I suppose it shouldn’t be very surprising to me that the resorts in Atlantic City charge you for every single amenity that they can, for every step you take on their property, and for every bite or sip of anything while you’re in the resort. This is the land in which retirees sit transfixed on three tumbling numbers – hoping they’ll line up and their life will somehow change.

Walking through the casinos Eliza and I saw older men and women, smoking and drinking, working two and three machines at a time – simply eking out the remainder of their existence at the mercy of the smoke, liquor, and gambling control boards. It isn’t a pretty sight. I’m all for a good game – this isn’t what this is. This is bloodletting and the vein is the pension plans of the retired and the drug and alcohol induced whims of newlyweds.

Did I mention we had a good time? For those of us with self control, the motivation to seek out the side streets, and the wherewithal to side-step the money hungry schemes – Atlantic City can be fun.

I suppose the part of all of this that makes me upset the most is that the Internet is a commodity nearly everywhere else in the world. Cafes, “cheap” motels, even the local car garage. It is a service. Like providing a phone book, phone, TV, business services, and “things to do” sheet all in one.

I’m just looking forward to the day when the Internet is as ubiquitous as electricity.

A few years ago I made it a goal to read a book a month for a year. I did OK. I didn’t reach my goal but I found time to read a fair number of books and had a great time doing it.

But now I’m finding it hard to get through a single book, or even a few chapters of a book. I find it especially hard to read long form on the iPad. With a flick of my fingers I can check Twitter, Facebook, my email, CNN.

Most books have rough parts. Parts that drag, lull, or seem to slow way down. You expect it. And when I came to these parts in past I would simply power through them. But now, if I find even a few sentences in a row that do not keep my attention I feel like I should move on, close the book, and read something else.

OK. We get it. We are probably all suffering from this trend. So how am I going to conquer it? Simple; practice. I’m going to retrain my attention span. I’m going to sit down with something – a book, a project, maybe even some time for meditation – and spend 30 minutes with it. Then, I’ll progress from there.

For whatever reason this hasn’t really affected my work or my personal research projects. I’m guessing that deadlines have something to do with that.

I’ll report back on my progress.

Illustrated by Christoph Niemann.

Jim Louderback, the CEO of Revision3, also provided his reasoning on the matter. I believe his comparison to Howard Stern and satellite radio is apt.

I think this bold move is great for a company like Revision3 to make. I hope there is some dialogue that carries on as a result of this move that, at the very least, puts the Internet into the mix for anyone that does traditional TV and wants something different. It may not be Conan’s choice but if it even makes it “a choice” for Conan that will be a success.

The Boxee Box, a mini-square-ish computer with the sole purpose of running Boxee on a television, is becoming more compelling with every press release. Made by D-Link this little box is being reported to hit the market at under $200 and to have one heckuva remote control.

At that size, with that design, that price point and with a remote control that sports a QWERTY keyboard on the back I see no reason not to get a Boxee Box. I’m still looking forward to details on the way it integrates with the home network though.

But then came this statement by Steven Frank of Panic (whom I interviewed in September of this year):

“Yes, but have you ever read the privacy policy for your _current_ DNS? I know I haven’t.”

This has Google’s public DNS casting a slightly different shadow now doesn’t it? Your ISP, while they probably do have a policy for privacy in place, has more than likely never shared that policy with you. Or, even if they have, you may not have read it.

Some people took Steven’s statement to mean that ISPs and other DNS providers do not have privacy policies. That isn’t how I take the statement at all and it isn’t how he meant it. He specifically said, “have you ever read the privacy policy from your current DNS”? He didn’t say anything about there not being any to read.

For the last few years I’ve used OpenDNS. They have a privacy policy right here. But, as Steven predicted, I’ve never read it. I’ve never thought about reading it. I was never worried about OpenDNS’ intentions with the data. So why would I be afraid of Google? They have my email, my documents, my calendar, all of my search history, my ad revenue, etc. etc.

What would I care if they have a log of where I’ve gone online? I don’t.

At first it was all about how to get the bits from here to there. Then it was how to link them together and to navigate through them. Then it was about adding media. Next came display ports and fitting well-designed information on them using both text and rich media together. The next big challenge was bandwidth – using it efficiently, increasing it, and making it affordable. And on and on the challenges came and went.

The next challenge for Web designers, according to Jason Santa Maria‘s article on A List Apart titled On Web Typography, will be choosing font faces. Until somewhat recently a Web designer would have to go through some technical fire-circles to use font faces outside of the normal ‘system fonts’ that come standard on every computer in the world. Due to the limited choices, designers haven’t had too much of a challenge about what font to use where.

Not anymore.

Web designers, according to Jason, are going to have to dive into Typography like never before. They will need to learn what font faces go well together, how many to use, how to use weight and selection to invoke certain emotions, etc. He lays out some really great rules to follow in the article but even he admits that his rules are breakable. His point is, roll up your sleeves and be prepared to work hard at this.

Two things excite me about the future of Tyography on the Web. The first is that we’re going to see an explosion of Web sites that incorporate font faces that we haven’t really seen on our screens. You know that feeling you get when you see a really well designed poster, magazine, book, manual, or anything else that is printed thesedays? You’re about to have those same feelings when you look at Web sites. The second is that old school designers, those that got ink on their hands when they started their career, are now the guys that know more than the new guys. The technical hurdles for using non-standard font faces on Web sites have been removed and the creative juices can now begin to flow from even the most non-technical designers. The field is wide open.

In a word, the world of type on the Web is getting interesting.

These facts are nothing new and, I’ll bet, do not allude those that built these services. But, they see a general use and purpose for these services and decided to provide their own solution to the problem.

The problem is that, in some cases, you need a shorter URL than the one provided by a particular Web site. Web sites with incredibly long URLs (like Amazon, Google Maps, or search results on a site) can be cumbersome to deal with in situations like writing email, Twittering (I’m cdevroe by the way), and sending SMS messages. URL shorteners attempt to solve this problem by creating links to these pages much easier by providing a significantly shorter URL that simply redirects to the URL that you chose.

Seems innocent enough. Seems simple enough. However, by creating a shorter URL that represents a longer one you’re, as Joshua states, adding unneeded layers that could potentially fail overtime. If the URL shortening service manages 1,000,000 redirects, and suddenly goes down, those redirects no longer work. This is a big problem.

For services like Twitter, which benefit greatly from these URL shortening services due to their short message limit, they stand to have millions and millions of dead links. Right now, by default, Twitter uses TinyURL to automatically shorten URLs to help them fit into the 140 character limit for SMS messages. Jason Kottke suggested that Twitter create its own URL shortening service so that they can guarantee it be around forever and to replace all of the short URLs it had created in the past. I’m going to go one step further and suggest that they buy Bit.ly.

While Twitter has chosen to use TinyURL I believe this was because Bit.ly wasn’t around when they added the TinyURL functionality. Bit.ly is more on par with Twitter’s real-time efforts. Twitter would immediately get their own URL shortening service that has, on top of it, a very good statistics package to show how those links are being used, where they are clicked on from, how many people clicked them, and a service that has a good API.

Two fans of Shaq decided to go to a diner in their hometown because Shaq Twittered that he was there. They showed up and, indeed, he was there. Shaq asked, via Twitter, if any Twitter-peeps were in the diner. They raised their hands. Shaq asked them to come over. They took some photos, shook hands, and left. One of the guys wrote about it on their blog (at Shaq’s request no less).

Since then Shaq has asked that people be more brave about coming to say hi. He even said to his followers that they have a special bond in that they are all on Twitter. In fact, at this very moment Shaq is in Miami and giving away two tickets to the first people to come up and touch him.

The fact that this all started at a diner just makes it all the better. I love diners.

Side note: You may follow me on Twitter. I’m cdevroe. The_Real_Colin, if you will.

Then you have the health conscious individuals that focus on eating smaller meals much more often.  Proven to keep your metabolism raging throughout the day. Coupled with a good routine of exercise this is the sure-fire way to keep healthy and energetic.

But this post has nothing to do with food.  It has to do with reading habits.

I love words. Reading them, writing them, seeing them crafted in ways that I can only aspire to.  Because of this I read a lot.  But I don’t read books (as often as I’d like).  I read blogs, link lists, and tidbits of information strewn throughout the World Wide Web.

The link lists that I subscribe to are like little bits.  Snacks, if you will.  The really good ones will sum up entire articles in only a few sentences so that I’m not forced to read the entire linked-to-resource to find out why that person found it interesting.  Really bad ones do the opposite.

The blogs that I subscribe to, in general, are well-written, hand-crafted, and consistently of high-quality, interesting information.  The others are generally related to my work or things I’m interested in learning about.  There are, also, the few that seem to fill in the cracks to make my subscription list more human and fun like photo blogs, blogs written by friends or family, and Web comics.

Lately I’ve been questioning my information in-take.  What is better; reading these little bits of information rather than chewing on the whole meal, or maybe the other way around?

The more I think about it, the more I realize how new this dilemma is.  Before the advent of the Internet the only way to get this much information at one time was to have a stack of books or magazines sitting in front of you, rifling through them as fast as your thumbs would allow, and reading a single paragraph from each page as you did it.  You’d probably think someone doing that was crazy but that is exactly what it feels like I’m doing.

Have you ever spoken to someone who knows 20% about a topic?  Sure they can hold their own in passing conversation about the topic so long as the conversation doesn’t last longer than 30 seconds.  Once the conversation gets specific, the “20 percenter” is left standing there trying to catch up to the conversation and realizing they don’t know anything at all about the topic.

I’m beginning to think that unwittingly I’m going to end up being that person.  A topic will arise at a gathering that I’ve read only four sentences about and I’ll answer the inevitable question of “Have you heard about (insert topic here)?” with a resounding “Yes!”.  Then I’m caught.  I’ve just stepped through the door of saying that I know something when I truly don’t.  Well, yes, I’ve read four sentences about how the Mars-lander was able to take a solid, ice-like material, and turn it into water (H2O), but I know absolutely nothing more about the topic.

So what do I do?  Stop reading link lists?  Perhaps.

But then what about blogs?  More often than not blog posts by friends, family, or even those related to the industry I work in do little more than entertain, catch me up on “the news”, or completely distract me from what I should be doing.  Very, very rarely have I found a blog post to be wholly beneficial to have in my brain.

Think about it.  When was the last time you remembered a blog post, in its entirety, to solve a problem you encountered.  Right away you’re probably thinking about a problem you had with your iPhone, or some sort of electronic device, that you fixed because you read a blog post about it.  That may be true.  But couldn’t you have found that information by doing a quick Google search?

Since the Egyptians began beating up papyrus plants some 5,000+ years ago humans have used “books” ((Paper based products like scrolls, books, and loose-leaf paper included.)) so why should I be any different?  I really enjoy reading books.  The tangibleness of a book is much better than reading on-screen, which is part of it, but the other part is the wholeness of books.  It is an entire work in one spot.  Blog posts, for the most part, are just pieces of ideas and opinions about a given topic rather than an explanation about an entire topic.  More often than not they take for granted the fact that the reader understands the topic being discussed (perhaps due to context or just because it is something that is considered general knowledge by the audience).

So do I unsubscribe from every-single-blog, shutdown my computer, and just go to a library every time I need to learn something? I’d say absolutely not.  But I do think there is a balance and I’m going to work at striking it.

I recently gave Pownce a spin for a few days and I really like it. Being that I do not use the SMS features on Twitter, I actually like Pownce much better than Twitter. I’m not going to dive into all of the reasons I like Pownce better because that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I am being forced to use Twitter over Pownce, sorta, because of “community pressure”.

Here is the breakdown of community pressure as I see it. There are a few reasons why we use services that, even though we like a different one, we still use the service.

1. All of our friends are on the service.
2. There is more activity on the service.
3. Everyone uses the service.

All of our friends are on the service. This is a pretty compelling reason to use any service really. If everyone you “know” is using that particular service, you’re bound to check it out and be part of the action. If the only reason you use Twitter is to keep up with what your friends are doing, and not because you like it more than another service that offers the same features, then you fall into this particular facet of community pressure.

There is more activity on the service. Nearly everyone of my “friends” on Twitter has a Pownce account. Yet, they don’t use it. So, it isn’t a matter of them not knowing about Pownce, it is more about them not actually using the account they created. Why? Probably because everyone that has a Twitter account is using it right now. The activity is contagious and spurs more activity.

I have yet to meet anyone that says that Pownce doesn’t do something that they want it to, or, that it is inferior to Twitter in anyway. (With the exception of SMS, of course.) I believe that if everyone with a Pownce account shifted their daily activities from Twitter to Pownce at the same time, that the reverse could be said for Twitter that is being said now about Pownce, that it is a ghost town. It is all about the activity.

Everyone uses the service. This may not fit with the Twitter / Pownce scenario as well as it does with the YouTube / (everyone else) scenario. Here is a quote from a recent article by Ryan Carson of Carsonified that he wrote about using YouTube to promote your message.

“I’d rather use Vimeo because it’s beautiful, but the truth is there’s a lot more people on YouTube. If you compare 90 views on Vimeo to 10,367 on YouTube there’s just no comparison.” — How to use YouTube to get your message out

Ryan expresses that he actually likes Vimeo more than YouTube, but it doesn’t matter because his goal of reaching as many people as possible is better accomplished using YouTube. I like Pownce more than I do Twitter, but it doesn’t matter, if I want to be part of the conversation I am forced to use Twitter because that is where the conversation is happening.

I’m still not sure what the solution to community pressure is or even if there is one. You can’t fight trends. Being “first to market” is still one of the largest advantages in any industry, period. Even when teams like Pownce and Viddler innovate in ways that previous teams doing similar things have never done, they still end up with the same challenge of gaining market share by “stealing” it away from those that may have it simply because they were first, not because their the best.

Then again, these shifts usually happen over long periods of time. Fads don’t change in one year, but have patterns over decades. The Internet is a different beast, where it seems like these patterns have a much shorter wave-length, but they do change, and it is possible to find niches. I’m looking forward to the point where all services are so wide open, and applications are at the end-points, and which service you use no longer becomes as relevant. But that may yet be a little ways off.

Why do you use the services that you do?

Well, Roxeanne of Beach Walks with Rox, decided to reply to that post with a slightly different twist on the same idea. She says there is no need to keep up-to-date on everything all the time, but she’d rather search for something once she needs it.

Great idea. Why keep up with everything when you may not even need that information? Just look it up later. This reminds me of another famous great mind Albert Einstein (yes I’m comparing Roxeanne to Einstein) who:

When one of Albert Einstein’s colleagues asked the eminent physicist for his telephone number one day, he reached for a telephone directory and looked it up. “You don’t remember your own number?” the man asked, understandably startled. “No,” Einstein replied with a shrug. “Why should I memorize something I can so easily get from a book?” — via Anecdote

I am not sure if this is fact or fiction but the idea rings true regardless. The Internet is an enormous phone book that can be consulted at anytime using powerful tools like Yahoo! or Google whenever you feel like you need some information. And as Roxanne says “…you might find something even better…” than what you would have if you’d kept an out-of-date bookmark of that information from the past.

If you aren’t already subscribed to Beach Walks with Rox I certainly suggest you check it out. The show is ran by two of my friends (whom I’ve not yet met) in Hawaii and it is one piece of entertainment (though I think Beach Walks has an enormous amount of value beyond simple entertainment) that I will never get rid of.

Thanks for responding Roxeanne and “Secret Cameraman”. Keep up the great show!

There are also some other great replies to that post in the comments, so be sure to check out those too.

[tags]beach walks, video, personal, thoughts, entertainment, hobbies, internet, web, thinking, roxeanne darling, hawaii[/tags]
[slug]re-entertain-yourself[/slug]

Being entertained by today?

The world continues to shrink due to the speed at which information is broadcast worldwide. This makes it really easy to tap yourself into pretty much whatever type of information you want and soak it all in. However, regardless of how small the world is perceived to be because of technological and information distribution advancement – the world is still huge. The amount of information found on the Internet is increasing at an immeasurable rate. In other words; you will never be able to keep up.

Let’s say for example that you are interested in space. By now you probably know that I have a modest amount of interest in space that continues to grow. The amount of information on the Internet about space is staggering. I can imagine a kid walking into a library years ago and pulling an entire section of books off the shelf dealing with space and being overwhelmed with the amount of information he has to catch up on. Even with modern day tools to help us find exactly what we’re looking for, this feeling remains very much the same for me. But this is a good thing – the bad thing would be to try to “keep up-to-the-day” on a particular subject globally, since it proves to be near impossible to do unless you are a researcher by trade.

Call it information overload. But there are ways to combat this. Be specific in what you are looking for and the amount of information on the specific thing can be whittled down into something manageable. Do not “tap your brain” into the Internet and hope that you have the time, or the ability, to weed through the right, the wrong, the bad, and the good. Eventually the cream will rise to the top.

Being yourself?

More specifically; finding out what your personal interests are. I get the whole “social web” thing that allows us to monitor hundreds if not thousands of topics or people in various ways. It allows us to interact with people who have similar interests than us regardless of geography, economic situation, or language. I completely agree that the Web is a cool place.

But have you ever found yourself being a follower of everything? I touched on this in “Taking advantage of the things you already own”, where people want the latest and greatest before they even know how to use what they already have. I’ve been guilty of this. But there is also the idea of the quantity of “things” you have too. Or the quantity of the interests you supposedly have. Do you have 1,000 hobbies? Or, perhaps you just have 1 but it changes every single day before you have a chance to fully explore the hobby you did yesterday? I think it is good to have a few hobbies, this way you can pick what you want to do today based on your mood – but having too many can lead you to never fully exploring any of them.

Where did all of this stem from?

Hopefully if you read this you are able to understand what I am trying to say and maybe you can even relate. I’m definitely not the best writer and I seem to leave stuff out pretty consistently so I hope I was able to at least make a little sense.

Where did this all come from? A few months back I was notified that my Flickr account was going to expire. It got me to thinking about whether or not I use Flickr to its fullest potential, and whether or not I could simply live with the free-account for what I actually do use it for. A few days later I got an email from Microsoft about my Xbox Live account expiring. I looked at the pile of dust on my Xbox and decided that I would not renew that either. I don’t want to be forced into using something because I’m paying for it. Then I looked at my telescope and watercolor paints collecting dust. Realizing I’d much rather use them than the Xbox. I spent some time outside collecting fossils (I used to spend the majority of my life outdoors and now it is the opposite) and I really wanted to start to find out what my “real world” interests were again. It used to be mostly natural things. The woods, animals, plants, dirt, anything outside. Then it completely switched where I spent over 10 years almost completely indoors learning how to do what it is I do now – but I believe there to be a balance and I am definitely not striking it. Call it my resolution for 2007 or just a personal goal – I want to balance things.

I was talking to my friend Dave O. the other day and he feels very much the same as I do. I’m guessing that we’re not alone. He was commenting to me how much he enjoyed playing games with his son, or just “petting the dog and staring at the wall”. I couldn’t agree more. I’m looking forward to this new challenge – and it will be a challenge. I’d like to start spending nearly the same amount of time pursuing real world personal interests as I do online ones.

The World only looks like it is shrinking when you look at it through a monitor.

[tags]personal, thoughts, entertainment, hobbies, flickr, xbox, nature, space, telescope, internet, web, thinking[/tags]
[slug]entertain-yourself[/slug]

There are several sites, some still in existence that I really do miss. I remember spending hours on the old Deviant Art just trying to find minimalist desktops and indy art. I also remember digging, refreshing (what is that anymore?) and bookmarking countless pages on The Force.net to find the latest and greatest information on release of the Star Wars Special Editions. I remember pulling my damned hair out trying to get ASP to do what I wanted by using Microsoft’s documentation.

It goes beyond sites though, since back then the web wasn’t about usage but rather building the foundation for what we have today. Using the Web in the 90s wasn’t, for me, about sharing photos and bookmarks, or creating and distributing content quickly and easily, it was about communication and expression of thoughts via hypertext. The more I think about Web 2.0, the clearer the picture becomes about the Web as a whole. We have an insanely far distance to travel before the Web becomes what it has the potential to be. Obviously services like Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Newsvine are getting closer to what we’d all love to see replacing Deviant Art, e-mailing bookmarks, and CNN, but they are still only very simple concepts done in fairly complex ways.

I listened to a few of the Carson Workshop podcasts and, I must say, I realized how complex our jobs sound to the “average uninformed developer”. Combine the complexity of learning the “best practices” in Web development with how many developers out there that are still using tables for layout, Microsoft Access databases, and reading Lockergnome for HTML tips, and you can see that we’re not even close to where we could/should be.

What makes it even worse is that the people that could be advocating these changes in the new and ignorant developers, are resting on their laurels or even bad-mouthing efforts to help out. Perhaps such efforts as Naked CSS Day won’t make a large impact on Web Standards Awareness, but who cares, at least Dunstan Diaz is trying to do something about it!

“Back in the day” (according to Dane Cook this was indeed a Wednesday) I was always amazed when new specs were released, new technologies developed, or different ways of accomplishing tasks were mastered. Nowadays, I see a lot of copying going on. Sure, we have our elite few that are definitely leading the innovation pack, but in the old days everyone was an innovator. If you couldn’t get something to work, you figured out a way to do it regardless. You busted down walls, you hacked like a mad-man, until finally the result you were looking for was accomplished. Nowadays, you run to Google and do about four searches and copy what someone else has done right from their site. Sometimes this is good, but if you find yourself doing this every time, it isn’t.

I suppose I miss the speed at which innovation seemed to be moving on the Web. Even at 56kbps and under, it surely seemed that the Web was changing faster in 1996-1999 than it is now. I think we’ve hit a Web 2.0 plateau where 10 major services were released and everyone else is trying to catch up with them instead of trying to do better than them.

Take microformats for example. A great effort. Standardize the way specific chunks of content are marked up, this way it will make it much easier to move, distribute, and work with going forward. However, some of these standards are just atrocious. I look forward to trying my hand at making some updates to some of those specs in the near future, but instead of trying to simply use microformats, we need more than just five people thinking about how to improve them.

Recently we’ve seen a gathering for an RSS Advisory Board. Thank heavens, the last guy that was running the show was not only an asshat, but he made Communism look like Kazaa (if you don’t get this joke you probably have a life, which is cool – can I borrow it?). I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with RSS in the near, and distant, future.

AJAX. Oh god, do not get me started. A superb effort has been put into improving not only awareness but accessibility, implementation, and documentation of the HTTPRequest Object. Sure, we’ve had these types of abilities for ages, but I still think all this “excitement” will lead to one good thing – improvements. Ajax, while not revolutionary at all, has caused many newbies to open their eyes to, not only standards (due to the use of XML, etc), but also to the thinking a little bit beyond the separation of presentation and content – but also of functionality. I’d like to put a name on this particular movement, but I doubt the World could hold such an acronym.

I said we’re on a plateau right now, but I think that might be incorrect. Rather, I believe we are on the escalator. The down escalator. And, instead of actually going down with it, we’re trudging onward and upward – each foot landing on the next step only to find another one approaching right after it. This battle to make the Web better may never really “end” but I definitely think we need to pick up the pace a little. Like back in the old days when we said “Screw you” to tables for layout, WYSIWYG editors that wrote horrible HTML, and oh yeah – Windows servers.

[tags]internet, web 2.0, ajax, web development, programming, microformats[/tags]