bleeding edge tech

You see, we love messing around with new technologies, if its not part of our job, its something we just love to play with - its our version of toys - sure we can't afford that Porsche but we can load a copy of the latest twitter clone and futz around with it. the key is that while we go jump on things and play with them for a while, that doesn't mean that they are great things, or useful at all. Sometimes its just novelty, this is the cool new thing that everyone is playing with. The true key is staying power, if you can consistently use something over a period of say, a month, and are still using it and finding it useful, then maybe its has "legs". Of course, it could also mean that its fulfilling a need but not perfectly (see 80% rule) so the time is ripe for competitors to swoop in a take over. Of course you have to be better and more perfect, otherwise the leader will win - until something better comes along. What I've found lately is that a lot of this bleeding edge Web 2.0+ stuff is really little tiny cool features that other products SHOULD have. Like twitter should be in instant messenger. Or in Windows Vista.

80% rule

I've found over the last little while that all of the technical stuff that we do only seems to address 80% of the problem - twitter is a great little status server but you have to update it manually, the same can be applied to so many things. Why don't we have some kind of buddy that watches everything we do then helps us out. there is just not enough automation out there - why cant my Tivo see that a movie I have on my Netflix list is going to be on TV and record it for me, then tell Netflix to cancel that movie from my list. Why can't there be something out there that scans all the TV on my Tivo and sends me emails telling me that there is stuff I might want to watch. Is this the Web 3.0 we've heard being talked about - adding layers of AI and automation to whats out there on the web right now?

wither web 2.0

i had free passes to the web 2.0 expo this last week but guess what - i didn't go. Why you ask? Well, there were a number of different reasons but the main one was that it seemed to defeat the whole point. The whole idea of the web and web 2.0 is user involvement and community building. Web 2.0 is about people, not computers. So a face-to-face conference talking about technologies which are supposed to make distances and face-to-face meetings unnecessary, seemed unnecessary. Why have the conference at all? Maybe its because most attendees understand that its a facade. Web 2.0 is all about getting people talking to each other - but in no way can it replace the face-to-face contact. Or can it?

wikipedia is your friend. just not my friend.

while not strictly tech, i gotta say that wikipedia is just about the most awesome resource in the world. i use it daily. the only problem i have with them is that they just keep on deleting the entry for my show as being "not important enough". I mean, come on people. I've done my show for over 2 years now, over 380 episodes, and have had over 335,000 downloads over the last year. What does important enough actually mean?

allergies

maybe i should explain my tagline. a long long time ago when i first started my podcast , there were very very few political podcasts. in fact, most people who podcasted and listened to podcasts were geeks and techies. Which explains still to this day that most of the top podcasts are still tech based, although there's a lot of juvenile humor (if you can call that humor) podcasts out there now. One listeners came across my podcast in those heady early days and said - Future's show is good, but he seems to be "allergic" to talking about technology. in fact here is the exact quote: " Love the show; one of my favorites. Not much tech talk; Chris seems allergic to it." Well, I love the quote so I'm using it. So there. I'm surrounded by technology every day. I'm totally immersed in technology. So I figured, why not talk about it. I can't go into too much detail on the stuff I do every day, since by day I work doing new product development for a very large, well known internet company. but theres a lot of tech stuff I can talk about. So I will. Also, not fit to podcast.

portable media

i dont have an ipod and will probably never have an ipod. i use my treo 650 as my media player. i use pocket tunes 4.0 to download and listen to music on my treo. i use the yahoo music jukebox and subscribe to yahoo music unlimited to go in order to put tracks on my treo. i can also use this in order to put podcasts on my treo to listen to. pocket tunes also has the ability to listen to streaming audio off of the internet, which IMHO, is where things are going in future. podcasting, just like satellite radio, is an interim technology.

cell phones

i have two cell phones. i carry my treo 650 as my home phone. i tried to use skype as my home phone but i just find its too tied to my residence. therefore i've moved most everything to my treo as my home phone. i have a blackberry 8700c for my work phone. i carry both phones at all times. its a pain in the ass sometimes but usually necessary.

all of my contacts are on my work phone since it auto syncs with my blackberry. blackberry rocks. i love the way everything happens immediately and automatically. no more syncing! that was always a problem with my treo.