Cloud is Coming

...even when they denied it, tech industry leaders knew that the Cloud was coming and that they would need to tool up for it.

For the individual, it means that you can declare yourself liberated from babysitting hard drives, strong arming simple-minded backup software, and the publishing workload that comes from having to tell everyone that your system is in the shop to recover contents from a drive.

Call me? Okay, all it takes is a click!

...readers here will almost certainly conclude that I'm a recidivist Google fan boy. I'm hard pressed to deny the charge.

Here's another good reason for me to love Google.

I spend a lot of my day working at my computer with a headset on so that I can meet with people on Skype.

So it made a HUGE difference for me when Google added the ability to call someone's phone directly from Google chat.

If a person gives me a properly formatted phone number in their email (and for Google, properly formatted covers a lot of ground), I can simply click on the number and a chat window appears that is ready for me to place a call to them.  I suppose that even without a headset on, I could simply allow the computer to turn into a speaker phone for me.

No need to sign up for a new service, no need to agree to any more Terms of Service, just a new feature, ready to go.

By the way, in spite of what you've read -- Google's support for privacy is progressive and gives me control over what I want to share with the world. I have actually read the ToS and I'm satisfied with the level of care that Google takes with my personal information.

And just so you know, Google doesn't pay me or feed me. They just keep giving me good stuff and they don't pick my pocket along the way.

Managing Twitter Follows

...I couldn't say "tweeps" in my subject line. I tried, but I just couldn't.

So maintaining an active Twitter presence is not for the faint of heart or the capricious. It takes time and active engagement to get the benefit of this social media platform.

And after a while, some folks simply decide that there's nothing in it for them and stop participating -- they mostly even stop reading.

That's just fine, but when you reach the upper limit for the number of folks you can follow, you may decide that you wish to stop following folks who are not participating.

A great tool for doing this is Untweep. (http://untweeps.com/)  This tool gives you a way to look up the people in your Twitter stream who have not updated in over 30 days (by default).

I personally use it to create a list of folks who have not updated in over 120 days and then go through with a knife to carve them from my roster.  This gives me room to follow new people who are actively engaged and contributing to the stream.

But I Know it Really Happened

...is it just me, or is Twitter search solely obsessed with the very recent past?  I wanted to pull up some updates that I'd made about 2 months ago, and cannot find them.

I tried advanced search, tried searching with Tweetdeck, and I even tried a Google search.

Where is the old stuff?  Is it only available to anthropology students at MIT who are researching us?

If you know something about this, comment right here.

Where do you look

...okay, it's been almost a year and a half since Microsoft rolled out Bing and told us that it was better than Google because they were calling it a "decision engine."

I've used it, read a bit about it, and I still don't see significant difference, and certainly very little of significant value to me out here.

What I do see is that it's much better for Microsoft (and notably, its advertisers) if I search at Bing.  Good for you guys!

Can anyone tell me an actual practical benefit that I might see as a user of Bing rather than as a user of Google for searches? (I've read the Wikipedia and the Microsoft agit-prop on the matter. I'm looking for something that I can tell my grandmother about it -- something that benefits us!)

How do YOU view?

...if you've never taken a leisure day to explore the richness that Second Life has to offer, you should do that as soon as you can. Some myths you can ignore.

The Platform

...so everyone is talking about the cloud, and you often hear the phrase "social media fabric."

What does that mean? I don't know, but I'll tell you this!

Anyone who tells you that they do know, that they do understand; that's your snake oil merchant.

It's evolving and we're inventing it even as we talk about it.

Take a look at this for clues.  Three hours of good hard study and you can credibly place yourself in the top 15% of so-called SEO experts.