View from the Mountain

Riding the technology waves

We dispersed our cattle herd in the fall of 1981. I grabbed my second technology wave that year when with my mother's help I bought an Apple II+ and started writing a newsletter for the Canadian Angus Association.

A lot of people at the time said the best thing to do was to wait for computers to go down in price.  Well except for the ones from Apple, computers are still going down in price twenty eight years later.

I am glad that I did not wait.  I managed to sandwich a nearly twenty year career with Apple in there.  I have often thought that there are only three outcomes with waves.  You can ride them, jump and get a little lift as they come by, or get smashed by them.

Standing still and get smashed by a wave has never appealed to me.  If you have ever been out in the ocean jumping the waves and got smashed by wave, it is something like going for a ride in a washing machine.

I have been riding the technology waves of social networking and blogging for five years now.  There are still lots of people in denial about the importance of social networking to business.  There are now as many paid blogger as lawyers.  I am one of those paid blogger.

I am also a Realtor®, and I no longer believe in typical print advertising.  There are a number of real estate agents in our firm which has four offices.  No one can remember the last time that they got a call from someone responding to an ad in a real estate magazine or a newspaper.

The world has moved on and if you want to connect with potential clients and especially buyers, you need an online presence.

I actually think Twitter has huge potential, but I know of a number of agents who do not want to take the time to figure it out.  They want things to stay the same.  It is not going to happen.

Life is about change.  We either adapt and move on, or we get left behind.  I plan to keep moving forward.  I am Ocracokewaves on Twitter.  Join me in the adventure.

This article, 10 Ways To Be Useful on Twitter, is a good start and David Pogue's article, All You Need to Know about Twitter, fills in the rest of the story.

By the way, my first technology wave happened to be round balers.  I was one of the first farmers in eastern Canada to use them in 1973.  The provincial agriculture departments said they would never work.  I was right, they were wrong.

Sticking your finger into the social media stream

Years ago I attended a briefing about a revolutionary intelligence gathering mechanism.  It was described as a river of data, and the cool part was being able to just listen for the pieces that you wanted to find.

Social media is a little bit like a river.  It can drown you, and it can hide what you want to find.  But if you can figure out how to connect with just the currents that you want then social media can be very rewarding.

You can find new people, new ideas, and if you are looking new clients.

However, it can also be a huge drain on your time.  I am pretty sure no one wants to know what I am doing all the time.  However, I do know that a few people like to know what I am up to once in a while. 

People enjoy pictures that I take so I often post pictures or articles that I find of interest.  If I write something that might be of interest, I will also post a link.

I try to comment on updates that are of interest to me and respond back to comments.

Social media is another way of letting yourself be touched on the Internet, and it is also a way of touching others.

It does not require that you be online at the same time like chatting online, and it also does not require a long individualized response like responding to an email or sending someone a letter.

The three types of social media that I am most familiar with are Twitter, Facebook, and City-Data Forum. 

Twitter I think is the most interesting and the most like a river of data where you can touch some new currents and go in some different directions.  I rarely update more than two or three times a day.  I have not gotten to the point of needing to split my Twitter into different feeds, but I have found that some people update too much for my taste.

Facebook has yet to do much more for me than provide a glancing connection with some people that I once knew well.  It does allow me to do a quick peak and see what they are up to, but it certainly is not something that I feel compelled to check or update.

The portion of City-data that I use is geographic specific rather than interest specific.  What I have written there, and the questions that I have answered have helped me build a reputation.  It has worked well, but it took some effort to craft a good way to respond to people and create the materials that help people with their questions.  With City-data it is easy for me to quickly look and see if there is conversation which interests me.

I do not think social media is to be feared.  It is just another piece in the puzzle.  It will work for some people, and others will never understand it.

Parents should at least explore social media so they have an idea of what is happening there.  Small businesses ignore social media at their own risks.

Certainly social media is a faster moving extension to commenting on blogs. Small businesses that ignore blogs are certainly going to be poorly prepared if they get whacked in social media. They will likely not know what hit them and be unprepared to respond in any form.

Professionals should be careful with how they use social media but I think it is at least as important to understand Twitter as it is to be on LinkedIn and Plaxo.

Depending on the social media, the impact can be fast and short-lived or it can build like a storm.  Being intelligently aware of how blogs, instant messaging, and social media interact can certainly prepare you for the future and help you weather the current economic storm.

I am Ocracokewaves on Twitter and AIM.  On City-Data I am dsobotta.

I welcome any interaction with folks trying to get a toehold in cyberspace.

Thoughts on organizing your email

I have lived in the world of technology since 1982.  I saw both email and the Internet develop into powerful tools.  I have also been blogging for almost five years and continue to use most of the useful social networks.

I gave a seminar last week at the Emerald Isle Parks and Recreation Center.  I used my laptop to present.  One of the participants noticed my inbox and was horrified to see that I had gotten perhaps one hundred emails that day.

I do not get half the emails that I used to receive when I was a manager at Apple Computer. There were days at Apple when I got two or three hundred emails.  At a certain point all I could do was hold my hands on the monitor and use Vulcan mind meld.

Since leaving Apple and going through a variety of careers, the last being as a Realtor® on the Crystal Coast of North Carolina, I have developed a reliable system for handling email.

It does not involve tedious filing of email into folders.  There are just not enough hours in the day for that even at my much reduced one hundred emails a day.

My solution is multiple email accounts. 

I have a personal email account using one of Google's free domains.  My wife and some of my family and a friend or two have also taken advantage of my domain which Google will let support up to twenty email accounts.  I try to keep most of personal mail with family and close friends in this account. We also do most of our online chatting through this account.  I have chosen the IMAP option which allows me to easily have access the same mail at multiple computers.  It also has a good webmail interface which lets me get at my mail from any secure computer.

I have a number of old clients and friends from Apple.  I actually have a special email account for them.  It used to cost me $9.95 per year, but it is now free.  It is also IMAP based so again there is no problem using it with different computers.

Bluewater GMAC Real Estate, the company where I work provides me with an IMAP account hosted by MailTrust where I used to work.  All of my internal company communications stays within this account.

Since I used to work with MailTrust, I also have another account with them.  I actually purchased it before I went to work with them.  I got it when I was a consultant for National Lambda Rail.  I have kept it and use it for all my official communication with clients.  Of course it is also IMAP.

I also have a .Mac account which I use mostly for subscriptions and paying for things.  It is my ecommerce account.  It is also IMAP.

I regularly use one other account which is attached to my main domain CoastalNC.org.  It is a POP account, and I use it for a contact point for a few blogs, some friends who infrequently communicate, and some local people whom I want to focus on that particular domain.  It probably gets about 2% of my email.  It is reliable and does have a good webmail interface, but of course being POP, you have to be careful with the settings on multiple computers.

This system works for me on Macs and Windows.  I use Apple's Mail on my Macs. I use Thunderbird on Windows XP and Outlook on Vista.  On Linux I only use my Gmail account but I do have Thunderbird configured.  I just do not use it often.

About once every six months, I spend a couple of hours moving IMAP messages from servers to my desktop.  Once in a while I will take an important mailbox that I have archived and make a copy to an external hard drive, and it put it on my server at home. That is a rare event these days, and I suspect that I need to do it even less.

I have managed to keep most of my important email on servers that other people back up.

Most people do not get the kind of email that I do, but many people do have business and personal email.

I highly recommend that you at a minimum separate the two.  I am a contractor where I work so I feel it is necessary for me to own my business email.  I do not want the company to own my mail.  I am fine with them owning the communication between me and them, just not between me and my clients.

It is very easy to get a free Gmail account and put your personal mail there.  Just follow this link and you will be set in a few minutes.

Next if you need serious email for business, buy your own domain and start building your brand.  MailTrust is a very reliable company and you can get three 10 gig email boxes for a total of $9 per month.  Your domain will cost $30 or so from MailTrust, but you will have better email than you get through any ISP.

For most people this will serve them very well.  If you want to make your life a little easier get a third account and keep your ecommerce in that account.  Then when you get an email in your business email saying that your bank account has been compromised, you will know that it is fake because you do not use that email account for ecommerce.

My next post will tackle my thoughts on social networking.

Precious Print

Within a few months of starting to blog in late 2004, I wrote a piece, Love and Respect for Print.  In my mind print has always stood for permanence.  I suspect it is why we still print contracts for people to sign.

Next month in Emerald Isle, I am giving a seminar on Digital Scrapbooking or how to get your photos and movies from the shoebox to DVDs and the web.  While on the surface it might look like I am abandoning prints for the digital world, I actually take a small Canon Pixma printer with me to the seminar to emphasize the importance of getting a real copy of your favorite photo onto to paper.  I also talk about how long inks and papers last.

One of my messages is that we should not abandon paper.  I am delivering this thought at a time when newspapers are dropping faster than rain in a nor'easter.  Today we heard that the Rocky Mountain News will publish its last issue on Friday.  That ends around 150 years of publishing.  I can only hope their archives survive.

This morning I read an article by John Dvorak called, Our History: Error 404.

Fortunately we are still printing newspapers, books, and magazines, but we know where that might be headed. At some point there will be the final nail in the coffin and everyone will be reading on a Kindle or with erasable paper or some such thing that will end hard copy forever. That point will mark the end of history, as everything will be subject to permanent erasure.

Part of Dvorak's worry is legitimate, and part of it just highlights what historians have had to do for many years, piece together records.  When you start digging around in your own family history, you are very lucky if you have a few letters and written documents to help tie things together.

At one time people wrote lots of letters, that was the way people communicated.  The telephone changed that long ago.  I went to military school as a teenager.  That was in the sixties and change was already upon us.

One of things we had to do each week was write a letter home and have it graded and perhaps censored before it was sent home.  Most of the censorship was self enforced since you knew teachers were going to be reading the letter.  In retrospect that weekly activity taught me how to write interesting letters.

At the same time I got into the habit of calling home by telephone either Saturday or Sunday.  It became a habit I followed until my mother moved in with us in 2000.

Most of the real information was conveyed by telephone.  It became almost a ritual. When I got married, my wife quickly added her folks and every weekend until their deaths we called them. Since we lived far away in Canada for many years, there was something reassuring in those phone calls.  However, there is no written record of those calls.  I wish there were just a few recordings.

The phone calls started breaking down written history well before computers did.  When we first moved to Nova Scotia, we were on a party line with nine other people, most of whom enjoyed listening to any conversation whenever they got the chance.  After all, we barely got two analog television channels and one CBC radio station.

Telephone calls were also expensive in those days so I guess the cost along with the party line was the driving factor behind my golden age of letter writing.  I ran into a few of my letters in cleaning out my mother's home after her death.  It was fun reading them and reliving those times.

Then a few years later, a friend of mine in Boston send me a package with several letters that I had sent her during our first years in Nova Scotia.  Since we have been great friends for close to forty years, she thought I would enjoy revisiting them.  I read some of them last month.  They were filled with information that I had long forgotten.  The letters even contained some hand drawn maps.  There was a time before Google maps.

I will probably end up scanning a few of the letters, but I will try to save the paper copies if possible.  They are a detailed record of daily activities years ago.  Those letters are just the type of information  that historians need in order to write meaningful history.

As an undergraduate in college, I spent a lot of time reading microfilm and musty pieces of paper.  I wonder what historians will find in the future.  Maybe they will be mining hard drives, but I hope it is easier than that.

I for one doubt that all the history will be gone as Dvorak postulates when the switch gets turned off.   I suspect enough paper pieces of it will survive for historians to piece things together.  Certainly there are enough National Geographics holding down bookcases to provide a good start.  A friend of my in New Jersey says he is not worried, his basement is full of the good stuff.

I know I have boxes of paper, books, and magazines.  I even have some of the high school literary magazines where I was a contributor.  One has one of the few poems that I have ever written, another has one of my only short stories.  Over the years I have kept magazines and papers that mean something to me, the first Doonesbury cartoons from the Harvard Crimson,  even a paper copy of the Guardian Newspaper article that I wrote.  They might all end up in the trash when I am gone, but I suspect some will survive.

While my web musings might disappear when the switches are thrown, I know they will have created some memories.  Some will likely survive in print, and I have not given up on a book.

The first chapter or so is done, mentally I am ready to move forward with it.  Maybe the nasty weather I have invited next week and turning the pages on another decade will get me moving forward.

Paper is not dead. It just is not the first choice these days. Paper needs to be used when necessary. 

The lack of paper is not even the biggest problem.  After all you can print all the emails you want.  My wife printed and saved all the emails we received from our oldest daughter the first year she was in college.  I have newsletter that I created for her the first time she went off to camp.

The biggest problem is that we have so much information that figuring out what to save is a challenge most people just ignore.

I hope that what papers I leave behind will be of value in the future even if only to my family members.  They might last longer than the DVDs that I have created.

Amazing Times

We actually do live in amazing times.  I am sometimes speechless at what companies can do these days with technology.

I almost feel like we are in a golden age of technology.

I sometimes find out about this stuff in strange ways.  Yesterday I was adding some Trulia code to my website and working on a real estate market report.   I came upon this new technology called Trulia in your car.

I had heard of using Trulia with your iPhone, but I had no idea that you can now buy a GPS unit that stays connected to the Internet and which provides the location of homes for sale in an area that meet your specs. You can also do live Yahoo searches from it.

It costs under $250 plus $13 or so a month.  I want a refund on my worthless Toyota Avalon GPS unit that cost $2K.

Then I found out about a new device from Sony that lets you geo-tag your photos and movies with certain cameras.  How cool is that?

On top of that Sony has a wireless enabled camera that has a built-in browser that allows you to log onto networks and upload your photos.

There are enough cool phones coming out, that even the iPhone makers at Apple might have to worry a little.

Last night I read about the new Canon PowerShot SX1 which is coming to the US in April. It appears to be a bridge product between an ultra zoom still camera and an HD video camera. It even has some sort of HDMI output.

I am still recovering from some of my Panoramio photos being considered for Google earth which comes fresh on the heels of my eureka moment that online software that can be better for specific purposes than the expensive stuff that I have on my computer.  I love the Avery.com online design tools.  I shudder at the thought of doing with regular software a two sided business card which comes out like a tent and has four printed business card surfaces.  You can do it in minutes with the Avery software.

My mind is still processing how easy it is for me to go to a website and get it to generate code for my website.  I just did that with Trulia and added some search functionality and stats to my Realtor® site.  It all just seems to work.

It is still amazing how easy it is to do a sophisticated post with media and links.  While all the platforms are a little different, it is a piece of cake for someone to write a post on Trulia, another on Typepad, and finish with one on a web platform put together locally.  They all seem to work very well.

And the communication that they foster goes around the world.  Earlier in the week I had someone from China contact me.  Yesterday it was Germany.

These are very cool times.  Now if I could make some money in real estate to buy a few of those neat gadets.