Social Media Revolution
http://youtube.com/v/sIFYPQjYhv8
Bringing this to Beijing with me next week
I have a new office, and boy is it nice.
Next Sunday through Thursday — Oct. 25-29 Lenovo Headquarters in North Carolina
Following week – Nov 1-5 will be in Beijing
So why the silence? Six weeks have transpired since the vitrectomy to reattach my left retina and I have been a little depressed and too challenged vision-wise to do much writing. No gory details — but here’s the state of affairs today:
1. I have double vision. There is a second version of everything pointing down and to the right of the real thing.
2. I have some problems reading as the day goes by and my eye gets tired
3. Due to scar tissue my affected eye has a “pinch” effect where everything is pulled together in the middle of my field of vision. This causes words on a page or screen to compress together into a solid “slug”
How do I cope?
1. Big fonts. I’ve cranked up my screen fonts.
2. Kindle — the font sizer on the Kindle is a great thing for bad eyesight
3. New glasses. I am being fitted with my first spectacles in six years with a prismatic correction to solve the double-vision
4. Eye patch to cut down the confusion.
Prognosis: very good. I have vision where I had none before and I could be looking at a six month wait before things really settle down.
Cotuit – Monday and Tuesday
Boston – Wednesday
Cotuit – Thursday
Friday – personal day to pull boat for the winter
Head of the Charles weekend coming up — no rowing for me this year
Sorry to turn into a Lenovo-shill, but hey, if Walt Mossberg acknowledges that Win 7 on a Lenovo restarts faster than a Mac — well I’m just saying ……
“Speed: In my tests, on every machine, Windows 7 ran swiftly and with far fewer of the delays typical in running Vista. All the laptops I tested resumed from sleep quickly and properly, unlike in Vista. Start-up and restart times were also improved. I chose six Windows 7 laptops from different makers to compare with a new MacBook Pro laptop. The Mac still started and restarted faster than most of the Windows 7 PCs. But the speed gap has narrowed considerably, and one of the Lenovos beat the Mac in restart time.”
Waiting for a flight home to Boston, I lit up my wireless connection and tuned into MLB.com’s post season baseball feed. Having paid for two years in a row for a fairly weak service full of irrational blackouts and lots of calls to MLB.com’s customer service line to get permission to watch the paid stream, I expected to be able to follow TBS’ post season coverage through the MLB.com subscription.
Well, the good news is that I can — through a pretty slick video viewer that permits to select between eight camera angles and stack them together in a single, PIP, split, or two by two configuration. The problem of this “pick your angle” model is there is no editor/producer selecting camera angles and the overall experience is somewhat shitty. I want someone to decide what I need to see and not click like a fiend to get the camera to track a frozen-rope liner out to the 6-4-3 doubleplay.
The Twitter integration … well is interesting in that the peanut gallery is now officially blessed as contributors to the spectacle.
But overall, the most interesting thing about the MLB/TBS “HotCorner” application is checking out the behavior of the camera operators during commercial breaks when they zoom way in and like creeps perv the faces of the VIPs in the expensive seats to see if there are any celebrities worth calling out during the play-by-play. Being the LA Dodgers one would expect some movie star to be fanning themselves with a program. The funny part is it is obvious the way the camera lingers that some producer is scanning faces and telling the cameraman to stick to faces wearing big “Jackie Onassis” sunglasses or who look important by dint of their jawlines and silver hair.
Go Sox.
oh, yeah, Yankee Suck
FTC guidelines have been released on blogola — I’ll digest the FTC regs later today and opine later — this stuff was anticipated all spring and now extends to celeb tweets. I’ll be interested what this does to disclosure statements – our Lenovo Blogger Advisory Council is accepting systems from us for review, but no ownership of those systems, just review units that need to be recovered. Should we push the disclosure to the council members or ask them to publish their own, even if there is no payments, but obviously a material connection. I’ll look it over during the Twins-Tigers game tonight.
From AdAge
The Federal Trade Commission is cracking down on blogger payola.
The agency, which protects consumers from fraud or deceptive business practices, voted 4 to 0 to update its rules governing endorsements, and the new guidelines require bloggers to clearly disclose any “material connection” to an advertiser, including payments for an endorsement or free product.
via FTC Regulates Social-Media Endorsements, Blogger Payola – Advertising Age – Digital.
Raleigh – Tuesday-Thursday
Cape – Friday- Sunday
First trip since Beijing in early August and the affaire d’ retina. Only long term trip is first week of November back to Beijing and perhaps a three-day weekend to Charlottesville to see my daughter at college.
“This is the notepad (the pencil and paper kind) that in the late 80s / early 90s inspired an IBM researcher to name the company’s new mobile computer the ThinkPad. To me, the IBM ThinkPad was the classic laptop computer to have. At least that was the case until I went full time Apple and the Chinese got a hold of the brand. At any rate, it is interesting to see the little promotional give-away that inspired a massive brand.”
Thanks to Simon Anderson for the tip
