two fold: 1) less junk mail being sent out 2) less junk mail being thrown away. Those who wish to continue to send me 4 catalogs a month from which I have never ordered a single thing may continue to do so — only now paying their fair share.

And while we are at it, require all those tax-dodging corporations who have incorporated offshore to pay international rates for all of their domestic mailings. After all, for tax purposes they are a ‘foreign’ company, they should be for postal purposes as well.

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‘Boutique’ Online Shopping – Customer Service Matters!

In my local and online shopping, I prefer to give my hard earned cash to a smaller outfit that offers a good (or in some cases superior) product and many times a much better shopping experience. However, of late, I have had two consumer experiences that lead me to believe that small online retailers don’t understand the importance of customer service (or customer relations).

First up in Inventory Magazine (and their related shop). With only two issues in circulation, Inventory is a fantastic magazine: interesting articles, well presented and sustainably produced. No quarrels there.

I decided to splash out and buy one of their bespoke store brand shirts albeit at a bit of a premium price. A little over a week later the shirt arrives. It looks as if it has been unceremoniously stuffed into a folded up shopping bag and a shipping label applied to the outside. A cursory inspection of the shirt shows that it has several obvious defects in the material and craftsmanship (slubs in the fabric, loose buttons, untrimmed threads). Basically, reminds me of the sort of thing you would see on the rack at as a ‘second’ at TJ Maxx. Clearly the item hadn’t been inspected at all before plunked into the bag and sent of to me, the customer. I am justifiably more than a little disappointed in the item I received so I sent off an email to Inventory. Several days go by with no response. So I send another. Still no response. I direct message them on Twitter (where they are fairly active so I know someone is on the other end of the line). Again nothing. At this point, my thought is ‘what the hell?’ – they have had every opportunity to a) respond b) make the situation right. Instead they have chosen to do nothing. Buyer beware when purchasing from Inventory Magazine’s online shop.

The second example is comical in an ironic (and similar) sort of way. Monocle is another fantastic monthly magazine that has ventured into online sales of a small number of curated items from music to books to rather dearly priced clothing ($400USD espadrilles anyone?). I already subscribe to the magazine so I have an online account with them. My attempt to use that account to purchase several music CDs from them was a very rough ride. After selecting the items and placing them in my shopping basket I attempted to check out. I selected my existing account from a list. But I can move beyond the screen because it keeps telling me I need to input a city name. Reselect info, visually verify there is, in fact, a city listed. Check. Still can’t proceed. Fire off an email to the Monocle sales team. The response: ‘try again later’. What?! Presumably they have invested in self healing technology for their site. So I try again a week later. Same error. Another email. Then another. Then another. Finally get a response to, wait for it, ‘try again later’. When I inquire if the issue has been identified and fixed (it has not) I get the curious response of ‘just send us your order and payment info in an email(!) an we’ll try to process your order. My payment info in an email? Are you mad? At this point nearly two months have gone by and they have not fixed their site. Now I need to renew my subscription. Same issue with that. I am able to work around it by manually re-keying all of my address info into the system. I was so frustrated that I emailed Tyler Brule (Monocle’s head) directly about my poor experience with the Monocle order process. You guessed it, no response at all.

The truly ironic part of this is how much Monocle the magazine bangs on issue after issue about who is doing customer service ‘right’ around the world and authoritatively proclaiming to those who aren’t ‘doing it right’ how they should improve. But apparently when it comes to actually providing customer service themselves, well, that is optional, suboptimal and unapologetic. Thanks for making me work so hard to be a customer, Monocle.

Fortunately, there are a few sites that understand customer service. One shining example is Corazzo, a Portland, Oregon-based provider of scooter/motorcycle riding apparel. From my first order, they have provided both stellar products and service. Questions and issues are dealt with promptly and personally. Subsequent orders are always accompanied by a hand written note of thanks (and many times a little something extra that shows they appreciate the return business). Absolutely fantastic. If they were a local company, I would stop by on a regular basis to congratulate them on their fine service and products and encourage them to continue in the same vein.

I can only hope that Inventory spend a little time with the Corazzo folks and figure out how to elevate their game. I wish Inventory success – if I didn’t care, I wouldn’t engage with them to try to improve. At this point in my experiece, they have a long way to go.

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Google Location History – Go Track Yourself!

Google is now providing a dashboard to allow you to view and review location data from you mobile device (if you have Google Maps installed and enabled Google Latitude for location reporting).

Whenever this topic comes up, privacy is usually one of the first things that leaps to mind. Google are careful to address this explicitly:

We’re really excited to make Latitude and your location more useful to you, but we definitely understand that your privacy is important. Just as before, Google Location History is entirely opt-in only and your location history is available privately to you and nobody else. Additionally, you may be asked to periodically re-enter your password when opening any Location History page, even if you’re signed in to your Google Account already (just to make sure you’re really you). Of course, you may always delete any or all of your location history in the Manage History tab or disable Location History at any time.

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MeeGo Ready To Go (On Netbooks Anyway)

The Nokia and Intel cross-platform OS MeeGo is now available for adventurous netbook owners and developers.

The MeeGo netbook user experience is the first of its kind for the flexible cross-platform OS, allowing everyone to get a taster for what’s in store when a device is launched in the near future. Building on the latest open source technologies the MeeGo netbook experience boasts instant access to synchronised calendars, tasks and files, along with real-time social networking updates on your homescreen. It doesn’t end there, the OS also provides aggregation of your social networking happenings, allowing you to see all your feeds on one screen and keep all your buddies informed with what you had for breakfast.

When it comes to browsing the MeeGo netbook user experience integrates Google Chrome or a fully open source browser solution plus Google Chromium is also on board.

The OS also includes easy to use applications for email, calendar and there’s also a brand new media player offering. There’s also support for a myriad of languages including Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Swedish, Polish, Finnish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, English and British English.

For those technically-apt developers amongst us there’s more than enough fodder for you to get to grips with. The release of MeeGo API includes Qt 4.6, the MeeGo SDK with an integrated application development environment, and various other operating system tools. Currently, the MeeGo SDK is focused on netbooks, but the next version of the MeeGo SDK, an early developer release in June, will support touch-based devices, such as handsets and tablets.

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Is Reason Always Right?

Several years ago I committed to myself to try to trust my intuition more and (perhaps with a bit of bias) I would say that commitment has served me well. This essay from The Guardian explores the topic a bit more.

Albert Camus said that the body is as good a judge as the mind. We know what he means. When we meet someone for the first time the whole of us responds to that person. Later the mind may reflect on the encounter and think that they were likeable, or not, but that first meeting will be an important element in whether we want to follow up the relationship or not. Yet, though there is a great truth in what Camus said, I believe that in the end the mind must be the final judge. The body, with its instinctual response, can orientate the mind in a particular direction or nudge it in another one if it feels it is going wrong, but in the end the mind must decide, using rational criteria.

The same point can be made in relation to what is called conscience. Some people think of conscience as an inner voice making them feel guilty, or telling them what to do. But conscience, as Thomas Aquinas said, is the mind making moral judgements. It is a matter of the mind, not any inner voice. In short it is the considered judgment we make when we weigh up all the pros and cons in the light of our values and overall perspective on life. This is not to say that guilty feelings, or intuitions are unimportant. They are. Sometimes they can stop the mind going down a wrong track altogether. When we make a rational decision it is very good to take into account the totality of what we are feeling. But in the end we must try to think as rationally as possible.

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Can Bacteria Make You Smarter?

So maybe the recent crazy for anti-bacterial everything is not necessarily a good thing? From Science Daily:

Exposure to specific bacteria in the environment, already believed to have antidepressant qualities, could increase learning behavior, according to research presented at the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego.

What next, the discovery of midichlorians and their impact?

Also previously Cut Down On Infections By Cutting Down On Antibiotics

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