Untangled

We're bringing this week's Social Edge updates to you from the road again. Just remember, when travelling, the best wifi is found at the cheapest motels not the fanciest hotels. At least that's been my experience on three continents. There's nothing I hate more than when the concierge at an overpriced hotel says that eys, there's wifi and it costs $10 a day for the password. Sure, it is annoying that they're nickel and diming you for something that should be more integral at this point to my travel experience than the ability to watch some b-grade movie blockbuster halfway through on HBO. Besides, if I want to be entertained rather than enabled and informed, there's always YouTube:

Conventional wisdom has it that being either an early adopter or late to the party when it comes to technology is less than desireable. I get a lot of questions about when it is too late or too early to jump in on the next big thing. So here are my thoughts on tomorrow's toys vs. yesterday's news.

If you hop on board too early, you end up being a bug tester and a guinea pig rather than getting to take full advantage of the technology. Plus, some technologies only become truly useful once their audience has reached critical mass.

On the other hand, if you are late to the party you may not have a seat left. At best, somebody will have more than likely taken your preferred seat. Plus all the cool kids will be ROFLing at you.

Generally, I'm an early adopter. I don't mind a few crashes here and there if it let's me do things I wouldn't otherwise be able to do yet. I'll try all kinds of widgets and apps and such that let me do neat new things and inevitably end up cluttering my computer to the point where I do a clean install and only reinstall the things that proved to be useful on a continual basis rather than neat for an afternoon or useful for the lifespan of a specific project.

With hardware I tend to be a little more patient because it generally costs more money and upgrading isn't possible via a patch. Still, even though I like to know what I'm getting myself into, I still am more of an early adopter than most.

With social networks I'm a bit later to the game. They need to develop a userbase first, and by extension a personality. I join them early on, because my name is so common I like to reserve my seat at the party before one of the other 5M Jason Clark's out there squats on it. Flickr and Facebook I have embraced to a pretty full extent, and am slowly warming up to Twitter for my personal use. I love it for @socialedge, but haven't really gone all in on it for personal use.

If you run an organization with any trademarks that you want to protect, when the next big thing arrives, just go stake your spot, plant your flag, and worry later how to go about leveraging it, if you ever decide to. With software it all depends on your comfort level. I don't recommend beta testing applications to people with a low tolerance for inconvenience. With hardware, evaluate the cost vs. the benefits and go from there. More than anything decisions on new technology have to do with your own comfort level with the products, and the benefits you will gain from adopting them, be that while the code is still hot or long after the pundits have all moved on to the next best thing ever.

So, Apple unveiled a new iPhone upgrade, the 3Gs, and it is nice. Yes, mine's on order, and I can't wait to finally see if 3G is worth the wait.

Apple says the s in 3Gs is for speed, and that's really what this upgrade is about. Oh, sure, the video recording is nice, as is the compass. Voice control? Cool for a few minutes I suppose. It's about size and speed. The coolness and the functionality will come from the apps, of which there are plenty.

Which is what the less touted more important announcement was all about. Snow Leopard, the latest in a long line of cat-themed OS releases, is due in September. Upgrades from the previous Leopard will be $29.

Like the iPhone upgrade, Snow Leopard doesn't have a slew of new features. It's faster, more stable, more consistent. Yes, there's a new version of Quicktime and Exchange integration built in. Nothing there that'll make too many outside of big corporate backroom IT departments will take notice of.

In both cases, iPhone 3Gs and Snow Leopard, it's all about the platform. Snow Leopard will be half the size of Leopard and take half as much time to install. Bells and whistles are nice, but when it gets down to the nitty gritty of it, you need speed and stability first, loud and shiny things second if at all. Apple gets that and took a step back to polish the inside of their code with the same meticulousness that they apply to the outside of their hardware. Hopefully, others will follow suit and make releasing more fundamentally sound products a hallmark of the industry.

So, Google threw a party last week, and gave away party favors. Legos one day, and a Google Android phone the other. The Legos are being used, of course, and will continue to be in use for years to come. The phone? Hmm. It is an interesting question. As excited as I was to get my mitts on a new piece of technology, I am not sure how much use it will get.

Don't get me wrong, it is a nifty little device. If it had come out three years ago I would have lined up to get one. It isn't three years ago, however, and I've had an iPhone for two years now. They simply aren't comparable devices. Android has possibility for sure, and is head and shoulders above the current offerings from Palm, RIM and Microsoft... but the iPhone is the elephant in the room I'm afraid.

As for the actual purpose of the conference, Google has a lot of interesting tools that are available to developers for free. Of these, the most accessible are Google Web Elements. Just like you can embed a YouTube video by copying and pasting a bit of HTML into your web page, you can now do the same for maps, news, search and more. If you are using Google Docs, you can embed documents and presentations in your site as well. Simple, but useful.

The big splash at the event was the unveiling of a developer preview of Google Wave. It was billed as what communication methods would be like if they were built with today's technologies rather than relying on decades old standards and protocols. It is very slick. At the end of the presentation, the developers on hand gave it a standing ovation. It will be open source so that anybody can incorporate 'most' of the technology into their own apps. Yes, the future looks bright indeed. I would try and sum up what Wave is, but best to just show you the video:

Ah, late May, early June. A time when a young geek's head is turned inside out by all of the freaky geeky news that abounds this time of year.

Getting a jump on the rest of the pack, Amazon announced their new Kindle DX shortly after having launched the second edition of its electronic bookreader. It hasn't hit the FedEx docks yet, so it still qualifies as a new announcement.

Over at All Things D this week, we'll be hearing from all the usual suspects: Microsoft & Yahoo, Twitter & Facebook. They've decided that Web 2.0 is passe and so they've moved on to Web 3.0. Did Web 2.0 ever get out of beta? Did anyone think that perhaps we should have gone through iterations, a 2.1 or at least a 2.5 before jumping over to 3.0? Oh well, Walt Mossberg must know what he's talking about because they have a Twitter account and an iPhone app. Just in time for them to tell you that Twitter is soooo 2008 and iPhone Apps are going to be sooo 2009 by the time D8 rolls around this time next year.

Facebooks big news? They figured out how to make take money, so they're worth a gajillion dollars. Yahoo? New home page redesign...zzz... sorry, more like Yawnhoo! At least they acknowledge that they have a nifty little site in Flickr that you can use now. Too bad they couldn't have done the same for Jumpcut before they decided to axe it.

So what's Microsoft up to? Bada-bing baby! No more of this Microsoft Live or whatever they called their search efforts before. Nope. They're going with the even more easily ridiculed Bing as their new revised attempt to be relevant in a market they've never been relevant in before. I suppose this will show Yahoo that assimilation was their best option. And if the product turns out to be a dud, that's okay, they're spending $80-100 million to let you know about it. Money that is obviously well spent since Vista has done so well in the marketplace.

Okay, I'm feeling a bit snarky today, fine! I need more than just marketing fluff to get me out of my dander! I need really deep geekiness to soothe my snark! Apple's WWDC announcements are still weeks away, so I don't have Snow Leopard to try out or a new iPhone to lust after. All in due time, I suppose. And Palm releases their new Palm Pre the day before. Either that phone is going to be beyond awesome or their marketing folks should talk to Microsoft before Ballmer comes to his senses.

Instead I'll just have to make due with a conference for programmers, the Google I|O conference. I went last year and was pleasantly surprised at how much practical information there was. Things I could really use. No toys that would bemuse me but actual coding supplements and tools that I could deploy and utilise in my everyday work. It must be a big deal now. They have a Twitter account.

I started reading Tara Hunt's The Whuffie Factor last night, and it got me thinking. And not just because I didn't know what the heck whuffie was. Basically, whuffie is reputation based social capital. I read the first chapter which touched briefly on how non-profits can benefit from building their online reputation via tools like Flickr, Twitter and the like. Sadly, there wasn't much in the way of examples once you got past NetSquared / Techsoup. I would say that the social sector hasn't been at the forefront of adopting social networking to effect social change, but I see that changing recently as more and more organizations are tweeting and podcasting and such. The most compelling example in the first chapter of the book was about the impact of an individual on a larger population.

Our personal connections and interactions are changing such that we as individuals are more connected to our network now than we are to the global mass market. This may seem contradictory when local newspapers are being overwhelmed by large conglomerates - at least in the traditional thinking that's why they are experiencing trouble. I would argue that location isn't as much of a driving force behind the news we desire and that the web does a better job of connecting us to local data anyway. What's more important to us is what is happening amongst the people in our network.

Tara also addresses the troubles of the recording industry in the book, and I thought about the supposed troubles being experienced in that industry as I plopped my earbuds in on my train ride in to the office this morning. Yes, the old standbys were there, and I could have spent the ride listening to the latest from Prince, Bob Dylan or Tori Amos. Instead I found myself checking out music from people in my network instead. Vulgaras, Shipwreck Town and snorb! may not be household names, but they are names in my household. Bob Dylan doesn't reach out to me via my network and tell me that he's written a great new song and hey, would I give it a spin and let him know what I think before he records it with his band, so he can get in line.

Even the fact that I was reading Tara's book was a result of my network. Our networks intersect. Hence the blurbs on the back of the book were from Social Edge contributor Seth Godin, Howard Rheingold whom we've chatted with here as well, and Tom Kelly of IDEO whose company's offices I've been given a tour of. Tara and I have yet to meet, but what she has to say is more relevant to me than something from somebody whose network doesn't intersect with mine.

The non-profit world is starting to join this networked world, and it will be interesting to see if the silos of folks working as individuals on various issues and threats will break down and people will start collaborating more across common interests rather than vested interests.

I stole the title from Seth Godin's post, which got me thinking. Well, change is something I'm always thinking about, as I'm never really satisfied with what is. It's not that I think the grass is greener on the other side, but rather that I think the grass could and should be greener right here and - usually - right now. Change is what Social Entrepreneurs are all about, right? If you aren't interested in making positive social change via a sustainable business model, you might just be a regular old entrepreneur, or maybe a social activist.

How can you change everything at your organization? How do you shake it up, redirect its focus, get it back on track - fix whatever it is that makes you feel like change is necessary, of paramount importance even. I'll focus on IT related changes you can make now that will shake up your business in small and large ways. If I stray away into non-IT related change, well, that's because there's overlay in all that we do.

1. Install a CRM. No matter what your business is, you have customers. How you interact with your customers determines whether your business thrives or dies. Respect your customer above all else, and do everything to make sure that your interactions with them are as positive and impactful as possible. (Caveat: See #6.)
2. Ditch generic email addresses for a customer service form. This one is simple and yet so effective. You can better manage your incoming communications this way by requesting information up front and routing the incoming results through something other than an inbox. You can implement a solution like InstantService that will decrease the amount of time you spend answering customer inquiries while providing your customers with a higher level of service.
3. To Tweet or Not to Tweet. You can tweet if you want to, but don't tweet just because it is what everybody else is doing. Figure out if it makes sense for you and your business. If it makes sense, and you direct your customers to follow you, be sure that you have something interesting to say, and that you say it often. Otherwise, don't waste your customers' time.
4. Trust your staff. Your employees might be familiar with Windows. Or Macs. Or Linux. They know what they're doing, or you shouldn't have hired them. Let them choose the tools that make the most sense for them, within reason. If your copywriter tells you they need a Cray supercomputer... you should probably review your hiring criteria. You wouldn't ask Michaelangelo to paint your ceiling with a chisel, why would you make your copywriter scribble in vi?
5. Focus on your core. Are you doing things that are not part of your core business? Stop it. Let somebody else worry about that. Sure, there are about a billion things that you could do to make the world a better place. Pick one and be the best at it.
6. Embrace the cloud. Do you have a server room? Why? Do you really need to be managing a web server? A mail server? A wiki server? Is that your core competency? There are companies that will do this for you. Let them. (See #5.)
7. Wikipedia. Does your org have an entry? Why not?
8. When possible, stop travelling. This becomes easier when you trust the cloud. Yes, there are times when face to face communiques are necessary, and others when they are highly desireable. But sometimes the time and money is better spent getting other stuff done.
9. Telecommute. If you have an office, ask yourself why. Again, embrace the cloud, but also restaurants, coffee shops, parks, and your living room. Bonus points for reducing your org's carbon footprint.
10. Quit your job. #25 on Seth's list. If you're thinking that wholesale changes are needed in your organization, maybe it's not the organization for you. If you aren't making the change in the world that you want to see, and you aren't able to change everything where you are at, move on and find a way to be impactful elsewhere.
11. Do the work. Borrowed again from Seth's list. Do you find yourself in a lot of meetings discussing what it is that you want to do or should be doing if only you had the time and resources? At some point you've got to put away the Powerpoint slides and the bar charts, stop the conversation and just get it done. You know how to do it, right? You trust that your co-workers do too? Empower everybody to do their work and then just get out of the way. Good things will happen. And isn't that the change you're really looking for?

 Change is good. Embrace it.

I'll be getting back to blogging about more fun things in a bit, and things that are pertinent to the field. Right now, however, there is comment spam aplenty, and any SPAM is too much. We're implementing some changes to dissuade the SPAMMers and make their posts less and less useful to them. We prefer not to add captchas to the site, but it may end up that that is our best option. I hate doing anything that makes it harder for legitimate users to interact with Social Edge, so I'm still holding out on that front. For now we'll work on making it less useful to SPAM us, a little bit harder, and see what we can do to block them from posting an interrupting our discussions.

Dear Scum of the Earth comment spammers,

I have worked for a non-profit for 8 of the last 9 years, and an inordinate amount of that time has been devoted to you, and to those like you. Comment SPAM. E-mail SPAM. Bots. Spiders. Viruses. Malware. Spyware. Etc. You are always there with a helping hand whenever I think I'm going to have the time to do something productive or useful. Invariably you are there with the promise of a naked picture of some celebrity, and medicine that you think might come in handy were I to ever meet said naked celebrity. So thoughtful.

Non-profits are great targets for your wares. Small tech staffs, big pagerank bonus for getting a link on a .org. Not a lot of time to deal with your junk attention. I get it. Low barrier to entry, high return on investment. But hey, have a little pride, huh? Are your evil hacker buddies really going to be impressed that you left a comment in arabic on Social Edge that links to your site? Isn't that kind of the malevolent hackers equivalent of going to the big dance with your cousin? You want to impress somebody? Go hack Google or Microsoft. Well, Google anyway.

I have a request. Leave us alone.

Isn't there a malicious programmer code of ethics out there somewhere? May I suggest an amendment? Leave the .org domains alone. If you're really feeling generous you could extend the same courtesy to the .edu domains as well.

May you rot at the bottom of a deep, dark pit Kind Regards,
Untangled

P.S. If traffic is all you really want I'm sure I could find some benevolent hackers out there to send you more traffic than your servers can take.

Google Earth has added historical photos to its already robust feature set. Now you can see what a region looked like previously from above and compare it to what it looks like now, or even earlier.

If only we could take a look into the future and see what the world was going to look like 10, 20 or 100 years from now.

When deciding how much hardware to purchase, there's a very simple rule to follow that will help keep you from having to buy and buy again. Figure out what you need right now and double it.

You think you need 500GB of hard disk space? Try a terrabyte instead.

Is 1GB of RAM enough for what you do now? Take 2GB. Maybe even 4GB. One can never have enough RAM.

That's what we did with our initial re-launch of Social Edge back in 2007. We outgrew that in 2008 and moved to a bigger installation, with some room to grow. Not enough room however, as by January of this year our expanding audience was finding that a visit to Social Edge was a less than snappy experience. So we've moved again to a new server that has twice the RAM, twice the CPU and ten times the bandwidth of our past setup. Plenty of headroom to allow the Social Edge community to continue its growth unabated.

But alas, enough isn't enough. While we have headroom now, we can't ignore the fact that you guys keep telling your friends, family and colleagues about Social Edge. We don't want to reach the point again where most of your visit to Social Edge is spent waiting for a page to load rather than reading the latest from Matt or Kjerstin, Sam or Leila. So more upgrades are on the way. We're doubling our capacity in the next few weeks, as well as implementing a few other upgrades to help ensure that we can keep up with you, your friends, your family and your colleagues.

I saw a billboard this weekend for the XO laptop similar to the one pictured below:

It got me thinking about the XO again. I'm in the market for an inexpensive netbook for someone who just wants basic email and internet functionality. Alas, the Give One Get One program ended in December, so there goes that idea. Billboards are still up though, so maybe they'll run it again at some point?

Anyway, as with all technology, I should know to wait for rev 2.

Still, they have a $200 netbook when netbooks are the one of the few things people want to buy right now, but they're not selling them to people. (And they have a ~$75 ebook reader / computer in the works when Amazon is selling the $359 Kindle left and right.) Their product has gotten rave reviews. Can somebody tell me why it would be a bad idea to stack these things up at every Target, WalMart and Best Buy in the U.S. and use that revenue to keep the company moving forward?

I'm kicking myself for not having thought of buying this as a netbook sooner. Maybe next time, if there is a next time.

I'm a sucker for the latest and greatest software, so I of course took a moment this morning to download and install Apple's new Safari 4 Beta. So far, it does feel faster and that is the best new feature any tech product can include. The new features are nice too. It's going to take me a bit to get used to having the tabs in the menu bar. I'm amazed that that departure from the standard UI design was allowed at Apple, but it seems to be usable.

But really, what is a new Apple product without a bit of shiny shiny? Coverflow in bookmarks? Nice. But AppleTV inspired Top Sites?:

Good stuff!

150 new features, including ARIA support. Can Web 2.0 be accessible? We'll see!

So, I was hoping to find a way to segment my Twitterstream into more useful chunks. I have done the same thing with RSS feeds via Netvibes. There, I put RSS feeds of a similar nature together so that if I want to know about what's going on in Plone-land or tech gadget-land I have tabs that show me nothing but feeds dealing with those topics. As long as I avoid the tabs for entertainment and friends I can remain focused and productive. It's less disracting than having everything in one place and trying to bounce between 'hey, check out this cool web app' to 'OMG HSM3 is out on DVD!!!'

So I installed Tweetdeck to see if it would allow me to do this, and I haven't spent a whole lot of time setting it up to segment types of followees or anything like that. Not because I don't want to, but because I keep getting distracted. By Tweetdeck.

It alerts me whenever people tweet and brings itself to the foreground. Since I started writing this entry it has done so three times. Each time there's been some interesting link to peruse. How can I not check out an article about pre-fab LEED houses? If I don't do it right then the Tweet will disappear down into my Tweetstream never to be seen again!

I'm sure there are settings that allow you to supress this oh so Windows Vista security-esque feature, but I can't get past the Tweets. There are so many of them! What I was hoping to use to better manage my information stream has turned into a torrential river of pithy remarks I can't help but follow up on!

Eventually I'll figure out the settings and then set up groups and learn how to manage the deluge more effectively. Right now I can't help but think of all of you out there who have auto-responses on your email accounts (there should be a way to exclude newsletters and other subscription emails from autoresponses - I waste a lot of time on these too) that say that you only answer email between the hours of xx:xx-xx:xx each day. It's a productivity issue -

Sorry, turns out that iJustine spotted a cheeseburger bed. Wicked!

Okay. Turning off Tweetdeck. For now...

On Facebook, the 25 Random Things meme has taken over. It has even started spreading outside of Facebook to the non-profit community. I have been tagged, and tagged, and tagged again yet I have failed to write up my own list of 25 random things about me. Maybe I'm lazy, or maybe I think that having a couple of blogs, a Twitter feed and a Facebook page makes me narcissistic enough as it is. I thought about listing out 25 Random Things about Social Edge but then realized that the juicy fun stuff would be innappropriate to share, which left me with:

1. Sometimes, I fear that we smell like cheese.

Nobody needs to know that. Really.

So instead, here are 25 Random Things about non-profits, technology, or cheese. In no particular order, of course, being that randomness works like that.

1. We don't really smell like cheese. That was a joke.
2. Google now has calendar and contact syncing for iPhone and Windows Mobile phones. Having kept my iPhone synced with my Address Book and iCal for the past year and a half, this is a very cool feature. No more losing phone numbers to the ether when you switch/lose phones.
3. Contact syncing between your computer, Google and your phone is nice, but how about with Facebook?
4. Yes, my tech suggestions always have a Mac-tinged bias. Sorry about that. I used to be more dual platform, but only under duress.
5. I think that having a web server application for an iPhone is ridiculous, but would love to hear of a good use for such a thing.
6. I'm excited and a little worried that the most interesting development work being done these days is for the iPhone.
7. I'm really interested in development that combines desktop and phone applications into a workable whole. Things like:
8. Things
9. MacGourmet
10. Delicious Library (NYR)
11. I'm also pleased as punch about web based apps with iPhone app extensions like:
12. Mint
13. Of course, Evernote has the desktop clients, iPhone app and web app.
14. I think this is where the future lies, the melding of the desktop, web and mobile, though I'm not certain the desktop app will stick around. Depends on how long it takes to get serious broadband access available to all.
15. Kindle 2 doesn't look like a Texas Instruments reject from the early 1980's anymore. And I could get the LA Times on it every day for only $9.99 a month. Still, I'm not paying for a digital copy of a paper that is available for free online and I'm not paying $359 to be able to buy books to read on a digital screen. They're still going to make me turn it off a half hour before my plane lands.
16. I'm flabbergasted that more hasn't been made about Apple not requiring serial numbers for iWork '09. This is huge. Incredibly huge. When the floppy drive disappeared from the iMac, people were aghast. This is bigger. This is about business models and how software companies will make money down the road. Maybe it's because it's a wonderful thing for your everyday consumer and the rest of the software industry is holding their breath to see what happens.
17. Quicktime X is coming, and Quicktime Pro might be a thing of the past. More signs of things to come, business model wise.
18. Windows 7 is coming. And just like with Vista there will be 6 different versions. Yay. Hoorah. And hey, one of those versions is targeted for 'emerging markets.' No, that wouldn't be the Ultimate edition. Gosh, I don't know why I was sad to see the OLPC run Windows. Just think, now instead of running an OS that is different and innovative children in 'emerging markets' will run an OS that is the same only hobbled. Who saw that one coming? Anyone? Everyone?
19. If and when I ever go back to the corporate world, someone will come across this post and use #18 to make my life more difficult. So be it.
20. CRM's can be a beautiful thing. Some companies help non-profits take advantage of this.
21. I don't know that a lot of people in the non-profit world are in agreement with the folks on Wall Street who are decrying any limits to executive compensation on bailed out companies. Not a lot of tears shed over folks who had their six-figure bonuses cut by a third either.
22. For more soap boxing over the global financial crisis, see me elsewhere. Here I'll try and avoid it and stick with looking forward and figuring out how to make tech work better and how to connect social entrepreneurs to the resources they need most.
23. Have you heard about Pulse?
24. You say Philanthro-capitalism, I say social entrepreneur. Or one of a hundred different names for what essentially is a bunch of people trying to do good things and make the world a better place for everyone, semantics be damned.
25. I like cheese, and so I wonder why I worry about smelling like cheese. Rarely have I worried about smelling like ice cream. Puzzling.

So there you go. 25 Relatively Random Things that may or may not pertain to what it is that you do.

Well, I thought the Amazon arrangement was a stroke of genius. Rely on someone who knows distribution to help you distribute their product. But they were asking people who weren't going to really be their customers to buy a product for their actual customers, and to have a cute, quirky machine to play with in return.

Now, after layoffs, the OLPC team is refocusing and rolling out their next rev, the XO-2, as an open source hardware model. Novel, and while it mimics what I thought was a good idea with their Amazon deal at a certain point someone's going to have to ask them a tough question: what is it that you do again?

Originally they were building a revolutionary new computer that was targeted to children in the developing world. That meant rethinking computers from the ground up. They developed a new OS with a new UI paradigm and they developed all kinds of new hardware innovations to improve battery life and outdoor use. They developed a new way of networking the machines together, a mesh, that allowed the machines to be networked together communitavely, extending their range in the process. The new 2.0 has innovations of its own too, with it being more like a digital book that doubles as a computer than the other way around.

So, what are they now? They spun off their Sugar OS and the laptops can now run Windows. Now they're going to create a reference platform for other companies to build. At some point I see them simply selling their innovations at a cutrate price to a PC manufacturer in order to cover debts and then fold. I hope I'm wrong, because I really liked this initiative from the get go. But if all they're going to do is try and build a low cost laptop that runs Windows, the best they can hope for is that one of the major PC firms relicates their model as a subdivision of their larger organization. Intel has started down that path, but... well, without a profit incentive I fear it won't ever amount to much.

Ah, it's 2009. Finally. Anybody else feel like 2008 simply overstayed its welcome? By about 11 months or so?

Still, no matter what you thought about 2008, you're going to want to back up those files. Why wait for spring to start your spring cleaning? Start the new year right and back up those spreadsheets, movies, and draft screenplays. Maybe even those family photos.

If it just seems like too much of a hassle, just think of what life would be like after a hard drive crash. I had that happen to me this past year at home. It was the one drive I hadn't backed up and it failed. I lost countless hours to coaxing the drive back to life and rescuing the files off of it. I used four different software packages to repair files, directory trees and the like. It wasn't pretty. It wouldn't have been necessary if I had been backing EVERYTHING up properly.

Ironically, it was also my biggest hard drive, and hadn't been backed up because of the time it would have taken to do so. And the blank DVD's it would have burned. Or the cost of a duplicate drive. So instead I spent more money for a backup drive, software recovery tools and more time than I would have otherwise. Another smaller hard drive failed and I simply formatted it and moved the files back onto it from the back-up. Took a heck of a lot less time and worry to accomplish.

Of course, you should also have an offsite backup plan. No, I don't backup my home files offsite. But I should. A fire, flood or other natural calamity would more than likely kill the original and backup drives in one fell swoop. Even a really good power surge could do it. Recently I came across an option that seems too good to be true. Mozy offers unlimited online backup for home users at $4.95 a month. I haven't tried the service out just yet, so I don't know if the "unlimited" applies to external hard drives or not, but I'll let you know. If they backup all of my terrabytes I'll be surprised - and I imagine my ISP won't be terribly happy with me either. Terrabytes? Yes, I'm a geek of many colors, and I have a ridiculous number of small, medium, and large files. If they work for me, they'll work for almost anybody. They also have business backup plans as well.

However you choose to backup your content is better than nothing, so get started. Resolve to review your backup procedures at the start of every new year. Take it from me, if you think it's a waste of time just wait until you waste time figuring out what to do without a backup.

Reached 100 followers this past Thursday. Still surprised at how quickly this grows with very little input on my part. It is getting harder to sift through my Twitter stream to find relevant items. Still, I'll keep up with it and see what happens.

So, the goal of this little Twitter experiment was to see if I could rack up 100 followers in a week. Drumroll please....

Doh! Nope, I went from 10 to 80. I did, however, change the ground rules shortly after getting started. I was going to follow Guy Kawasaki's 10 tips for getting followers, but a funny thing happened before that got under way. Once I started following more folks in the non-profit space, people started following me. So I decided not to do anything else for the past week but find folks to follow and follow folks who followed me. A few of those 80 followers are jokes. Osama bin Laden is following me. I guess I could help out my government by following him back and then letting them know where he's at. Since Barack Obama is also following me now, I wouldn't even have to say anything. A number of the accounts that follow me have been suspended for suspicious activity. I don't know what the term is for Twitter-spammers or Twitter-cons would be, but I have attracted a couple of them it seems.

For the most part, however, it seems like I have legitimate folks following me. And I've seen a few interesting things via the tweets, as I indicated previously. I've also seen some Twitter shorthand that I haven't taken the time to parse just yet. Every niche has its own vernacular, so if I'm going to keep this up, I suppose I should learn. During the holiday break here in the states I even found myself checking my tweet stream on my phone. Addictive? Yes! Useful? Still not entirely sold, but will continue to evaluate.

Now, on to part 2, where I actually follow Guy's tips!

So the experiment continues. Up from 10 followers on Monday to 65 this morning. Will it be 100 by next Tuesday? We'll see. The holiday here in the states might slow things down.

Intereting things from my tweetstream:

• Tweetsgiving
• PolicyPitch
• SEC Outlines Its Reasoning For Shutting Down P2P Lender Prosper
• Refugees International
• FORGE & transparency: How radical do we want to be?
• Five mistakes international organizations make when using Twitter