Paying it Forward from jkOnTheRun.
Remember, you don’t have to have had a bad experience yourself to start the chain.
By helping one person, you help out all of humanity. Do something nice this %holiday% season.
(No I haven’t seen the movie, I just like the thought..)
We’ve all heard it. Blogging is a medium that not only enables publishing of content, but also encourages conversations. Technology like Trackbacks and Pingbacks, and search & analysis sites like Technorati and PubSub allow bloggers to see the relationships between blogs, and to carry on distributed conversations.
The question I will pose is this: “How does the permanence of blogging impact the conversational nature of blogs?” It’s true that you can always edit and delete posts from blogs that you control, but the Google-caches and Wayback machines of the internet present at the very least the possibility of permanence for every post you make.
Robert Scoble unintentionally started a firestorm with a post about Windows Media. I don’t think Scoble would ever retract anything that he says on his blog unless he was forced by some legal means. With the number of people/sites aggregating and indexing his blog, it would be pointless anyway. If this post was, as many people claimed, truly ignorant or “stupid”, then it would likely have been ignored. It received a lot of attention because it was controversial.
With a metered dose of his typical flair, Rory Blyth provides an intelligent analysis of the reactions that Scoble received.
Rory actually produced some similar fireworks surrounding some comments he made about John Dvorak. The conversation was actually initiated by Rory’s part-time partner in crime Carl Franklin, although Carl left out the expletives and references to high-speed trains. Rory ended up taking down the infamous post 9209, although it lives on in the ether, and in the minds of those who read it.
This is just the tip of the iceberg though. If you actively blog on the public internet, then your “conversations” may live forever in public view. How freely would you talk if you had several corporately owned tape recorders strapped around your neck? What if the cafeteria at that developer’s conference had a microphone stand in the middle of every table, with a note saying that Google was recording every word that you said? Would you really feel free to express your views? To try out new ideas?
And what about personal blogs? Ten years from now, what happens when potential employer pulls up a cache of that exlpetive-ridden blog post you wrote when you were ticked off with one of your friends? Are you going to wish that you hadn’t hit “post”? What about when your future father-in-law finds and reads that post where you rave about your old high school sweetheart, and how she’s “the one”.
Blogging is a wonderful medium, but it’s dangerous if you don’t understand the permanence and the public nature of what you are doing. If you truely do understand it, it can almost paralyze any real or controversial discussions.
I think the only solution is to be humble. Understand the medium, but don’t let that keep you from using it to it’s fullest. If you say something, and you later decide it was not the best idea in the world, admit it, learn from it, and move on. If you have a significant change-of-heart, edit the old post to link-forward to your new point of view, but leave the original text intact. Be honest with yourself and the world. We’re all constantly learning, and we all make mistakes, and often we learn more from our mistakes than our successes.
Peter Torr poses some very logical and well thought out questions about code trust and the Firefox browser.
His initial post, “How can I trust Firefox?” was Slashdotted, provoking legions of zealots into a frenzy.
He follows up with a post titled “I love Slashdot” where he attempts to logically address the responses to his initial post.
Hopefully the elements of the discussion don’t get lost in the frenzy.
I’m not sure how this lines up with the EULA, but Steve Makofsky has some interesting pointers about how to run Windows CE of a USB drive.
Really, it’s just a matter of running the Windows CE device emulator, and the “launcher script” that you download actually installs and uninstalls DLLs to the system directory when it’s run, so it’s not quite as portable as the write-ups make it seem.
I was hoping that this would be a “bootable CE on USB” type thing, but it falls well short of that. It’s an interesting novelty just the same.
The Audiovox SMT5600 (AKA: The ScoblePhone) is _still_ up for grabs at Amazon. There’s a perpetual two-week offer for a $200 Amazon.com rebate, along with a $50 AT&T rebate. That brings the post-rebate cost down to $-25.01. The rebate has been reissued at least three times now. Not sure how many more rounds there will be.
There’s been a bit of confusion about the “required” data plan. Most people are reporting that they don’t end up getting signed up for a data plan, or that AT&T customer service obliged in removing or changing the data plan after signup. After reading several stories of outrageous first-month bills resulting from incorrect assumptions about the data plan, it’s probably a good idea to follow-up with AT&T after your service is activated.
Nathan Weinberg points to a Scoble post
talking about MSN Spaces upgrades on December 16th.
Over at the Evil Empire, Stephen Speicher Tries to Drum Up “Conversation” with a unique blog post. He even references Scoble in an obvious plea for attention.
From jkOnTheRun: Happy blogday, Robert Scoble!
I’ve had Microsoft’s beta desktop search tool running for about 18 hours now and have some observations to make.
On the up side:
1. I love the emphasis given to the metadata.
2. Searches are quick and effective.
3. Shorcuts and commands from the deskbar rock!
4. Word Wheel is a great interface!
5. Right-click actions & drag and drop make the results much more useful.
On the down side:
1. The indexer doesn’t seem to handle multiple logged-in users very well. I haven’t done a controlled test to verify this yet, but when I logged into my home machine this morning, it appeared that the indexer had been running even while I logged in as a different user (Fast user switching). If anyone has trouble duplicating this, feel free to contact me (email address is in my profile).
Further suggestions:
1. Just like everyone else, I wish this would integrate with Hotmail a little more closely. Let me search my email! Even better, let me index multiple account types (Hotmail, gMail, POP, IMAP, Exchange), and let me add several email accounts to my search profile.
2. RSS! Let me include an opml blogroll for indexing. I don’t know how many times I’ve said to myself “Now I just read something about that the other day on some blog” and then I spend 15 minutes searching Technorati to find it. It’d be awesome if MSN Search could keep track of my online “experience” and let me recall things easily. (This would make the most sense if MSN Messenger had an integrated Blog reader).
3. Allow the machine to publish a secured “search service” that would allow me to tie all the machines I use together into a search group.
That’s all for now…
Microsoft’s Desktop Search is live (in beta).
The teleconference is focusing on the user experience & integration with Windows, Outlook, etc. They’re also focusing on the inclusion of “verb actions” that allow you to launch content-appropriate actions with your findings.
Other pluses:
Uses Metadata
Respects privacy
High performance
Better Indexing
Integrates with products from various teams accross Microsoft.
More later after I get a chance to try it out.
Microsoft just announced it’s MSN branded Desktop Search offering, The MSN Toolbar Suite.
Downloads are available here.
The MSN Toolbar Suite includes desktop search functionality similar to that offered by Google, X1, Copernic, and Yahoo!.
More observations to follow.
The teleconference just started…
advance info from: http://toolbar.msn.com/
“Preview MSN Toolbar Suite Beta with Desktop Search (U.S. English only)”
The blogospher is buzzing with speculation and predictions about Monday’s Teleconference
The general concensus is that Microsoft if going to announce a desktop search product.
Robert Scoble has touched on this several times, and even provides a “Desktop Search Reviewers’ Guide”, which we can assume outlines how Microsoft’s offering is stronger & better than those from X1, Copernic, Google, and Yahoo!. This “guide to differentiation” is right in-line with a suggestion I made about the MSN Search Beta. Basically, if it’s not obvious, tell me why it’s better.
Neowin has their take here.
Mary Jo points to an alternate possibility of Microsoft launching Microsoft Office Outlook Live (MOOL) during the teleconference.
Maybe both? Maybe something more?
I’m hoping that Microsoft can deliver a little bit more than just a better desktop search today. Robert Scoble used words like “Wicked” & “Speechless”. Scoble is generally part of the “under promise, over deliver” camp. Even though contributing to the buzz is a far cry from a “promise”, it’s almost as bad to underdeliver on buzz as it is to fail to meet a promise.
Hopefully we’ll get a little more than we’re expecting.
