My Digital Makeover [dot] Net

Honored, sir.

Jimmy:
Definitive biographer of Jerry Lee Lewis,
Producer of the Sandinista Project,
One of the nine lives of Spencer F.Katt.
A reader.
A writer.
Publisher of Media Unspun
President of The Vineyard Group.
Executive editor of MIT Sloan Management Review
TEDdy Boy
Editor of Release 2.0
I could go on and on, but please allow me to get to the point:  Damn nice guy. 

Thanks.

Thanks, Sondra.

 

It was my priviledge and pleasure to once upon a time work side-by-side with Ms. Sondra Magness.  We had a lot of fun and got a lot of good work done during some very difficult circumstances.  Now. Symantec is lucky to have her on the team.  She's rocking that world and more.  Thanks for twit on the clip, Sondra. 

It's 2009 already. Are you managing your online identity? Are you making the Internet work for you, instead of the other way around?

How may I help you?

I need to raise the profile of my practice.  I need to find prospects.  I need to stay top-of-mind with prospects and clients.  I need to recruit employees.  I need to get competitive information.  I need to stay in touch with the latest trends.  Then, once we collect all these needs, we can refer to them throughout the day and show how what we're demoing and talking about is a cost-effective, low-task way of filling these needs. 

How can I maximize my productivity on the Internet and accelerate / make more efficient my daily media diet?

How can I connect what I read to what I blog about and make it one seamless program?

How can I keep better track of interesting web pages, especially when I use more than one computer in the course of my day? 

What's the best way to re-purpose content into blog postings?

Drop what you're doing and head to drop.io

You need to know this about me right now:  I am driven by enthusiasm.  It is enthusiasm that makes me reach for my browser and start posting to a blog.  And my enthusiasm is ignited by disocvering something that is an order of magnitude (better still, exponentially) better than the current tool in my chest.  (Other things that spark my enthusiasm is the magic of literature, a great cup of black coffee and today's newspaper, but that's fodder for another venue of mine.)  Bethatasitmay, I came across something this week that is especially fabulous and I'm going to tell you why right now.

drop.io. 

Here's the problem you've been trying to solve:  You have one monster size file that you need to move from your computer to one or more computers that aren't on your local area network, in other words, you need to move this big file across the internet.  This is a problem because email is absolutely the wrong way to accomplish your goal for several different reasons ranging from mail gateways that are smart enough to woah up a terabyte attachment from just waltzing on into the local network. 

Digital Makeovers.

I've tried a couple of times to embed the video, but this Internet Guide just can't seem to make it work. So here's the link to a CBS News, MoneyWatch segment on Digital Makeovers that features... me.

Link to video. 

NYTimes, 4.5.9: Aging by Megabyte

I didn't want to bring this up, but we're getting older.  I know, it's an unpleasant topic no matter how rational we may try to be, but there it is.  We're getting older. 

Not only are we getting older though, we're all getting older.  It was just a couple of weeks ago I was doing a litttle business with a journalist who was using me as a resource for a story about using the internet to get a job and she was taking the angle on the story about how "baby boomers" were uncomfortable using the internet, especially social networks.  --And that's why she was turning to me as a source, because I'm of the boomer generation and know something about both the internet and social networks.  As we continued working on the story, something finally sank home to me, it was the way she was using the expression "baby boomers."  Baby boomers was rining like the word "old," and "elderly."  Terrific I'm going to be sourcesd as someone who turns out to be "old,:" and of the previous generation, knowledgeable about social networking, technologically advanced for his age.

Here's a telling selection from the story:

My twins, Sam and Adam, college freshmen, have informed me that if I call their cellphones and they don’t answer, I am not to leave a voice message. It takes too long for them to access. They are way too busy there at college. I’m supposed to hang up and they’ll know it’s me by the “Missed Call” signal. They will then call back when they are not so incredibly busy there at college.

Better yet, I should text them.

I know several parents who have taken up texting their kids for just this reason.

My feeling on this is, forget that. I’m paying for their phones. For that matter, I’m paying for college. I don’t need to text; they need to make time from their very busy lives there at college to listen to Dad’s 10-second voice mail message.

And here's a link to the story.  Highly recommended. 

NYTimes, 4.5.9: I Hate My iPhone. The true story of a technological dissenter.

Virginia Heffernan writes an interesting column for the Sunday NY Times Magazine.  One the one hand, she's stone geek.  On the otherhand, she has a sometimes contrarian to the geek culture and try to pass herself off as someone normal.  This week, she takes a slightly contrarian position about her iPhone.  Here's a snippet from the article: 

Oh, God. I really was losing it. As I composed my running-late text, the iPhone’s iciness deepened my revulsion. Did this device, which was built never to be cradled, ever warm up? I was also mortified by my illiteracy. My right index finger — the only digit precise enough to hit the close-set virtual iPhone keys — seemed an anemic, cerebral thing, designed for making paltry points in debating club. I repeatedly stabbed to the right of my target letter. It was like being 4 again — or being 90. I couldn’t see, it seemed; I couldn’t point; I couldn’t connect.

It's a pity Ms. Hefernan didn't enjoy her iPhone as much as I do.  It's a wonderful productivyt tool, quite easy to use and an absolute category killer as it completely redefines what a cellphone is all about. 

Here's a link to the article. 

WSJ, 3.7.9: How to Twitter.

I think it's a bit presumptuous to be declaring already that the formula for communicating on Twitter has been solved.  I do think that you probably have some pretty good ideas about how you might use this new channel for influence and staying in touch with the people in your life and career that matter.  I won't go into the details now, especially as some of my own opinions are just half-formed and not very useful to you.  Just let me share this one thing with you:  Never before in the history of the world have we had such a chance to enlarge of diminish our reputation thanks to the wondrous internet.  Every single thing you write on the this huge wall will last forever and become part of how people think of you and understand you.  So don't mess up.  Okay?

Julia Angwin in her Wall Street Journal article I want to pass along with you, as long as you take the advice with a grain of salt, keeping in mind what I wrote to you above.  Here's some sensible advice from the article: 

I spent a surprising amount of time trying out tweets in my head before tweeting. I aimed to tweet once a day, but often came up short. I found it difficult to fit in both news and opinion. Without a point of view, though, my updates were pretty boring. So, for instance, I changed "eating strawberries during a snowstorm." Into "eating strawberries during a snowstorm. not carbon efficient but lovely."

Here's a link to the rest of the story.

WSJ, 3.30.9: The Art of Your Story

            

WSJ, 3.6.9: The Ghost in the Love Machine.

Lately I've been impressed by something I want to share with you.  Several of my dear friends who have lost their jobs are finding out that finding new work requires a very new set of skills.  If you aren't using social networks to find your next job, you aren't finding your next job.  Some people are having a  problem understanding this. 

What's interesting to me is that people seem to be more willing to entrust their love life to computer networks than their jobs or their careers. 

Here's an interesting story from the Wall Street Journal about "Friend Finder," an electronic device that accelerates the computer dating process.  What's additionally interesting is that the author, Dara Horn, is the product of a computer dating service. 

If it gets off the ground, the "Friend Finder" would become the latest offshoot of the enormous computer-dating industry, which today's singles have come to rely on in their search for love. But those who think of technology-assisted dating as a relatively new phenomenon couldn't be more wrong. My parents met in 1966 through the world's first computer-dating service. I am the second of their four children, and they have been married for nearly 40 years.

Astonishingly, the concept of computer dating did not originate in some lonely teenager's garage, but rather at the pinnacle of America's intellectual establishment. In 1965, Harvard University was one of the few institutions with access to an IBM 7090, a $3 million room-filling machine intended, according to IBM's 1960 press release, to "speed the design of missiles, jet engines, nuclear reactors and supersonic aircraft."

It ended up speeding the design of me.

Here's a link to the story.