Wave Master Blog

Lifestreaming coming sooner than you think

via aford.posterous.com

This is coming sooner than later - the ability to record everything will be the death of email, meeting notes, AND YOUR privacy.

You'll be able to send portions of your day to family, friends, and co-workers. More popular people will be able to sell their life-stream to the general public, and all of us will consider bathroom breaks a little more meaningful in the near future.

What this will mean long-term is the role of the aggregator will have to merge with that of the personal filter - thus the emergence of the aggregated-filter.

Connection in the Sticks

Spent the weekend in Salem, IL with my in-laws and the family. It was a pleasant trip with a very uneventful schedule. Ran Sunday morning and when I got back to Springfield I downloaded my run from the Garmin Forerunner 205 to the laptop and that is picture that detailed my jog. Find anything interesting about that picture?

See, in most of my maps the GPS shows me running on streets. This one just appears to be an open void. Like I ran in space, or in the Tron movie with no streets to run on. Which is odd, since I ran 4 miles on paved roads. I guess Salem, IL doesn't get the same GPS coverage that other areas get. Even Shelbyville, TN gets roads in the sat coverage.

Also found only one other person on Twitter while doing a "nearby" search via Tweetie on the iPhone. What I did find was that my Sprint Wireless connection while only working at 10% connection was pretty darn fast. I guess not having a bunch of other people on in the area makes the connection smoother.

Here's the ironic part. Salem is one of the few places in the United States to have wireless broadband pumping signals to television, phone, and internet. The speed at which 8,000 people could get online is staggering, but the apparent lack of interest is what puzzles me.

(P.S. I dislike the new editor for Typepad)

Get Fed

I don't know how often I will say it but, trust me it will be often...get an Aggregator! Then subscribe to your favorite sites and soon you will forget what surfing the net aimlessly was all about anyway. Seriously, I read several hundred websites on a weekly basis. Not all of them get read daily...due to work and eating and breathing and such (although I am pretty sure I can breathe and read at the same time - just not type and inhale) and my wonderful little aggregator NetNewsWire keeps them all logged and accounted for in one handy location. Simply put, a great way to process a load of information from disparate places in one handy organizer.

I bring this up because my job has me telling many people about the amount, quality, and opportunity around processing content online. See, the software we have built to feed CultureWaves is called neemee (link to our blog). It is a revolutionary web wrangler that allows you to capture just what you want, read what some of the most fascinating people you will ever meet find interesting and collaborate with them in an almost 24/7 capacity. If it has taught me anything through bringing it into people's offices and worlds and presenting it is, most of the business people I have met don't power-surf the net. They search from Google or Yahoo, they go to their favorite sites via bookmarks, but they don't use an RSS Aggregator. Much less know what an RSS feed is. And you know what, no big deal. I'm here in this post to learn you on what an Aggregator, and RSS Feed is and why you should care.

The best way I can describe an Aggregator is one location to read all your most important blogs, vlogs, entries, articles, and posts from the sites you most like to frequent. If you are like me, you would like to read a thousand more pieces of information a day, but simply can't make the time. An Aggregator holds these pieces for you, then when you have the time you can go back and read them at your leisure. I use NetNewsWire for it's simplicity, made for Mac, ease of use and no ads. If you want something for a PC I would recommend FeedDemon.

Once you have your Aggregator in line go out and start acquiring your sites. Clicking on the RSS logo or verbiage via most sites sidebars will direct the information directly to your aggregator. This becomes the place to read, collect, and learn. Now you are getting fed.

New iPhone 2.0 Update

 

Just updated my iPhone software and had the wonderful opportunity to add a lot of applications.

Added Bomberman, Typepad, Jott, Twitterific, and Remote. All are performing perfectly except for Remote. It's fairly upsetting to see a ton of comments about how easy and positive users comments are about an app and not be able to use it. Makes you feel like a doofus.

The update was easy and simple. I have geeked out for the last few hours just looking at applications and messing with my settings. Why buy a new iPhone when the old one does everything the new one does but with slower web surfing away from a hot spot? We'll see...

Shot this photo of the woman while I was posting this post. Ahhh..Typepad how I love you.

Jailbreak

I finally did it! I "jailbroke" my iPhone tonight. Jailbreak is the term for a hack to open the iPhone up to 3rd party software applications. This was a scary step for me, my iPhone being the one device that connects me continuously throughout the day no matter where I am in the country. Maybe because I am going to be in town all week, I feel like I could deal with something going awry, maybe because I was just so damn tired of seeing all those cool apps for people who have done the process themselves, maybe I didn't feel like waiting for June and the new SDK, and maybe, just maybe - I really wanted Solitaire on my iPhone.

Whatever the case may be, I did it. Took me an hour, mainly because I am slow at these things, and I have to thank my friend "BP73" for helping me through it! Without the assistance, and links I never would have had the courage to go through with it.

Here are a couple of links to get you going if you want to do it on your iPhone or iTouch. The link to the software, a great link for reading on your own, and some cool apps here.

Twitter, Tweet, and Twurl

My latest favorite web app is Twitter. This little baby is all the buzz of the net right now. Twitter, if you don't know, is somewhere between instant messaging, RSS, and email. Just 140 characters or less to get your point across, and that is why I love it. This includes any link you might want to drop in as well, and that's why sites like tinyurl and twurl are so important to Twitter. Twurl, my favorite, can take an url like this "www.thethingsidoformyblogseemridiculous.com", and turn it into a space saving little link like this, "http://twurl.cc/i6".

3098 unread posts in my NetNewsWire as of right now, and with many of those being substantial in length and depth leaves me feeling like I have so much undone.  Twitter, on the other hand, allows me to connect on a quicker, more streaming mode with the content I would like to read. Twittervision also gives me the opportunity to see where the tweets are coming in from around the world and link to them quickly.

Here comes the Twitterverse! Tweet to your peeps, and follow their twits. aford's Twitter.

The Air is Sweet Up Here

Today my MacBook Air came in…or at least that’s when the good fellas from IT gave it to me. Besides the fact that I was totally stoked to get it, it is a delightful looking machine. Tim, put the laptop in an interoffice mail envelope (just like Jobs did during his Keynote about the MacBook Air), and hand delivered it to me. We both got a good chuckle out of that, and I brought it home the same way. Of course, I am going to get a case that looks just like it, why wouldn't I?

The functionality of the computer is very pleasant so far. I am digging the speed of the unit and of course the touchpad! Oh sweet-sassy-molassey that’s a wonderful interface. I have yet to find the same functionality on Firefox as I have on Safari, and if anyone knows of an update to the previous browser…holla.

I am a tad bit concerned about the minimal number of ports on the Air though. When I do a presentation I tend to need a hookup for the projector and then another USB port for the remote, and a potential audio jack for the speakers. Guess I’m going to learn to make do though…because this baby is sweet enough to make it without those things. We'll see how the comp works over the next few weeks...and will hold my final review until it's good and broken in.

Check out my photos in the Photo Album here.