The Old Tech Icing Header

Moving On

I've decided to hang up the hat on this Tech Icing blog.  Mainly, I've really missed writing my other blog, where I can write about anything that's on my mind, instead of such a limited subject group.  I guess I could keep up both blogs, but I'd rather not have to separate my thoughts like that.  I'd still like to write about technology, just not have to.

New blog address:  www.jorlib.com

Even though I'll be starting from scratch, I'll keep links to both Tech Icing and the old jbfinallyblogs blog on the new site.

Wii Christmas Morning Freak Outs

love love this video montage of kids opening up their Nintendo Wii presents.  Commercialism at its best.

50 kids happy to get a Nintendo Wii - watch more gamer videos

End of Holiday Hiatus / Last 10 "Days" of Techie

My family has been in town the last week or so, and I've taken the opportunity to be on an mini tech blackout. No blogging, almost no e-mail or IMing.  As much as I love all these things, it's important to me to take a break now and then. 

It's been a really wonderful holiday all-around - and I still have another week left!

However, I do realize that I started a list of the 12 Tech things I can't live without, and I want to finish that list.

Last 10 Days of Tech (not in any real order)

10. RSS feeds

One of the handiest ideas ever.  With so much information out there on news sites, blogs, etc. .... it is easy to get overwhelmed.  Basically RSS readers (such as Google Reader, which I is the RSS reader I use) keep track of any new updates to the sites you choose to follow.  This way, you save time and don't miss anything. 

Bonus: Being able to check your RSS feeds from your phone greatly increases its usefulness.  Standing in line for a movie, waiting for whatever - you can catch up with everything.

9. On-line Travel Sites

8. iGoogle widgets

7.  Camera phones

I hate to carry around a camera - even when I'm on vacation.  Since my phone pretty much never leaves my side, I can always take a pic when I feel like capturing a moment.

Bonus:  With Twitpic, I can take a pic, and upload it to Twitter in a matter of seconds.

6.   DVR / Tivo

5. Online reviews (i.e Citysearch for restaurants, Online reviews of doctors, etc.)

4. Social networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc.)

When I moved and knew no one in my new neighborhood, I joined a myspace Astoria group where I met the love of my life, and one of my very best friends.  I will be forever thankful for that.  They also help me keep in touch with my friends that live all around the world.

3. Podcasts

I walk my dog a lot.  Having podcasts to listen to is an absolute must. 

My favorite podcasts:

You Look Nice Today, The Ricky Gervais Show, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, Fresh Air, Car Talk, Awesomed by Comics

2. Twitter

1. Google Maps  (especially using it on my phone)

#11 - IM, You Complete Me (12 Days of Techie)

I really cannot imagine my life without Instant Messaging (IM'ing).  That sounds dramatic, but it's true.

Ironically, my AIM name is "jbfinallyjoins".  I gave myself that name because I was one of the last hold-outs in grad school to sign up for an IM account. Seemed like a distraction and a waste of time.

"What's the point," I wondered, "Isn't sending e-mail back and forth practically the same thing?"  How wrong I was. 

To say that I'm addicted now would be an understatement.  It turns out that IMing is practically my favorite method of communicating - second only to face to face.  I MUCH prefer an IM over an e-mail.  (And don't even get me started on how much I hate voicemail).  I can somehow have 10 IM windows open at one time, and respond to everyone in good time.  If those same people were to send me an e-mail with even a one sentence question, it would take me much much longer to respond. That's just how I roll now.

I'm sure my view is slightly skewed since I work from home as does most of my company.  If we did not have IM (ahem, SameTime, our very useful internal IM product), I think we just might grind to a halt.  It's so much a part of our culture that pretty much no one will ever call you without IMing first to say "are you otp?" (off the phone)

I'm not afraid to admit that (Business-wise or personal-wise), IMing gets me through the day.  So, if you ever have something to say to me, your best bet is to add jorlib to your googletalk list.

Pros:  Most IM programs save every thing you say, so you can search back even week laters if you need to jog your memory.  It goes the other way too - if you don't want something to be saved in the google-verse for all eternity, I'd use some other method of communicating.

Cons:  By all means, if you are on an important phone call, TURN YOUR IM OFF or GO ON AWAY.  We've all been guilty of this once or twice, but the bottom line is that multi-tasking is not an excuse to be rude.

12 Days of Techie - #12 = Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

In honor of the holiday season, I going to recount the 12 techie things for which I am most thankful.  One per day, for 12 days before xmas.  Not necessarily in a particular order.

#12.  Nintendo Wii

I freaking love the Wii.  We've had it for over a year, and I still love it.  It had been years since I had played any video games, but that didn't stop me from jumping right in.  I love that you actually move around when you. With Wii Fit, you can even break a sweat.

Notable qualities:  You can even break a sweat (especially with Wii Fit).  Fun to play with groups of people (especially Super Mario Party 8 or the Sonic & Mario at the Bejing Olympic Games)

Cons: Can be addictive (I had to ban myself from Zelda and Super Mario Galaxy for months).  Now I'm taking it one day at a time.            

I could also do without the Wii Fit weighing me everytime I use it, and blowing up my little Mii character proportionally. Ouch!

New Design

I keep playing around with the look of this site.  Sorry if it causes any confusion, but I want it to look just right.

I think this one will stay for awhile - after all, who doesn't like a picture of a dog holding a cell phone?  (Especially when she's a cute as Maeby is here!)

Text Tidings

The last few years Ive noticed a trend... on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, friends from all over have begun sending out text messages.  I, for one, love this trend.

Sure, a phonecall is more personal than a text.  Sure, some people write one generic text message and send it out to a whole list of people at once.  (I've done that myself.)  But who cares? 

The important thing is that you are letting people know that you are thinking of them.  People that you might not have talked to in months, or even all year.  It's nice to be remembered - even in in a small way - and let people know the same.

Thanks for lowering the bar, technology!  :)  It's better to stay in touch a little than not at all.

Wi-Fi and other givens

This isn't necessarily a web 2.0 topic, but I'm at the airport in Barcelona, super early for my flight (a rarity for me), and I was just thinking -- what the heck did we do before Wi-Fi?  I guess we read books and stuff.  But that's besides the point.  The point is, Wi-Fi is awesome, and enables us to stay in touch almost anywhere. 

I know that most of the time I take technology for granted, like cell phones (that work in other countries no less!), cars, planes, glorious iPods with a cornicopia of free podcasts to download, instant messaging, twitter, and um...Pinkberry counts I think.

I can't wait for the day that Wi-Fi networks stretch entirely around the world.  Some say that when that happens, we've gone too far - that there's a point where information is too abundant and accessable.  To that I say, have some personal responsibilty.  Nobody makes you leave your blackberry on at all times.  It's all about choice.  You are the only one that will choose the level that you are accessible at given time.  Mix it up.

Election Day Twitters

A lot of people still don't get why Twitter is so cool. There's no better day than today to find out, if you still haven't.

I first experienced this during the debates, a streaming dialogue of people's thoughts and reactions. Check it out for yourself at election.twitter.com

Oh, and if you're new to twitter, make sure to follow me @jorli and I'll do the same!

This had better be good

I just heard about a new website called Zealog.com (by stumbling across the blog of an old high school classmate and social media blogger Ryan Kuder).

You may be saying to yourself.. Zealog?  What's that?  That's a random name, what does it mean?  Good question.  I have no idea, except that somebody commented to Ryan that it was one of their fav sites, and he remarked how great it was. So I checked it, and got this message when I clicked "About us" on their page:

"zeaLOG is currently in private beta. We could tell you what it's going to do someday, but then we'd have to... well, you know."

Okay.  Playing hard to get I see.  I admit, I'm a little curious, so I than I clicked "Sign Up" and got this lil message:

I'm sorry... but do you seriously have a button that says "Start waiting"?!  I hate waiting.  If you are anything less than awesome when I finally log in, I will not be happy.  If I even remember you then.

Update on Monday, October 27, 2008 at 11:08PM by Jorli

Update: Minutes after posting this, I received this e-mail:

Dear jorli,

Thank you for signing up for zeaLOG.com. You've been added to the waiting list and we'll let you know just as soon as a spot opens up.

Team zeaLOG

Wait, there's more!   Moments after that, I received an e-mail that I've been approved for membership in this beta secret society. 

This whole process reeks of contrived hype.  I'll let you know what I think of this later.  But for now, I'm kind of sleepy...

Use it or Lose it

Just got back from amazing vacation, where I've not done any blogging or working - just lots of hanging out and exploring.  I have been reading though (thanks to my handy google reader on my phone), and came across some good articles and blogs.

Chris Brogan had a guest blogger, Dennis Howlett, that brought up some interesting points about Web 2.0 adoption a few days ago.  "At best, the benefits I've seen brought about by web 2.0 adoption are marginal. The notion that ground up business adoption would sweep the earth hasn't happened."  This is definitely a phenomenom I've noticed. 

Those of us that use Social Media and Web 2.0 on a daily basis are just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.  Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but the main takeaway here is that the benefits that are obvious to us avid users are not readily apparant to non-users.  Adoption will be slow at first for the masses.  This is the case with any new technology.

For those of us that want to see more pervasive use of social media (for example, I love being able to find more creative ways to do marketing, but would like to reach more people), we can't just sit there and wait for people to catch up.  Don't just tell your friends about twitter or RSS readers or whatever you are most passionate about at the moment - show them how cool it is.  Demonstrate.  And above all else, don't fall into the age-old technology trap, by acting all superior that you heard about it first.  It's not a contest... it's a game.  It's more fun when we all play.

Web 3.0 Shenanigans

I have to speak out about this whole Web 3.0 business that I'm seeing all over the place lately.  As a lover of the Web 2.0 space, I can tell you that I would fully embrace Web 3.0, if it were here.  But it's not.  I'm sure it will be awesome, but it's just not here yet.

For something to exist, I think the people using it should be able to understand it at a minimum.   Maybe not call it by the correct term, but once explained, they understand. As an example, I know quite a few people that heavily use Web 2.0 technologies without ever knowing what "Web 2.0" means.  They just love facebook, or twitter or whatever.  But when I point out examples of Web 1.0 sites vs. Web 2.0, they get the difference.

At this point, Web 3.0 is still a heavily disputed term - the semantic web, the intelligent web, network computing...  I am interested to watch Web 3.0 as it reveals itself, but I take issue when people talk about it as if it exists concretely already.   

Oh, and one more thought... what happened to Web 2.1 through 2.9?  Or why not just say, Web 5.0 - I mean, 5 IS my favorite number.  The naming seems a little arbitrary to me.

Rave = Roomatic

Here's a new, fun site based on twitter.   Roomatic.com is a simple little twitter aggregator  where you can type in any word or phrase and it provides real time updates of tweets on that topic.  Sure, you can do a similar thing with the #hashtags on twitter, but I personally find it cumbersome to remember to type in a #hashtag everytime.  Plus on twitter, your view is not automatically refreshed.

Sidenote: Actually, in general, I find tags to be pretty cumbersome.  They also are quite arbitrary.  I have tagging  features in my gmail and in my personal blog, but I've never really gotten into them.  Most of the time I forget to tag things, and then later, I'm like great, where heck is that.  I find it easier to just search for a keyword that I know was in the email or blog entry I'm trying to find.  That being said, I'll probably end up putting tags on this post, because what the hell, maybe it helps something, and hey, this time I remembered.

Back to roomatic.  It's awesome, and you should try it out.  Type in your name and see if anyone's talking about cha.  (Sarah Palin, I'm talking to you!)  I also tried "Astoria" (most common place to be today - the park or beer garden, big surprise), "websphere" (it's good to know what people are tweeting about your brand), and "corrective action" (that one is for you Ang).

However, I think calling this an "Instant Twitter Chatroom" (as Roomatic describes itself) is not really accurate.  First of all, there are way too many people twittering at a given time for it to have the intimate feel of a chatroom.  Second of all, the word "chatroom" brings up visions of the old school type things circa 1998 AOL, which is not something I would want to associate with.  Roomatic... you're better than that.

Ranting and Raving

A word about the format.. Although this is called TechRant, that's only half the story.  When I hear about something especially useful and cool, I will be rave about it.  There's two sides to this coin.

I already have one in mind, but I'm running out the door.  If only I didn't have to work all day....

Update on Monday, October 13, 2008 at 7:53PM by Jorli

Note:  Tada! The blog name has changed from Tech Rant to Tech Icing.  This was prompted by the fact that techrant.com was already taken, as was techrave.com.  And I don't wanna be riding on anyone else's coat tails. So it sent me back to the drawing board in terms of what is this blog really going to be about?

This blog is about technology that makes a difference in peoples lives. It's about the fun stuff, the super cool stuff, the stuff that changes the way people interact.  The icing on the cake.  Thus, Tech Icing seemed like an apt name.

Yeah, but...

I consider myself a technophile.  Despite the fact that my education background is not at all technical (BS in biology, MBA in marketing), I have always been an avid consumer and lover of all things new and techie. 

I am well aware that there are a lot of tech blogs out there.  I read many of them regularly.  However, one thing that often gets overlooked in this industry is the "so what?" factor.  As in, sure it can do "X" and "Y", but so what?  How will that actually impact my life?  Or what threshold needs to be reached before this is actually useful? 

It is easy for the people creating things to fall in love with the technology and forgot to question it's usefulness or how it fits in the with the overall picture out there in the real world.  And it's just as easy for the rest of us to get caught up in the hype of a new product launch or start up.  You need people to question things, to start discussions...  I don't think there can be enough vocal, opinionated end users out there.    So here's one more.

And speaking of feedback, I'd love to hear yours.  As soon as I have a few postings, of course.