This “important WINDOWS” update” showed up in my email in-basket Saturday and, based on the text, punctuation and the fact that the purported sender was “windows.com” instead of Microsoft, it’s a safe bet that it’s malware.

My recommendation? If it arrives in your email, ignore>delete.

Ted Stevens Loses his Senate Seat

Convicted felon Ted Stevens has lost his re-election bid for the Alaska Senate seat which he held for the last, oh, eleventy-hundred years. While in the Senate, Stevens gained notoriety for bringing home epic quantities of pork barrel projects, being convicted of a felony, and, how could we forget, comparing the Internet to a series of tubes during a debate on Net Neutrality legislation:

“They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”

But now that Alaskans have routed him from office by a whopping 3,724 vote margin, we must now deal with the aftermath of his absence from the Senate.

The Internet is no longer a series of tubes.

Just as Alaska has moved on and found another Senator, we too must move on and find another ridiculously inaccurate characterization for the Internet. Help me out…continue reading

Total time spent online is up 24.3%. At least that’s the conclusion reached by Jay Meattle after, I assume, conducting a thorough study. To graphically illustrate his conclusion, Jay provided this handy graph but neglected to mention the source data used in its construction. Perhaps it’s provided elsewhere on his site. Nonetheless, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt since we all sort of assume that we spend too much time online and, after all, it’s a pretty impressive graph. Check it out:

From the graph and presumably the data it depicts, Jay concludes:

“We are spending more and more time consuming information online. Logically, since time is finite, online advertising spend[ing] should follow a similar trajectory with marketers allocating their ad budgets in proportion to where people are spending their time.

Needless to say, this is a time of considerable opportunity for online media properties and online marketers!”

Well, sure. But shouldn’t we at least consider what kinds of online activity are included in the data? I mean, I think we can all agree that a great many people use the internet as their primary news source. My readers (ahem) probably fall into this group. If they weren’t online, they would be reading Time or Newsweek in paper format thereby contributing to deforestation. So let’s classify them as “green” onliners. And some are online to post the aforementioned news stories, also “green” onliners but sub-categorized as “producers” vs. “consumers”.

Then there are ‘net “surfers”, free spirits who simply ride the internet waves in search of the next “big one” but contribute little beyond clever cryptic comments like “Awesome dude” and “LOL”. If they weren’t online, they would be watching cable TV or skateboarding…

Click to read more ...

Thanks James!

I have a hard time understanding the success of MySpace. I know, it’s for “social networking”, I get it. But the personal sites I’ve visited are clunky, crowded, confusing conglomerations that have left me exhausted and wondering why MySpace doesn’t clean up its interface.

Someone once told me MySpace was originally designed for musicians to distribute samples of their music and book gigs. And the music window works great, although it would be a more pleasant experience without the surrounding clutter.

Anyway, kids soon discovered MySpace and the rest is history. Unfortunately, freaks and pervs discovered it too. If you have kids, especially tweens and teens, MySpace is not a safe place for them to hang out.

My older younger brother (think before you ask) recently joined Facebook and asked me to sign up in order to share his photos. So, reluctantly, I did. Surprisingly, I found the interface to be infinitely more intuitive than Myspace which I hate but joined in order to communicate with my grandson, Dakota, while he was in Europe with his soccer team. I know, lots of folks love Myspace, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one that thinks it’s a bloated, clumsy clunker.

Anyway, between the two, Facebook appears to provide a smoother user experience and a better sense of humor. For example, I found this post on the site’s own blog somewhat amusing. Apparently, some folks aren’t choosing a gender in their profiles, an omission that has caused some problems for Facebook’s language translators, so much so that they’ve asked members to kindly select one or the other. Of course, not to appear insensitive to users who haven’t yet decided which gender they want to be, Facebook has granted an exception:

“We’ve received pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting. We have a lot of respect for these communities, which is why it will still be possible to remove gender entirely from your account, including how we refer to you in Mini-Feed.”

The male/female distinction is “too limiting”? How so, I wonder. What other distinctions might there be? Anyone?

Remember the WiFi pact brewed up between AT&T and Starbucks earlier this year? Well, the two have announced that the rollout has begun at company-operated Starbucks locations and the nationwide effort will continue throughout 2008.

Effective May 1st, qualifying AT&T high-speed internet / WiFi customers — that’s those who subscribe to one of the three higher-speed residential broadband packages, a small business broadband package or a U-verse offering with high-speed internet — will have free WiFi access at over 7,000 coffeehouses across the US. Coupled with AT&T’s January announcement offering broadband subscribers free WiFi at all their WiFi locations nationwide, it’s looking like a pretty good year for AT&T broadband subscribers!

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and LONDON, England (April 1st, 2008) – Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Virgin Group today announced the launch of Virgle Inc., a jointly owned and operated venture dedicated to the establishment of a human settlement on Mars. …

For thousands of years,
the human race has spread out across the Earth, scaling mountains and plying the oceans, planting crops and building highways, raising skyscrapers and atmospheric CO2 levels, and observing, with tremendous and unflagging enthusiasm, the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply across our world’s every last nook, cranny and subdivision.

An invitation.
Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.

The question is, do you want to join us?
Ever yearned to journey to the stars? You can learn how to become a Virgle Pioneer, test your Pioneering potential, or join the Mission Control community that will help develop the 100 Year Plan we’ve outlined here.

Interested? Complete the questionaire to see if you’re a suitable candidata. Questions? Check the FAQs. Read the hundred year plan. More

Aviary is a suite of web-based applications for people who create. From image editing to typography to music to 3D to video, there’s a tool for artists of all genres. It’s an image editor, similar to Photoshop, but different.

The latest addition to the already popular suite is Dodo, a web-based time machine. Still in Beta, it does some amazing things sure to impress creative professionals.

According to the Web site, the application will allow you to age and de-age people, places and things from any browser with Flash 9 enabled, and is incredibly simple to use: Just upload an input picture, choose between different settings that might affect the aging process (i.e. amounts of alcohol and tobacco consumed), set a year and hit “generate”.

Aviary sees a market opportunity across several mediums beyond graphic design, from tracking down long missing children, to determining if a girlfriend will end up looking like her mother.

To access Dodo, sign up for an Aviary account at http://a.viary.com. If you already have an account, log out and back in to see it appear in your tool list.

To see Dodo in action, watch the video demo below.

Aviary won’t disclose the technology that makes all this possible, but we believe it’s akin to magic considering the timing of the launch.

Google Australia has announced today the launch of gDay, a new search engine that allows users to search a day in advance of real time:

Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.

We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!

To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank.

The core technology that powers gDay™ is MATE™ (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation).

Here are a few of the things that slipped through the proverbial cracks this week but are still worth mentioning:

TechCrunch has two separate reader reports of a phishing scam targeting Facebook users. The scam involves a notice appearing on the wall of user profiles as a message from a friend saying, “Hey, I got a new facebook account. I’m going to delete this one, so add my new profile…” with a link that appears to direct to the new profile but actually directs to a URL on view-facebookprofiles.com, a domain registered (and whois protected) on Namecheap and hosted at Softlayer that looks identical to the Facebook login page. Users fooled into resubmitting their Facebook details on this page then have their Facebook accounts hijacked and all of their contacts receive a similar message, propagating the phishing scam. It’s not yet clear what the phishing scammers are planning on using the compromised accounts for or how far it has spread, but beware…

Adobe has launched a basic version of Adobe Photoshop available for free online. Photoshop Express will be completely Web-based so consumers can use it with any type of computer, operating system and browser. According to Yahoo! News, Adobe says providing Photoshop Express for free is part marketing and part a strategy to create up-sell opportunities. It hopes some customers will move from it to boxed software like its $99 Photoshop Elements or to a subscription-based version of Express that’s in the works. More…

Remember Apple’s Newton? It brought handwriting recognition to hand held computing years ago but never quite found its niche market. Well, Apple’s kept its patents viable and now seems poised to reintroduce it for Mac OSX, other applications and the iPhone according to a report by Arnold Kim for Mac Rumors. “Apple has started hiring for a new Handwriting Recognition Engineer. The job description specifically seeks someone who would be responsible for ‘advancing Apple’s handwriting recognition technology for Mac OS X’ and ‘to other applications and the iPhone.’”…

There you have it. I’ve cleared my desk and I’m taking the rest of the week off.

Another comical skit from The Vacationeers…

I’m one of those people that hates to read instructions. I’d much rather either figure it out myself or, better yet, watch it being done before tackling it myself. So this new service seems right up my alley…

A New York City startup called Howcast launched yesterday and wants to be the “YouTube of instructional videos.” In fact, the three founders—Jason Liebman, Daniel Blackman and Sanjay Raman—are ex-Google employees who worked on Google Video and YouTube before leaving eight months ago. They’re apparently going for a little more polished look than YouTube, trying to bring some production values to the world of Web video.

The site provides professionally produced instructional videos on everything from “How to Groom Your Cat” (see below) to “How to Hang a Picture” and “How to Paint a Room”. There’s a familiar formula for each one: The Howcast graphic, an intro explaining what you’ll need for the task at a hand, and step-by-step instructions explained in a voiceover. The site’s video player lets you jump to different chapters, or steps, zoom in for a better look, and provides the transcript as well. Viewers can add comments in the form of tips, warnings and facts to each video. And the Flash-based site lets you browse the video directory on the left hand side while you are watching a video without interrupting it or going to another page. More…

Although a few similar sites already exist, I’m looking forward to trying some of these as Howcast’s library broadens. Lord knows there are a lot of things I need to learn how to do!

Here’s some good news for AT&T broadband subscribers: Free Wi-Fi at AT&T’s 10,000 or so Hot-Spots! I haven’t read all the particulars yet but it appears that Premier and Basic service levels benefit. Key for me will be learning what “additional” locations are included since I don’t spend a lot of time at Barnes & Noble or McDonald’s. But hey, anything that adds to the puny number of free HotSpots in my area is a bonus!

When getting things done involves making phone calls, you want to spend the least amount of time and money on the horn as possible — and several tricks and services can help you do just that. For example:

I’m usually tuned into Google’s innovative new services but I guess I missed this one. It’s a free 411 service! Instead of calling regular telco or cellular 411 services for information (and an extra charge on your bill), use Google’s new 411 service by calling 1-800-GOOG-411 to get a street address or phone number, even a map of the area via text message. It’s free, fast and easy to use. We’re adding the number to our cellphone, home and office speed-dials! Watch the video, then give it a try!

Lifehacker has compiled a list of Top 10 telephone tricks to help you skip through or cut off long-winded automated voice systems and humans, access web services by voice, and smartly screen incoming calls. I haven’t tried the other 9 but probably will in the near future. Let me know how they work for you!