First U.S. Rehab Center for
Internet Addiction
Opens Its Doors.

Excellent post and the video that inspired it.  How much time have you spent on the internet?  Probably too much.  See the list of 10 signs of addiction–you might be surprised at how many you can answer yes to.

The young man featured in the CNN video on the Mashable page was pretty matter-of-fact about his issue.  It was a somber sight though, this young man with such talent–it appears that he’s getting back to what he loved in “real life”.

It reminds me that there’s other important stuff off of this grid.  Much of my work is on computer and on line, so it’s difficult to flat out break away sometimes.  All the more harder to do so anyway.  Hard or not, it’s necessary.  At issue is balance.  You do the work here that’s needed.  The internet has sucked so much attention away from television and more traditional media outlets, but big media’s getting into the fray to provide more content here.  So it’s more tempting to stick around and find the gossip, the tv shows, the sensationalism.

Recovery starts when you know you need it.  Sometimes others let you know.  Regardless of how you found out, take the path.  Prioritize and establish–or re-establish–that balance.

GReactions

I am going through the motions with gReactions right now.  Put it on FireFox 3.5.2, MBP OS x.

The install was smooth.  Mozilla provided precautionary words before download.  Did due diligence.   I do not see any customization capability yet.  That would be nice.  The font is so small it’s just about impossible to read.  Getting a size option on that would be welcome, or at least a bit larger font.  The timeliness of the responses, the dialogue, appears to be instantaneous–the scraping process would be a hoot to check out.  I’m going to get to know that a bit better.

Tracking the sources of the comments is klugy.  These days as well, it seems difficult to find the real source of items–you might need to navigate through a couple of third party syndications before you get to the original post/reaction.  A very high order would be real time refreshing, i.e., a FriendFeed within the results.  I didn’t see how that could be done here–a refresh within Google Reader would either make the item you’re looking at disappear, and or the entire feed would refresh to the most recent item.  The topic gets drowned in all the updated content.

You can filter the responses by the syndication source, this is a useful feature.

Overall it’s a great.  Hey, it’s viewed as Alpha, version 0.1.c.  I’m keeping it in GR.  Can’t wait to see and install updates.

Real time web blowing my mind.  I wonder what the world will be like after this.  It’s already after this, and another million pages and entries and blog posts and tweets and retweets have been created.  I’m not offering hard numbers here, just a personal reaction as a tail end baby boomer who was born way before the information age barely kicked in (or at least the mainstreaming of it).

We are getting it all as it happens–but what are we getting?  Once again, and most importantly, we have to look at a trust issue.  In what comes across our radar, our content, interest, what do we act upon?  Do we consider our sources?  How and where do we filter the data?  Can we really call it information yet?  Assertions are made, but for the most part, they’re fields in RSS streams.  The have not been assessed, we don’t know their true value yet.  Caveat emptor and good luck sorting through it.

One of my reasons to hang with iGoogle — the Motivational Quotes gadget.  And this just popped in from Jim Henson:

“When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope still is to leave the world a little bit better for my having been here. It’s a wonderful life and I love it.”

The gadget stays at the top left, and this is one of the great reasons why.  I’d love to share the gadget more easily.  Hopefully that will improve.  And with words like Henson’s, we need more of this sharing, big time.

Site Comparison of google.com (rank #1), facebook.com (#3) | Compete.

Methinks it’s a comin’. The FriendFeed grab, with ex-googlers, imho could make the difference. Synergies abound. Having just taken a look at the new *promoted*  igoogle social gadgets offerings–which didn’t seem friendly at all to me , I see Facebook gaining further ground.  I’ll keep trying these igoogle gadgets I suppose, but it’s not a warm and fuzzy to me.  I’ve always felt a blockage of some sort in the flow of things.  However, the interface is so awesome I’ll continue to visit often.

However busy and dictated Facebook seems, it’s engaging and exciting. There’s something for everyone in there. And although at the moment you can’t seem to quite skin it the way you want, if you go in and focus on what you’re in there for, you can get it done.    Facebook killed it.  I mean killed it in a killer way.   And overall, for such a universe of applications it’s organized superbly.  I just checked out the Facebook search capability through a Robert Scoble/Jesse Stay rebleet of this from Gary Vaynerchuk , and it looked pretty darned promising.

The web is social, search is becoming social, this whole web is a dialogue.  I think everyone’s got the memo, but I’m not sure who’s taking the best action right now.  Well, I think Facebook’s got it.  Facebook stands as the grandest UI in the middle of ‘em all.  It’s got advertising but thus far the advertising is not obnoxious.  It calls attention to itself but doesn’t force you to leave.  It’s relatively easy to use.  Developers are all over it.  It’s only going to become a fiercer competitor–in search, in social media, in syndication, in content, in overall 21st century bad-assedness.

Oh, did I forget yahoo?  MS?  Oh, sorry. : )  Maybe in a later post, tweet, rant, song, or mashup.  The web’s an app, and it’s got a few users here and there.  Maybe it’ll catch on.

Why iGoogle’s ‘Social Gadgets’ Should Kill Facebook — Datamation.com.

Mike Elgan writes:

iGoogle as a social networking site sits directly between MySpace and Facebook in the area of customizability. It’s more customizable than stodgy, boring Facebook, but less customizable than garish, horrid MySpace.

Strong words, yes.  I somewhat agree with them. I haven’t seen iGoogle yet as social media, more personal homepage. But a clear transformation has been happening; I for one am excited about it.

We have application classes to work with–and understanding them is going to be of assistance in our attempt to accomplish things at any given time.  I’ve noticed more noise in regard to this.  It’s a great question to ask.  Social Networking, Social Media, Personal Home Page, News Reader, Portal, and so on.   At this point, out of all sites and all application types, my home is Google Reader.  I’ve got my sources and I’ve categorized them into groups.  No fuss, no gimmicks.  Just stories and opinions.  This is where morning coffee happens.  Information as far as I see it.  And I chose it over iGoogle–but I’m at iGoogle before long.  I’ve got a Google Reader widget in iGoogle (as well as a twitter gadget and a weather gadget and 20 other of those 60,000), but the widget in too clunky in iGoogle to really get a grip on it.   So I’ll get over to it in a tabbed window and switch around a bit.

We’ll see how iGoogle transforms. It seems with widgets these days, an introvert’s index.html could turn into a social networking site.  Cut and paste some code.  Get some FaceBook connect implementation happening and then promote it.

I’ll be checking out those new igoogle gadgets for sure. I have been an iGoogle user for quite a while now and have preferred iGoogle over FaceBook and MySpace. With the $ at stake, changes are going to be taking place in nanoseconds.  Oh yeah, and good luck killing FaceBook.

A hearty thank you to the inventive, brilliant Dave Winer. His suggestion to do a #blogpostfriday versus a #followfriday is most welcome, and I’m going to follow this new tradition. We have become so used to the short form. 140 characters can convey a good deal, no doubt–especially with hyperlinks. But there must be a place for more thorough thought than this.

It seems that in this day and age we are conditioned to follow.  It’s a snap to follow by clicking and supplying a few grunts and mindless reactions of acceptance, conformity, and compliance.  Will we go beyond that?  We certainly have.  I have been a writer for many years and for many reasons I see it is imperative to continue to put words down at length.  Paper, screen, anyplace–keeping the hands moving, keeping the connection with what goes through my mind, hopefully keeping this brain healthy.

Every Friday,
rain or shine!.

We are focused on those clicks, on catching the latest fad, the latest gadget, the snappiest way to snap our fingers on our MacBooks, Toshibas, iPhones, G1’s, Wings, and other “miracle machines”. We forget about taking the time to think things through, to savor ideas, maybe outline and plan a little bit. We need vehicles to carry our thoughts–so we can save them for ourselves or convey them clearly to others. To have a meaningful exchange.

Dave’s name has appeared quite a bit in my FriendFeed, through his direct posts or through the admiring words of others.  To find out that he was a pioneer of the RSS protocol and more, and he is still continuing to work on ways to enhance these open technologies–these are  noteworthy accomplishments indeed.  How small do you feel when you stand beside the ocean?  How small do you feel when you stand beside one of the inventors of it?!  This is the man PC World calls “The father of modern-day content distribution.”. So when he speaks about blogging, I would be inclined to listen.

This whole world seems ADD’d out to the max.  Focus seems next to impossible in this uber-rapid information age.  I fight for it every moment, for my clients, for my friends, for my wife, for myself.  Let’s say there’s room for improvement.  How about for you?  Are you ready to cast that first stone?

What are we sculpting?  What are we planning?  Is there structure to it, or is it a formless ramble?  I for one see value in randomness, in quick shots, thoughts in spurts–but settling back and really saying something.  That’s what I want to be about.  I want to think.  Complexities abound; shouting as well.  Extended words, built sensibly, with balance, solid construction, direction and detail.  That’s my goal.  At least now and then.

Imagine folks taking time to assemble their thoughts, their responses to events, to stimuli–careful, considered responses.  How much would be different!  The moments to be still and get to know a subject a little bit, to live with the words, chew on them–there’s a novel way to approach the day.  A novel way to approach a Friday–a #blogpostfriday!

Write on.

Dare I hit the download button?  What will happen to these API’s?  Think they’ll be around in a few weeks?  It certainly would be something to see what’s encapsulated there in the cloud.

Anybody out there working heavily on these?  What platform are you using?  PHP?  Java?  What kind of results are you getting?  Any mashups, samples?

I’m inclined to create a sort of nostalgia-laden gadget, who knows, associating football scores with tweets about ObamaCare.  What would the result look like? I’d love to hear from some of the experienced on this one.

Twitter’s a Mess: First the DDOS, Now Koobface Returns.

I haven’t laid too heavy on the tweeting.  It is a challenge to get beyond microblogging.  At least it’s challenging for me, so I’m looking into “longer forms”. <g>

Regarding Koobface:  with this and other worms, a buyer beware should ring from every email received.  We click without thinking–I know this from experience.  One thing that Outlook has is a review of the URL–in emails Outlook will highlight the email if the href is different than the text which is enclosed by the <a> tag.  I’m not sure about the proliferation of these shortened url’s–I’ve seen various scripts to show the fully resolved url, but I click through these links.

What is certain is that miscreants would love to bury the big tweety bird!

One can look at the world pre- or post- google.  Maybe you wouldn’t necessarily want to do that, but you still could.  I know for sure it has made research a lot easier, and it has saved my tail more than once.  I for one do not have such an encyclopedic mind as to immediately know exactly what to do when some obscure error comes up in html, xml, visual basic, or any other app–or for that matter, any other matter of life!

In short, google has exceled.  Sure other search engines have been existent for a longer period of time, but none has been so simple and elegant as the king of white background and understatement.

This same less is more philosophy seems to have come to Google Chrome, the company’s new internet browser.  This morning I finally decided to take the plunge.  Just about the first thing I did when I installed was to make Chrome the default browser.  What came over me?  I haven’t seen the reviews, but here are my impressions:

• Would love to see toolbars/plugins – being a firefox/ie user for a good number of years, i miss the plugins such as Web Developer, Compete stats, blinklist, and more.  The developer community certainly has had a great deal of time with these other browsers vs. chrome, but they’d still be nice to see out of the box.  I’m sure the volume of plugins will mushroom in the coming months.
• Open source code – solid, great to see this, it should ease plugin development!  And yes, should I care to do some spare bathroom reading, it would be nice to print out a section or two.
• Memory footprint – Chrome does well here.  Less than 50% of my firefox memory usage–but with Chrome at no plugins, this is a big advantage.
• Ease of installation – There was no issue here, it downloaded quickly even on a (gasp) gprs connection to my laptop.  Not necessarily a distinguishing factor, but it’s nice to have.
• GUI Impressions:  Lives up to simple and elegant.  Here’s where an absence of toolbars is of benefit.  Chrome just lets you get to your web pages.  There’s solid storage/thumbnails of visited sites, as well as integration with your google account.  Big convenience here, but I have not necessarily been big on storing my browsing history on my google account.
• Performance – no true technical benchmarking here, just impressions, which are that this is average, and a page or two typically working perfectly in other browsers crash in Chrome.

__________

I see Chrome as a 3 out of 5 for the moment.  It’s no longer the default browser (that lasted about 5 minutes).  I might use it as an outlyer for now, to see if pages rendering well elsewhere will work well here.

Of course, Google overall as always blows me away with innovation, convenience, pertinent results, endless capabilities.