tech ronin

Orkut: Day 1 - Having Fun

OK. I know I just said that the last thing we need is yet another social networking service. Because it fragments things and screws them up. And I said *bad* things about Google just recently too. But hey, life unfolds from minute to minute. Being curious and receiving an invitation from someone I like, I signed up last night without a second thought. Orkut was down for repairs/upgrades when I first tried but an hour or two later I was in and on.

They've got a big questionnaire that is good I think. Gives you lots of room to quickly list stuff about yourself, interests , and professional stuff if you want to fill that in. And, in lots of places you can control who has access to that particular tidbit - such as your age, for example ;-). The groupings for selection of who gets to see the piece of info are: you, friends, friends of friends and everyone. That's not quite as granular as I would like but is an excellent first cut. And, if you don't fill it in, it just doesn't appear - a blank by that attribute is not displayed for all to see that you did not reveal that info.

Here's what I like mostly. You can surf around with great velocity. You can join *communities* aka bulletin boards, networks whatever quickly. You can surf the people in those communities quickly. It looks great!!! Aesthetics always make a big difference with me when I'm using a piece of software.

So the speed and ease let you get around and see a lot of information in a hurry. I like the decisions they've made in general. They promise your email address is secure. Good enough for me for now. I've invited about 10 people and have some confirmed friends. Am connected to 15000 people with 9 friends. The big numbers are not a goal at all but total people I'm connected to has risen by about 2000 in the last few hours. I'm still interested in the friends of friends and that's about it except when browsing. I like to see which communities people affiliate themselves with and occasionally will look at their profiles. Having legible photos everywhere helps.

It's fun. That's the testimonial. Fun as a function of ease of use, aesthetics, and tasty people information and communication. The less the dating element intrudes the better for my taste. I like that I can make that clear and then actively pursue people for affiliation, friendship, information, support and, oh yeah, business networking. Don't like that my relationship status is one of the key variables displayed in people lists even though I've specified that dating is not what I'm looking for - I would rather see a different variable displayed and hope they fix that one somehow. If you want more opinions and speculation about Orkut, just Google for it. ;-)

Fragmented Social Networking Services

I'm afraid that most of the enthusiasts for social networking services are beginning to get fed up. These services, now abbreviated YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Service) are proliferating like rabbits and its getting frustrating. First the programmers and entrepreneurs, then the bloggers, then the press and more recently Venture Capitalists have gotten hot and bothered about the potential of all these services.

On the one hand, I'm glad we get to play and experiment with these little social networking environments, but people skip around and spread their energy and attention so widely with no cross-talk between the services. Especially for people like me who want to try lots of these services. I get stretched too thin and my online *friends* seem equally stretched and enthusiasm is dropping like a rock.

My real world friends have given these services little attention. Maybe I'm not in the right age group, but I couldn't recruit more than a couple friends onto Ryze and haven't hardly tried with the others. It's not like the others (LinkedIn, Friendster, Tribe et al.) had so much more to recommend them that I could say, nevermind about Ryze, this new one is IT.

I've given most attention to Ryze (of which I've been a gold member since Mar-03, but have to admit that when I started blogging around the beginning of May, most of my free *online networking* energy has been spent either blogging, perusing other blogs or commenting on other blogs. Once you have a blog, you're committed in a way that being a member of these communities doesn't come close to unless perhaps you are the moderator of a network that is active. [See my Blogging as Social Networking post.]

These YASNS just aren't very good yet. Maybe they never will be. But they seem to need more than profiles, testimonials, photos, explicit friend networks and bulletin boards to go very far. There needs to be more to do on these things. More ways to get to know people and interact with them. To build trust. To provide support.

Most importantly, these communities need to be linked. These gated networks aren't working. It's frustrating to fill in profiles over and over again. It's impossible to get your real friends to monkey around with all these different communities and spend time filling in profiles and inviting friends.

We either need a much better YASNS that kicks butt and stands out as the one worth joining so people aren't fragmented so much in relatively equal and limited islands. Or, we need some decent standards and EASY ways to join multiple YASNS. And forget it if you want me to pay for all these different ones. That's not happening. I'm about ready to drop my gold membership on Ryze because I'm really not getting much use out of it.

What if my friends join different individual YASNS and invest their time in the particular one or ones they join. They want me to get on their YASNS and I want them to get on mine. We either stubbornly stick with our own first choice or switch or join both.

What I'm trying for is to get my actual friends networked together online so I can see and benefit from explicitly identifying and knowing who the friends of my friends are and so on (4 deep is the absolute maximum of interest and 3 deep (which is just the friends of my friends) is a great starting point.

The latest YASNS, Google affiliated no less, is Orkut. Some are praising it. I still think there's social gold in these hills but am not sure were going to find much of it with the current explosion of new services. Too much already.

Surfing backwards with Technorati

I've always been one to read backwards, especially in the bookstore but also often with new non-fiction books I'm excited about. I'll just open the book randomly and read and then go back to the previous page and keep going for a while and then open at another random spot and read. I hate having to start at the beginning slowly and get introduced with background material and all that. Perhaps it is just impatience. I just dive in and immerse myself.

So, I guess it's not surprising that I've found a way to do something similar with blog surfing. Here's what I do. I find a blog that I like. Then I copy the blog's URL to the clipboard and go over to Technorati Cosmos and paste the URL in and click Get Link Cosmos. This shows me everyone who is linking or has linked to the blog I like. Now I can surf among those who like the blog I like.

It also shows me (1) how many inbound blogs and links each linker has, (2) an excerpt from the blog if available and (3) a cosmos link for that blogger which allows you to take a step further back in the chain.

The more conventional approach is to look at the links my blogger of choice has listed as his or her favorites and then try them out. I do that too. But there's something about going backwards that appeals to me.

A Blog is a Blog?

As I surf the weblogs I know and explore new ones, I find there are different types of blogs and they interest me differently. Here's the beginning of a list of blog types:

• Industry Expert blogs. I don't like the tone of these blogs usually. They are too practical. Too designed to impress. Too constrained. Too professional. They tend to use industry jargon. Too serious. Not entertaining enough. The problem is that the blogger is controlling the content for effect. His career is on the line here. She doesn't want to drive away potential customers perhaps. He doesn't want to offend other important players in his field. But, if this is my field, then an ambitious and high-quality blog may be worth my while. It's *free* information and commentary, afterall.
• Personal Journals. If the person is a good writer and has an interesting life, is likeable and opinionated and a good observer, this can be quite a great blog. Naturally, most personal journals don't manage to meet all these criteria - but it's always a treat to find one that does it for me. Here it seems that the blogger is writing for him or herself and wants to get stuff out. They seem pretty oblivious to possible negative consequences of expressing provocative opinions or revealing negative material about themselve. I'm afraid that an illusion of anonymity and safety is in operation and that sometimes that illusion is shattered and the level and extent of disclosure may drop off.
• Soap Box blogs. These only work for me if I share the values and assumptions of the Soap Box blogger. If I do, I might vicariously enjoy it or get ideas about something I'm interested in. But for the rest, I don't want to be preached to.
• Rant Blogs. These have to be really funny, not just angry and ring true for me a lot. Make me aware of my own complaints that were being rolled over by mainstream society. It could be for example a feminist who rants about something and then I realize, yeah, that's right. How dare they? This can be good if you've been putting up with bad treatment and not really realizing that you deserve better so that you can put a stop to it, avoid it or at least say "Hey, I don't like that!"
• Passionate Amateurs. If a passionate amateur is blogging on something I'm interested in and he's a good blogger, this is my favorite type of blog. He or she doesn't have an axe to grind and really is sharing out of sheer enthusiasm. The enthusiasm is contageous. The information is often better than you get from the mainstream press because it's more personalized with authentic voice. It's not homogenized. It's not professionalized and objectified. It doesn't have an institutional bias.
• News Blogs. I especially like these when they are well put together and have lots of good stories about topics that interest me.
• Link Blogs. If the subject is especially intriguing like SmartMobs, I like these. But they tend to the sterile side and don't have much personal voice.

Treo 610 Coming Mar 1

Hey, this is cool if true. BargainPDA says that a Treo 610 with higher resolution screen, bluetooth and more memory is coming March 1st. Lots of times the dates on these things don't pan out. And there is no other confirming info as yet so maybe this is just a rumor. However, it sure makes sense to me. I've been expecting just exactly this kind of an upgrade sometime this Spring. It overcomes the few deficits in what is otherwise a great Cell-PDA.

Sounds like I'll have at least one attractive replacement option for my Sony Ericsson P800 when my one year T-Mobile contract expires in June. I wish there was a better market for used high-end cell-PDAs out there. My P800 would be a good EBay item. Remember, I'm trying to exercise some restraint in the technolust department. Of course, online window shopping is perfectly OK.

Here's the exact quote from BargainPDA:

Now you can use just one device—instead of many—to get it all done. The Treo 610 is an update to the successful Treo 600 Phone from HandSpring. The 610 will include BlueTooth, Hi-Res Screen and greater amount of memory than the Treo 600.

[via Gizmodo]

Google Sucks!

OK. We are in the information age. We are flooded with information including an incredible amount of spam, but I digress. We have amazingly powerful, networked and often wireless computers of all sizes and shapes that should in theory help us master and exploit the information that's coming our way. But no! Google is king of search engines but is reminding me more of a poor Microsoft product that stands on its laurels than anything else.

It's too bad because being able to get the information we need when we need it is crucial to our productivity and probably even to our satisfaction and perhaps even happiness. If I could find that ideal apartment I've been looking for, that would help make me happier, no doubt.

Correct me if I'm wrong. But, Google is not innovating much. They've got their so called mysterious search technology that seems to be about as complicated as multiplying the number of hits by a weighted average of the number of hits of the pages that are hitting. Great! That means I always get the megasites and index and aggregator sites at the top of my searches. I get the *big* sites. And top that off with a bunch of paid sites that get in the way at the top of the lists.

What I'm looking for is usually the smaller sites run often by one person who does it as a labor of love. Someone who doesn't have an axe to grind. So I get good information with authentic voice not corporate speak.

And, frankly, I want a desktop tool that I can set so that my preferences and perhaps list of searches I find valuable are used. I don't want Google to decide whose on top of the lists. Let me tell it what *my* priorities are and go from there.

And then add in what software like Grokker is starting to explore. Putting information into meaningful clusters. This is important and I hate it that we've got a practical monopoly in the search engine industry slowing down and squelching the innovation we need to take advantage of all this information processing horsepower we have at our disposal. Google is better than nothing, but let's get on with it!

References:
Microdoc News - Online Magazine about exercising personal power in the Information Age: Is Google Keeping Up With The Information Revolution?. Jan 13, 2004.

eWeek: Vivisimo, Grokker, Teoma Engines Help to Narrow Search Results. Jan 2, 2004.

I'm becoming a blog evangelist

Sorry. Another one bites the dust. I've got my friend Sally blogging a bit lately and I'm getting excited. She's self-employed and very gifted. She's got NPR (National Public Radio) on a lot when she's working around the house so learns all sorts of good stuff that I don't hear because I can rarely work with something like NPR on in the background.

There are tons of gifted adults running around this world who aren't expressing their gifts enough (1) for their own need for self-expression, (2) for their own need to share what they know and are enthused or passionate about and (3) for the rest of the world which needs our gifted people to be out in the world expressing their gifts.

If you love, like or are a gifted adult (don't underestimate yourself now), you owe it to yourself to read the book The Gifted Adult by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen. Check the book on Amazon - it has the table of contents, index and the new *Search Inside* feature. Most gifted adults keep such a low profile that they forget they are gifted. But, unfortunately, they not only don't contribute and express themselves as much as they could, they often harbor a misunderstood bitterness that leads to all sorts of problem behaviors. This book changed my life.

Back to blog evangelism. I'm thinking that blogging is a wonderful outlet for gifted adults. They typically have all sorts of ideas and extraordinary curiosity, do much more research than they really *need* to do and know lots of good information that some of us would love to benefit from. Blogs give the gifted adult a platform or soapbox on which to express themselves in an idiosyncratic (they love that), fun and truly valuable way. I've got a bunch of gifted friends whose not yet existent blogs I would absolutely love to read.

Where to Live?

Ever since I started hearing about the internet, I started thinking about the possibility of someday moving out to some remote location with lots of trees, open space and cheap property. Of course, that remote location would need to have internet access and some kind of express delivery like FedEx. I live 10 miles from San Francisco, so I pay a substantial premium for being so close to a major city. It's very convenient, believe me.

As I started thinking about moving out to the boondocks somewhere, I thought it wouldn't work for me because I've been primarily a computer consultant and my base of customers is very local. After doing consulting for 18 years, I've got a big reservoire of satisfied customers - well, maybe there's a couple out there who aren't ;-). I get a lot of business from local referrals. I thought I needed to be a writer *or* create a software product. Then I could move to the boonies.

That led to my developing a software product to experiment with the possibility of having a business that wasn't location-dependent. And, lo and behold, my software business is now my primary source of income with my consulting a second and lots of the consulting is done remotely using phone and email with lots of pdfs and file exchange. It works quite nicely.

So now that I am capable of living somewhere else, where could be as good as where I am right now, I wondered? My first thought is - probably nowhere except other similar situations near really cool English-speaking cities such as Vancouver, BC, Seattle, WA, New York City, San Diego, CA (the beaches are so great down there). So, one option is to move to one of these other places and work and just have a great time seeing what it's like there. I would throw in a few *foreign* cities as well such as London and Sydney. Two years per - or would it be 5 years?

I bet some people do this now and more will in *the future*. The reason I'm not likely to do it is that I am introverted enough that I would be homesick and have trouble making deep friendships quickly and would miss my friends and family. Or at least, that's what I imagine. The way you handle part of that problem is to either move somewhere where one of your friends has already moved or take one of your friends or partners with you if you can convince them to move.

But, this doesn't really fit my original idea of moving out to the boondocks where it is cheap. So here's my second idea: What if you could form a community or find a community out in the boondocks that was full of talented, creative, progressive and interesting people? I am spoiled by the big city of San Francisco - the cosmopolitan and liberal social standards. I like a *live and let live* environment. I like a place that frowns on ethnic and any other kind of prejudice even if everyone still has to struggle with it due to enculturation. I like a place where people are growing and experimenting. I don't want to worry about being harassed by rednecks because I'm not dressed conventionally. [To be continued]

Technolust needs balance

Due to some rather unpleasant medical bills this last couple of years and the economic downturn, I've had less disposable income than I've become accustomed to. Given the uncertainties I've talked about and the way in which we've lost the security that used to be part of the *good job* and all the rest, I've been thinking that there needs to be a balance in my weblog between rampant techno lust and economic sanity. Here's a few starters on this topic:

• I was known as the spendthrift by my father even as a child (among 4 children)
• I mentioned recently that my practicality quotient is near zero
• I'm an N (Intuitive) on the scale between S (Sensing) and N in the Myer's Briggs scale. Don't bother me with the details. I like the big picture.
• We in the U.S. are big spenders. We've consumed the world's natural resources this last hundred years like nobody's business.
• We've wasted so much - look at the full landfills around us
• We buy new clothes all the time
• We each individually drive cars
• If we can afford it, or, in many cases even if we can't, we buy big fancy houses and cars - the latest is SUVs
• But lots of us in my *boomer* generation and younger feel consumption guilt. We hate to throw things out because it reminds us how little we actually used it if at all. We recycle but know that not a whole lot gets done with all that recycling in a lot of cases.
• We either have money and spend it profligately or we don't have money to keep up with lifestyles we see on TV and in the movies, so we spend like heck the money we DO have. Lots of cheap stuff is very popular in some circles. And, of course, there's always the fancy shoes in the ghettos.
• I'm speaking for the Ronin among us and probably mostly the Tech Ronin who read this figuring the techier types read more blogs than the less technically inclined do. As independent contractors and micropreneurs surfing the waves without a safety belt, we might want to consider finding ways to live well without spending enormous sums of money all the time. We might want to break out of the hypnosis of the latest and fastest and smallest and coolest new gadget - even. I know its heresy, but I'm just thinking out loud here.
• I think I'm going to add a stream or category about small is beautiful or something because I see it as a great solution for those of us who may still be trying to adjust to the loss of the dot.con boom and the death of the good job. We might need to explore how to downsize in a smart, quality, personally satisfying and healthy way. This from Ms. Spend Thrift par excellence! We'll see how long my enthusiasm lasts but there's really lots to talk about. I will probably not go into the old standards very often - like bargain hunting tips or where to get the best deals. I'll be being my big-picture self and be looking at overall concepts.

Jobless Recovery?

If you look at the Dow Jones average, it sure looks like our economy is recovering and moving along pretty nicely. The international picture averaged is equally rosy from a recovery point of view.

As a micro-business owner, I can't help but be pleased to see the markets go up. I'm hoping that my prospective consulting and software customers will be optimistic about the future and spend some money on their infrastructure.

That's not how things are going though. Spring was awful and seemed to correspond to the official part of the war in Iraq. I had more sales in the summer than now. And I have an international (mostly English-speaking) market. Since I've been improving my product, my web presence and been getting some recognition, I suspect the phenomenon is not a personal one.

People just aren't sure what's going to happen next. We learned how to trim back in the most recent downturn. Lean and mean. There's enough fear and uncertainty floating around that people don't want to get caught holding the bag. So they aren't hiring - much. They aren't spending as much on infrastructure as they would have during the *new economy* boom years: 1993 to 2000.

The truth is - they are behaving rationally. The stock market and expansion that occurred during the *boom* was kind of crazy. It lasted so long that there's a tendency to think that those times constitute the norm. A brief perusal of dot.con will disabuse you of that notion. Maybe what's happening right now is the baseline... about medium-strength economy or maybe even a little on the high side since the 04 election motivates our politicians and bureaucrats to pump up the economy. I'm still hoping for better days ahead, but I'm not counting on it.

Now that we are in an environment where lots of services can be delivered remotely, outsourcing to either Cheapville, USA or cheaper markets overseas (like India) is likely to increase. That means many jobs that would have gotten created here, will be created elsewhere. Jobless recovery.

The stock market does not care if we have more jobs. It watches whether companies are profitable. Profits *may* be enhanced by job cutting and outsourcing. I'm hoping that outsourcing is partially a buzz phenomenon that will cool off a bit as (1) companies discover that hiring locally has its advantages and (2) cheap overseas labor markets like India start getting more expensive.

I have no doubt, on the other hand, that relying on permanent full-time employees alone is a mistake for most companies. We are in a turbulent environment and it makes sense to have a core group of employees (sometimes that's just you) and then hire temps or contractors on a project basis when the demand is there. It's more flexible. When things are turbulent, you need flexibility.

I'm not an employee. I'm one of those independent contractors who keeps things lean and expands with additional subcontractors as needed. Working in this environment is a little like surfing. You take your best shot. I could give up my own business and my independent ways but there's not really a *good* job market to go back to. It went away during the last 18 years I've been doing my own thing.

Sure, there are still good jobs - quite a few of them. But companies merge, split and go out of business pretty often and jobs get cut or farmed out. You are more likely to get a contract than a job these days when you go looking for a job. I love the freedom and creativity of having my own company and I'll live with the ups and downs in income and requirement that I get my own health insurance and pension.

I like being on the leading edge of social change. I figure I'm gaining the skills that will serve me well in the years ahead. I'm building goodwill, visibility, equity and brand in myself and my own undertakings. I'm connecting with my web presence, weblog and by email - and I even get together with people on a regular basis.

Tech Ronin is devoted to exploring and commenting on our 21st century opportunities and predicaments - examining what we are doing and can do to make our lives more satisfying and fulfilling.