…OK, OK, Phillip Torrone didn’t QUITE do that, but he found a way to make his plants Twitter him when they are thirsty.
I’m still waiting for the Twittering diapers. Of course, its hard to miss Milan’s dirty diapers, ppppuuuu!
I’ve joined FriendFeed
February 24, 2008 By
Yet another way to distract me from my goals: FriendFeed.
Seriously, this is a really great way to join all your social networks together. More on this soon.
Wonderful free music from SXSW
February 24, 2008 By
Last night I fired up Bittorrent and downloaded 3.5 gigs of music from this year’s SXSW bands. Am listening now. It is totally wonderful music. A real gift. To download you need Bittorrent and a few hours (I just downloaded it overnight).
This is a major gift to all of us on the Internet from the bands and from SXSW. I appreciate it very much — this is NOT stolen music, it’s all on the up-and-up. Thank you to Bram Cohen, who brought us Bittorrent. It’s really great to have a way to distribute such large files to everyone in the world.
Switching to Gmail…
February 24, 2008 By
Yeah, yeah, I know, I should have done this years ago. But Hotmail is just something I was addicted to. My email address is all over the Internet, so I resisted totally making the switch. Plus I was an Outlook guy, so didn’t really need to deal with the online service, all your emails just came into Outlook. Now I’m trying to move everything online. Why? Because I have several computers and I’m tired of installing them with software. I don’t have an IT department to load everything up and I’ve been having a ton of problems with computers (mostly on my Mac, believe it or not) so have had to do a lot of clean installing this past week.
Anyway, since I’ve had to live with the Web version of Hotmail I’ve had a good chance to go back and recompare it to Gmail and, well, it just doesn’t measure up.
Gmail is faster. Easier to use. Has better spam blocking. A nicer interface. Is better integrated into Google Calendar, which I’ve also switched to. Is far more productive.
Gmail also works better across different browsers. Hotmail works great on IE on Windows, but sucks on Safari on Macs. Gmail works the same on all browsers, which I greatly appreciate because it makes me more productive and I don’t care which browser I have open.
So, soon I’ll be switching my email address on my blog to scobleizer@gmail.com — my Hotmail address is now forwarding email to that Gmail address anyway.
Microsoft=Success; Google Docs=Fail?
February 23, 2008 By
I’m usually on the lookout for new shiny objects. New ways of doing things that turn out to be better than the old way. A post on ReadWriteWeb demonstrates why Google’s online word processor and spreadsheets aren’t as good as Microsoft’s stuff. Richard MacManus said it brought about one of the funniest quotes on a blog comment ever: “Google docs is chock full of FAIL.” I can see where Karim, the guy who made that comment, is coming from.
On the other hand, I’m moving my stuff online increasingly. Why? First of all I have several computers. Second of all I erase their drives frequently and installing stuff just is a pain in the behind. Heck, just finding the DVDs for installing is a pain (I’m not that organized).
Also, I need to work with people all over the world now. Some of my editors are in New York. Others are in San Francisco. Rocky is an hour away in Pacifica. Shel is an hour the other way.
So, sending more docs and spreadsheets via email is just not going to do. Yeah, I know that Microsoft has online collaborative stuff, but it requires installing Office and pretty much having Windows (half my computers are Macs, which makes going back and forth even tougher).
Is Google’s stuff chock full of FAIL? Absolutely! Hope they are listening to Karim, cause if Google made all that stuff better it’d certainly be a shiny object worthy of our attention.
Mullenweg at Northern Voice
February 23, 2008 By
This is the first year I’ve missed the Northern Voice conference. Real bummer, but can’t do every event every year. Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic (the fine people who make the blog software I use here) talked about blogging and social media this morning during his keynote. I’m listening to the audio recording of that now. Matt’s one of the smartest people I know, so I always listen to him to see if he’s noticing something happening that I’ve missed.
UPDATE: I’m about halfway through Matt’s speech and it doesn’t disappoint. I wish I had a video, though.
