DISQUS

Tom Shea - I think Graffitio is fascinating and I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more press.

One really counterintuitive thing that I like about it is that it is anonymous - there really isn't any overt connection, you just see what strangers have 'written' in the air around your current location.

After I installed it, I dicovered that there were a couple of 'walls' in my primarily residential neighborhood already.

OK, bear in mind that for the most part, people commenting here are heavy duty social media users and 99% of the people in hotels are not. The fact that people are going to MySpace pages means nothing other than maybe they are updating their MySpace page with "Whee, I'm in Hawaii!" or seeing what their friends are doing.

It's probably not worth the effort for hotels to do this. And for those who are traveling and want to meet people with common interests, there are lots of other ways to do it (such as good old Craigslist).

There's also the reality that if connections matter. If I'm going to Boston and a friend says, "Oh, you should connect with Jill" (to have dinner because we would get along great, to talk business because we ought to be working together), that friend will make the introduction (and that has happened to me). The fact that someone is staying at my hotel means very, very little.

Unless I have down time and I'm bored, in which case offline social networking works. You know, go down to the lobby or bar, get a coffee or a drink, and talk to the other people who clearly didn't feel like sitting in their rooms. No wifi required!

I want to second the recommendation for 4Q. What you THINK people want on your site is interesting, but it may be quite different from what actual visitors want. Doing some voice of customer research - the kind of stuff you can't get from Google Analytics & co. (as useful as they are) - is key.

Of course, by only selecting the stories "you are interested in" you do wind up missing a lot. One of the reasons I get a dead tree paper is to see what is going on that might not be on my radar (in politics, around the world, etc.). If my entire news intake were self-selected, I'm afraid I'd end up with a narrow view of things that just reinforces my current opinions, rather than challenging them with stories that force to me to examine those ideas.

T-Mobile - ugh. I once submitted an email support request for a simple question regarding my hotspot account (info I should have been able to get just by logging in to my account) and got an email that said, "We've got a lot of emails now, so we're not answering them; call us on the phone." Because yeah, that's more efficient than having someone sit down and respond to the emails.

They are one of the worst.

Marc - I agree with you that the primary mission of education shouldn't be workforce training. That idea has been around in American culture more than most other societies for a long time, though, and has been reinforced by the reality that education opened up a lot of economic opportunities for a lot of Americans in the 20th century.

Pink's quote is right on, but I just question whether all this technology is helping anybody validate anything, or distinguish between good and bad sources of information. It's ultimately very shallow, and I find as time goes by that I believe more and more that a traditional liberal arts education is probably the best way we've found to prepare a smart person for life.

The unspoken assumption here is that if a kid is creating content or some kind - sending email, creating a social network profile, putting a video on YouTube - that's inherently good. What's missing is another question: do they know anything? are they learning to think deeply about things? are they able to think critically about information they encounter? Are they informed about important things?

Because the fact is some things are more important than others. I think it's great that it's so much easier for a creative kid to find ways to express that creativity, but if it's coming at the expense of being able to do primary research, evaluate information, or spend two hours reading something that gives more than a sound bite take on a topic.

And it appears that this is not happening. In a world where senior citizens are demonstrating that they can learn to use new technology, the big educational challenge isn't making sure kids are up on the latest technology (all of which will be obsolete when they finish school anyway), it's critical thinking, intellectual curiousity, and appreciation for complex thought that is important.

Well, it depends on what's necessary, and that of course is going to vary for different audiences. If I had friend or family in China, I would have been very glad for Twitter's ability to get information out quickly. On the other hand, for most Americans, news coverage provides all the "necessary" information (although obviously people might want to also follow the story out of simple human interest).

There is a negative side to speed and immediacy, though; consider, for example, the ongoing debate about the US health care system. I'm not sure that the ability of social media to keep us all updated on the latest utterance by a political candidate, or even the latest study on some aspect of health care financing or management, is all that useful when most of the public is lacking basic information about how our health care dollars are spent, where the gaps in the current system are, or how alternatives have worked and not worked in other countries; so that's a topic where it would be best to tune out the news and for every voter to go read some more in-depth material - even if it hasn't got anything about the last few months' discussion of the issue.

Faster is valuable for some things, and not for others. I try to filter my information by thinking about what's actionable and what's not. There are lots of topics that interest me that I don't read many blogs about, or follow tweets about, simply because I'm not going to do anything with that information on a daily basis, and it's much more efficient to see slower but more carefully organized information.

Here's the question: can you be fast and thorough? Fast is important, but I would say that we have as a culture (not just in the social media world) lost a lot of our ability to think deeply and critically about a subject.

One of the resasons I keep pruning my RSS feed, etc., is that knowing that 100 people are talking about something that happened three hours ago is often a lot less useful than reading about it in depth a few days or a week later. And it can be more efficient to wait and see the post-game wrapup, so to speak.

I think it's worth paying attention to our consumption of fast vs deep media. Speed is seductive, but not always useful. (And this should go without saying, but I'll say it: there are good and bad examples of fast and slow/deep media and content.)

I fly Continental a lot (when you live in Houston, they're usually the fastest/cheapest way to get anywhere) and my experience is that they are a better than most of their competitors. Not perfect, sometimes annoying, but generally a notch above the rest.

I've had one baggage incident everywhere (an itinerary to Spain got re-routed because of a delay, my bag didn't get to Madrid till a while after I did) and they were pretty efficient - the bag turned up at my hotel as promised, when promised.

I was surprised that they let your bag go on without you - I thought that was some kind of security issue - but I could be wrong about that.

I'm with Chris; Technorati no longer is a useful tool for me. Long ago I set up searches & added them to my feed reader so I could see when someone linked to me, or wrote about specific things of interest to my clients. Now I basically get a feed of splogs, and periodically the searches vomit up tons of links to me from a a year or so ago. And when I got to the site, it's basically a mess of stuff of little use to me.

I understand the company's desire to add new things like the percolator, but it does seem to be coming at the expense of the basic tools.

It sure is more than talking about your cat; I talk about my dog, too!

More seriously: I do NOT use it for anything I want to be sure somebody will see, because I assume that they might be using it the way I do: I look at it, but I make no attempt to see every tweet from everyone I follow. If I'm off it for 24 hours, I left the room for that time, and I missed the conversation. I do try to go check for @ replies to me that I missed, but I don't always see them all.

I use it to get some human contact during the day, to see what people are chatting about, to throw out questions that the smart people I follow might have some answers to or interesting thoughts about, that kind of thing. Sort of chat room / focus group / place to yell for help / place to sound off all at once.

Given that the subjects in the study were high VP level and higher execs from companies in the top 20% of US businesses, I think you're right; Vista anxiety probably has more to do with this than a consumer marketing campaign.

Regarding the notion of human filters being a "control" - well, a good filter (e.g., an editor) brings a depth of subject knowledge to the filtering process that most of us don't have.

If I were an expert on everything, I wouldn't need editors. I'm not, and none of us are.

The whole idea that human editors don't add value becomes really troubling when you apply it general news coverage. The fact that a certain set of stories is popular or grab my attention doesn't mean that they are accurate, complete, or useful to me when I start making political choices. I'm not suggesting that we place blind faith in someone to tell us what we need to know, but let's face it; if, say, the political stability of the middle east is an important topic to you when you vote, you are much better off finding out what acknowledged experts have to say - and what sources they recommend for keeping abreast of things - that seeing what story was the most popular on a news site. Or just diving in and deciding what you like, which all too often is what you want to hear.

And remember, it's not a binary choice. There are critical roles for both human-guided information sources and self-created filters that help you find specialized knowledge that you want or need.

Expertise is meaningful, and most of us only have it in a very limited number of subject areas.

I hate to sound like retro guy here (I'm not, really) but this is where human editors become really, really useful. I know that I cannot possible follow every blog or every twitterer with something interesting to talk about, so I focus on getting a core set of people in Reader and Twitter who will tell me when something interesting is out there.

It's a very old media model, but it works. It's more useful, for example, to have Dwight Silverman, the tech editor at the Houston Chronicle, publish his linkpost every morning with a dozen interesting stories that to try to sort through a hundred sources.

Is it perfect? No, nothing is, and of course you are relying on somebody else's judgment to tell you "hey, you should know about this." But if you choose those people carefully it works well.

You don't have to be female to think that this is really stupid. Disappointing, considering how funny this blog usually is.

I really kind of hate Facebook but feel like I'm stuck with it, because so many others use it. But I resent that I have to log into the damn thing instead of just picking up an RSS feed of updates from it. It's kind of a chore, but some local business & tech groups use it to announce events, so, I live with it. I'd be happy to see everybody abandon it, though, unless they decide to make themselves more open to the rest of the world.

All the applications, write on the wall, etc. stuff - I just can't be bothered.

Running a site like this takes time. It provides benefit to site visitors. You're entitled to make a little money from it. If the ads start to detract from the content, you'll lose in the end - it will make people less likely to visit the site - but in general, I think it's fine to have some advertising here.

There are some attempts to deal with this. I've been using co.mment.com, which gives you a bookmarklet that you click on a comment page - the comment thread is added to your co.mment login. YOu can go to co.mment to see all activities in comment threads you've tagged to follow, or you can get an RSS feed of the whole thing (which is what I do).

It's very simple and seems to work very well. I also looked at CoComment after chatting with them in their stand at a trade show, and it looks like it's much more powerful - but they don't guarantee it'll work with any browser but Firefox, which is an issue for me.

There are probably some other solutions like this out there.

TypePad drives me nuts in this regard. They use CAPTCHA, which is fine, but it's on a different screen than the comment form. I can't tell you how often I'm multitasking, I leave a blog comment and click "submit", and then half an hour later I find a CAPTCHA form waiting for me in an open browser window - which you have to fill out twice because it has some kind of time-out feature. Just irritating.

It's the iPhone. Seriously, I am more satisfied with it than almost any tech purchase I have ever made. All my business mail is hosted by Google so IMAP makes everything nice, and now that I've gotten used to the touch screen keyboard I can type on it faster than I could on my old BlackJack. And having the real web is great. The Google Maps app, now that it will figure out where you are, has been incredibly handy.

I never use the iPod features, though.

I got a complete kick out of this; my first job was a library page, also. Shelving rocks! :)

But what happens when you get sand on it at the beach?

But there are varieties of idiocy, aren't there? If you mean that one shouldn't be afraid to risk looking idiotic by expressing some out-there viewpoint, or saying something outrageous, or challenging common assumptions, then you're right.

But frankly, I think a lot of bloggers would do well to think through their posts a bit before writing them. I'm not saying they need to be mini white papers, but when a writer bothers to organize his thoughts and write something slightly more structured, it means better communication. Maybe that's stilted; I think of it as respectful to the people who are investing time in reading.

OK, this is really silly. The brand promise of Apple is that things will work more smoothly than with a Windows machine, and having extensively used both varieties of PC, they do deliver on it. "More smoothly" isn't perfect.

You did get pounced on because you dared to question Apple, you got pounced on because your criticism was silly. Your complaint with Apple was that your computer wasn't working right. The end. It wasn't "and when I called tech support, they gave me the runaround" or anything like that; you had a problem and you started screeching "screw you, screw you." Why should anybody take that seriously?

It's pretty funny that you characterize your post in such neutral terms as "writing about it on your blog." Go back and read what you wrote. If you had written, "My Mac is doing X, I'm really frustrated," you probably would have gotten a lot of comments suggesting fixes. You threw a tantrum instead, and people reacted to the tantrum. Big surprise.

I don't know you, and I would never assume that someone's writing gives you a clear picture of their personality, but in that particular post you came across as a brat with poor impulse control. Sorry. And the "plus I don't get free stuff" just played right into that.

We all have those moments when we rant, and blogs make it all too easy to make them part of our permanent record; the mature thing to do is take responsibility for what we write, even at our worst moments. You might consider it.