Rick Mahn's shared items in Google Reader

HP and Acer Start Netbook Price War

Daniel Fleshbourne — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:03:58 -0500

Hewlett-Packard and Acer have lowered prices of their netbooks as the back-to-school sales season kicks into gear in the U.S., offering bargains for users. Acer slashed prices on its Aspire one netbooks on Friday to as low as US$329 for one version, while HP revealed new prices for Mini-Notes on its Web site.

Price-cutting by the two big PC vendors could prompt other netbook makers, such as Asustek Computer and Micro-Star International to follow. Netbooks are mini-laptop PCs designed for mobility, and typically weighing less than 2 kilograms. Most of the components on board, including the microprocessor, are less powerful than those of full-fledged laptops so batteries last longer. They're designed for Internet surfing and work on spreadsheets or word processor documents, not for heavy duty gaming, video editing or other multimedia work.

View: The full story @ PCWorld

Read full story...

Happiness CCXLVI

Rick Mahn — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:30:37 -0500

Time spent on your word of mouth branding.

Community Platforms: Here Comes The CIO

jeremiah_owyang — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 04:08:04 -0500

I’m currently doing an intensive 3 month research project on the topic of Community Platforms, and it’s become very clear that by talking to many of the 27 brands, 9 vendors, and leaning on forecast data where many decisions are currently being made to purchase these enterprise software solutions. To start with, many solutions (define as a set of software, services, support) are being purchased by marketers who want to bring a social aspect to their corporate website.

These marketing folks, who may have worked with IT in the past to load CMS programs are bound by corporate red tape, de-prioritized by IT project management, or want to evade the rigors of legal and security and free to purchase community platforms using Software as a Service model (SaaS). Why is this beneficial? As they’ve only to rely on IT for single sign on (SSO) they often can handle the rest within the web marketing team, or lean on the services of the community vendor.

Yet, they aren’t the only buyers, HR departments are starting to become sponsors for enterprise social network platforms to improve internal knowledge transfers, collaboration, and developing specific programs for alumni, new hires, interns, and even women using pre-packaged use case features provided by these vendors.

You can see where this is headed right? IT departments realize that fragmented communtiy software is going to lead to a disparate mess to clean up, and many are starting to make recommendations for enterprise platforms that will span the usage of the whole company. Why? To reduce overall resources, ensure security, centralize data, and ensure, well that they are responsible and safe when it comes to their information.

I’ve only heard of a few instances from the marketers that I’ve interviewed where IT has thought of community platforms as an enterprise solution rather than a one-off by marketing.

Talking with many of these folks in this research project, I could make the case that in 12-24 months we’ll start to see CIOs start to initiate projects to deliver enterprise social networking mandates, take ownership over these disparate projects, and wake up and realize the importance of these tools beyond marketing and HR.

This yields all kinds of questions regarding: security, what does enterprise-class entail, how will Microsoft/SAP/IBM respond, will Saas or on-premise software be required, governance, flexibility, allowance of third-party widgets, and costs. More to come on this as I dive further into this research project.

It’s amazing it’s taken so many years for this to come around, I first started writing about this back in 2005 with Dennis McDonald.

'Where to' might not be as important as 'how loud'

Seth Godin — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:37:06 -0500

Here's what they say to you when you graduate: "What are you going to do now?"

And here's what they say to you when you're about to leave on vacation: "Where are you going?"

In marketing (and thus, in life) it might be a lot more important to know, "How are you going to do the next thing?" or "How are you going to do your vacation?"

Direction is drilled into us. Picking the right direction is critical. If you don't know the right direction, sit tight until you figure it out.

The hyperactive have trouble with this advice. So they flit like a hummingbird, dashing this way and that, trying this tactic or that strategy until something works big, then they run with it.

What we're seeing, again and again, is that both of these strategies rarely work.

Organizations that sit tight tend to get verry comfortable with sitting, and they don't move when they need to move. They want proof that the direction is the right direction, they study it, consider it, test it, and the next thing you know, they are fourth in a three-person market.

Organizations (and leaders, and followers) that flit have a similar problem. They're so good at flitting, so happy with it, that they continue to flit even when a decent path shows up. (Classic Dip behavior). No direction is perfect, so we play with a strategy for a while, but you know what, flitting is more fun, so we go back to that.

The alternative is to do your best to pick a direction (hopefully an unusual one, hopefully one you have resources to complete, hopefully one you can do authentically and hopefully one you enjoy) and then do it. Loudly. With patience and passion. (Loud doesn't mean boorish. Loud means proud and joyful and with confidence.)

No flitting, no waiting for proof. Just consistent, overwhelming performance in pursuit of a vision you believe in. That's far more important than which direction you chose in the first place. And yes, I think it's a marketing decision, because the market embraces 'how.'

HP and Acer Start Netbook Price War

Daniel Fleshbourne — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:03:58 -0500

Google drops Bluetooth, GTalkService APIs from Android 1.0

Daniel Fleshbourne — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:25:09 -0500

Google Inc. dropped Bluetooth and the GTalkService instant messaging APIs from the set of tools for the first version of the mobile phone operating system, Android 1.0, according to the Android Developers Blog. But the company made clear that handsets using the Android OS will work with other Bluetooth devices such as headsets, for example.

Dropping the Bluetooth API (application program interfaces) means software developers won't be able to create applications that utilize Bluetooth for the Android OS. Bluetooth is a short-range radio technology that allows devices to work and communicate together wirelessly. An API is a set of tools and protocols designed to help programmers build new software applications.

View: The full story @ Computer World

Read full story...

Take the Tools and Run With Them

chrisbrogan — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 06:42:20 -0500

It dawned on me that there’s a risk of us all falling into the space of learning, writing about, and talking about the same tools. That as more people come and get passionate about how social media and social networking can be used, we may run the risk of adding more workers to the lab, and not promoting more uses of these tools out in the wild. The point of what I do here, in case it’s not completely obvious is this: I learn about things and share the information with you so that you will run off and do amazing things with the tools that have nothing to do with this space.

Does that make sense? My goal is that you pick up stuff here, and then run out and do things, and then maybe come back later and show me your great podcast about circus life (note: I had nothing to do with inspiring this podcast. I’m pointing to it as an example of a neat podcast about the circus, since disbanded).

Realtors, teachers, book sellers, bankers, farmers, whoever - the idea is that you learn some how to, figure out which tools make sense, and then you run far away from here (social media blogs) and do top shelf amazing things.

Come back often to say hi, if you’d like. I’m not shoving your learning process away. But make the CONTENT of what you build with these tools such that it focuses on your universe and the relationships and stories you want to build.

Make sense?

Photo credit, Jurvetson

ShareThis

Shel Israel: 7 Tips for New Twitter Users

Matt Craven — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 06:39:37 -0500

Shel Israel, formerly of FastCompany.tv, has written a great post outlining 7 tips for new Twitter users over at his Global Neighbourhoods blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

3. Celebrities don’t count. You can always start by getting followed by a few celebrity Tweeters like Scoble, Calacanis and Loic. But they give you no credibility at all because they simply follow everyone. Their purpose is to be a new media star and it works well for them. But is that what you want from Twitterville. Those of us who have been around for a while see no value in their being listed at as Followers, because they follow everyone.

Shel’s tips aren’t anything profound - but they do represent a good guide for someone new to twitter who is looking to make the right impression.

Possibly Related Posts

Happiness CCXLIV

Rick Mahn — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 06:00:28 -0500

Building community as an extension to the social web.

Being YOU

jeff — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 07:27:20 -0500

Back when I was in high school, I remember sitting in class and listening to a teacher ask a question and not being the person who raised their hand to answer the question even when I thought I knew the answer. It was only after hearing others in my class get the question wrong when I would consider raising my hand and sharing what I believed was the right answer. If I was called on, I generally knew the answer but I rarely wanted be the one to volunteer it. All these years later I ask myself why did I behave like that in high school? I suspect part of the answer was that I was afraid of being me. I was uncomfortable with who I was and the last thing I wanted to do was to be noticed at a time when I would rather blur myself into the sidelines and be invisible to those people around me rather than be seen. And maybe I was just a “little” shy.

And maybe this is something everyone goes through when they are growing up. I’m not sure about this since I never asked anyone else about it. But given the chance to repeat this experience all over again, if I was going to re-live my high school experience, chances are I would act the same because that is who I was at that moment in my life. I was lonely, I was shy and I didn’t have a clue about a lot of things. (I was a geek and didn’t know it.) O.K., I still don’t have a clue about some things but when I was growing up there wasn’t a book of clues for me to read which informed them about the realities of life. For some yes there was Catcher in the Rye but not everyone in my world could relate to the world of Holden Caulfield. And looking back I don't think I could have really appreciated the power of being able to read "the book of clues" for high school students.

Then one day I woke up and understood that getting noticed is sometimes o.k. It is one of the ways we get to define ourselves. And I was comfortable about it. And I realized these awakenings are all steps in the continuing evolution of how we become the person we are.

Part of growing up included getting comfortable with myself. Understanding my faults, my weaknesses and getting to know myself as a person. And this isn’t something that happened over night or during the course of a day or a week or a month. No for me it is something that slowly transformed me over time. And something I think about even today.

There are times in our lives when we don’t know who we are or what we want to be and this happens for some of us more often than we know. There are times when the only person I ever talk to about this is me. This is the inner dialog in my mind that doesn’t always result in an answered question. Sometimes the person we think we are and the person we want to be are two different people. Sometimes we get lucky and there is a chance to blur our different selves together. Other times we need to deal with the reality of who we are verses who we have become. And along the way we need to be aware of what is going on around us.

My advice is when you find yourself during one of these periods of self discovery is that you should not afraid to be YOU. You are the one person directly responsible for your future. Be proud of who YOU are.

Once you are comfortable with who you are and where you are and where you want to be you are in the best position to assume the responsibility of being yourself. The rest is up to YOU.

Tags: Entrepreneurship, leadership, Entrepreneur, Jeff Pulver

Please consider leaving a comment. Share a thought. Share your experience. And feel free to find me on twitter and continue this conversation.

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business

chrisbrogan — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 21:30:17 -0500

We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape. You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I’m not going to address the naysayers much with this. Instead, I’m going to offer 50 thoughts for people looking to use Twitter for business. And by “business,” I mean anything from a solo act to a huge enterprise customer.

Your mileage may vary, and that’s okay. Further, you might have some really great ideas to add. That’s why we have lively conversations here at [chrisbrogan.com] in the comments section. Jump right in!

Oh, and please feel free to reblog this wherever. Just be kind and link back to the original article.

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business

First Steps

Build an account and immediate start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, your competitor’s names, words that relate to your space. (Listening always comes first.)
Add a picture. ( Shel reminds us of this.) We want to see you.
Talk to people about THEIR interests, too. I know this doesn’t sell more widgets, but it shows us you’re human.
Point out interesting things in your space, not just about you.
Share links to neat things in your community. ( @wholefoods does this well).
Don’t get stuck in the apology loop. Be helpful instead. ( @jetblue gives travel tips.)
Be wary of always pimping your stuff. Your fans will love it. Others will tune out.
Promote your employees’ outside-of-work stories. ( @TheHomeDepot does it well.)
Throw in a few humans, like RichardAtDELL, LionelAtDELL, etc.
Talk about non-business, too, like @astrout and @jstorerj from Mzinga.

Ideas About WHAT to Tweet

Instead of answering the question, “What are you doing?”, answer the question, “What has your attention?”
Have more than one twitterer at the company. People can quit. People take vacations. It’s nice to have a variety.
When promoting a blog post, ask a question or explain what’s coming next, instead of just dumping a link.
Ask questions. Twitter is GREAT for getting opinions.
Follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who she follows, and follow her.
Tweet about other people’s stuff. Again, doesn’t directly impact your business, but makes us feel like you’re not “that guy.”
When you DO talk about your stuff, make it useful. Give advice, blog posts, pictures, etc.
Share the human side of your company. If you’re bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections. Point us to pictures and other human things.
Don’t toot your own horn too much. (Man, I can’t believe I’m saying this. I do it all the time. - Side note: I’ve gotta stop tooting my own horn).
Or, if you do, try to balance it out by promoting the heck out of others, too.

Some Sanity For You

You don’t have to read every tweet.
You don’t have to reply to every @ tweet directed to you (try to reply to some, but don’t feel guilty).
Use direct messages for 1-to-1 conversations if you feel there’s no value to Twitter at large to hear the conversation ( got this from @pistachio).
Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about you. Try to participate where it makes sense.
3rd party clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl make it a lot easier to manage Twitter.
If you tweet all day while your coworkers are busy, you’re going to hear about it.
If you’re representing clients and billing hours, and tweeting all the time, you might hear about it.
Learn quickly to use the URL shortening tools like TinyURL and all the variants. It helps tidy up your tweets.
If someone says you’re using twitter wrong, forget it. It’s an opt out society. They can unfollow if they don’t like how you use it.
Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.

The Negatives People Will Throw At You

Twitter takes up time.
Twitter takes you away from other productive work.
Without a strategy, it’s just typing.
There are other ways to do this.
As Frank hears often, Twitter doesn’t replace customer service (Frank is @comcastcares and is a superhero for what he’s started.)
Twitter is buggy and not enterprise-ready.
Twitter is just for technonerds.
Twitter’s only a few million people. (only)
Twitter doesn’t replace direct email marketing.
Twitter opens the company up to more criticism and griping.

Some Positives to Throw Back

Twitter helps one organize great, instant meetups (tweetups).
Twitter works swell as an opinion poll.
Twitter can help direct people’s attention to good things.
Twitter at events helps people build an instant “backchannel.”
Twitter breaks news faster than other sources, often (especially if the news impacts online denizens).
Twitter gives businesses a glimpse at what status messaging can do for an organization. Remember presence in the 1990s?
Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn (if you look for it, and/or if you follow the right folks).
Twitter gives your critics a forum, but that means you can study them.
Twitter helps with business development, if your prospects are online (mine are).
Twitter can augment customer service. (but see above)

What else would you add? How are you using Twitter for your business?

By the way, Jeremiah Owyang has a great post on this, too.

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.

ShareThis

WTF is up with Air Travel?

MG Siegler — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 02:40:56 -0500

I just got back from a trip to Las Vegas and all I can say is: The air travel industry in this country sucks.

I go to check in at the Vegas airport and I'm informed by the US Air ticketing lady that they now charge extra for ALL checked bags. I thought she was kidding. She wasn't.

I mean, how utterly ridiculous? Do they not expect passengers to travel for more than a day or so, thinking everyone can simply pack what they need in small carry-ons? No of course not, they know full well that most travelers are going to have to pay that fee. But there's another problem that came up today because of it.

To avoid the fee, quite a few people are carrying-on bags they would normally check. Because of that the overhead compartments got entirely filled up today.

It's not like there is less luggage, it's just moved from below the plane -- where there is plenty of room -- to the main cabin, where there is anything but plenty of room. Ridiculous.

It's not a huge fee ($15) but it's still yet another added on expense by the airlines after you've already booked your ticket. Yes, airlines are getting shafted by the rising cost of fuel, but they've already raised fuel surcharges like crazy, this just looks greedy.

As does the fact that US Air also offers absolutely no free drink service on the flights! I think it's $2 for a soda -- exact change, of course. God is the state of air travel sad.

I flew first class out to Vegas (hence, apparently, how I avoided the bag charge the first time around) and there is no way I would call it "first class." It was more like "marginally-better-than-coach class" -- it's slightly larger seats and the free drinks. Whoopie.

I just don't understand how it can be 2008 and air travel is rapidly getting worse, not better. You'd think advances in technology would help the experience, instead it's becoming something I dread. As much as I'd love to pay an insane amount of money to sit in a jam-packed flying cylinder from the 70s, I think I'd rather burn my cash -- which I basically did gambling this weekend, but I digress...

Virgin America is about the only airline I think I'm going to take from now on within the U.S. The problem is that their stops are so limited. I've also heard good things about JetBlue, but again, limited.

Still, these guys seem to be the only ones who are paying any attention to improving the customer experience of flying. They're also relatively new, give them time, I'm sure they'll screw it up like the rest of them.

If I had the money I would definitely buy my own plane. (Okay, obviously most people would, but it would be VERY high on my list of what I would buy first.) I love traveling, but the shitty U.S. airlines have made me dread it.

Charging you to check any bag. What a joke. Pretty soon they're going to start charging us to sit down on the plane. In fact, I would not be at all shocked if they one day rip out the seats and make coach standing-room only to cram more people together (I'm only half kidding).

Yes, the fuel thing is hitting them hard, and yes, the terrorist attacks definitely did not help matters any. But I remember flying before September 11, 2001 -- it still sucked. It's just getting worse.

[photo: flickr/ma1974]

Mac vs. Windows: Does it even matter?

Mathew — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:31:06 -0500

I know the question in the headline of this post might seem like anathema to a whole host of Mac and Windows fans, who treat their operating systems the same way some people treat their religious beliefs (namely, as something to argue incessantly about). But C.K. Sample asked the question over at the O’Reilly blog, and it’s one that has occurred to me more than once over the past year. There will likely always be people who need a specific operating system, because certain software or tools they use at work will only function with that OS, and there will always be people who prefer one over the other. But for my own purposes, the operating system has become almost irrelevant.

I used to use a Mac for work years ago, then switched to Windows (and before either of those, I used an Atari 1040ST). At home, I used Windows up until a year or so ago, when I switched to Ubuntu. I have a box running Ubuntu and one running XP side-by-side, just in case there’s an app I want to try that only runs on Windows. And if I could convince my chief financial officer to approve it, I would probably buy a Macbook and run Parallels, so I could have two operating systems side-by-side. But in the long run, it doesn’t really matter to me what the OS is, since virtually everything I do involves the Web.

Obviously, not everyone is in the same boat. I write for a living, which requires little more than a text editor. But even the other things that I used to depend on a specific OS for — email, calendar, more elaborate document editing, etc. — are now accomplished through Google (or Zoho). I’ve even started using the online photo-editing app (Picnik) that is now built in to Flickr for editing my pictures, rather than doing it on the desktop with Photoshop or the GIMP. My photos and other documents are backed up through Flickr, Google and Amazon’s S3, so I can get to them whenever and wherever I want, regardless of what computer I’m using. Why do I care what the OS is?

Asking My Readers – A Poll

Steven Hodson — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:00:33 -0500

One of the long running features I have had here has been the nightly From the Pipeline posts. The idea of the post is that I pick out some of the more interesting things that have caught my eye on FriendFeed during the day. Then at the end of the day I gather them all up and post them for everyone to have a look through.

Recently though I have had a couple of emails from people suggesting that this type of post while not a total time waster wasn’t something that they found interesting at all. One of the suggestions was to use Google GReader to share them with people – the only problem here is that I don’t use GReader and have absolutely no intention of every using it.

That said I definitely don’t like wasting my reader’s time and if the night From the Pipeline post isn’t doing anything more than just taking up space then it is time for it to go away. However I also think that there could be people out there who do like the post and I wouldn’t want to make a snap decision that would upset my regular readers.

So as of today you will see a new poll at the top of the sidebar on the right side that asks my readers how they feel about the post. It will run for 30 days and at the end of that time if the majority say they don’t like it then I will no longer do it. On the other hand if the reaction is to keep it that is what I will do. In the meantime while the poll is running I will keep posting the From the Pipeline posts.

Conversation Tags: polls, From the Pipeline, listening to readers

Carrying on with the improvements – Contributors

Steven Hodson — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 18:55:01 -0500

Now that the new look for the blog has pretty well settled into place; other than some minor tweaking it is time to start looking at some other ways to add some value to the blog. One of the big things these days seems to be the increasing use of guest bloggers. Now personally I’m not a big proponent of guest bloggers as I don’t think it does anything to really benefit the person doing the guest post. In most cases it is a single one off or possibly two posts where the guest blogger hopes to get their name out in front of an audience they might not have had access to otherwise.

In principal this might seem like a good idea but the reality is that in most cases the readers of that blog don’t make the guest blogger connection. I can’t count the number of times on FriendFeed where the blog owner has had to clarify that they weren’t the one that wrote the post but rather some guest writer. Where guest bloggers might like to think that they are gaining an audience that can be translated back to there own blogs I feel that they are just being used as filler while the blog owner takes a holiday or can’t think of anything to write.

What I have decided to do starting today is to invite a selected number of bloggers from various parts of the world and with varying interests in technology to join WinExtra as regular contributors. At this point I don’t foresee the number of contributor exceeding five writer but they will be writers who I have a high regard for and would like to give them an additional platform to express their thoughts and ideas. There will be no editorial line that they will be asked to toe – in fact I want them to be able to write about things that are important to them and are tech related in they way they are most comfortable.

With all this in mind I am really happy to announce that Alexander van Elsas has agreed to become one of WinExtra’s first contributing writers. While there is no timetable or post counts being placed on any of the contributors I hope that we will see Alexander make his presence known in short order – in fact I am really looking forward to it.

I hope you all will look forward to his contributions here as well and as soon as I have tied down any further contributors I will let you know who they are.

Update: One more contributor has been added to the Contributor Roster. While most might know of Art Lindsey III as a conservative political blogger he also has a strong technology background when it comes to hardware, podcasting and videocasting. He will be adding to the blog with both his personal opinions on technology as well as writing on hardware due to his contacts within that part of the industry. As with any contributors there is no defined posting schedule for Art but I am sure we will see him soon adding to the conversation.

Conversation Tags: blogging, site news

Managing Your Life in the Clouds, Part 3: The Yahoo! Experience

(author unknown) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 12:37:00 -0500

In part three of my survey of email and PIM sync services, I look at Yahoo!'s cloud computing experience, which offers excellent mobile support!

20 Free eBooks About Social Media

Daniel Scocco — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 05:05:39 -0500

If you want to learn more about social media but don’t wanna spend money on Amazon, you just got served. Chris Brogan compiled a nice list with 20 free eBooks that you can download and start reading right away. Topics go from viral marketing to blogging and Twitter, enjoy!

20 Free eBooks About Social Media

Happiness CCXXXVII

Rick Mahn — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:30:34 -0500

Happy to say that I’m still happy.

CAPTCHA’s Can Be Useful, Don’tcha Know

Chris Albrecht — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:55:46 -0500

To some, a web site like Craigslist asking you to verify that you are indeed a human by retyping distorted, nonsensical words is irritating. But the next time you do it, you could be helping to fill in some historical blanks.

NPR ran a story yesterday on Luis von Ahn, assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the guys who helped develop the CAPTCHA technology. The short version: Efforts to digitize (really) old books and newspapers were being hampered by faded ink that confounded OCR software. The solution von Ahn came up with was to use the words that the software couldn’t recognize and insert them into these so-called reCAPTCHAs and use the power of human brains to decipher them. CAPTCHAs serve up two words, one is the security word, the other goes toward the book digitization effort. It sounded interesting, so I called von Ahn to find out more.

Here’s how it works. The New York Times is working to digitize all of its issues starting way back in 1851. It starts by scanning every single page as an image. That’s where reCAPTCHA comes in. It runs two optical character recognition (OCR) programs to turn all of those images of pages into text. Different OCR programs tend to make different mistakes. When the two programs disagree on a word, that word is plucked out and distributed among CAPTCHA security programs spread out across 45,000 web sites like Craigslist and TicketMaster.

Human beings then look at the words as part of the CAPTCHA security measure and do the deciphering by retyping what they think the mangled word is. Depending on the word, as little as two or three people agreeing on what it is is enough to figure it out. The word is then sent back to the New York Times to be reinserted into the text version of the image.

Initially, this project was part of Carnegie Mellon, but von Ahn said that they are spinning out reCAPTCHA as its own company. While The New York Times is paying to use the service, reCAPTCHA is also doing work free of charge for the Internet Archive’s project to digitize every book published before 1980.

But von Ahn is looking beyond just re-typing words as security measures. He says that his team has tried using images and having people type what they see. The problem, von Ahn says, is that people don’t spell very well, so even though the image is of a “cat” people could spell “kat” and not answer the question correctly. ReCAPTCHA is also expanding into audio, and using the audio version of CAPTCHAs to have people listen to and decipher words from garbled old recordings or closed captioning transcriptions.

The idea of taking a necessary evil like spam prevention and turning it into something useful is a good one. Who knew selling my old digital camera on Craigslist was actually an act of historical preservation?

Microsoft Office Live Workspace Has Great Potential - Now Only If It Supports OneNote

Truc Bui — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:05:50 -0500

I was invited to sign up for Office Live Workspace Beta and gladly took the offer. I see Live Workspace as a perfect cloud-based collaborative tool, especially for the college environment where sharing ideas, class notes, peer edits for papers or journal articles, etc., are all paramount to the learning environment. Right now Workspace supports almost all Office software. Word files, Excel files, and PowerPoint files can be uploaded and downloaded straight from the cloud onto a local terminal for editing or collaborative discussion. One of the best things about Workspace is its ability to transform and streamline workflow.

This last semester, I was helping a classmate write and edit his research article and had to either wait for him to meet with me or wait for his email to come through. From there, I would have to download the file via USB flash drive or via email attachment. After editing or marking the draft up with suggestions, I would have to save the file, email it back, or put it on my flash drive and retransfer it back to him. Although this works, the file saving and re-saving sometimes meant I would litter my computer with drafts that are useless. The workflow definitely could be better.

Enter in Live Workspace. Workspace downloads and installs a toolkit where you can save and open directly from the Workspace. Cloud storage, meet Microsoft Office. Sort of. Although I can save and open from the Cloud, the program I use the most is not included (yet) in Workspace. Word, Excel, PowerPoint... but no OneNote 2007. It's absolutely true that OneNote utilization at my university is painfully lacking, which is probably anecdotally true for the majority of people who use OneNote versus more familiar programs like Word or Excel. Collaborative learning and studying using OneNote or PDFs of OneNote files, note-taking and sharing only happened between 3 people in my classes. It only happened when we were all physically present and hooked up to the school's network. That's 3 out of approximately 200. Granted, having the option of exploring the limitations of OneNote in the Cloud should be included now while Live Workspace is still in beta form.

If Microsoft would implement OneNote support in Workspace, OneNote's sales would greatly increase, especially if Microsoft makes a proper PR campaign touting the advantages of using Office within the Cloud. Cross-platform implementation where Apple users (a significant percentage of college students use Macs) can also use Live Workspace will definitely help foster a truly collaborative learning environment that is software based and will boost sales of Office software across platforms.

In the coming weeks when school starts up again, I will be revisiting this topic. Hopefully I can get a few of my classmates to join me in the Live Workspace Cloud and I'll report back on how well things work between computers and the Workspace Cloud. If there are things you'd like for me to look at in Live Workspace, or if you have suggestions on how to use Live Workspace, please share them. I'm always looking for ways to improve workflow.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Office Live Workspace,Cloud Computing,OneNote,Microsoft Office

Originally Posted On GottaBeMobile.com - THE Source for Mobile PC News.