View from the Mountain

Tomatoes once again

While I plan to keep View from the Mountain focused on information that might be of use to people in our technology enhanced society, I do not plan to abandon some of my traditional topics.

One of those is our annual "Great Tomato Race."  This started years ago when a childhood friend of mine who still lives in Lewisville, NC and I started competing to see who could get the first tomato.

Since I lived in the mountains of Virginia, Mike, my friend, did not have much trouble beating me in the early years.  I think I managed one win in about five years.  In late 2006 we moved to the coast, but it took me a year to figure out the climate and varieties.  Last year I won with a June 1 tomato.

Now rumors of me moving to the coast just to win the tomato contest are totally unfounded.  I moved for the beaches, fish, water, and laid back life style.  However, I did enjoy winning last year.

We also picked up another contestant last year in my fishing buddy Dean who also lives at the coast. This year there has been a fair amount of jockeying and suggestions that I might have an unfair advantage living close to the water.

In fact I could hear the moans yesterday when I sent out the picture of our first tomato blooms.  We are on track to have another great year unless the fiddler crabs attack early.

Tomato wars are something you are born to fight if you have southern blood running through your veins.  My mother was a master tomato grower as was my wife's dad. 

Victory or not I will be enjoying great tomato sandwiches early in June.  Watch this page for announcements.

The pretenders to my crown will be crushed.

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.