Why back up your data? How about this:


You can't afford to lose data, so back it up. Get a second hard drive. Get a tape drive. Get a RAID array on your server, a SAN on your network. Do it now before you try to lose weight, backing up your data will actually work. Six months at the gym can still be offset by a plethora of pies and ice cream.

If you haven't backed up your data, I warn you, the video below can be very scary. It's not meant for weak at heart daredevils who carry around their only copy of their data on their 4 year old laptops.

Don't be a daredevil, back it up.

They have wifi in Mecca for the Hajj. I won't be there to attest to the network's reliability, but I find it amazing how pervasive internet access has become.

I like their warning, especially:



That's a message every mall in the U.S. should have up this time of year.

Wifi in remote locales is of special significance to us here at Social Edge this week, as we bring you this week's edition from Peru, China and back home in Palo Alto.

So how's the wifi at the great wall? How's the bandwidth at Macchu Picchu? Inquiring minds want to know! Hopefully we'll be able to find strong signals along the way

Soon, there will be wifi in the sky too. There will be nowhere and no time when you won't be able to work. How will the 40 hour work week adjust? Or will it? It's fabulous that we can be connected anywhere and everywhere but how does one truly unplug?

Okay, I know, the 40 hour workweek is a myth from oldentimes anyway, so if I'm looking to kiss it goobye it's already too late.

Next week: Ecuador!

Way back when, examples of how to use an application invariably had demos featuring a company that made and sold widgets. Nobody actually sold widgets, but they were fun to fake.

Now there are lots of different widgets, be they Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets, Windows Gadgets, Yahoo! Widgets, Google Gadgets, Facebook Apps... ah, the list goes on and on. Widgetbox has Blidgets and other widgets, and there are Gydgets too.

Even Social Edge has widgets - or shall we call them wEdgets®? - that you can put on your blog, your MySpace or Facebook page - you can do all kinds of things with them! You can let all of your Facebook friends know about your favorite Social Edge Blogger:

We're experimenting right now to see if this is something that people will use or not. We think that there a useful way of letting people share our information out to like minded folks. We'll see what happens. We've also started a Facebook group, so we'll see how that goes as well. If you don't have time to experiment, it's probably not that big a deal for you to wait and see how some of this shakes out. If you are with a new organization, this might be an ideal way to get the word out about who you are and what you do.

What is bacn? It's email you want - but not right now. Things like newsletters you've subscribed to, Facebook invites (really, who doesn't want to be your friend?) and alerts from your favorite online stores. Maybe you've signed up to be sent news stories about a certain topic. At any rate, bacn is email that, like SPAM, can get in the way of the email that you really need to get at. Even though it is solicited email that you have given permission for, it can still be annoying.

Are you sending bacn? Are people treating it like SPAM?

Part of this has to do with frequency. A newsletter once a week from a site that you love is a nice reminder of what's going on there. An email every day from a site that you kind of like - blech. People have more to do than read your email. Let them know upfront how often you'll be contacting them, and never send them more than they've agreed to receive. You can have them agree to get mail from you whenever you get the urge, but don't abuse their permission. Your bacn will inevitably end up ignored, deleted and eventually their permission will be withdrawn.

I love my iPhone, but I wish it was greener. I love reading my e-mail and watching videos on the clean, elegant little screen - but I could do without the toxic brominated compounds and hazardous PVC.

In a previous life, I dealt tangentially with issues related to the material composition of cell phones and other electronic devices. Nokia was at the forefront of companies in the information technology / electronic components space when it came to addressing the issues involved in determining what their products were made of.

This sounds silly, of course, because they make the products, why wouldn't they know what they were made of? Most electronic devices are made up of components that are manufactured by a myriad of suppliers, whose parts may come from another group of suppliers. You would be amazed at how many companies are responsible for bringing annoying ringtones to your local cinema. Without knowing what every one of those suppliers along the chain are making their components out of, you can't know what's in your product.

It's like when the Marine Stewardship Council certifies that the fish in your supermarket has come from a well-managed and sustainable fishery. You have to know what the whole supply chain looks like and how each part of the supply chain interacts with the next.

I'm not surprised to see Nokia's new phone, the 3110 Evolve, hit the market. Revolutionary new features? Yep. Just not the ones that annoy everyone around you. Recycled materials? Check. Energy efficient adapter? Check. On sale now? Well, not yet, evidently. Definitely something to watch for, however.

I'll be most curious to see what the chemical composition of the phone looks like too.

We have comments on Social Edge, though we don't see them used that much outside of our weekly discussions. This holds true even when we have content that is a bit more, for lack of a better word, provocative. Recently we published an X-Interview with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. We haven't had a single comment on the site to this post. You have to be a logged in member to be able to post a comment, but still, I was surprised to see that there wasn't a single comment responding to what the former president had to say.

The same video is posted to YouTube, where comments are a different story. At this time, there have been 38 comments on YouTube. The comments have not, however, been a shining example of considered cognitive discourse, and have instead veered off into insipid insults and argumentative posturing. With all the knuckle dragging you would think the video was a prolonged insult to neanderthals. Alas, I don't know that any of the comments related to the content of the video at all, instead merely focusing on supporting or debasing the subject of the video, Mr. Carter.

Oh, how I would have loved to read a discussion concerning the eradication of guinea worm and other diseases! If it devolved into a political discussion with an intelligent back and forth on the pros and cons of habeus corpus restrictions, that wouldn't have been terribly disappointing either. Instead, people have used the comments to call President Cater an "ass," a "son-of-a-bitch," a "fool", a "senile old bastard" - you get the picture. We're not reaching Lincoln-Douglas level of debate on this one.

I have to admit, while reading the comments I was tempted to delete most if not all of them and close down further comments on the video. YouTube allows you to set your comment options thusly:



Ultimately, what people want to say is up to them. Sometimes, however, what goes unsaid is far more interesting than what is shouted, screamed, hollered or typed.

I love books. Yep, I may live my life online, but when I log off, I retreat into the two dimensional world of dusty pages, alliterative phrases and the occasional dangling participle.

You would think that I would be the ideal target audience for a product  like Amazon's Kindle, that brings old dead tree media into the 1st century. Yet for some reason, I just can't make the leap. I understand that an electronic version of a book is a lot more useful than an actual book, I do. I get the fact that if I run across a character who was mentioned earlier, I can search and find that initial reference and see if they were left handed than as they appear to be now. I can click a link in a science book that takes me to a picture of the Horsehead Nebula:


This is all well and good. And the fact that your internet service on the device is free? Wicked. I thought I liked free shipping. I think I would love free internet service - accessible anywhere Sprint is available - all the more. (There are drawbacks to the internet connectivity, but I won't be picky on this point for now. The fact that it is there and free is probably the most revolutionary aspect of the product.)

$9.99 for new releases? Very cool too. And newspapers. Granted, no LA Times, but that will come I'm sure.

The electronic ink technology looks very nice as well. It doesn't appear to have an option for color, which is something of a letdown when it comes to magazines and blogs, but fine for most reading.

So what's the hangup? Why can't I get behind an electronic book device?

Sure, the limited internet capabilities are free and the books are cheap - but that initial $400 price? Steep. I would need to buy a lot of books before I made up the difference. More importantly though is the DRM (Digital Rights Management) issue. A number of eBook readers have come and gone - who says this one is going to stick around? Can you back up the books to a computer and read them there? Really, what I would prefer would be to read books on my iPhone and store them alongside my music and movies in iTunes. Then I wouldn't have to lug around another device - which is why I bought an iPhone in the first place. If I have to lug something around in addition to that, how about a regular book? Saves on batteries.

But still, there's something else. Technology needs to be more organic. Which is a cheap way of saying that there's just something missing.
 I want to be wowed by an eBook reader, I really do. I love the idea of being able to cart around a slew of books but not enough to carry around a $400 device to do so.

Technology should break down barriers between you and the information you are interacting with and/or the barriers between you and other people. A great example of where this works is customer reviews on Amazon. Visual voicemail on the iPhone gets you to the messages you want to hear faster than previous methods of voicemail. Kiva does a great job of breaking down barriers between lenders and entrepreneurs, enabling them to connect directly.

Your technology solutions should do the same. If your project management software is getting in the way of getting work done, ditch it. Maybe for your team a paper calendar tacked up on the wall is more feasible. Are you looking at implementing a CRM (Customer Relations Management) system? Before shelling out the bucks, make sure that all those bells and whistles are really going to be beneficial. Chances are, they're not. Especially in small organizations. Keep it simple, keep it useful.

Perhaps the biggest reason why I'm not excited by the Kindle eBook reader can be summed up by another one of Amazon's offerings, a subsidiary called MobiPocket. If they wanted to sell me books and not book readers, the eBooks that they sell here would be priced the same as the ones for the Kindle.

Until Amazon, Sony and others who have tread down the eBook path stop treating the books and my money as being disposable, they can keep the reader and I'll keep the cash and by dog eared copy of Cat's Cradle.

(Notice that the book version shows other formats prominently, including the Kindle format, but the Kindle page link to the book version is virtually hidden.)

Go on, you know you want one.

I cant help but think of the old cartoons, probably Bugs Bunny... 'One for you, two for me, one for you, three for me.'

I'm anxious to see one, and especially interested in getting a look at the UI. I'll let you know what it's like if I manage to get my hands on one. Or you could get one and see for yourself. Go on, it matches that new sweater Aunt Bertha just sent you.

Or if you are so inclined, you could give money to the cause via Facebook or the One Laptop Per Child site.

"All hail the mighty gPhone, even if it doesn't actually exist. Turns out, the gPhone is a mobile development platform with an OS called Android, middleware, "key" applications and a forthcoming SDK. Funny, I thought the press had pretty much decided that the gPhone was going to be the first phone to bake you cookies. Which would have made these kids happy:



"It would give me anything I want." At first, these kids were cute. Then, really annoying and cloying. Then, they simply became a representation of all that we've been told that an unannounced bit of technology would be. And just like the kids' visions of a phone that helps animals feel better and makes peanut butter sandwiches, the journalists' pronouncements on what the gPhone would be turned out to be nothing more than wishes.

Of course, what we really need from a cell phone are the two things that Google, Palm, Apple and other mobile software makers can't give us. Speed and coverage. Which is why Apple's iPhone is the first phone that doesn't make me want to slam it against a counter more often than I use it to talk to people. When coverage or speed from AT&T's network is pathetic, I flip over to the iPod functionality and enjoy some music or a movie. It downloads mail when I have coverage and I read them when I don't. It doesn't really matter how slick Android is, nor the apps that come with it, the network is still going to be as fast as a tricycle on a highway.

Interesting that they'll have an SDK out 3-4 months ahead of Apple's SDK, while phones built on the platform won't start showing up until next June at the earliest. Will the folks that make jailbreak apps for the iPhone convert their stuff over to work on phones that don't exist? Or will they be converting their stuff over to work "properly" via Apple's SDK in February? My bet is on the latter, since they and their customers will be able to use the fruit of their labors immediately.

Still, I'm looking forward to seeing what apps Google makes available and how they deal with the limitations of low bandwidth. Will they have a suite of mobile office apps? How well will they function? And the true test that won't come until late next year - how does the work people do on the phone convert over to their desks? We'll get a glimpse on November 12th - same day as the One Laptop Per Child Give One Get One program starts.

By the way, I've heard rumors that here on the Edge, we're going to be releasing the sePhone. It'll solve all of the world's social and economic inequities through the delivery of vibrations that cause the whole world to sing Earth, Wind & Fire's Let's Groove:



And everybody gets their own horn section! Because as we all know, that is the key to lasting happiness. We're still working out the kinks though. Right now, the vibration causes people to sing instrumentals. We'll keep working on it. Just don't hold your breath.

I'm old.

This is what it must have felt like for my father when I told him that Duran Duran was like an 80's version of the Beatles. He must have spontaneously sprouted grey hair right then and there.

I'm on Facebook, and I don't know what the heck I'm doing there. A friend of mine asked me to be her Facebook friend, and how could I tell her no? I hadn't realized that we weren't friends already. Now, I have validation that we are buds. But I haven't embraced it yet. Somebody else asked me to be their friend and alas, after a couple of tries accepting his invitation, I was frustrated enough that I went back to programming. So now I feel bad, because he doesn't know that he's my friend. I've dissed him by not being able to figure out how to accept his invitation.

Oh, the humanity. Or lack thereof.

Then I read a Newsweek article on Facebook-ing Philanthropy. Okay, now some established dead-tree media is talking about the possibilities for philanthropic causes to leverage social networks. I have to figure this out now, before somebody realizes that I'm old. My read is that although no money is coming in, awareness is being raised. Now organizations need to figure out how to capitalize on those eyeballs in a quantifiable way.

The Daily Bruin also ran a recent article on Facebook and Philanthropy, which included the following quote:


Great. The real world is messed up but what is so great about this online world is that it is just like the real thing. Only with virtual kegs of beer. (And yes,  I rewrote the  previous sentence to be more grammatically correct. I can feel the grey hairs sprouting with each passing moment.)

I was just about to start following the breadcrumb trail back out of Facebook and into the real virtual world when I read this:


Oddly enough, this made me feel better and I decided to take a bit of a look around, see what I could find in this den of virtual iniquity. In order to be a responsible Facebook Citizen, I found the Causes application and added it to my profile. Then I went and searched for causes to support. Now, when my handful of friends come and visit my profile, they can see that I support the Alliance for Climate Protection, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation, and one of 11 different options for Kiva. I picked the one with the most members and the most money donated.

For some reason, I skipped joining Sam's Stop the Lies of Global Warming cause. He seems to have everything he needs already, other than a dictionary and a copy of The Elements of Style, perhaps. And yes, how old am I? I just edited out a frontal lobe joke, because it is unseemly to me to bash a high school kid for being young and ill-informed. *sigh* I swear, I'm going to go straight from Facebook to a retirement home. Besides, Sam's obviously figured out how to add friends, and I'm still trying to figure out how to log in properly so that I can add all my friends to the same profile.

Also not making my causes cut was a Stop Vegetarians cause. I didn't realize that I was abnormal and part of the problem. I guess if I really cared about making the world a better place, I'd be choking down a hamburger for lunch. Instead, I have my mind set on a nice green salad with sprouts.

So yes, Facebook did originate as a social network for college students, and in many ways has stayed true to its roots. It is as much about sex, drugs and music as one would expect, with some social causes on the side. Just like Berkeley in the 60's. Only instead of waking up and wondering where you are, you wake up and wonder if you would have more friends if you had more bandwidth.

It is still too early to buy your own XO Laptop from the One Laptop Per Child initiative. The Give 1 Get 1 program doesn't start until November 12th. You can still donate one without getting one right now, however. Or, you can give a whole bunch.

OLPC has added options for those who would like to donate on a grander scale. Not content with buying one laptop to be sent to a child? How about 100? 1000? How about 10,000?

The more you donate, the more say you have in where the laptops end up.

Last week I attended the 2007 Plone Conference in Napoli, Italy. Plone is the software that powers the Social Edge web site, and it was great to get a look at the latest revisions to it and talk with the folks who are doing the actual development of the product. Or platform. Maybe it's a platform product? Well, however you describe Plone, it is working well for us here on the Edge. Now we get to start planning when we're going to upgrade to the latest release and what features we'll put to use first. With any luck, users will never notice a big change, just new features as we roll them out. It is going to take us a little while to gear up for that, so don't expect anything new to show up right away.

One of the keynotes at the conference was from Tom Moroz of the Open Society Institute, and it was about the similarities between the open source software movement and work by non-profits towards an open society. Interesting parallels, to be sure. I was most interested in his comments about the need for online collaboration tools for non-profits.

It was also interesting to find out about some of the organizations that are using Plone to run their sites. Discover Magazine has a nice Plone based site, as does Novell, but I was more surprised to find out that the CIA is also using Plone. I guess I can stop fretting over whether or not Plone is secure enough for us here on Social Edge. They should still probably consider updating their favicon, though the folks working on Plone appreciate the free advertising.

I was surprised by the number of Windows based laptops at the conference. Not that they were numerous, but in fact the exact opposite. I saw more presentations delivered from Ubuntu based machines, along with other Linux variants than I did from any of the various flavors of Windows. Macs, on the other hand, have gone from being a geek's focus of condescension years ago to the most prevalent platform for hardcore developers. Even more surprising to me was that Keynote is taking hold amongst this crowd over PowerPoint.

The most interesting part of the conference, however, was just the camaraderie of the developers. Coming from a corporate background, it still surprises me that folks from around the world can come together to develop something as complex as a content management system, for free, and have that product end up being robust and secure enough to meet the needs of major corporations like Novell, and security intensive organizations like the CIA. As Tom Moroz discussed in his keynote, we all have something to learn from the open source software crowd.

So you've heard about the One Laptop Per Child Project, and about the Sugar OS it runs and you've been curious to see one for yourself? Maybe even take one for a test drive? Well how about going one better and actually buying one? Heck, maybe you'd like to buy one for somebody else while you're at it.



Well, soon you'll be able to.

For two weeks starting on November 12th, you can buy an XO Laptop - as long as you buy a second one to donate. Right now you can donate as many as you'd like at $200USD a piece. On November 12th, $399USD will get you one and one for a child in a developing nation.

David Pogue reviewed the XO for the New York Times. He liked what he saw.

Seth Godin donated five. Who else is going to step up to the plate?

Is your business a 501(c)3? If so, Google has something free for you.

Google Checkout for Non-Profits is free through 2008, and allows you to collect donations on your site quickly and easily. They have also wrapped it up with their YouTube offering. Depending on what they charge for the service you may not want to use it in 2009, but until then, there's no good reason not to take advantage of it now. Then you can add a little box like this to your site:



No, we're not taking donations here on the Edge. That's just a screenshot, an example of what it will look like on your site. Chocolate, however, is always accepted around these parts. Mmm, chocolate. But food products are harder to send over Cat-5 and wi-fi than donations via Google Checkout.

IBM has developed a new voice to sign language technology called SiSi (Say It Sign It). Interesting stuff. Don't know how this would work with podcasts, but having it work with live presentations is pretty outstanding.

Over the last few weeks, I've been taking a look at how to caption video, and I have to admit, the process is still a bit daunting. Creating a transcript is time consuming, but taking that transcript and placing it appropriately into the video? You have to be really committed to keep that up. I didn't find the process to be particularly efficient, and I think that there has to be a better way to add captions. One that doesn't take so much time and isn't so mind-numbingly repetitive.

At first glance, it seemed like a software package would be required, and possibly some specialized hardware as well. Hardware? Yeah, I was surprised too. Not to mention the money. Somehow I don't think that a software package that costs more than your computer and all of its other software applications combined is something that is going to get past too many holders of the purse strings, at non-profits or for profits. I was beginning to see why most closed captioning is done to meet legal requirements and not to meet the needs of the user base.

Then I came across Automatic Sync Technologies. It is an online service that allows you to upload video or audio files and have captions added. If you provide a transcript the process takes as little as 5 minutes for an hour of video. Without a transcript the process takes a couple of days. It works with a variety of formats that work well for web video, including .WMV, .WMA, .MOV, .RM, .RA, .WAV, .MP3, .FLV, .M4A, .M4B, .M4V, or .MP4. They also do

Billing is $85 per media hour for non-profits if a transcript is provided, and is billed in 10 minute increments. So a single 5 to 10 minute podcast would cost about $15 if you provide the transcript. We've come to expect things for free on the web, but this seems to be a reasonable price. I'll take a look at the service and see if I can find other similar services and compare them for price, quality and speed.

I have been working on adding closed captions to videos on and off for a couple of weeks, and I found a post that talked about a video service I hadn't been aware of called Jumpcut. Yahoo! bought the service last year, so I was doubly surprised I hadn't heard of them. I guess
Yahoo! has had enough trouble without getting the word out that they have a video site along the lines of YouTube.

What's nice about Jumpcut is that it allows you to upload videos, just like all of the other video wannabes,  but then you can edit the video you've uploaded online. I decided to give it a try on this week's X-Interview with Acumen Fund Fellow Adrien Couton. Here are the results:



Okay, I'm not a professional captioner, but I think the end result isn't half bad, especially for a free service that didn't require me to install any software. There are other kinds of editing that you can do as well, that may make editing in a program like iMovie almost redundant. I was glad that they had a save link though, as editing video in a browser felt kind of precarious! Not that the site hiccuped at all, it just felt new.

Still, I do have a few less than positive thoughts about the process. While I was glad I could add the captions/subtitles, the process was very time consuming. Off line editors seemed to be a bit easier to use, including the cross-platform / Java app MagPie. MovCaptioner for Mac has the best interface I've come across so far. It plays a section of the movie over and over as you add the caption and then move to the next bit of video as you finish. Much faster than adding the text and then adjusting it's placement. Also, I don't see a way to export the added text to a .smil text file that caould be added to other services, like iTunes. Nor do I see immediately where I could download the movie to so that I could, again, share via iTunes.

Still, a very promising web app, and one that I'll be delving into more to see if it can fulfill it's potential for adding captions.

Lately it seems as though the tech world hasn't been keeping up with accessibility. It's easy to overlook accessibility issues when you're in a rush to get things out to market, and it seems that closed captions have been one of the casualties of the market. I recently sat in on a conference session that dealt with accessibility issues in the Web 2.0 space, and as aware that all the cool whiz-bang features AJAX and Web 2.0 methodologies bring us aren't always developed with everyone in mind. It's still a young market, and I'm glad to see efforts made to close the gap here. What I didn't realize was that closed captions had taken such a hit.

It's understandable with the explosion of video podcasts that not everyone is adding captions to their videos they make in their mother's basement. We haven't done so with the X-Interviews - yet - and really, a lot of people are just starting to get the hang of getting video on the web at all. What surprised me, however, was that HDTV shows and digital downloads were either missing captions or they were difficult to access. I don't know anything about HDTV standards, but it seemed to me like this was a ridiculous problem to have with a technology that was designed to allow more information to be included in the stream, not less.

The digital downloads were less surprising, but still - Quicktime has included closed captions since 7.2 and the iTunes store sells TV shows that have already been captioned. Seems to me that this is a no-brainer. Somebody at Apple must have thought so too, as the new version of iTunes with it's highly touted ringtone feature also includes support for closed captioning. My iPhone is perpetually set to vibrate, so there's little concern that people watching a movie with me will be interrupted by the Commodores "Brick House" if my partner calls me. For me, the closed captioning support is a much more relevant and welcome addition.

It is supported in podcasts as well, as you can see in this SpaceGeek podcast. It's also a nice way to take video shot in one language and make the content available to people who speak other languages.

Hopefully, Apple will update the listings soon to provide an easy way to tell if a video is closed captioned or not. Right now, I can't tell what is or isn't. I searched for closed captioning and came up with one season each of 24 and Stargate - but neither mentioned if they actually were closed captioned. Still, it's a step in the right direction. The new iPods are also supporting captions, though I haven't seen that myself as of yet.

I should also note that Google Video supports closed captions, and has a nice, visible marker denoting videos as such. It's great to see this start to happen, and it will be interesting to see how it progresses. Hopefully there will be some decent, inexpensive automatic captioning applications soon so that everybody can include them in their videos easily whether they are filming on a big Hollywood sound stage or in their mother's basement.

Revver and Brightcove and Blip, oh my!

So many video upload services and so few hours in the day. How to choose which one to upload your videos to? And why?

Along with the services mentioned above, you could also use Yahoo!, Google, MySpace, MetaCafe, and DailyMotion in order to share your videos. And, of course, who can forget the $1.6B behemoth of the business, streaming their users' videos to computer screens, AppleTVs and iPhones everywhere, YouTube. (There are more, of course, but for the purposes of today's discussion, we'll stick with these.) If you are looking to plop your videos onto your own page any one of them will do so, with varying degrees of quality and ease.

If you're want to share your videos with as many users as possible, you might choose YouTube for the size of its audience, and risk getting lost among the dancing on treadmills and the ubiquitous hand-holding otters. You might have a better chance of breaking through on one of the smaller, less used sites. But why should you settle for just one? Well, because uploading videos to 9 different sites is a long, drawn out bore.

Thankfully, there's a site with an answer to what ails you, or at least what has been ailing me. TubeMogul allows you to store your login information for nine different video sharing sites and submit your video to all of them at once.

This week's X-Interview is the first video I've tried this with, and if the results are good, I'll go back and upload the previous X-Interviews (All 35 of them! Yikes, it may take me a bit of time even nine sites at a time!).

It takes a bit of time, but I've been writing this while letting the uploads run their course over in another browser window. Let's see what the results look like. I'll skip YouTube since that's what we've been using for the X-Interviews for a while now.

Yahoo!:


MySpace:


MetaCafe:


Google: