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.