Category Archives: Tech Stuff

SXSW: Privacy Parts

Posted on March 19, 2010 | 5 Comments

Got back a few days ago from my annual trip to Austin for the SXSW Interactive conference–learned a lot of cool stuff and met a lot of cool people, as always. I’ll be posting a few of my observations over the next few days, but before I do, I wanted to point you guys to the transcript from Danah Boyd’s excellent keynote address on Internet privacy and social norms.

Give it a read–the issues she’s addressing affect literally every Web user. In my former life as a tech blogger and security editor at PCMag.com, I came to realize a few things:

1) Your data is not as private as you thing

2) Your data is much more valuable than you think

3) The companies that collect data on you are using it

4) A huge subset of Web users are completely clueless. About everything. It might not even be a subset…it might be a majority.

5) It’s almost impossible to enforce any kind of privacy norms, because everyone (myself included) checks that little box that says “I agree to the terms and conditions” without reading the terms and conditions. And most of us choose the privacy defaults that we’re presented with. And most of us are completely clueless.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Tech Stuff, Web Stuff

Check Out InstantJury.com

Posted on October 21, 2009 | Leave a comment

My friend Brett (besides being the other half of Mere’s rhythm section and the defacto mayor of Hoboken) launched a website called InstantJury.com, which solves disputes between embittered roommates, rival siblings, jilted lovers, and run-of-the-mill frenemies.

Got a beef? File suit on InstantJury, specify the damages you think you deserve,  and the defendant will be subpoenaed via e-mail. At that point, you each have 24 hours to make your arguments and counterarguments, and then the InstantJury community weighs in to determine who’s right and who’s wrong.

For a good look at how it works, go check out the Hall of Shame cases. This one is my favorite, I think. Outed by the Excel spreadsheet!

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Posted in Tech Stuff, Web Stuff

Tweeters Never Prosper

Posted on September 28, 2009 | 4 Comments

Man, everyone’s in a tizzy over The Washington Post’s new social media guidelines for reporters. The full text of the policy is on PaidContent.org, but to summarize, WaPo expects its editors and journalists to be responsible on Twitter/Facebook and not post anything that might be construed as editorializing.

Bloggers are having all kinds of fun opining on how restrictive and backwards the policies are. Journalists should be able to say whatever they want, right?! (TechCrunch rails on WaPo here). I disagree with just about everything in that post. News organizations have a huge stake in maintaining objectivity. They owe their very existence to it. In the case of reporters, they’re paid for their unbiased take on news events. Why should WaPo let them go shoot their mouths off on Twitter? Credibility and the perception of objectivity of the kind that WaPo relies on is not easily obtained, but it is easily lost.

PCMag has a much more relaxed policy, mainly because they see Twitter as a traffic driver to the PCMag.com site and a way for writers/editors to build PCMag’s cachet on the social network. But the staff’s tweeting runs the gamut. Brian Heater (@bheater) has a feed full of non-sequiter jokes–no tech stuff at all. Sascha Segan (@saschasegan) and Cisco Cheng (@ciscoc) are, in my opinion, some of the best tech tweeters, providing their followers with all kinds of good info.

But that’s only one approach to the Twitter issue, and it’s too early to say if it’s the right one. Would PCMag be better served by keeping all those writers locked up and making them supply that info for publishing on the PCMag web site/blogs? I don’t think so, but perhaps. Would they have a right to enforce such a policy? Of course. After all, Twitter is, in some respects, a competing publishing platform.

Lastly, TechCrunch’s bloggers always seem unable to grasp the idea that not every news outlet can be or should be or wants to be just like TechCrunch, and that there’s a need for different news outlets with different goals and models. I’m glad TechCrunch does what it does, and it does it well; but we need some WaPos and some NYTs and some PCMags too.

Update: I meant to include this story from Mashable, about Texas Tech football telling the players to stop tweeting after a couple of them said negative things about the team and head coach. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

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Posted in Tech Stuff, Web Stuff, Work Stuff

I’ll Miss You, PCMag

Posted on September 16, 2009 | 8 Comments


Today’s my last full day at PCMag, after working there for five and a half years. It was my first (paying) job in the media, and my boss, Vicki, was the one that hired me. And, incredibly unusual for a media company, our PCMag.com team has changed very little in the past five years–most of the people on the PCMag.com online team were there when I started, or were hired soon after. I think that’s a real testament to quality of the workplace and the quality of the work the team does.

As with any group of people that have spent so much time together, we’ve built some tight bonds and our own culture, which I’ll really miss. I’m leaving PCMag of my own volition, but it’s still going to be hard to leave the friends and the job behind. So I thought I’d make a list of all the things I’ll miss about the place. It’s mostly for myself, but also so the people I’ve worked with will know how I feel upon leaving. Here’s the list:

The Lunchtime Music Jams
Almost every day, a group of us eat lunch in my office and listen to music on GrooveShark.com. We choose a theme each day, and go around the circle picking songs that fit with the theme. We have the snobbiest of indie music snobs (Brian) and the poppiest of American Idol fans (Jen), so the playlist we create is bizarre and delightful. It’s like a midday party every day!


The Creative Mischief
Creative people have fun in creative ways, and I’ll never forget the pranks and games we played in our downtime. Office laser-tag wars. An office filled to the ceiling with balloons. A 50X-scale recreation of the PCMag.com homepage on Vicki’s office wall. Epic Rock Band and Karaoke nights. The Battle of Hello Kitty vs. Bobblehead Michael Miller. The many, many one-joke websites we launched. The mischievous idea that morphed into a full-blown podcast with thousands of listeners (oops!)

The Toys
We are literally surrounded by toys in the office, and encouraged to play with them. We have PR people emailing us, begging us to accept new toys to play with. That’s quite a nice situation to be in.

The Smart People
Top to bottom, PCMag is full of smart people. Those analysts in the PCMag Labs know everything, and it’s fun to associate with guys like that. And of course I’ll miss the intelligent, fun editorial and production teams.

The Nerds
Seriously, PCMag has some NERDS. You think I’m a nerd? Get Brian Heater, Eric Griffith, and Whitney Reynolds together–it’s like they’re speaking a different language (probably some mixture of Klingon, high-elvish, and parseltongue).


The Creative Freedom
Vicki has always left me to my own devices, to a large extent. When I wanted to launch a software blog (AppScout), she and Jim Louderback both encouraged it and facilitated it. When I wanted to write a fun story or review a cool new game or attend a nerdy tech conference, she’s always given me the green light. And she was very supportive of the PCMag After Hours podcast, even when it became more like PCMag Workday Hours. That kind of freedom at a workplace is rare, and I’ll miss it very much.

The Grammar Fights
Words cannot express how much fun it is to have it out with co-workers over grammar and usage. Hashing out the perfect wording of headlines might actually be my No. 1 favorite workplace activity, and I love that there are plenty of other people at PCMag who feel the same way. I hope my successor discovers the trove of good headlines that is Whitney Reynolds (she’s not technically an editor, but more than once I’ve given her dull headlines or dreary copy which she miraculously made fun and interesting).

The News
It’s fun working in the media. You get to meet interesting people and always be in the know on the cool tech stuff that’s happening. I love the churn of the daily news cycle, and though I wouldn’t call myself a *real journalist*, it’s been fun to participate in the news world in the limited capacity that I did.

The Events
Even more than the daily news grind, I’m going to miss covering events. I’m seriously going to be depressed come early January when half the world is in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. It’s stressful, it’s exhausting, and I’m pretty sure it’s my favorite four days of the whole year.

Web Surfing
Facebook? Twitter? Digg? It was my job to check them regularly/obsessively. :-)

I’ve only highlighted the fun stuff, of course. Here’s my list of things I didn’t like about PCMag:

Just kidding. I’m not blogging about that.

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Posted in Tech Stuff, Web Stuff, Work Stuff

Say Hello To My Little Friend

Posted on August 22, 2009 | 3 Comments


Say what you want about the gutless, featureless mini-laptops known as netbooks. Corinne and I got one today, and we love it so far. Sure, any REAL computer would be embarrassed by the Atom processor, the 1GB of RAM, and the total lack of CD or DVD drive; our snotty iMac probably doesn’t feel very threatened by our new toy.

But said iMac lives in our bedroom, whereas I spend four hours a night by myself in the living room with our little Bumblebee while Corinne sleeps. There’s some fun stuff to do in the living room–a Wii, our TiVo, lots of movies to watch–but four hours of TV and video games a night were rotting my soul, and heaven knows what it would have done to Bumblebee’s developing brain over the next few months.

So, long story short, we got a Toshiba Mini NB205 to keep us company while we sit up all night with the little one. It’s a cheap, tiny, 10-inch laptop with a very usable keyboard, 2.5-pound weight, and over 8 hours of battery life (in case Corinne wants to take it on a long flight or to the park or something). Netbooks come even cheaper than the NB205, but this one spoke to me from the store shelf, and it’s PCMag’s Editors’ Choice winner.

Now I just gotta install the Windows 7 release candidate and it’ll be perfect!

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Posted in Tech Stuff

Time Warner Cable is Still Evil

Posted on August 2, 2009 | 1 Comment


Those of you who followed my Twitter feed back in February and March know that I’m no great fan of Time Warner Cable. I won’t get into the specifics of my beef with them; suffice it to say that my list of grievances is frustrating and not short.

My friend shared an interesting tidbit of information about them tonight. If you’re a TWC, Verizon FiOS, or AT&T cable subscriber, you already know that those companies strongly urge customers to sign up for their “Triple Play” packages (cable, internet, phone). TWC calls me every once in a while to remind me that I have no phone service and that I should sign up for it—ironic, right?

Anyway, my buddy did sign up for the Triple Play because it was cheaper than just getting the TV/Internet package. He never used the phone service, never gave the number out, and pretty much just ignored its existence.

The funny thing is, telemarketers call him. Now, I ask you: Who do you think sold his phone number to the telemarketers? Perhaps the telecom company that pressured him into signing up for the phone service in the first place? The company that priced the phone service so it’s cheaper to get than not to get?

Boy, I tell ya, if TWC didn’t have a monopoly in my neighborhood, I’d really give em the what-for before dropping them and going with another provider! Good thing for them I can’t do that, right?

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Posted in New York Stuff, Tech Stuff

On TiVos, Kindles, and Old Shoes

Posted on July 30, 2009 | 4 Comments

Allow me to set the stage for this post with a metaphor: I have a closet that is teeming with old shoes. Around 25 pairs, which is quite a lot, especially for a guy. I don’t buy a lot of shoes, I just have a lot of shoes, some of which are as old as nine years (my basketball Nikes) or even a decade (my Gore-Tex hiking boots, which saved my live during those Finnish winters on the Arctic Circle).

Every year or so I tell myself I’m going to consolidate my shoe collection: I’ll buy two good pairs to replace 10 old pairs. I buy the two new pairs of shoes, but then I start to think about all the specific usage scenarios I have for those old pairs. In the end, new and old shoes are forced to fitfully coexist in my small closet.

For instance, two years ago I was all set to throw away my favorite pair of shoes ever, a pair of brown Onitsuka Tigers. I bought some replacements, and wore my Tigers on a rafting trip as a final hurrah before I chucked them. But after an afternoon in the river, the shoes looked good again, and I decided it was important to have a pair of “kick-around” shoes. I’ve continued wearing them regularly for the two years since, and now they finally have a hole in the fabric. I’ll probably still keep them around for mud football or some such occasion.

Now, on to the point of this post. Technology is very much like my shoes, and it’s driving me crazy. Case in point: My DVD player. It’s a nice DVD player, but I almost never use it. I subscribe to NetFlix and have a TiVo, so I very much prefer to stream movies on my TiVo using NetFlix Watch Now. It’s free, it’s immediate, and there are no red envelopes to return; no waiting for new discs to arrive.

But only maybe 10 or 15 percent of Netflix’s catalog is available for streaming–the vast majority require getting a physical disc in the mail from NetFlix. Some of those I can download to my TiVo through Amazon’s Unbox on-demand service, others I can buy through iTunes. All of them are available through BitTorrent, but I usually feel guilty doing that and it’s a bit of a hassle.

There are plenty of NetFlix/Amazon/iTunes movies to keep me occupied for the rest of my life, if I didn’t ever care about watching specific films. But I do. So the DVD player stays.

There’s also a VCR hiding in a dark corner of some closet, but we won’t even mention that, except to say that I never need it, until I do.

Just like with the shoes, I’m surrounded by AV clutter, but I don’t want to get rid of it because I really do use it all. Physical and digital media don’t coexist nicely together, and yet they have to because of the stupid digital holdouts that are only available in physical form. If EVERY movie were available through NetFlix Watch Now, I’d be a happy man, and I would pay extra to be able to throw out my DVD player and still have access to a complete movie catalog. Do you hear me, movie studios? I will pay extra.

My wife and I recently got hooked on a TV series that had the first two seasons available on TiVo Watch Now. We devoured those, and were hungry for more, but guess what? The more recent seasons weren’t available for streaming. So I got them off BitTorrent, loaded them on to my iPhone, and hooked my iPhone up to my TV. And I didn’t even feel guilty about it!

The Kindle is the same way. We’re literally drowning in books in my apartment–I’m trying to cough a paperback out of my lungs as I type this. We could box most of them up and donate them to a library, if the Kindle could replace them. But it can’t, because the catalog of available books is incomplete. Not only that, but the catalogs are disparate across various e-reader services. So I’ve got my favorite e-reader on my iPhone, Eucalyptus, but there aren’t anywhere near enough books available for it, so I also have Kindle on my iPhone. And the catalog for that is woefully incomplete as well.

I know we’re experiencing the natural pangs of new industries being born, and I’m sure in five years these issues will mostly be resolved. But I’m impatient. I want to be able to stream every movie, download every book, and have two pairs of shoes that fit every occasion. Surely that’s not too much to ask?

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Posted in Tech Stuff

A Star-Studded Tech Podcast

Posted on July 3, 2009 | Leave a comment


Those of you who don’t follow my Twitter feed—and you absolutely SHOULD, because every tweet reads like it was spun from pure gold—probably don’t know about the little podcast that I co-host for PCMag.com called PCMag After Hours. My co-host Brian Heater and I chat about technology with tech-industry luminaries and PCMag’s own experts.

Basically, every week Brian and I sit in my office and make a list of people we really want to talk to; we’ve had guests ranging from an editor of The Onion to Trent Reznor to a tech-industry venture capitalist.

This week, everyone on our list inexplicably agreed to participate in the show! Our friend Natali Del Conte from CNET is our in-studio guest, talking about her new video project for CBS, and we also talk to Gary Vaynerchuck (of Wine Library TV), Xeni Jardin (of BoingBoing), and comedian Marc Maron (of Air America).

Listen/watch here, or you can subscribe to the PCMag podcast feed on iTunes.

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Posted in Tech Stuff, Web Stuff, Work Stuff

Real Music with Fake Instruments

Posted on April 26, 2009 | Leave a comment

My friend/coworker Brian Heater and I are launching a new tech podcast for PCMag.com this week, and I was tasked with creating some theme music for it. Inspired by cutting-edge electro-music makers like my friend Nathan Bowen and by the desire to do something a little geekier than the theme for PCMag Radio (Anything At All, by my band Mere), I decided to try a thought experiment: What if I used the fake plastic instruments from Rock Band to make real music?

I cobbled a quickie demo version together, and I think it sounds kind of cool. I didn’t get crazy with the music hacks; I just used the drum pads, the pedal, the guitar strummer switch, and the fret buttons, and then that metallic sound is me hitting the drum frame with drumsticks. I applied a few audio filters to some of the sounds, but tried to do so sparingly (I wanted it to retain the plastic-toy sound of the instruments as much as possible). The main cheat I did was to tweak the sound of the pedal. Originally, it was was almost silent, but now it actually sounds kinda like a bass drum.

The one addition I’m still trying to figure out is how to add notes, either in the form of a melody or a bass line. Any ideas? If you think of any, lemme know!

Here’s the clickety clack:

Mere’s Anything at All:

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Posted in Music Stuff, Tech Stuff, Work Stuff

Social Media Marketing on Tiny Little Blogs

Posted on April 7, 2009 | 2 Comments


Wanna know why everyone’s blathering on about how much Facebook and Twitter are worth? Why companies are tripping over themselves to get on Twitter? Or why everyone is trying to pass themselves off as social media marketing consultants all of a sudden? I’ll show you.

Yesterday, I read a hilarious blog post that my sister-in-law Jessie had written a few days before. Every year my mother-in-law somehow gets a hold of a list of names given to babies in a hospital in Rexburg, Idaho, and supplies Jessie with it for a blog post. If you know anything about Rexburg, you know it’s rural, overwhelmingly Mormon, and home to BYU Idaho (14,000 students, 26% of which are married). It’s like a perfect storm for crazy baby names. Great fodder for a great blog post, and Jessie totally nailed it.

I loved the post and wanted all my friends to read it, so I posted it on Twitter, from whence it was copied over to Facebook. I have a small group of 350 Twitter followers, and a group of 500 facebook friends. I’ve met and personally know all my Facebook friends, and I know maybe thirty percent of my Twitter followers, so overall it’s a fairly tight-knit group. (By contrast, PCMag’s Editor in Chief Lance has six THOUSAND followers, and my friend Natali has 15K, but I’m more of the typical Twitter user–they’re celebrities, at least within our tech sphere.)

Jessie provided me with her traffic numbers from yesterday, and I was astounded. She got 19 clickthroughs from Twitter, and 53 from Facebook. Now, those sound like small numbers, but that’s a 5% clickthrough rate from my Twitter followers, and a whopping 10% from my Facebook friends. 1 out of 10 of my Facebook friends not only SAW the link, but CLICKED on it—wow.

I’ve run a couple Facebook ad campaigns, one for my band during our Olympic hype, and another for my stupid cat blog (I should say, my stupid and practically defunct cat blog). I did it mostly out of curiosity, and the click-through rates were pretty average for FB ads, I think: around 0.1 percent. I wasn’t thrilled by that rate, but I was satisfied with it, as Facebook ads are known for being underperformers.

Here’s where social media marketing comes in. One out of a thousand people might click on an ad that a company pays to put on the Facebook sidebar. 1 in 10 might click on a link in a Facebook friend’s feed. Note that this is not an apples-to-apples comparison: 1/1000 people who SEE a Facebook ad click on it. 1/10 who are FRIENDS with the person who posted the link click on it. For the numbers to make any sense, I’m betting as many as 50 or 60 percent of my friends who saw the link clicked on it. And as friends leave comments, I’m betting the click-through rate gets even higher.

In other words, if a company or brand can find its way into your Facebook feed, it’s golden. Especially if your friends then pick it up and share it with their friends.

A Facebook friend of mine is a contributing writer for a great Mormon blog called “By Common Consent” that gets between 15K and 20K unique visitors a month, according to Compete.com
. He loved Jessie’s blog post and got it added to BCC’s sidebar of links. That little link in the sidebar was good for another 165 clicks to the blog.

These are small potatoes, of course—micro-level stuff that I’m just using by way of example. Jessie and I are just specks in the Twitterverse, and less than specks in the blogosphere. But everyone on Twitter and Facebook and Blogger are talking about stuff, throwing links around, and talking about their favorite and least favorite brands. That stuff carries way more weight than an ad does, so companies want in on the action. And if a company can get a mention from Lance, with his 6K Twitter followers, or from @KevinRose with his 433,376 followers, even better.

Now go read Jessie’s post. It’s way funnier than this one.

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Posted in Tech Stuff, Web Stuff