Jake Ludington’s Digital Lifestyle

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pSocial Media school is almost in session. If you’re still trying to get your head around how to use Twitter, want to know why you need to blog, need to attract high quality employees to your company or simply want to know how to connect the dots with local social media opportunities, you should join me at the Social Media 101 conference on September 25, 2009 at the Executive Briefing Center on Microsoft’s Redmond Campus./p pI’m specifically speaking on a panel about blogging and there’s also a ton of great information on how to use Twitter for your business, along with using social media to attract talented people to your company. The event starts at Noon, so you can even get some work done in the morning before sliding out of the office for an afternoon of social media education. See the full a href=”http://eastsidebusinesstechnology.com/2009/08/17/agenda/”Social Media 101 agenda/a for more details. Tickets are reasonably priced at $60 for an afternoon of social media education – a href=”http://sm101.eventbrite.com/”register now/a./p

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The fog was thick for this morning’s 10:35am sailing of the Wenatchee from Bainbridge Island to Seattle. From my usual spot in the galley area, I occasionally glanced up from my Kindle to look out the window, only to be greeted with a thick gray cloud in my field of vision. As we got near shore on the Seattle side, I suddenly saw Ivar’s zipping past at a speed considerably faster than what I’d normally expect for the morning commute. The ferry gave 5 short blasts on the horn to indicate imminent collision, followed by a loud bang and a jolt to the ferry. Down the aisle someone shouted for a doctor on board.

I went out on the front of the ferry to see what happened. All things considered, the damage looks minor, as you can see in the pictures here. As far as I can tell only one woman was injured and the resulting injuries appeared to be minor.

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Near the end of 2005 I finally took the initiative to learn to speak Mandarin, which is the official Chinese dialect spoken in China, as well as learn to read and write Chinese characters. I opted to hire a tutor in Seattle who could help me in this pursuit. In September 2006, I went to China for 2 weeks, where I found out that my Chinese was good enough to get around, but not good enough to get by. In the summer of 2007, I went to China for 6 weeks, studying Chinese 4 hours a day 5 days a week. By the end of that trip, I spoke Chinese better than 95% of people in the United States (maybe more), but I still needed work. Another month or more in China would have made a dramatic difference in my ability to speak Chinese, but that wasn’t in the cards.

Since I don’t have regular access to speak to people in Chinese, I’m constantly looking for tools to keep my Chinese from going stale in my mind. Most recently I ran across the Rhythmic Mandarin series in iTunes. Most of what’s there is already part of my vocabulary, but I can’t help thinking this would be an ideal solution for anyone who wants to ramp up to learning to speak Mandarin quickly because it uses a fairly unique approach to language learning, based on The Third Ear by Chris Lonsdale.

Rhythmic Mandarin is an amazingly catchy method for language learning, combining music and spoken phrases into context that makes it easy to learn. I think the key for me that sets Rhythmic Mandarin apart from other language learning audio tools I’ve seen is that they effectively chunk phrases in ways you would expect to hear them in conversation, rather than trying to focus entirely on whole sentences or just bombarding you with vocabulary.

I wish I had found this years ago, because it would have made my Chinese language learning much easier. You can order CD versions at Amazon.com, but I recommend you download Rhythmic Mandarin as MP3 files, because you can easily take them with you anywhere. The MP3 files are ready for your iPod, Zune or any other player. The methodology strips away the confusion of learning a language and makes it seem quite simple.

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I want great journalism to stick around. I don’t care whether big news outlets like New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal are the source of that journalism or something new and better. What I do know is that Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira is asking the wrong questions about how to news outlets compete with the likes of Gawker and Huffington Post in the online space.

In a piece titled either How Gawker Ripped Off My Newspaper Story or the Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition), Ian Shapira outlines the effort he put into writing a story about business coach Anne Loehr and the subsequent “theft” by Gawker in a blog post.

The major complaint Shapira has against Gawker is that they reference too much of his story in the Gawker article. I tend to agree with the issue of quantity, but find the solution (requiring Gawker (or anyone) to pay to reference more than a certain amount of a story to be a solution that only lines the pockets of lawyers who do the prosecution on violators. The reason Gawker works is because they neatly summarize things people few people want to spend their full attention on. Most people don’t have time for the full in-depth story. We want quick news hits that allow us to comment and move on to the next thing. Better Solution: Washington Post should build a better Gawker. WP could be giving people the full Shapira article and simultaneously be running their own Gawker competitor, extracting the best parts of an article with a link over to the full deal. Shapira could even be the blogger that summarizes his own article in that context, possiblly including a juicy tidbit or two that didn’t make the editor’s cut.

Overquoting on Gawker’s part resulted in too much of Shapira’s followup dedicated to a discussion of revised copyright laws, which is a misguided solution to the problem. Instead of focusing on how to crack down on the length of quoting, Mr. Shapira ought to be asking what Washington Post and others big news outlets can do to attract more of the audience that opts to start their news day at a Gawker or Huffington Post type outlet. As the guy who covers the Millennial generation for WP, Shapira might even be the guy who can find the solution to competing against Gawker.

A good starting point would be a comparison of the barriers to reading created by Gawker vs. the barriers to reading created by the Washington Post. In the case of Gawker, the Web reader has no barriers, you just hit their page and start reading. With the Washington Post, at various points in navigating their site, reading is interrupted to attempt forced registration. This interruption in reading implies that the primary business of the Washington Post is to collect user accounts, not display ads on as many pages as possible. If the Washington Post can’t give up the nag completely, then at the very least they should allow me to skip it and keep reading or rely on registering people when they comment (which is what Gawker does).

Another issue that leaps out at me is figuring out how newsrooms can make better use of technological advances. Example one: Shapira complains about an abridged biography that took him 3,000 words of note to acquire. While I’m sure some fact checking is in order, I got the same info reading the about page on AnneLoehr.com. A little advance research on the Web can save hours invested in gathering a story. Example two: Shapira reports spending four hours transcribing Anne Loehr’s presentation he attended as part of his research gathering. One word here: Outsource! When I need a transcription, I send my audio to CastingWords.com or something similar because I don’t have the time to transcribe. If my little one-person operation can afford that, surely Washington Post could be getting a discounted rate on transcriptions in bulk. The Post reporters could be spending that extra time engaging with readers in social media outlets or creating the blog summaries of their articles.

Another complaint in the article about Gawker is the failure of referring links from site’s like Gawker to prevent layoffs and contraction. That’s not Gawker’s fault. Just like classified advertising used to be a major source of revenue that supported journalism at newspapers, the new model needs a new sugar daddy. In my 5 things to drive online newspaper revenue I propose that newspapers need to get serious about being the source for online travel information about their geographic locale. When I search online for travel info, the local paper is never the best source of information, despite travel being one of the best paying online ad categories.

To summarize: If WP wants to beat Gawker, they need to:
1) Consider readers first by reducing nag screens
2) Embrace technology to create a more agile staff
3) Adopt an aggressive effort in travel to drive online revenue

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Every November my mom’s parents went to Arizona to escape the cold Iowa winters. We went and visited a couple of times, but the year that sticks out in my mind is the one where we went during Major League Baseball spring training the year after Mark McGwire was named AL Rookie of the Year. My brother was an Oakland A’s fan, so we went to see two then rising stars, McGwire and his “Bash Brother” Jose Canseco. Paul and I were hopeful of getting autographs from players after the game, because the spring training atmosphere tends to be more laid back, with far fewer people swarming players for autographs than during the regular season.

During the game we sat next to the on-field clubhouse entrance for the Oakland A’s, which meant we could see all the players walking past in between batting practice and the actual game. When Mark McGwire came through we asked him for his autograph and he stopped and graciously autographed baseball cards for my brother and I, along with a few other kids. We got lucky with the timing, because it was a moment when it wasn’t interrupting anything to do with the game.

After the game, someone suggested we wait at a specific point where the players come out from the locker room if we wanted to catch Jose Canseco. We waited around for awhile and there were few other people around. His then-girlfriend Esther Haddad, a former Miss Miami who later became his first ex-wife, showed up in his shiny red sports car to pick him up. As Jose came out we politely asked for his autograph. He blew us off and climbed in the driver’s seat of his car. Miss Haddad generously offered her autograph as a consolation, I think realizing that her boyfriend was being a jerk. I had plenty of experience getting autographs from players prior to this, so I realize there are times when players simply don’t have time, but that particular instance leaves me bitter.

I bring this up because once again Jose Canseco finds himself in the news as the subject matter expert on PED use in baseball. Canseco recently told ESPN:

“And I’ll tell you this, Major League Baseball is going to have a big, big problem on their hands when they find out they have a Hall of Famer who’s used.”

I’m assuming he’s pointing a finger at Rickey Henderson since it hadn’t come out until this week and nothing Canseco has done previously suggests he’s strategic in the way he reveals information. No matter what he says, or maybe because Jose Canseco says it, every time I hear his name in reference to steroids, I don’t think about him being the cheater everyone is painting steroid users to be, I just think Jose Canseco is that jerk who wouldn’t sign my baseball card.

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If your current password management solution looks something like the picture here, it’s quite possible anyone could steal your passwords. The person next to you at Starbucks may appear to be smiling politely in your direction, but they could be using the eye contact to distract you from their effort to copy down your user account information.

I see sticky notes with user data plastered on laptop cases all over the place. Coffee shops and airport gate areas, and the Seattle to Bainbridge ferry are just a few of the places where I see this general lack of security.

Dramatically increasing your password security takes minimal effort. Firefox includes a great password management solution if you only have a few passwords to remember, just be sure to enable the encryption option and protect your passwords with a master password so you aren’t exposing them. I use Roboform for my own password management. If you’re on a Mac keeping your passwords in the Key Chain will do the same service, which might be why I almost never see sticky notes on a Mac. Those are just a few of the options, there are literally dozens of password managers.

Posting your passwords in a public way will get your data stolen. This post was most recently inspired by the woman sitting next to me in coach on my BOS to SEA flight Sunday. Her sticky note password solution looked just like this. My other favorite is the sticky note under the keyboard trick used by several of my co-workers at an insurance company I worked for over 10 years ago. If the goal is to keep administrative level access to those with the appropriate clearance, a sticky note is a lousy security plan.

And while I’d never consider stealing a password from anyone, I do occasionally point out that there might be a safer alternative. How about you? Ever recommend a password manager to replace the sticky note solution?

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If you like the way wild caught salmon and steelhead taste (which is far better than that farm-raised crap), I urge you to use the National Wildlife Federation form to send a message to the Obama administration about Columbia River and Snake River salmon and steelhead populations. Both are seriously endangered to the point commercial fishing is basically no longer viable.

This is the National Wildlife Federation pitch:

I am writing to urge the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to lead an effort with the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to protect and restore the lower Snake River and its legendary wild salmon and steelhead runs.

I ask that the White House, NOAA and CEQ change course on the Bush Administration’s Columbia & Snake River Biological Opinion and provide leadership toward a durable solution on the Snake River that restores salmon and addresses the range of energy, agricultural, and other issues through a collaborative stakeholder solutions process.

Due to the threat posed by four dams on the lower Snake River, the Snake was recently listed as one of our nation’s ‘Most Endangered Rivers’. All four remaining populations of Snake River wild salmon and steelhead are in danger of extinction. A national treasure and tens of thousands of jobs are at serious risk of disappearing forever.

Working together, NOAA and CEQ can help restore the Snake River and its wild salmon fishery by ending the divisive and failed practices of the past, and convene a stakeholder process that brings together fishermen, farmers, and energy users in the West to collaboratively solve this long-running conflict in a way that restores salmon, creates jobs, and invests in our communities and a clean energy economy.

A restored Columbia and Snake River salmon fishery would generate hundreds of millions of dollars per year for the recreational and commercial salmon and steelhead fishing industries. Similarly, a restored lower Snake River would provide an estimated $310 million annually in new non-fishing recreational opportunities such as boating, hiking, hunting, and camping.

There are no other fish in the world like those that return to the Snake River and its tributaries. These unique fish runs migrate nearly 1,000 miles from the ocean, through a desert, and into the high mountains of central Idaho, eastern Oregon, and southeast Washington State. And thanks to their high elevation spawning grounds, Snake River salmon and steelhead are well positioned to thrive in spite of global warming as long as sufficient numbers survive their migration to the ocean and back.

Thank you in advance for your leadership on this important issue.

While I don’t particularly care about the specifics of jobs and the other political wrangling included in that message, I’m sure that just telling NOAA and CEQ that I want to save some fish because they taste amazing wouldn’t hold much political water. I’d hate to see a world where we’re left with antibiotic ingesting, artificially colored salmon as the only viable alternative and as of right now, the Yukon is already stressed in meeting demand for wild fish.

Save the Salmon!

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I’m currently camped out in the Seattle airport preparing for an overnight flight to Boston for the Shareware Industry Conference, where I’ll be speaking on how to use video to reduce support costs. I’m excited to see many of the familiar faces I know from the shareware world, but since this is my first trip to the Boston area, I’m hoping some of you will have some suggestions for things to see or do while I’m in town. Fenway Park would have been near the top of my list, but with the Red Sox on the road I’m not sure that’s worth it. I’m considering making their Pawtucket, RI farm team one of my stops instead, having seen them play the Iowa Cubs a few times when I still lived in Des Moines. I will likely save the historical spots for a summer when we can take the kids, so I’m especially interested in anything that’s unique to Boston.

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Something about the ongoing discussion about bloggers, reviews, and whether or not the FTC should have rules of disclosure for bloggers rubs me the wrong way. I’m a blogger, for lack of a better description, and I do review products. Sometimes those products are sent to me by companies, sometimes I buy them, and for some software products I sometimes use the free trial to assess whether I’d recommend it or not. I disclose where I get products when I review them, but you will rarely see me write a negative review. This isn’t because I care about protecting sponsorships, I’m sure there’s more money to be made in the butt kissing business, but I wouldn’t sleep well at night knowing I became a glorified product pitchman. Almost without exception I only write reviews of products I’d be willing to purchase, because I don’t want to waste your time with junk.

In the New York Times yesterday, Pradna Joshi writes an article titled Approval by a Blogger May Please a Sponsor, where she seems to be criticizing the practice of not writing negative reviews by stating of Classymommy.com author Colleen Padilla:

But unlike postings in most journalism outlets or independent review sites, most companies can be assured that there will not be a negative review: if she does not like a product, she simply does not post anything about it.

Maybe Colleen Padilla is legitimately worried about losing sponsors. Maybe Pradna Joshi hasn’t spoken to fellow New York Times journalist to see the long list of products he’s never written about good or bad, because a reviewer only has so much time in the day for products. And maybe because Pradna Joshi simply writes the stories assigned by an editor, there’s no real understanding of why any reviewer doesn’t bother with a review (positive or negative) for every product they see.

Here are a few of the reasons I don’t waste time on negative reviews:

You have a finite amount of time for what I write. I want to make sure I’m not wasting your time by telling you about stuff that sucks.

I have a limited amount of time to write. While it can feel cathartic to rip apart a lousy product, in general writing a negative review means I spent a bunch of time on something I don’t like. Since I don’t have an editor assigning me articles, I’m going to devote my writing time to things I like.

Negative attention is still attention. This may be the most important reason I don’t write about products I hate. If I think a product is lousy why would I want to draw attention to it? My exception to this last point is writing words of caution about things that might cause harm – I will take the time to issue a warning if I think something might damage your computer.

What’s your take? Should I be writing more negative reviews and spending less time on telling you about cool stuff?

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When I review new computer hardware, I try to first use it “as is” and then make configuration changes based on the way I’d use a computer if it were actually mine. One of the key components of “as is” configuration is the software that comes pre-installed. For instance, on the HP dv2 I received from HP for testing some of the pre-installed software includes a Norton Internet Security trial, a Microsoft Office trial, Slingbox Sling Player, and muvee reveal. Then there are the paid links to services like ebay, a Quicken and Quickbooks trial download, NetZero, and Juno.

Some of these pre-installed features are actually useful and some of them are downright annoying. Take Norton Internet Security for instance. While I’m all for a secure computing experience, I don’t particularly want to use Norton’s products. Everytime I power on the HP dv2, I get nagged to activate the Norton trial. Once I get past the “as-is” experience, Norton will be the first thing on the list to get uninstalled.

Other software I might actually want to try if I knew what to do with it doesn’t ever make itself known. The Microsoft Office trial doesn’t ever do anything unless you open one of the applications. Since I’m not informed of a situation when I’d want to use Office, I don’t ever have a reason to try it out. Of course, I already know what Microsoft Office is for, but that doesn’t mean everyone who gets a new computer does. muvee reveal is a fun application for making quick movies from your video recordings. If I wasn’t already aware of muvee’s software, I would never know that it’s for video from the information provided on by this HP dv2. The Slingbox Sling Player is definitely an advertisement for buying a Slingbox, but it also sits quietly on your computer, so if you never bother to look at it you won’t ever know why you would or wouldn’t want to use it. If you already have a Slingbox, it is nice to already have the software ready to go.

Presumably either the software companies are paying to put this stuff on new computers or HP is paying to have access to the software. In either case, if I never use the software, the financial transaction involved is a waste. Even worse for me as a customer, at retail places like Best Buy encourage me to pay for an optimization service that removes trial software so I lose and so do the software companies. In a better customer experience, I’d get some education about the benefits of the software so that I might make an informed decision about what I want or need.

But my real question is, what do you do with the software that’s pre-installed on your new computer? Do you use it? Do you uninstall it? Is there software listed in your start menu that you’ve never tried? Would you use more of the software on your computer if you knew what it was for?

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