I just dialed into a customer’s computer with Copilot to install pdf writing software. I tried printing a web page in Internet Explorer 7 and instead I got 30 pages of HTML. Microsoft’s support site had info on fixing this problem for IE4 and nothing else. After some googling, it turns out the fix was to re-enable IE as the default browser or uninstall AOL. Seriously guys, what kind of bug is this. It is crap like this that drives me away from Windows. Gahh I cannot stand it at all. Dealing with issues such as that are such a total waste of time. My Mac has problems from time to time as well, but nothing like that.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media.

Edit: clarified in some places and added more info.

I like to be really productive when I work, and I like to know what the heck is going on. At the same time, I am not the best at remembering my long list of things to do or places to be off the top of my head. While I found paper lists to be useful to a point, I found that tools on my computer made managing my life super easy. Over time I’ve adopted various portions of David Allen’s Getting Things Done action management method.

I am a dedicated mac user (and a switcher!), and I’ve found a ton of great mac apps that streamline my time on the computer, where I spend the majority of my time working or playing (and alternatives can be found for Windows as well!).

Email

Moving from my ISP’s email to Gmail was like crossing the Iron Curtain. Suddenly I had tons of storage space and was able to access my email through an excellent user interface. As well, search became useful! Today I use my email as my primary inbox for tasks and information, especially because of my iPhone’s constant presence.

Calendering

The logical next step was towards maintaining a good personal calendar, and a great option was only a link away at Google Calendar. After switching to a mac laptop, I moved to Apple iCal, but I back up my calendar to Google Calendar using the excellent utility Spanning Sync.

Tasks

The hardest part of getting organized for me was finding the right task management software. I knew that paper just did not work for me, though I love using my moleskine notebook for notetaking when I attend conferences or otherwise go to hear speakers.

I didn’t begin a trusted GTD system until found an app that I liked. I tried way way way way way way way way way way way too many GTD apps (Note: a number of those are cross-platform). Eventually I settled on iGTD, which is free and was excellent until the sole developer stopped work. I jumped ship to the $80 OmniFocus and have been in heaven ever since. While it certainly is not perfect, I’ve finally settled into a system I can trust to keep me organized and on task.

Knowledge

I’m someone who tends to collect tons of random information that I want to keep. Right now everything is fairly spread out and hard to combine into something useful, but I have permanent links in Safari and Firefox, reference links for the future in delicious (thank you pukka!), whole website pages in Evernote (cross-platform with a webapp!), and DevonThink Pro for the miscellaneous knowledge that I forget two seconds after committing to the database (router config settings anyone?). I also use a password manager for all of my logins for websites, FTP servers etc.

Scrivener is my choice of software for creative or academic writing of all sorts–term papers, blog posts, and the like. Pages and Bean work great for most school assignments and random files full of text. Bookends is a fairly good bibliography management utility (yes, it formats all your works cited pages for you! ☺).

For school notes and anything else that works better in outline form, I use the great (mac-only)OmniOutliner (by the OmniGroup like OmniFocus).

Also, I finally committed myself to having “current projects,” “files,” and “school” folders on my Desktop with everything filed fairly neatly.

Putting It Into Practice/Conclusion

I like to believe that when I work on anything, I am proceeding at the fastest possible pace my mind and body are capable of (okay, okay, three hours of sleep slows me down, but not much). I know where everything is, I know what I need to do and when I need to do and when it’s due, and I have all of the tools to do everything as fast as possible.

I want to end with a special shoutout to the most amazing application of all, quicksilver. Quicksilver allows me to launch any file or app from the keyboard in seconds. But, it can do so much more, from moving or appending text to files to sending emails, viewing and editing my bookmarks, opening links, to controlling iTunes or my FTP client or the operating system…. Learn it, love it, live it mac users. Windows users, check out this list here for some poor alternatives ☺.

I hope you can be successful with your quest to be productive.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

I’ve been following the recent attacks in Mumbai. I first heard the news on CNN, but the best way to keep up has been online. What always amazes me is the dedicated cadre of Wikipedians who constantly update Wikipedia with the latest news (aside from Wikinews’s excellent coverage). Fifty minutes after the attacks started Wikipedia had a page on the attacks up and four hours after a page on the previously unknown Deccan Mujahideen.

As well, CNN throughout the day has shown MMS videos, witnesses via Skype videochat, and discussion of the Mumbai bloggers keeping connected during the Mumbai curfew over the net and via services such as Twitter.

I like this trend. I love our continually-developing participatory culture. I think that ultimately it is for better, as consumers’ competition with traditional content producers can only result in increased product quality. The MSM (mainstream media) is beginning to embrace citizen journalism. For example, readers on CNN.com can now submit stories through iReport (with a disclaimer about the news being unvetted).

Any discussion of citizen journalism requires a discusion of its legal implications. In the United States, journalists are protected from disclosing their sources in thirty states. There is no legal precedent yet for whether bloggers, who increasingly break major news before the MSM, can be classified is journalists and thus be under those same protections. Only time will tell, but I am hopeful.

EDIT: Additional info from CNN on the ongoing Twitter use during the Mumbai crisis. I agree with CNN’s assessment that the wisdom-of-the-crowds nature Twitter is both its greatest asset and handicap. From the article:

As blogger Tim Mallon put it, “I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.

“During the hour or so I followed on Twitter there were wildly differing estimates of the numbers killed and injured – ranging up to 1,000.”

What is clear that although Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted.

A quick trawl through the enormous numbers of tweets showed that most were sourced from mainstream media.

Someone tweets a news headline, their friends see it and retweet, prompting an endless circle of recycled information.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

“The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand.” (1). Currently, most all content on the web is written for human consumption and understanding. It is currently very, very difficult for software such as search engines to extract from context clues what exactly the page or data it is looking at means, or what the data is related to. Various efforts have been underway to deal with this problem so that computers can better organize and information on the web. These efforts include RDF, which is a essentially a markup language designed for the purposes of building out the semantic web. The purpose of RDF is to allow for a “formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.” (2).

The reason that the development of the semantic web is so useful and cool is that it will allow for much, much, much easier use of the myriad amounts of data published on the web. As I mentioned above, the issue that computers have when looking for information on the web is that they cannot tell what context the data is. A computer may see tabular data in an HTML page, but it has no idea if the data is baseball stats or a listing of physical constants on a physic teacher’s website. Yes, context can be determined by keywords, but an even better way to define what the data represents is doing so formally using a technology such as RDF. Then, if a company such as Google reads a webpage, it can know exactly what the data presented is, and then provide better search results related to that page. As well, now someone can easily re-use the data for their own purposes, using something akin to Yahoo! Pipes, without depending on the author of the webpage having created an API or RSS feed to share the data. Screen-scraping becomes easy.

Further Reading:

• Microformats
• Comments and links on Slashdot

References

1. http://www.w3schools.com/semweb/default.asp
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

Anyone else see any humor in my having an obnoxiously long title for this post?

Personal computers only were really invented in 1976 with the release of the Apple I (and it was the Apple II that really made the market take off starting in 1977). The organization that incited this was the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of hobbyists in Silicon Valley in the mid-’70s who can be called responsible for bringing computing to the masses. Before this, computers were huge machines reserved for businesses or universities, and not devices that just anyone might have in the home. This group was all about sharing their designs and ideas. Even before them, the culture existed. I cannot give salient examples, but the open culture has always existed in parts of the tech world.

Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project (which led to the creation of GNU/Linux) in 1983, 2 years before Windows was first released (but after MS-DOS was around). Unix has been open-source since its creation. Linux has technically been around since 1991 when Linus Torvalds released the kernel), but Unix (specifically BSD Unix, the “free,” non-AT&T version) has been around since 1977. Unix was one of the, if not the, first powerful, free, complete operating/time-sharing system, and Linux was intended to be (and is) a compatible replacement for it, and is now even better and more capable for use by individuals for day-to-day computing.

The original code in Windows that handled the networking was taken right out of Unix. And, the modern (post-2000) Mac operating system is based upon Unix and mostly compatible with Unix and Linux software programs! Both software companies have benefitted from free operating systems in huge ways.

• See this previous post for examples of major open-source projects today.
• See the first paragraph of this previous post for more on the open-source movement.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

The Philosophy

Something I think is a really cool offshoot of the kind of thinking that characterized the free speech movement of the ‘60s is the Free culture movement, which supports the “permission culture.” From Wikipedia: “The movement objects to overly restrictive copyright laws, or completely rejects the concepts of copyright and intellectual property, which many members of the movement also argue hinder creativity.” From these ideas came the Copyleft movement, which supports licenses that use copyright law itself to “remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions” (Wikipedia). It advocates for licenses such as the GNU GPL and Creative Commons licenses that include the Share-alike clause

Arduino

From the free software and permission culture came the open hardware movement as well, exemplified in the Arduino microcontroller platform. What makes the Arduino project unique is that its plans are licensed under a Creative Commons license, so anyone can take the design and improve upon it. Technically, the microcontroller is useful in a wide range of applications because of its inexpensive cost ($50 to buy, less to build yourself), extensibility, and support for standard open-source programming tools. It is useful for people from artists making interactive projects to teachers teaching electronics.

The potential for open hardware projects like this are awesome, and the business models that could be built around them are very compelling even though the designs are free. As this article from Wired discusses, the business model revolves around producing quality versions of the hardware while using the power of the community to improve the product, like any commercial open-source company does. Hardware projects with similar licenses to Arduino include the open-source car and to some degree, the telephony solution Asterisk and the self-replicating protyping machine the RepRap.

Who cares?

The permission culture has shown it is ready for prime time. Openness is here to stay, and technophiles have embraced it. Why don’t you?

See also:

• Arduino’s CC license
• Open-source Philosophy
• General info on open knowledge
• Can’t forget Linux – your friendly neighborhood open-source operating system!
• Google search for “open source hardware”

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

HTML and CSS are the presentation languages of the web. A programmer may build an application in Python or Java, or make their website more beautiful or fun using Javascript, but ultimately all that these languages do is allow for abstracted, automated editing of a page’s HTML and CSS.

HTML

HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, started as the sole language for making a website using Tim Berners-Lee’s WWW system, the system that became the web as we know it today; when you made a page on the net, you wrote HTML to define the content, layout, and design of the page. Note that HTML is not a programming language, but a markup language–you use it to describe how something should look, and the computer interprets it and renders a page onto your screen. Wikipedia says it best: HTML “provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document — by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on…”

Making a well-designed layout for a webpage was difficult because the only way to position elements such as images and text was to place them into tables with hidden borders. As well, much of the HTML code was redundant. There was no way to write one line that made every single link bold and green; you had to specify attributes of page elements individually for each element. To make a single link bold and green, you would write it as <strong><a href="http://woot.com" color="green">Woot</a></strong>. Please note that the use of the color attribute is deprecated; style should be used instead, but I’m using the old-fashioned example on purpose.

Edit: To clarify, the more important reason not to use tables for layout is that if you do, you are essentially marking all of your content as tabular data when it is not, thus making life harder on search engines. (Thank you: http://www.digital-web.com/articles/everything_you_know_about_CSS_Is_wrong/)

CSS

In 1996 CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, was unleashed upon the web (although full support in the major browsers took another 3-4 years). CSS allows for the separation of form and content in web design. That is, you can write the content of your webpage then structure it using HTML, and then define the actual layout and colors and font and what links do when your mouse passes over them using CSS. Wikipedia always says it best: CSS is “used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language” such as HTML.

Now if you wanted all links to be green and bold, it only took one CSS statement ( a{color: green; font-weight: bold;} ) (note how I don’t even need to wrap all of my HTML links in the <strong> tag, I just use CSS). Web design became much easier because instead of structuring the page using tables, CSS could be used to position page elements either relative to the edges of the window or other elements, or absolutely using coordinates on the page. More complex designs became possible, and webpage maintenance easier.

Standards

Today, as always, the W3C, the World Wide Wide Consortium, manages these two languages, as well as the varied ecosystem of dialects that have sprung out of HTML such as XML and all other technical standards related to the web. XML is Extensible Markup Language, and it allows people to make their own languages with their own tags. Major use example: RSS and podcasting.

Tags

As you may already know, HTML is written as a collection of tags. For example, all HTML pages start with the <html> tag and end with </html>. All tags that “open” a statement are written as <tag> and all that close it are written as </tag>. With the exception of a few self-closing tags such as </ br> (which makes horizontal rules), always close your tags!

When you write posts using Wordpress, you can always switch between the visual editor and HTML editor. All that the visual editor does is translate your clicks and words into HTML. If you do try the HTML editor, it works the same way, but you can see the code changes your actions make. The tags you will find most useful are the <a> tag, which is for links (a standing for anchor), the <p> tag, which denotes a paragraph, the <h1>–<h6> tags, which allow for headers to be inserted into a page, and the <ul> and <ol> tags, which allow for bulleted and ordered lists (and don’t forget your <li> tag too!).

The W3C has an excellent HTML primer that will do far better than I ever could at teaching HTML.

The Future

To me, the best feature coming out of the W3C’s work is the <canvas> tag. This tag allows for animations like those made in Adobe’s proprietary Flash software and played in Adobe’s proprietary Flash player to be done using open standards and tools.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

I would like to return again to the issue of TANSTAAFL–There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. In the last post in the series, I discussed where money is needed. Now, I would like to give a simple overview of how that money is acquired. When I refer to companies here, I mean organizations whose primary role is to provide some service over the Internet.

Venture Capital

VC “is a type of private equity capital typically provided to immature, high-potential, growth companies in the interest of generating a return through an eventual realization event such as an IPO or trade sale of the company. Venture capital investments are generally made as cash in exchange for shares in the invested company” (Wikipedia). Besides the traditional banks providing VC, some organizations have sprung up from people who were successful in businesses who are now looking to do VC funding with the money they made. One of those, and one of my favorite companies, is Y Combinator. They are slightly different in that they provide seed funding, which is the initial infusion of cash for startups and traditionally the riskiest for the loaner. One of my favorite startup blogs is that of Paul Graham, who works with the company. A great website that focuses on tech startups and the ecosystem that funds them is TechCrunch.

Advertising

Much of the web is funded by text and other ads. HowStuffWorks has an excellent explanation of how web advertising works. Google’s revenue consists almost entirely of income from their ad programs. Google’s ads are particularly interesting because they revolve around textual analysis of your search queries and the content of webpages on which Google’s ads are shown. Site owners are most commonly paid by advertisers by the click-through rate–how many people click on the ad–although many other more complicated systems exist.
A potential issue for the web is the prevalence of tools such as the free Firefox plugin Adblock and other similar tools for other browsers that block ads from appearing in your webpages by blocking known ad servers.

Other Methods

• Many websites offer premium or subscription services. For example, Wordpress.com offers free blogs that are feature-limited and occasionally show advertisements. For a fee these limits and annoyances can be lifted (or you could also go to Wordpress.org and download the software they use free and install it on your web server and customize it to your hearts content like I did). Of course, the free accounts are useful for hooking users into the site and allowing them to become comfortable enough with or find enough of a need for the service so that they are more likely to pay for it.
• Donations often fund open-source projects and some topical personal sites.
• Some corporations will fund open-source projects through either infusions of cash or employee time if the projects are important to them. Notable here is Google and all of its open-source efforts.

Who Uses What

• Any company with another revenue stream obviously may fund their homepage or other web presence through those monies. Among others, companies and startups will use primarily three sources of funding: venture capital, advertisements, and paid services.
• Individuals or small groups funding sites primarily for pleasure and not profit will generally fund their costs through their own monies, donations, and advertisements.

Advertisements and Me

I could care less about advertisements on the web. Although I could probably increase my perceived browsing speed by using Adblock, I feel no compulsion to use Adblock or Saft to block advertisements from distracting me from my web browsing, because they don’t distract me whatsoever. Over the past ten years or so, I’ve learned to totally ignore and mentally filter out any advertisements and to easily and accurately discern content from advertising. I surmise that the fraternal ability to this is how well I am able to filter out noises around me when reading or otherwise concentrating on a task.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

One of my favorite acronyms must be invoked here: TANSTAAFL – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. There’s a price behind everything, especially in the tech world (and free/open-source software is no exception). I would like to give a shameless plug for donating to FOSS developers and explain the costs behind using the web.

FOSS developers are awesome, awesome people to me. They, for various personal reasons that are often not monetary, spend lots of their time creating, maintaining, and improving the universe of software that is FOSS. They work on projects from operating systems (Linux and Unix) to databases (MySQL, SQLite) to programming languages (Python), PHP, Perl) to web servers (Apache) to web software (Drupal-powers EmeryCentral, Wordpress, phpBB) to word processing (OpenOffice and Abiword) to photo editing (the GIMP). There are FOSS applications in every domain that there is a need in (including niches such as amateur radio). The quality of the work is so good for much of the software that it surpasses anything else produced commercially, and thus the operating system and web server that power most of the Internet and the hardware that runs it (Linux and Apache) are community-built, as well as many of the web software tools that let you utilize the Web. My simple plea is that you occasionally donate $5 here and there to the projects that have allowed the Web to flourish and grow with the freedom and pace that it has.

(Readers familiar with developing and deploying websites should skip ahead)

For anyone who does not know what expenses go into making a website or developing FOSS software (which is done using the Internet to coordinate team members spread all over the globe), this is to give you a basic overview. To have a website, you obviously need a server) connected to the Internet. You will usually pay to have a server located in a datacenter with hundreds or thousands of other servers and powerful air conditioning and multiple redundant power sources and Internet connections, or you may share space on a server with other users using virtualization. Web-hosting space is available from $5 a month upwards, but to have a site support thousands or tens of thousands of views a day quickly becomes expensive because of the amount of work the server needs to do and the amount of bandwidth) that is needed.

To cover expenses that are inevitably incurred, sites (be they homepages for a FOSS project, a blog, a news site, or any other site) will pursue a number of solutions that will be discussed in my next post: advertising and subscription services.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

On September 28 2008 SpaceX’s “Falcon 1 has made history as the first privately developed launch vehicle to reach Earth orbit from the ground!”. On Wired.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

I am so damn excited for the future. I look at where we are today with tech, and back into the past at where we came from, and then finally at the ideas incubating in academia and industry, and chills run down my spine at the thought of where we will be in 2, 5, 10, 20 years. My favorite anticipation is of ubiquitous (read: 99% coverage over the continental U.S.), speedy Internet access.

The coolest part of this pervasive access would be that every single device could have network access. Now, I do not envision any desk lamps, microwaves, or washing machines with direct access to this network, but they could (and should!) have access via mesh networking through a gateway of some sort in the home.

The effect of this network omnipresence on media will be massively profound. Yes, the dystopian future of Epic 2015 is a distinct possibility that must be managed, but I think that through proper regulation (by both the government and the people), the advantages of ever-present access far outweigh the horrors. My favorite exception beyond simple global Internet access is the combination of that access with other services such as location through GPS. The iPhone and the Android G1 come closest today to providing the kind of access and services envisioned. Applications beyond those already available on the Internet include those that would take advantage of the built in camera and the location awareness. Viewing media on these rich-content devices will be a pleasure, but producing geotagged media on-the-go through applications that share the information quickly with your contacts and friends for everyone’s furtherance are just awesome.

There are a number of technologies currently in development that could begin the process of truly universal wireless access, including WiMAX and LTE. Both standards are designed to be able to work over a range of frequencies. A particularly valuable piece of the spectrum that companies developing and planning to deploy these standards wish to use is the 700 MHz band (also know as the UHF band). This band is extremely valuable because according to some estimates it would possibly allow for network towers with a range twice that of current cell phone towers (although frequency availability would still be an issue, but still the number of towers needed would be vastly less than is needed with the frequencies currently apportioned to cell phone providers). One other not so new but currently mostly underutilized standard is IPv6, which is needed because otherwise there would not be enough Internet Protocol addresses for every device to have one.

Please also see this alternate viewpoint on why we should fear ubiquitous Web access.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

Hurricane Ike News Coverage Media Analysis. Completed following this assignment prompt for a class I am currently taking on media literacy and new mediums. 

For more analyses, see the Hurricane Ike blog series by Jonathan Coffman, a self-described “social media professional”.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

Hurricane Ike is a prime example of the advantages of our ever-increasing interconnectedness through the Internet and wireless services like cell phones (and hopefully eventually, ubiquitous Internet through WiMAX).

Facebook & Twitter

Pre- and post-storm, these three services helped everyone stay connected and informed about each other in ways not possible just a few years ago. The usefulness of Facebook is obvious: the quick and easy way to update your friends about how you are doing (or to complain to your friends around the country) was, and is, to update your Facebook status. Anyone can do this via text messaging from their cell phone, as well as respond to Facebook messages and Wall posts, Many people can browse all of Facebook from their phones, Blackberries, and iPhones too. And, of course, people have slowly regained access to laptops, making updates, and especially checking your friends, as easy as usual.

An especially awesome service that has become hugely popular with the web-savvy crowd has been Twitter. Twitter explains itself best:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Twitter is an example of a Microblogging service. You can update your Twitter account using text messages, their regular and mobile websites, and multiple iPhone applications. My favorite feature is the Twitter Facebook app that automatically changes your Facebook status to your latest Twitter update; both the status and Twitter fulfill the same concept of microblogging, but Twitter is a better-designed service (though oft-plagued with reliability issues). One last cool Twitter feature is that any developer can connect to the software using its API to create cool new services and software such as the Facebook app and their own Twitter search engine. Twitter is a perfect example of a Web 2.0 site.

Texting

Cellphone texting was and is hugely useful during disasters such as Ike. I used it pre- and post-storm to first wish everyone safety, and then after to check in with people. Cellphone companies recommend that during disasters, it is best to use text messages instead of voice to communicate, because otherwise the cell towers become overloaded (It’s not as much of a problem now, a few days after the storm, but I still have been getting more “All circuits are busy, try again later” messages when I try to make calls than I ever have before). AT&T (and the other providers as well I’m sure) sent out public health and safety messages on behalf of government agencies such as the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) reminding people to not use generators indoors and to drink bottled water only. Texting was extremely useful to everyone for person-to-person communication, and with its market penetration, texting really makes the mass dissemination of urgent information in a crisis easier than ever before in history.

A random note: What I found especially intriguing was how for the first 8 hours after the storm, I had better cell service in my house than for the next few days. I think some cell tower sites have backup power supplies or generators that last for the length of most normal power outages, but obviously this storm pushed the backups far beyond the time they would be needed for normally.

Websites & Blogs

For anyone with mobile Internet access, the hands-down, easiest way to stay informed was through the websites of major news channels here in Houston¹. All news sites had mobile versions of their websites set up, and some even offer text message alerts to your phone. Many news channels set up oft-updated (and easily updatable for them) blogs.

1: For more on why the Internet is best, see the “Evaluation” section of my Media Portfolio assignment on Hurricane Ike news coverage

Automated Phone Systems

As all Emery High School students know, automated phone systems are a useful way to notify a large group of people in an emergency about events such as school closures. The EWS website was updated throughout the storm as well. What is notable about phone systems is how today, anyone can set up one of these systems using VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and Asterisk (open-source telephony software). Telephony services which used to be the purview of the telephone companies only can now be done by anyone on the cheap. Wow.

Email and other services

Email played a huge role for emergency services in this disaster. Most communications within the emergency management offices, and between themselves and other offices and the media, were done using email. They most likely were not using public Internet access lines, or switched over to as the city lost power, special emergency wireless links. Email is most convenient for the quick dissemination of both time- and non-time-senstive communiques.

One other notable media service was the simulcast of many TV stations’ coverage on FM and AM radio stations. One of the more low-tech, but most reliable, ways to stay informed. Also relevant to a discussion of radio’s role is my aforementioned media portfolio assignment.

Looking Ahead

There will be more disasters. According to many seismologists, California is past due for a large earthquake, and we all know that the hurricanes are relentless. For the next times, for everyone in the country, people need to be more aware of the multitudes of various resources available to them. News stations need to inform viewers in high risk areas; everyone needs to be informed and prepared.

With knowledge of the myriad methods of communication, we can sit secure on the eve of a storm knowing we won’t be subjected to one of our greatest fears: not knowing what’s going on.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

Sorry for the random Dr. Strangelove reference, I just love it too much. Before we get started, here’s a video that will blow your mind – Flobot’s handlebars (on YouTube)! Watch it 2-3 times and look at all of the symbols and the storyline deeply.

Beyond the sites many of us use daily – YouTube, Google, some of us Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Fantasy Sports, and maybe CNN, there are a ton of awesome and useful tools out there on the Interweb. I will catalogue a number of my favorite tools on the net for you and talk about the significance of what I consider the coolest part of Web 2.0: collaboration!

Google docs

Google Docs is a powerful tool for creating and editing text documents, spreadsheets, and slideshow presentations (“Powerpoints”) collaboratively. In this case, collaboratively means that you can edit a document at the same time 1, 2, 3, 5, or 20 other people are! I love using Google Docs for any class project where I need to write something with other people. Of course the web-based document editor doesn’t have anywhere near the power of a computer program on your desktop, it is suitable for 90% or more of a student’s work. The presentation creation features don’t allow for anything near as cool as Keynote does on the Mac transition-wise, but its great for showing a presentation in a pinch like we did in class yesterday. The spreadsheet feature is surprisingly awesome because not only does it support some in-cell functions, but you can even use it to create forms (like a grade survey on where to do prom, or a signup form for who will bring what food to a class party). Other collaborative web-based word processing suites exist. An especially good one with some interesting business tools is Zoho.

Basecamp, Google Sites, Wikispaces

If you need to collaborate on a big (or small) project involving a lot of (or just a few! )documents or todo’s, there are many options on the web. I can highly recommend Basecamp and Google Sites. So far, Wikispaces seems like another powerful and well-built tool as well. Each is suited towards slightly different styles of working and collaborating. Experiment and see which you think will work the best for you. The order of them in the title is a rough spectrum from most to least structured.

digg, reddit, and delicious

I purposely did not capitalize the names because that is how they are written in the sites’ respective logos. These are each examples of quintessential Web 2.0 websites, because they exemplify the social web. These sites depend on their communities of users to define the content on the site. digg and reddit are social news sites where the users submit links to news articles, pictures, and anything else and then vote for which links they like the best. The articles which achieve the most votes the fastest¹ make it to the front page – the users control the content on the site! delicious (officially formerly del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking website where users submit links and tag them. Many users use the site to find articles on particular topics, to find “hot” news articles, or just to organize their own bookmarks better using the tagging features.
1: A highly simplified explanation, they use some complicated alogirthms to prevent gaming of the system.

So why should I care?

You should care because all of these tools will make your life easier at one point or another. You won’t have to drive to a friends house to do a project, or email a document back and forth 30 bajillion times to get something done. You can better manage your college application process, or just finish a group research project with less stress. You can utilize the bored masses on the Internet to find and identify the funniest and best content on the web for you.

All of these tools, and more out there (see the links at the end of this post) allow for totally new methods for the creation, management, discovery, organization, and storage of media. Check them out, they really do make a difference.

A few of my other favorite tools on the web include Google News, Facebook (of course), and Google Reader.

Major shoutouts to Markdown for making the formatting for this easy, and Showdown for turning my Markdown into HTML for Wordpress.

Author’s note: For those of you who are wondering why I combined Web 1.5/2.0 web-based tools and Web 2.0 “social” collaboration in one blog post on seemingly somewhat unrelated sites, it is because everything here does fit the definition of collaborative tool. I do recognize that I might have muddied the waters a bit, but my goal is simply to introduce people to the breadth of the best-of-show tools on the web.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

This will be the first post in a series about web browsers, and will dabble in history and include some usage tips and fun stuff. First up is the new kid on the block, Chrome. 

For anyone who regularly follows tech news on the web, it’s been impossible to miss the madness over the (premature) announcement of Google’s Chrome web browser. I’m not going to repeat any of the facts here (for those, see any of the links at the end of this post). 

What I want to discuss, in compact form, is why this browser is so significant, and where it fits into the plethora of browser options that already exist. Firstly, here is a list of the major browsers for the majority who is unfamiliar with most of these beyond Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari:

Basically, Chrome is a web browser designed for the newest generation of web technologies and the newest websites. It is designed to be speedy and to ensure that the browser itself does not interfere with the user’s browsing.

Simply interesting is how the other features announced for Chrome so far are ideas pioneered by other browsers. From the Opera Browser, comes the “radical” tab and address bar locations and the home tab “speed-dial feature.” From Firefox  comes the “awesome bar.” Also, on the more technical side, both the Chrome and Firefox teams have put huge amounts of work into writing revolutionary Javascript engines for their products (V8 and Spidermonkey). This work is what brings you increased performance when using most modern websites such as Gmail and Facebook. The Google Team does admit that their aim is to take the best of the browsing world and combine into one über-product. 

There is much more to be said, but for now, here are a few good articles on Chrome:

• The comic book used to introduce Chrome
• On Wired
• Chrome can be downloaded here
• On the averted legal crisis
• Mozilla’s view on Chrome (via slashdot)
• Opera’s take on Chrome
• Chrome Pros and Cons

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.