mip's scan

last post of the day, month

Well, here's the last post of the day, and last post of the month.  Bye-bye March.
I'm heading out of town on conference but I'll continue to blog next week while on the road.  Thought I'd leave you with another ZoomCloud that will give you a snapshot of words from the past month that showed up in the blog.

Blogging for Business

Usually I just place a book review in my Amazon sidebar 'thing' (to the left and down on this page).  But occassionally, I like to create an actual post for a book I thought was particularly good and/or relevant to stuff I'm working on.  Blogging for Business by Shel Holtz & Ted Demopoulos is one of those books.  In my opinion it's a good read for those people inside an organization who are responsible for setting a strategy for blogging.  I particularily like how the book doesn't get lost in the hype of blogging.  There's no "blog because it's cool" aspect to this book.  It sticks to an important first principle that I apply to all the IT work I do - let the business lead.  Blogging is no different and Blogging for Business captures.  If I may, a quote from early on is:

"The best business blogs were implemented in support of some business goal. Determining the kind of blogs you might consider begins with a review of your goals and issues in order to identify where your opportunities may lie. One kind of blog you should never launch is the "let's launch a blog" blog. Any company blog should be viewed as a part of the company's communication strategy."

To me that is an important starting point and I was glad to see the book go from there.  I think if you are getting into blogging as a small, medium or large sized business, this book should be on your list to read.  You'll appreciate the content and I liked the tone of the book itself.  How to get it?  Well, I'm not much of a physical-bookstore-kind-of-guy anymore, so for folks in Canada click here, for US readers click here. 

Back From the Dead?

When I got my Treo 650 more than a few people said "mip - you should have waited...Palm is coming out with something new."  I didn't wait.  I hate playing the wait-&-see game.  If you play that game you are either disappointed or whenever you get something tech you are unhappy with it one month later.  Then Palm announced that it was releasing the Treo 700w powered by Windows mobile.  More emails came to me and friends would say, "You should have waited."  I'll admit I thought it was the death bell for Palm.  I even wrote about it.  Still I held fast and said "Well you won't see it in Canada for a while."  Was I trying to make myself feel better.  Nah.  I knew it would take a long time to get here and by the time it did, the real info on how this new Treo was would be out.  Well, it looks like the Palm OS isn't as dead as we all thought.  I'd heard rumblings and seen the odd post here and there about the Treo 700w disappointing but now I found a detailed review.  This reviewer at first blush thought the Treo 700w to be pretty good.  So much so that he went and got his own.  Now, months later he lists things that are "bad" about the device.  The most glaring issue being:

But the real problem with the Treo 700w is the pitiful stability of the software. Many users (including I) have seen their units lock up and become totally unresponsive until reset. Even when running correctly, the phone can become sluggish and “go away” for a minute or more. Worse, even an incoming phone call won’t wake up the Treo when it’s in this state. I’ve lost quite a few calls because the phone went wonky.

This gets to the nature of the OS.  The Palm OS was built on simplicity.  Thus it was more stable.  I remember when it was rock solid a few generation back - it has become less so in recent years with the addition of more functionality.  It looks likes the Windows implementation on the Treo 700w is even worse. 

You can read the entire review here.  Am I glad I didn't wait?  You bet I am.  I've been enjoying the Treo 650 all this time while the nay-sayers are still waiting to upgrade their phones.  As for me...if the Treo 700w does come to Canada...well...this time I will wait...for the Treo 800p.  ;-)

Bling For Your Blog

What a great expression:  Blig for Your Blog! 
I love it.

But what is it?

Well Typepad has launched widgets as a feature for Typepad users to leverage when creating blogs.  What is a widget?  Well it's an easy way to add all kinds of interesting features, service or content to your blog.  For instance, I created a widget that you can see further down on the right-hand side.  It's a Pandora widget.  Pandora is a service I use for listening to music streamed over the internet (awesome service by the way).  Anyway, I can tag music as items that I feel are my favourites.  Now with the Typepad widget I can share that.  As well, you can simply key in a song name or album name or artist name and you'll get your own custom radio station.  If you click the thumbnail images I've included here in the post, you can see the steps I took to get the widget added to my blog.  It was dead simple.

There are lots of widgets available already.  You can get a listing by clicking here.  What this does is allow you do add neat widgets without having to create snippets of code that you cut and paste into your blog.  It makes it easier and more tightly integrated. 

I think that what this will do is encourage more people to create services/content that can be easily plugged into other people's blogs.  That rocks.  Anyway, if you're a Typepad user, have fun.  If you're not, well, perhaps this will be a time to re-visit this great blogging platform.   At the end of the day though, remember, it ain't the bling that will bring them back - it's the content.

I spoke about this topic this morning over at my show Leading Edge Technology. 

mip's mid-week update

Great show lined up for you all today.  I hope that you've been well and welcome back to another episode of the midweek update!  Join me in today's show where I talk about a whole series of things like:

• Warming Up The Internet
• Lord of The Rings Theatre Production
• Google Patents Free WiFi
• PayPal Mobile
• Mint Inc.
• Apple's Next OS - Virtualization Built-In
• What Microsoft Should Do
• Voodoo Pad
• ShowUsYourCharacter.com
• and a Plug for LoveHouse Radio

You can download today's show by clicking on the link Download midweek_update_march_29.mp3 or subscribe to us in iTunes. 

Don't forget to join me for next week's show where I'll be podcasting from a special "on-the-road" location.

Origami / UMPC Pricing

Remember how it all started off so nicely?  The video and hype had us imagining what life would be like with these new devices called Origami.  Even the name gave us visions of a device that could morph itself to fit different uses and different places.  Then the official announcement came out and the Origami became the Ultra Portable PC.  A slight spin on the tablet PC.  Not quite as sexy as we would have hoped.  Still, a new device that captured my interest.  Now....the pricing has been announced and to me, it's way too high.  If this device was being positioned as something between a PDA and a Tablet and/or laptop, the price should be between the two as well. 

$900 - $1000 in US dollars!  Yikes  that is too steep.  You could get a laptop with more power for less than that.  I saw this over at Tablet Kiosk - check it out for yourself.  In my mind I think that the lack of unique functionality coupled with the price will cause Origami to transform one more time....into a lead balloon.  Do I still want to hold one of these, try it and carry it around for a bit before I pass final judgement.  Yes, of course.  I'm a gadget-carrying geek after all.  But do I have a strong, gotta-go-out-and-buy-one-of-these-urges?  At that price....sorry, no I don't.

Some Open Thoughts on MS Windows

I was working on one of my PCs over the weekend that has Vista on it.  My daughter was nearby and said "When will you put that on my computer." 
I looked over at her and smiled "You never even use your PC.  You've got an iMac." 
She laughed. "What?  Come on.  I like to play too."
"It's not ready yet," I said referring to the beta status of Vista.
"When will it be?" she asked
"Well it was going to be around your birthday in November but now it'll be in 2007."

Telling an 8 year old something is coming out in 2007 is like telling them it'll be ready a million years from now.  She went off to play with her cat.  My wife had overheard and said "Was that true?"
"Yeah," I said.
"But it looks ready already," she said pointing to the screen.
I explained beta-this and beta-that to her. 
"How come it's late?" she asked.
I stopped what I was doing and rubbed my chin.  "Why?"  Yes indeed. I'd read all kinds of silly things on the subject, things like "60% of the code needed to be re-written" which if true, would mean the product wouldn't launch till much later than 2007!
"Not sure, really," I said finally.  "Lots of reasons."

"What would you tell Bill Gates to do?" she asked grinning.
I laughed.  "Bill Gates doesn't need me to tell him what to do."
"But what if you were a consultant he hire, hypothetically, what would you say is slowing everything down." 

My wife is great.  She loves to needle me.  Likes to hear me rant.  Loves to hear me get passionate about something technical.  She always gets me thinking.

What would I say?  Hmm...the question has been turning over in my head for two days now.

Recording Podcasts On The Go With Evoca

Hey everyone!  Hope you had a great weekend.  Thought I'd share a post with you on something I recorded over at Podcaster News.  Today's episode, which was brought to you by a newly signed sponser (ShowUsYourCharacter.com) was about a new service called Evoca. 

What Evoca effectively let's you do is record podcasts via your cellphone (or any phone for that matter).  When you sign-up for the service you must provide them your cellphone number.  Once the sign-up process is complete you are ready to record.  I simply dialed the number they provided me and started recording a sample podcast.  When I was done, I hung up.  Then I went to my browser, logged into my evoca account and there was my recording in mp3 format (I inserted the test recording into today's Leading Edge Technology show).  Quality was pretty good - better than some of the recording software I tried/used on my Treo.  Recording length was only 2 minutes which is too short to do any serious podcasting but long enough to record something you might use as a spot in a longer podcast. 

All in all I liked what I saw.  What they'll need to add is additional dial-in numbers otherwise I think that it'll be hard to capture a greater sized group of users.  I'm sure that will come as they move out of the beta.  Be sure to go check it out.  Why don't you record a 1-2 minute podcast greeting and send it to me. I'll play it in this week's mid-week update show.

Windows XP On My Macbook Pro Using OpenOSX

I referenced in the past couple of podcasts I've done how I was trying to get Windows XP to run on my iMac and/or my Macbook Pro.  Not a dual boot.  I'm not interested in having to restart my hardware everytime I might want to jump into XP for something. 

So I used OpenOSX and came under fire on two accounts. 

1. People didn't believe it was up and running
2. People said I shouldn't have paid or OpenOSX when you can get Q for free

Ok, let me address the second item first - I tried Q and there is no way (currently) to get it to create the XP image for you on an Intel Mac.  You must do it on a G4 or G5 and when it's done, you then copy the image over.  I know that OpenOSX has based their offering on open source software, but they've added something to it and that makes it ok to charge me $25 for their effort.  I tried a bunch of other 'free' approaches and couldn't get them to work.  OpenOSX worked so in my opinion, it was worth the $25.

Ok, now the first point - does it work.  In a word yes. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, let me post some screen captures taken from my MacBook Pro.

Ajaxwrite

For years Microsoft Office has dominated the productivity tools market.  A small number of competitors came and went.  It was tough to break into the stranglehold that Microsoft had created.  Why?  First, because switching would cost money.  Then came OpenOffice but still, no real in-roads were made.  Why?  Because of user inertia.  They'd have to learn new software, where the features and function were, not to mention converting documents.  Plus the constant fear that documents created in one platform might not be compatible with another.  You see the barrier to entry was high because even if some people overcame their inertia to change, not all people would, and that would mean that when you gave people access to the documents, they might not be able to read it.

But now it seems the barrier to entry is being lowered with the rush toward Software as a Service (SaaS).  Why?  Because now you don't just send the document to someone in an email - you send them to the service.  That makes it universal.  That lowers the barrier for entry.  And that makes it very dangerous for Microsoft.  Google's purchase of Writely is the tip of the iceberg.  There is a massive, dangerous thing lurking beneath the surface waters of SaaS and the good-ship Microsoft would be well advised to navigate carefully if they want to avoid the fate of the Titanic. 

Others are jumping to this now as well.  It isn't surprising because the fact that the barrier for entry has become much lower.  Take Ajaxwrite, which is a service that I as looking at that triggered this post.  It's simplicity.  Within this very post I can say to you, my dear reader, "Want to do some word processing?  Click here."  Ah ha! That light blub just went on didn't it?  You see, with Software as a Service, it allows anyone to take that service and offer it to their users.  It becomes consumable/usable content.  So does this mean Microsoft is doomed? I say no.  Why?  Because you can be sure that they are already preparing to launch a similar set of service based tools.  The question I have is how they'll be able to charge for it? I don't think people will pay the same dollars they have in the past.  And that is the rub.  I think that Microsoft will play in this space, but it'll come at a cost. No doubt about that.