As a news junkie and a history junkie, I have to say that Google’s newspaper archive is just about as fascinating as it gets.

Announced on the official Google blog the other day, it appears the monolithic search company is going to attempt scanning and indexing just about every North American newspaper ever.  They are going to be working their way through scanning and indexing them for the fore seeable future, but as you can see from the example to the right, you enter a search term and you get highlights showing why it was brought up.

What I love is they are scanning these as they were printed, so if you feel like just browsing a paper, you get the ads, headlines, the little odd stories and things that have disappeared over the years.  In the sample newspaper I was looking at, there was a column called “Daddy’s Evening Fairy Tale” which was a short story for fathers to read to their children at night.  So cool and such a slice of America from years ago.

The part that just amazes me is the depth this can add to term papers for students.  Will they use it is another question, but you can get a real taste for how a historical event was viewed at the time it was happening by reading actual accounts.  I would have killed for something like this when I was in school.

Kudos to Google, I think this is a very worthy effort.

I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to figure out exactly how Digg works.

For those of you unfamiliar with Digg, it is a social bookmarking site that once you add a link to it, people can vote, or “digg it”, to rank it higher.  In theory, the more diggs you get, the better chance you have your article going popular and making the front page (FP) of the site.  While just being on Digg brings you some traffic, making the front page brings you INSANE traffic.

Naturally, every blogger wants to make the front page, but it rarely happens.  To that end, people endlessly try to figure out the formula of what it takes to make it, and about the only thing most people can agree on is that it must happen in the first 24 hours your article is on the site, but beyond that, it’s a mystery.

In general the articles from this site rarely make it on to Digg at all, I think maybe 10 times total.  The one I did the best with was Anonymous Takes On Scientology, but I was fairly certain it wouldn’t make the FP.  Over on Mashable, just about everything I write gets put on Digg, and on average I make the FP once or twice a month.  Even with a good track record, I can’t figure it out.  I thought I had it down to a mix of number of Diggs with a high number of comments.  I had some with lots of diggs/low comments and they didn’t make it, and then had low diggs/high comments and they didn’t make it either, so obviously the formula was a balance.

Today a friend of mine is nearing the 24 hour mark, he has almost 300 Diggs, almost 100 comments… still not popular.  Say what?

It’s probably a good thing that bloggers can’t figure out the formula, otherwise we’d all be writing the perfect Digg articles on a daily basis and the site would be useless, but at the same time it becomes a bit depressing when you think you’re so close, and then it just never happens no matter how many of the factors you’ve hit.  Apparently I need to go back to the drawing board though as my friend’s lack of FP has totally chucked all of my theories right out the window!

So, what do you think it is?  What makes a Digg article go popular?  Throw out some funny theories if you want, because we all know that none of us have it figured out.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is at it again. I know… you’re all shocked.

The RIAA, the goverening body that is charged with the protection of musical copyrights, is again going so far in their efforts to protect music, that they seem to be doing more harm than good.  The latest confirmed casualty is the startup website called Muxtape.

The site, without a doubt, was questionable in its legalities from day one.  It allowed users to upload MP3s to the site and they could then make a “Muxtape” from those.  It was meant to bring back some of the feeling people got from making mix tapes for friends back in the 1980’s and 90’s.  You were limited to putting 12 songs on each Muxtape, and there was no means for downloading the songs present in the site, all in an effort to show the record industry that this was merely a way for people to promote the music they loved.

As of August 19th, the image shown above here appeared on the front page of the Muxtape site.  The problems more than likely stem from the fact that third-party developers came up with ways for people to download the music, even though one of the owners of the site repeatedly pleaded with poeple to not do so.  The company blog does make things a little less clear, though:

No artists or labels have complained. The site is not closed indefinitely. Stay tuned.

Whatever is going on with Muxtape involves the RIAA, and that is never a good thing.

So, while clearly Muxtape was on shaky legal ground all along, you then have the case of Pandora, which is 100% legal, but may be shut down by virtue of the greed of the music industry.  According to a story in the Washington Post, last year a federal commission, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB),  ordered that the royalty rate online radio stations pay to SoundExchange be doubled.  Mind you that at this time terrestrial radio does not pay any royalties (although the RIAA is looking to charge radio stations now), and satellite radio, which is subscription based, pays a lesser fee rate than online radio does.

Pandora is free to its one million daily users, and has become one of the most popular applications on the iPhone/iPod Touch app store, and all of this is made possible via advertising revenue.  Under the new fee structure, Pandora will have to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of its projected $25 million in revenue to SoundExchange.  If this should go into effect, Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora, says he will have to shut the site down because the company will only be wasting money at that point.

Okay, lets do some simple math for the music industry shall we?

Old Pandora fee structure
35% of $25,000,000 is $8,750,000
Sales of music discovered due to people listening to Pandora is impossible to calculate

New Pandora fee structure
70% of nothing due to Pandora shutting down under new fees is $0
No sales of music discovered due to people listening to Pandora is not impossible to calculate, it is $0

Which one looks more attractive to you?  The old fee structure, or the new, greedier structure, that leaves the music industry with earning nothing?  I think I’ll take curtain #1, Monty!

The music industry is going berserk with the online industry because I think they feel like they finally have a way to track stuff.  The amount of piracy that went on while I was in high school was astronomical.  We were all constantly taping off CDs for each other, passing them around, taping music off the radio and so on, but the industry could do nothing about it because they had no way to track it.  Now comes the Internet and they have ways to see how many times everything gets played, how many times something gets downloaded, and they have gone absolutely bat crazy with trying to figure out how to squeeze every penny they can out of it.  Remember when they wanted a percentage of each iPod sold because Steve Jobs couldn’t sell them if it wasn’t for the music to put on them?  Yeah, prove to me they aren’t trying to take insane amounts of money they shouldn’t be able to.

As I see it, the problem here is that the industry is forgetting that without the ability to discover new music, they won’t have any sales.  I have no desire to listen to commercial radio and be forcefed they drivel they program.  Sites such as Pandora are amazing because they learn from you and what you like, and then they will recommend new music based off of that.  I have discovered several bands I had never heard of via this site, and now it may go away because the music industry just simply can’t control their never-ending greed.

Perhaps this actually is there plan.  Perhaps they want to be able to dictate how we discover music so they can continue to force us to listen to the likes of Britney Spears.  There is something horribly broken in the music industry, and it isn’t a couple of stolen MP3s from the likes fo sites like Muxtape, or from Pandora not paying enough in royalties, it is from the music industry having this omnipotent style attitude that essentially everyone in the world works for them.  Enough is enough.

In the above linked article about Pandora, towards the end, there was this quote from a musician (you know, the people this is supposed to all be about?) that I think sums it all up pretty well.

Matt Nathanson, a singer-songwriter who has recorded for both major and independent record labels, said he is worried that the demands placed on Internet radio could “choke” the industry before it gets its footing.

“Net radio is good for musicians like me, and I think most musicians are like me,” he said. “The promotion it provides is far more important than the revenue.”

There you have it folks.  True, this is just one musician, but this is still an actual musician saying that this is more important as a promotional tool than a revenue stream.  Every industry has promotional tools, why does it seem the music industry can’t have one without taxing it to death?  And if they aren’t taxing it to death, they want to sue people who listen to music… or they want to dictate how you can listen to it via Digital Rights Management (DRM)… or they want to impose a tax on all Internet subscribers to help cover “the cost” of piracy… the list of endless as to how this industry is attacking the consumers.

It is time you finally voice your opinion on this in various manners.

• The best way possible by skipping buying a new album, even if it is by your favorite artist, go to their concerts instead, buy their tshirts, make sure THEY get the money, but try everything you can to make sure the companies don’t see a dime.
• Write your congressman, let them know you think this new royalty scheme is a joke.
• Write the music companies themselves and make sure you tell them of your intentions.
• Blog about it, spread the word.

It’s up to us folks, how much longer will we stand for an industry that so clearly hates us, but isn’t essential to our everyday well-being like food or water, dictate such insane policies?

One of the features when you log in to your WordPress blog dashboard is you can see past entries from the same day in years past.  Well, I typically take a look at these to see if they inspire a new entry from me, and Firefox haters go to a whole new level, published one year ago today, led me to some interesting discoveries.

As a refresher, there was a man who had determiend the Firefox plugin Addblock Plus was just pure evil, so he had set up his websites to block Firefox users.  Instead of just blocking folks, though, it redirected them to WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com, which, at the time, explained his thought process behind this and how Mozilla allowing Adblock Plus to exist meant that Mozilla was endorsing it.  I ended up covering this for TECH.BLORGE.com also, and at that time Danny Carlton, the owner of the blocked site, and I had a… well… less than friendly exchange of emails.  Well, let me rephrase that in that I was friendly and he wasn’t.  You can see the quotes in either of my original pieces.

So, flash forward to today, and just for grins I decided to revisit his site while using Firefox to see what would happen.  Well, low-and-behold, I got onto his main site, JackLewis.net, with no problems.  So I decided I should go see what was on WhyFirefoxIsBlocked now, and what I found was a site that used to sport no ads covered in Google Adsense ads, and now just filled with news gathered from other sources telling you how horrible Firefox is.  I did a search on the domain name to make sure it hadn’t been taken over by someone else, but it is still registered to the same Danny Carlton in Oklahoma that owned it last year.

Considering how friendly Mr. Carlton was last year, I didn’t bother emailing him to see why things had changed, and since this isn’t a news piece, but an opinion piece on a personal blog, it wasn’t really necessary.  Seeing as this is my opinion, I’m thinking Mr. Carlton discovered that:

1. His campaign was pointless and never going to take off.
2. He claimed Firefox users were a small percentage of the Internet, but I showed in both stories I wrote that my personal research showed they were well over 1/3 of Internet users.  Perhaps he missed the traffic?

It’s just interesting to see how much changed in a year.  From a freelance web designer who was angering a third of the web, to someone who seems to have lost their willingness to fight in something they believed in so hard… what an odd little journey.  Oh well, my little write-up on him on BLORGE led to my most popular post ever while I worked there, so I guess I owe him some sort of thanks.

Back in April of this year, I did one of the largest lists I had ever done for Mashable: Dating Toolbox: 120+ Sites For Singles To Find Love.  I thought I had hit the majority of the dating sites out there when I even found one dedicated to farmers, but somehow I completely missed The Ashley Madison Agency.

As you can see, there slogan is, “Life is short.  Have an affair.”  I’m kind of surprised this didn’t end with an exclamation point, but oh well.  As you’ve guessed from that, this site is dedicated only to married individuals who are looking to cheat on their spouse.  I admit I didn’t bother signing up to peruse the site myself, but I would imagine there are more than a few single men in there also whom are sure they can provide some lonely housewife with just what they need, but in general it is for married folks.

Though the site has been around since 2002, I had never heard of it until the news came out that ESPN’s parent company, Disney, had instructed the network to stop running television ads for the service.

Wait…

They run television ads for a site built specifically for people who want to have affairs?  According to the article in AdFreak, Noel Biderman, president of the agency, doesn’t understand how the service differs from the beer ads run on ESPN and why those are allowed to continue while this site isn’t.

Er… well, you see, the thing is…

Honestly, I have a very “live and let live” mentality when it comes to other people’s lifestyles.  I have known people of of so many varied backgrounds that it would be impossible for me to be judgmental of anyone who chooses to do anything short of murder.  What I do have is a problem with is a website whose sole puprose is to profit from facilitating the breaking of marital vows.  I am not naive in that I don’t know this happens on other dating sites on a daily basis, but those sites are not built around that lone concept.  The site says they don’t encourage infidelity, and they say that just because it exists it won’t cause people to stray, they are merely providing a service.

urk… I think my brain just broke.

Just because you can build a site or service doesn’t always necessairly mean you should, and this is one of those cases.

Just me yammering at you this week folks, and I apologize in advance for my voice starting to go towards the end. Stupid pollen.

This week I talk about this story at Valleywag about people getting angry, again, about how Google Street View violates your “privacy”.

I give some thought to a comment left by Kim Greenblatt in regards to the post I did about The Dark Knight still not being profitable at the $314 million dollar mark.

And lastly I go on about this story of the band Buckcherry “leaks” their own music, and blames pirates. Stupid people.

Here’s a link to the MP3 for those who wish to download it.

A year and a day ago I wrote about how some bloggers had the idea that messaging on Facebook would replace email.

Yeah… anyone seen this happen yet?

As I have become more immersed then ever in the world of working on the Web, I have become even more convicned that thisis never going to happen.  This isn’t to say that something won’t eventually replace email, but it certainly isn’t going to be something like Facebook messaging.

When I was at the SummerMash Seattle last weekend, only one person asked to friend me on Facebook, and that was only because he had a computer right there he could do it with.  It is far too complicated to give someone your Facebook address as opposed to me saying “seanpaune@such and such”.  If you remember my name, you remember my address essentially.

You also don’t see anyone making a native way to gain access to your Facebook messages on your phone and other mobile devices.  Yes, there is now a Facebook application for you to use on the iPhone and iPod Touch, but that still isn’t as easy a concept as email.  If anything, I think services like Twitter are replacing the one line emails I thought Facebook might replace, and if anything, my Facebook traffic has declined in the past year.  Even more so than anything online, text messages seem to be being used more and more.  While I was in Seattle, I sent and received more texts in 2 days than I usually do in a month, and when not texting, I was getting messages on GTalk.  Even crazier?  People who usually don’t talk to me on the phone actually called me.

Total Facebook messages received while I was gone?  None.

While I do think the nature of communication is changing, moving to Facebook is about the last place I see it going.  It is still an enclosed system that takes too much work to access to be used as an effective messaging system for busy people.  So, one year on, I would have to call this concept even crazier than I did a year ago.

Fans of Joss Whedon may want to rush over to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog before Sunday.

For those who haven’t heard about this yet, this is a wacky little project Joss came up with of a series of 3 short films to be broadcast on the Internet.  The story follows Dr. Horrible’s (Neil Patrick Harris) quest to get in to the Evil League of Evil while also trying to woo Penny (Felicia Day). The problem with both of the Doctor’s quests is that Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion) is getting in his way by stopping his evil deeds and wooing Penny.

So, why do you need to watch these before Sunday?  Well, for now, they are free to watch, but after Sunday they will be taken down and you will only be able to purchase them through iTunes, or wait for some sort of DVD release.  Each episode is 13 - 14 minutes in length, and episodes 1 & 2 are out, with episode 3 coming out on Saturday.

Now, I am sure some folks out there are wondering how they actually are quality wise, and I have to say I have loved the first two episodes.  I get the feeling Mr. Whedon is a frustrated musician, but I would love to see him do a rock & roll musical film, or dare I say, a Broadway show?  I think he may actually have the chops for this after this project and the Buffy, The Vampire Slayer musical episode showing what he can do.

Anyway, it is great fun, and well worth your time.  It has his common theme that no one is black or white, but we are all shades of gray.  And, could someone please tell me when I started enjoying Neil Patrick Harris’ work so much?  I love him in just about everything he does now.  Nathn Fillion is Nathan Fillion as always, but his last line in episode 2 made me nearly cry I was laughing so hard at his delivery.

Get over there and watch it for free before it’s gone!

Back in May I publiched a post named “Microsoft Walks Away From Yahoo“… I’m not 100% sure that was correct.

In what has become a saga fit for any daytime drama, it appears that Microsoft and Yahoo started talking again, with corporate raider Carl Icahn thrown into the mix somehow.  Mr. Icahn has been calling for the ouster of Yahoo’s board of directors for some time now, and today made his proxy fight official by filing papers with the SEC to replace the existing board with his own slate.

All of this came about over the weekend as Yahoo rejected another offer from Microsoft that seems to have been quietly brewing for a while now.  The new joint deal between Icahn and Microsoft was proposed Friday night and would have reportedly put Microsoft in charge of the search business and Icahn controlling the rest of the company.  The proposal included ousting the current board, including CEO Jerry Yang, and replacing them with Icahn’s chosen people.

According to a story in the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo has been willing to talk about selling at $33 a share, but their current board must stay in tact.  This has been the main sticking point for Microsoft/Icahn, and their offer seems to have been more than generous.  Reportedly it would have paid $1 billion now, with $2.3 billion per year for five years, with a minimum payment of $1.6 billion for the length of the agreement.  Microsoft would have also purchased $3.9 billion dollars worth of shares and acquired $2.8 billion of Yahoo’s debt to pay shareholders a special dividend.  This would have covered just Yahoo’s search business, leaving them their content business.

With yet another offer rejected, shareholders are demanding answers, and with their annual meeting coming up August 1st, they’re going to want blood to know why Yang keeps rejecting these proposals.  Mr. Yang may very well find himself out of a job, with no money, if he keeps this up and doesn’t explain himself better to the shareholders.

It would be fascinating to know which part of this whole debacle was on Mr. Yang’s mind as he lunched with the Google co-founders in the pictures above.  Sure it is impossible to know all of the finer details in a situation such as this, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out why Microsoft is so insistent in their desire to acquire the company, or why Yahoo is so blasted resistant to the concept.  It’s obvious they aren’t going away, and the longer Yang and crew hold out, the worse this is potentially going to be for every one as Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, and Icahn get more and more aggressive.

Even from my far removed vantage point, I think it may be time for Yang to take the money and run with it.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) group, the people responsible for regulating the rules of domain names, passed a new measure today that could either be the greatest idea ever, or the worst.

According to Times Online, people will be able to purchase pretty much any top level domain they can think of, so instead of seeing .com, you might see something like .apple or .microsoft.  This is only going to be for big corporations, though as prices will start at $100,000.  So, lets say I bought .seanpaune, and then sold the right for people to buy domains on it just like you do a .com now, those are the type of people they are looking at.

My problem with this is that up until now I knew if I needed to go to a website, all I really needed to was remember the first part of the domain name.  So long as I remembered that part, I knew the last part had to be .com, .net, .org and so on, but now I will have to remember everything.  I know this doesn’t sound major, but lets say I’m driving down a highway, and I see a billboard for a company that I am interested in.  Instead of just having to remember one word, now I also have to remember the extension, and that may not be easy while going 65 mph.

The only big success story I can think of using one of the off-shoot extensions already is Del.icio.us.  They hit on a beautiful idea by using the underused .us extension, but how many times are you going to see something like that under this new scheme?  Sure some people will try it, but most of those styles of extensions will only be good for a limited number of domains, and the person will have trouble recouping thier $100,000 investment.

It is obvious that ICANN is doing this to make more money, but I feel they have done a horrible disservice to the Internet at large with this decision.  Yes, all the good .com names are gone, but such is life, and this will only lead to a rash ever increasingly confabulated names and user confusion.  This will only serve to confuse the Web at large and possibly frustrate people to the point of not even wanting to bother with it.

Then comes the idea of how fast do you think people will rush for things like .sex, .porn and any other number of popular Internet activities such as .betting and so on.  This will also cause a problem for small companies that could easily see their name snapped up as an extension because they can’t afford a $100,000 price tag, and even in just the scenario of needing to buy thier addresses with yet another extension.  I already have several misspellings of my main domain names locked down, now I will have to worry about a possible endless wellspring of new domain extensions I may need to snap up also to protect my company name?

The better idea would have been to release a few new extensions a year, but now we will just see a flood of bizarre names, people investing in extensions and domains that will do them no good and users that are just fed up. Good job, ICANN.

Message forum etiquette is one of those things that you could say seems to have disappeared over the years, but that would imply it ever existed.

Cries of “newb/n00b” whenever someone joins, insulting choices when one likes a piece of technology another member doesn’t, and on and on. Well, apparently I am not the only one who has ever found all of this to be silly as the guys over at Red Vs Blue put together a video of things you never read in forum posts.

If you don’t follow Red Vs. Blue, you won’t get a couple of those jokes (such as why the robot speaks Spanish and Caboose is… well… Caboose), but that doesn’t change that this may be the best thing ever said about the actions of people on the Internet.

As I have discussed several times before, the nastiness on the web seems to do nothing but get worse over time.  In particular, I have never understood the whole “newb” thing.  Like the people yelling about you being new to a forum weren’t also new at one time?  Were they somehow magically born with the knowledge of the forum, so they came into it knowing how to do everything?

One of the best comebacks I have heard to this was while playing an online game the other day.  Some people were mocking a “newb”, and a guy spoke up, saying to leave the new person alone.  Someone replied that they got mocked when they joined, so why shouldn’t they do it in turn?  The defender said, “Well, you know that you should mock all new people, but you don’t see me hitting my kids for not knowing how to do things.”

The newb got an apology from those mocking him.

Somehow I doubt we will ever see this age-old trend stop, but it sure would be nice.  So listen up the RvB guys… even they rant about Lost.

As part of the nature of the AnimeUSA business, we end up doing 26 conventions around the country each year. We go in, set up for the weekend, sell for 3 days, pack up and do it all over again.  As we currently work it, it is my parents who go out to the conventions as they both work for me, and I stay back at the office as I am the only one who knows how to work the websites.

On this particular weekend, that brought them within just a short drive of the diabolical Miss M that I mention from time-to-time here on the site.  See, this is the part about M I have not really ever pointed out to the readers of my site in that M and I have never met in person.  We met back in February of 2007 on a message board and hit it off in moments of the first time we talked.  Now, nearly a year and a half later, I actually consider M my best friend, but I tend not to discuss this because of the nature of how we met.  As if I don’t have enough strikes against me already with everyone thinking I’m a hermit!

Since they were in such close proximity to each other, M trekked over to the convention center and met up with my parents for dinner.  Mind you, M and I talk on the phone so frequently that she has talked to both of them just in the course of them answering the phone when I’m not around.  So, it wasn’t a completely cold meeting, but still odd that my parents have now met her in person while I still have not had the opportunity.

She and I have tried numerous times to meet up in person, but something inevitably gets in our way as adult responsibilities are want to do.  We think we finally have a safe date picked out for later this year, but we don’t want to jinx it, so I’ll just keep it to myself for now.

Why do I share all of this with you?  Well, I think it’s time people realize that as we live more of our lives online, that virtual friendships are going to become more common.  I have been on the Web since 1986, and have had many cyberspce only friendships over the years, but there seems to be a shift in them: while in the past they seemed to be only someone you would chat with on an aquitannce level, they seem to becoming more intense.  As we do everything online, from blogging like this, sharing videos on sites like YouTube, posting pictures on Flickr and so on, it is becomeing easier to let people become incorporated into your life, and the lines between virtual in real life friendships is blurring more and more.  All that is missing is that face-to-face element, but even that is disappearing with free video chatting capabilities being built into more applications.

Do I think will ever go completely virtual?  Of course not.  I think in 99.9% of cases, friendships forged in real life will always be tend to be stronger, but there will be the rare cases where friends made in an online environment can be as strong, if not stronger.  Sure there are chances for people to fib about themselves, be it their appearance or just making up facts about their life, but in general I think online cuts out some of the malarkey.  You don’t tend to hide as much because for the most part the person is faceless to you and it’s not worth exerting the effort to type it out.  There is also the chance to guard those parts of yourself you don’t want to share with others, but that is for everyone to judge personally if it is a positive or a negative aspect.

I will probably always prefer making friends in person, I can’t see that ever going away, but you do end up with those rare instances where you meet someone online that the only thing that really makes it different from a real life friendship is the distance.  Personally I find the distance interesting at times because it can allow you to get a taste of other cultures depending on where they are from.  I have had online friends from Mexico, England, Brazil, India, Japan and several other countries, and I have learned things about each of their cultures that I probably would have never known otherwise.  Not all of them were or are strong friendships, but it is still interesting to learn about how they view the world.  From M, I just learn how to formulate diabocal plans to take over the world… apparently it has a lot to do with designer shoes…

So what say all of you, dear readers?  Have you met any online friends you think will be life long friends?  Are they people you just “hang” with while your online?  Do you avoid talking with people online all together?  How do you say the nature of friendships changing in this digital age?

By the way, in case you were all wondering why she is simply known as “M”, well, if you were an evil genius, would you want everyone knowing your name?  Although, in her case, I know she just has managed to keep her name out of every search engine, so who am I to ruin her track record?

I’ve never been horribly comfortable with self-promotion, but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do it. With that being said, I would like to introduce you to my newest time consuming project, StarterTech.com.

This is a new blog which, as the tag line implies, tries to simplify technology so that anyone can understand it. The new project was born out of my own mother’s problems with trying to educate my 60-year-old father about technology, and her constant exasperations with him. She finally asked me one day if there was a blog that did nothing but explain various aspects of technology as simply as possible, I said I didn’t think so, and thus StarterTech was born.

Technology is something I have always been passionate about, but I don’t think it is nearly as all inclusive as it could be, and those of us who live with it everyday sometimes forget that people don’t just “know” all of the ins-and-outs of it. I learned several years ago to try to take a much more patient approach to teaching people about technology when I taught an adult education night course in computer basics. I had agreed to do it because a friend asked me, and it really opened my eyes to the fact that -gasp- not every one is computer savvy or a tech geek! After a few false steps, it really gave me a sense of satisfaction to convey my love of tech, and what it can do for us, to people that were just learning, no matter what their age.

I am hoping to do the same with StarterTech, just with a broader audience. And, no, it is not lost on me that people have to know how to use a search engine to find me, but there is not much I can do to teach them before they even find me. This is part of the reason I am trying to write the simplest headlines and phrases I can in the hopes it will aid them in locating the site.

While it is done in a blog format, I am trying to make it so people who go to a search engine and look for an answer to their problem won’t have any trouble finding it. Yes, it is being written in a normal chronological fashion, but it is much more about being a reference site and trying to explain how to do things on the web, as well as explaining basic concepts.

The first article went up on April 12th, so I am still trying to get the body of work up to speed, and right now I am trying to cover very basic ideas that will be referred back to numerous times, such as What Is Social Networking?, How To Pick A Password and even things like Web 101 Guide To Acronyms.

I am actually fairly excited about this project, and I plan on getting guest bloggers in to do articles about fields I don’t understand myself, such as capturing video from your TV. This is very much not just online tech, but all technology.

So, please stop by the site, or sign up for the RSS feed, and join me as I lose my mind as I add yet another project to the 5,000 things I already do! And to all my tech-guru type friends out there who will probably laugh at me, why not drop me an email or comment about guest blogging on a subject near and dear to your heart?

My much beloved Firefox web browser will finally be getting a new version on June 17th!  Hopefully with slightly less memory leakage, and a bit more stability, but a new version all the same.

In celebration of this release, Mozilla, the company behind Firefox, is going to try to set a record for the number of downloads in a single day for a piece of software.  You can click on the image to the left to sign up for a reminder email to be sent (they promise no more after that), or I imagine every blog on Earth will be mentioning this next week to remind all of you.

Some of the things you can look for include OS-themed appearance, new download manager, new password manager, new bookmark system with tags and a whole lot more.  I am so all over this on Tuesday!

Ever heard of Faceparty? I know I haven’t and I even work for the largest blog in the world for social networking, and recent news about how they are battling sexual predators is the first I’ve ever heard of them.

Melissa Gira Grant of Valleywag, the gossip rag of the Web 2.0 crowd, wrote this story up yesterday, and I am just blown away by it. It seems that in the United Kingdom, there is a proposal for a new law that would require websites to check member’s email address against a list of addresses registered of those used by known sexual offenders. Now, mind you, this is not law yet, but just a proposal, but Faceparty felt they should go ahead and comply.

This caused a problem for the social network because they have never verified the email addresses used bu their members were legitimate, so they had to come up with another plan of action. What did they decide was the easiest course of action? Why to delete all members over the age of 36 of course!

Yes! Why didn’t I see this before? You can identify all sexual predators by their age! There has never been a sexual crime committed by say a college-aged person, or someone in their 20’s, it is only those people over 36 that do this. A quote from the company tries to clarify their move:

“We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which”

Of course there is no way to tell which is which because this is a completely arbitrary decision with no real basis.

So, honestly I was willing to ignore this, contrary to popular belief, I do actually get tired of always being pissed off, but then I went and visited their site. Towards the bottom of their page, I found a link labeled “Adult Verification“, so I of course had to follow it, and I find a page all about protecting children… while using sexually suggestive models and telling you how if you sign up for this pay service, £8.95 a month, they’ll give you access to all the adult photos and unmoderated pictures that users just posted!

Does anyone see some conflicting principles at play here? On the one hand, they want to “protect the children”, but on the other hand they are willing to sell you the ability to see adult material if you are over the age of 18. I have never seen any other social network do such a thing, and I have to say the whole things reeks of bad decisions or ageism to me, but the company cut that off also:

“Despite malicious rumours spread by a few people on the website, it is not true that we have deleted members due to ‘ageism’”

Then explain the willingness to have such conflicting policies. Explain how you came up with the age of “36″ being the magical number to determine who may or may not be a sex offender. Why not 25? Why not 30?

Yes, I must admit I’m 36, but, no, I have never had a Faceparty account, but I do belong to numerous other social networks, so I do have a dog in this fight, and all I can hope that this is an isolated, ignorant, decision, and not a sign of things to come.

Is there good reason for people over 36 to be on networks? I think so. I’ve been able to reconnect with many people I lost contact with over the years, I can stay in easy contact with other friends I have spread all over the planet, and I know some people in that age range who are on networks so they can monitor what their kids are doing.

As I have said before when it comes to policing social networks for sexual predators, where are the parents in all of this? If people would realize that if parents were more involved with their kids, setting limitations on what they can do with the computer, and how, you wouldn’t have to worry about social networks doing it for you.

I’m not sure that this is what this particular case is about though. In my purely cynical opinion, based strictly on my random speculation, and I would be interested to see how many people over the age of 36 signed up for their age verification service. I would hate to suggest this was some bizarre way to cut some bandwidth expenses, but you kind of have to wonder if there wasn’t some possibility that this was a way to cut some of their least profitable customers.

I’m all for protecting children, but I certainly think there are more tasteful ways of doing it.

Well, the party is over.

Microsoft had finally upped their offer to $33 a share from the $31 they initially offered, but it seems Yahoo wanted $37 a share.  Steve Ballmer finally decided it wasn’t worth the games, not the protracted fight it was going to be, so he has opted to move on, leaving Yahoo to their own devices.

Where does either company go from here?  Who knows, probably plodding along on the same paths they already were.  I still can’t quite grasp why Microsoft wanted this deal so bad, but that si for them to know and the rest of us to never learn.  I for one am just glad this is over so it won’t be in the news every five minutes.

I warned you all this was coming, and here we are: RSS Awareness Day. Real Simple Syndication (RSS) is gaining more and more acceptance, but it is still used by such a small percentage of people who read blogs on the Web, and I honestly can’t figure out why.

Today, Adam Ostrow over at Mashable, one of my many bosses there, I think summed up RSS in the simplest terms I have ever seen: I like to make the analogy to old-fashioned newspapers, which are often a round-up of stories from the wire services like AP and Reuters, blended in with content produced by the paper’s own reporters.

If you think about it, he is 100% right, it certainly is like you are creating your own newspaper. When you want to read the news, do you go to the AP site, then the Reuters site followed up by your choice of news network? No, typically you like it all in one place, so it’s easy to access, and read quickly, saving you time.  This is just what RSS does for you, except it does it with blogs and other news streams.  Check out this video if you have no knowledge of how it works.

I was a late bloomer, as I said in RSS - Is it for me?, but later recanted in RSS Revisted. My life would be impossible without this tool. I almost don’t want to read any site now that doesn’t support RSS!  So what are you waiting for?  Why aren’t you starting a reader yet?  And you can always add my feed as your first… you know, just saying.

A big thank you to Daniel of DailyBlogTips.com for this wonderful idea of spreading the love for RSS around.

Adam Ostrow, one of my editor’s at Mashable, has launched… well, re-launched, an exciting web application that I can’t believe how much I enjoy.

ReadBurner had a short-lived run earlier this year that got the tech bloggers buzzing, but then it sadly went away when it got more popular than people could handle.  Adam, along with  Drew Olanoff, Thomas Connors, and Alexander Marktl, saw an oppurtunity to sweep in, re-design it, and bring it back better than before.

So what does it do that makes it so interesting?  For those of us who use Google Reader for our RSS feeds, we have the ability to click a handy little button that lets us share whatever stories we find interesting with those people who are in our Google contacts.  Until ReadBurner it was just amongst friends, but using some of Google’s handy ways of sharing tools, RB shows you which stories are being shared the most, how many times it has been shared, and who it is that thought it was worth passing around.

For those that might worry that you’re being shared without your permission, no worries.  You have to manually add your feed to ReadBurner.  (You can find the link to your items by clicking on “Your shared items”)

Is it interesting?  Oddly, yes, but I couldn’t tell you why exactly.  It does bring some stories to your attention that you might have otherwise missed, or never even been aware of, but that also adds to the amount of information you have to process in a day, but it’s fun, so who cares.

The stories do trend towards being more about what’s going on in the tech side of things, and it may not be quite as useful to say someone who like politics, but that’s why people need to spread the word.  The site is only as good as the people who add their feeds, and while I already love the site, I think with more diversity to the stories, it’ll be even better.

So what are you waiting for?  Come over, join the fun, add your feed.  Oh… and it’s optimized for mobile devices.

RSSDay.org has decreed May 1st Is RSS Awareness Day.

I admit I was late to the Real Simple Syndication (RSS) game, as I said in RSS - Is it for me?, but as I later said in RSS Revisted, I can’t believe how much it speeds up my day now.  Where I used to go around to all my favorite blogs several times a day in hopes that they had updated, I now just click a tab in my browser every so often to check Google Reader.

So, the goal is to get as many blogs as possible to talk about the benefits of RSS on May 1st, and that’s all it takes.  If you run a blog of your own, just plan to to discuss it on that day, and look at it this way, you’ve got one less subject you need to think of for a post!  For those of you who wish to promote the event beforehand with a post, or posting a banner on your site, up through April 30th, you can even win a prize.  It seems like a win-win situation to me!

And while we’re talking about, either click here, or on the huge RSS icon in this post to subscribe to my feed.

Walt Mossberg, the technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, spoke to a technology conference in Finland about the future and gave what is probably the most salient breakdown of what is wrong with American broadband that I’ve heard. He talks, at first, about what consumers want from their Internet, and then at the 4:36 mark, he launches into why our Internet speeds are a global embarrassment.

When will we realize we are settling for not even “second best”, but really what is “third best”? As I’ve talked about before, instead of forging ahead, trying to bring the newest technologies to this country, we are willing to settle for DSL as a standard for “broadband” speeds.

I understand we are dealing with an amount of land mass that dwarfs countries such as Japan and Finland, but we have to get over this presumed hurdle and start to catch up with the rest of the world. Not only are we suffering from slower speeds, but insanely high prices. I am currently paying $63 a month for 8 Mbps down/ 500 Kbps up, while people in France are paying €50 ($78.50 as of today’s exchange) a month for 100 Mbps fiber optic. (Mind you that is 100 Mbps down AND up.)

I understand there are other problems in the country that are pressing such as the war in Iraq, the current/pending recession, oil prices, food prices, etc, etc, but I also understand we are not doing anything to prepare for the future of technology. We are being left in the proverbial dust as other countries surge past us in the race for Internet speed, and it is going to impact us.

Wouldn’t you like to have a speedy enough connection that you could reliably do your word processing online, saving you the expense of buying something like Microsoft Office? Wouldn’t you like to have clearer quality Skype calls, allowing you to call friends and family all over the planet for free? Cloud computing is the wave of the future that will allow us to store far less data locally, making it accessible from anywhere in the world, but if we don’t get our speeds up, we will be held back in our ability to take advantage of this. It will also hinder companies from wanting to work here if they can not get speeds and pricing comparable to what they find elsewhere, which, in turn, will impact our economy.

This issue has to be dealt with, and an election year is the perfect time to do it. I beg of you, Please make sure to contact your state Representative or Senator and express your feelings on this subject.  Let your voices be heard that this does matter not only to you, but to the future of our country.  If we continue to allow ourselves to languish miles behind the rest of the world for much longer, it is only going to get worse.