Blog from Your Browser with ScribeFire

In my stop and start journey towards cross-platform utopia, I am experimenting with ScribeFire, a Firefox, Chrome and Safari add-on that promises to let you blog away from the comfort of your web browser.

I like the layout. I can’t get the ~~image upload or~~ Live Preview functions to work (one down; the image upload seems to work). This may be a firewall problem. It doesn’t have the best feature about my beloved Live Writer: the ability to paste an image directly into a blog post and have that image uploaded when you publish (that feature alone saves me scads of time when I use Live Writer).

It does allow you to insert images from Flickr, but I don’t see a way to log into your account. When I searched under my name, it found three photos. One of an anole (that’s a “n”). I’d prefer a way to pick and choose from my photos.

What an anole

I like the idea, but I think the firewall and the photo thing ~~are going to be~~ may be the deal-stoppers for me. If I could get Live Preview to work, and figure out some better way to access photos, we might have a contender.

Google.Me: Filters, Lists and Privacy Driven?

Gina Trapani, who is always among the best sources on the internet for reliable, well presented information, has another interesting post today about Google.Me, Google’s forthcoming Facebook competitor, clone and/or killer. Embedded into Gina’s post is a 224 (long-winded much?) slide presentation given recently by Google’s Paul Adams.

I read the presentation for as long as I could, until exhaustion, hunger and that “will this never end” feeling I last had when I tried for the third time to slog my way through 100 Years of Solitude overcame me. When I awoke from my slumber, I had a new vision of what Google.Me may be all about.

While I’m still very concerned that it is getting cobbled together and will be thrust upon us in an unfinished condition, Paul’s slides lead me to believe that it will be built around some combination of filters, lists and easy to understand and implement (unlike its nemesis Facebook) privacy controls. Given how important the proper use of filters is to a decent Facebook experience, there is the potential to do some good here.

I don’t “friend” my kids or their friends on Facebook. I also don’t generally “friend” my co-workers on Facebook. But if I did (or ever do) I can completely understand how hard it would be to adequately compartmentalize those areas of your life within a social network. And I’m positive that most people on Facebook don’t understand how to implement its byzantine privacy controls. For example, I am amazed at the number of people who have managed to protect some of their information, but leave other parts (often their photos) wide open to view by anyone. Not to mention the risk that search engines and third party apps may penetrate the privacy walls that are (sort of) in place.

buckets-300x300 I also believe that there is real benefit in grouping people by relationship proximity. While I don’t take the “all-comers” approach used by many of my fellow tech-bloggers, I have a couple hundred Facebook “friends.” I care about all of them, but I care about some a lot more than others. Everyone has similar groups. The problem is focusing on and targeting one without over-including or neglecting the other.

If Google can make an application that looks and feels like an integrated platform, and not a bunch of random parts tossed together (which is exactly what Google Apps looks like), add a way to easily create buckets of “friends,” and make it really, really easy to slice, dice and deliver content to the various buckets, it might be onto something.

Ideally, Google.Me will serve as a hub for all or most of its users’ Google-created and third party content. Foursquare, Skype, Yelp, Twitter (?), etc. This would allow for deeper integration, and consolidated sharing with the relevant buckets. Likewise, there needs to be filters on the receiving end, to spare me from Farmville and other stuff that make me want to set my hair on fire, and to keep Dwight from ever actually meeting me in person.

The way Paul’s presentation keeps returning to the groups of friends concept is strong evidence that buckets are a big part of Google’s strategy. I just hope Google builds something new and exciting and doesn’t try (again) to force us to embrace our Google Profile. At least not without completely reinventing Google Profiles.

If they get it right, cool. If not, there’s always this.

Jon Stewart on Net Neutrality

Good, funny overview. In 3.5 minutes.

Radio Tries to Legislate Life Support for Its Dying Business Model

I haven’t listened to over the air radio in years. Because of the ads. And because I don’t have to. There are about a million better ways to get the music you want, without the extra annoyances. Like iPods, iPhones, Pandora, CD-Rs, XM radio, singing, beating two sticks together, farting. Anything.

emptybag In fact, I wouldn’t listen to over the air radio if they tried to make me. Which is exactly what the National Association of Broadcasters and the empty-bag holding, cat mourning RIAA want to try to do. Every time I start to think the RIAA has finally begun to grasp the inevitable fact that it cannot stuff the digitally downloadable cat back into the bag, it does something even more desperate than suing dead grannies.

Like, say, trying to get Congress to require that all mobile devices contain FM radio receivers. So we can have more music choices. Riiight. They’re trying to do me a favor. How nice.

If this happens, I’ll renounce my US citizenship, burn all of my CDs and cut off my ears. Seriously, has there ever been a worse idea?

We can’t just let this drop. We have to humiliate the people who came up with this harebrained scheme as a warning to ensure that other people with similar thoughts keep their bright ideas to themselves.

Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association sums it up well:

The backroom scheme of the [National Association of Broadcasters] and RIAA to have Congress mandate broadcast radios in portable devices, including mobile phones, is the height of absurdity. Such a move is not in our national interest. Rather than adapt to the digital marketplace, NAB and RIAA act like buggy-whip industries that refuse to innovate and seek to impose penalties on those that do.

These organizations need to realize that their business model is dying, and nothing is going to save it. We need to tell them to either evolve or die. And if they don’t want to evolve, to hurry up and die.

Why Jesus Was Wrong About Apple Television

Jesus Diaz, that is.

I don’t know if Apple plans to manufacture a television or not, but it should. If I had to guess, I’d say it will and that the current Apple TV is giving up its name for its forthcoming big brother.

atv-300x255

Why should Apple make a television? I’ll give you 6 reasons:

1. The trend is towards content on demand, and away from traditional content providers. Netflix, Hulu, etc. are prime evidence of this. In fact, I’d dump DirecTV and its never-ending “Searching for signal in Satellite In 2” message in a heartbeat if I could access most of the shows I care about online. Apple is very good at identifying and accelerating trends. I think on-demand TV via the internet is the next big thing, and I think Apple may be the one to ultimately drive the masses that way

2. Everyone hates their current content provider. I have fought with DirecTV for months trying to get a permanent fix to my signal problem. DirecTV sent yet another repair tech out a week ago Thursday. A week ago Saturday, the message returned. I’m paying for service I’m not getting, for months on end. Cable is no better (though in the absence of a third option, I may soon be a cable customer again). There is a very dissatisfied population of satellite/cable customers waiting for a way to stick it to their current provider. Apple may show them the way.

3. Everyone loves Apple. Apple has incredible brand loyalty, which is why people (like, say, me) stand in line for hours to buy the newest iPhone. Part of love is trust, which means that consumers will trust a product delivered by Apple more than one made by another brand. Recent antenna problems notwithstanding, Apple has a pretty good track record of delivering quality products.

4. Who cares if you can buy televisions for less than $2,000? You can buy every single product Apple makes for way less. Apple is living at the high end of the market, where $2,000 for a television is not the hurdle it would be at the middle and lower end.

5. It’s not really $2,000 anyway, when you consider all the gear it would replace. You’d no longer need a separate DVD player, home theater receiver (assuming the Apple sets have adequate speakers and audio outputs) or universal remote control. Depending on the OS and available apps, you might be able to get rid of a computer and monitor or two as well, along with the associated peripherals. $2,000 for the iMac of home theaters would be a pretty good deal.

6. Perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t have to be an either/or thing. By the time any Apple television comes to market, there will be even more streaming and downloadable content available. An Apple set, with an OTA antenna or just basic cable service, would still be a whole lot cheaper than the couple hundred dollars a month many people currently pay their cable or satellite provider. That monthly savings would allow for a lot of iTunes purchases. I think that’s Apple’s end-game.

If I were a satellite or cable provider, I’d be very nervous. As a consumer, I’m hopeful.

Enjoying the Last Weekend of the Summer

My kids are in full bummed-out mode now, with school starting for two of them on Wednesday and for the third next Monday. I remember the feeling- it’s like a massive case of the Sunday night work blues.

We decided to squeeze the last drop of fun out of the summer break, by going to Lost Pines for a long weekend.

We had a great time, swimming in the lazy river, rafting (and swimming, accidently or otherwise) on the Colorado River, rock climbing, riding a zip line, playing Pay Me, and hanging out with our friends the Fenrichs and the Veldmans.

Lost Pines-112
Christina, Delaney, Remy, Cassidy & Raina

Here’s Delaney and Cassidy climbing the rock wall at McKinney Roughs Nature Park. They were the first two up.

Lost Pines-48

The group, just before we rafted on the Colorado.

After climbing up the rock wall, Cassidy, Delaney and Raina rode the zip line.

Tech Note: There’s some serious weirdness with the video on Delaney’s first jump. I don’t know if this is a glitch in the iPhone camera or the program I use to convert the Quicktime files to MP4s. This video incompatibility business is really irritating.

After we climbed, rowed and zipped, we relaxed around the pool, and played tag in the lazy river.

We had a lot of fun.

Now, back to the grind. . .

How to Make Your Crappy Netbook Awesome with Jolicloud

I have bought some stupid gear in my time. Really stupid.

Now I’m never going to top this, which was undoubtedly the stupidest thing I’ve ever wasted my hard earned money on.

Yes, I actually bought a Samsung Q1

Honestly, I can’t believe that someone who can get through grade school, much less college and grad school, would be dumb enough to buy one of those. But this isn’t about that. Thankfully.

This is about what could be the second stupidest thing I’ve ever bought. An HP 2133 netbook. After I was overcome by its itty bitty screen and general lameness (and that was before the iPad rendered all netbooks null), I quickly hid it in a cabinet in my study, hoping that no one would know. As luck would have it, Cassidy found it the other day and asked me if she could have it.

I previously tried to install Ubuntu on it, specifically the Netbook Edition (which looks really, really cool), but was once again foiled by the Broadcom wireless card incompatibility, which kills Ubuntu buzzes the way sledgehammers kill gnats. So I reinstalled Windows (let me say again how much I love TechNet). And handed it to Cassidy, telling her she could have it as long as she told people she found it in a dumpster, and not in her daddy’s study.

It took about 3 minutes for her to declare it unusable. With any version of Windows, the screen is just too small to do anything other than, maybe, read an email. Opening programs is a crap shoot, with the success rate at actually opening the program you’re aiming for with the touchpad and tiny screen at around one in three. Cassidy tried to work on a short story she is writing, and quickly gave up. Just about anything drove the netbook to a screeching, time draining, hour glass spinning halt.

So she gave it back. Emphatically.

Since it’s been sitting on the counter in my study, taunting me, I decided to try and save it. And I decided to use Jolicloud to do so. Jolicloud is described as “a super-optimized Linux that makes the most of your netbook hardware, battery, graphics and connectivity with a cool interface that will make your life easier.”

Let’s see how it goes.

Before

I’d turn it on, but I’d die of old age before it booted into Windows.

Getting Jolicloud (Harder than it Should Be, But Worth It)

I almost abandoned this experiment, and turned this post into an anti-Jolicloud rant when I found out you can only get Jolicloud via a BitTorrent client. I don’t know anything about torrents, and I don’t want to know anything about them. This pissed me off, but I was invested so…

I went to download uTorrent. And look at this little gem:

Really? Are you serious? How completely bush league is this? I must have been right to avoid all this torrent business. How desperate must Ask.Com be to sneak onto computers to have to resort to semi-trojan status?

I was getting madder by the minute, but nothing is as bad as seeing that useless netbook on the counter, so I unchecked the boxes and proceeded.

Torrent movies must be really fun, it’s telling me I have 11 hours to go to download a 689 MB file. This is almost as fun as typing on a netbook. At the end of the day, it took something less than 11 hours, but a long time nonetheless. At a screaming 1.x kBs a second.

Creating a USB Installer

Next you download the USB Creator, thankfully without uTorrent. Hopefully, now that I have the iso file things will be back to sane.

To create the USB installer, you install and run the USB Creator, and point the application to the downloaded iso file and an inserted USB stick. The approach is identical to other USB installations I have done, including the lamentable Windows>Ubuntu>Windows installations on this netbook.

Other than Microsoft Security Essentials asking about the Jolicloud files and whether I wanted to send them for a risk assessment, things went smoothly. It took about 3 minutes to create the USB installer. After uTorrent, this seemed like warp speed times infinity.

Installing Jolicloud

This is where things took a turn for the good.

I stuck the USB stick in the netbook and fired it up. Well, maybe not fired. I turned it on and it slowly chugged to life.

Jolicloud recognized and connected via the wireless card. A+ for that! Ubuntu still hasn’t gotten that part right.

Full installation is a 7-step, easy process, during which you choose your language, set your local time, pick your keyboard layout, decide if you want to delete any existing partitions (yes, in my case, as I want the netbook to be Jolicloud-only), decide if you want a single or side by side installation (single in my case, for the same reason), and pick a user and computer name. This process seems really well implemented and takes just a few minutes.

You then create an account. I used Facebook Connect, and was connected with my Facebook account instantly. Then you create a Jolicloud name and password. Easy peasy.

You are given the opportunity to connect with any of your Facebook friends who are already using Jolicloud. My pal Rick was already using Jolicloud, and I was prompted to connect with him. I’m not yet sure what happens after you connect, but it’s a cool feature.

Did I mention that I’m happy about the wireless card thing?

After the installation process is over, you restart and you’re ready to go. And go you can. Jolicloud boots up quickly and has the chops to perform all the usual tasks- only this time without pulling your hair out.

There are a ton of apps available, with more to come. You can even see what your Facebook friends like.

After

Very nice. Now if I can just keep Cassidy from taking it back.

Net Neutrality and the Least Unacceptable Alternative

The internets (now apparently using the plural isn’t as cute and clever as it used to be) are abuzz (pun semi-intended) with talk over Google and Verizon’s Joint Proposal for an Open Internet.

I don’t profess to be an expert in Net Neutrality, other than a pretty strong feeling that I am for it, and that it is good for the consumer. One thing I am an expert in, however, is negotiation. I get invited all over the country to speak on negotiation strategy.

In negotiation strategy, there is the concept of “least acceptable alternative.” The idea is that if you know you aren’t going to get what you really want, you have to seek something you can live with. For example, if I want to go to a ballgame, but it’s our anniversary and my wife wants to go to the ballet, I should reevaluate my goals and try to end up at a concert. It’s not the ballgame, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the ballet.

When things are really stacked against you, the least acceptable alternative morphs into the least unacceptable alternative. I hate all of the alternatives, but I hate this one less than the others.

The question we should be asking about this policy and the roadmap it contemplates is not if it is exactly what we, the consumers, want. It’s clearly not. The question is if the proposed plan is the least unacceptable alternative, and if not for whose advantage was the true least unacceptable alternative abandoned.

Figure that out, and we’ll know how all this is shaping up.

Is Google.Me Getting Cobbled Together via Acquisition?

cobbled As those participating in the lively and interesting discussion in the comments, Google Reader comments and (maybe) Google Buzz surrounding my last Google-related post know, I am pulling for Google.Me. I think it is facing a monumental task in trying to divert the flow of attention from Facebook, but I hope it succeeds.

But the more data points that trickle out about Google’s forthcoming Facebook killer, the more concerns I have. A combination of one thing we think we know and one thing we know for sure is driving me crazy. Conventional wisdom is that Google.Me will launch in the near future, perhaps even imminently. We know that Google has been on a buying spree, most recently buying something called Jambool, for a measly (in this messed up industry) $70M. Just the other day, Google bought something called Slide (at least it has a name that doesn’t make me want to club a kitten to death). There have been others, and there will certainly be more.

How can you assimilate the mad buying spree and the pending launch and not be afraid that Google.Me is going to be another tossed-together mishmash? Like Google Apps, except worse. The biggest problem Google has across all of its non-search apps is inconsistent (in function and looks) design and an almost complete failure of consistency.

How can the same company create something as elegant as Google search and as inelegant as just about every other product? I don’t get it.

TechCrunch leads the Jambool story with this sentence:

Google continues to gobble up companies that will form the backbone of its new social strategy and the upcoming war with Facebook.

It’s really, really (like almost impossible) hard for me to envision an elegant platform arising out of cobbled together parts. I’m looking for Jessica Biel and they’re gearing up to give me Frankenstein.

Granted, Facebook is not the most well-put-together web site in the world. But I want this to be a race for the top, not a race to avoid the bottom. I’m just not sure buying a house room by room is the way to go, if you’re really striving to turn heads (and the herd).

I’m still hoping Google can pull it off. But I’m getting a little concerned.

Aren’t you?

GoodSongs: Classic Vinyl Edition

OK, get ready for some classic vinyl that I bet you’ve never heard. Here’s another installment of our hand-picked music recommendations.

Purchase links (for those that can be purchased) are at Amazon unless otherwise noted.

Fraternity of Man – Don’t Bogart Me, from their 1968 self-titled LP . My favorite version of a song done by many others, including The Byrds and Little Feat.

Wet Willie – Country Side of Life, from their 1974 record, Keep on Smilin’. One of many gems by this vastly under-appreciated, Jimmy Hall led band.

Quinaimes Band – Try Me One More Time, from their 1971 self-titled LP. I am writing songs again, and I intend to write one like this. This songs rocks.

The Wildweeds – John King’s Fair, from their excellent 1970 self-titled LP. This record, from Al Anderson’s other band, is one of my favorites from our classic vinyl vault. I can’t find a place to buy this record, other than eBay and collector’s shops, but The Wildweeds do have a web page, so check there from time to time. This is truly a fantastic record.

Les Dudek – I Remember, from his 1977 record, Say No More. I’ve featured this one before, but I can’t talk about classic vinyl without mentioning it again. I wore the grooves out of this LP, and particularly this wistful gem, back in the day.

Cowboy – Everything Here, from the excellent 1970 LP, Reach for the Sky. It would be impossible for me to over-state how much I love this song. It may just be my current theme song. The entire record is excellent.

Scarlett Ribbon – Four in the Morning. A friend sent me this song, because she knows it is my all-time favorite Jesse Colin Young song (you can buy his version here). I have not be able to find any records by this band (even on eBay), much less a way to buy them. But I’ll buy the record this song is on if I ever get a chance.

White Witch – Class of 2000, from their excellent 1974 LP, A Spiritual Greeting. Man, do I love a sci-fi song. How much you ask? Well, so much that I actually wrote a song (Lindy Blue Star) about one of the characters in this song.

These are great records, by some fantastic bands. Go buy these records and support people who make this great music.

Artist Notice: I am a musician and songwriter. I do these posts to draw attention to great music in the hopes that our readers will buy these records and allow these artists to continue making great music. If you don’t want us to feature your music, let us know and we’ll take the song file down immediately. On the other hand, if you are an artist who does the sort of music we feature, let us know. We’re always looking for new artists to feature.