You know the saying, about how the ones who supposedly should know better, well, don't. I was recently reminded of this after a couple of my own experiences. I was having lunch with a friend of mine who owns so many domains that she did a lookup on what she thought was a great name only to find out that she actually already registered it. So let me also come clean here, and tell you how I can also be like this friend and mess up too. I know it may hurt, but supposedly confession can be good.
So my first tale is about how I almost lost the subscriber list for this newsletter that you are reading in your comfy inbox right now. Yes, I have all sorts of backup routines that I have developed because of what happened many years when my office was above a music store (and a Subway, boy do I miss that convenience). The store had an electrical short that caused a small fire. Just before the fire started, I had ducked out for a few minutes to run an errand, and by the time I came back the fire department had roped off the building. Luckily, nothing was damaged in my office, other than the front door that the firemen broke down to make sure that the fire hadn't spread upstairs. Now, I had been doing my backups on tape. Where were those tapes you might ask? Sitting right next to my server. Since then I have gotten offsite backup religion big time and make sure that one copy of everything is always somewhere other than my office.
Or so I thought. The one thing – and I hope it is the only thing – that I didn't have a current backup for is the actual list of my subscribers. Well, I had done one in March, but I really didn't want to go through the process of trying to update that.
My mail list server used to be located in a friend of a friend's house. Granted, this person is one of the original Internet Wise Men. But still, even the wisest of wise men have server crashes from time to time, and his server crashed last week, taking my list down for a week. That was all the motivation that I needed to start a new list on a "real" provider (I am using EMWD.com, which offers Mailman hosting for $4 a month for low volume lists. They seem to know what they are doing, they are usually reachable via email queries, and I don't have to learn yet another list server's quirks since I have been using Mailman for several years now.) And it is relatively simple to make backup copies of the entire subscriber list: all it takes is sending a single email command to the server and storing the reply. Which I now will do on a regular basis.
What both of these experiences have taught me was that no matter how I analyze my data backup and procedures, there is always room for improvement. You can't think of everything. And the key to backups is doing them regularly. Sort of like flossing your teeth, which I need to do more often too. But not just relying on the guilt generated from not doing them (in the case of my teeth, by my hygenist) but a regular procedure that can easily and quickly be implemented so that it doesn't get postponed because something else of higher priority comes along.
Next I want to tell you about my new iPhone. Yes, I know, I am a little slow to embrace this baby, no need to abuse me about it. The story is within about an hour of getting the thing, I was on it talking to my daughter for tech support. The shame, I know. She thought it was funny. But then I had another question shortly after that. And this is after spending hours reading all sorts of stuff about all the 57 different analysts and tech bloggers that are in love with their iPhones and have done all sorts of cool stuff with theirs. Welcome to 2008, Strom.
Finally is my thoughts about WebInformant.tv, my new screencast product reviews site. After putting together the first bunch of videos, I realize that the content sits on four servers: one where the actual videos reside, one that hosts the Web site proper, another one that has the RSS feed, another server back in my office that has the original copies of the videos. And this doesn't count the numerous other servers that repurpose the videos, too.
Do I really need such a complex system to deploy this service? Not really, it just grew into this, because I wanted to use the best tools from a variety of places. Yes, I could eliminate the server that delivers the RSS, but the one that comes with the Web site is pretty lame. I know this is often how many of you end up with unsupported systems, but at least I have documented where all the files are kept and the process by which I post a new one (and this is of course backed up in a few places, too.)
So I hope you have enjoyed these tales of torment. Have a nice weekend, and keep those backups safe.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
The 140-character attention span
Call it GenT, the Twitter and texting generation. We are all becoming ADD, to the point where we can't spend large blocks of time concentrating anymore. We are so over-stimulated, what with 10,000 Web sites (or is 10 million, I can't accurately say) a minute being added to the collective cosmos, and updating all of our social network feeds, and whatnot.
Twitter, for those of you stuck back in the old school world where you still use your computer for communication, is the "micro-blogging" service that sends a 140 character line of text to your friends and followers who subscribe to your postings. You can use your mobile phone or a traditional Web page, and the information is sent almost instantaneously, at least when the service is running. I am not yet a fan. Texting I don't think I have to explain anymore.
But with texting and Twitter, what has happened is that we have created the first entirely post-email generation. Look at both of our presidential candidates: one doesn't use it personally, and the other has gone so GenT that he doesn't need email to get the word out to his supporters. (An aside: the current issue of Technology Review has an interesting article about Obama's use of social networks here:)
https://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21222
Those of us that grew up on email back in the quaint text-only, pre-Web days all know the reasons why we went with email: no phone tag, near-time responses, planet-wide connectivity, flattening organizations, micro-targeted responses. Yada yada.
Well, those same reasons are being used by the GenT'ers: in the time it would take me to compose a reasonably simple email message, I could have texted someone and gotten a response, posted it on my Twitter feed and had thousands of my closest "friends" tell me what they think, and moved on to my next activity. Email is so five minutes ago.
And email tag is just as much of a productivity drag – in some cases worse than voice mail hell. We have all gotten those endless threaded messages where we don't even remember what the original question that started the whole shooting match was about. Even exchanging Instant Messages is not fast enough, especially if your correspondents forget to turn on their "Away message" when they by chance get up from their chair for a few moments off-screen. You wonder what has become of them, and why aren't they not answering your IM?
When my daughter was in her early teens, it was IM that kept us connected. Now if I really need to find my kids, it is via text. Email is usually the worse way to try to get their attention None of them have Twitter feeds yet. I consider myself lucky.
Another trendlet: Thanks to all of these GenT services, now having a single monitor attached to your PC isn't enough screen real estate. You need at least two, and sometimes three LCDs to show all your scrolling feeds, IM buddy lists, and up-to-the-moment "tweets" in addition to the normal email and word processing windows. (I keep calling them "twits," that must be a Freudian slip.)
When was the last time you sat down for a couple of hours and got into a book? You know, those funny things that you buy from Amazon that don't have any electronic interface that you actually have to turn pages, and read every word? Talk about quaint, grandpaw. Back in my day, we used to walk five miles in deep snow to school, carrying these objects, too.
Nicholas Carr talks about this in his article in Atlantic this month entitled, "Is Google making us stupid?" Don't be misled by the hed. He talks about how his concentration wanes after reading a few pages, and "deep reading has become a struggle. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing." Indeed, I was fighting just getting to the end of his story, and that was only 4,000 words. Try tweeting all of that!
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
But we aren't stupider, I mean less smart, because of Google or all the GenT tech: we are just more impatient. One network manager at a small college told me how he deals with peer file stealing: rather than turn it off, he just adds a few seconds delay into the connection during the work day, so that the students bail out of the connection and come back at night when he turns off the delays. If he just shut it off, they would be motivated to figure out a way around the block, but most of the students are too ADD to abide by the delays and move on to something else, knowing they can come back at night to grab their files.
This post-email GenT stuff is ironic for me to say the least, especially to someone who wrote a book on Internet email, let alone reads lot of them still. Years from now we will look back on this period much like we examine other accidents of history, like the Truman Doctrine and the Dred Scott decision: things that seemed important at the time, but now are mostly the subjects of junior high research papers. Yes, email is still around for us old fogies that insist on using all of our hard-learned touch-typing fingers to communicate, but it won't be long now. In the meantime, you can subscribe to my feed here and keep up with all the important moments in my life:
http://friendfeed.com/davidstrom
Twitter, for those of you stuck back in the old school world where you still use your computer for communication, is the "micro-blogging" service that sends a 140 character line of text to your friends and followers who subscribe to your postings. You can use your mobile phone or a traditional Web page, and the information is sent almost instantaneously, at least when the service is running. I am not yet a fan. Texting I don't think I have to explain anymore.
But with texting and Twitter, what has happened is that we have created the first entirely post-email generation. Look at both of our presidential candidates: one doesn't use it personally, and the other has gone so GenT that he doesn't need email to get the word out to his supporters. (An aside: the current issue of Technology Review has an interesting article about Obama's use of social networks here:)
https://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21222
Those of us that grew up on email back in the quaint text-only, pre-Web days all know the reasons why we went with email: no phone tag, near-time responses, planet-wide connectivity, flattening organizations, micro-targeted responses. Yada yada.
Well, those same reasons are being used by the GenT'ers: in the time it would take me to compose a reasonably simple email message, I could have texted someone and gotten a response, posted it on my Twitter feed and had thousands of my closest "friends" tell me what they think, and moved on to my next activity. Email is so five minutes ago.
And email tag is just as much of a productivity drag – in some cases worse than voice mail hell. We have all gotten those endless threaded messages where we don't even remember what the original question that started the whole shooting match was about. Even exchanging Instant Messages is not fast enough, especially if your correspondents forget to turn on their "Away message" when they by chance get up from their chair for a few moments off-screen. You wonder what has become of them, and why aren't they not answering your IM?
When my daughter was in her early teens, it was IM that kept us connected. Now if I really need to find my kids, it is via text. Email is usually the worse way to try to get their attention None of them have Twitter feeds yet. I consider myself lucky.
Another trendlet: Thanks to all of these GenT services, now having a single monitor attached to your PC isn't enough screen real estate. You need at least two, and sometimes three LCDs to show all your scrolling feeds, IM buddy lists, and up-to-the-moment "tweets" in addition to the normal email and word processing windows. (I keep calling them "twits," that must be a Freudian slip.)
When was the last time you sat down for a couple of hours and got into a book? You know, those funny things that you buy from Amazon that don't have any electronic interface that you actually have to turn pages, and read every word? Talk about quaint, grandpaw. Back in my day, we used to walk five miles in deep snow to school, carrying these objects, too.
Nicholas Carr talks about this in his article in Atlantic this month entitled, "Is Google making us stupid?" Don't be misled by the hed. He talks about how his concentration wanes after reading a few pages, and "deep reading has become a struggle. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing." Indeed, I was fighting just getting to the end of his story, and that was only 4,000 words. Try tweeting all of that!
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google
But we aren't stupider, I mean less smart, because of Google or all the GenT tech: we are just more impatient. One network manager at a small college told me how he deals with peer file stealing: rather than turn it off, he just adds a few seconds delay into the connection during the work day, so that the students bail out of the connection and come back at night when he turns off the delays. If he just shut it off, they would be motivated to figure out a way around the block, but most of the students are too ADD to abide by the delays and move on to something else, knowing they can come back at night to grab their files.
This post-email GenT stuff is ironic for me to say the least, especially to someone who wrote a book on Internet email, let alone reads lot of them still. Years from now we will look back on this period much like we examine other accidents of history, like the Truman Doctrine and the Dred Scott decision: things that seemed important at the time, but now are mostly the subjects of junior high research papers. Yes, email is still around for us old fogies that insist on using all of our hard-learned touch-typing fingers to communicate, but it won't be long now. In the meantime, you can subscribe to my feed here and keep up with all the important moments in my life:
http://friendfeed.com/davidstrom
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Yeah, but is it art?
Many of you know that I am a big museumgoer. And this weekend was no exception: I managed to visit three excellent ones. One of them, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, had a flyer about their upcoming video programming and that got me thinking about how we consume works of art in today's online world.
First off, I should tell you that I am not a very possessive and materialistic kind of guy. I don't like to have lots of things, other than books, and for the most part enjoy art for art's sake, for the opportunity to look at something unusual, beautiful, provocative, whatever. I haven't owned a lot of art works either: most of the time I enjoy seeing a picture or sculpture in a museum or gallery that I have seen a reproduction or read about, sort of like coming across an old friend that you haven't seen in a long time.
The museum's flyer mentioned a few works of art that are rather intriguing because they combine data visualization, virtual reality, 3D gaming environments and the Web into a new medium that leverages all of these but goes in a completely new direction. Most of the Web-based art that I have seen over the years is very static, drawing pretty pictures or using computer code to generate a series of images.
One show that I went to at New York's PS1 five years ago had some interesting uses of physics with art, but wasn't really about online works:
http://strom.com/awards/338.html
But when it comes to art that can only be viewed online, what is our role as art consumers? Should we want to "own" a copy, whatever that means? It is enough to have a URL that we can link to it, and hope that the link doesn't break over time? Should an artist maintain a server of his works, or encourage visitors to freely copy them? What happens when the software that supports the work becomes obsolete, or the hardware platform is no longer being manufactured? Should an artist attempt to use open source tools and methods so that others can modify, mashup, or extract his works? And what is really art, anyway? Dada dot com, here we go again.
As you can see, I had lots of questions, and not many answers. The notion about what are these new art forms started me to do some Web research about how visual artists are using the Internet today. Some of the early efforts involved using video games as a medium: the art form, as it were, was the artist as a director for the games' characters and creating new situations that were captured digitally.
But the really interesting stuff happens when you get an artist who knows how to program. An example of this is Sheldon Brown's Scalable City, which was shown earlier this year at San Francisco's Exploratorium (a truly wonderful place in its own right) and can be seen in this video online:
http://www.experimentalgamelab.net/movies/moca_documentation_large.mov
Jon Phillips, who is another artist-cum-programmer, talks about using the Creative Commons license to allow the public to freely modify his works. You gotta love an artist that on his blog (rejon.org) publishes code to tweak his memory registers. He has begun an effort called openclipart.org, which sadly doesn't allow one to preview the clips very easily.
Not everything is about the visual arts either. John Keston's Audiocookbook.org posts a new sound clip every day that will "inspire you, give you an idea or simply entertain" and the material is also CC licensed.
If you are in Kansas City on September 26, check out the evening lectures (Phillips will be there) at the Nelson-Atkins. I think you will find them interesting.
http://www.nelson-atkins.org/calendar/EventDetail.cfm?id=9431
First off, I should tell you that I am not a very possessive and materialistic kind of guy. I don't like to have lots of things, other than books, and for the most part enjoy art for art's sake, for the opportunity to look at something unusual, beautiful, provocative, whatever. I haven't owned a lot of art works either: most of the time I enjoy seeing a picture or sculpture in a museum or gallery that I have seen a reproduction or read about, sort of like coming across an old friend that you haven't seen in a long time.
The museum's flyer mentioned a few works of art that are rather intriguing because they combine data visualization, virtual reality, 3D gaming environments and the Web into a new medium that leverages all of these but goes in a completely new direction. Most of the Web-based art that I have seen over the years is very static, drawing pretty pictures or using computer code to generate a series of images.
One show that I went to at New York's PS1 five years ago had some interesting uses of physics with art, but wasn't really about online works:
http://strom.com/awards/338.html
But when it comes to art that can only be viewed online, what is our role as art consumers? Should we want to "own" a copy, whatever that means? It is enough to have a URL that we can link to it, and hope that the link doesn't break over time? Should an artist maintain a server of his works, or encourage visitors to freely copy them? What happens when the software that supports the work becomes obsolete, or the hardware platform is no longer being manufactured? Should an artist attempt to use open source tools and methods so that others can modify, mashup, or extract his works? And what is really art, anyway? Dada dot com, here we go again.
As you can see, I had lots of questions, and not many answers. The notion about what are these new art forms started me to do some Web research about how visual artists are using the Internet today. Some of the early efforts involved using video games as a medium: the art form, as it were, was the artist as a director for the games' characters and creating new situations that were captured digitally.
But the really interesting stuff happens when you get an artist who knows how to program. An example of this is Sheldon Brown's Scalable City, which was shown earlier this year at San Francisco's Exploratorium (a truly wonderful place in its own right) and can be seen in this video online:
http://www.experimentalgamelab.net/movies/moca_documentation_large.mov
Jon Phillips, who is another artist-cum-programmer, talks about using the Creative Commons license to allow the public to freely modify his works. You gotta love an artist that on his blog (rejon.org) publishes code to tweak his memory registers. He has begun an effort called openclipart.org, which sadly doesn't allow one to preview the clips very easily.
Not everything is about the visual arts either. John Keston's Audiocookbook.org posts a new sound clip every day that will "inspire you, give you an idea or simply entertain" and the material is also CC licensed.
If you are in Kansas City on September 26, check out the evening lectures (Phillips will be there) at the Nelson-Atkins. I think you will find them interesting.
http://www.nelson-atkins.org/calendar/EventDetail.cfm?id=9431
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Announcing WebInformant.tv, sponsored screencast reviews
Web Informant Announcing WebInformant.tv, sponsored screencast reviews
We have officially crossed over from the TV generation to the Internet generation: a recent study from Doubleclick Performics shows that more teens now spend more time in front of their PCs than their TVs. Call it the YouTube generation, blame it on last fall’s writer’s strike or too many channels and Nothing Is On, but let’s face it, the days of watching TV on our TVs seem so quaint now. And Google just came out with a new browser optimized for videos today.
I have decided to join the You Tube generation myself, and this summer I have begun to create a new kind of content for you, my beloved and loyal audience. Let me take a moment to indulge in some shameless self promotion, and also tell you a bit more about what you can see on my new venture called WebInformant.tv.
Most of my professional life has been spent explaining technologies that I use to various corporate IT audiences: first writing reports for the US government and then Megalopolis Insurance in their early attempts at supporting end-user computing. Later on I worked for Ziff, CMP, IDG, JupiterMedia and TechTarget in various capacities – starting magazines and editing Web sites and writing thousands of magazine articles and two books. It is a body of work that I am proud of, and still enjoy freelance work for all five of the major tech publishers. As cartoonist Lynda Barry said in a lecture last week, “A friend told me: You have managed to make a pretty decent living by just being yourself -- well, I have tried and failed at everything else." I know exactly how she feels.
For several years I have been saying that missing from this corpus is video tutorials that show IT people how technology is actually being used, putting it through the typical paces that they would want and being able to see the screens and the logic flow of the product. I try to do this in all of my product reviews, and one of the reasons why I feel I have been successful is that I can capture this ethic and point of view very accurately in my articles.
So what is this new venture? WebInformant.tv is a series of sponsored video screencast product reviews. Sponsored means that the product’s vendor pays me to produce them. Right now it is just a one-person operation: I do everything from pick the products to write the scripts to produce the videos and promote and post them online. While this is a lot of work, it is very invigorating and thrilling too. I am looking at licensing, if that is the right word, this operation with other tech journalists whose work I respect, but ultimately this is my show. The vendors get simple up or down script approval, so the words you hear on these videos are really my own thoughts and opinions. Each video is about five minutes, and has things that I liked and didn’t like about each product.
The word screencast has been used by TechSmith’s Camtasia to describe PC screen recordings – what you are watching is not a movie of my mug, but as if the video camera was focused on the PC’s monitor and watching what I was doing with my mouse and menu clicks. You hear my voice narrating the video and giving context to what you are watching. I try to pack a lot of information into the five minutes, so you get a feel for the product and why you would or wouldn’t want to use it.
I am not the first person to do screencasts in a big way – Jon Udell was doing them for several years when he worked at Infoworld, and I appreciate his skills and leadership here. And there are other products that do this – Screenflow for the Mac and Adobe's Captivate are just two of them. There are free services also at screencast-o-matic.com, uTIPu.com and freescreencast.com too. (You see, I just can't help myself, have to go and compare tech.) I like Camtasia and have figured out most of its quirks to make it work for me.
The products that I review lend themselves to visual explanations: the first series that I have produced include SkyRecon’s StormShield and eEye’s Blink – both of which are endpoint security products that protect a Windows desktop from a series of attacks. There is also Secure Computing’s TrustedSource.org service, where you can look up the reputation of a particular domain and see what email servers have been sending messages on that domain’s behalf. And the products range from the free Timedriver.com appointment scheduling service to ones that cost several thousand dollars.
There are also very complex products that I have posted reviews: Servoy Developer is useful for building rapid Java applications that can run unchanged on both desktop and inside a Web browser. Altiris Workflow Solution from Symantec is great for automating just about any computing task and can leverage some very powerful data mining techniques.
One of the interesting things that I am doing with WebInformant.tv is turning the model of content creation on its head. In the past, I wrote articles that were copyrighted by the publishers and posted on their Web sites only. With the screencasts, I want to distribute the content as widely as possible, as long as my branding and message remains intact. Once the video is posted on my site, it is also cross-posted on many other video sharing sites, including You Tube, Google Video, and others that specialize in how-to information. The vendors get their own copy that they can distribute as well as part of their marketing materials, or to augment their own Web sites, or whatever. Some of the vendors that I have begun to work with have created their own screencasts, so they clearly understand the power of this brave new world. By the way, the site Veoh.com does a nice job of cross-posting videos, definitely worth a closer look.
There are other reviews in the works, and I hope to be able to continue to enrich the site with new products for a long time to come, and grow my own video “channel” into a more vibrant place. And don't worry: I'll still be writing and editing, blogging and podcasting, and speaking around the world as always. This is just another arrow in my quiver, another way to enhance my brand, and something new to keep it fun.
Those of you that work or do PR for a vendor and want to sponsor me to review your products, send me a quick note and I can provide more specifics. And I welcome your feedback as always on how to improve the videos and make them more useful for your own situation. Enjoy watching Webinformant.tv! If you want to subscribe via RSS to keep updated when I add new ones, add this URL to your reader:
http://www.dailymotion.com/rss/videos/davidstrom/1
We have officially crossed over from the TV generation to the Internet generation: a recent study from Doubleclick Performics shows that more teens now spend more time in front of their PCs than their TVs. Call it the YouTube generation, blame it on last fall’s writer’s strike or too many channels and Nothing Is On, but let’s face it, the days of watching TV on our TVs seem so quaint now. And Google just came out with a new browser optimized for videos today.
I have decided to join the You Tube generation myself, and this summer I have begun to create a new kind of content for you, my beloved and loyal audience. Let me take a moment to indulge in some shameless self promotion, and also tell you a bit more about what you can see on my new venture called WebInformant.tv.
Most of my professional life has been spent explaining technologies that I use to various corporate IT audiences: first writing reports for the US government and then Megalopolis Insurance in their early attempts at supporting end-user computing. Later on I worked for Ziff, CMP, IDG, JupiterMedia and TechTarget in various capacities – starting magazines and editing Web sites and writing thousands of magazine articles and two books. It is a body of work that I am proud of, and still enjoy freelance work for all five of the major tech publishers. As cartoonist Lynda Barry said in a lecture last week, “A friend told me: You have managed to make a pretty decent living by just being yourself -- well, I have tried and failed at everything else." I know exactly how she feels.
For several years I have been saying that missing from this corpus is video tutorials that show IT people how technology is actually being used, putting it through the typical paces that they would want and being able to see the screens and the logic flow of the product. I try to do this in all of my product reviews, and one of the reasons why I feel I have been successful is that I can capture this ethic and point of view very accurately in my articles.
So what is this new venture? WebInformant.tv is a series of sponsored video screencast product reviews. Sponsored means that the product’s vendor pays me to produce them. Right now it is just a one-person operation: I do everything from pick the products to write the scripts to produce the videos and promote and post them online. While this is a lot of work, it is very invigorating and thrilling too. I am looking at licensing, if that is the right word, this operation with other tech journalists whose work I respect, but ultimately this is my show. The vendors get simple up or down script approval, so the words you hear on these videos are really my own thoughts and opinions. Each video is about five minutes, and has things that I liked and didn’t like about each product.
The word screencast has been used by TechSmith’s Camtasia to describe PC screen recordings – what you are watching is not a movie of my mug, but as if the video camera was focused on the PC’s monitor and watching what I was doing with my mouse and menu clicks. You hear my voice narrating the video and giving context to what you are watching. I try to pack a lot of information into the five minutes, so you get a feel for the product and why you would or wouldn’t want to use it.
I am not the first person to do screencasts in a big way – Jon Udell was doing them for several years when he worked at Infoworld, and I appreciate his skills and leadership here. And there are other products that do this – Screenflow for the Mac and Adobe's Captivate are just two of them. There are free services also at screencast-o-matic.com, uTIPu.com and freescreencast.com too. (You see, I just can't help myself, have to go and compare tech.) I like Camtasia and have figured out most of its quirks to make it work for me.
The products that I review lend themselves to visual explanations: the first series that I have produced include SkyRecon’s StormShield and eEye’s Blink – both of which are endpoint security products that protect a Windows desktop from a series of attacks. There is also Secure Computing’s TrustedSource.org service, where you can look up the reputation of a particular domain and see what email servers have been sending messages on that domain’s behalf. And the products range from the free Timedriver.com appointment scheduling service to ones that cost several thousand dollars.
There are also very complex products that I have posted reviews: Servoy Developer is useful for building rapid Java applications that can run unchanged on both desktop and inside a Web browser. Altiris Workflow Solution from Symantec is great for automating just about any computing task and can leverage some very powerful data mining techniques.
One of the interesting things that I am doing with WebInformant.tv is turning the model of content creation on its head. In the past, I wrote articles that were copyrighted by the publishers and posted on their Web sites only. With the screencasts, I want to distribute the content as widely as possible, as long as my branding and message remains intact. Once the video is posted on my site, it is also cross-posted on many other video sharing sites, including You Tube, Google Video, and others that specialize in how-to information. The vendors get their own copy that they can distribute as well as part of their marketing materials, or to augment their own Web sites, or whatever. Some of the vendors that I have begun to work with have created their own screencasts, so they clearly understand the power of this brave new world. By the way, the site Veoh.com does a nice job of cross-posting videos, definitely worth a closer look.
There are other reviews in the works, and I hope to be able to continue to enrich the site with new products for a long time to come, and grow my own video “channel” into a more vibrant place. And don't worry: I'll still be writing and editing, blogging and podcasting, and speaking around the world as always. This is just another arrow in my quiver, another way to enhance my brand, and something new to keep it fun.
Those of you that work or do PR for a vendor and want to sponsor me to review your products, send me a quick note and I can provide more specifics. And I welcome your feedback as always on how to improve the videos and make them more useful for your own situation. Enjoy watching Webinformant.tv! If you want to subscribe via RSS to keep updated when I add new ones, add this URL to your reader:
http://www.dailymotion.com/rss/videos/davidstrom/1
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Leave off the last s for (in)security
Those of us that grew up in the Big Apple remember those obnoxious ads for 1-800-Mattress where the announcer told us to "leave off the last s for savings." The company is still selling bedding and still preying on the general public for its lack of spelling prowess. (They actually purchased the 800 numbers with the misspelled names because so many customers dialed them, but that is a story for another time.)
My point today is about that ending 's' but in another place that might have you losing sleep. I am reminded of their little ditty with an email from a reader who asks if there are many eCommerce sites that still don't use secure Web pages (where they use https: instead of just plain http:) for their shopping carts.
Sadly, they do still exist. I ask you all if you come across examples, to email them to me and I will add them to my strominator.com blog post and publicly shun them. It is time we put a stop to this shoddy practice. Come on people, this is the new millennium, we have better things to worry about, and this is not new technology or hard to do. Why just this week I purchased an SSL certificate – what you need to turn your Web server from http into https -- and it took all of about 10 minutes and less than $50. Godaddy makes it relatively easy to get one and get it setup, and if you don't want to use theirs, there are dozens of others who will take even more of your money for one.
Even Google's Gmail has gotten on board the https cluetrain: last week they turned on a very nice option that forces your browser to open a secure session when you are reading your Gmail account (go to Settings and scroll down to the "browser connection" choice and click the button to "always use https" and then click on save, it is that easy. If you use Gmail, go and do this now and you can thank me later.
Why is this important? Because someone can hijack your browser session and obtain personal information if you leave off the last 's'. This is especially the case when you are using a shared public computer, such as at an airport or library. But it can happen even if you are at work, if your work network has a wireless segment that anyone can see your traffic on just by sitting outside your building, or if someone brought an infected laptop into the office that is recording your sessions.
My correspondent wrote to the eCommerce vendor (in this case, it was the photo printing and sharing site Fotki.com) and asked why they did leave off the last 's.' This is what he got in a reply:
Please don't worry about missing padlock, we no longer use HTTPS on our payment page, because web browsers tend to send warning messages about web page security and some users get confused with that. All credit card transactions are going through the secure network and properly encrypted by means of Java Scripting.
Yeah, and some users are still misspelling "mattress" too and dialing the wrong numbers. Steer clear of these Web sites that are trying to make it easier for others to steal your personal information. And don't leave off that last 's' unless you plan on spending some sleepless nights when your identity is compromised.
My point today is about that ending 's' but in another place that might have you losing sleep. I am reminded of their little ditty with an email from a reader who asks if there are many eCommerce sites that still don't use secure Web pages (where they use https: instead of just plain http:) for their shopping carts.
Sadly, they do still exist. I ask you all if you come across examples, to email them to me and I will add them to my strominator.com blog post and publicly shun them. It is time we put a stop to this shoddy practice. Come on people, this is the new millennium, we have better things to worry about, and this is not new technology or hard to do. Why just this week I purchased an SSL certificate – what you need to turn your Web server from http into https -- and it took all of about 10 minutes and less than $50. Godaddy makes it relatively easy to get one and get it setup, and if you don't want to use theirs, there are dozens of others who will take even more of your money for one.
Even Google's Gmail has gotten on board the https cluetrain: last week they turned on a very nice option that forces your browser to open a secure session when you are reading your Gmail account (go to Settings and scroll down to the "browser connection" choice and click the button to "always use https" and then click on save, it is that easy. If you use Gmail, go and do this now and you can thank me later.
Why is this important? Because someone can hijack your browser session and obtain personal information if you leave off the last 's'. This is especially the case when you are using a shared public computer, such as at an airport or library. But it can happen even if you are at work, if your work network has a wireless segment that anyone can see your traffic on just by sitting outside your building, or if someone brought an infected laptop into the office that is recording your sessions.
My correspondent wrote to the eCommerce vendor (in this case, it was the photo printing and sharing site Fotki.com) and asked why they did leave off the last 's.' This is what he got in a reply:
Please don't worry about missing padlock, we no longer use HTTPS on our payment page, because web browsers tend to send warning messages about web page security and some users get confused with that. All credit card transactions are going through the secure network and properly encrypted by means of Java Scripting.
Yeah, and some users are still misspelling "mattress" too and dialing the wrong numbers. Steer clear of these Web sites that are trying to make it easier for others to steal your personal information. And don't leave off that last 's' unless you plan on spending some sleepless nights when your identity is compromised.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Managing contacts
Last week's thoughts about the past ten years of email have got me thinking about how we collect, maintain, and use our digital contacts. And really, when you think about what and how you use email, it is all about staying in touch with people that we have met, and answering and asking their questions.
To do this right, you need a decent contact manager. And over the years I have used dozens of products, starting with a venerable rolodex card file back in the pre-computer days. There was a great and simple program called Dynodex that ran on Macs that I used for many years: it was fast, it didn't take up tons of screen or computer real estate, and it didn't have a lot of fields to mess with. Right now I use Gmail's contact manager, and while it is cumbersome to have all my contacts online, it isn't fatal, even when (as what happened earlier this week) when Gmail goes down.
I tell you up front that I am not a big fan of Microsoft Outlook. Outlook standalone, without Exchange, is overkill for me, and besides, it ties me too closely to Windows. But there are some people that swear by it (and sometimes swear at it). My sister's company uses Outlook in standalone mode, which is probably the worst choice for any enterprise contact system.
Some people love ACT for keeping track of contacts: I think it is also overkill, and the latest versions have suffered from feature bloat. Really, all I need besides a person's name and email address is a phone number and maybe a short description or job title. I can search through my Gmail archive and see all of my correspondence with that individual, so I don't need to replicate that in ACT. I realize that many people want a lot more out of their contact managers, and that is why ACT and Outlook are so popular.
There are several things that I look for in a contact manager. One is the ability to put a single contact in multiple groups: for example, I could have a client who is a CIO that also is someone that lives in Boston. This person would be in three different contact groups: clients, CIOs, and Bostonians. I have about 50 different groups in Gmail, and one of the reasons I like the service is because I can have this kind of structure – and also for my emails too. Outlook and other desktop emailers only allow messages to be placed in a single "folder." Gmail uses labels, and you can have an almost unlimited number of them, but more importantly, each message can have multiple labels attached. Why is this important? You want to be able to sort through similar collections of people, or find out who on your list meets particular criteria, just to name two actions. Once you start using labels and groups, you wonder how you ever got along without them.
Another test is what happens when the contacts aren't personal, and need to be shared around your enterprise. Then you might want to consider one of several hosted contact management services. I actually wrote something about this for the New York Times last year:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/business/smallbusiness/14contact.html
And then there is the issue of what happens when you want to migrate from one contact manager to another, and that is usually hard to do. While most products support some kind of import and export feature, the devil is in the details: for example, Gmail doesn't allow you to export your group memberships of each contact, so you have to re-create that even if you export from one account and import to another Gmail account. Others don't fare well with the free-form text fields: if you have commas or other punctuation inside them, they will mess up the particular contact record.
There are other online services that are somewhat useful for managing contacts, such as Plaxo's Pulse and LinkedIn. Neither works well enough for me to use them exclusively, but are helpful to keep track of when someone has moved to a new job (or in the case of LinkedIn, about to consider such a change). There are also other synchronizing services, such as Glide, but it didn't like to deal with 9,000 addresses and took a while to catch up.
Stepping into this space are the various social networks that try to enumerate all your "friends" but again they are flawed: not everyone you know is a member of one particular social network, and not everyone wants to use the social network as a means to keep up with their business contacts (seeing people's sexual or religious preferences for my business contacts comes under the heading of Too Much Information, for example).
Ideally, I would like one system to use for maintaining my contacts that could also be used as a publishing platform for this newsletter, so you could subscribe to various other editorial products of mine for example, or change the way you hear from me. Most of you like these weekly emails, but not everyone – some people want RSS feeds, for example, which is why I cross post the Web Informant on my Strominator blog too. (I know, brand confusion: I probably should fix this sometime soon.) The social network that understands that will get my immediate attention, for sure.
To do this right, you need a decent contact manager. And over the years I have used dozens of products, starting with a venerable rolodex card file back in the pre-computer days. There was a great and simple program called Dynodex that ran on Macs that I used for many years: it was fast, it didn't take up tons of screen or computer real estate, and it didn't have a lot of fields to mess with. Right now I use Gmail's contact manager, and while it is cumbersome to have all my contacts online, it isn't fatal, even when (as what happened earlier this week) when Gmail goes down.
I tell you up front that I am not a big fan of Microsoft Outlook. Outlook standalone, without Exchange, is overkill for me, and besides, it ties me too closely to Windows. But there are some people that swear by it (and sometimes swear at it). My sister's company uses Outlook in standalone mode, which is probably the worst choice for any enterprise contact system.
Some people love ACT for keeping track of contacts: I think it is also overkill, and the latest versions have suffered from feature bloat. Really, all I need besides a person's name and email address is a phone number and maybe a short description or job title. I can search through my Gmail archive and see all of my correspondence with that individual, so I don't need to replicate that in ACT. I realize that many people want a lot more out of their contact managers, and that is why ACT and Outlook are so popular.
There are several things that I look for in a contact manager. One is the ability to put a single contact in multiple groups: for example, I could have a client who is a CIO that also is someone that lives in Boston. This person would be in three different contact groups: clients, CIOs, and Bostonians. I have about 50 different groups in Gmail, and one of the reasons I like the service is because I can have this kind of structure – and also for my emails too. Outlook and other desktop emailers only allow messages to be placed in a single "folder." Gmail uses labels, and you can have an almost unlimited number of them, but more importantly, each message can have multiple labels attached. Why is this important? You want to be able to sort through similar collections of people, or find out who on your list meets particular criteria, just to name two actions. Once you start using labels and groups, you wonder how you ever got along without them.
Another test is what happens when the contacts aren't personal, and need to be shared around your enterprise. Then you might want to consider one of several hosted contact management services. I actually wrote something about this for the New York Times last year:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/business/smallbusiness/14contact.html
And then there is the issue of what happens when you want to migrate from one contact manager to another, and that is usually hard to do. While most products support some kind of import and export feature, the devil is in the details: for example, Gmail doesn't allow you to export your group memberships of each contact, so you have to re-create that even if you export from one account and import to another Gmail account. Others don't fare well with the free-form text fields: if you have commas or other punctuation inside them, they will mess up the particular contact record.
There are other online services that are somewhat useful for managing contacts, such as Plaxo's Pulse and LinkedIn. Neither works well enough for me to use them exclusively, but are helpful to keep track of when someone has moved to a new job (or in the case of LinkedIn, about to consider such a change). There are also other synchronizing services, such as Glide, but it didn't like to deal with 9,000 addresses and took a while to catch up.
Stepping into this space are the various social networks that try to enumerate all your "friends" but again they are flawed: not everyone you know is a member of one particular social network, and not everyone wants to use the social network as a means to keep up with their business contacts (seeing people's sexual or religious preferences for my business contacts comes under the heading of Too Much Information, for example).
Ideally, I would like one system to use for maintaining my contacts that could also be used as a publishing platform for this newsletter, so you could subscribe to various other editorial products of mine for example, or change the way you hear from me. Most of you like these weekly emails, but not everyone – some people want RSS feeds, for example, which is why I cross post the Web Informant on my Strominator blog too. (I know, brand confusion: I probably should fix this sometime soon.) The social network that understands that will get my immediate attention, for sure.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Ten years of email
This week Google's Gmail crossed the 7 GB storage threshold – meaning
that anyone can get a mailbox with at least that much storage, and for
free, too. (The size continues to increase slightly each day, wonder
of wonders.) It made me stop and think about how much my email habits
have changed in the past ten years, when Marshall Rose and I sat down
to write a book about Internet emails. Back then, 7 GB was a lot of
room for your mailbox, and I don't think anyone imagined that we would
have it free of charge, either.
Of course, one thing that is very odd is that Gmail has been in beta
like, forever it seems. (We are coming up on close to 5 years.) I
wonder when Google will consider it good enough for a release
candidate? If this had been Microsoft, we would be on v 3.1 or
something by now, for sure. One wag suggested that the real product
name is "Gmail Beta." Har har.
Ten years ago, I was using desktop email software to store my
messages. If memory serves me, I used a succession of products,
including Eudora, Thunderbird, and Lotus Notes. When I had problems
with T-bird corrupting my messages about two and a half years ago, I
switched to Gmail, and have been a pretty happy camper for the most
part. What is interesting is that Google hosts the email for my
strom.com domain, again, completely free of charge and with a very
capable user interface as well. I don't need to store my emails on any
desktop, because it lives in the cloud.
So ten years ago, we had the following email programs popular enough
that we included them in our book: Lotus cc:Mail (extinct), Netscape
Messenger (extinct but replaced by Thunderbird you could say), Eudora
Pro (still very much alive, although no longer under the thumb of a
phone handset maker thankfully), Compuserve (not extinct but should
be), AOL (ditto and back then it was on v3), and Microsoft's Outlook
Express (v4 that came with IE v4, and replaced with the Mail app in
Vista).
Curiously, CS and cc:Mail were proprietary software that didn't start
out using Internet protocols and standards, and had their basis in
local area networks (cc:Mail) and closed online systems (Compuserve).
The ones that are still among us are Internet-savvy. Indeed, you could
say that AOL had one of the first popular gateways to Internet emails
(although MCIMail beat it by several years, it wasn't very popular).
Compuserve was also very popular in its day, despite having email
addresses that only a geek could love like 73234,5869. Trying saying
that string often to your friends.
Back ten years ago, we didn't have Web-based emailers that were worth
much of anything. They had few features, couldn't really interoperate
with all that many browsers, and had lots of other quirks. Outlook's
Web interface was dog slow and required all sorts of tricks to work
across a public Internet connection. We wrote in our book: "Either the
market will enforce adult supervision … whereby IMAP technology is …
standardized or a huge opportunity will open up for Web-based email
readers." Gmail has tried to play both ends here, with its support of
the IMAP protocols as part of its service.
In our book, we introduced the concept of having 100% pure Internet
for your email – having products that faithfully implement Internet
standards natively if possible. And yes, Notes/Domino, Groupwise, and
Exchange are all far from 100% pure, which is why they are in decline.
Back ten years ago, email was still a relatively new concept for
corporate communications. You could still find pockets of people who
weren't accessible via a "dot com" email address, and not that many
people put their email address on their business card. It was rare to
find a corporation that would be diligent about answering their emails
from their customers in a timely fashion. Well, some things don't ever
change.
Back then we didn't have the broadband penetration that we do now, and
certainly not the Wifi penetration that we have now. It is perhaps
harder to resist the urge to check your email because it is so
available. With Blackberries, iPhones, and Internet kiosks everywhere
you don't even need a laptop to stay connected. And the US is even far
behind other countries now, sad to say. Ten years ago we still had
dial up modems that we used to get connected. I haven't touched a
modem in so long that I can't remember when, but it was probably
around ten years ago when I started tossing them and not carrying them
on business trips anymore.
One thing that hasn't changed much in ten years is secure email usage:
almost no one does this, despite some major advances in encryption
ease of use. In our book, we called the state of secure email
standards "a sucking chest wound" saying that no one has a solution
that is multivendor, interoperable, and Internet standards based. That
is mostly true today, although there are some solutions that do a
better job at hiding the certificate management and automatically
decrypt and encrypt message traffic. And several multivendor attempts
in the past decade to standardize on approaches have mostly met with
failure. Still, despite the many well-publicized breaches, secure
email remains out of reach of ordinary humans.
I hope you enjoyed my trip down email memory lane. Certainly, email
has become the glue that binds together so much of our communications.
that anyone can get a mailbox with at least that much storage, and for
free, too. (The size continues to increase slightly each day, wonder
of wonders.) It made me stop and think about how much my email habits
have changed in the past ten years, when Marshall Rose and I sat down
to write a book about Internet emails. Back then, 7 GB was a lot of
room for your mailbox, and I don't think anyone imagined that we would
have it free of charge, either.
Of course, one thing that is very odd is that Gmail has been in beta
like, forever it seems. (We are coming up on close to 5 years.) I
wonder when Google will consider it good enough for a release
candidate? If this had been Microsoft, we would be on v 3.1 or
something by now, for sure. One wag suggested that the real product
name is "Gmail Beta." Har har.
Ten years ago, I was using desktop email software to store my
messages. If memory serves me, I used a succession of products,
including Eudora, Thunderbird, and Lotus Notes. When I had problems
with T-bird corrupting my messages about two and a half years ago, I
switched to Gmail, and have been a pretty happy camper for the most
part. What is interesting is that Google hosts the email for my
strom.com domain, again, completely free of charge and with a very
capable user interface as well. I don't need to store my emails on any
desktop, because it lives in the cloud.
So ten years ago, we had the following email programs popular enough
that we included them in our book: Lotus cc:Mail (extinct), Netscape
Messenger (extinct but replaced by Thunderbird you could say), Eudora
Pro (still very much alive, although no longer under the thumb of a
phone handset maker thankfully), Compuserve (not extinct but should
be), AOL (ditto and back then it was on v3), and Microsoft's Outlook
Express (v4 that came with IE v4, and replaced with the Mail app in
Vista).
Curiously, CS and cc:Mail were proprietary software that didn't start
out using Internet protocols and standards, and had their basis in
local area networks (cc:Mail) and closed online systems (Compuserve).
The ones that are still among us are Internet-savvy. Indeed, you could
say that AOL had one of the first popular gateways to Internet emails
(although MCIMail beat it by several years, it wasn't very popular).
Compuserve was also very popular in its day, despite having email
addresses that only a geek could love like 73234,5869. Trying saying
that string often to your friends.
Back ten years ago, we didn't have Web-based emailers that were worth
much of anything. They had few features, couldn't really interoperate
with all that many browsers, and had lots of other quirks. Outlook's
Web interface was dog slow and required all sorts of tricks to work
across a public Internet connection. We wrote in our book: "Either the
market will enforce adult supervision … whereby IMAP technology is …
standardized or a huge opportunity will open up for Web-based email
readers." Gmail has tried to play both ends here, with its support of
the IMAP protocols as part of its service.
In our book, we introduced the concept of having 100% pure Internet
for your email – having products that faithfully implement Internet
standards natively if possible. And yes, Notes/Domino, Groupwise, and
Exchange are all far from 100% pure, which is why they are in decline.
Back ten years ago, email was still a relatively new concept for
corporate communications. You could still find pockets of people who
weren't accessible via a "dot com" email address, and not that many
people put their email address on their business card. It was rare to
find a corporation that would be diligent about answering their emails
from their customers in a timely fashion. Well, some things don't ever
change.
Back then we didn't have the broadband penetration that we do now, and
certainly not the Wifi penetration that we have now. It is perhaps
harder to resist the urge to check your email because it is so
available. With Blackberries, iPhones, and Internet kiosks everywhere
you don't even need a laptop to stay connected. And the US is even far
behind other countries now, sad to say. Ten years ago we still had
dial up modems that we used to get connected. I haven't touched a
modem in so long that I can't remember when, but it was probably
around ten years ago when I started tossing them and not carrying them
on business trips anymore.
One thing that hasn't changed much in ten years is secure email usage:
almost no one does this, despite some major advances in encryption
ease of use. In our book, we called the state of secure email
standards "a sucking chest wound" saying that no one has a solution
that is multivendor, interoperable, and Internet standards based. That
is mostly true today, although there are some solutions that do a
better job at hiding the certificate management and automatically
decrypt and encrypt message traffic. And several multivendor attempts
in the past decade to standardize on approaches have mostly met with
failure. Still, despite the many well-publicized breaches, secure
email remains out of reach of ordinary humans.
I hope you enjoyed my trip down email memory lane. Certainly, email
has become the glue that binds together so much of our communications.
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About Me
- David Strom
- David Strom has looked at hundreds of computer products over a more than 20 year career in IT and computer journalism. He was the founding editor-in-chief of Network Computing magazine, and now writes for Baseline, Information Security, Tom's Hardware, and the New York Times.