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Viva Las Vegas

February 28, 2005 By Leave a Comment

I’ll be at a major computer vendor partner show in Las Vegas for a few days and I was reflecting on my first experiences there and how much it has changed.

I started going to Las Vegas about 25 years ago for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and a variety of other venues (and occasionally for fun). Did my fair share to keep the lights on by leaving money behind, but that was in my foolish days (my Grandpa once told me, “Steve…gambling is a tax on the stupid”).

Just like watching your kids grow up, it’s pretty amazing how the passage of time, growth, death and rebirth is almost imperceptible as time marches by. Just thinking on the LV of 25 years ago vs. today is stunning.

When I began going there, LV was still in an afterglow of the time when the Rat Pack, Mafia and unseemly behavior was the norm instead of today’s more family and couple orientation. CES was huge and occurred twice per year since there were tons of Ma & Pa retailers selling electronics, along with many local and regional chains. Now it’s Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal-Mart and Target so having two huge shows a year is overkill since there are fewer buyers. CES is now once a year and much smaller.

Comdex (the Computer Distribution Expo) was ENORMOUS with 130,000+ attendees at its peak and, at one point, filled something like 9 buildings. Due to problems in the industry and retail consolidation (Best Buy, Circuit City et al), Comdex was skipped in 2004 and may not be back.

Las Vegas has sure changed. On this page of photos, virtually none of these properties had been built 25 years ago. Yikes.

One constant though…Elvis is still there.

Filed Under: Gadgets & Hacks, Technology, Travel

The Why of Buy…

February 27, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Just a quick one post this morning: Researchers scan for insight into how marketing may brand the brain’s preference for products and politicians in this article called, “Searching for the Why of Buy“.

If you look below at yesterday’s post about “How is *your* brain wired?” and one a little further down on “Hacking Your Brain“, I’m sure you’ll see the acceleration that is occurring in neuroscience. The good news? We’ll figure out the root causes for many maladies, behavorial afflictions and ways to enhance ourselves. The bad news? Clever people will figure out new ways to get us to buy, to vote and to be influenced with techniques we may not care to have applied to us!

Filed Under: Brain/Mind, Commerce

How is *your* brain wired?

February 26, 2005 By Leave a Comment

For years I’ve been fascinated by the ways in which my brain is wired. Always having a sense of ‘knowing’ mine was different as I always seemed to see things others didn’t, there were many behaviors deemed by others to be different that I desired to be the same: disorganization, impulsive risk behavior, and a constant demand for intellectual stimuli. All that said, the best part was enjoying an ability to make cognitive leaps others couldn’t which I put to good use often.

As someone not educated in brain chemistry and neuroscience — and clearly not able to even self-diagnose my ADD — it wasn’t until I met my bride that my interest in this took a left turn. She had worked in a corporation with significant diversity: race, creed, sexual persuasion and more. This woman helped soften my previously hard line view of the world and the people within it (though she’d argue that this had a simpler explanation, “Men don’t grow up until they hit 40″ and I’m now past that!).

Before she and I got married, I’d never knowingly interacted with anyone homosexual. Though I grew up with the typical male bias against homosexual men, I’d often been intrigued with the obvious fact that gay men saw the world differently. The gay men I’d met through her at gatherings were incredibly creative. Their ability to drive a narrative in literature, the theatre, in song, and with design was atypical and seemed to somehow combine the best of both sexes.

So an article I read today in the New Scientist got me thinking about this issue of how God wired our brains. This article about how Gay Men Read Maps Like Women at first struck me as humorous. But as I thought more about it, the study’s hypothesis that, “…homosexual people shift in the direction of the
opposite sex in other aspects of their psychology other than sexual
preference. That is, gay men may take on aspects of female psychology,
and lesbians acquire aspects of male psychology” made me stop and think.

How is your brain wired? Do you even know? What are others researching or thinking about when it comes to neuroscience? I think about the number of aberrant behaviors that are undoubtedly caused by misdiagnosed or untreated neurological syndromes.

Here is some interesting food-for-thought:

This post is not about any particular issue. Instead it’s in the spirit of my blog overall: intellectual curiosity about the “why” behind things I’m observing and how these dots connect. This includes how our brains are wired making outcomes in life potentially our fate if there is no awareness of root cause. That’s the power of understanding and making the connections.

Filed Under: Brain/Mind

They’ve seen the invisible…

February 24, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Researchers at Cardiff University in the U.K. have discovered a galaxy made up primarily of dark matter. As it states on their web site, “(Cardiff)…astronomers has discovered an object that appears to be an invisible galaxy made almost entirely of dark matter — the first ever detected. A dark galaxy is an area in the universe containing a large amount of mass that rotates like a galaxy, but contains no stars. Without any stars to give light, it could only be found using radio telescopes.“

Here’s another good article on the BBC News site.

My only sadness about the finite life I’m living right now…is that the closest I’ll get to galactic (or intergalactic) travel is Star Trek.

Filed Under: Space

Positive & Negative: Today in blogging…

February 23, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Two things of interest today about blogging that is both positive & negative. One positive discusses the power of blogging and its acceleration as a personal publishing phenomena. The other article is a negative one about an Iranian blogger jailed for 14 years.

Update:

A few positive more positive articles here, here and this interesting study from Pew Internet (download PDF of report).

A few more negative articles that are about bloggers getting fired for blogging here, here and here.

Filed Under: Blogosphere

Linksys Wireless Game Adaptor: What a piece of crap!

February 22, 2005 By 2 Comments

UPDATE 2/22/05 at 8:25pm: It’s been 21 hours since I sent Linksys a customer support email (incident: 050221-002616) and I’ve received nothing. Nada. Zilch. Nice customer service, heh?

Anyone that knows me understands that I have a propeller on my beanie (fairly technical…albeit my propeller is a small one) and I can figure out just about any configuration issue when it comes to consumer electronics or computer products. Love gadgets and problem solving too.

But after my experience last night I have a couple of questions: what the hell does Joe Sixpack do to get all this stuff hooked up!?! If I have issues…Joe has serious problems and companies like Linksys (Cisco) have even bigger ones if they wanna sell more of this stuff…’cause Joe isn’t buying more if it’s this complicated.

Here’s what happened to spur this rant: my 10 year old son has been pretty excited to get on XBox Live. I bought a Linksys WGA11B wireless game adaptor, the XBox Live kit, and last night I set about getting it configured and hooked up. Figured at most it’d be a half hour job.

Quick note about my home network to illustrate that I’m not just some bonehead who hasn’t done this stuff before: I have five machines on my wireless network and one device. I run WPA encryption (since WEP has been cracked), a “closed network” (meaning it doesn’t broadcast its name — also called the SSID) and I have the MAC addresses from each computer/device placed in the access control area of my wireless router for kind of a triple whammy of protection.

I spent 3.5 hours tonight trying to get this thing to work (the last hour was with their India-based help desk). For the life of me I cannot get this damn thing on my network unless I completely turn off ALL encryption. All devices on my network are (I mean were) WPA encrypted. *After* I was on with their help desk the first time for a few minutes about an hour in to my adventure, I was told that THIS ADAPTOR IS NOT COMPATIBLE WITH WPA — only WEP!

Of course, do you think Linksys could’ve printed this important fact on the box? Nah…that’d be too easy (unless their target market *is* boneheads that run unencrypted wireless home networks). I had to dumb-down my network to WEP encryption in an attempt to get it to work. It still didn’t.

There’s a lesson here. Is the answer to have Joe Sixpack (i.e., the mass market) be insecure with their wireless networks in order to get wireless products to work? Is it possible to make it any more difficult to get this configured? I also am stumped by my poor experience with the India-based help desk since it was pretty clear that the young woman I talked to was used to dealing with Joe and yet was very limited in her knowledge and not terribly helpful. It was noisy in her call center, tough to hear her, she often put me on mute, and it made my frustrating experience all that more so. Oh yeah…their support website and product documentation were both incomplete and weak.

So tomorrow evening I’ll be returning this product and the XBox Live kit to Best Buy for a refund and Linksys will have to eat the return (plus I can’t imagine what that one support call for an hour to India cost). Can you guess whose wireless products I will *never* buy again, never recommend nor give positive feedback about in the future?

Most importantly I’ll have to figure out an alternative or deal with a disappointed boy.

Filed Under: Commerce, Conversational Marketing

Structured vs. Unstructured: Are blogs a mess?

February 21, 2005 By 2 Comments

During my morning workout today I was listening to David Weinberger (Cluetrain Manifesto, Small Pieces, Loosley Joined) giving a talk to the Library of Congress (LOC) about taxonomies, categorization and knowledge. He compared and contrasted these with the physical (i.e., libraries and the Dewey Decimal System) with the virtual (internet and/or digitized content), and how all that relates to the ‘old’ way of capturing knowledge vs. the ‘new’ way of handling it on the internet. Pretty interesting observations by Weinberger in this talk.

The reason he was invited by the LOC was his observational skills coupled with his blogging abilities and insights. The essence of where he ended, though, was troubling to me. It was all about the unstructured nature of blogs, the explosion of content, the cross-hyperlinking, and the difficulties of capturing all that information — without tying up the loose ends and actually have answers or recommendations.

There are ways being developed to pull together the blogosphere at least. Google bought Blogger. Technorati is doing a great job at identifying searchable blogs and having an engine to do so. Others like IceRocket, Daypop, BlogDigger, Bloogz, and even the boringly named "Blog Search Engine" are enabling the targeted searching of blogs.

While this is useful and there truly is a trend to be able to tap in to the collective consciousness of bloggers, how does this help drive knowledge? How can we turn this in to helpful information within a context of what we might be trying to find, learn or discover? What if we have specific knowledge we’re trying to gain…how do we find the published (encyclopedia’s, Wikipedia, mainstream media) *and* all the connections to them from bloggers? (This pre-supposes that bloggers are, in fact, hyperlinking to any of these published media — and many don’t). At the very least, is anyone tracking all of these connections being made by bloggers? (Maybe there is a trend here too).

Big problems to fix. Big minds thinking about them. We’ve only just begun….

Filed Under: Blogosphere, Innovation, Web 2.0

Skim *Hundreds* of Blogs & Feeds in Moments?

February 19, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Carved out some time today to finally sign up with Newsgator online. It is a *very* powerful aggregator of RSS (syndication) feeds from web sites and blogs.

I went there and signed up for the free service (there are other ones with more features that are premium pay for upgrades) and chose many of the blogs in my “Fav Blogs” bookmark list which I surf to every day. It also suggested several others and let me add my own feeds. Very cool.

I can’t help it though…I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with aggregators. Some of the aggregator web sites I still somewhat frequent are ones like FreshNews, NewsHub, and one of my favorites WorldTechNews.

The love part? Being able to quickly scan for items which might interest me. This is incredibly useful when I’m trying to stay on top of a company, an industry or a trend. This is my main mode during my work day and I am often scanning several aggregators like these so I don’t miss anything (the jewels I find are amazing too…and people have often wondered how the hell I find all the stuff I do).

The hate part? No context. No serendipity. Take a look at an “A” “B” comparison between my own blog posts within Newsgator…and those same posts right inside my blog. Though the Newsgator parsing is pretty good, it’s not as pleasing to view. Also, I’ve built context around the posts (like who is the nerdy, ADD poster child that is writing this damn thing anyway!) that help set the tone for the posts. The value of context is probably arguable with my blog…but most others I go to have interesting context wrapped around the posts and I often go off on tangents and discover new things or make new serendipitous associations.

Of course, a Newsgator or site aggregator user can easily and instantly go directly to the blog or web site of interest and gain the context if they so choose. This is what I do too. But what if much or most of that context is purposely there to help offset costs with contextual ads or commerce? It’s all stripped away with an aggregator.

The tradeoff for me of losing context and the serendipity factor is mostly positive when I’m in a hurry during my work day and negative when I’ve got leisure time to read, poke around and go off on tangential web discovery trips. So yes, the jury is still out on my opinion of Newsgator.

Filed Under: Blogosphere, Innovation, Web 2.0

The Copyfight…

February 18, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Continuing on yesterday’s theme of the Creative Commons and why it’s so necessary, it’s clear to anyone who has followed the Napster/music industry/movie industry angst over piracy, the challenges surrounding disturbingly long copyright extensions fostered by the Sonny Bono Act, and many other areas of copyright law being defended by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that we’ve got serious systemic issues with the state of copyright law in the United States.

You may not be aware of all the areas being hammered on by restrictions on copyright. One such area is in the agonizing pursuit of permissions for film documentaries. The most famous of these is the struggles encountered by the PBS film “The Eyes on the Prize”. First shown in 1990, rights began running out five years later and it can’t be shown anymore (the escalating rights payments prohibit it).

I remember reading a couple of years ago about a filmmaker sued for showing the “copyrighted garden design” of a courtyard in Los Angeles (there was a scene in his film showing someone walking through the garden). Music playing in the background in a scene needs permission and payment. What’s next? No more street scenes or you have to pay every trademark holder showing on building signs?

The Public Voice Project has a site about The Copyfight (read about it here). The copyright fight is worth making your voice heard. Also, check out The Copyright Site for some “copyright 101″.

Filed Under: Blogosphere, Current Affairs, Web 2.0

Loosen up a little….use the Creative Commons

February 17, 2005 By Leave a Comment

There is a cartoon I’ve shown to people that has made me howl with the tagline “I think you should be more explicit here in step two” (click the link to look at the cartoon for the joke). For today’s post I wanted to use this cartoon as the basis of my post but was uncertain over usage rights.

On Sidney Harris’ web site was this request, “Copyright © 2005 by Sidney Harris. No reproduction other than for personal enjoyment without written permission.” Since I respect copyright and property rights (and am uncertain over the “journalistic or editorial liberties” I can take with a blog) I sent them an email.

My inquiry:

Every time I look at your cartoon,  ” you should be more explicit here in step two” I howl. I’ve used this personally  as illustrative of how often people make cognitive leaps in business and sort of go from concept to finish…usually

skipping over the middle.

Was wondering: may I show this on my blog? Address below…

Their response:

To: Steve Borsch

Thank you for your inquiry about using the “I think you should be more explicit…” cartoon on your blog.

Because the cartoon is copyrighted, we follow the guidelines of the National Writers Union, and ask a reprint fee or honorarium for any use of it. For blogs we ask our minimum fee, which is $35 per cartoon.

If this is satisfactory, payment can be sent to the address below.

Yours truly,

Jennifer Charl, Copyright and Permissions

for S. Harris

Sidney Harris

Box 1980, Federal Station

New Haven, CT 06521

It’s not the $35 (I can handle that) and they’re within their rights to not have their content stolen. There is an easy and better way to balance one’s rights with decent use: The Creative Commons (CC) licenses.

It’s really pretty simple as it states on the CC web site: Creative Commons defines the spectrum of possibilities between full copyright — all rights reserved — and the public domain — no rights reserved. Our licenses help you keep your copyright while inviting certain uses of your work — a “some rights reserved” copyright.

While I don’t mean to disrespect or demean Mr. Harris or his work, he’s not exactly Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury fame and could probably use a little exposure — which bloggers could do.

Filed Under: Blogosphere, Current Affairs
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