The TeleInterActive Lifestyle

Another instance of not being able to leave a comment at a WordPress powered blog happened today. I tried to leave the following...

The primary reason that I click through to the web site from a feed, is to read comments or leave one... As now. Full articles are much more likely to draw me into the conversation.

I generally don't subscribe to partial feeds.

BTW, feeds can contain enclosures. That being said, the day an article opens in my feed reader [RSSowl] and automatically launches some flash spam with sound at full blast, will be the day that I'll have a new reason to unsubscribe from that commercialized feed.

... to The RSS dilemma by Matt Marshall in Venture Beat.

After submitting my comment, this URL appears: http://venturebeat.com/2007/04/19/the-rss-dilemma/#comment-49841, but no comment does.

This is getting frustrating.

From our own experience with a Squidoo Lens, we can agree with Seth Godin's recent advice to very small businesses, that a lens can drive traffic to your blog. Our Open Source Business Intelligence lens is #8 in Computers with an overall LensRank of #159. Our lens and blog are now on the first or second page of results from a Google search for Open Source BI or Open Source Business Intelligence. We've been as high as #2 overall. We think this is pretty amazing for an enterprise focus lens of such arcane interest competing against lenses on MySpace themes and designer laptop bags. Our OSS blog gets upwards of 300 hits per month from the lens.

So, I agree with Seth on the value of third-party, high SEO value sites like Squidoo and Flickr. I also have a great deal of respect for TypePad and Six Apart. However, I think that branding through your own domain is very important. I don't think that myDomain.typead.com or myDomain.blogspot.com is as powerful nor as useful as blog.myDomain.com. Most hosting companies, such as our own, where your current web site and email get provisioned now, likely have some open source blog engines like b2evolution and WordPress available. There are many themes under creative commons licenses or freely available for use with these blog engines. Another consideration is whether or not you, the very small are going to do what you're told and blog frequently enough not to look abandoned. After all, as the Nox say, the very young do not always do as they're told. And the very small business owner may be too busy to blog even monthly or weekly, let alone several times per day. So, first consider if blogging is right for you, or if a content management system (CMS), that allows you to easily update your web site with news about your business and articles or reports of interest to your customers, or forums that can serve as a community site for your current and potential customers may be more important for you. Both content management systems such as Joomla! and forums are as easy to update as blogs.

Blogging allows you to speak as if from a podium, add comments and you're a speaker taking questions from the audience, allow trackbacks are you've created a type of panel discussion. Wikis allow you to author or community author a book or magazine. CMS allows you to provide fresh information to your audience. Forums, where registered users can also post, allow the most free-form type of discussion. So, first decide what you need, alone or with an adviser, and then decide if you'll do as you're told.

/dev/null on a *nix computer is the bit bucket, the place where things go to disappear, the black hole of the computing universe. It appears that any comments that I try to write recently just disappear. This is mostly happening with Wordpress and TypePad powered blogs, either on wordpress.com or self-hosted using the open source Wordpress blog engine. With the help of Nicholas Goodman and Gianugo Rabellino, I know that the comments are NOT going into the Akismet queue of comment spam on their sites, and Gianugo even reposted the comment that I sent to him in email "pretending" to be me by putting my name, email and URL in the appropriate fields - it went through just fine. I've even tried leaving the comment with Camino and Safari, as well as the Firefox that I normally use on my MacBookPro. I should have mentioned that Wordpress gave me an error message saying that I had left that comment already when I tried to leave the same comment with Camino after trying with Firefox. I don't think it's a cookie thing; it doesn't seem to be browser related; nor do I seem to be marked as spamming. The only other thing that I can think of is that it is somehow related to my IP address. I'll try commenting from my "south bay office". Any one with any ideas... please HELP.

Update 20070415;13h12: It seems trackbacks won't go through either, as my attempt to communicate with the BI Team blog shows.

Update 20070418;15h45: I should mention that I've had this problem in the past with TypePad blogs, such as Shel Israel's, and today with Seth Godin's.

We're constantly recreating our 6D™ project management methodology. It started with combining Clarise's software development and project management experience with my aerospace system engineering and program management experience to adopt strict project controls to modern business needs for responsive software development and system integration processes working through distributed personnel. Well, here's a quick thought... software development and deployment should move away from traditional release cycle concepts to one of continuous process/code improvement within SaaS and virtual appliance environments. No code is alpha nor beta nor production, but a continuum of changes and adaptations responding to fluctuating business needs; done within a well managed environment to prevent security errors, poor performance, "garbage out" and junk code. So as we're assuring that our 6D™ [six dimensions of a project] is in accord with the PMBoK, we'll be keeping this thought in mind as well, and let's think beyond Extreme and Agile programming and continuous process improvement for software quality.

Powercast, which first came out of the closet at CES in January of this year, winning best Emerging Technology for 2007, has been getting some press this weekend [Engadget, CNN Money Business2.0, Ben Metcalfe - no not April's Fool].

While Philips was the first partner announced, the Business2.0 article states that over 100 companies have now signed-up. I'm hoping that one of these will come out with a cigarette lighter Powercast transmitter, filling the company car with energy giving rays of life for our cell phones, Palms and Bluetooth headsets.

Powercast is the first [I think] commercial application of an idea that has been around for a very long time: beaming electrical power over radio waves. While existing in science fiction and comic books for as long as I can remember, the problem of efficiency and loss has prevented a practical product until now. Powercast technology uses a transmitter, small enough to be plugged in just about anywhere, and a very small, relatively inexpensive receiver suitable for wireless sensors, mobile devices, cell phones and computer peripherals, with the result being the transmission of 6 VDC over about 1 meter between transmitter and receiver, automatically "trickle charging" the device whenever it is in range. Using very low power [wattage] making the FCC happy, the receiver regulates the input, providing a constant voltage as required by the device. This would be much more convenient than inductive rechargers, such as from SpashPower or the eCoupled technology, which haven't seen much uptake as yet by the device industry. With the inductive charging technology, also around since before the turn of the century before last, you must place the device to be charged within the magnetic field of the charger - perhaps a few millimeters, essentially touching, hence the SpashPad. With Powercast, you only need to be within one meter, and you can keep using the device whatever device is being charged.

While Powercast isn't the dream of having your smart phone powered by the cell tower, it will

• help road warriors trim down the number of power converters they need to carry about
• encourage the use of both Bluetooth and may even help bring actual UWB and Zigbee devices to market
• make life easier for medical implant users
• help us aging, forgetful types
• eliminate that old excuse "I can't talk right now, my battery is dying"

One question that must always be asked is what health risks may be posed by such a device. Powercast has a series of FAQs available as PDFs, including one on health and safety. Be warned though, that after asking the standard identifying questions of name, email, company, phone number, and address, you are not brought to a download site; rather, the PDFs are emailed to you. Somewhat annoying [I hate the practice of forcing email to do file transfer], but it does force one to provide a valid email address if you want to get the information. While I can understand the desire of a company to understand who is gathering information on them, this seems to fly in the face of current open marketing practices. For example, there isn't a link to their corporate blog.

OK, rant over, back to health issues. According to their FAQ, which while somewhat generic, discussing RF hazards as a class, seems reasonable. Powercast uses RF and is no more dangerous than any other RF device, such as TV, radio, Bluetooth, etc. Their range of commercial devices seem to put out 0.5 watts for a USB transmitter, up to 2 watts for an unspecified application. Powercast claims that most devices are well below that 2 watt max, which is half of the 4 watts produced by a CB radio and on par with devices such as cordless phones and walkie-talkies. I guess this means that the tumor I'm [not] likely to get behind my ear from my Bluetooth headset will just a grow a wee bit faster.

While no longer being frustrated by my Bluetooth mouse or cell phone dying at the worst possible moment would be great, I imagine that the real future for this technology will be empowering the ever increasing flow of data from wireless sensor networks, from active RFID and Zigbee to smartDust.

My take is that Powercast will be helping us live the TeleInterActive Lifestyle™ to its fullest, and fueling our data management consultancy as those terabytes become petabytes and the Googolplex of data being generated needs analyzing [no, not Googleplex, but almost].