It seems like just yesterday I would fight with a 9600 baud modem to log on to CompuServe, usually taking several tries to get a solid connection.  When I worked up to a 56 Kbps modem, I thought I was rocking good speeds, but luckily there was a lot more to come.  Around 2000 I got my first cable modem, and it was a couple Mbps (meagbits per second), and finally worked my way up to 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps up.

Well, as luck would have it, my ISP, CableOne, has finally finished testing its DOCSIS 3.0 equipment and that means a bump up to around 50 Mbps (or “really, really fast”).  The odd part is the numbers you see to the side where my upload speed is about a 25th of my download.  While slower uploads are not unusual, this much disparity between the two numbers is a bit extreme.

Either way, these types of download speeds are going to become a little bit more common over the coming years, but seeing as some people are still on dial-up, you have to wonder when those people can expect even the most basic of high speed solutions.  There has been a proven connection between better Internet connections and local economies as more companies are willing to come to a town, so you would think every town would be backing projects to improve their Internet, but it just isn’t happening.

Of course, with faster speeds comes other issues such as data caps, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish that you don’t want to hear me go on about.

Hopefully others will be seeing speeds such as these in the near future, but it bothers me that this test said my new speed outranks 84 percent of the U.S., I’d much rather it say I outrank 16 percent.

Empire Avenue is yet another way of trying to measure just how influential someone is in the social media scene, but, as with all of its predecessors, it’s broken on launch.

I won’t lie, the link above to the new social media game Empire Avenue will earn me some credits in the game.  Just because I’m going to mock something doesn’t mean I don’t also participate in it.

Since the dawn of social media, people have been trying to figure out who is the most influential, who has the furthest “reach”, who has the most “klout” and so on.  The problem is that as soon as these services launch, someone figures out how to game them, or they give such a weighted value to well-known social media types that people lost interest because they know that their scores will never go up.  Lets face it, unless you are a blustery windbag (like some I won’t name), you’re never going to be considered a “network influencer” because you don’t cause enough drama.  And if you don’t think manufactured drama fuels the social media scene, then you should be thankful for being blissfully unaware.

Empire Avenue is at least up front about the fact it’s a game, and that’s part of the reason I’m enjoying it so much.  People are desperately running around trying to improve their “worth” on a fabricated stock exchange because they have some sort of delusion it will prove how valuable they are in the social media sphere.  While I am well aware I’m playing a game and know that my supposed “worth” isn’t even as valuable as the pixels that take to display it on my screen.

Lets take a look at my profile.

In another day or so it should look even more “impressive” because I will have been on the service for five days and that’s when calculations for your activities on other sites kicks in.  For now, it’s a decent amount of “achievements” and so on, but can you spot the gaming?  Notice it says the my two blogs (SeanPAune.com and FunJug.com) have been endorsed ten times?  For a blog to help your score it needs to be endorsed five times, so how did I get my endorsements so quickly?  I went on the blogging community board and asked people I don’t know to endorse them, and I did the same for them.  Yep, really measures your influence, doesn’t it?

Seven people have bought shares in me thus far, a couple of them then left me messages asking me to do the same for them as the more investors you have, the higher your ranking on the site.

Once again, a site comes along to help you see who is the most influential in social media, and immediately people begin gaming it to get a higher score and make people think they are big names in the industry.  The thing I hate to break to these people is … no one is ever going to look at Empire Avenue as any sort of true metric.  It’s just not going to happen.

The other issue?  You will never get your average person to play this game because they just aren’t going to care about it.  A virtual stock exchange where you buy shares in people?  It’s absurd, involved and quite frankly, boring.  Do you think your average Facebook user is really going to care what their value is on a faux stock exchange?  No, they don’t.

While this game is all the rage right now in the social media scene, just like so many other things that have popped up over the past few years, it will fade into relative obscurity within a month or two.  The main reason is it does nothing useful.  Something like Twitter is useful, Empire Avenue is a time suck with no useful aspects that people will eventually figure out and move on to “the next great thing.”

You want to know the secret to knowing how influential you are in social media?  Just don’t care about it and use the tools that actually do you some good.  If extra people start following you, it’s just a nice byproduct.

“What is CES?”

I have been getting this question a lot as of late as I prepare to head off to the event next week. CES is the abbreviation or the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It is a trade show that covers all of the Las Vegas Convention Center and spills over into several of the casinos. For four days a year the electronics companies descend on Vegas and show off all of their wares for the upcoming year, announce new services and basically make you drool all over yourself with all of the pretty new gadgets.

The show officially runs next Thursday through Sunday, but those of us in the press get in earlier in the week for press briefings, keynote speeches, preview events and so on.  I will actually be getting into town Monday afternoon and start things off bright and early on Tuesday morning.  From there on out its a rocket sled ride until I leave the following Monday.

While I have attended many trade shows over the years, most notably the International Toy Fair in New York City, this does sound like the largest I will have ever attended clocking in at 1.8 million square feet of display space.  Comfy shoes will definitely be in order.

I’ll be covering the show for TechnoBuffalo.com, so you can follow all of my posts over there, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some thoughts don’t spill over to here also.

It’s a long boring story about how I came to draw this “P” on Monday the 29th, but I swear it wasn’t my intention to do so.

I originally headed south to Columbia, MO, and then a car problem caused me to have to head back home.  Well, my dad met y mom and I in Macon, swapped cars with us, and as we were in desperate need of a stop at a Sam’s Club, we headed over to Quincy, IL.  After I got home it crossed my mind what my Google Latitude history might look like.

For those of you unfamiliar with Latitude, it is a GPS service offered by Google that allows you to see friends around you and create a history of where you go.  Due to my family’s extensive travelling, we have it turned on, but share it almost exclusively between ourselves.  It’s a safety thing if we should break down somewhere or be in an accident.  For fun, it’s just interesting to look back at where you’ve been, and sometimes you end up with cool designs … like a deformed “P”.

I’ve heard of people doing this on purpose, but it just isn’t something I would ever have time to do.  If I hadn’t had a car break down, I wouldn’t have drawn this “P”, but hey, it’s something to take an interesting screenshot of.

Rumors of the iPhone coming to Verizon have circulated since the phone first came out in 2007. To be honest, I’d given up caring some time back, but these latest rumors are the strongest yet, and it does appear that the Apple phone will show up on the Verizon network some time next year.

The big question is: Why does it matter?

People have been acting like this will somehow change the entire world.  The feeble will walk, the blind will see and somehow I’ll finally understand the “comedy” of Emo Phillips!  HUZZAH!  No, what it will do is increase the ongoing war between Google’s Android operating system, and Apple’s iOS program, which has been losing ground to the Big G.

The iPhone coming to Verizon (and possibly other carriers) has nothing to do with giving consumers what they want, it is merely a way for Apple CEO Steve Jobs to fend off Android, a contender I think he really didn’t see coming.  By limiting the iPhone to one carrier the company surely got a bigger percentage of each sale, but they also cut out huge sections of the possible customer base.  People, such as myself as a loyal Sprint customer, wouldn’t change over to AT&T for anything, but back in 2007 that was fine because enough people did that Apple grabbed a huge chunk of the market.  Well, those of us on other carriers now have Android at our disposal, and suddenly we don’t feel envious enough of the iPhone to even ponder switching.

Oops.

The second component to this is that the iPhone has gotten huge off the back of its wide array of apps, the vast majority of which are built by small developers.  As the Android phones have grown in popularity, so has its app market.  Developers are going to go where the consumers are, and with new Android devices popping up seemingly every day across all the carriers, those all important coding geniuses are going to start looking elsewhere to sell their wares.

Apple has become a victim of its own hubris.  It could do no wrong with the iPhone there for quite a while, but when faced with the double attack of a decent new OS on the market, and the fallout of the antenna issues from this past summer, the company has to be wondering where all the new customers are.  The only way to get them is to open the phone to more carriers, and the sooner the better.  The next regular iPhone update will happen in summer 2011, but the company can’t wait that long, they need fresh customers as soon as possible, so expect something to happen in very early 2011.

Will it be Verizon only?  Who knows, but I do think eventually Apple will have to have the iPhone on every major U.S. carrier if it hopes to stave off the little green robot from Google.

It never ceases to amaze me each year when Sept. 19th rolls around how International Talk Like A Pirate Day just keeps rolling along.

This year I decided I should be a tad bit more pirate like and used a pirate name generator to come up with my name.  Saldy it came back with Cap’n Roger Dullblade. I’m less than thrilled.

Then every pirate needs a ship, so I headed over to the pirate ship name generator, and I got Hades’ Mermaid.  Okay, I can live with that.

And, finally, I needed to translate my boring old English into pirate, so I used the pirate talk translator to write you the following:

I said, “Dearest readers, I hope you have a marvelous, and fun filled, Talk Like A Pirate Day.”

Which translated to, “Dearest readers, I hope ye be havin’ a marvelous, an’ fun filled, Talk Like A Sea dog Tide.”

… apparently I’m horrible at being a pirate.

You do realize that thanks to the Internet that just about every piece of information is available at your fingertips 24/7, right? Of course you do, and that’s because you have a brain.

Apparently the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Department and two California television stations aren’t all that bright.

It would seem that the sheriff’s department released a two page flyer warning parents about the dangers of a new mascot for pedophiles everywhere named Pedobear. They warned that if you see him depicted anywhere that you should question the motivations of anyone connected to the image, and be sure to keep your kids safe. They even got television stations such as KSBY to run stories to warn people of the area about this rising danger.

While I have made it very clear on this blog how I feel about pedophiles, there is one small problem with this whole thing … Pedobear is a joke that was born out of the infamous 4chan message board.

Pedobear has become a way on the site to denote that you have posted something potentially creepy about young children, and it has now made its way out to the rest of the Internet. It has become a well-known Internet meme, and even if you aren’t familiar with it, a simple Google search for “Pedobear” returns multiple pages explaining the joke.

The sheriff’s department contacted Valleywag and explained they knew it was a joke, but yet they included real department phone numbers on the flyer to report crimes, and that sure doesn’t help the news reports that went out that now put egg on everyone’s face.

To be perfectly honest, I think the department is trying to cover its behind for falling for a joke. If you look at the flyer below (click the images for larger versions) you have to wonder why they put the dispatch and sex offender division’s phone numbers. Did they send out corrections to the TV stations?

No, I think folks the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Department fell for an Internet joke that they could have easily researched in about three seconds. Even more disturbing it that news clip above. The news didn’t research this? Oh good job.

Again, I have no love for pedophiles, and children should be warned about them, but how many innocent people who laugh at about Pedobear will now get funny looks from their neighbors? How many phone calls will come in reporting someone as a pedophile when there is no evidence other than the bear? If this was a joke release, whomever came up with it should be fired immediately. It’s one thing when it is an Internet meme, but a whole different thing when law enforcement puts their official stamp on it.

Oh well, at least Pedobear lives on to even a wider audience now.

Working in the world of tech blogging, I have to write about pretty much all of the companies out there, but I have discovered that any time I say anything positive about Apple, I am immediately labeled an “Apple fanboy”, and anything I have to say is dismissed out of hand.

Huh … funny I’m writing this on one of my many Windows-based machines.  Oh, and my Android-based HTC Hero is laying in front of my keyboard.

I’m currently sitting in my office at work and thought I would list all of the computers this “Apple Fanboy” works with:

• I have two totally separate Windows-based towers, both running Windows XP SP 2, here at work.
• Behind me is computer running Windows Me which I only use on occasion as a file server.
• There are four other computers in this room, all running Windows XP SP 2.
• My main laptop is running Windows 7 Professional, which is my newest computer, and I have to say I am loving Windows 7.
• My backup laptop is running Windows XP SP 2.
• My parents, whom I equip their computers for them, have a Windows 7 Home-based laptop and a Netbook running Ubuntu.
• There are other laptops in various states of usability, all running Windows XP SP 2.

Now, as for my Apple products:

• I have a 160 GB iPod Classic
• A 1st generation iPod Touch, which I bought used off of a friend when he switched to a first gen iPhone.  Yes, I have the Touch since about 3 months after launch.
• A 32 GB Wi-Fi iPad … which I also bought used off a friend when he decided he wanted a 3G version.
• A 27″ 2010 iMac.  This is my first ever Mac … as in I bought it at the last refresh.

As I stated earlier, I carry an HTC Hero phone, and before those I carried various models of BlackBerry handsets.  I have never owned an iPhone.  I hate AT&T and I have this funny habit of liking to be able to make phone calls that don’t get dropped because I held the phone in the wrong way.

You know what I’m a “fanboy” of?  Technology.  Plain and simple, I love technology.  I use the tech that best suits my needs, and I don’t really care who makes it.  The only reason I bought an iMac is I’m getting into more media production, and Macs are hard to dispute for their ability to produce and edit audio & video.  I don’t even turn it on on the days I don’t have any editing to do, there’s no point as I’m still much more comfortable in a Microsoft environment.

People have tried to convince me for ages I should buy a MacBook Pro, but I think they are horrendously over-priced.  I always hear the argument, “but they last longer!”  So?  It is still a huge amount of money to lay out initially, and at the speed with which I break down laptop keyboards I can buy three Microsoft laptops for the same price.

If I am guilty of being a “fanboy” to anything related to Apple, it is that I’m a fanboy of Steve Jobs.  I think the man is a marketing genius, and I fully expect there to be courses taught someday in the future over his business decisions.  He pulled Apple from the brink of bankruptcy to become one of the biggest companies in the country with revenues in the billions each quarter.  How can you not respect that?

For whatever reason, this silly Microsoft/Apple war still rages, and humans, for whatever reason, feel the need to label everything in this world.  Nothing can be ambiguous.  What does it really matter what equipment I use?  What does it matter what I’m a fan of?

Oh, in case you think I am always positive about Apple?  Check out the MacBook Paper post I wrote after the introduction of the MacBook Air.  Yeah, I thought the Air was silly, and I still do.

I suppose there are worse things to be called then an “Apple fanboy” — and oh, I’ve been called most of them — but this one truly puzzles me every time someone says it.  My next computer?  A Windows 7 desktop.  I love it on my laptop, and can’t wait to get it on my desktop, but I’m sure that in spite of that, the next time I say something positive about Apple the “fanboy” term will be thrown in my face again.

Bring it on.  It amuses me.

It’s that magical time of year again when Apple is set to unveil its new iPods and make all of us cry a little over the ones we already own.

For the past several years Apple has held an event in Sept. to announce the new line-up of iPods.  It is pure coincidence this happens just shortly before the holiday shopping season, I assure you.  The invites went out today to the media for the event to be held on Sept. 1st, and not a lot else was said except for the picture of the invite you see to the right clearly indicating that this year’s event will include information on the iChisel for all of your wood carving needs.

Something I’ve always wondered about Apple and its events is that the invitations always go out about seven days before hand, and yet all of the media is expected to be there.  (Note: I have never received an invite, nor any of the blogs I work for, apparently we aren’t cool enough)  Does everyone realize how expensive it is to book a flight this close to departure?  I know companies cover it in their expense account, but seriously, unless you are a video-based site, just stay home and follow the umpteen live feeds of the event.  You’ll get the story out faster, you’ll save yourself the money and you’ll be free of a lot of stress.

As much as I would love to go to one of these, my practical side would win out pretty darn quickly when I figured out the costs of getting me there at the appointed time.  Am I really going to get enough traffic to make in revenue what I just lost in expenses?  Doubtful.  Just a big old mystery to me.

All that being said, expect the big announcements to be the iPod Touch getting video chat via the FaceTime app, and possible the relaunch of Apple TV as the iTV.  I’ll be covering everything that day over at TechnoBuffalo.

Yes, that disturbance you felt in the force was true … I bought a Mac.  A 27-inch iMac to be precise.

This is something I have wanted to do for years, but I never really had a “need” for such a system, it was always just a “want”.  With the amount of media I’m producing now, and with a lot more to come, I finally felt like I needed the editing power of a Mac.  With the refresh of the iMac line last week, I jumped on it, and here I am … staring into the face of an enormous 27-inch screen.  (seriously, this is almost too much screen!)

I’ve been playing with it for several hours now, teaching myself to do various things, and I have to say I finally enabled right clicking on the mouse, I just couldn’t take it any longer.  I have been right-clicking on things for so many years that I just don’t know what to do without it at this point.

Of course I am not fully switching away from the Windows platform, quite the contrary actually.  I may go days without turning on this Mac as it was bought for specific jobs, but it’s here when I need it.

Overall it’s not a horrible experience, although it’s taking some getting used to not having programs fill the entire screen most of the time … and learning how to save a file to where I wanted it to go took some learning.  Once you get those things down though, it’s pretty quick.  Now … learning the “new” keyboard shortcuts may take a bit of time …

(yes, this post done entirely on the iMac … a first for me.)

Tomorrow Apple is holding a press conference to discuss the iPhone 4.  Everyone is assuming it will be about the antenna issue, and Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins has an idea what the solution may be …

I think some of my brain cells exploded yesterday.

I think I have officially gone off the deep end when it comes to social media.  Working in the tech industry I am inundated with the stuff every single day, and the only way I can get through it without losing my sanity is by doing the Braindead Techcast with Steven Hodson every weekday evening.

See, I think Steven and I (along with Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins) realized long ago that the whole concept of “social media” is a sham.  This whole, “It’s about conversations!” line is just a whole lot of clap trap.  No, what it’s about is giving even more information to marketers and letting them find whole new ways to sell you things.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t some value in it.  It’s an easy way to keep up with friends and family, to find out about interesting links you may have never stumbled across, but at the end of the day it is just a giant marketing tool, and we’re all playing along like good little lemmings.  I’m a part of it, I admit it, I belong to so many “social” sites that I have probably forgotten some of the one’s I’ve joined, but I also have no delusions of grandeur about being at the fore front of some wave of world change.  There have been moments where it has empowered people, such as last summer with the Iranian elections, but most of the time it is just a way to promote yourself, boast about how drunk you got or to share photos of your life that no one really cares about.

Then yesterday I think I had a minor aneurysm.  I saw a Tweet from a well-known social media “expert” who shall remain nameless because they simply don’t need any more ego boosting of their importance that said:

so interesting to see how many internet marketer types have 4000+ followers and a klout of 5. that’s what happens when you twitterfeed only

Now, I had heard of Klout, but I honestly hadn’t bothered to check it out because I simply didn’t care, but now my interest was up.  I went to their About page and … well, I’ll let it speak for itself:

Klout is the standard for influence. We believe that every individual who creates content has influence. Our goal is to accurately measure that influence and provide context around who a person influences and the specific topics they are most influential on.

Klout tracks the impact of your opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph. We collect data about the content you create, how people interact with that content and the size and composition of your network. From there, we analyze the data to find indicators of influence and then provide you with innovative tools to interact with and interpret the data.

The Klout Score is the influence metric. It measures overall influence through 25 variables broken into three categories; True Reach, Amplification Score and Network Score.

I’m sorry, “the standard”?  And who exactly figured this out for you?  Is there a new division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology that I am unaware of?  Have you been certified to be “the standard”?  Uh-huh, right.

And this, kind readers, is two of the main problems with social media: That people set them as experts and people just accept it, and that anyone would every really give two hoots what their “klout” is.

The first point is obvious.  Since the dawn of social media, people have been proclaiming themselves to be “experts” and “gurus” in the field, and I just laugh my rear end off at them.  This is still a field in its infancy, and it changes daily as to what is in and out.   Remember when we all had Digg buttons on our posts?  Funny, now they all say Twitter.  How’d getting to be a Digg “expert” work out for ya?  Still getting a lot of calls?

Klout saying they are “the standard” means just as much.  It immediately conveys a sense of importance and weight to their service that just simply doesn’t exist.

And that brings us to the second issue about anyone giving a hoot about this.  The above quoted Tweeter later said it was just a number and then went on some namby pamby commenting spree about its the quality of the conversations and so on.  Sorry, but you brought Klout up, you get stuck with it.  Why in the world are you looking up other people’s Klout numbers if they are “just a number”?  It means you put some importance on it, and I just don’t get that.

How about we just go back to using social media for what it’s best at?  Fun.  Who cares what my “reach” is?  Who cares how much “influence” I have?  Social media isn’t science, and I think we’re stripping out some of the core components of it by caring about such stuff.  I don’t ever want to see the day where I think twice before sending out a Tweet because it might damage my “influence”.

I’ll save you all the trouble since I know some smartass will go look it up, @seanpaune has a Klout of 30