Technology

On one of my current projects, I made a bad choice of web hosting company. Fortunately, we figured out how bad this service was before launch, so transition to a new host didn’t disrupt anything. Whew!

I just want to give a little shout-out about a great service that helped me transition the website (which is built using Wordpress) to the new hosting company. EZSiteMove.com came to the rescue after my failed attempts at figuring out how to move everything over and have the site be completely operational.

They did a great job in the time advertised, and the rate was reasonable. Two thumbs up!

The flamboyant new owner of the Tribune Co., billionaire Sam Zell, visited one of his properties in Virginia, the Daily Press, yesterday, and (according to this report) told employees this:

Tribune’s smaller newspapers, including the Daily Press, would serve as a ‘petri dish’ of innovation, where new ideas would be tested and incubated before being passed along to the company’s big three: the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Newsday of Long Island, N.Y.”

I have to say, while I think Zell is on the right track with trying to shake things up at Tribune, he’s got this backward. Letting the smaller properties in a chain try the innovations and then passing them along to the flagship papers is something the newspaper industry has already been doing — and I think that’s part of the reason the industry is still in such a mess. It’s not bold eough.

Some of the largest newspapers are bleeding badly; layoffs and buyouts are the order of the day, and quality of the product is deteriorating. (My local paper keeps getting thinner; the day is very near when it’s no longer worth it to renew my subscription.) Zell should be telling his flagship papers to stop stalling and start innovating big-time. Waiting for experiments from the hinterlands to pan out before implementing them in Chicago, LA and Long Island is a going-too-slow approach.

Zell is known for being a change agent. So why doesn’t he demand that every paper in the Tribune chain innovate like there’s no tomorrow? Tomorrow is going to suck if they don’t.

Look, pure-play Internet companies have demonstrated that there are billions of dollars to be made from innovating. I’m sure that Zell believes the newspaper industry can reinvent itself and take part. So why would he take such a conservative approach? How odd.

What do you think?

From NYT today: “Google Sees Surge in iPhone Traffic.”

Apple’s iPhone, of course, is the first mobile phone that has a decent web browser. So it’s predictable that buyers would be using that function a lot. (I use a Blackberry, but the web interface — not to put too fine a line on it — sucks in comparison to the iPhone’s. I seldom use it for general web browsing or searching because it’s so clunky.)

The figures cited by the Times show that iPhone owners use the web a lot. Even with only 2% of the smartphone market, iPhone web traffic to Google outdoes the more widely adopted smartphones. I notice a friend who has an iPhone surf on it constantly, so I’m not surprised.

There’s an obvious recommendation to be made to media companies as a result of this story: Get ready for serving many more mobile customers with your content and services. The iPhone is the tip of the iceberg, and more iPhone-like smartphones are coming soon. Now’s the time to gear up.

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.

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?

Amazon’s Kindle e-reader device was just introduced, and it does look very cool. It’s what many of us have been hoping would come along for years — a truly wireless device that will allow purchase of books, magazine subscriptions, and newspapers, as well as pick up feeds of blogs. Roger Fidler must be pleased.

Check out this video for an overview of the device:

Of course, as amazing as the Kindle appears to be, the glaring deficiency is the black-and-white screen. I don’t know … I’m just not sure I could plunk down several hundred dollars for a device that has me reading newspapers and magazines without color. I look forward to later versions with color screens. That’s got to be a tough technology nut to crack.

I have an early e-book reader sitting in a box somewhere — it was manufactured by RCA. That thing is so clunky and underpowered compared to the Kindle. The interface to download books is “stone age” compared to the Kindle’s wireless (and wi-fi-less) connection to the virtual bookstore. The technologists are getting really close to giving us a great personal digital reader.

Canon has stopped making film cameras. It’s about time. Film? Get over it.

(But there are still holdouts, it seems. My daughter is going to summer arts camp again this year, and plans on taking some photography. The camp insists on teaching them darkroom techniques and how to develop photos with chemicals. Why don’t they teach them blacksmith skills, too, while they’re at it? Sheesh.)

All of a sudden, the single monitor on my desk seems so inadequate!

(And if that’s not enough, check out Brad Feld’s treadputer.)

One of the earliest and best Google Maps mashups is Adrian Holovaty’s ChicagoCrime.org, which takes publicly accessible Chicago crime data and gloms it onto a satellite/street map in all sorts of interesting and flexible ways. Now Holovaty, who is a Chicago-based Web technologist for Washingtonpost.com, has added a new and cool feature:

Crimes in the database are now linked with crime writeups from the Chicago Journal newspaper. Here’s the site, and here’s a sample writeup + map. Below is a screen grab of what the map part looks like.

Nice! … Shouldn’t this sort of thing be on, say, the Chicago Tribune’s website? Yeah, Holovaty works for another company. But ChicagoCrime.org is a labor of love for him; from what I know from talking to him, there’s no money in it. (The site doesn’t even use Google AdSense.)

Keep an eye on his little side-project empire, too. Holovaty tells me he’s got some other similar stuff that’ll debut one of these days.

My business partner, Derek, turned me on to a great new voice: Kathy Sierra. Derek heard her speak last week at the South by Southwest conference, and she’s got a blog called Creating Passionate Users (co-written with two other authors in a book series she’s doing for O’Reilly).

Our business (the Enthusiast Group) is about serving people who are passionate about the sports they participate in, and we obviously want our users to be passionate about our websites. So I’m all ears on what Sierra is talking about.

This post and this follow-up are great. Must reading for every online publisher! The short version is this: Pay attention to what MySpace is doing. That oh-so-popular site responds to how people use the site and continually adds new features (and changes things) without being asked. Its on an ultra-fast or quick-release development cycle, adding new things every couple weeks. And MySpace’s young audience seems to eat that up.

This is so different from the old way of publishing (and software development, the topic Sierra writes about), where the traditional mindset is that too much change too fast will piss off readers and users. MySpace is finding that this generation eats it up when things change (for the better) constantly. They thrive on it.

(I can understand that. Despite my advanced age — late 4os — I’ve always loved change, while some of my contemporaries go crazy when some application or website they’ve gotten used to changes how it works.)