Today, as I am sure you have noticed, I'm short on my five blog posts a day by about . . . um, five. That is until now.

I've been down with a bug all day and feeling a little better thanks to a great post from Bruno Giussani on his blog Lunch Over IP. The post is titled, Tips for Conference Bloggers, and includes an incredibly insightful and well designed PDF cheat sheet.

His post from a little over two years ago holds strong today and is resonating with me enough to crank this post out. Timing is important in this case since we are beginning a new conference season with mega events like SXSW on the horizon.

I spent nearly the entire last week at CES and had my pride handed to me by this monster trade show/conference/press extravaganza. I was ill prepared for everything that the event would throw at me and approached it like an average conference. This is a mistake I won't repeat.

What I learned at CES was that there are two types of attendees: those doing business and those covering the event. Those in the first category are more concerned with parties, sales and future business relationships. Those in the latter are analyzing, comparing and framing the event for publication.

Publishing from CES is a formidable process. Most press covering the event have teams of people dedicated to gathering information and creating media needed for a final publications. This is a smart move for an event with over 100k attendees.

In addition to the excellent PDF from Giussani's post that addresses the 95% of the concerns of a blogger in 2010 there is 5% that could be added for the here and now. There are new event realities and technologies that can enhance his original thoughts.

1. MiFi is a must have for connectivity. This is especially important for Giussani's rule of blogging an even no later that 10 minutes after it has ended. Conferences don't as often have wifi available as they did back then except in a few locations like press or blogger lounges.

2. Photo/Video lighting gear. Get used to shooting in dark to minimal light and learning your cameras settings well. Check your first few shots or reel to view the quality and make corrections as needed. Much of this can be enhanced with lighting rigs that will allow you to get the shots you need when they happen . . . not when you are ready for them with white balance or aperture settings.

3. Backup workflow. You have a machine that you love and take every where with you, right? What happens when it goes down? Before the event or during you should have a backup plan for gear failure so that it doesn't destroy your workflow. Blogging an event can be difficult in the first place, but when the workflow you went into the even is disrupted it can be detrimental to timely coverage.

4. Speak to previous attendees of the events you are going to be covering. This falls under the guidelines on page 6 of the PDF of collaboration. However, this is a proactive measure before the conference begins so that you can understand what obstacles you might be up against.

5. When the authors recommend having fun, it shouldn't just be at the end of the day for parties or networking. It should be throughout the day. It is counterproductive to be worried during the day about connectivity, media fails or missed opportunities. If something happens that you're not happy with, put it in the back of your mind or write a note down for it and move on. Dwelling on something that you can't do over is to your detriment and that of your readers ro viewers.

Please head over to Bruno Giussani's blog and download the PDF that he has made available. Even if you're not blogging a conference or trade show, there is great value in these tips for any writer publishing to the web.

Image: Screen shot of the PDF cover (Bruno Giussani).

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How To: Conference Blogging is a post from: TechStartups.com

We've all had to deal with losing our most precious data photos of family, spreadsheets and the 1.5 million images of kitties being cute. I joke, but we have all been there, that moment when you know that your data is gone.

You sit crushed under the weight of the mental notes you are taking about what has been lost. Then you realize that you have a backup maybe. That it might be accessible from another computer maybe.

With a solution offered by Spare Backup there is no maybe. Their software ensures that your data is saved, it's in a format that you can recognize with icons for you applications and it is accessible in more ways than one. More than one? They offer an innovative mobile solution as well as an easily navigated online backup.

My first impressions of the mobile access and online service have been favorable. I have been able to access data backups with ease on mobile. Sure I can't restore my computer from it but without having to wait to get a new one up and running I can look at those cute kitty pictures.

As for internet access, the best feature of Spare Backup's offering isn't really the storage, it is awesome too but plays second fiddle to a masterfully designed user interface for getting to your backup data. The interface is icon driven and succeeds where most consumer backup services fail making the icons useful and descriptive for the kind of files you will find behind them.

Spare Backup offers three levels of service to customers: single pc, family pack to backup five computers to one account and a corporate package. They all offer the standard online backup to the cloud and the ability to burn the data to fixed media like CD/DVD. I'm sure if you are stealthy enough you could use another app to create an .ISO backup and send it over to an external drive.

If you're looking for a new solution for backing up your computer, take a look at Spare Backup. They have a long history of improving their software since going public in 2003. Unlike most startups, if you like the service that Spare Backup provides you can actually buy into the company, as they are publicly traded. Another funding method that we'll address in a future post.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Spare Backup and Spare Yourself Some Pain is a post from: TechStartups.com

This isn't the first time I've noticed things online disappearing over time. My first two years of blogging are gone. Some of that was backed up by the wayback machine.

I've seen other people's blogs, or other online items go away too. Hey, quick, find some of your Tweets from just four months ago. They are all still online, but you probably can't find them. Me neither.

Or, wait until you are hacked and don't have a backup, like happened with me. I love the folks who say you should have backed up. How do you back up everything you do online? You can't. Quick, back up all your Google Docs, your Tweets, your Flickr photos and all the metadata surrounding them (comments, tags, etc), your Facebook items, etc etc. You will die trying.

I know, I've been backing up like a crazy man lately since I got hacked. What's funny is one of my brand new hard drives died. Luckily I had a backup of that. But what if I didn't?

What if my house burned down tonight? I wouldn't be able to save everything. Heck, I'd be worried about getting my family out and screw the hard drives.

So our online lives leak away.

It gets worse after you die.

You think your family will be able to save your Flickr photos? Not if you don't give them your passwords. Here's why: they won't be able to find them.

I let my Flickr Pro account lapse cause I was too lazy to put in a new credit card. I couldn't even find my old photos. Why? Because Flickr's search only shows the last few photos and they turn off the calendar and all sorts of things if you stop paying for the pro account. Yowza.

Reminds me of an interview I had with Jeremy Toeman who built a new company called Legacy Locker. But now we need to put enough cash in there to keep Flickr accounts paid up so my sons will be able to see their photos after I die.

Some best practices I've learned:

1. If you care that it stays around, use services from big companies. Google will probably stick around for a while. Twittergram? Gone.

2. Put your stuff in multiple places. Why? Because maybe Yahoo will decide to turn off the Flickr service in 10 years. So, make sure your photos go to other services.

3. Back up what you can, but that won't help long term. Quick, if your dad handed you a hard drive with 10,000 photos would you be able to find anything on there? What if you got that hard drive in 30 years? Would you be able to even look at what's on it? Remember, when I was in college my entire life was on floppy disks. I can't even read those now.

4. Print out stuff that you really want to save. I still have my trunk of photos from my childhood, but lots of my photos taken digitally over the years are gone or hard to find.

5. Use services like Legacy Locker to ensure that your kids at least will have your passwords and rights to your stuff and accounts.

Any other best practices?

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Average Tech Company Layoffs? 21%
Being native to the tech industry, I'm watching Techcrunch's layoff tracker, which has a roster of 288,153 layoffs since August 08. Let's assume that Techcrunch's data is right, and focus on one of the columns listed on the report shows the percentages of layoffs per company. Being the analyst I am, I did a quick average and found out that most common percentages of layoff is 21%.

21%, this means that if you work at a tech company, and look up and down your aisle, 1/5 people you know, could be packing their boxes.

Hate Your Job? Suck It Up
After speaking with others that were thinking of leaving their jobs before Oct, they are now thinking twice, why? The competition for specific jobs is fierce, and with less compensation, people that have crappy jobs are going to suck it up, despite the fact they have to do more with less.

Got Laid Off? You've A Stigma to Overcome
I speak to a lot of CEOs in my job as an Industry Analyst, and I've been asking them where they would hire top talent from, from the existing workforce (already have a job) or those that got laid off. Each one (over 5) told me that they would still try to poach top talent from existing companies, sadly those that were laid off on first round have a stigma attached to them. In fact, some of you may be over and under qualified, and you should know the dangers and solutions.

For those that were cut in first round, I'm sensitive to your situation, you know I'm doing what I can to help those that got laid off with my survey results of those that were hired since the recession was announced.

Filtering the True Social Media Experts
So what about those that got laid off? friend and former colleague Robert Scoble suggests several tips to those who joined the mobility pool, while many make sense, he suggests that:

This means removing ANYTHING that says you are a social media expert from your Twitter account. There is no such thing and even if there were there's no job in it for you. Chris Brogan already has that job and he's not giving it up.

I disagree and agree, here's why: first of all, recognize there's a few different types of social media experts, those have have done it, and those that say they can.

Within the corporate (client) environment, it's easy to find folks that have done it, in fact, I've created a list of those within companies larger than 1000 employees that are social media strategists, or community managers. I'm a bit behind on updating the list, I'll do it soon, please carefully read the requirements before submitting.

On the vendor or agency side, this is a bit more challenging, as an client, you should ask for at least 3 case studies of success, and gauge if they are walking the talk.

However, it gets more difficult on the consultant side, why? When people get laid off, the first instinct is brand themselves a consultant for hire. As a result, anyone who has been using social media tools for personal use could brand themselves as having social media skills and experiences for corporate yet we know it's often very different.

Now, if you truly are a social media expert, and a consultant, you've likely already a book of business and you're working with clients. Therefore any employer who is seeking to hire you, and sees that you're positioning yourself as a social media consultant without a book of business or client or vendor experience will quickly see through it. That's where Scoble is right.

Key Takeaway: If you are the real deal, tout it. Of course you should highlight what you've done right, but because we're in a community, others will reference you so it may not matter as much.

Update: Dawn Foster has some good points on how to find out who's a real social media consultant.

Talking About It Openly Can Help
Here's a unique approach, my friend Cece Salomon Lee a PR/Marketing/Social Media professional on vendor side recently god laid off, (her husband was laid off the next business day) and she's chronicling her journey on this blog Survival Mode. I worked with her on a client/vendor relationship and am happy to be her reference.

When Layoffs Are A good Thing
Before the recession was announced, I planned a trip to Maui, in fact I just got back last week. What did I notice? Now is a great time to go on a vacation. Flights were $250 round trip from SF to Oahu (ours was only 1/3rd full), and condos were renting at $100 a night. You can go to Costco and buy food on first day, avoid eating out, and rent a car for $25 a day and go to the world's best beaches. So if your job is secure, or you got a nice severance check take that trip you've always wanted to.

Of course, layoffs are good, actually great, but only if you're the CEO of Seagate, who received a $5,000,000.00 severance paycheck, that's a golden parachute inside of a parachute, with a backup parachute on a glider. I counted last night, that means they'd need to sell over 50,000 Seagate Free Agent Drives (less than $100 each) to make up for that compensation not counting his $500 hourly consulting fee. I'll be he's going to Hawaii.

I have a Forrester report coming soon based on the survey results from top brands, whether or not they are going to increase or decrease their social media marketing spend during a recession stay tuned.

Fix Problems by Reinstalling Windows

As a tech blogger, part of my job involves reviewing software which is so interesting but frequent installation (followed by un-installation) of software programs also tend to slow down the computer.

To deal with this problem, I did a clean installation of Windows last weekend and re-installed all the important software programs from scratch. As expected, the boot-up time has reduced and the computer's performance has improved significantly. Luckily, this task is not as complex as it may sound but here are a few things you should remember before taking the plunge:

Pre-Installation Checklist

1. Get Magical Jelly to retrieve a list of product keys that were used to install Windows and Microsoft Office on your computer. Print this information.

2. Get Belarc Advisor to create a detailed report of all software programs, hotfixes and hardware devices available in your system. Print this report as well.

3. Uninstall all software programs that had to be activated at the time of installation (e.g. Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft Office). It's important that you do a proper un-installation of these programs through Add/Remove Programs because simply deleting the folder from Program Files directory will not free up the license on the manufacturer's activation server.

4. Install Driver Max to create a backup of all device drivers currently installed on your system. This will come handy after reinstallation incase you are not able to locate the driver installers on the vendor's website.

5. Create a backup folder on c: (say c:\old_files) and add the following files to this folder

i. Your Outlook pst file that has all the mails, contacts, tasks and other Outlook items.
ii. If you have purchased any custom fonts, copy the relevant ttf files from the c:\windows\fonts folder. c. All documents, Live Writer drafts, pictures, music and videos from your My Document folder.
iii. Backup your custom dictionaries from Firefox, Microsoft Word, Live Writer, etc.
iv. Export all browser bookmarks and copy them to the backup folder.
v. Open your Firefox add-ons window, take a screenshot and paste that image in the backup folder. This is a good way to remember your favorite Firefox extensions.
vi. Export your podcast subscriptions in iTunes as as OPML (XML) file.
vii. Product keys (serial numbers) of all licensed software.

6. If you have a partitioned hard drive (say C: and D:), just copy* the backup folder created in step 5 to the D: drive. If you don't have a partitioned hard disk or if the size of partition is small, install Live Mesh, add c:\old_files folder to your Live Mesh account and wait until all the files are uploaded on to the web. Mesh offers 5 GB of space and it may therefore be a good idea to burn all the heavy files (like videos, music, etc) onto a DVD instead of transferring them online.

*You can copy large folders across drives through Windows Explorer or the xcopy utility.

Re-Install Windows from Scratch

Now is the time to do a clean installation of Windows. This is probably the easiest part. You can either boot your computer from the original Windows installation CD** or, while you are running Windows, pop-in the installation CD and run the setup.exe program just like you would install any other Windows app. Always choose "Fresh Installation" instead of "Repair".

**If you installation media doesn't include the latest service packs, try creating one yourself. Windows XP with SP3 is available as a downloadable ISO while you can slipstream SP1 into Vista fairly easily.

Post-Installation Tips

It can take around 30 minutes (or more) for the whole installation to finish. Now jump to the Windows Update website and let your browser download all the hotfixes, security updates, driver updates, etc. If your computer is unable to connect to the Internet, chances are that your computer doesn't have the proper network drivers. No problem as you can easily get the drivers from the dump that you created using DriverMax utility.

If your display is acting funny or there's no audio, just install the right drivers from the vendor's website (preferred approach) or use your backup media. Once all the patches are installed, Windows Vista users can free up few gigabytes of disk space by making SP1 permanent. Windows XP users may skip this step.

Now turn on the Firewall and install all the other software programs and associated updates in any order. The next important step is to clone your disk image via DriveImage XML (free software), Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost. Windows Vista Ultimate also comes with a "Backup & Restore Center" that you may use to create a complete backup image of your entire computer to another drive, external disk or a DVD.

These disk images will come very handy after few months when your Windows PC get slow again. You won't have to repeat the rebuilding exercise as the PC can be easily restored to the original state through these disk images.

Don't experiment on your main PC

If you are tech enthusiast who loves to try new software / browser add-ons, I would strongly recommend that you don't install these software on your main system - instead get Virtual PC (it's free), create a Windows XP / Windows Vista virtual machine and use that environment as your new playground.

Another recommendation - do get a cane of compressed air to remove all the dirt from components inside the computer case. Sometimes software may not be the reason behind your slow and slugging PC - the culprit could be the dust sticking on the CPU heat sink.

How to Rebuild your Computer and Reinstall Windows Without Headache - Digital Inspiration

Content as infrastructure

I say the notion of persistent ubiquitous content. And when I say content - I mean all sorts of content - movies, TV shows, music and books - blog posts, links, RSS feeds, wikis - ideas, statistics, directories, memes, stories, articles, lists of links, concepts and most importantly personal expression byproduct.

What I mean by being persistent is that this content gets stored up on the web and is always there. And by ubiquitous - I mean its everywhere. So always there and everywhere.

What's important to keep in mind when building the mesh is that everything starts and ends with the user, the customer, the human being who's using the stuff. That's why every one of these blog series' posts will have the user's ID (profile page) at the center of the drawing. Then by overlaying any or all of these domain' drawings on top of each other, we'll be able to get an idea of what the mesh will actually look like - which I'm betting will be a hodge-podge and distributed mesh' of inter-connecting pieces - loosely coupled together.

No one vendor will be able to dictate exactly how the mesh will evolve. It'll be a hybrid combination of open and proprietary standards, all driven by market factors, latest trends and a gradual education of the mainstream populace as to the benefits of all this stuff.

You'll also notice that I'll put an RSS icon and the words - DataPortability and Interoperability on each chart - as well. Think of these things are portals or rabbit holes between each of the domains' I'm writing about.

Some of the connections between the components and domains of the mesh - will be based upon open standards, like RSS, OpenSocial or OpenID while others connectors' will be proprietary APIs, like Microsoft Windows Live Contacts APIs or MySpace APIs. And just so we're clear - the purpose of these blog post series is to map out how these various kinds of domains will all exist unto themselves as their own unique dimensions connecting to humans and providing unique functionality for us all - moving forward.

If we (software developers) can all agree upon standardized constructs, such as an RSS feeds, shared public servers, user profile pages or groups - then we can have disparate implementations, techniques and solutions - while at the same time - provide a comprehensive, loosely coupled meshed architecture which anyone can contribute to and benefit from - just like the web.

This mesh doesn't have to get LED by Microsoft or Google, but they can contribute to it - for sure. But I just wanna remind everyone that this all started with RSS and RSS readers - and the fact that no one (despite some efforts) owns or controls RSS. And even though HTML has it's own little governance and political world surrounding it - it also is not controlled' by any one entity or constituency.

Over the years I've given up thinking that there's one way to build the mesh, or that one set of altruistic standards and solutions will fit all.

As long as there is time - Microsoft will do it their own way. As the dusts of time accumulate we'll see that Google is also it's own world - unto itself. And there's no way in hell you're ever gonna tell Steve Jobs how to do soemthing, he's always gonna be his own man.

So now the questions are: will Facebook continue to innovate, extend and grow - or just become a puppet aligned with Microsoft? I'd also like to see if MySpace will continue on it's own path, or will it become subservient to Google? And thank god for the Evan Williams' of the world!

Politics aside - from a technology POV this is all possible, but it's gonna take cooperation, devoid of ageism, sexism or capitilism to make this all work. Yes we all need to make money, but NO you don't get to lock my balls up in YOUR vice. Ain't gonna happen.

The little guys needs to live off the crumbs left behind by the behemoths and this whole thing needs to work around the world - evenly.

So as user's behavior patterns shift and migrate and as vendors smarten up and start thinking of the user FIRST - in the center of all universes, I believe that the market trends and pressures from users will define the mesh. This series of blog posts simply lay out SOME of the domains, standard constructs and APIs - that will make up the mesh. it is by no means complete or exclusive.

Technology solutions today enable users to assume that we can buy music (and soon) movies through the web just as easy as going to Virgin Megastore or Wal-Mart. Customers are getting over Blockbuster and are choosing NetFlix instead. Because of separate regional rights and languages - we're seeing music and movie downloading and rental solutions pop up around the world.

End-uers are getting used to the notion of storing their files (text, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.), their media libraries (images, music, videos, etc.) and their user generated content' (blog posts, reviews, etc.) in storage facilities or storage lockers (as they're sometimes referred to) - on the web. On-line storage is an entire market category, though it's gonna be hard for small guys like Box.net and Omnidrive to compete with the likes of Amazon's S3, AOL's XDrive or both Microsoft and Google's storage offerings (Live drive and GDrive.) But god bless them - they are alternatives to the bug guys.

But storing files you own and control is only part of what ubiquitous and persistent content is all about.

What I MOST excited about is when we can rely upon old news reels, stock photo libraries, statistics libraries, biographies and documentaries - from places like the BBC open project and the Internet Archive. Wikipedia is also morphing towards this sort of on-line knowledge dissemination and availability.

Pioneered by Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive - the idea of backing up the web' was so outrageous that I just couldn't believe it when I first heard of it.

You mean they're going to backup - the entire web - how many times? Forever?

And then when I heard about the BBC Open project - my head did a similar thump you mean the entire library of everything the Beeb has ever done will be available -on-line forever? (Of course we've found out later that its not quite everything and that it's gonna take YEARS to get all the rights clearances - but at least they got the right idea!)

Soon after the Beeb announcement Pathe also made their catalog on-line BUT they were charging for it - and it was minuscule compared to what the Internet Archive and the Beeb have.

We tried to to do a storage play for bloggers, podcasters and vloggers called ourmedia.org (back then) - as a UGC front-end to the Internet Archive. But the same month we launched - YouTube launched. So we know what happened with that scenario.

Now persistent ubquitous content is available for everyone. Your great American rock video, novel, soap opera or viral video - can be stored up in YouTube (or blip.tv.meta-cafe, Revver, whatever [insert 40 brand names here.]

If you step back and think about content as infrastructure you can take a different attitude towards stock photos, soundtracks and beats, 3D models, 3D city models and all sorts of reusable digital content assets. You can bake historical references, sports statistics, background on diseases and weather trends into your blog posts and software. You can make collaborative hypermedia a dream come true.

A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it - as a key construct - is a mesh that can provide health information, small business knowledge and courseware for all ages - free and built into word processors, email, spreadsheets or browsers.

A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it - can enable entirely new kinds of record labels, movie studios and book publishers - which have a fighting chance of surviving. By lowering distribution, development and www costs - we can enable the Long Tail to at least cover their costs and pay the rent and feed themselves.

A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it can seamlessly tie into other domains like the Live Web or Tools- and seamlessly mesh' with other constructs like micro-content, aggregators or collections.

Persistent ubiquitous content is an idea who's day has come.

I'm hoping that in all the billions of dollars of revenues, greed and exploitation of users, we can make sure to get enough content on-line and available for free - that new kinds of educational tools, knowledge bases and learning environments can evolve - to make our kids even smarter than we are.

Persistent ubiquitous content is a domain which can mesh into any other domain, construct and API. Here's a chart outlining some of the ways I think of this:

all sorts of opinions - threadsML, message boards, stored conversations, IM transcripts,

Action Items in this domain include:

- MORE free content - we'll never be done, they'll never be enough!

- APIs for content infrastructure - not sure what two-way APIs would be here - but they'r eimportant!

- standards for content infrastructure - hmm - I wonder what that would look like?

- educational objects' - that's an idea that's been bantered around for a while!

- persistent conversations - which are re-entrant and annotatable. That's what ThreadsML was all about.- and (of course) we need to continue to educate end-users onwhat the hell it is we MEAN by persistent ubiquitous content!

Action Items in general include:

- make sure that ALL the open standards continue to rise in popularity, that all implementations are compatible with each other and that more open standards get created

- testing and compatibility labs - a place where we can guarantee that everything works together. Building a COMPATIBLE mesh will be a challenge - and it won't ever happen if things break or don't work.

- two-way APIs - until we can write back into systems and services as easily as we can get data from those services we won't have a symmetrical architecture and a successful mesh environment

- establish OutputThis as a standard for content producers to list all of the destinations they'd like to route their content - to. SEE Dataportability.

Summary of persistent data repositories discussed here:

Box.net, Omnidrive, S3, GDrive, Live Drive, XDrive, Wikipedia, Revolution Health, Stats Inc., Freebase, Twine, DMOZ, Technorati, Hulu, iTunes, Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, all sorts of wikis I didn't even bother to put down. All the micro-content places - I'll cover in the next post!

Major players and people to watch and listen to:

Brewster Kahle, J.D. Lasica, Ross Mayfield, Brad de Graf, Jon Lebkowsky, Harold Gilchrist, Susan A. Kitchens, Mike Linksvayer, Mary Hodder, David Weinberger, Howard Rheingold, Stephen Downes, B.K. DeLong, Brian Dear, Marc Eisenstadt, Christopher Allen, Aaron Swartz, Paolo Valdemarin, Jamie Faye Fenton, Bernard Goldbach, Jeremy Zawodny, Larry Lessig, Joi Ito, Jimmy Wales

Major organizations and advocacy groups:

BBC, Internet Archive, ourmedia, mediaventure, Creative Commons,

Final NOTE: This is my second post in this series - I ain't done yet! Next up - #3 - micro-content.

Other than a pushback from an HP guy to the effect that Craig Mundie said Silverlight integration with the iPhone would never happen, there were no obvious clues in the lobby after the SteveNote. Of course, in keeping with the PR denial, the fact that I made up the Silverlight scenario out of whole cloth made it more than a little interesting that an HP official had actually discussed such a thread with Mundie before I had even made it up. Given the wave of exits from Microsoft Classic in recent weeks (Jeff Raikes, Charles Fitzgerald, Gates' glidepath) my bet is whatever Mundie says may be irrelevant in the reasonably near future. But then you have to examine the breadcrumbs Jobs sprinkled around Moscone West.

For starters, the transitional upgrades to both the iPhone and Apple TV auger well for Jobs' continued accupuncture approach to finding pressure points on the body politic of the carrier and cartel communities. Get static from NBC and competition from Amazon and the record companies switch over to the movie rental business and resuscitate Apple TV in one nifty move. Decouple Apple TV from the Mac and Windows, and Steve sends a loud message to the record companies too: watch the iPhone go tetherless next and regain the lion's market share. And Time Capsule combined with a free upgrade and a lowered price point suddenly turns Apple TV into a child management system in HD without having to wait for BlueRay to drop into the adoption zone.

The iPhone upgrade offers another clue in the Google containment scenario. The Maps location functionality is augmented by an additional GPS workaround with WiFi to supplement the cell tower triangulation now commoditized across every other mobile platform. Broadcast SMS keeps us connected across both the iPhone network and the downlevel rest of the market, including smart and even dumb phones as receivers. Webclips deliver application status to the iPhone home screen two months ahead of SDK apps and suggests that the value add of native apps will be integration of offline storage and rich services. Hmmm how will that be delivered?

Flash? Nope. Java FX? Never. Google Gears? Maybe but only as a caching mechanism for text. Let's see, what multimedia service fabric will work equally well across Windows and OS/X and Linux other than those two which Apple has frozen out of the loop? Could it be Silverlight? Does Apple want to let Google control the RIA turf with the possibility of an Android-seeded nullification of the Apple leverage over the carriers and cartels? Build it anew and have less clients than Dennis Kucinich has voters? Or partner with Microsoft and continue to exploit the advantage of control of the entire device to maintain market dominance to wield against the content and bandwidth suppliers?

More breadcrumbs: Office 08 ships on the MacBook Air DVD-less, over the air. Apple TV sucks down rentals (aka software) over the air computer- and DVD-less. If Entourage and the rest of Office were to move to a Silverlight platform, the iPhone, Air, iMac devices would be the Rolls Royces of computing devices in the enterprise. The Intel Trojan horse that Jobs has so strategically exploited will complete the takeover of the PC from within, particularly if iPhone 2.0 includes Intel chips. It's hardware plus services, something the new guard at Microsoft can live and prosper with.

Like the Presidential campaign, it's not who is most experienced or most viral or any of that. Rather, it's who's left after the least are gone. All the religious arguments closed versus open in particular are left in the dust by our desire to live as much in the future as we can. How else to explain the power of the iPhone to upend the usage patterns of 1.0 mobile devices and create a small but highly influential class of users who live as much or more on the mobile Net as they do on the corporate and home networks. With 2% device share, the iPhone has beaten and now runs a close Obama second to devices with a 43% share. One device works on the Net; the other sort of does. Game over.

Now Apple TV is refreshed with a sidestep of the HD conundrum. Switch to cable for HD because satellite has less capacity? Or wait until BlueRay drops below a hundred bucks? No need, particularly if you already have one gathering dust. Upgrade your backup and Airport to Time Capsule and watch as HD podcasts come to life around the free transport and advertiser subsidy built into the Apple TV model. Who's threatened here? Netflix, Blockbuster, and the TV networks who better settle their ass soon with the writers before the public catches on to the fact that the presidential campaign seems to have continued right through the strike without a hiccup and with far more drama, humor, and cliffhangers. The soaps never recovered from the OJ trial, you know.

Apparently nobody considered what would happen if the razor was software-upgradeable. Nobody but Steve Jobs, that is. The best moment of the Air demo was when Steve pinched and expanded a picture with the now-familiar iPhone multi-touch move, the one I've seen people reach out to their current screens and unconsciously attempt to do without thinking. Free upgrades across a wireless grid of devices send a powerful message that everybody wants in on.

A couple weeks ago, my hard drive went belly-up and I had to restore everything from backups (thank you SuperDuper). Restoring from a crash is like moving to a new apartment. You can cargo cult and just move everything from point A to point B, or you can take the opportunity to reevaluate what you should keep and what you should toss.

This reminded me of a tip Jason told me for unpacking from a move. The idea is you dump all the packed boxes into the middle of the living room. Then you take things out one-by-one only as you feel the need for them. After a couple weeks of unpacking only what you need, you discover the rest of the pile is prime material for donations or the dumpster.

I loved the idea. And my hard drive crash was the perfect chance to test it on my overgrown music collection.

So here's what I did.

1. I made my living room pile. I found the iTunes Music Library folder on my backup and copied it to my Desktop as a folder named Music.

2. I opened iTunes and kept it completely blank. I set it to Album View to replicate my CD shelf of yore. Then I waited for an itch.

3. When a craving hit, I opened my Music folder on the Desktop, found the Album I wanted, and dropped it into iTunes.

Two weeks later, I have a beautiful hand-picked selection of Albums in iTunes. And since that Music folder only takes up 4848 pixels on my Desktop, I'll leave it there as long as I want as an Archive in case a rare itch hits.

You don't need a hard drive disaster to replicate this tip. Just copy ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/ to your Desktop and rename it Music. Then inside iTunes, delete everything. Wait for the itch, and start cherry-picking your own small music collection. Enjoy!

Back in April, we speculated about one of the hidden dangers of depending on web services to store your data: the possibility that no one was doing backups. Now that possibility may have turned to reality for users of Omnidrive (once touted as the clear leader in the online storage field by TechCrunch). The service has been offline for some days, with its servers currently not responding at all. A December article at ReadWriteWeb contains serious allegations of fraud from the company's ex-CTO (as well as a defense from the CEO).

My sympathies at this point are with Omnidrive's users, particularly those who have their only copies of documents on an unreachable server. I can think of plenty of times when a days-long outage (let alone a permanent loss) of my own document storage would be devastating. The larger question, though, is what you as a user can (or should) do about this? Online document storage is certainly attractive to the web worker; being able to access and share your work easily in any browser is definitely a killer feature. But how do you balance that off against the fact that your documents could simply vanish overnight?

One possible approach is simply to choose your storage vendor very carefully. Backup vendor Mozy, for example, is owned by giant EMC, Jungle Disk uses your Amazon S3 account for storage (so your data will be available even if Jungle Disk itself goes under), and Google Documents is, well, Google. Some smaller vendors have their own serious backup policies to guard against hardware failures.

Yet in a world of imperfect hardware and software, as well as regulatory and legal issues, choosing one company for storage is still ultimately a gamble. It may be unthinkable that an EMC or Amazon or Google could fail, but it's not impossible. No matter how carefully you choose, entrusting your data to a single online storage vendor is the equivalent to storing it on a single hard drive: it introduces a single point of failure into the system.

For hard drives, of course, we've long had several answers to this problem: backups or RAID. If disks are unreliable, make a copy of the data elsewhere. If one disk is unreliable, store your data on three or five or seven disks, with a scheme that allow perfect data recovery even if one or two disks should suddenly be reduced to iron filings by hardware failures. What the disappearance of Omnidrive suggests to me is that it's time for the next step in the evolution of online file storage, now that there is more than enough competition in the market for simple storage. We need the online equivalent of backups and RAID.

This doesn't mean that the online storage services need to use backups and RAID on their servers; that's irrelevant to me as a consumer in providing protection against vendor failure. Rather, I'd like to see products that automatically back up, say, a Box.Net account to Amazon S3 storage. Or an API that writes copies of my data simultaneously to Amazon and the fabled GDrive, and allows retrieval from either service if the other is missing. Or even a way to mirror my online storage, overnight, down to a desktop drive for safekeeping.

Until products like these are available (and if I've just missed them, please let me know in the comments), storing your documents online will remain a gamble. Perhaps a safe gamble, but it could be made far safer with more vendor independence.

Share/Send

Weave is currently available for beta users of Firefox 3 here. The basic idea is that browser metadata (things stored in your Firefox profile like bookmarks, history, RSS feeds, usernames and passwords, etc.) is pushed into the cloud and stored on Mozilla's servers. The data is available to users from wherever they get online and users can share information with friends, family, or third parties while retaining control over how, when, and if the info is shared.

Mozilla is launching the service with a set of organizing principles to reassure users of their privacy and the intentions of the project. Those principles are reprinted below and in my mind will make it easier for consumers to trust Mozilla with their data:

Mozilla will:

• provide a basic set of optional Mozilla-hosted online services
• ensure that it is easy for people to set up their own services with freely available open standards-based tools
• provide users with the ability to fully control and customize their online experience, including whether and how their data should be shared with their family, their friends, and third-parties
• respect individual privacy (e.g. client-side encryption by default with the ability to delegate access rights)
• leverage existing open standards and propose new ones as needed
• build a extensible architecture like Firefox

Image via Mozilla Labs.

Mozilla presented some initial use cases for Weave including data backup, using Firefox from anywhere (or on mobile devices) using personalized info (like your history and bookmarks), and collaborative bookmarking. The next version of Weave, planned for 2008, will include a set of APIs for developers to build additional services that can access and (presumably) store metadata.

Weave and Data Portability

The first thing I thought of when reading about Weave was the project being undertaken by the folks at DataPortability.org to create a standardized set of protocols for sharing and remixing our data. It seems to me that Weave has many of the same goals: increased control over personal information, anywhere access to that information, easier third party access to information, etc.

As Dan Farber points out, Mozilla has 15-20 projects in development ranging in areas from calendars to email to instant messaging. Weave could potentially hook into all of these in the future and begin to draw together the pieces of the mythical web OS.

But by supporting things like OpenID and OAuth, could Weave potentially act as a hub and delegator for all of our online activities and personal information? That already seems to be a goal of the project, and Weave appears to operate with many of the same ethical principles as the DataPortability.org project (i.e., users have control of their information and how it is shared), and it further seems to me that something like OAuth could make Weave even more secure for users. Support for the data portability stack would, in my opinion, make Weave a more powerful framework and help define standards for data portability that would benefit all users in the long run.

According to a statement in the comments of a blog post by Mozilla Labs VP and General Manager Chris Beard, Mozilla is open to working with the data portability stack. "We've definitely been following openid, oath, etc. very closely as well," he wrote. "The focus first should be on what can and should the browser do as an intelligent agent on behalf of the user and then we can determine how best to get there from here."

What do you think of Mozilla Weave? What would you like to see developers build using the forthcoming Weave API?

Why Buy Online?

As a lifelong near-sighted person, prescription eyeglasses and especially prescription sunglasses have long commanded a high premium due to the seemingly precise and scarce nature of creating them. Until a few years ago, I only had two options for eyewear: my optometrist (here's an employee admitting they pay less than ten bucks per pair) or a 1-hour place like Lenscrafters (which is part of a multinational monopoly). About ten years ago, when I was fresh out of college and scraping by month to month with my first real job, I broke my only glasses and had to pay $400 for an emergency pair (that were ugly and I hated and I wore for two more years before I paid off the old ones and could afford new ones). For far too long, glasses have been expensive.

Today things are different, with Coscto and Walmart bringing prices down to the $100-150 range for frames/lenses and they serve as a good economical option to the mainstays. With the advent of online sellers, it's now possible to get a decent set of specs for anywhere between $20-$100. The online selection is phenomenal as well.

Get Your Measurements Right

First thing you need is an up-to-date prescription. Though people usually get one every 2+ years, most optometrists will only honor them for a up to a year afterwards. If you're getting one soon, you're in luck, because you can go in knowing a little more than the average patient. When you're done with the standard exam, ask the eye doctor or an assistant if they can give you your pupil distance. It's a simple matter of looking through a binoculars-like device that measures the distance between your pupils. It should be a number in millimeters and be sure to write it down either on the prescription or on a piece of paper (if you get two numbers, that's right/left which you can add up to be the PD). If you forget to ask or already visited an eye doctor recently, you can measure the PD yourself, by simply printing out a ruler and looking in a mirror (or taking a photo of yourself with the ruler below your eyes).

Armed with your prescription and your PD, you're all set for ordering any glasses you want online.

Measure What You Have, Know What You Want

It helps if you have two things: a bit of fashion sense and a measuring tape. I personally loved my last pair of eyeglasses (paid $500 at a fashion eyewear store two years ago), but they were a bit too short in the lens height department which became annoying as I could often see below my lenses during common everyday tasks. The glasses fit well otherwise and armed with my wife's soft sewing measuring tape, I took millimeter measurements of all aspects of my old glasses: lens height, lens width, length of bridge (distance between lenses), total width of lenses plus bridge, and the length of the side arms.

Now that I had my prescription (with PD), and my frame measurements, I copied it into a text file and kept it open as I shopped online. I knew I needed lenses around 53mm wide, about 20mm apart, and the arms needed to be at least 135mm long. My old too-short lenses were only 26mm tall, so I was looking to get something with around 30mm of lens height. Some online shops let you plug all these numbers in and specify what you want to search on as the most important (I did lens height must be at least 28mm search), but most all online shops will display the measurements below each frame, which should help narrow down your searches.

In terms of frame design, I knew I wanted a half-rim frame (metal/plastic top and arms, clear lens below) or a full plastic frame, and most every online shop categorizes frames for sale by their construction in this way. Knowing that you want frameless glasses or nerdy plastic retro glasses definitely helps making shopping online easier because some online shops can offer 500+ different varieties of just one style of eyewear. If you're not quite sure what you want, you might want to browse a real eyeglasses store for a bit to narrow down your desires.

Ordering Up, Playing the Waiting Game

Once you find something you like and it's about the right size, it's time to order. Plug in your prescription details (if you can't make them all out, most sites have helpful tips on deciphering a prescription) and pick out your options. The one option that will turn a $20 pair of glasses into an $80 pair is the lens choice. Be careful when picking out a lens because there are plenty of add-ons you might or might not want. Generally I pay for the highest level of non-glare coatings and I usually pick the middle of the thin-lens options (my personal prescription rules out the thinnest, lightest lenses). Most of my online glasses have run about $50 or so.

Shipment and fulfillment is generally pretty good. I ordered five pairs of glasses total, from four different retailers and started receiving pairs about a week later. The longest one was maybe three weeks, which is about normal for most optometrists, so in general ordering online was faster than higher cost traditional options.

The Verdict?

I used to wear the same glasses for 3-4 years between changes so I'm finding it incredibly liberating to pick from five different sets of glasses each morning. I have a couple fashionable pairs for going out, a couple understated ones for working and I can even take a chance with a wacky retro frame if I'm in the mood. All told, my glasses cost me from a low of $26 to a high of $84 per pair, mostly depending on the options I picked for lenses. If I had to come up with any criticisms, the only (very) minor issue I had was one pair's lenses (with identical prescriptions on both sides) were cut slightly different, so that when the light hits them, you can see a bit more of border on one lens over the other (like I said, it's minor). I purchased frames from four different companies mentioned on the GlassyEyes site and every pair showed up intact and the prescriptions all seemed identical.

I've had such good success with it that I recently ordered some higher priced specialized sports glasses online, saving about 35% over what an optometrist office would charge. Overall, I couldn't be happier with the process of buying glasses online. I'm happy to have several backup pairs and different styles to fit my mood. About the only drawback is that there is almost too much selection online. Picking out each frame took me about an hour, after wading through 150-200 results and checking measurements on the ones that caught my eye.

I encourage anyone looking to save some money and get a bigger selection to search online. Glasses are no longer a scarce resource costing many hundreds of dollars, they can be as simple as buying a DVD or book online, and cost about the same.