My Digital Makeover [dot] Net

Your Head (and your life) in the Clouds.

For at least the past year, okay, maybe two, there's been a lot of discussion about Cloud Computing and something of these discussions have been at best .... enigmatic, obscure or just plain opaque.  

First, a comment from the distant past:   A million years ago, I was working with HP on the introductionn of HP's line of consukmer PCs, the Pavillion.  One of the things I learned from that product introduction was that must innovations in  computing don't come from the business side of computing but from the consumer side.  For example:  USB slots and headphone jacks on the front of the computer?   That's all consumer innovation. 

Anyway, that draws me closer to the task at hand and that's cloud coputing.  My conteintion is that cusomers will adopts (or have already adopted cloud computing) at a much faster rate that businesses.

Webmail is just a case in point.  We can point all we want at the convenience of walking up to any networked PC and using our email, but the real boon here is that we do not every, never have to work about how much disk space our mail is taking up or, (and I'm not pointing fingers here), that last time your successfully backed up your computer. 

And, by the way, don't forget that your keeping your contacts there as well. 

gMail and Yahoo got into a competition about how much space they would give their users from free, but the big inflection point came when Amazon introduced S3, their version of unlimited, inexpensive storage.   Amazon's model is wholesale so several very smart little companies sprung up to capitalize on Amazone S3.  Peraonlly, I use Jungle Disk and a Fireforx extrenstion called OpenFox S3.  Hundreds of other samll companies have sprung up offer other specialized servcies, but, if all you want is something that looks like another diski on your desktop and and automated backup, Jungle Disk is absolutely the way to go.  It's cross platform which means I have it installed on my Ubuntu, Macs and Wi---dows machines. 

Other, less exoteric cloud computing services to consider would be where your story your photographs and, again, both Yahoo and Google have this covered for you.  I've been a fan of flickr since it's inception and have even been written up in a bood that describes an art project I created there. 

And, regarding things like documents and speaksheets and etc. Google has that covered for your as well. 

Sooner or later we're going to have some Serious Questions regarding hof much of our lives we've giving over to Goggle and Yahoo, But in the meantime, I'm going to put as much as I can into the clould and let someone else worry and drive failures, back up / restores and disaster recovery. 

Don't let this happen to you.

Computer Weekly dicided to go all dishy about how certain puublic relations people at certain pulic relations companies and certain business ended up stepping all over their .... reputation by Twittering before thinking.  I recommed the whole article business this one I must call out as it concerns one of the brightest lights of social media Public Relations. 

Top 10 Twitter marketing blunders in photos

Senior VP at PR company Edelman, Steve Rubel, decided to post a negative comment about PC Magazine on his  public Twitter feed. It read, “PC Mag is another. I have a free sub but it goes in the trash."

In response the magazine said it was considering a boycott of the PR company, and Rubel offered a public apology after the magazine editor-in-chief asked, “If we’re not relevant to Edelman’s employees, then how could we be relevant to their clients?”

[more]

You just updated Firefox and...

... some of your favorite plug-ins are now disabled.

I've just finished receiving a spate of email from readers along the lines of, "I just installed the new update to Firefox and I just found out that [fill in the blank] doesn't work anymore.  I know exactly what you mean.  You've spent the time to tune Firefox into a productivity machine.  Wisestamp is handline your tricked our signature for your web-based emails, sharethis owns your ability to pass along cool sites and articles to friends and delicious has a catalog of about five years worth of bookmarks.  --And they're gone.  All gone.

Well, not really.  Welcome to the world of being an early adoptor.

Call me jaded, but I've been in the business long enough to know what that a new software release is always going to be a Traumatic Event.  In these day of Web 2.0, even more so.  First, I neve use a ".0" release, these are the software releases numbered 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 etc.  The likelihood of a company announcing a clean, bug free .0 version is exactly that 0%.  At least wait for the .1 relase. 

Then, there's the issue of the new Web 2.0 interdependencies.  At last count, according to Mozilla, the company that publishes Firefox, there are more than 5,000 add-ons for the product.  And at last count, I'm using 27 extensions and only two different themes.  Some of these extensions are from companies that are actually in business and others are published as a labor a love by individuals.  (Let's give a special tip of the hat to Ms. Gina Trapani who publishes the series of "Better gMail," "Better gReader," etc. extensions that make so much for productive for me.) 

Here's the point, some of these people and companies publishing extensions and themes are going to be really on top of their game and the extension still won't be compatible with the brand, spankin' new release of Firefox for a couple of days, couple of weeks, or, sad to say, ever.  You have two choices:  One, upgrade right now and bit the bullet when you find out that your favorite extension is now out-of-date.  Two, mark your calendar for two weeks after the new release and save that date for your upgrade.  The odds are much better that the extensions have been re-coded to be compatible for the new release.  And, (thank you very much, Firefox) your extensions will automagically up-date when you install the new release. 

Just in case some of you might be reading this and haven't made the switch to Firefox and are asking yourself, "Why on earth would I want to add that complication into my life?  I'll just sit tight on iE (or Chrome or Opera)?  You make a good argument but once you've experienced the power and flexibility and ability to customize your browser experience with Firefox, I just don't know how you could ever be satisfied with anything else.  True, Chrome runs like a scalded dog and Opera has some good cross platform benefits, but...

I just Firefox on three different platforms (Ubuntu, Mac and ... you know, the OS from Seattle).  My bookmarks, passwords, history and auto-fills are completely synched across half-a-dozen different machines thanks to xMarks (formerly Foxmarks).  My browsers are tricked out so that the menus and interface is completely minimized (to maximize my screen acreage for demonstration purposes), and I love having access to my Amazon S3 disk through my S3Fox extension.  Oh, and my to-do list is also incorporated through the Toodledo plug-in.  I could go on but I won't bore you with increasingly arcane and geeky references. 

And I like the idea that Firefox is supported by such a large community of people who have invested so much time and energy into the platform.  --It's something I look for when selecting software or a platform:  How big is the community?  I don't ming a lot of other people doing some of my thinking and research for me. 

So, hang in there.   Don't be such an eager beaver.  Whoa up and let the rest of the community catch up with you so you'll have a softlanding when you do finally upgrade. 

The cone of silence.

I have synesthesia and I won't burden you with a unnecessary information except to say that working in a cube farm has deleterious consequences.  Perhaps you too are bothered by the snorting next door, or the telephone conversation two rows over that is absolutely TMI.  What to do?

If you're part of the iPod generation, plug in, turn on and off you go.  For myself, listening to music is an active experience.  I'm engaged in parsing what's being played.  So I turn to a couple of other blanketing sonic distractions. 

First, I prefer headphones to earbuds because headphones visually informs someone approaching you that  you can hear the glide of their Hushpuppies across the industrial carpet.  It's a signal.  It's letting people know that you are involved.  Regarding headphones, I was priviledged to work for a public relations agency representing the patent holders of noise reduction technology and if you haven't experienced what happens when you power on a pair of noise reduction headphones all I can tell you is that it's magic.   Being a man of simple means, but well connected, I read on Brad Fitzpatrick's journal (that would be the Brad Fitzpatrick that founded LiveJournal) that the Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7 QuietPoint Active Noise-Cancelling Headphones were twice as good and half the price of the more famous Bose Quiet Acoustic line of headphones.  I always take the advice from people smarter than I am and have been very happy with my pair. 

Now, regarding what you'll listen to, I want to steer you to something that lays down a background of sound.  Perhaps you've seen on the badge on my blog that points to soma.fm.  I highly recommend soma.fm for background ambient music.  Or, perhaps you're more into the natural sounds of the world and in that case, birdsongradio might be a perfect match for you.  But if you prefer something simpler, there's simplynoise which comes in the flavors spanning white, pink and brown/red. 

Oh, one more thing that recommends listening to ambient music or white noise is being spared the embarrassment when a neighbor comes over to your cube to let you know that your humming along with your favorite jam on your headphones is driving her crazy.  --It happens.

Please Pay Attention, Please.

Wonderful article in today's NYTimes, about the new etiquette of using, or not using, our computers, smartphones, etc. at meetings.  I've seen many benefits and many abuses.  Once upon a time I worked for Pam Alexander who took almost verbatim notes during meetings on her notebook computer and then instantly send out the notes to the appropriate account team.  And we were expected to do the same.  It gave the agency a tremendous advantage.

On the other hand, I have been annoyed to the point of table pounding (really) by people who are trying to proces down their email queue during a meeting.  (The claim of multitasking carries no weight for me.)  

It is routine for Washington officials to bow heads silently around a conference table — not praying — while others are speaking, said Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Although BlackBerrys are banned in certain areas of the State Department headquarters for security reasons, their use is epidemic where they are allowed.

“You’ll have half the participants BlackBerrying each other as a submeeting, with a running commentary on the primary meeting,” Mr. Reines said. “BlackBerrys have become like cartoon thought bubbles.”

And I do enjoy the comment about how some of us have begun using IMs and SMS as back-channels during meetings.  During meetings, I've send people in t he meeting messages ranging from "Wake Up!" to forming and reforming alliances during a spirited debate.  "Back me up on this and I'll...." 

Overall, I think the most important thing we can give our children, friends, clients, bosses, staff is our attention.  Time is a non-renewable resource and attention units is a prized currency.

[Link to the story in the NYTimes]

Sharing More About Sharing This

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

Your Social Media Crash Course -- The Results Are In.

Discover Simple, Private Sharing at Drop.io

CBS News Covers My Digital Makeover

Mr. Cringely Talks about Blogging.

Mr. Cringely's comments are particularly insightful.

IBM & MIT Discover the Value of Social Connections

I've consulted with IBM.  It was back in the big days.  The PC AT had just been introduced by the entry systems division of IBM, the renegades sequestered way down in Boca Raton.  I worked with a brilliant team of people assigned to a very specific task:  use broadcast media to teach people about personal computers.  From there, we introduced the PS/2 and a ton of new technologies.  But I mustn't wax on so nostalgically. 

I came to understand and deeply respect IBM.  I learned that IBM could do almost anything it set out to do.  Its patent portfolio -- the richest, deepest and widest in the world -- signals what IBM is really made of. 

MIT has it's own track record but I don't have any personal touchpoints there as I attended the school on the other side of town. 

The combined forces of IBM and MIT have been focused on social networking issues and Business Week is spilling the beans.      Here's how the reporter, Stephen Baker, sets the stage for the first of three stories Business Week decides to title, Value of Virtual Friends:

Messaging with the boss much? Maybe you ought to be. Workers who have strong communication ties with their managers tend to bring in more money than those who steer clear of the boss, according to a new analysis of social networks in the workplace by IBM (IBM) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The research, released this week, even assigns a dollar value to e-mail interaction with an employee's managers. Among the group studied, several thousand consultants at IBM, those with strong links to a manager produced an average of $588 of revenue per month over the norm.

The results represent an early attempt to understand the value of the broadening variety of personal connections afforded by the Web. Users of social media rack up LinkedIn contacts, Facebook friends, and Twitter followers by the hundreds, if not thousands. But figuring out how big a difference all those contacts make in a person's life, financial or otherwise, is a far murkier matter.

That's why leading tech companies, including IBM, Microsoft (MSFT), and Yahoo! (YHOO), are hiring economists, anthropologists, and other social scientists to map and classify new types of friendships—and put a value on them.

Researchers at IBM Research and MIT's Sloan School of Management found that the average e-mail contact was worth $948 in revenue. To unearth that and other data, they used mathematical formulas to analyze the e-mail traffic, address books, and buddy lists of 2,600 IBM consultants over the course of a year. (Their identities were shielded from researchers, who viewed them only as encrypted numbers, known as hash codes.) They compared the communication patterns with performance, as measured by billable hours.

Here's a link to the story. 

And here's a link to the report:  Download ValueOfSocialNetworks,

I think we're beginning to see some noteworthy science on social networks, science that will illuminate the way we work.  Please pay attention.