Sneak Peek: One With Tech

See those links on the right? “One With Tech” is a work in progress right now. But when it’s done, this blog will look a little different. One thing you’ll see in the future version of this site is that I’ll be linking to the other One With Tech blogs from my main page. No, they’re not all up-and-running 100% just yet. Some might even be scrapped altogether and other new ones may show up. Who knows? But the end result will be a one-stop shop for all the tech news you can handle. 

However, you can get a little taste of what’s to come right now by checking out one blog that is up-and-running*: Lord of the Ping. Filling a void in the blogosphere, Lord of the Ping brings you real-world I.T. “news you can use” to counter the overabundance of web 2.0 blogs (ahem…) that you see today.

If you’re a modern day I.T. guy or gal, Lord of the Ping is your blog. If Mark Russinovich is your hero, you laugh when people talk about Google Docs in the Enterprise, you love a good techie office prank, and you get all excited over System Center Configuration Manager 2007, you should check it out. Think of it as the “anti-SarahInTampa.” As I hype the mobile Facebook app for Blackberry, Lord of the Ping reminds you to lock down your Blackberry Enterprise Servers. Oh nooes! Better hit up m.blackberry.com before your I.T. admin reads that!

* except for Archives & About page

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Yahoo launched a new social network called Kickstart today. The network is aimed at college students, recent alumni, and recruiters. Unlike Yahoo’s “regular” social network Mash (aka “Yawn”), Kickstart is more like a wannabe LinkedIn for the Facebook crowd. The Kickstart homepage even lists as one of the reasons to use Kickstart: “Uncle Ron may work for IBM, but it doesn’t mean you want him writing on your wall or poking your friends.” So basically, Kickstart wants to help college students and recent grads build a “professional” network for the purpose of career networking. But really, what about LinkedIn? Although that’s clearly what they want Kickstart to be, Yahoo is betting on the fact that “the kids” won’t have heard of it and will use Kickstart instead. Really? Even though all us “old” 30 & 40-year-olds took over Facebook, once a college-only network, when the kids want to grow up, they won’t come join the grown-ups on LinkedIn? Yeah, right.

There’s no Gphone. No shiny-screened iPhone killer. Instead, what Google announced today was a mobile platform. Code-named “Android” (huh??), the platform includes an operating system, user interface, and applications. A collective sigh from letdown bloggers shuddered through the blogosphere today. According to the Official Google Blog’s post on this, they think the platform they announced “is more significant and ambitious than a single phone,” which begs the question, “have they seen the iPhone?”

Sure, sure…the Google mobile platform was developed in cooperation with the Open Handset Alliance, which includes 30 tech and mobile leaders like Motorola, Qualcomm, HTC and T-Mobile, which means the Google platform won’t be tied to any one device and you won’t have to switch carriers to use it. It makes sense. It fits with their goal of “providing access to information to users wherever they are,” as they say.

However, I wanted this:

Consumers won’t see the Google platform in action until the second half of 2008.

A recent post on Feedburner’s blog announced the long-awaited AdSense integration that was sure to have been forthcoming since the Google acquisition of the FeedBurner service. The new capability puts AdSense ads on your blog or website, but not (yet) in your feed. If you want to activate the service, you first must sign up with AdSense, then sign into your FeedBurner account, click the “Monetize” tab, and connect your account to your AdSense account. You can then run a 300×250 or 468×60 text or image AdSense ad on your blog. The ad appears below the first item on your site and archive pages. You can customize the colors or use a saved color palette you already set up at AdSense so the ad fits into your site’s look and feel. FeedBurner users who are already a member of the FeedBurner Ad Network can choose to run the AdSense ads when there are no FeedBurner Ad Network ads to run.

Let’s see how it does…

On a side note, FeedBurner has inexplicably stopped showing me the number of subscribers subscribed in Google Reader, which was a least a couple of hundred people. Their stats are *broken.* I need feed stats tracking alternatives! (Update: This is a confirmed glitch!)

Seriously? I was sure we would see it one day, and apparently, that day is now here. A “Google Operating System” called gOS is running on this PC. The OS is a variant of the popular Ubuntu with lots of optimization for Google products. This isn’t an officially Google-sponsored PC, so I suggest Google disassociates themselves with the PC makers fast. The PC, designed to be a low-end, affordable desktop is being sold at Walmart. The PC has a 1.5 GHz Via Technologies C7-D processor, 512 MB of DDR2 memory, an 80 GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, an Ethernet port, a parallel port, and 6 USB ports, and comes with OpenOffice pre-installed. Although I’m sure the PC is decent, it’s hardly the glamorous launch Google would want for their (currently rumored) OS. I mean, jeez, eMachines are sexier than that.

Google announced on Thursday of last week that MySpace will also being joining their new platform for sharing applications across the web, OpenSocial. Conspicuously absent from the first list of social networks signed up for the platform, there was much speculation as to whether or not OpenSocial would ever really take off without big names like MySpace or Facebook onboard. Google also announced that Bebo would be joining OpenSocial as well. I’m not sure why there was a delay in announcing what are, arguably, the most important members of the new platform; these weren’t last-minute decisions…Google & MySpace execs even said that they began discussing an open-ended system more than a year ago. Apparently, the sole reason for the delay was so that the announcement coincided with a party that Google was throwing for its software developers Thursday in Mountain View. Good to know they have priorities.

My birthday is this month, but my present came early: today, I got a chumby! It’s the sort of thing that it’s hard to justify to buy for yourself, but extremely cool to receive as a gift. If you haven’t heard, chumby is a new (and may I say, awesome) compact device that displays useful and entertaining information from the web. On your chumby you can get news, photos, music, celebrity gossip, weather, box scores, blogs, and more by using your wireless internet connection. Like they say, chumby is “just pure 24/7 gratification to be able to have the Internet on tap.”

To use chumby, you plug it in and connect it to your wireless network. From chumby.com you can configure playlists of “widgets” to display on the device. Widgets can be anything…RSS feeds, web clips, animations, games, videos, etc. My “default” channel has Tampa’s weather from the Weather Channel, a Facebook widget, Twitter updates, a clock (from Cute Overload), and news from Engadget & TechCrunch. (Oh, and LOLCats…sorry, couldn’t resist). I also made a games channel, a flickr photos channel, and a “feeds” channel featuring content like Digg news, CNet content, Wired, GigaOM, and more.

The chumby also has speakers, so you can connect your iPod to your chumby using the iPod’s USB connector and play your iPod playlists on the chumby.

Even better than all this, chumby is totally customizable! For starters, chumby comes with charms you can hang from the side to personalize it. But even better, the chumby is completely hackable. You can thoroughly customize your chumby in one of four ways: hardware, software, flash, or crafts. The hardware is hackable, developers can write software for the open-source, Linux-based platform, and Flash developers can code for it as well. You can even customize the outside - the chumby is designed in such a way the insides can be easily removed from the leather casing so you can make it look the way you want. (See some customized chumbys here).

Each chumby device has the following:

wi-fi connectivity • access to the free chumby Network • 3.5″ LCD color touchscreen • two external USB 2.0 full-speed ports • 350 MHz ARM processor • 64 MB SDRAM • 64 MB NAND flash ROM • stereo 2W speakers • headphone output • squeeze sensor • accelerometer (motion sensor) • leather casing • AC adapter included

This chumby was an “insider’s release” chumby. I signed up for the “Insider’s Release” list a while ago, then forwarded the invite info & login information to Joel along with a “hint, hint - birthday idea” note. The holidays are almost here, I suggest you do the same. Chumby is under $200, so you won’t break the bank.

And wow, it sure is fun!

*Mine’s black but the widget only comes in tan!

As a huge fan of CNet’s "Buzz Out Loud" tech podcast, I was really sad to see Veronica Belmont leave the program a few months ago. Although Tom & Molly are pretty cool themselves, Veronica brought a more youthful perspective to the program, with her love of WoW, lolcats, all things Apple, and the internet in general. Veronica left to join search start-up, Mahalo, where she will now bring her on-screen talents to a daily video show called Mahalo Daily, which launches November 5th. So, what’s the video show about? Mahalo’s CEO, Jason Calcanis, describes it like this:

"The concept was pretty simple: every day talk about something you find really interesting that is related (broadly) to technology, internet culture, or the media….The topics would be researched by our team of Guides before and after we taped the show. So, if our researches at Mahalo were doing search pages ("SeRPs," for search engine result pages) on Halo 3, playing a guitar, or the Tesla electric car, Veronica could then go do a show about those topics. In some cases Veronica might find something interesting (as she is very apt to do) and send that topic down to Mahalo researchers for further investigation. So, imagine mashing up a daily video show like WallStrip or RocketBoom and combining it with the Wikipedia or digg… or something like that. The metaphor is not perfect, but it doesn’t have to be… I think you get the idea: show + research = goodness."

Anyway, here’s a teaser:

Snitter is a Twitter app that brings the fun, addictive micro-blogging service, Twitter, to your desktop. Unlike a similar app, Twitterific, Snitter runs on both Mac and Windows PCs. Built with Adobe’s AIR, Snitter offers many features, many that are beyond what’s available on the Twitter website. Snitter’s features include:

• Auto-updates to the tweet list
• Highlights of messages sent to you via @ syntax (and makes a chirp)
• Clears current list of tweets
• Refreshes list of tweets
• Displays last time it tried to request an update
• View 20 most recent items in your timeline
• View 20 most recent replies
• View 20 most recent direct messages
• View and filter friends list by name and screen name
• View and filter followers
• Links to easily @reply and Direct message users
• Keyboard shortcuts to access each panel (t=tweets, a=archives, r=replies, d=direct messages, f=favourites, i=friends, o=followers, u=updates)
• Add favorites tab and allow tweets to be set as a favorite
• Notifies you of new versions of Snitter
• Audible notification of new tweets
• Remembers previous window size and location
• Will minimize to system tray
• Auto-login

As a Vista user, I’m using Twadget myself, which is a Vista sidebar gadget. The gadget is simple: you can update your status and view the most recent tweets from your friends. The most recent version hyperlinks the URLs posted, the one thing that I was sorely missing. It’s not as rich an app as Snitter, but it’s a handy way to keep an eye on Twitter throughout your day.