Finally I can be secure and not be annoyed by having to put my password in when I just run away for long enough that my screensaver kicks on. Yes!

Often you may run away to grab a sandwich, get the mail, or answer the phone. You’re away, but not for very long. Just long enough for your screensaver to kick on, which usually would lock your computer, requiring you to enter your password. If this happens enough, you’ll say “screw it” and just leave your computer unlocked all the time. Solved!

Maybe I’m just in love with the flip-phone itself. It probably could have been any other phone, and I’d love it just as well. But all I know is, I want my v551 back. And while we’re at it, my Nintendo 64.

Let’s deconstruct this video, which, by the way, was created in the 1980s. Before basically any of this was invented. Apple’s team that made this video was brilliant.

1) Computers that talk. This is here now, both in Mac OS X and the latest versions of Windows. Not quite as nicely spoken as this, but the Mac one is quite good. (Not sure about the Windows one)

2) Animation to make the guy’s face talk. This is basically here too. I’m not 100% that it can be done automatically, but I’m pretty sure it’s possible. (VS. manually created)

3) Time aware calendars: Yep.

4) “Let me see the lecture notes from last semester”: Well, in a roundabout way really. Searching (on mac anyway) is pretty much amazing.

5) “Pull up all the articles I haven’t read recently”: Not really. Unless you count RSS readers, or Queues like on Hulu.

6) John Fleming article: Again, searching. With keywords, this is fairly possible.

7) Multi-Touch functionality: That is, touching to do things rather than a mouse. It’s in millions of people’s pockets now.

Video Chatting: Completely here.

9) Video Chatting with screen sharing. It’s possible in iChat.

In the end, we’re extremely close to this reality. There’s a pretty new system called Siri out now. I watched a video of one of the guys who is making it discussing the way it works and how they built it the other day. The hardest part of these things is the context-aware system. Humans are so smart they’re dumb, they leave things out expecting the other person to figure it out. “I booked a ticket to London for tomorrow”…”Wonder what the weather is like”, etc. Well, a human realizes that they mean the weather in London. However, a computer has no clue. Enter context-aware. Siri has the ability to “remember” previous queries. So, ask it about movie times in Evansville, and then ask it the weather for tonight. It’ll assume you mean in Evansville.

We’re getting really close to this reality. And I can’t wait for it to happen.

First, a bit of statistics.

Studies have shown people will, on average, wait on a site to load for 8.5 seconds. Which means, after about 8 seconds, if your potential client hasn’t seen any images, they will leave. Poof. Gone. You’ve lost what could be a big chunk o’ money due to a slow loading site.

Second, usability.

People have become used to normal websites- where the address bar, back & forward buttons work. It’s been that way since the web began, and flash sites generally screw that up completely. People WANT to send their friends/coworkers/family links to things (and chain letters, but that’s another rant). Unless the flash site is extremely well created (and let’s face it, the majority aren’t) that simply isn’t possible.

One study that I found very interesting was done by dack.com. It found that on Tiffany’s website (in 2000, but still extremely relevant), where they had a normal HTML shopping site and a flash version, that participants could find out simple things, such as how much an item was, comparing multiple items, etc 40% faster on the normal HTML site than the flash version. One of the major things that tripped people up? The normal back button didn’t work. And as far as I know (and I make websites for a living, but I could be wrong…) it’s simply not possible to make that work with flash.

Third, Apple.

There’s 50 million iPhones out there. Surely one hell of a lot of iPod Touches, and they’re on target to do well over 1 million iPads by the end of the year. None of which have flash. People are using iPhones and such a lot more than they used to, and that’s only going to go up. Don’t expect flash to come to iPhones/iPads/iPod Touches any time soon, since Apple and Adobe are basically in a holy-war still.

Why should you care? Well, iPhones account for about 25% of the smartphone market. That’s a LOT of people to exclude.

Finally…

Why should you use a technology that forcefully excludes a huge portion of your potential clients and will annoy the rest of them? It’s just bad business sense.

Regular sites simply work faster, better, and in the end really have the upper hand on any flash site. Especially with really cool stuff coming out of JavaScript development at the moment, flash is really, truly, (hopefully) dying a nice, slow, painful death.

Of course, I’m guilty of it too. However, the only reason for that is I simply haven’t had time to fix my site.

This can give hours of hilarity, and truly broaden one’s knowledge… for better or worse. I recommend the first link under “why can’t i own a canadian” (which I found that somewhat relevant since the Olympics are in Canada this year) to anyone who either is a God-fearing person with a sense of humor, or anyone who’s agnostic or atheist.

Some of the suggestions are somewhat sad though, such as “grandparents raising grandchildren” or “how to kiss a girl”. But, everyone’s gotta learn somehow…

Are bloggers journalists?

As a blogger you may not consider yourself a journalist, but even if you’re just writing about your day or what you think about a subject, you are.
Journalism, as defined by the Random House Dictionary is:

1. A person who practices the occupation or profession of journalism.

2. A person who keeps a journal, diary, or other record of daily events.

Therefore, anyone who blogs is, by definition a journalist! (How does it feel to be a journalist? Pretty cool, eh?)

The power of blogs…

Blogs have given the public at large the power, not only in this country but the entire world. No longer do we have to rely on the “traditional” media. Too many times in world history horrible things have happened—and gone unnoticed—due to everyone relying on traditional, and in some cases, state-sponsored media. (I’m looking at you, Iran and China, and many others probably.) If it weren’t for Twitter, it’d be very unlikely that anyone would have known the full impact of the recent (and sadly, failed) Iran Revolution. How many of Hitler’s atrocities could have been stopped or could have never happened if we had this ability in the 30′s and 40′s?

Ethical Blogging

Editing previous posts

Sims recently said (and I’m paraphrasing here…) “The blog is a living, breathing thing…I know people who, and I have, gone back to posts I wrote 2 years ago to change and update them…Your ideas change, your perceptions change, and sometimes you want to reflect that in old posts.”

This really got me thinking. This is really a bad idea to spread without some caveats. Even though it is technically possible to do something, doesn’t mean it should be done. I technically can take an axe to my laptop, but I shouldn’t, as it’s still pretty new (2 years and counting…hopefully I won’t have the urge to upgrade for at least another 2, but Apple will probably come out with something so amazingly cool I won’t make it that far..), works great, and I need it for work and school. If you are going to edit previous posts, you should use Strikes or simply add the word EDIT: at the bottom and add text there if you want to add to it. Some (possibly all, I’m not sure) blogging platforms, when you update a post, it sends it back through the RSS feed, and people who have already read it will find it pretty odd and annoying that you’ve changed it without giving any indication of the changes. It will make you seem less truthful, and probably undermine your credibility in the long run.

Standards

As I said in my introduction, there’s around 1,200,000 mentions of blogging ethics on the web. It’s a topic that has plagued blogs since the beginning—For blogs to be taken seriously in the real world, and be a true competitor of the traditional media, bloggers must be able to convince the general public that they are credible. Too often do bloggers say “oh, it’s a blog, I don’t need to write with proper capitalization, punctuation, spelling or language”. I completely disagree. (When I say language, I mean using real words and not “foul” language.) As a blogger, you should consider every post you write as something that someone, be it a fellow blogger, your parents, a possible boss, your children might read and judge you. As far as the boss thing goes, bosses are ever increasingly checking up on social media sites for prospects and current employees… so watch out. However, this reminds me of an XKCD comic…

It’s important for everyone to retain credibility. Even if you don’t want to gain thousands or millions in readers, the people who do read it will stop if it’s hard to read. So, always assume that someone incredibly important, someone you want—or need—to impress is reading. Who knows, they might be.

A Code of Ethics

• Be Honest and Fair
• Minimize Harm
• Be Accountable

I shall leave you with a link to the first article on that Google search. It’s quite good and goes into detail of these main points.
A Bloggers’ Code of Ethics at CyberJournalist.net