Category Archives: Technology

Business & Marketing, Technology

I Picked a Fight with Guy Kawasaki

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Last night I picked a fight with Guy Kawasaki on Twitter. For those who don’t know, Kawasaki is a marketing genius, former brand evangelist for Apple and current venture capitalist. He’s a big name. One of his current projects is Alltop, a cool little site that offers the best of the web for any particular subject (say, church?).

I called Kawasaki out over the Alltop Twitterfeed, where anyone can sign up and let Alltop post tweets to their Twitter account. It’s essentially handing over the keys to your platform and ceding your voice to a commercial. A handful of people I follow on Twitter signed up when Kawasaki offered a signed copy of his new book. I started to notice when I saw friends posting tweets about stuff they normally didn’t talk about:

Is it stork time?: http://pregnancy.alltop.com is for you.

Mostly for lawyers: Electronic Discovery news: http://ediscovery.alltop.com

If you love bags, you’ll love this site: http://bags.alltop.com

And then different friends tweeting the exact same thing. I smelled a skunk. And it was Kawasaki.

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Technology

War of the Worlds on Twitter

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War of the WorldsYou may not have noticed yesterday, but aliens rose up and crushed mankind before succumbing to the common cold and dying off. One person described the mayhem like this:

“Smoking, smoldering hunks of buildings, cars, and people lay strewn about. The tripods have left the Warehouse District in ruins.”

If it sounds familiar, it should be. Some enterprising folks recreated the War of the Worlds radio drama on Twitter. Instead of fictional news accounts about aliens, people posted fictional Twitter updates about aliens. There were also fictional photos and even videos. Wired covered the story and perhaps as many as 10,000 happened upon the event.

And I’d wager many of them were confused.

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Blogging, Technology

Is Blogging Dead?

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Hard at WorkLast night I read a Wired magazine article about how Twitter, Facebook and Flickr have killed blogging. The article starts with this anti-blogging sentiment:

“Thinking about launching your own blog? Here’s some friendly advice: Don’t. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug.”

I’ve been blogging since 1998 (coming up on my 10-year anniversary!), so this is an interesting discussion for me. I definitely agree that Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and all the other content-publishing tools out there have changed the face of blogging. My own blogging has changed drastically since I began using Twitter.

But I don’t see the blog going away.

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Internet

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is Here

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Josh Whedon (of Buffy and Firefly/Serenity fame) has finally released his online superhero musical spoof, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day. It comes in three installments that will be released today, Thursday and Saturday. Then on Sunday night it will be taken down and you’ll need to wait until the DVD comes out (how diabolical!).

For now you can watch it at the Dr. Horrible site or buy it on iTunes.

This little musical bit of entertainment was conceived during the writer’s strike and put together on the cheap. And it’s pretty funny. It’s also receiving a lot of attention for something that amounts to 42-minutes of entertainment: TV Guide, Wired, MTV, Entertainment Weekly, Gawker. But we’ll take it.

Technology

Why I Returned my Nintendo Wii

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I owned a Nintendo Wii for less than 24 hours. For the uninformed, the Wii is Nintendo’s latest game system that seems to engage the non-gamer by using motion sensing technology. Basically instead of pushing buttons, you move the entire controller, much like a baseball bat or steering wheel. In short, it’s revolutionary.

I’ve been eyeing one of these systems since they came out in late 2006. But they’ve also been hard to come by. I’ve only seen them in the store once. Until Thursday night when we walked into Best Buy and they had four Wiis sitting on the floor. With a large pile of unspent birthday cash still on hand, I snatched up a Wii. I spent $330 on a Wii, an extra remote and an extra nunchuk (the controllers the Wii uses–it comes with one remote and one nunchuk, as well as the Wii Sports game), including tax. I planned to purchase one more game, Mario Kart, which was currently out of stock but would run another $50. So a $380 minimum investment.

We went home and played bowling, baseball, tennis and boxing (I think I might have lost every game, but that’s beside the point). The next morning when I woke up I was having second thoughts.

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Internet

I Want to Write a Fake Twitter Character

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OK, we all know that I’m a geek. But the latest and greatest proof of that is that my favorite posts on Twitter come from fictional characters. Darth Vader, Cobra Commander, Fake John McCain, Fake Barack Obama. I don’t know what it is, but I’m a sucker for the fictional updates (as long as they’re good–G.I. Joe’s General Hawk kind of sucked).

There’s something about getting an update from Cobra Commander that makes me laugh. Maybe it’s the thought of an evil character doing something as mundane as text messaging. Or maybe it’s just the burst of something over-the-top funny and short. Sometimes life gets a little too serious and you need a little funny.

Anyway, I love the fake Twitter characters. And I want to write one. I’m into too many things that don’t pay the bills, so if I go this route it’ll have to pay. I haven’t figured out how to make Twitter pay (neither have they, so I’m not alone), so if anyone has ideas I’m game. Or if anyone would like to hire me to create their fake Twitter character, I’m so there.

Adoption, Internet, Politics

McCain vs. Obama: Getting Answers on the Adoption Tax Credit

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About a week ago I was talking to a friend about the adoption tax credit that offers a $10,000 credit when you adopt. This friend claimed the credit was George W. Bush’s idea and lamented that if Barack Obama gets elected the credit will vanish. So I decided to sort out some facts. Which is harder than I thought.

To start with the basics, the adoption tax credit started in 1997 as a $5,000 credit and was raised to $10,000 in 2001 as a part of Bush’s tax cuts. Bush didn’t start the tax credit, though he did raise it. It’s also not clear if this is something Bush pushed for or if it was just part of the package. It’s also slated to expire in 2010 if it’s not renewed.

And this is where it gets tricky. Where do the current presidential candidates stand on renewing the adoption tax credit?
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Internet

Twitter Recap

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A friend commented the other day that I don’t blog anymore, I just twit. He’s right, the blogging has dropped off lately. Partially it’s from being busy, partially it’s from having Twitter as a release valve. But I haven’t forgotten about you. I do have several blog entries in me, they just haven’t happened yet.

Until they do, how about a little recap of the best stuff from Twitter…

  • Wondered why Barack Obama’s web site has no search function. Either I’m dumb and can’t find it, or their web team is dumb and didn’t include one. The way campaigns pack their sites with info, I don’t know how you get away with not having a search function.
  • Watched a couple episodes of Cleopatra 2525, a half hour, Xena-quality, sci-fi TV show, solely because it starred Gina Torres from Firefly/Serenity. Cleopatra has to be the campiest thing I’ve seen in a while. It was pretty bad.
  • Pointed people to Cookie Monster’s appearance on the Colbert Report. Hilarious.
  • Realized that Sandy Patti Cover Band and Steal My Catchphrase would be awesome band names.
  • Noted more lost public art in the Twin Cities. This time around it’s the mural on the old St. Paul police station at University and Dale.
Internet

10,000 Flickr Photos

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So this weekend my Flickr account surged past the 10,000 photo mark. Yes, I’m addicted. Currently I have a total of 10,098 photos that have been viewed 127,872 times.

  • 4,018 of those photos feature my daughter.
  • 1,880 feature art.
  • 1,133 feature my wife.
  • 914 feature me.
  • The most popular all time picture is The Wife Who Needed Spanking, which isn’t technically a picture (it’s a scan of an old newspaper and proof that the Internet is full of sickos—then again, I posted it).
  • The photo with the most comments (6, I don’t get many comments) is also not a photo, it’s a scan of a newsletter. After that it’s a tie for 1970s in-laws and the reviled Spruce Tree Building.
  • 1,476 of my photos have never been viewed (at least “viewed” as Flickr counts it).

Yay for online photos.

Technology

Twitter, Plurk, Bless You

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I’ve been using the mini-blog/messaging app Twitter a lot lately. You could say I’m addicted. I’ve also noticed that while Twitter has had problems in the past few weeks, lots of folks are checking out competitors like Plurk. I’m not a super-techie so maybe I’m missing this, but I want to know when someone is going to come up with a non-exclusive standard for the thing we do that I call Twittering.

Meaning, a bunch of years ago Blogger.com was one of the main blogging tools in town, but they weren’t the only one in town. You could still blog without them and read blogs without them. The medium triumphed, not necessarily the Blogger brand (and I imagine a lot of the usability of the blog brand has to do with RSS, yet another standard).

I want to see the same thing happen with Twitter. I want the medium to triumph, not just Twitter or Plurk or whoever. I don’t have time to reinvest in a new platform every so many months and it seems stupid to spread users of this medium across multiple platforms. I should be able to get messages from all my friends regardless of their system (hmm, kind of like cell phones). I’m not sure when, if or how that’s going to happen, but I hope it does.