Movers

Here we go, they came to take our stuff away today. One more stop at the office and then major re-arrangement.

My Hub Pages

I've found that Hub Pages is an easy way to write articles that you, as an elder and experienced member of communities have always wanted to share. Here are a few of my recent ones:

You Business Email: Who do you trust?

You Should Get Out More

The Night I met Gala Dali

Why I love my new Cordless Phone


Enough shameless plugging for now. If you want to see what goes on in this white-haired skull, take a look when you get a chance, ok?

Talkshoe Quits Paying for Content

CEO Talkshoe Dave Nelsen announced didn't announce yesterday that effective 30 days ago, Talkshoe would no longer pay for content. I say "didn't announce", because when asked why the counters stopped functioning around the 29th of May, he posted his observations about podcast advertising (which I think are spot on by the way) in their blog. He then sort of apologized for the manner in which the event was handled in a forum post, promising that though he couldn't reveal anything, he would still do his Sharing show next week.

Dave: Many felt that we should have paid thru end of May, or at least thru the day we announced the "pause". This is an exceptionally reasonable point. I would have liked to do exactly that but it was just not possible. I apologize for not explaining why.

I've known Dave for a year and a half, and grown to love his original use of words like "exceptionally reasonable", implying that most points raised were not reasonable. :) What I think none of us expected was Talkshoe breaking up with us via the equivalent of a FaceBook message or SMS. "Sorry, we need to just be friends."

More opinion about Talkshoe, on which I've built three long-running conference calls on this page. I think a lot of us will remain "good friends" with Talkshoe and continue to do shows in spite of the fact that they broke up with us by text message. Dave says that only 10% of the shows were making any money, so the shock wave on affects 1 in 10 of the, what, thousands of hosts?

User-created content is what drives Web 2.0, so I wonder if this is a train wreck about to happen or whether Talkshoe is too insignificant number-wise for this incident to matter in its life. Talkshoe has thus far provided an exceptional service to the Long Tail on a model no one is sure will ever be economically viable.

Larousse Goes Online

The 150 year old French publishing company Larousse opened its new site a few days ago. The site immediately was overwhelmed by the number of interested visitors, but became available again yesterday. As I write this on a Saturday morning in Europe, the site is up but not as responsive as we've come to expect from search and reference sites. One of the reasons this is of interest is that although this site is in French only, Larousse is owned by Lagardère which owns French, English and Spanish language media outlets. An experiment by Lagardère is no laughing matter. It may turn out to be the wave of the future, where traditional media "gets it".

I explored the site, which chose Microsoft .NET technology on IIS 6 for some reason, is very slow and erratic, but when it does work, here's a few features I think are of interest.

Doing a search on a word or name brings up a multi-paned results page. On the left are expandable panes for article links, quotations, timelines, multimedia objects including images, video and sound files. On the right, member-contributed articles are listed. For example, the name "Obama" does not have a Larousse article but there is a member-written contribution on the right, "Obama, Illinois Prodigy".

There appear to be social networking features such as "community" planned but not yet available. There are thematic alerts, but are there keyword alerts like those on Google or Yahoo? That would be important for brand watching. Bookmarking is another feature that isn't on at the moment.

The site currently suffers from ajaxmania, so the search field sometimes misses the first letters of the word and login buttons don't always work, requiring a full reload and a lot of patience. Also, the stats metering slows the site down. All in all, I do not believe that adequate technical resources were aligned with this effort. Perhaps it has had more success than the budget committee expected or the developers don't have the experience on such potentially busy sites?

Coincidentally, I see an offer for full access to Larousse publications online "starting at" 1 euro per month. Features promised are access to the 4 bilingual dictionaries, the full Larousse dico in French and the entire encyclopedia. The bilinguals with English will certainly be of interest to many who have found by experience that the free translations and dictionaries available on line are pretty spotty in quality. Still, paid online access in trad media has not shown itself to be all that commonly successful.

More to come.

April in Paris

Hashtags and Twitter

Just because I'm older than dirt doesn't mean I don't seek out the best ways to make my time on the net more efficient!Chris Borgan pointed this article out saying "Hashtags are being used more and more by people looking to refine their use of Twitter. I've seen them used a lot, but never understood their application until this article." Great idea, hashtags.

read more | digg story

Thoughts: Identity Theft and Spam Prevention

Because we will be moving on a few months, we actually decided to start preparing now. In that preparation we began by looking at the countless archive boxes of stuff like utility bills, bank statements, apartment-related paperwork, etc. Every piece of paper involved in these things has name, address and often other more potentially dangerous information like social security or bank account numbers. This should make it obvious why I went out and bought a new paper shredder.

What's less obvious is that while shredding documents, and I mean thousands of pages, some papers only have my personal info on the first page of say 10. In that case, why waste time, energy and my shredder? I tear those up, rather than shred them. Sometimes, there are other peoples' names on these pages. It made me think of things like those "share this" links where you can put a friend's email address and send them the page URL. Can you trust these? I don't know, but I do know that every time I have changed my email because of spam, it takes only a week or two before I begin getting spam again.

The bottom line here is simple: think before you give your address out to a web service and think too before you give someone else's address, you may be compromising their email without knowing it. If you want to share a URL, copy it and email it to your friend, don't use the web link to do it.

For your own safety, it's wise to use remailing services such as sneakemail.com or trashmail.net when subscribing to lists, services or whatever. Although you figure "hey, gmail (or hotmail or yahoo) is free, I'll just get another account" you will be better served by keeping even the free accounts private and using remailers for services you aren't sure of.