Month: November 2008

Internet fast for the holidays?

Dave

First of all, do we still talk about “memes,” or is that something else on which I am hopelessly behind? If we do, here’s a meme I’m seeing among some of my Twitter folks: an Internet fast for the holidays. Three of my colleagues have mentioned it, and two have cited spousal annoyance as a reason. That caught my attention, as I’m getting some heat at home for being buried in the BlackBerry or constantly staring at my laptop. Telling The Mrs. to follow me on FriendFeed did not elicit a positive response.

I’ve felt a bit overwhelmed by all my connecting methods lately. Ever since accepting the position of social media manager at SAS I’ve felt I needed to beef up my online presence. I started blogging in 2003 but I haven’t blogged about work until I started this blog, and that makes me feel at a disadvantage. At least once a day on the blogs or Twitter feeds of the social media gurus I follow I hear about something that I’m either not doing or not doing to its full potential. Steve Rubel is the worst “or best, I suppose”. I’m convinced he makes his morning toast on his iPhone, via Gmail. I was awake at midnight Saturday, in bed with my laptop, with a vague feeling I needed to be doing something with my Facebook profile, or checking in on the groups I’m following but not, you know, following. And then there’s my LinkedIn profile, and should I be using TweetDeck, and do I have Twitter alerts set up and what was the tool that Jim Tobin mentioned last week that made his BlackBerry beep whenever someone mentioned him on Facebook? Or was it Twitter? And do I even need that?

So the idea of an Internet fast sounds appealing, and also terrifying. Does that mean I’ve let social media become the equivalent of a dozen new inboxes that need to be dealt with? And if I go cold turkey “heh” on the Web this Thanksgiving, where am I going to look for stuffing recipes? A cookbook? What is this, 1952?

Have you condsidered an Internet fast? What would you miss the most?

Don’t pay the ransom. I’ve escaped!

Dave

Okay, I’ve been a bad, bad blogger. Between one, two or three members of the household having a cold for the last month, adjusting to the new day care “or as we call it, baby school” routine, some travel, some birthday activities and getting ready to transition to a new job within SAS “starting Dec. 1 I will become SAS’ first-ever social media manager”, there hasn’t been a lot of time or energy for baby blogging. Which is a damn shame because the boy is cuter than ever, and doing all kinds of stuff like pulling up and cruising and feeding himself hippie Cheerios substitutes and babbling and pointing at things and going “Hoohoo!” when he’s proud of some recent accomplishment. I have captured almost all of that in photos and some of it in video, and I promise I will upload as much as possible in the next week.

In the meantime, I offer you a photo Bonnie shot of Conrad at our neighborhood park, which may be the best photo ever. Of anyone. By anyone. Of all time.

That’s our happy boy.

Shouldn’t spammers be getting better, not worse?

Dave

The text of two spam emails I received this morning, blocked by my Outlook filter:

Good Afternoon

 

My name is Tammy, I live in Florida and I make handmade jewelry. I would like to know if you would have a possible interest in seeing my items on my website?

 

Thank you in advance.

 

Sincerely,

 

Tammy

And this one, which is at least concise:

 

open attachment file read and reply my letter business proposal from abdulla khouri

Caffeine + information overload = insomnia

Dave

I never have trouble sleeping. The last time I remember having any real trouble getting to sleep was seven or eight years ago the night my house was robbed. Oh, and ten years or so ago when I decided to start drinking coffee. After a few weeks I was having rapid heartbeat and withdrawal headaches and insomnia and realized I had gotten to my mid-30s without developing a caffeine addiction and that was no time to start. But today I had a big cup of regular coffee with an espresso shot and now, more than 12 hours later, I can’t sleep.

I’m getting a similar feeling from Twitter these days. I love the concept. I love the immediacy. I love being able to see what people are doing and reading and recommending in such a short format. As a writer I find it a fascinating exercise in brevity and craft. But come on, how do you keep up with it? I just added half a dozen people in the last couple of days, for a total of 60 people I’m following, and I already feel overwhelmed. Guy Kawasaki alone sent 54 tweets in the last 23 hours. With an inbox holding 2,000+ emails that need to be read, deleted or filed, I get enough of that feeling from my Web 1.0 channels.

I just downloaded TweetDeck in the vague hope it would provide some relief, but while a nice interface, it doesn’t really address the problem of having enough time to read it all. I’ve starred quite a few tweets that contain links to articles I want to read later, but now I have a backlog of tweets to follow up on. Did I mention I have 2,000 emails in my inbox? How about the number of unread items in my Google Reader? I don’t need another firehose.

Is Twitter really a positive development in communication? Or will we start seeing articles in the next couple of years by people describing how they’ve increased their productivity by, as impossible as it sounds, turning off Twitter. “At first it was hard, and my colleagues had difficulty adjusting, but now I realize I’m getting more done.”

Hello, Internet! Are you ready to rock?

Dave

WordPress just offered me the opportunity to own my own domain and “make this blog davebtommylive.com for just $15 a year.” Thanks, but I think I’ll stick with dbthomas.com and dbthomas.net.

Does that mean that even davebtommy.com is taken?

I’m pretty sure that when I bought my first domain, plooble.com, I paid $150 for it. I came home late one Saturday night and had an email from Mindspring offering to sell me my own domain. How could I pass that up? I don’t remember what I paid for domain #2, dbthomas.net. Dbthomas.com was taken at the time but a few years later a domain broker sent me an email telling me it had become available and offering to sell it to me for 30 bucks. I went to GoDaddy and got it for $8.95.

Amazing now that $150 ever seemed a reasonable price for a domain. I’m glad I got the ones I did when I did. Or else maybe www.davebtommylive.com would sound like a bargain.

Although I am going to start introducing myself as Dave B. Tommy, Live.