Archive for December, 2007

Just got word today that the transaction is complete: My (ex-)business partner and I sold off the websites of our company, the Enthusiast Group, and the money and paperwork came through today. While the company didn’t work out, I’m glad that the websites can live on. Some nice communities formed, so at least we won’t disappoint the people who got hooked on them.

While this wasn’t a financial success for us, I still have some good feelings about what we created. One of the regulars to one of the sites, YourClimbing.com, posted some very kind words a few days ago:

Thanks Steve, Neil, and those at yourclimbing.com

In this season of giving, I would like to give thanks to the visionaries at yourclimbing.com for having the insight to bring such a wide audience of people from many walks of life, age groups, and financial backgrounds together. We are all bound by a love of climbing, that has found an outlet here on these pages. Many of us have found new friends and climbing partners on these pages, we have shared stories of heartbreak, joy, sends, projects, wishes, and areas to climb. However, what we have shared most is a feeling; a feeling of belonging to a community of like-minded people who “get us”. I want Steve and Co. to feel that they haven’t failed with this site, but have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. That have brought us together, and bonded us as a family, and their influence will be felt in many of our lives, for the rest of our lives. There is not anything richer they could have given to us, and while I and most of us are sad to see this site change hands, I’m sure I speak for us who are committed members of this site when I wish them the best in all the rest of their endeavors, and hope they succeed as well as they did with this one. I would love for them to keep in touch through this site, and let us know how they are doing, and hopefully one day I will see them in person, so I can convey my thankfulness for what they achieved in my and many of our lives.”

Since it’s winter and much of my exercise has been indoors, I’ve been watching DVDs to pass the time while on the treadmill or bike trainer. Right now I’m watching old episodes of “My So-Called Life,” a great drama from 1994. In case you don’t remember it, Life was a “realistic teen drama series that takes a look at a 15-year-old girl and her trials and tribulations with being a teenager and dealing with friends, guys, parents and school” (description from the Internet Movie Database). While critics loved the show, it nevertheless got canceled after only one season.

I fell in love with this show when it came out, but re-viewing it more than a decade later, it’s even more poignant. (That could be because my eldest daughter is now 15, and Life’s fictional family is identical to mine right now: married couple with 2 daughters, and the youngest TV daughter is about the age of my youngest daughter.)

But I’m not writing this blog item to recommend the show. (Well, I do; it’s good.) Rather, watching the episodes I’ve been struck by how much things have changed since 1994. That was the first year after I left the traditional newspaper world and started working an Internet career. I was one of those rare birds who dived in to the online world then. Most people still didn’t understand it, much less made it a big part of their lives.

I suggested to my 15-year-old that she watch the first episode of My So-Called Life, and she did. What surprised me is that she thought the show was OK, but it didn’t reflect her life. 1994 suburbia was different enough from today that she couldn’t relate to it.

Part of her “that’s how it used to be reaction” is probably because of the technology differences between then and now. (The emotional and relationship story lines certainly haven’t changed.) In 1994, no one had a cell phone, and certainly not every other teen you know. The Internet wasn’t part of a teen’s life (unless you were a tech geek). The computer in your house was probably shared by everyone, and was pretty lame compared to today’s. There was no MySpace or Facebook, and teen relationships were still based on personal interactions, not digital ones. Most everyone still got their news from the daily newspaper and TV news.

As we enter a new year, I can’t help but look back to 1994 and marvel about how far we’ve come. Digital technology now so pervades our lives that even looking back only to 1994, it seems like a very different world. It was one that today’s teenagers can’t relate to, because it seems foreign to them.

As news and media companies embark on figuring out how to survive and prosper in 2008 and beyond, they might want to keep this in mind if they hope to be relevant to my daughters’ generation.

NYTimes.com released its Top 10 Viewed Features of 2007 (even though 2007 isn’t over yet!), and here they are:

1. Magazine: Sweeping the Clouds Away
2. U.S.: Virginia Tech Shooting Leaves 33 Dead
3. U.S.: Virginia Gunman Identified as a Student
4. Health: Study Shows Why the Flu Likes Winter
5. Magazine: Unhappy Meals
6. Maureen Dowd: A Mock Columnist, Amok
7. Books: An Epic Harry Potter Showdown
8. Multimedia: The Victims
9. Circuits: The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype
10. Dining & Wine: 101 Simple Summer Meals

I’m trying to make sense of this but am having a hard time. What do you make of the list?

I’m baffled by the top traffic-getter, the story about classic videos of Sesame Street being released. That’s the most popular story of the year on NYT?! (My inability to relate to that story may be because by the time Sesame Street came on the air I was too old for it.)

I definitely don’t get why 3 of the top 10 stories are about the Virginia Tech shootings (2 articles and a multimedia graphic about the victims). NYT wasn’t the local paper(/website), after all.

Some stories on the list make perfect sense for getting high traffic: a review of the latest Harry Potter novel; a review of the iPhone when it came out; Stephen Colbert “filling in” for Maureen Dowd; the story about why the flu likes winter. (The latter is one of those stories that captures lots of attention because we can all relate to it. Ditto for the “Happy Meals” story about what we should eat to stay healthy and avoid disease.)

But overall, I don’t know, I expected to be able to identify some trends about what attracts online news readers. What do you see here?

I was reading Howard Owens’ latest post and noticed that in the first paragraph he links to a Wikipedia entry in order to explain MBOs (management by objective).

It’s normal for bloggers to provide links to Wikipedia; I do it frequently, too — usually as a shortcut to defining a term or describing something.

But isn’t it interesting that mainstream news organizations seldom link to the “people’s encyclopedia.” I think that says a lot about the difference between old and new media.

It explains much about why mainstream media struggle with a new world where everyone can have a voice. Many mainstream news organizations still resist linking to outside sources at all (though that problem seems to be waning), and they remain largely unwilling to trust “unvetted” sources like Wikipedia. (Of course, many of us would say that the massive Wikipedia contributor community is doing the vetting of information.)

Sure, Wikipedia has its problems. But I think news organizations can and should acknowledge Wikipedia’s power in the Internet community by linking to it. There’s always the option of inserting a note of caution when linking, describing how Wikipedia is a public-driven resource and its information may not be perfect.

Are there examples of mainstream news organizations routinely linking to Wikipedia which would refute my (admittedly generalized) observation?

In some ways I feel like the future I’ve been waiting for is here — sort of. I’m talking about Amazon Unbox and TiVo, with which I can now rent movies without driving to the video store and feeling guilty about further contributing to climate change. Hallelujah!

We had a pretty bad snowstorm here in Boulder today, and one of my daughters was home sick, so I loved being able to rent her a movie without braving the awful roads.

Alas, Amazon Unbox is far from perfect, because it’s crippled by the movie studios. While I was able to rent Because of Winn Dixie for $2.99 from the comfort of the living room, many other movies are only available for “purchase.” Example: The Bourne Ultimatum is only available to buy for $14.99; you can’t “rent” it.

The difference between “rent” and “purchase” is that with “rent,” the movie gets deleted from the TiVo hard drive 24 hours after you’ve hit the play button. With “purchase,” you can keep it on the TiVo as long as you like.

How dumb is that?! I’d watch Bourne for $3 or $4, but I’m not going to buy it. So Amazon and the movie companies lose out on huge amounts of revenue. If you poke around Unbox, you’ll find a LOT of movies that are only for purchase. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Don’t blame Amazon, of course. It’s just abiding by what the movie companies demand in terms of licensing. And while I’m no expert on the movie industry, I can bet that it’s more complicated than just making the decision to allow TiVo rentals for everything in the catalog.

It just goes to show that we’re in a transition period, where the consumer experience is still rather stupid when it comes to movies on demand. I’m sure it’ll get there, and my daughter and I can rent whatever we damn well want to — without spewing any carbon into the air. Won’t that be nice!

So, spam now accounts for 90-95% of all e-mail. That’s up from 5% in 2001, and 70% in 2004 when the federal CAN-SPAM Act went into effect. That’s depressing.

Personally, I’m not bothered too much by receiving spam, since Gmail does a pretty good job filtering it. But where it has an impact is that I’m pretty certain that the occasional “false-positive” — an e-mail meant for me that’s not spam but is caught by the filter — is going into my spam folder.

I used to check the spam folder periodically, scanning through looking for personal mail put there by mistake. But that’s untenable these days with the volume of spam that Gmail catches on my behalf. I don’t even bother looking there any more.

But I often wonder what I’ve missed.

This is my first blog entry produced using Jott. That is a service that allows you to speak into your phone, and have your words converted into text and then post it to another service. In this case, I have dictated this blog entry to Jottfrom my phone and I’m having Jott post to this blog. listen

Powered by Jott

I just discovered Jott.com, a very cool voice service that can interact with other web applications. Tonight I’ve been trying it out with RemberTheMilk, a web to-do utility that interacts nicely with Google Calendar. By using Jott, I can speak into my cell phone while I’m away from my computer and very easily add a reminder to my RTM tast list. Very handy!

Jott also works with Twitter, and I’ve been experimenting with that. The short explanation is that after you set up your (free) Jott account and link it to your Twitter account, you can use your cell phone to call in Twitter posts (tweets). Jott gives you a number to call; just speak (up to 30 seconds) and it’ll get posted to Twitter. (Because Jott recognizes the number you’re calling from, it’s super quick; just tell Jott where to send the message and start talking.)

Of course, the voice recognition isn’t going to be perfect, but it seems pretty darn good.

In earlier posts I’ve been discussing the idea of reporters using Twitter for covering major breaking stories with micro-burst coverage — that is, very short news alerts sent to Twitter as new information is discovered. Using Jott to speak to Twitter will be faster than trying to text sentences with your cell phone. It’s worth experimenting with.

Hmmm. Borders dropped this coupon offer into my inbox today. $9.99 for any music CD in the store (single disc).

My first thought: Wow, great deal! Second thought: Why would I want to buy a CD? I haven’t bought one since … I can’t remember the last time. All my music purchases now are digital.

Perhaps this is a sign of the slow death of the music CD? I’m sure they’ll be around for a while longer, serving the still-significant portion of the population that hasn’t yet made the transition to digital music. But just as you seldom see anyone with a film camera, we appear to be headed that way with CDs.

Borders may have to give them away. That’s the price I’d pay for a CD these days.

I’m an outcast in my family. I’m like Apple’s “PC Guy” in a family of “Mac Guys.”

This morning I learned that my mother-in-law just got a new Macbook after a life of using PCs. This was a few months after my father-in-law switched from lifelong use of PCs to a Mac. Within the last year, my wife and 2 daughters each have gotten Macs — again, switching away from PCs. Oh, and there’s my (now ex-) business partner, who switched to a Mac in 2006.

I’ve been using a PC since 1995, when I gave up using a Mac because in those days, every new Internet application that came out was for PC only; the Mac versions usually came out 6-12 months later. But I’m ready for a change back. PCs have gotten so annoying, with all the crap that accumulates on them: the spyware, the viruses. (Last time I upgraded Norton Anti-Virus, Firefox slowed to a crawl, and I’ve yet to find a solution.)

Maybe Santa will put a Mac under the tree for me this year. Let’s see, have I been nice? … Umm, my start-up company nose-dived this fall. I doubt Santa can afford it.

But seriously, my family can’t be an aberration. There seems to be a serious move away from PCs. Have you noticed it in your circle of friends and family?