Just because I think Jott is more useful in the real world doesn’t mean I don’t think Twitter is cool.
I am enjoying using it.
If you are a friend of mine, in the blogosphere or in the real world, here’s my Twitter page. Add me as a friend and I’ll do the same.
Ed Bott posts a defense of claims that Vista is slow. He cites another post by Carl Campos, summarizing his 10 weeks with Vista. I agree that Carl’s post is a good overview of what’s right and what’s wrong with Vista.
I installed Vista on the day it was released and have been running it on 2 desktops and 2 laptops ever since. Leaving aside my horrible experience with the 64 bit version, my experience has been mostly positive. The question is whether it has been positive enough to recommend people upgrade from XP.
Here are my thoughts after a couple of months with Vista.
First, User Account Control is still extremely annoying. I disabled it on all of my computers. That helps, but disabling it causes problems to pop up elsewhere from time to time, particularly when you try to delete certain files. The only fix I have found for that is to re-enable User Account Control temporarily, delete the file and then disable it again.
Since I have a Radeon X800 video card, I had to wait for new drivers before I could run certain programs, such as Second Life (where I still have a ton of visitors and no way to monetize them, sort of like most Web 2.0 applications). Once the updated drivers were released, I was able to log back into my Second Life account and reset my dance pads, so I could give away more Linden Dollars. Need some Linden Dollars? Come see me at Sibine 03 (106,33).
The biggest annoyance is that when I bring Windows back up after the screensaver has been active for a few hours, my taskbar looks weird and mouse clicks, including the one to Restart, are non-responsive. I have to Control-Alt-Delete and then Restart from that screen, where the mouse once again works correctly. I reconfigured my power options so that neither the monitor nor the computer would be shut down or “put to sleep.” No help. I hoped the new video card drivers would fix this, but they didn’t. Ed, any thoughts?
Vista certainly doesn’t seem any slower than XP. It may be faster, but if it is, it’s not significant enough that I notice it. Other than one scary RAID corruption (which may not have been Vista’s fault), Vista has been pretty stable for me- again, other than the annoying mouse/taskbar problem mentioned above.
Like Carl, I’m not crazy about the new Start menu layout. You can arrange your application the way you want, but it takes some effort.
Search is much better. Still not as good as X1, but Microsoft is closing the gap.
One of the new features I like the best is the Folder (named after the account- mine is “Kent”) where all of your downloads, documents, contacts, etc. are easily accessible.
Vista is a step forward, for sure. But unless you are a computer expert or are having problems with XP, I’d probably wait until your next computer to upgrade.
One of my longtime themes has been that some bloggers have an exaggerated view of the role and power of the blogosphere. When you’re the 40 pound lemur in the little cage at the end of the primate hut, you sometimes start thinking you’re the 900 lb. gorilla.
Shelley Powers has a great post today about impulse control, or the lack of it, in the blogosphere.
I don’t know anything about Dave Winer’s latest legal battle, but I do know that if thinks calling out a judge on the internet is going to help his case, he is sadly mistaken. Don’t get me wrong, if some company ripped me off for a few hundred bucks, I’d post about it the way Dave did when he got tangled up with Travelocity. But when the stakes get really high, the marginal utility of bashing someone on a blog decreases. Hire one of those planes to fly around the courthouse trailing a sign calling out the judge and see how that works out for you.
I don’t know anything about the Maine blogger brouhaha either, but this quote from Shelley’s post is spot on:
Where there are passionate sides to an argument, truth usually lies somewhere between-both repelled and attracted to the play of emotions. That, however, doesn’t stop webloggers, who follow the scent of fresh blood in the blogosea, moving impulsively, en masse, in support of the weblogger-in-need of the week, rarely letting a little thing like truth interfere in our righteous cause.
We have seen this happen over and over in the blogosphere- the same way it happens in office spats and neighborhood disputes. Clans line up according to clan relationships. Clan relationships are developed to get or retain a clan advantage. Only in coffee bars and neighborhoods, the clans have to face either other. The blogosphere can be anonymous. Like driving, blogging can release the inner asshole.
Stated another way, blogging can cause a complete loss of impulse control.
And even if teens of bloggers unite in opposition to a larger, richer and more powerful opponent, the alliance is doomed to failure if the effort takes time or prolonged effort. Why? Because bloggers generally have the attention span of a gnat and, as Shelley says:
[Only] the tiniest fraction of webloggers might have some influence in this regard. Most of us don’t, and never will. Of those who do, most use such for their own personal interests, rarely for any greater good.
Even the lady Shelley links to who maintains a site against the Maine blogger says she is writing a book about the “sorry tale.”
Trying to make a buck is deeply ingrained in American culture. There’s no point in trying to undo what Wall Street, TV shows and Hollywood have built.
But trying to make blogging something bigger, more important and more powerful than it is, does a disservice to those who appreciate blogging for what it is by implying that what it is isn’t good enough.
Impulse control is lost as anonymity increases and as a group of people begin to believe their own bullshit. It happens in the real world and it happens in the blogosphere.
All we can do is keep reminding the lemurs that there are gorillas out there, even if we can’t see them.
Dave Taylor tells you how to remove one of the scourges of many a computer. I can’t express how much I dislike Norton anything, though I once tried to do so.
The 20 Greatest Historical Myths.
The world’s hardest sudoku. A few weeks ago, I printed it out and gave it to a guy I work with who likes sudoku. I told him it was in the medium level of difficulty. He’s still working on it.
Thomas Hawk wrote a very thoughtful post on race and photography. Now if someone would explain to me why churches, of all places, are not more integrated. It makes me sad, on this Easter weekend, that there will not be more people of different colors celebrating together on Sunday.
Dwight Silverman has a nice summary of Goog-411. I have been experimenting with it off and all day, and so far I’d have to say it is awesome. You can connect to the number or just say “text message” and Google will text the name, address and telephone number to your phone. Since my wife hasn’t used a phone book in years, maybe this will save me some money.
I’m still in the middle of my Lloyd Cole revival.
Here’s another great song from that same great album.
Link for feeds.
Music videos (which they simply don’t show anymore on TV) are one of the many great things about YouTube.
I also see that Lloyd has a blog.
Steve Rubel has a post setting forth 3 reasons why Twitter will be sold soon. I’ve been watching Twitter for a while. I just signed up (see the box in the right column). It’s a cool little application, but here are 3 reasons why I respectfully disagree with Steve.
1) Twitter is growing by leaps and bounds- no doubt about it. It is the app de jour for the blogging crowd, which as I have said a million times before is sort of like being the favorite book of the Yeti crowd. You hear a lot about Yeti if you happen to be in Nepal, but Yeti is a non-factor for most of the people in the world. I also wonder how many of the current Twitter groupies will stay the course over the coming weeks and months as the new app de jours come and go. If I were going to bet on someone getting bought, it would be Jott. Now there is an application that I find really useful. People in the real world will find Jott useful.
2) My reason number 2 is also Steve’s reason number 2: Twitter doesn’t monetize its audience. It shares that inconvenient truth with about 99% of the rest of Web 2.0. As soon as Google buys Twitter and starts trying to cram more ads down our throat (or collect more of our personal data), a lot of users will bolt. Stated another way, the “I dig it” threshold is much lower for a garage project like Twitter is now than it is for yet another Google attempt to increase ads and decrease privacy. Some one should go back and look at last years’ darlings and see how many of them have monetized their traffic. And how many of them are out of business.
3) While Twitter is probably cheap, there is a reason for that. If there were an obvious way to monetize its buzz, it wouldn’t be. Even the Web 2.0 market is somewhat efficient. It’s the big, seemingly insane buys (YouTube, MySpace, etc.) that end up prolonging the cycle and generating cash, or at least the potential for cash. I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry about that, but it’s true. These great little apps like Twitter have a hard time finding a place in the VC arena where everyone is trying to hit home runs. Like Tony La Russa said, you can win a lot of games with doubles and singles, but most of the money gurus have forgotten this.
I like Twitter. I’ll probably use it for a while. But it’s not something I like enough to pay for or to suffer through ads for.
So unless some Mighty Casey with a lot of money to spend decides to take another stout swing, I think Twitter will have to settle for being cool.
The other day, I was driving home listening to XM Radio. I channel surfed over to one of the I Love Lucys (Fred or Ethyl or Lucy, I can’t remember which) and heard a wonderful song, from an almost perfect record, that I had forgotten all about (one of the sad by-products of the LP to 8-Track to cassette to CD to MP3 buy it all again scam).
It was Speedboat off of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions‘ first record. Rattlesnakes, from 1984. Speedboat is my favorite song on that record- and that’s saying something, as Rattlesnakes is an excellent record from the first song to the last.
A lot of the new bands I read about via Fred Wilson and others have a sound very similar to some of the post-punk alternative rock bands from the eighties. I bought Rattlesnakes and have enjoyed rediscovering this gem.
Go buy it- preferably in CD or LP form. You’ll be glad you did.
They are both a walking bad decision.
Lucky sees the pantry- he immediately roots around for a loaf of bread to eat. He notices some Amdro on an ant mound- yum…tasty. At any given time, he has four or five bad ideas working simultaneously.
The RIAA sees the record label cartel begin to weaken- it immediately begins carpet bombing the resistance, and takes out a lot of customers, both wholesale and retail, in the process.
Techdirt led me to a very interesting article in yesterday’s New York Times. In an op-ed piece by a couple of guys who used to own a record store – you know, the kind you actually drive to and browse- the following good points are made.
First, “The album, or collection of songs – the de facto way to buy pop music for the last 40 years – is suddenly looking old-fashioned. And the record store itself is going the way of the shoehorn.”
As a deep tracks sort of guy, this is the single worst thing that has happened to the music industry since someone decided to make Barbara Streisand a star. I don’t want studio enhanced dribble from some eye candy media creation. I won’t good albums full of good music, made by people who can actually write songs and play instruments.
Today’s music business is The Monkees writ large.
Another truth, “By continuing their campaign to eliminate the comparatively unprofitable CD single, raising list prices on album-length CDs to $18 or $19 and promoting artists like the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears – whose strength was single songs, not albums. The result was a lot of unhappy customers, who blamed retailers like us for the dearth of singles and the high prices.”
Putting a couple of good songs on a record along with some filler and tossing it out the door has been a favorite trick of the record labels for as long as I have been buying records. Back in the late 60s and 70s, we knew what acts could be counted on for a solid record and which ones couldn’t. If there was a song on one of the latter records you wanted, you could either buy the single, record it off the radio or borrow your buddy’s copy and record it to a cassette.
Amazon (actually CD Now, but who remembers them?) landed the first blow to the traditional record store. Most people can wait a couple of days for a CD, so online buying makes a lot of sense. I will not buy a DRM infested song, yet I have not been in a record store in years. I just click a button at Amazon and 2 days later the CD shows up at my door.
Then iTunes and others landed a blow to both the traditional record store and Amazon, by selling songs a la carte. While I have a philosophical objection to DRM, to our kids DRM is just as normal as album covers and liner notes were to us. They happily download the songs they want- DRM or not. Going to Amazon and buying a CD is as strange and unlikely to them as downloading the latest Hannah Montana song is to me.
The world changed.
The RIAA then made it worse by trying to change it back. From the artice:
Labels delivered the death blow to the record store as we know it by getting in bed with soulless chain stores like Best Buy and Wal-Mart. These “big boxes” were given exclusive tracks to put on new CDs and, to add insult to injury, they could sell them for less than our wholesale cost. They didn’t care if they didn’t make any money on CD sales. Because, ideally, the person who came in to get the new Eagles release with exclusive bonus material would also decide to pick up a high-speed blender that frappeed.
The RIAA tried to stuff the cat back into the bag, and all it accomplished was to put a lot music store owners and a lot of passionate music fans out of business.
I might be happy using a 64 bit OS.
But for now, I have punted. I wiped my new laptop and installed a good ‘ol 32 bit version of Vista.
Now, I can pull my POP email (couldn’t before).
Now, I can access my office email with Outlook web access (couldn’t before).
Now, I can access my office via its portal (couldn’t before).
Now I can use Rhapsody (couldn’t before).
Now my built-in web cam sort of works (didn’t before).
Granted, I knew when I bought a 64 bit system that a lot of stuff wouldn’t work. But I was surprised at how much didn’t work.
Maybe I’ll reinstall the 64 bit OS in a few months, if more applications are compatible. In the meantime, I have happy to have my old, slow, insecure 32 bit OS that runs the applications I need.
Newsome.Org 