Kress Consulting

This talk by the author of Here Comes Everybody answers the age-old question: what if they put on a tv show and nobody watched?

A fascinating datapoint:  in the amount of time that Americans watch television every year, we could build the entire Wikipedia 2000 times.

I’ve been migrating my much-neglected blog to a new domain — from kressconsult.com to kcon.us — and taking advantage of the migration to also upgrade the software (WordPress), change the theme, and generally freshen things up. I notice that a lot of my old posts demand a follow-up. For example, I’ve gone from not finding a use for Jott to being hugely dependent on it.

I also notice that I still like using blogging software as a mini-CMS. If your website’s subtance is more important than its style, a blog is a good way to go. You can always move to a full-fledged CMS like Drupal or Joomla! when you need to.

And finally, I am reminded that I need to update this blog more often. Think of it as a belated New Year’s resolution.

I thought this article about a tendency to hold one’s breath, or breathe shallowly, while reading email was interesting and alarming. (Yes, I’m a shallow-breathing email reader.) The short-term effects on stress level, and the long-term health effects are something to be concerned about

I’m not a big advocate of small children using computers, but access to appropriate, empowering technology is certainly an important factor in determining whether children grow up with real opportunities and choices. One Laptop Per Child aims to give every child access to technology and informational resources that are currently unavailable to children in many places.

The XO laptop  addresses the challenges of poverty, harsh environments, and limited access to electricity by offering an affordable, rugged, and alternative-powered laptop. It features innovations in screen readability, battery life, and networking. It also offers an integrated and learning-centered operating system based on Linux and providing social networking, file-sharing, and collaboration tools.

For a limited time, you can donate an XO laptop to a needy child, and receive one for your child (or yourself!), for just $399. This includes a $200 tax deduction and a year-long Tmobile Hotspot subscription. This is a really good deal, it’s for a great cause, and it might even give your child an empowering alternative to video games and brain-draining TV. Take a look at the Give One Get One website.

That’s what Virtual Ubiquity calls its web application, called Buzzword, currently in “preview” mode.  I will attest that it is cool, way cooler than any of the other online word processors I’ve seen. But is it a real word processor? It’s got lots of bells and whistles (tables, floating images, comments) and you can share your documents in various ways. But I want to be able to import and export documents in a variety of software formats (Microsoft Word being the obvious one), without having to do any reformatting. Buzzword isn’t quite there yet.

I’m amazed by a webservice called Jottit. Go there, type some words in the box, and presto! You’ve got a website. You can give it a user-friendly address, password protect it, and create lots of subpages, all with absolutely zero knowledge of HTML or Dreamweaver. If you want to, you can use the Settings and Design links to add some style. And if you know how to, you can embed HTML in the text you type. But you don’t have to.

Jottit borrows some concepts from wikis and some style from blogs, while managing to be its completely own thing. Amazing.

The title is the subject line of an email I received yesterday. It was a beta announcement for BookSwim, an online book rental service that I’ve been watching for a while.

From the email:

The wait for a full-service online book rental company is over. You signed up many months ago on our bookswim.com mailing list to stay informed — well BookSwim has officially launched.

I’m curious about three things:

• Will people pay $20 a month for a steady stream of books to read? (The monthly fee is $14.99 for an apparently limited time, but in the long run you’ll pay $19.99 a month for the three-books-at-a-time plan.

• Will libraries follow this model to make it easier for patrons to receive and return books by mail?

• And why in the world is that subject line phrased as a question? It’s very clear from the website that BookSwim is a wholesale appropriation of the Netflix model. Why the sudden identity crisis?

Check it out and let me know what you think. (Oh, and use promo code LUV2READ81407 for 20% off your first month.)

I picked this up from Steve Anderson of ONE/Northwest. Jing lets you create a simple screencast, along with your narration, and share it. Watch this Jing video to find out how. Available for Windows and Macintosh. Poor man’s Captivate?

CoScripter, from IBM, lets you script a series of actions in the Firefox web browser, and then share the resulting demo with other people. This provides an easy way to create quick tutorials or demonstrations for coworkers or clients. The installation is tedious (you have to register a web account with IBM) but the possibilities are tantalizing. Sort of a poor man’s Macromedia Captivate.

I like the idea of using a wiki to collaboratively gather software requirements. I tried this a year or so ago with a group of IT people, and it didn’t work very well. Were they scared of wikis? Or just not very interested in the project? In that case, I dropped the wiki and went through traditional requirements gathering exercises, and got what I needed.

But I still like the idea. Here’s an example of a library using a wiki to gather requirements for staff scheduling software.  I hope it works well for them.