Elroy Jetson

Facebook Needs to Contextualize

Twitter is the buzz of the town. It would be hard for someone not to have heard of Twitter unless they live under a rock. The stunning Twitter growth has Facebook clearly worried.

This competition has been a good thing for consumers. It has pushed Facebook to open up more and open up faster. Facebook released its “Open Stream API” yesterday which basically allows developers to generate applications the way developers have for Twitter. The first such application is already on the street. It is an Adobe AIR application that works much like Tweetdeck without some of the bells and whistles.

It’s great to see Facebook competing with Twitter, but if Facebook really wants to win then they need to differentiate themselves. The way to differentiate themselves is by contextualization.

I have mentioned this in the past, but it’s important enough to bring up again. A person lives in many contexts. Most people have a work context, a family context, a friend context etc. My Twitter network is not the same as my Facebook network. Each of these networks are important but I need to keep them separate. My mother doesn’t really care about my interests in technology or sociology. She is more interested in what her grandkids are doing. The people I work with are interested in the technology information but not so interested in what my children are doing at summer camp.

If Facebook, or I suppose Twitter, wants to beat out the competition then contextualizing my relationships and the information that is shared based on that context needs to get figured out.

Can bad U.S. Africa policies get worse?

Four U.S. presidents have had a hand in taking a bad situation in Somalia and figuring out a way of making it worse.

Now Somalia is in the news again, this time a young man (between the age of 15 and 26) who without a doubt was involved in what here in the U.S. would be called a reprehensible act or, viewed from an African perspective, could be seen as an act of trying to make lemonade from lemons. This Somali young man faces life in prison.

Now someone clear this up for me. We are going to apply U.S. law and U.S. culture and morality along with it, to sentence a young adult for a crime that was largely the fault of failed U.S. African policy. Somehow this is justice?

I wonder if we could at least only select jurors that could point out Somalia on a map.

Tip #3 Greasemonkey

While we won’t cover any scripts in this tip, it’s important that you install the FireFox addon Greasemonkey. Greasemonkey is an addon that allows you to install small scripts that can run against designated web sites allowing you to manipulate their behavior. A large number of scripts have already been written and if you are a javascript wiz then you could even write your own. In later tips I will tell you about a few really useful scripts to modify the way GMail works. So for now take a look at the userscripts repository to get an idea of what is out there and install the addon.

• Tip #1 - Working Effectively in the Digital Age
• Tip #2 Google And the Toolbar

Tip #2 Google And the Toolbar

At this point I assume you have read Tip# 1 and have Firefox installed and are now ready to surf the web. This next tip is going to save you a ton of time just getting to things, but first lets discuss the elephant in the room Google.

Google started out as a search engine but has grown to be so much more than that now. Google has a wide toolset that gives you the ability to utilize data, both your own and data from around the Internet, in very effective ways.

Let me caveat this with my standard disclaimer all of the tips I will present can likely be accomplished in many ways utilizing any number of search engines. I just happen to find that Google has the most complete set of tools.

Just like Firefox is the base for all of our Internet tools, Google Toolbar is the base for all of the productivity tools. From the toolbar you can execute searches, your searches will be saved so you can recall them later. You can add some Toolbar Gadgets and enhance your experience even further. A few Gadgets I recommend are GMail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Reader.

The other thing that the Google Toolbar does is allows you to change some of the default browser behavior so that it interacts with Google applications instead of the pre-installed defaults. For instance you can set it up so that when you want to email a page you can do it through your GMail account or when you subscribe to an RSS feed it will send it to your Google Reader account. More information on how to use and customize your toolbar can be found at Google Toolbar Help.

The important point is to simplify and leverage existing tools to make your life easier and be more productive.

Previous Tips

• Tip #1 - Working Effectively in the Digital Age

Working Effectively in the Digital Age

Have you ever got out of bed dreading the 500 emails that are awaiting you in your inbox? Ever wonder how some people always seem on top of the latest information in your field with little to no effort? Of course you have and this problem is only getting worse as we plunge further into the digital age.

We are expected to process more information, faster, with the ability to recall any detail from any time in the past more than ever before. Luckily, all the tools required to do this effectively exist for us today. All that is required is an understanding of how to assemble these tools together and use them effectively.

Over the next several weeks I will provide you with tips on how to enhance your ability to process information, increase the volume of information that you can process and how to effectively utilize the tools that exist today to do if all.

Finally, and most importantly, all of the tools and tips I will introduce you to are free.

Tip # 1

You have to start somewhere so the best place to start is with a good foundation and ours will be the web browser.

In the current climate the most fundamental tool is the browser. We won’t get caught up in the browser war debates and all of the tips that I will provide could be managed in almost any browser, but I have decided to provide these tips in the easiest way so that means Mozilla’s Firefox.

I chose Firefox for one simple reason – addons. Addons are programs designed to enhance the way the browser works. Understand this – Firefox isn’t the fastest browser available nor does it support W3C standards the best, but it does an adequate job for our needs. What it does do better than any other browser is allow you to simply and easily install and manage addons. We will be using a number of addons in future tips.

So for today’s tip, and this is essential for future tips, download and install Firefox. Don’t forget to set Firefox as your default browser. Yes I understand this is scary, but live on the edge. You experience moving forward will be much more enjoyable.

As an aside I will share that I use Apple’s web browser Safari. Versions of Safari exist for both the PC and the mac and most of these tips can work there also. I use it for the pure speed of the browser. You may use something different. If you do, more power to you and I think with a little effort all of these tips could be managed in any browser.

Is the financial crisis real?

Is the current global financial crisis real or has instant access to information just have us thinking like adolescents?

Listening to the pundits on talk about “toxic assets” this morning on the way to work got me thinking that the current recession is more likely a function of how we process and respond to information in the digital age.

Information is blasted at us like a shotgun blast and it usually is incomplete or only loosely researched, much like this blog post. It is more like stream of consciousness then real information. Society expects people to rapidly respond to nuggets in this stream without any real reflection on the information. The information cycle is like a snowball effect - bad news becomes increasingly worse.

Why doesn’t good news follow this same pattern? My hypothesis is based on Neil Postmans work in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Simply put we act on the bad news because we are attempting to find a way to give it meaning in the context of our lives. We do not act on the good news because there never was any application or impact in the context of our lives in the information.

End of unstructured thought for the day.

Digital Natives - Challenging the Popular View

Relative Poverty

A better title might be should poverty be relative to the cost of living?

Poverty is something that is often overlooked in today’s age of the “Haves” and the “Have Mores” as  Dalton Conely would call them.  But the startling fact is that 58.5% of Americans will spend time in poverty at sometime in their lives.

CNN highlighted an remote Alaskan community that is living in obvious poverty, yet they are unable to get any assistance from the government due to the average income in the community was to high, $26,500.  This figure is fairly arbitrary as it covers all of Alaska which has a varied cost of living.

The “Have Mores” would consider people living below the poverty level as lazy and unwilling to work, not taking into account the fact that their wealth is derived from the availability of low wage earners that poverty produces.

The “Haves” are too busy trying to catch up with the “Have Mores” to worry about poverty, yet they are the ones that have such a high chance of ending up in poverty when their race to catch the “Have Mores” fails.

This is certainly an area we do not devote enough resources.

When the Safety Net is Broken

The New York Times is reporting today that the number of recipients is at a 40 year low despite high unemployment.  They report that Michigan, where unemployment far surpasses the national average, is having a 13 percent drop in their welfare rolls.  This begs the question, how are these people surviving?

One of the possibilities raised in the article is that the recession simply hasn’t hit low-skilled jobs that poor people typically take.  How does this change the cycle of poverty if true?

The article goes on to point out that, while the nation wide welfare rolls went up a fraction of one percent, the food stamp program is up twelve percent.  This is an alarming differential.

States are currently running large deficits.  Since they bear the burden of cash welfare programs none seems eager to expand the program or relax time limits and job requirments that were impossed during the boom economy of the Clinton years.

So the question remains, how are the poor getting by in this economy?

My Bookshelf

In honor of the rumored Kindle 2 from Amazon, here is my bookshelf.