The Human SuperComputer

Since I could not get to SC09, we are going to try a little experiment in High Performance Collaborative Computing. Much like Condor, I am asking to borrow a few of your spare cycles to carry a message for me. The 3 hour time difference and the fact that the Ogre is on the floor pretty much all day has caused havoc with our communication systems. I want him to understand he is missed and see if I can make him smile in the middle of Chaos that is the show floor.

If you are at SC09 today, please go by the Purdue University booth (2473) and ask for Dave. ( or ask for GOAT, or maybe even ask for Ogre). He will be the guy who has grown out his hair to look a bit like Wolfman Jack. Just give him the following message:

"There is a Kitten in Kokomo waiting for you". If you want, tell him Roguepuppet sent you.

If you manage to make it by, feel free to respond below and tell us what his response was.

Even if you do not leave a message, please accept my heartfelt thanks.

And if you are not at SC09 either, but know someone who is.... pass this on.

Email: The Nail in the Coffin

I have been musing for a while now about the seemingly imminent death of email, but last night I became convinced that personal email is already dead, we are just hammering the nails in the coffin.

Yes, there is no doubt that business email is still alive ( and broken and annoying)- but that is another post. Let's focus on Personal email.

I was on a phone call with my mom when the ringing of the hammer sounded clearly.

"We decided to talk to Verizon and get off of AOL and just use our Verizon email."

Excellent news! AOL ( stop cringing) was the right choice for my parents back in 1990, when the web was new and there were not many user friendly email interfaces. Now, it just inevitably led them to clicking on links in ways that launch that horrid AOL browser and things were broken. Plus, it is spending money on a service they really don't need. Times are tight and money is not free.

"Your Dad was reluctant and is concerned about how the email will look, but I told him it really did not matter, hardly anyone we know uses email any more. When I look at my email, it is almost all junk or ads or things people forwarded me. We don't have many people who send us stuff any more- you all moved to Facebook".

Wow. Astute for a basically computer challenged person who strongly resists change of any kind. She was not happy about the shift, mind you- ( I did not even want to boggle her with the plethora of social networks where I have a home... we will just leave it as Facebook for now).

"I am going to have to get on Facebook if I want to keep in touch, and just when I learn it, you will all probably move someplace else. But there is no doubt that email is just dead."

This from a 64 year old woman who is far from a computer analyst and does not know Facebook at all, apart from her grandaughters talking about it and the little bit we showed her over the Easter Holiday.

If she is not on Facebook soon, I have no doubt she will be on by the end of my daughters' week-long visit with them the first week of June. Honestly, I think she will like it better than AOL email.. but for my sanity and hers, I hope someone solves the interoperability/open authetication/platform communication before they leave and migrate to the next great social networking platform and leave her behind on Facebook wthout a linkage.

Breathing in the Social Networks

What will it take for social networks to become as pervasive as air? Charlene Li, the co-author of Groundswell, recently gave a talk at OReilly's Graphing Social Patterns conference on the future of social networks that you can hear via the IT Conversation Network, (you can also see the slides to the talk on Slideshare) where she envisions a future where social networks become as pervasive as air- following us everywhere we go without effort.

I was listening to this podcast on my way back from the airport yesterday, and more than once during her talk wished I was at the conference to talk with her in real time.

The first time was when she was first defining "like air" as following you everywhere on the web- it sounds futuristic, but I immediately thought of my recent experiences with Glue. The more she talked, especially when she talked about wanting to "see friends reviews" on Amazon, the more I wanted to run up to her with my miniLaptop and say "look at THIS!". In some ways, Glue does exactly what she was talking about in the realm of sahring recommendations and experiences online with friends, regardless of where you know someone from. If someone is listed as my friend on Glue, it does not matter if they looked at and reviewed an item on Amazon and I am on the BestBuy site, I will still get their feedback on that item. The thing that makes Glue less useful than it could be is the same thing that made Twitter less interesting 18 months ago... a lack of participants. But even with low numbers, I am already more excited about Glue than I was in the early days of Twitter. I am excited to envision what will be possible when my entire Twitter, Facebook and gTalk networks are on Glue. I am also looking forward to the first Glue Ap for my BB, where I can scan in a product barcode via the cell phone camera and have Glue give me back the feedback of my network who browsed it online.. and vice versa.

My second moment of wanting to share directly with Charlene was when she was talking about the current closed circle nature of socialmetworks and how this needs to change. It came fast on the heels of my attempt at explaining Facebook to my mom. Taking my mom on the Facebook journey was honestly not my idea, it came because my eldest daughter spent most of their visit this weekend trying to convince her grandmother to join, so they can communicate more easily. I had been reluctant to drag my mom into this, because I knew that her learning curve might not keep up with the shift in social networks. My teenaged daughter does not have much of a vision about life before (or after)Facebook and she has no idea that in other geo-ethnic groups Facebook is NOT the place to be, it might be Bebo or Hi5 or Orkut or one of a shifting group of social networks. My fear has been that just as my parents learn and feel comfortable on Facebook, their grandchildren will move on to the next hot thing in social networks and leave them behind again. I know there is a coming shift from email to social network messaging, but what we really need is an interface to bridge the gaps. I need a way to forward my daughter's external email address to her Facebook inbox and she needs a way to send messages from her inbox to people she knows external to Facebook- either to an email address or to an inbox on another social network.

As Charlene points out, if the social networks themselves will not put this in place, there will be portals that start to agreggate and cross link the networks. This still needs better authentication schemes and ways of creating site and contact grooups to manage it. I do not want everyone I know to have access to everything I do, but I would love to be able to have a networking group called "professional" and when I add you to it, you automatically have access to me on LinkedIn, see my HPCMfg Blog feeds, are linked to the ZoneMfg blog, and send are in my "professional contact" group on GoogleVoice. Folks who get added as friends get added to Facebook, Twitter, LastFM, Glue,StumbleUpon, get the feed to this blog, and are in my "friends" contact group on GoogleVoice. Music Lover? You get connected to me on AmieStreet, Glue, iLike, LastFM, get the feed for my Vox music review blog, and get the feed for all things I tag "music" on Delicious. Family? Techie?CurtainCall? Kids? Gardener? WebSurfer? All of these would be configured as different subsets of my activity online and I could add someone's ID to as many of these groups as I wanted to customize and fine tune their access and our interactions. If anyone out there is working on this today, I want to BetaTest it.

edit: Phil Windley kindly pointed out that although the Graphing Social Patterns conference was presented by OReilly, IT Conversations is not associated with O'Reilly. I have corrected the original post text. ( I was also excited to note when I looked up his Twitter page, that Phil uses Glue.)

GS Cookie Time

My eldest daughter is a senior GS and it is cookie time again. Unfortunately, the seniors ( gawking big High Schoolers) have to compete with those cute little brownies who come door to door or stand outside of the grocery store hawking wares. So, I told her we could do a little experiment and try to leverage our online network to get some orders. If you live reasonably close to either Kokomo or Purdue and would like to order cookies ( 3.50/box) you can either leave a comment here, email me directly (put COOKIE ORDER) in the subject line or DM me the info on Twitter. I need to know how many of each kind and your email address. I will email you to follow up and get a phone number/street address to confirm and be able to get them to you at delivery time. I can accept Paypal for the payments if you will not see me in person over the next couple of weeks. ( paypal adds a 2.9% +.30 fee, so please include that)

You also have the option to purchase cookies that will be donated instead of you consuming them. For her troop, all the donated cookies will be delivered to men and women serving in the military. You can not choose which kind to donate, just a number of boxes to donate. You do not have to live anywhere near us to purchase donations, just let us know how many you want to donate and an email where we can contact you to work out payment info.

Below you can find the list of the cookies that her troop is selling this year, and you can see all of the GS Cookies on the GS website. If you do not live in our area, there is a nifty gadget on the same page to assist you. You can enter your zipcode and they will direct you to the right troop. If you buy from someone else, comment here so she can at least know that you were inspired to buy by this post.

Her troop is offering:

Lemon Chalet Cremes
Trefoils
Do-Si-Dos
Samoas
Dulce de Leche
Sugar Free Chocolate Chips
Tagalongs
Thin Mints

old school does not rule

Tonight I got contacted by an old friend whose wife makes hand crafted jewelry and is trying to sell it online. "How do I get in the top of the Google search results?" I explained the basics about how Google ranks sites and pointed them to the concept of Search Engine Optimization. But when I tried to give them my real advice, I hit a brick wall.
"Do the easy SEO stuff, but I would not waste a lot of time trying to game the system. With handcrafted articles, you would do better to have her focus on some social media sites, become active and develop a network of people who know her, like her art and spread the link with their friends".
I got a blank silence on the other end of the phone. "So I could use a really obscure keyword and then use it to test when the Google spider has revisited the site and see what changes with my rank, right?".
We went back and forth like this for several rounds, slight variation on the words, but the same underlying meaning. No matter what I said, he was convinced that the only way to be successful was to get highly ranked on Google.
I finally caved. "You could always pay to have your site in the top listing...."
"Yeah, I think that is a little beyond what we want to do."
I did not have the heart to tell him that Adwords was not necessarily as expensive as he thought.
"well, I wish you luck and hope some of this was useful..."

How do you convince people of the value of social media without them living it first hand??

The importance of Bridges

EDIT: I won an HP Magic giveaway on Chris Pirillo's site ( link later when it is not the middle of the night). This makes me in-eligible for Sugar Jone's contest. However, I have already met some amazing people and Sugar has given me permission to continue to network with others. I won the contest I did, because of the power and reach of my network of friends and contacts. I will always believe in the power of reaching out to help someone without thought of reward, because eventually it really does come back to you. It is all very surreal right now, I am sure I will have more to share later on. If you are here to network and find other people whose lives you can change, read on and comment. I will reply. If you were hoping to just "gain points" by commenting, feel free to skip this and move on to the next link.


There is great clarity in my mind that one of the things I am best at is being a bridge. Bridges are structures that help to overcome an obstacle or clear a path from one thing to another. We usually think of bridges as wooden, or metal, or perhaps even rope. The word evokes different mental images in different people perhaps a large spanning structure, like the golden gate bridge. Maybe your mental picture is an old log you used to use to cross a stream in the woods when you were a child. For others, the word bridge calls up a scene from an Indiana Jones movie, with a precarious rope bridge barely attached to a cliff over a deep canyon. If you are really a geek, you might even be picturing a bridge in an electrical circuit- essential for converting energy from AC to DC. But I say that some of the most important bridges in our world today are the human ones.

None of us can fix all the problems in the world. None of us can help all the people who need assistance, or provide resources to everyone who needs it. We do all the small things we can to make our immediate world a better place- feed the family next door, donate used clothes or toys, lend a helping hand at the local soup kitchen and we can see the changes around us. It changes the lives of the people we touch and it changes our lives by reaching out. These are so important. In our immediate family, we work hard to teach our children to donate outgrown clothes and toys, to collect cans for canned food drives, to donate time to local animal shelters or to help fight teen drug abuse. They see us donate blood, vote in elections and take an active stance in the community we live in. Those are all incredibly important and I would not want any of them to stop.

But some problems are bigger than what we can tackle on a personal level. Some problems exceed our own personal resources ( time, money, location, mobility) and leave us feeling frustrated. This is where you can become a bridge. You may not have the time to donate to a local animal shelter, but you know three people who do and you can connect them. You may not have the money to put a new roof on someone's house, but you know of an agency who assists and you get them in touch. You may not be able to grow an extra row in a garden, because your yard is too small... but you know someone at your church or school who has a huge yard.

In the internet age, it is easier than ever to see potential connections. How often have you been online and thought.. "wow, how ironic. I just read about someone trying to figure out how to get rid of their old bed without a truck.. and now this person is blogging about needing a bed. What a weird world this is." Instead, be proactive. Introduce the person without a truck to the person needing a bed. It does not have to be a formal introduction... maybe just passing on a blog note, or a quick tweet reply to point someone in the right direction. Don't assume that just because you read something on the internet, everyone else knows it is there. The internet is a big big place, awash in information that often only small numbers of people see.

In the normal course of your online browsing, chatting, blogging and tweeting, take a minute.. when you see a potential connection- be a bridge. You don't need money or the ability to travel, or to even be well enough to leave the house. You just need to be willing to speak up and point out the connections you are seeing. Convert the crazy alternating current of energy flowing around us into a direct current that can take action and solve problems. Be a bridge and be astounded with how good you end up feeling with all that energy flowing through you.

note: this entry is published in response to a request for the HP Magic give away contest being hosted by the Living-in Theory Blog. If you are interested in what I would do with such great computer loot, you can check out an earlier blog post I wrote on the HP Magic Contest.

Social Media Lessons learned

The last week has been an interesting social media experiment for me. As you know by now, HP is doing a massive computer giveaway split across 50 different blogs. I became inspired and am still trying to work hard to win one of the contests to make a little Christmas magic happen here in the Heartlands. I entered a couple that were random drawings..and lost. I entered one on Liz Henry's Blog about poetry, technology and politics that was an "inspire me" contest. I got an honorable mention for my comment, but no computers. I was excited because people liked my writing, but no computers to share. Then I found out about Chris Parillo's contest.. it was a write a post and get the most comments sort of post. I wrote about something I have a passion for.. cooking and then started the social media pimping. I wanted to spread the word, but did not want to be completely annoying about it all.
I did a couple of tweets about the contest and included a link to the article. I posted it on my Facebook status. I sent out multiple emails to different mailing lists. The comments rushed forward... mostly family and really good friends at first. We jumped up to 21 comments in no time at all.. putting us at about number 5 or 6 in the contest. My hopes surged.. maybe we had a real chance at this.
The next day, I put out a few more tweets, but the response was slow. We stalled at about 24 comments. I really want this for the people involved, so I started calling some friends who I had emailed in the initial rush. I sat people down and asked them to read and comment on it... we jumped up to 41 comments. There was a chance after all..
With less than 24 hours left in the contest, I decided to get a little more pushy.. I started DMing people on Twitter. I actually DM'd so many that I used up my 24 hour quota of DMs (several of us did not even know the limit had been added...). But I started getting lots of positive results. DMs back from people, emails, wow. I got excited. I logged back into Facebook and started Facebook IMing people who were actively online.. asking them to please check it out and comment if they liked it.
The comments awaited moderation and poor Chris apparently came down with food poisoning, others covered for him. With no idea where I stood, I finally drifted off to sleep at about 1am.
I woke up at 3am this morning to check. Comment count was at 96!! Unfortunately, someone else has 100 and another yet has 110, so although no official winner has been announced, I am guessing this is one I did not win.
However, I learned a really important lesson about social networking. We all talk about the power of public statements and posts. We get in the pulpit and talk about how it streamlines communication and action to have things like blogs and general public streams of ideas and discussions. And I think these are all very very good things. This is a good way of asynchronously getting together groups of people who would never have converged, otherwise. But when it came down to really getting things done, to really motivating people to action? The personal, direct one on one interaction won out every single time.
I do not regret participating in Chris's contest.. I got introduced to Geeks!, which I did not know about and found some great new people to follow and interact with over at Twitter. Life is all about the journey.
Oh, and the computers? I have not given up on those yet either.. I found another contest to tackle and try all over again over at Sugar Jones' Living in Theory blog. You should come and join in the fun. This one is not about popularity or the power of your story alone.. ( thank goodness-- no more requests for contests)it is also about community building. I am impressed with the concept, and look forward to applying some of the lessons I learned in the last couple of contests. Watch a little later for my essay part of that entry, and check out the #sugarmagic tags on Twitter to see if we can get a community built up.

12 seconds of excitement

It has been a while since a new interactive web tool actually got me buzzed up. I see lots of potential in lots of new tools, but not all of them have applicability to my life directly, other than geek curiosity. Vlogging in some form or another is something that has been teasing at me for more than a year, but I have not been able to find a solution that is easy and portable enough to make it a winner. Qik had an initial attraction, but I do not own a Nokia phone, so it will not work for me. I can not even sign up for an account with Qik without the right phone. uStream has some interesting potential, but again I can not easily upload things from my Treo. I love what ustream is doing with the broadcast of longer events, of bringing events that would have been otherwise unavailable to the masses live across the web. I have watched LOTS of events on uStream, and participate in live chat.. but I have not used it for broadcasting yet. Both of these missed the boat for cases where I want to share something, but have no connectivity at the moment I am recording ( often the case inside a school building, for example)

Kyte looked like it was going to be a lot of fun, but I had to be at the computer to upload and make channels. But now I have 12 seconds. The thing I am most intrigued about with 12 seconds is that I can take video I recorded on my treo and email it in as an attachment, and it is auto shared. I can think of all kinds of potential for this one... vacation video sharing (our family vacation starts this Saturday), event clips (Gencon is around the corner), party bits and clips... all kinds of scrapbook type sharing on top of the daily conversation and discussion that people may be doing. Since my Video Camera and my Treo both use SD cards, it even means I can record with my digital video cam and then email from the treo later. My mind is starting to get a bit excited on this one-- who said my Treo is extinct and I need to move on?

Looks like for the next month I am going to be hammering this service hard, please check it out, comment, give feedback and let me know if it works for you. I will do more reviews here as the month progresses. As a bonus, I also have a few invitations left, so if you are interested in trying out 12 seconds yourself comment here and let me know.