Month: January 2007

Burning Questions • A 360 Degree View of Audience Engagement

Burning Questions • A 360 Degree View of Audience Engagement

FeedBurner just implemented a big improvement to their already excellent feed management service. I intend to play with this tonight.

“As promised, site statistics are now live. Our architecture conversion work after the BlogBeat acquisition is complete, and our free StandardStats service now enables any of our publishers to track both feed and site audience, all from the comfort of your FeedBurner account. There is a lot to discuss, so this post will cover how to get started, what you get when you activate site statistics, what’s coming next, and our vision for how the pieces all fit together.”

SanDisk rolls out flash hard drives for laptops | CNET News.com

SanDisk rolls out flash hard drives for laptops | CNET News.com

I think this is important. A solidstate, diskless hard drive, with faster data access and near to no crash risk. I’d buy one.

“SanDisk on Thursday released a 32GB drive for commercial notebooks that stores information on flash memory chips rather than the magnetic platters that make up a traditional hard drive. The drive is available only to manufacturers, and the company declined to give out pricing or identify any notebook makers that will adopt it, but SanDisk said notebooks sporting the drive could come out in the first half of 2007.”

What I’m Reading — Beowulf

Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, landed under the Christmas Tree (which has been stripped and now lies in the burn pile behind the tin shed), courtesy of my mother-in-law who has excellent taste in literature.

Everyone knows the story. Warrior Beowulf comes to the aid of the Danes who have been getting raided by a nocturnal monster that invades their gilded mead hall and eats everyone up. Beowulf steps off his longboat, tells the Danes to chill, settles down with his men, the Geats, and awaits the evil beast. Beast arrives, chows down on one of Beowulf’s Geats, Beowulf wrestles the beast, one Grendel, and manages to rip its arm out of its socket.

Grendel limps off, to die in the swamps, and the Danes party down and give Beowulf his due and lots of bling. Ah, but Grendel’s mom isn’t pleased with the affair, so she pays a visit and kicks some more butt, taking off with Grendel’s amputated claw and depriving the Danes of their trophy.  Beowulf shrugs it off, puts on his chain mail and helmet, tracks mom down in the bogs, slays a nasty bog monster in a pool of water, and dives into that same pool to sink down and have it out with mother.

Mom dies, loses her head, the blood corrodes the blade, and Beowulf pops back for more a party with the Danes who tell him he ought to be the king of the Geats.

 

But wait, there’s more ….

Heaney pulls off a magnificent translation — his introduction is worth reading on its own for its discussion of language and the role the legendary story played in the development of Nordic and ultimately Anglo-Saxon literature. This is a creepy campfire story the told around the peat fire to freak out the kids — a Dark Ages version of Three-Fingered Willy — and is well worth a good read. It’s not every day one of the touchstones of modern literature gets translated by a Nobel Prize winner in Literature, so go to it and really bum out your seatmate who is reduced to reading the SkyMall catalogue. If you want to know where Tolkien got his inspiration (Tolkien was the critic who “discovered” Beowulf) then this is the source.

Counting the real ‘Second Life’ population | CNET News.com

Counting the real ‘Second Life’ population | CNET News.com

Daniel Terdiman, CNET’s Second Life reporter, covers Clay Shirky’s campaign to clarify Second Life’s dubious traffic numbers — number in two in my list of reasons why I won’t be building an island there anytime soon. Terdiman gets a thumbs up for some objective reporting — he was one of the reporters called out for misreporting the “resident” number reported by 2L. The NYT went off the deep end earlier this week, but I’m too lazy to site the sloppy reporting.

David Kirkpatrick at Fortune also took time to explain himself under the Shirky critique, conceding “The product is unusable by most casual users.”
From CNET:

“We’re being asked to believe that this is the future of the Internet,” said Clay Shirky, a writer and professor at New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, referring to the grandiose hype surrounding Second Life and its cultural significance.”If you’re being told that something is the future of the Internet and the arguments are based on the incredible popularity, the first thing you want to understand is how popular it is,” Shirky added.

As of Wednesday, Linden Lab reported that there were 2,325,015 “residents” of Second Life. The company defines each of those as representing “a uniquely named avatar with the right to log in to Second Life, trade currency and visit the community pages.”

Here’s the problem: that total does not equate to what is commonly considered by most Web or online businesses as “active users,” in large part because many people who sign up for Second Life try it once and never come back, and because individuals can have as many as five different avatars, each of which would count as a “resident.”

Flightpath sleeping

There is nothing like a hotel room on the fourth floor of a four story hotel about 1/4 miles from the end of a runway. We’re talking right on the flightpath.

Every inbound jet sounds like impending doom, sailing in about six feet over the roof. Good fun until 12:00 am when things start to settle down and I can get to sleep.

O’Reilly Radar > Celebrity CIO evaluates alternatives to Windows

O’Reilly Radar > Celebrity CIO evaluates alternatives to Windows

at Harvard Medical School wants to run OSX on a Dell, but since that isn’t going to happen:

“(He says that SUSE on the Lenovo T60 may be the answer, since it will be the first commercial laptop with Linux configured and supported by the manufacturer.)”

The new office is sweet

My first corner office. Whoopee. Very modern, very slick. Nice Avaya VOIP phone with bluetooth. Actually excited to be in RTP for the first time in a while. Now, for some reason I am stranded a few floors from my team (who have yet to move in) and am surrounded by the Procurement Department.

The thing has me most excited? I can, for the first time, actually send pop3 mail from my david@churbuck.com account. In the old digs outgoing SMTP was blocked and I had to wait until the evening to reply to personal mail.

Of small things massive victories are made.

This office has great energy. The former, temporary home had a cold war feeling to it. Very IBMish with conference rooms that were numbered — B1243 — not named.

Trying out the new Word 2007

Testing the new Word’s blog capability. Very different U/I but I was happy to see a publish to blog function. It also allows the post to be categorized, either by adding a new category or by determining existing ones.

This could be the major answer to offline blogging for me. Way to go Microsoft.

Whereabouts 1.2-1.7

1.2 – Doctor and Lawyer, daughter to school, Jet Blue to North Carolina

1.3 – move into new office near the airport in RTP in the town of Morrisville. This is a big milestone for Lenovo to move out of former IBM offices to our own new edifice.

1.3.-1.5: internal marketing workshops — full day affairs

1.5 -fly back to Boston

1.6-1.7 – Cotuit to de-Christmas the house.