Category Archives: Web/Tech

This blog and my “internet infrastructure” has had a stellar uptime record the past 6 years but it all came crumbling down Friday morning. Apologies. If you tried sending me an email at [email protected] on Friday or Saturday, I did not receive it, please send again. It’s fixed now.

I learned my lesson: research domain registrars before using them. RegisterFly.com wiped out all my DNS settings (and brought down this blog) and email account for no apparent reason. I soon became one of thousands of people who call the RegisterFly operation fraudulent. After 8.5 hours with non-English speaking offshore tech support people who repeated over and over again “Just wait 24 hours and all will be fixed” I decided to give up and apply the Powell Doctrine of Overwhelming Force to transfer my domain.

It was an immensely complicated and trying process, but suffice to say that within 30 hours I had achieved the impossible: I left RegisterFly, signed on with GoDaddy, and reconfigured my CNAME settings to integrate with this blog.

Bottom line: avoid RegisterFly (or any reseller domain registrar). Back to regularly scheduled programming….

One of the shifts in behavior I think we’ll see over the next few years is a de-emphasis on email in favor of technologies more appropriately suited for collaboration.

Email is a communication medium. Not a collaboration medium.

Email is also best for two-way communications. One-way communications — newsletters, updates, news — is better in RSS than email.

The problem is that many people are in bed with Outlook (or whatever email system they use). So they use a two-way communication medium for everything. This is not efficient over the long run.

If you’re one of those guys who "lives in Outlook / Entourage / Eudora" even when you’re trying to brainstorm, edit documents, or plan an event, it’s time to bite the bullet (ie, the switching costs) and think about what kind of information should flow through an email application versus other applications.

The question is, what are those other applications that should be part of your virtual office infrastructure?

(hat tip to John Kembel for sparking this idea)

Imagine my glee when I entered the HiveLive conference room last week and saw their conference table doubled as a ping pong table. Only in a start-up!

Loyal readers know of my love for ping pong and my constant struggle to find playing opponents (even in China).

Unfortunately, CEO John Kembel (what a smart, great guy) and I weren’t able to play a round since we got so engrossed in the HiveLive work, which is very cool stuff. With the tagline, "Share what you know with who you know" HiveLive is trying to make headway against that vexing problem of information management.

I’m sick of keeping track of my information / knowledge in a million different services and locations (online and offline) and I’d be much happier to "send my stuff to the sky," access it from anywhere, and share it with trusted friends.

If you want an invite to beta test HiveLive, drop me an email.

I’m fascinated by social network theory. It’s fun to map the relationships of individual actors within a broader social web.

While most of us may think of network theory in the context of internet social networks and our own relationship-building efforts (weak ties vs. strong ties, etc), I fondly recall a moment in my high school psychology class where I insanely suggested we map out the cliques in the senior class. A couple minutes later the black girl in the class (who volunteered information about the "minority group") was going at it with the "beautiful blond," one other girl was close to tears, the jocks were all laughing, and soon enough the teacher ended the ill-fated exercise. Ah, high school, our first exposure to social networks, connectors, and orphans.

Anyway, if you want to get an academic introduction to social network theory, check out this free online textbook by a UC Riverside professor. I recommend reading the first chapter to get an overview of how the field operates.

(Hat tip: del.icio.us/chrisyeh)

Stan James, CEO of Lijit, has a nice post up titled The Cocktail Party Effect. He illustrates how the process of listening to only one person at a cocktail party (while your ears hear many other voices) takes form on the internet.

Creating meaning out of the information overload (or many e-cocktail conversations) most of us ingest on a daily basis is one of the central challenges of the web 2.0 world. For more on this, check out Ryan McIntyre on "intelligence amplification".