Category Archives: Tools

Speaking tomorrow night at Keene Public Library: “The Big Disconnect – How Communication Is Changing All Around Us”

UPDATE: Just confirmed that the start time is 7:00pm versus 6, which is what I thought it was, but I was writing my post based on info on the library’s web site. 😉


If you are in the area of Keene, NH, tomorrow night, Monday, April 13, 2009, you are welcome to swing by the Keene Public Library at 6pm7:00pm to hear me speak on: “The Big Disconnect – How Communication Is Changing All Around Us” where I’ll be talking about who the ways we communicate and the tools we are use are changing… basically the topics I write about here, over at DisruptiveTelephony.com, in my FIR reports and essentially in most of the other places I write. The full abstract of the talk is below.

This whole thing started off innocently enough. Another parent at my daughter’s school knew about the kinds of things I do and asked if I would be willing to talk to the library board (on which she sits) about changes in communication technology. They are apparently doing some long-range planning over these next few months and she thought my input would be helpful. My first response was (and still is) to suggest they talk to my neighbor and long-time Keene resident Jon Udell who has, among other things, created the LibraryLookup Bookmarklet Generator. She appreciated that info but continued to also want me to talk to the board.

Given that this is the kind of presentation that I do on an ongoing basis anyway, I agreed. Then somewhere along the way it seems the library board morphed this into a public presentation… when she asked me for a headshot and bio for flyers, well, I knew it was getting a bit bigger… 😉

Ah, well… it didn’t and doesn’t matter to me. If I’m speaking to five people or 20 and private or public, it should be a good conversation regardless. Having this presentation has also been helpful in that it has helped me synthesize some points that I’d been thinking about for some time into a more coherent form.

So at this point it’s a public event to which anyone can go. If you find yourself in Keene tomorrow night, feel free to stop by. Here’s the abstract of the talk:

Is the future of our inter-personal communication a ‘tweet’? Are we going to become ‘friends’ with everyone through sites like Facebook? What are all these ‘feeds’ people are talking about? And what is going on with all these e-books?

We are living in a time of great change both in terms of the technologies and tools we use to communicate but also in terms of the changes those technologies are making to the fabric of our society. Traditional media outlets are under severe stress. Newspapers are folding or stuggling. Television audiences are fragmenting and moving online. Radio empires are collapsing. Email is dying under the weight of spam. Landlines are being cut in favor of mobile phones. In the midst of all this change, people are sharing details of their lives in social networks like Facebook and MySpace. They are ‘tweeting’ with Twitter. They are posting video to YouTube. They are collaborating using documents ‘in the cloud’. They are networking on LinkedIn. They are blogging and podcasting. They are sharing and creating information in so many new forms and ways.

In this talk, communication technology expert Dan York will discuss these trends and technologies and look at how both the ways in which we communicate are changing as the underlying technology changes. What is fueling those trends? How are people changing the way they consume information? What does it mean for each of us as we blur the contexts in which we interact with people? What are both the challenges and opportunities for organizations and businesses? What are some of the societal impacts? What about privacy? (Or is there such a thing?) And how can people most appropriately participate? Come with your questions and join in the conversation about how communication is changing all around us.

P.S. I don’t know that I’m entirely comfortable with the label “communication technology expert“. I suppose some people may consider me that, and I have been working with online communication networks and tools for pretty much 25 years at this point… but from my perspective the more you know, the more you know you don’t know…


If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.


Technorati Tags:
, , , , , , , ,

Have you looked at the Twitter Fan Wiki lately? Amazing number of tools…

239F0ED3-565A-4A5B-8B96-F77D463A8AB2.jpgWow! Have you looked at the Twitter Fan Wiki lately? It is at:

http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps

I wound up there late last week for some reason and realized that it had been many months since I had visited the page… what an incredible number of apps built around Twitter! There is no official “count” that I could see, but dumping the page source to a file and grepping for <li> in the relevant part of the file gave a count of close to 700 listings.

If you haven’t taken a look at this view of the Twitter ecosystem lately, it’s worth a look. (And if you are looking for topics for your blog, you could just start at the top reviewing Twitter apps and you’d have no end of things to writing about…)


If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.


Technorati Tags:
, ,

One single picture that shows why I want Google Chrome on Mac OS X…

Why can’t I wait for the Mac OS X version of Google Chrome? After tweeting that today, someone asked me again. Here is a very simple picture that shows WHY I want Chrome on Mac OS X:

firefox-jacking-cpu.png

Yep, there is good old Firefox jacking both my CPUs to close to 100%.

Funny thing is that it wasn’t even a large browsing session for me. The session manager plugin I’m now using says that I had 3 windows with 59 tabs.

Yet somewhere on one of those tabs was some kind of screwed up web page that was jacking my CPU up. Perhaps it was a Flash object. Perhaps some kind of multimedia content. Perhaps just lousy design. But the problem is that I can’t find that tab easily.

Enter Google Chrome. I want that Process Manager to see which of the many tabs is killing my performance. (And then I want to kill that tab!) I’m looking forward to it!

P.S. And yes, I have indeed tried the Stainless browser for Mac OS X, which implements multi-process browsing like Chrome. It’s nice and seems to work well, but it (like Chrome apparently) is still very much a work-in-progress. I’ll keep watching it, though, and trying it out from time to time. Perhaps if Chrome continues to take forever and if Firefox keeps sucking up all my CPU from time-to-time… perhaps then I *will* move to Stainless…


If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.


Technorati Tags:
, , , , ,

The “World Wide Web” is 20 years old today…

www20.jpg
It’s hard to believe that the “World Wide Web” is 20 years old today. As written on the “WWW@20” site:

Twenty years ago this month, something happened at CERN that would change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled “Information Management : a Proposal”. “Vague, but exciting” is how Mike described it, and he gave Tim the nod to take his proposal forward. The following year, the World Wide Web was born.

They are having a celebration today over there where Tim Berners-Lee will speak.

When I tug on my ever-greying-beard a bit, I can think back to the some of the “Intro to the Internet” courses I taught in the Boston corporate market (primarily) back in the very early 1990’s. The courseware I wrote had a section at the end that talked about this new thing, called the “World-Wide Web” that you used by telnetting to info.cern.ch and navigating through a “line-mode browser” by typing the number of the link you wanted to follow. This was, of course, the era of “gopher”, “archie”, “veronica”, etc. so this new “www” thing was an interesting addition.

And then, of course, came Mosaic in 1993 and everything changed… (including my courseware! 😉 )

Happy Birthday, World Wide Web! And thanks, Tim Berners-Lee, for writing that first proposal…

Some other coverage:


If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.


Technorati Tags:
, , , , ,

The Great Gmail Fail – and the collective panic/meltdown on Twitter…

In case you weren’t watching your Twitter stream this morning (US Eastern time), Google’s Gmail has been down. You can read about it on Mashable, TechCrunch, VentureBeat and probably a zillion other blog sites by now. It’s probably back up by now.

But if you were on Twitter this morning, you would have DEFINITELY known that Gmail was down. Here’s the state of search.twitter.com after I left the tab open for a bit:

gmaildown-twitter2.jpg

Yes, that’s 22,057 messages since I opened the window – all mentioning “gmail“. In the time it’s taken me to write these few paragraphs, the count has now climbed to 22,601.

gmaildown-twitter-1.jpgThe Twittersphere is experiencing a gigantic collective spasm of worry/panic/meltdown, along with a healthy dose of amusement thrown in at all of the worry/panic/meltdown.

Many of us have spoken or written about Twitter as an “attention lens” where it helps point you to what others find important at the moment. This morning it wasn’t so much a “lens” as it was a giant screaming sledgehammer!

It was, in many ways, absolutely fascinating.

Kind of like standing on the side of the highway watching a giant wreck/collision. Or watching similar scenes on TV. It was mesmerizing to a certain degree. I also learned of the site http://twitterfall.com/ via the page to watch ‘gmail’ tweets:

Twitterfall.jpg

It was admittedly interesting to have on my screen in my hotel room as I did an early round of email checking. With the sheer volume, though, I did have to bump up the speed from the default to “4 per second”.

The reality is, of course, that the collective focus probably did absolutely nothing to help Google bring the service back online. Instead, you had 7 zillion people repeatedly checking their browsers – or rushing to configure IMAP because IMAP access to GMail was working, albeit with slow spots. The amount of traffic heading into GMail’s servers must have been rather massive.

Scattered amongst the plaintive wails of anguish were naturally those pointing to problems with so many people relying on Google’s services… and pointing out the problems of pushing services into the “cloud”… etc.

All of which are valid concerns, of course, but I suspect the reality is that in a few hours or a day or two this will long be forgotten. Google’s Gmail was down for a few hours. Next topic….

Google just makes Gmail so seductively easy to use. I imagine people will just keep on going (although one hopes people will look into either IMAP or Google Gears so that they do have a local copy).

gmaildown-twitter-2.jpgMeanwhile, the tweets continue… (as now everyone needs to tweet that the service is back up for them, of course!)

P.S. And I should say that I am as guilty as anyone as tweeting about Gmail being down.


If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.


Technorati Tags:
, , , , ,

The Firefox Add-on/Extension that I want – saving all tabs across all windows

There’s a Firefox Add-on/Extension out there that I want… badly. Here’s what I want it to do:

  1. Bookmark all my tabs across all my windows into a bookmark folder that I can name.
  2. Let me go back through those bookmarked tabs to find individual ones I want.

That’s all I want… take a snapshot of all the tabs in the all the windows… and then let me get back to that data easily.

The add-on Tab Mix Plus almost gets me there. It does my #1 above in that it will capture all my tabs across all my windows. But unless I’m missing something it doesn’t let me do my #2… it treats the capture of all my windows and tabs as a “session” and lets me save “sessions”. But I can’t (that I can see) easily access individual pages that I had opened. I can reload the session… but that’s it. All or nothing. If I want to just get to one page that I had open, I’m out of luck.

There is, of course, the built-in “Bookmark All Tabs…” option in Firefox’s Bookmarks menu, but this only works for a single window. I have to do it for each of my various windows… which can take a while.

Now why do I want this? Largely it’s the way I work… a large part of my work involves researching various emerging new technologies. When I’m in a deep dive, I may open up several windows each with a whole bunch of tabs. Sometimes explorations lead on to other explorations…. sometimes my current thread of research is interrupted by some other thread, which spawns its own windows…. and then there may be yet another thread of research I’m interested in based on something I saw in my Twitter or RSS feed.

It’s fairly routine for me to have 8, 9 or 10 Firefox windows open, each with some number of tabs. A recent save with Tab Mix Plus was of 9 windows and 53 tabs.

Now it’s unfortunately also fairly routine that some tab somewhere will have some bad code in the page that will cause Firefox to start eating up my CPU. At which point I have to try to figure out which tab it is – or living with a slower (and HOT) MacBook Pro. And at some point I’ll want to restart Firefox so that I can have my computer back.

Ergo… my interest in this Add-on/Extension. I’d like to just take a snapshot of where all my research is, restart Firefox, and then be able to go back to parts of the windows that I had open before.

Seen anything like this?

P.S. And yes, this is one reason I’m looking forward to Google Chrome coming out on Mac OS X… it has that “Task Manager”-like view that lets you identify (and kill) whichever tab it is that is going rogue. (And yes, I know there’s a proof-of-concept browser on the Mac that is similar, but given some feedback I’ve heard I’ve been wary of trying it out.)


If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.


Technorati Tags:
, , , , , ,

Why Apple’s move to take iTunes DRM-free matters…

After tweeting this in response to the MacWorld keynote today:

twitterdanyork-itunesdrm.jpg

I had a couple of people ask me what DRM is all about and why it matters. So here’s my take on why DRM for music matters to me.

“DRM” is “Digital Rights Management” and if you want the gory details Wikipedia has a lengthy article but essentially DRM is “copy protection” in either software or hardware form that restricts your access to some digital media to only “authorized” devices/programs/computers/etc.

In the context of iTunes, it is the software that restricts you to only being able to play purchased music on specific computers or devices. When you buy a song from the iTunes Music Store (that has DRM), you can play that song only on computers that are authorized through your iTunes Music Store account. If I recall correctly, you are limited to 5 computers. If I have a new laptop or iPod or whatever, I have to authorize that device before it can download and play the music.

Proponents of DRM for digital music files, primarily the music companies, promote DRM as a way to ensure that artists (and those companies) get paid. Their fear is that without DRM people will just wildly copy music all over the place and the companies and the artists won’t be paid. And to a certain degree this is probably a valid fear.

The problem is that to a user DRM is often a royal pain-in-the-neck.

If I have a physical CD that I rip into online music files on my system, I can then move those files to any other server, to another disk, to another music player, to another laptop. There is no DRM and I can just move those digital files around the same way that I could a physical CD. It makes it trivial when you find that all your music is filling up one system and you want to move it to another and have music play out of that system instead of the one you are using now.

With DRM-restricted music, you can’t always do this. You have to authorize the new system. When I went to sync a new iPod to one of my systems, I had issues where it couldn’t download the music because it wasn’t authorized, etc., etc.

It makes me not want to buy music online.

Or, at least, DRM-restricted music. After having so many headaches recently with moving some music around when I was trying to free up room on a system, I decided that for a future purchase I was going to find DRM-free versions, even if it meant going out and purchasing the physical CD and ripping the CD into MP3s. Then, of course, I discovered the Amazon MP3 Downloads. Same basic prices as iTunes (cheaper in many cases) and without any DRM.

I own the digital music files and I can do with them whatever I want to do.

I can move them around. I can put them on different music players in my house…. basically everything that I can do with a physical media like a CD (or tape or album for those who remember such things). And yes, those who are unethical can of course copy them and give them to other people. But the point is that the digital media is now mine to do with as I wish exactly like the physical media is. I am in control.

I have therefore almost no incentive to purchase from the iTunes Music Store when I can get it from Amazon (unless, of course, the music is exclusively available in iTunes).

Steve Jobs wrote about this back in February 2007 when he wrote this:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Today, it seems, Apple has reached that state… they said that 8,000,000 songs will be available DRM-free now and all 10,000,000 songs will be available soon. You will need to pay a bit more (and that extra 30 cents probably goes to the record companies) but at least it is mine and I can play it wherever and whenever I want.

That is why I was so pleased with the Apple announcement.


If you enjoyed this post, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.


Technorati Tags:
, , , ,

Twitory, Twithority and the quest to rank Twitter search results by authority

Do we need a tool that ranks Twitter search results by number of followers?

That’s been one of the big debates circulating through the Twittersphere / blogosphere since Loic LeMeur kicked off the conversation over the weekend. I haven’t had the time to weigh in, but Neville Hobson put up a good post about two search sites: Twitority and Twithority. (And yes, there are two web sites that do almost exactly the same thing that have a one-letter difference in their domain names!)

In my own brief testing, I rather liked how TwitHority provided a two-column view of results by ranking and results by time. Nice to see. On the other hand, I liked how Twitority (no H) provides a Technorati-like way to search by degree of authority (although I have to wonder what they set a “lot” at, as it never turned up results for me).

Personally, I do like the option of being able to rank search results by number of followers. Yes, I understand that the number of followers is meaningless in so many ways… and that it can also be gamed by someone who, for instance, sets up tons of bogus twitter accounts. I realize that it’s a very imperfect measurement. Still, it is a measurement that’s out there. And the fact remains that if someone tweets something about you or your product/brand/service out to 10,000 people, odds are pretty good that it will potentially be read by more people than if someone tweets it out to, say, 20 people.

We’ll have to see how these sites work out… but in my mind I’m glad to see someone trying to help us make sense out of all the data out there.


If you enjoyed this post, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.


Technorati Tags:
,

Is a “blog comment system” from Disqus and IntenseDebate really necessary?

Which blog comment system is better – Disqus or IntenseDebate? That’s the subject in Scott Jangro’s great post: “Comment Systems Review Redux” as well as his earlier post about evaluating such systems.

I admit that I’m still a bit cautious about using either. I understand some of the arguments for using such systems instead of just the “regular” comment system of your blog platform… but I’m not yet convinced it’s worth doing. Scott’s review is very helpful, yet raises these questions:

  • Comment Spam – As Scott notes, human spammers will get through most anything. Part of my question is what do you get with Disqus or IntenseDebate that you don’t get with, say, Akismet?
  • Community – One of the more compelling arguments for using a system is that it will help create a “community” among those who frequently comment – yet Scott seems to indicate that this isn’t terribly useful so far. So what, then is the value of such a system?

I guess my other concerns include:

  • Load Time – Are there any metrics out there on what, if any, time is added to the load time of using a blog comment system? One of my concerns right now across all my blog sites is that by including all these various other services, I’m increasing the amount of time it takes to load the page. Look at the right columns of this page… content in some of the blocks there is loaded via pulling RSS feeds, which adds to the display time.
  • Availability – How “available” are these systems? i.e. what assurances do I have that they’ll be up and running? What happens if they are not available? Will people still be able to leave comments? Will the post still load?

Obviously I need to do some more digging and research. But I guess I’m still not clear on the exact problem that Disqus and IntenseDebate are trying to solve. Now I don’t deal with zillions of comments on this site, so perhaps I’m simply not the target audience.

Regardless, I’m still watching and monitoring… and I’m very glad to see articles like this that help differentiate between the different systems.


If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing to the RSS feed or following me on Twitter or identi.ca.


Technorati Tags:
, , , , ,

Noupe: “50 Most Beautiful Icon Sets Created in 2008”

50mostbeautifuliconsets.jpgAre you fan of well-designed icons? Would you like some new icons to use on our blog or web site?

As a long-time fan of design in general, I was pleased to learn from my Twitterfeed (I’m sorry, I don’t remember from who!) of the “50 Most Beautiful Icon Sets Created in 2008” on the Noupe blog. Some very cool icon sets in there… many/most free and others commercial.

I love to see the range of creative ideas people come up with…


If you found this post useful or enjoyable, please consider subscribing to the RSS feed for this blog or following me on Twitter or on identi.ca.


Technorati Tags:
, ,