The noble experiment

For the last several years, I've blogged. I'm ending this experiment after much enthusiasm, debate and a hiatus. I didn't start blogging because I thought it was the best thing to happen to media since Gutenberg, nor am I stopping it now because I think blogging is useless.

I'm stopping because being a good blogger is hard work. Personally, I have time for only one all-consuming hobby after my paying job and family responsibilities. I'm moving on to another form of my favorite avocation so I'm not lying on my deathbed some years hence, wondering, "If only I'd ...."

But I'm leaving blogging -- first on the Lost Remote group blog, and then with Byte Me online -- with these six Blogging Lessons Learned:

Blogs take time. To craft a good post -- one with insight or humor -- requires effort. Blogging is writing, and writing is communication. To communicate well (even in brief), you have to think about what you want to say, put yourself in the head of the person you want to say it to, and then say it well. Crappy writing is crappy blogging. Or a kind of performance art.

Blogs are addictive. There is some bizarre adrenalin high knowing, just knowing, that dates are ticking by without an entry in your blog. Part of this, of course, is due to an inherent flaw in how most blogging tools are structured -- forcing reverse date order. But the last time I ever felt this kind of constant, generalized performance anxiety was when I worked in a broadcast newsroom with a never-ending news hole to fill. You get addicted to beating the dateline deadline. There is no twelve-step program, either.

Blogs are not a new medium. New mechanism is a better phrase. The medium is the Internet (or, more specifically, the Web page). The mechanism is blog authoring tools. Very useful, very cool, and very ubiquitous (unless your service's server goes down). But blogs are not the new papyrus. They're a new way of inscribing the same digital papyrus.

Blogs are not "citizen journalism." Blogs enable citizen journalism. A blog is like a piece of paper. What you put on it -- from journalism to conversation -- is your choice. See the above re: "performance art."

Blogs are rapidly becoming MSM. There. I've said it. Those blogs whose creators have audiences larger than newsletters, specialty magazines and even small-market radio and TV stations are no longer underdog players. They are mainstream media outlets, in a medium -- the Web -- which itself has become mainstream.

Blogs are not mystical and hard to understand. This is the one lesson that businesses which profit from the blogging boom would like you not to learn. They'd rather sell you consulting services on creating a blog (just visit Blogger and get your feet wet), the proper "tone" of a blog (just write the way you talk, but a bit more grammatically), or newsletters, conferences and more. Want to blog? Read other blogs, then start. Blogging is like writing -- as someone once said, the only way to become a good writer is to write. The only way to become a good blogger is to blog.

As I fade into the blogging sunset, I've created an index of my best original essays on this site. Plus, I'm leaving up for pixelated posterity my last couple of months of entries.

That said, farewell. Until I start again.

Nerd dating service

Clueless ... or crafty?

At first, Microsoft's latest ad campaign to get customers of its old versions of Office to upgrade had me scratching my head. Why, I wondered, would Microsoft run an ad campaign -- in several publications and online -- that seemingly equates customers who are happy with the Microsoft products that they've already purchased with dinosaurs?

But then it came to me: It might be a pretty clever move. Software owners are used to being cajoled to upgrade. This time, the software company is essentially poking fun at laggards. It could actually get the laggards' attention ... and some admiration for Redmond's marketing guts.

Perhaps it represents a new millennium type of zen anti-marketing. So either it will work. Or lead to extinct sales prospects.

The downside of longevity

Interesting piece in the May issue of the Atlantic (subscription required) about the downside of extending both the average and maximum human lifespans, including this note: Over a mere 100 years (mere, in terms of human existence), the average U.S. life expectancy has grown from 47 to 77.

Or put another way, what used to be old age is now middle age.

That leads to what I occasionally think of as the Mid-Life Myth. The myth, of course, is that mid-life really is the middle of your life. The reality is you can die at any time. It joins other myths at mid-life, such that garlic supplements are odor-free (only going in). Not to mention new medical research that shows even if you make it through mid-life, you may be setting the stage for health problems later on, such as middle-age obesity being an indicator of later dementia.

Still, Atlantic correspondent Charles C. Mann notes, pushing both the average lifespan increasingly upward and moving what was thought to be the maximum lifespan (about 120) upward through technology, surgery, gene therapies and drugs may lead to unintended consequences, such as increasing the wealth gap between the older and younger (think LOTS of compound interest), more multi-generational conflict within families and fewer opportunities for young workers as old workers work longer.

And if you don't think increased lifespans are already having an effect, Mann points to the political power of AARP, the divorce rate (in 1860, earlier death made middle-age divorce largely unnecessary), and extended adolescence as even adult children move back home.

It is a case, as many science-fiction scribes have noted regarding longevity and immortality, of being careful what you wish for.

Disappearing tech history

The news that Intel has awarded a British man $10,000 for his copy of a 1965 issue of Electronics Magazine -- the one that contained Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's musings that later became known as Moore's Law -- brings to the fore a great fallacy of the Internet age. It's one that I frequently hear espoused by younger colleagues and, occasionally, those my age or older.

The Great Fallacy: That because of the digital Library at Alexandria that the Internet represents, there's no longer a need to keep an extensive archive of one's own.

However, as any observer of the Web can tell you, the shelves of the Internet are constantly morphing. Web sites with valuable reference material for a niche audience may, at some point, take down those archival pages in a re-design, or put them behind a password-protected wall. Security or confidentiality fears (such as those that occurred after the 9/11 attacks) have led to the removal of academic and scientific treatises.

And many documents have yet to make it to the Web. Cleaning out some early consulting files from my garage a few weekends ago, I came across a Broderbund Software catalog from 1992, marketing collateral for the original Myst, and marketing plans for companies ranging from Taligent to Apple's Software Dispatch. (Packrat? Guilty. I even have a shrink-wrapped copy of Microsoft Bob.)

I doubt you'll find any of those documents on the Internet. Which, combined with a perception that everything worth saving may already be available online (so why not throw it out?), could make it difficult for future Intels -- or academics -- to fully trace the remarkable development of an industry that has changed the way we work and live. These aren't earth-shattering collectibles, but they do mark some important ups and downs.

Microsoft has a museum. And there are initiatives to start grand, general tech industry history showplaces.

But for those who would understand the history of an entire industry -- and the large number of companies that did not survive, but made a huge impact -- perhaps the most important artifacts aren't online or already in a museum. They are housed, like some of the earliest computer startups, in someone's garage.

TV tech experts and credibility

Wonder why that tech "expert" on your local TV station never says anything bad about a product? Or why, if you see a satellite news report from a technology trade show, it's always persistently praising a gaggle of gadgets in three minutes or less?

It may be because the expert was paid -- either directly or indirectly -- by the manufacturer. It's a common practice which stations and paid talent rarely disclose to viewers. The Wall Street Journal did a nice job summing up the contradictions and frequently co-dependent relationship between local TV stations and talent this week (subsequently, so did NPR and the Washington Post).

It's also a regular occurrence in the toy industry, as I noted in a piece last December.

When I spent several years doing tech commentary and reviews for the Seattle Fox affiliate, I was occasionally asked if I'd take money to promote products on satellite media tours while I was also working for the station. I declined. I think viewers expect that when an on-air expert is being paid and is talking about a product, it's clear where the money is coming from -- and that money shouldn't come from more than one source at a time.

In situations where a station or network isn't paying a contributor (and a contributor isn't clearly representing and paid by, say, a magazine, newspaper or organization), the station and talent should ask the common-sense question: What will the viewer assume? And they should err on the side of disclosure.

Otherwise, there's a term for it with which journalists should be familiar: appearance of conflict of interest.

Internet ads the cat's meow

If I ever had doubts that Web advertising worked (and a variety of reports now indicate that "It's the growth sector -- again."), seeing a small ad on the home page of the RSS/XML aggregator Feedster caused me to click over to find ... Catster.

The results were immediate. My wife posted personal pages for Kayla and the dearly departed Samantha, who passed away last year.

Catster is, to me, a non-obvious use of the Internet. Who would want to read personal pages about cats? (And I'm a life-long cat owner.) But flipping through 27,695 cat pages makes me realize cat fans can be as passionate as Trekkies.

Then again, many of them are the same people.

When good cable goes bad

Comcast has suffered three significant broadband Internet outages in a week. The problem, last Thursday, this Tuesday and last night, affected Comcast's domain name servers (DNS) and prevented high-speed Internet customers from getting to Web sites and some other Web services.

Last night's outage was repaired this morning and acknowledged today on Comcast's support forum with the note that, "this issue does not appear to be caused by DoS attacks, DNS poisoning, or any hacking attempts." But Comcast still doesn't say, or know, what did cause them. Some of the forum responses were not polite, especially from those who said they were up all night trying to update business Web sites.

Part of the challenge Comcast faces is communication. As a Comcast broadband customer, I called twice last night. The first time I was automatically disconnected after five minutes on hold. The second time, after several minutes on hold, there was a special recorded acknowledgement of a nationwide problem, which I welcomed ... along with the standard recorded message to go online to Comcast.net for help. As if one could.

The larger challenge Comcast and other broadband providers face is that (as the outraged forum responses imply) Internet access is so ingrained into our daily lives it's no longer a nice-to-have, but a need-to-have. There's an expectation of a consistent level of service and communication for which cable operators aren't traditionally known.

As cable companies have moved into offering high-speed Internet service and even phone service (through Voice Over Internet Protocol), losing a cable connection no longer means just missing a favorite TV show. It may mean missing, well, everything.

Email trust recovering

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a new survey showing the number of people who trust e-mail less because of spam has declined over the past year, from 62 to 53 percent. It also notes that phishing spam (e-mail fraudulently trying to solicit personal financial information) is replacing porn spam.

The take of many headlines and articles on the survey has been that we're becoming more "accepting" of spam. Not so. Over half (52%), says Pew, "complain that spam is a big problem," more than pop-up ads or computer viruses. We're still very irritated by it.

I suspect the reality is that server-based spam filtering has gotten better, companies are now actively going after the worst spammers and -- as the survey points out -- our definition of what we call "spam" has narrowed.

So while we still don't care for spam, we're all feeling a bit less helpless under the onslaught. And that's a good thing.

The quiet skies

It should come as no surprise to regular business travelers that a new national poll shows 63 percent of those asked don't want cell phones to be used in flight -- even if the FAA eventually gives its approval.

The survey of more than 700 frequent and infrequent air passengers, done by Lauer Research at the behest of the National Consumers League and the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, also found that 78 percent thought cell phones would contribute to the "already tense, close quarters" of sardine cans in the sky.

This comes as no surprise to me, at least: At a luncheon held in Seattle by Alaska Airlines for its most-frequent fliers (MVP Gold status) in early March, airline officials asked a similar question of the people it depends upon for a good chunk of its revenue. The show of hands in the room overwhelmingly was against having your seatmate chatter away incessantly with no possibility of escape.

Personally, I think this is the perfect opportunity to bring back a feature of airliners that went away when on-board smoking was banned. How about Talking and No Talking seating sections?

(Fancifully, when someone dials a cell phone, the overhead compartments in the special section could open up and -- instead of dispensing an oxygen mask -- could drop a leftover Cone of Silence from the 1960's TV series Get Smart over the head of the caller.)

Of course, some not thrilled with the concept may want to put the Talking section in the back, so those being called can also hear the lavatories operate.

Gaga over Google

Okay, I've read the praise that others have heaped upon a new feature of Google Maps. But I've come up with another use for the satellite images Google has added in the wake of its acquisition of Keyhole Corp. Nostalgia.

Can you think of a better way to see how the neighborhood of your youth has changed without actually visiting it in person? Type in the street address of your childhood home(s), then click "Satellite" on the upper right bar. It's an aerial view, and frequently a very distant view. But it's a view, nonetheless.

Wow: I can see my house from here.

Media shifting not just for the young

Merrill Brown and Carnegie Corporation's new report "Abandoning the News," about how 18-34 year olds are moving away from traditional sources of news, is getting some attention in digital media circles. Looking at my own news and entertainment media preferences (and, admittedly, as someone about a dozen years removed from the high end of the report's target demographic), I think the report could go even further.

I've replaced watching live, unfiltered broadcast and cable television with TiVo -- two TiVos, actually. I have a hard time imaging not being able to pause live TV, rewind to catch something I want to see again, or see a menu of shows, based on my preferences, ready to be viewed whenever I want. If there is a significant news story, I can replay a live feed. It is almost painful to watch raw TV in hotel rooms when I travel.

I've replaced broadcast radio with XM Satellite Radio. I was initially spurred to subscribe to XM by the awful, irritating commercials on the local classical radio station (as XM has three commercial-free classical channels). That alone was worth the $10/month subscription. But I also have access to over 150 other channels, including BBC World News, XM Public Radio (including Bob Edwards, PRI and APM shows), and audio feeds from C-SPAN, Fox, CNN and others. Better still, my XM model -- the Delphi MyFi -- is fully portable and can store five hours of programming on a hard disk (complete with song titles and artists, as it's a digital feed), so I can take music and news with me on a plane.

I've replaced print newspapers with Internet feeds. I scan several news sources on the Web daily. I get my immediate news from Google News and have the ability to search for specific stories on the Wall Street Journal Online and get some personality or summaries on blogs. While I still enjoy the tactile sensation of newspapers (except for the ink) and still subscribe to two of them -- one local, one national -- because they're easier to read on the couch, that technological advantage may not survive another decade.

Do I do all these things because I'm a rebel or a nerd? Not really. I do them because they are convenient, because I have limited time to "consume" news and want to focus on what I want to know, when I want to know it. I don't want to have to wait, or wade.

"Abandoning the News" is only the start of the story. Morphing news (and entertainment) delivery is the rest of the story, for all demographics.

No dearth of Darths

What is it with this trend toward edible Star Wars villains? First, Hasbro unveiled Darth Tater (posing here with a certain marketing executive and author). Then, M-Vader came on board to promote Mars' first-ever line of dark chocolate M&Ms, launching this weekend.

Which begs the question raised by Brian Chin in an e-mail exchange: Isn't Darth Vader supposed to be scary?

Perhaps he is. Darth Tater is a potato. M-Vader is chocolate. The common thread -- both are high in carbohydrates.

The marketing of Darth delectables may be nothing more than a clever tactic by those who have the most to gain by making carbs frightening again, even as their once-mighty influence has begun to fade.

Beware Emperor Atkins.

When tech really changed the world

Whenever nerds like me spout off about how "technology is going to change the world," it's important to remember those instances when it really did change the world -- and the stakes were far greater than whether one could legally fill an iPod with downloaded music.

Smithsonian Magazine recalls one such moment in biotechnology 50 years ago this April. The place was the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The person was Jonas Salk.

Working against the clock, knowing that every summer brought a season of crippling and potentially deadly polio to some 50,000 children and adults in the U.S., a scientific panel confirmed Salk's polio vaccine really worked. Within a few years, the number of new cases of polio had dwindled in the U.S. and summer was no longer a time when pools and public events were shut down as precautions against the disease's spread.

It provides a sense of perspective in the current environment where designer vegetables, blogger escapades and a media-free Windows XP seem to get all the attention.

Over-converged

Convergence devices are cool. But as with any multi-purpose gadget, marketers have to be careful not to appeal only to those who want every function, which is a subset of those who may find one function appealing. After all, piling on functions tends to increase the price, which suddenly can make a multi-function gadget uncompetitive with its focused brethren. And too many front-line features can confuse a purchaser who then delays a buying decision.

Sony might be discovering this with the PlayStation Portable. Despite lines of early adopters last week at its launch, there are still plenty of PSPs available on store shelves.

Sure, it's a game player. But it's also been touted as a full entertainment system for movies (on a proprietary disk format, another potential problem) and music. That means a $250 price tag -- $100 more than the Nintendo DS, and $150 more than the iPod Shuffle.

Tapwave tried to avoid this "it's a whipped topping, it's a floor wax" trap when it introduced its Zodiac handheld game system more than a year ago. Tapwave originally focused on the great game play -- and oh, by the way, it also happens to be a fully featured PalmOS personal digital assistant. (Lately, the organizer features are getting more play, but then, Palm is cool again.)

It's certainly too soon to use the cheesy "game over" headline for the PSP less than a week after its launch. But Sony, trying to regain some of its cool factor from Apple, seems to be taking it on the chin both in lackluster PSP frenzy and now that a court has told it to stop selling the PlayStation 2 due to alleged patent infringement (on how it creates vibration in controllers). Sony, understandably, is appealing and will keep its bread-and-butter PS2 on the shelves for now.

Of essays and "blogs"

I've created an essay index (using the ever-flexible authoring tool, Notepad) so the older long essays on this site -- from back when Byte Me was a source of essays and an e-newsletter -- are easily found without having to dig through a reverse-chronological-order archive or use a search engine.

But it makes me wonder -- again -- about "blogging." The focus of the term is wrong. At its core, blogging is a Web publishing mechanism. And it's a confining one, if you don't want to live inside the standard box of dated posts, monthly archives and comments (which I've chosen to turn off due to comment spam, probably again enraging a High Priest of Blogging who will insist that this means Byte Me isn't really a blog.)

It is the content of blogs that matters, not the tool. The tool is indeed a wonderful thing -- I appreciate being able to post new entries no matter where I am, as long as I'm at a Web browser. The tool has opened up the ability for a broad, non-technical audience to publish news, information and opinions widely (what I once called the "democratization of information" years ago). As a result, the content, too, can be a wonderful thing.

But a blog is a Web site. Blogging is a publishing mechanism. One doesn't savor the can. One savors the soup.

The best blogging tool yet-to-be-invented will allow someone to organize the site any way they want (with or without dates, in any order) without directly editing HTML code, and publish from anywhere. You won't notice that it's a "blog." You'll notice is a darned good and interesting site. The publishing mechanism needs to become invisible to the visitor.

In addition, the term "blogger" has become so tied in the mass consciousness to harsh commentary and criticism of politics, the news media and current events that, for some, it's no longer fashionable to call what they do a blog.

Me, I kind of like another term. Webster even already has a definition for it, for "one who conducts a public journal." Perhaps we should call it "journalist."

Hardwired for celebrities?

I've often wondered about our fascination with celebrity -- especially since being a celebrity has shifted from being known for what you've accomplished to being a celebrity because of how well you're known. It's a phenomenon dating back to at least Charo and expanding exponentially these days to include reality TV show contestants and Paris Hilton.

This tautology is nicely explored, along with other matters regarding how real life has become more like entertainment, in Neal Gabler's fascinating 1998 book, Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.

That was then. Now Business 2.0 (subscription required) has published a marketing article on the power of celebrity endorsements. And in doing so, the article points out we humans may be psychologically hardwired to believe celebrities.

Turns out psychological experiments suggest that the more often a face is shown, the more people tend to like and seek out the person represented by the face -- simply because the face is familiar. Neuroscientists call this the "mere exposure effect." As the article puts it, "This condition isn't unique to humans; researchers at Duke University recently learned that rhesus monkeys will give up cherished treats -- in other words, they'll actually 'pay' -- to peek at photographs of dominant troop leaders."

No wonder people think the folks they see every day on TV are somehow known to them ... even if they're fictional characters.

You can't spell empty without EMP

In a series of probing articles today, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer dissects Seattle's Experience Music Project museum as it nears its fifth anniversary. The litany is, well, unfortunate. Half the expected attendance. Frozen exhibits. Rounds of layoffs.

I covered EMP's grand opening and then its first anniversary from a technology analysis perspective for Seattle's Q13 Fox (there's a lot of interesting tech behind the scenes, as befits a museum to one of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's passions). But even then, I wondered how many people would return to the rock n'roll museum after having "done" all the interactive music exhibits. My family and I were charter members; we only visited twice in the year we belonged, perhaps answering my own question.

Less than a year ago, part of EMP was turned into the Science Fiction Museum, honoring another one of Allen's passions which I happen to share (and again, I bought a family charter membership). I went to the pre-opening day preview and was fascinated. But I have to wonder if it, too, might unfortunately have a limited repeat audience.

Maybe it's a lack of appealing local marketing. Maybe it's too expensive for most visitors. Maybe it's a bit too much focused on one person's passion. Hard to say: In museum time, five years is the blink of an eye. It's not that a narrow-interest museum can't survive -- there are successful museums focused only on dolls.

Perhaps one logical step is to combine the two museums and broaden the scope. Experience Pop Culture, anyone?

Media is/are plural

Excellent piece by William Powers in the National Journal pointing out that critics of "the media" are missing the point: There no longer is a single, unified "media." Thinking of the news media as a sole lumbering beast ignores the advances in, and spread of, technology over the past two decades to 24/7 cable news networks, Internet news sites, satellite radio and Web logs.

I made a few of the same points more than a dozen years ago (see"When Dinosaurs Ruled the Airwaves"), but that was pre-Web, pre-blog. This is a continuing trend, and putting all the media animals into the same zoo ignores the fact that the zoo gates were blasted open years ago.

Darth Tater link revealed

I've been asked by several colleagues where they can find the rumored photograph of me posing with a life-sized incarnation of Darth Tater. It's here (complete with a fairly awful pun about my professional background) on the blog of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Brian Chin.

The Internet being what it is, it subsequently showed up here (on the blog A Man with a Ph.D.), here (on Blogging Baby) and who knows where else.

For the record, I was actually working at Toy Fair.

At least new links to the photo appear to have stalled, relieving me of any risk of being the next cautionary tale for Internet fame.

Fleeing/embracing connectedness

I'm still too busy to re-start Byte Me as it used to be (essays and e-newsletter), but occasionally current events remind me of something germane that may provide additional perspective.

Had too much of connectivity? Blackberries and high-speed always-on broadband access getting you down? Feel addicted to -- not love, as sang Robert Palmer -- information?

Then check out "Go Faster" or "Go Away?" from the 25 October 2002 issue of the Puget Sound Business Journal. Communications dissonance -- wanting simultaneously to be more connected while being left alone -- is, in my mind, still the modern malady. But information, to be valuable, can hardly be just a one-way mirror for reflection. So we get sucked in despite our desires for private time.

Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry, two lively columnists from the Wall Street Journal's online edition, cheerfully explore that line of thought in their own way in this week's fine Real Time column, "Addicted to News of Addiction" (WSJ subscription required).