|
|
Changing things up, one beard at a time Via Seth, I found a way to loan through Kiva while offering up nothing more than my pride.
I picked a ZZ Top beard, because every girl's crazy for a Sharp Dressed Man.
Sometimes change is hard. Sometimes it seems like there's no hope. Then again, sometimes change is simple, fun and silly. It doesn't feel like change at all when that happens. It just seems like you found a fun new toy to play with. Wheeeeeeeee!
You may never have the a spot on their list of the 25 highest selling books, but that doesn't mean that your book is a failure and a waste of time to write. You have a smaller audience than Stephen King. You have a smaller audience than the Huffington Post. But you have an audience, and if you want to grow your business, you want to increase the size of that audience. Getting people to read your blog on your site is difficult. The people who come to your website are more than likely already a part of your network. Getting new people to your site isn't even the important thing to consider. Getting your ideas and your message out into the wild, that's where the honey pot is at. If you write about Social Entrepreneurship, is your blog listed on AllTop's Social Entrepreneur page? Is there a Squidoo page about your cause? Is there a group of like-minded folks who blog about the same corner of the universe that you do? Connect with them. Blog with them. Link to their blog postings from your blog. In a couple of years I expect to see someone write a similar article about how you shouldn't Twitter anymore because the professional Tweeters are hogging the spotlight, and you should do the hot new thing instead. Information is information, regardless of the method of delivery. Getting your information noticed is the trick. There are some new tricks of the trade out there, but they shouldn't be seen as replacements for the "old" 2004 blogging way of doing things. They are new ways of marketing your ideas. Can you sum up what you do in 144 characters? Great! Use Twitter. Do you also have more in depth information that you would like to convey? Great! Use Twitter to drive people to your blog and expound on your ideas there. Do you have something even more profound and/or complex to expound upon? Great! Write a book, get it published, blog about it, tweet about it and see what happens. Become a part of a network of like minded people and share your ideas with them. Get them to tell other people about your ideas. About your tweet, your blog, your book. Put it out there in as many different ways as you can. Let other people worry about what hot new trend is taking the place of yesterday's hot new trend. You've got better things to do, and lots of different ways to share your thoughts and experiences with the people who are going to help you the most. The developer of iBeer, an iPhone app that allows you to simulate the ingestion of beer without quenching your thirst or becoming inebriated, is suing Coors for making the copycat iPint app. (The developer, Hittrix, also makes the non-alcoholic and calcium free iMilk.) How much are they suing for? $12,500,000. For virtual beer infringement. Really? $12.5 Million? For virtual beer? I can see their business plan now. "We'll make an app that a beer company can rip off, and then sue them when they do! For millions! Then, we'll go after Big Dairy! Muwahahahaha!" All the great minds that work on application development for the web, for the iPhone and for social networking platforms such as Facebook... and what we keep seeing are things like iBeer. Tim O'Reilly has noticed this, and Om Malik talked about it at the recent Start conference. Most of what is resulting from all of the incredible connective tissue that has evolved for use on the web is frivolous fluff at best. Again, it's not that I mind fluff. I love fluff. And may I just say that if you don't have Social Edge flair on Facebook yet, you really should get over there and grab it?
There are of course serious things that are being worked on, but a lot of that is engineering that allows other people to create things. That's what Facebook Apps are, and a lot of Google's developer functionality and things like Ning. Even Twitter. It's not about the technology but about how we use it. Right now, we're using it to turn iPhones into lighters or to send virtual chocolate to each other via Facebook. There's more to life than this. We're better than this, aren't we? We are. The media, both new and traditional, have noticed that Kiva is doing something different. It's not about the technology but in how it is being applied. It's about the creative use of the tools that are available to us. Maybe way, way, way back in the day a group of Homo habilis used tools to help prepare food while Neanderthals used tools to create Pleistocene era virtual food, something like iCarrion, or iDeer. So the point of my soapbox rant? Well, maybe that if we start concentrating our energies on creating products and services with purpose rather than with cols hard cash as the only objective, we'd all be a lot richer. He didn't mention what he thought of Facebook, if he ever saw it. I think he would approve of the capacity for creating your own little gang, your own little extended family of friends. He knew that being alone was no way to live, and that the essence of living, as well as the best survival plan, is to connect with like-minded people and create overlapping networks of people you can rely on when times are tough and have fun with when times are good. I think he would have objected to the impersonal nature of it, and to how little effort it takes to call somebody your Facebook friend. He would have opted for going over to their house, meeting them and spending time with them. Can you rely on your networks? Can you call up your Facebook friends when you need help? If you're planning a party, will they all show up? Probably not. It is, however, easier to let them know that there is a party though, right? If they can't be there, you can still share the experience with them and still share a connection with them about something they were unable to attend. It is a lot easier to do with your online friends than with a gang of luddites. I hear a lot of complaints that people on Facebook are just farting around. So, what's wrong with that? Farting around is how some of the greatest things in life happen. Okay, I highly doubt it, and not just because megalomaniacs have such a hard time playing nice with others. It is hard not to start thinking that way when you hear that Google is deploying their own data satellite (sort of) and have filed a patent for a fleet of floating data centers that would host the world's biggest repository of human knowledge out in international waters. And there's the little matter of Google Maps Street View to be considered as well.
I mean, has anyone checked to see if Sergey and Larry have adopted matching white persian cats? It's easy to think that just because Google is huge, it is going to succumb to the temptations of the marketplace and become evil. It is also quite easy to take a look at the good that comes from Google and its associated technologies and think 'pshaw! How can a company that enables so many cool and altruistic things be evil?' The truth, however, probably lies somewhere in between. The notion that companies have become so anthropomorphic in our societies as to be viewed as evil or benevolent is in and of itself a bit worrisome. Same goes for nations. Both Google and (your country here) are more complex than that, as they are made up of a multitude of individuals. Some individuals may be evil, others benevolent. What's the ratio of good to evil? Who has the upper hand? Can a culture - national, corporate or otherwise - be evil? The more important aspect of Apple's release of the 3G iPhone was the 2.0 version of the software, which has now been updated twice. (Bug fixes are nice... and yes, there are evidently a few more kinks to be worked out.) The new rev of the software allowed for 3rd party apps to be written and then sold or given away for free via the iTunes store. So when the early adopter storm calmed down and you could get the software update and add apps to your iPhone, I was tickled pink to peruse the available apps and utilities. And games. Yes, the fun stuff was plentiful from the get go. Etch-a-Sketch? Cute. Othello and other tried and true games? Check. Motion sickness inducing games that take advantage of the accelerometer and touch screen. They are in spades. What were missing, however, were useful geek utilities. Oh, what's a geek to do when they can't ssh into their server and rename files while avoiding eye contact with people out in public? Well, they may not have been there at the outset, but they're streaming in at full speed now. SSH. VNC. Telnet. FTP. Ping. Ah, now geeks everywhere can rest easy knowing that if they're within reach of a phone call, they're within range of their servers and fixing whatever problem arises. Out dancing? At dinner? Playing with the kids at the park? No problem! Pull out your iPhone and let your loved ones know you'll get right back to them, just as soon as you've restored services to your web site. Somebody will figure out the associated quality of life issues that go along with being able to work 24/7, right? This kind of always on, always plugged in kind of connectivity does raise boundary issues that we've been dealing with for a long time now. It will exacerbate them, of course, but if you're running your own enterprise and have a flexible schedule, it's up to you to balance those issues for yourself and for your staff. And yes, there are iPhone apps to help you out here as well. Project Management. Time keeping. Outlining. Enterprise level contact management. The pieces of the mobile office puzzle are falling into place. The nicest part of this evolution of the iPhone as a mobile platform is not that you'll be able to work on things whenever and wherever you want or need to, but that you will be able to get your work done however you need to, whenever and wherever you are.
The most painful part of that video, of course, is that I know every word of that song. When it comes to your infrastructure, you generally have to either initiate the change, or react to a failing, obsolete artifact. The latter is inevitable while the former is proactive. To complicate matters further, if you make an unnecessary change you run the risk of causing inefficiencies - or worse. So how do you decide when to make a change? Of course, telling your CIO that you are following the advice of someone who thinks it's a good idea to include not one but two Brady Bunch music videos in a post may not be the best way to get your point across. Let's keep that between you and me, okay?
What, that's not enough self-aggrandizement for you? Okay, fine. iTunes has reorganized their podcasts section, separating the audio content from the video content and Global X's X-Interviews is now featured at the top level Government & Organizations category, which is a little odd in that most of the podcasts at that level are miltary in nature, along with some U.S. Government produced podcasts. Oh, and Sesame Street. Of course, the Sesame Street podcast is for families of deployed military personnel, so even that has a military bent to it. Well, enough with the patting oneself on the back. On to more important issues. Jim Fruchterman blogged recently about AxsJAX at Google. It's a good read, with video to boot. I've been very heartened to see the increased focus on accessibility at the tech conferences lately. It seems to me that this kind of technological advancement beats a multi-touch sphere proof of concept hands down. 3-D Pong. Wow. Yeah, I've been waiting for that. Okay, I've moved from self-aggrandizing to snarky... let's see if I can move the conversation in a more helpful, beneficial way. How often do you print when you don't really need to? (And how often do you end up with an extra page with nothing but a page number and a carriage return on it? Don't you hate that?) You could use this as your desktop picture, or... give PrimoPDF a try. It's a great way of avoiding the printer until you really have to splash some ink onto paper. If you're a Mac user, PDF printing is built in to the OS, so you can do this directly from most every print dialog box. You have to trust the people you work with, and your IT staff requires even more trust. Like it or not, if you have an email server and a server administrator, your company secrets are in their hands. Unless, of course, you resort to government-esque tactics such as never using email. As long as your business interests are legitimate, you don't need to resort to such paranoia. Hire good people and trust that they're going to be worthy of the faith you put in them. You do want to make sure, however, that another person in the organization has access as well. As far as contract work goes, you might want to include a password clause in your contracts. Just a simple statement that says at the conclusion of their work for you they will provide you with administrator passwords to all of the systems they install. Nothing terribly oppressive or threatening, just a little, 'when you're done, can you make sure and leave us the keys?' Better to ask up front rather than after the work is complete, you've paid for it and you have no access. This article, however, had nothing to do with sports. It has to do with internet access on the go. The blind can get around the internet via screen readers, but this software has to be installed on the users computer in order to be used. But what about when you sit down to use a computer that's not your own? WebAnywhere is a step in the right direction.
Now we just need to get web developers to do more to make their pages accessible. It's not easy. I was at a screen reading demonstration at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and they had a screen reader read a few popular web sites. It was an eye-opening experience, no pun intended. Of the four or so sites that were read, the audience could only figure out what one of them was, the New York Times. One of the things that became obvious is that the better your site navigation is for screen readers, the better your site navigation is for everyone. It's hard to adapt, and it's hard to step back sometimes and develop products, on the web or otherwise, while keeping accessibility in mind. It's not any harder than skiing blind though, so it's time to stop making excuses. I went to the Google I|O conference last week, and my mind was changed. Well, not so much changed as it was put at ease. APIs can be your friend! And they're not anywhere near as intimidating as they seem from a distance. Oh, and don't believe what you were told growing up, if you came of age more than 5 or 6 years ago. Applications belong in the cloud, not on your desktop. Google makes a pretty good argument for this as well. One example was the Data Visualization API they were showing off. With this little API, you can connect it a spreadsheet that you have stored in Google Docs, share it with a coworker or someone at another company, and then show a chart or a graph based on that data on your site. Then when either of you update the spreadsheet, the chart changes to match. The price is right, too. It's free. If you are so inclined, browse through their other APIs and such. It's not too hard to imagine that these tools will save people time, and allow for collaboration that wasn't possible way back in the dark ages. You know, pre-2004 or so. |