Mark Krynsky

In my current quest to collect more personal data around my activities to draw knowledge and information with the aim of achieving a better quantified self I’ve kept a lookout for apps and devices to help me. We’re currently about to enter an amazing time whereby we’ll shift our attention from the vast knowledge of the world’s data we can access on the web to wanting to learn more about our own body’s data. There’s currently a many sensing devices available, and many new ones being created, to track our physical activity, sleep, weight, and other personal body metrics. These are going to continue to evolve and provide us with more data about ourselves and the next step will be to help us learn and improve our lives with that information.

We’re a couple years into using location based services and Foursquare has pretty much become the de-facto standard. The thing about Foursquare is that it was created and is primarily a social location app meaning that you actively use it to both share and view your friends locations. While this is a great feature with many benefits the way it operates requires you to pro-actively mark your location manually to use it. When it comes to personal data tracking you want the ability to set it and forget it. It’s easy to become forgetful and can become burdensome to manually track personal data.

Location is an area where I’ve wanted to have a passive way to track my movements outside of having to manually do it by “checking in” on Foursquare. I recently became aware of a new app called Placeme (available for iOS & Android) which does just that. You simply run this app in the background and with your smartphone’s built in sensors (accelerometer, wifi, gps) it has the ability to mark your locations along your daily travels. It knows when you’re driving, walking, or staying still based on the phone’s sensors and with that data can accurately determine the locations you visit. It knows when you get there, and when you leave being able to track your duration at the location. It then builds a history where you can view locations you’ve visited by day in a calendar view, or you can view by location and see a log of all your visits. You can add notes for every visit logged to a location. You can also search your visited location history. The ability to track all of this data is a quantified selfer’s dream app for location as I haven’t found any other app that can do this passively.

The raw data stored by the location tracking aspects of the app are just the tip of the iceberg. We know that tracking personal data is just the first step towards analyzing it to find ways to improve our lives. Below is one of Robert Scoble’s patented long interviews that logs in at over 30 minutes with the the app’s creator Sam Liang. During the interview they discuss all of the possibilities that this app could provide through future functionality based on the location data. Robert discusses how the app crosses the “freaky line” because people that use the app are providing very private and sensitive information.

Most people have an aversion to apps that pass along this type of data but Sam points out in the video something that is key. If you can show a user significant value from providing the data, then you can get them to overcome that hurdle. An example of this could be that you frequent a gas station that is being tracked and Placeme could provide an alert letting you know that you could save money by pumping gas at a station 2 blocks away. In the video Robert eludes to the fact that the data stored by the app can be the basis for many other feature based apps. Watch the video to better understand all the things that could be possible. You can also visit this post that Robert made on Google Plus to see his take along with the 300+ comment discussion surrounding the app.

I’ve been using the app for almost a month and am very impressed. In fact I’ve found myself using Foursquare much less and only when I want to share my location with friends. However I love that I don’t have to do anything to have this running log of all my traveling that I can add to my other daily tracking data. I’m looking forward to updates to the app, primarily hoping there’s a way I can export the data at some point as in the near future I’m looking forward to aggregating all of my personal data by day within a single service. Several are going to come online soon and location data is a pertinent data point I’m looking forward to including.

We’re all going to die. We all create digital content and most of us have no plan for archiving our data for future generations after we die. These are two harsh realities that smacked me over the head when I attended a panel at SXSW this year titled “Digital Immortals: Preserving Life Beyond Death“. The panel covered one of the most critical aspects that face us today in this newly minted digital world. The panel was moderated by Evan Carroll who both co-wrote a book and contributes to a website on the subject of the digital afterlife. You can listen to a recording of the panel here, follow along with the slides here, and read a summary of the panel by Evan here.

I highly recommend you follow the links above to experience the diverse speakers covering several different topic areas related to this subject. This is a very important subject matter with many different layers to it. I remember leaving the room inspired to identify some of the themes that resonated during the talk for me and write about them. Many of the issues discussed have been on my mind ever since creating Lifestream Blog. While I originally covered the ability to aggregate our digital data across disparate services I quickly realized that much of what I was publishing may never be archived in a way so that my future ancestors could be able to view it. I’ve already written several posts on the topic of how death and the future may impact our digital diaries and most recently referenced Adam Ostrow’s TED talk who was on the panel in a post.

After the panel I started to think about the steps we need to take to preserve, prepare, and produce our digital legacy. I began to break down each of these 3 steps to try and provide methods and tools to achieve them before we die. Each of these steps are very broad and can have many different approaches and strategies to deploy them. Below I will break each of these down and provide some insight on how to tackle setting up plans for each of them.

Preserve Your Data

Before you can make plans regarding how future generations will be able to access your data, you need to ensure that you’re taking steps to preserve it. The tips here are to employ an archive and backup strategy. This includes both making sure that your personal physical storage data is backed up as well as the data you are creating and publishing to online services. For personal data on your hard drives you can find many good tips and articles online to help you do this. I recommend creating a 2 step backup plan. Create backups daily from your personal computer (multiple in your family if you have them) to an external storage device. I’d recommend using a RAID NAS (network attached storage) so that you can easily have multiple computers running backup software to save their data to this central location.

There are many people that employ the local backup strategy but then stop there. This isn’t good enough because in the event of a fire or burglary you risk losing everything. So besides simply doing local backups, you must also add a cloud backup strategy. These services will let you automate the process of backing up your data over the internet daily to remote servers. By taking this extra step you’ve ensured an important and extra critical measure to preserve your data.

Backing up your local data is a measure taken for all the content you create that is stored there. So documents, photos, videos and more. You should try to identify and backup as much personally created data as you can. Richard Banks who was on the panel that our sentimental objects aren’t necessarily secondary to our mundane ones, which will help others understand our lives from the day-to-day minutiae we now can preserve.

But what about content you create on the web? I”m referring to services that include Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs and more. In this case you need a way to get that source data into a format that can then be brought down and archived along with all of your local data. There are some unique services that do just this that need to be included as part of your backup strategy.

Some resource examples for this step:

• Local Backup Strategies and Software articles
• How to backup your computer – Lifehacker
• What’s your backup plan – The 99 Percent
• Set up an automated bulletproof file backup solution – Lifehacker
• Cloud Backup Services
• Backblaze, Carbonite, CrashPlan
• Web Content Backup Services
• Backupify, Social Folders

Prepare a Data Access Plan

Airdrie Miller, who is the widow of blogger Derek Miller who wrote a gut wrenching farewell post before he died, discussed many of the challenges she encountered after Derek died on the panel. She told of not being able to access systems because she didn’t have Derek’s passwords and told of another situation having to deal with renewing a domain she wasn’t aware of. I’ve heard of the process of preparing all of this information for later access as creating a “digital will”.

Start by creating a detailed document with instructions on how to access all the digital data that you’ve been so good about preserving. Then I highly recommend creating a master password repository both for personal data and online data. Some of those passwords may also be linked to online accounts that are tied to subscriptions services such as blogs and domain registrars that will also require renewals and upkeep. There are a few online services that provide this as well as software. It would also be smart to have a designated digital trustee which would almost act as a data godparent to provide technical support in the event it was necessary. Accessing your data backups and working through services may be challenging for some family members so training and designating a technically savvy friend to help out in the event they’re needed will be helpful.

Some resource examples for this step:

• Detailed instructions document and digital trustee
• Provide information for password services / software with the master password to access
• Designate and train a digital trustee on accessing your data and passwords to help out
• Provide information for all on-going subscriptions to services related to digital data
• Password Services and Software
• Lastpass, 1Password (password services
• Legacy Locker, Entrustet (digital will services)
• KeePass (software)

Produce a Way to Access the Digital Archive
So now that you have ensured the preservation of all your data you need to create a good way to access all of it. This step can take on many different forms and will no doubt evolve over time into better methods we can only dream of. You should start by determining both the tools that lend themselves best to displaying the data in a way that you want, along with some good tagging and search capabilities. You also need to decide whether you only want the data to be displayed on a local computer or over the web as well. You may not find just one piece of software or web service to provide a method that suits you, and may need to incorporate several to achieve what you want.

Bill Lefurgy from the Library of Congress was also a speaker on the panel. He discussed many aspects related to “digital preservation” telling us they’ve built a  website at DigitalPreservation.gov where you can find many resources on organizing your digital data. I dug around a bit and found several useful things including a whole section on personal archiving as well as a PDF with details for archiving and organizing several different types of digital media.

Some resource examples for this step:

• Digital Archiving
• Picasa, ACDsee (photo management software)
• Video Archiving tips
• Digital Archiving Web Services
• LiveOn, 1000Memories, Singly (software or service), ViewShare

If you question why we need to create a digital legacy I ask you to watch this great video created by the LiveOn service and also remember our lives aren’t just to chronicle what we do for ourselves, but it’s to provide a record for our future generations. I plan to create a dedicated “Digital Legacy” section on this site in the near future that I will maintain with updates over time as new software, services, and strategies become available for this process.

 

Update: Here’s another good video I discovered on this subject at another good site resource at DeathandDigitalLegacy.com

It was 5 years ago today that I created Lifestream Blog. It all stemmed from the fact that I became intrigued with the ability to find a way to aggregate content I created across social services into a single location. Furthermore, I wanted that content to appear in reverse chronological order. A digital social diary if you will. The original concept of “Lifestreaming” had been around but the application of using the web and social services as a method of implementation was very new. Back in 2007 there weren’t many ways that one could achieve this. I wrote a post detailing all of the research I had done to share with other people and thus Lifestream Blog was born.

Reflection

It’s been an amazing journey. When I created the blog I truly felt that this concept was something that was going to be huge. Within months of launching the site there was an avalanche of startups launched that aimed to bring Lifestreaming to the masses. I reviewed many of them and over time was contacted by founders to provide feedback and advice. It was an amazing time where you could see the evolution of this concept in various unique implementations. Initially most services only provided aggregation of RSS feeds but as the evolution of the web continued with the proliferation of websites providing API access to their services, we continued to see Lifestreaming services innovate.

Lifestreaming Services Peak

At it’s peak from 2008-2009 we saw the largest number of pure Lifestreaming services emerge. Leading the pack in terms of users and features was FriendFeed. These former Googler’s had created an amazing team who iterated often and created many cutting edge features that led to the creation of a great community. But in the end the service just couldn’t distinguish itself in a way to attract mainstream users to Lifestreaming and the droves of those potential people continued to join Facebook. As FriendFeed continued their mission, you could see new features pop up on Facebook that were heavily borrowing things that were being done on FriendFeed. Eventually FriendFeed saw their userbase become stagnant and in August of 2009 they were acquired by Facebook. In the end it was more about the talent grab as most of the former team were integrated at Facebook. I saw 2009 as the end of the Lifestreaming service goldrush. FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor eventually became CTO at Facebook and I see their recent launch of Timelines as the culmination of many Lifestreaming concepts by the integrated team coming to fruition.

The Evolution

From 2010 to now I have focused on several other areas related to the data we create on social services. I became very interested in how we can glean insight from the data and how we can filter and prioritize the massive amounts generated by the firehose. I became very interested in the growth of social magazine apps which allow us to connect our social accounts and use logic to filter relevant content for us. I’ve also become much more interested in Lifelogging and the Quantified Self. There are an amazing number of devices coming to market to track personal data as it relates to exercise, sleep, nutrition, as well as blood and dna analysis. I feel we’re on the verge of a huge revolution in pro-active and preventative healthcare. The evolution of these devices and services to analyze the data over the next few years will be amazing.

The Future

So what’s next here at Lifestream Blog? Well, I’ll continue to focus on what I mentioned in the previous paragraph and continue to bring insights and tips regarding social services and data. I also just got back from SXSW and saw a panel titled “Digital Immortals: Preserving Life Beyond Death“. I’ve written about the aspects of Lifestreaming and death before but the panel really inspired me to give this much more thought. I plan on creating a new section here on the site soon where I’ll provide tips on the preservation, preparation and archival of our digital lives. I also will continue to monitor advancements in this area and report what I find. I feel that providing a digital legacy of our lives for both our family and future generations is critically important.

Giving Thanks

So that’s my update folks. I can’t begin to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed sharing my thoughts and discoveries here with you. I truly appreciate all of the readers that have visited over the years. You’ve provided great feedback and in many cases friendships were born from here. I never realized what a powerful vehicle this blog would become. I urge any of you that have a passion in life to create a blog and share your thoughts and resources with others. It will truly bring you amazing things!

Today’s news uncovered by Arun Thampi that Path has been uploading users entire address book to their servers does not bode well for them. You can read coverage around this issue on ReadWriteWeb, TechCrunch, and Venture Beat. But none of that coverage discussed the future implications as Path has already announced future support for health tracking devices.

I’ve become a big fan of Path over the last few months. It provides a beautiful mobile Lifestreaming app and offers some nice syndication features to boot. But  I became even more excited as I heard about the possible future integration with the Jawbone Up. Having a single app to use for Lifestreaming as well as tracking health activity is a very interesting development. Then just a few weeks ago I learned of the newly announced Nike Fuelband which is a new health tracking device that Path announced it will support. So it’s now clear that Path is definitely going to integrate health tracking devices and data into their app.

It’s one thing to compromise users trust when it comes to status updates and other social data, but health data takes that to a new level. It’s a shame that this unnecessary data exposure will no doubt make users take notice and perhaps dissuade them from using the app as they move into their next phase of integrating health data. I hope the Path team can reconcile this issue and provide a means for ensuring it doesn’t happen again in the future. It’s such an elegant app with a bright future that will delve into an area (Lifestreaming + Lifelogging) that nobody else has entered yet. Hopefully they’ve learned from this and will provide a clear on-boarding method for the addition of their health devices support later this year.

UPDATE: Path’s CEO Dave Morin wrote a blog post where he admits the company made a mistake and apologizes. Path also deleted all address book data from their servers and have released a new version of the app that allows users to opt-in to address book sharing if they wish.

The gadgets and services for Lifelogging and practitioners of the Quantified Self continues to grow and evolve at a very fast pace. I made a trip to CES this year which was unique in that it provided a situation for my personal and work lives to collide. As manager of web production for the X PRIZE Foundation I was attending CES to help work our booth in support of our launch announcement for the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE. On a personal level I also was very curious about all the new health and fitness gadgets and services that would  be announced.

Below is a video of Qualcomm CEO Dr. Paul Jacobs speaking at the CES keynote. If you forward to minute 58 you will see him bring Dr. Eric Topol onto the stage who then demonstrates several new health monitoring gadgets that are already available or coming soon. You can also see X PRIZE CEO Peter Diamandis announce and provide details about the Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE at the 1 hour, 8 minute mark.

This years’ CES showcased many new technologies that will appeal to both the Lifeloggers and increasingly the mainstream public as well. Unfortunately I didn’t get to walk the show floor very much but I have been monitoring all of the news coverage that has been coming out since the show. The competition for health and fitness tracking devices is really heating up. Early devices like the Fitbit and Bodymedia Fit saw some new players enter the market with the recent Jawbone Up as well as the Motorola MotoACTV device announced at CES. Then just 3 days ago right after the dust was settling at CES Nike announced the Fuelband which is similar to the Jawbone Up in that it is a device you wear on your wrist. In fact Digital Trends went ahead and wrote a post to compare the two similar devices. Then Mashable stated that “Nike also announced partnerships with Foursquare and Path.” I find this information very interesting since Path had hinted at offering the ability to integrate with the Jawbone Up in the future and now the Nike Fuelband announcement pretty much solidifies that, but also shows that they’re considering support for multiple devices. The integration of Lifestreaming and personal tracking devices is very exciting and Path will be a first mover in this area distinguishing their app from anything currently out there.

Even though I didn’t get to walk the show floor I was lucky to be working the Qualcomm booth next to Bodymedia’s Chris Knorr. I learned about updates to their service that will analyze the activity data to help provide recommendations and adjustments. They’re also releasing  disposable patches in addition to the armband. I asked Chris what health related devices or services he had seen that were impressive at CES. The first thing he mentioned was the Macaw App which is aimed as a prevention plan based health app available for both iOS and Android. It’s supposed to provide the ability to be paired and synced with multiple wireless health devices and then import all the data in one place to provide a health profile. I downloaded the app but don’t yet see the ability to add 3rd party devices and didn’t find any details on their website about device support. Perhaps it was just announced and coming in the near future. On the surface it sounded somewhat like the health aggregation service I wrote about last May which I’m sure we’ll start to see several startups attacking very soon.

The other device and service that Chris told me about was Striiv. This device and service puts an emphasis on gamificaton to motivate people towards staying fit. Striiv does this by providing a pedometer device that has a built in display that ties in your activity to generate resources which you can use in a simulation game called MyLand. The other nice aspect is that you can also donate your activity to help various causes via GlobalGiving. The LA Times review called it “Sim City meets Wii Fit” which seems like an appropriate comparison. If you visit the link you can see a video demo of the unit.

Yesterday I read Dean Takahashi’s post stating that “Quantifying our lives will be a top trend in 2012″. It’s a great  summary of some highlights of personal tracking devices at CES with his thoughts on the near future. I obviously couldn’t agree more with Dean and think these devices will continue to get better, cheaper, and continue to improve by analyzing the data to help improve our lives. This is going to be a great year for the health and fitness technology space and I’m really looking forward to it.

Today Facebook officially announced 60+ apps and web services that will now utilize their new open graph protocol to passively share information while you use them to your Timeline. Last year when Timeline was first launched to developers there were a few apps that were immediately available. This included Spotify and Rdio to share the music you were listening to in real-time to your newsfeed, Timeline, and Ticker.

Now a whole slew of ways to share have become available that cover travel, food, shopping, fashion, fitness, entertainment, causes and several others including some fairly unique ones shared over at AllThingsD. You can get a complete breakdown over at The Next Web. If you want to get in on the action and start your sharing right away just visit this page and start adding apps.

Look for a deluge of passive updates starting to appear on people’s timelines over the next few weeks. Even though Facebook has taken extra precautions with regards to privacy there will surely still be some snafu’s we’ll hear about. It’s unclear how the reception to this onslaught of information to an audience that is already fatigued will play out but hopefully as users we’ll see some value from the wealth of new data we will willingly share. I’m hoping that more tailored recommendations and other patterns will help surface more useful and interesting information. I know, wishful thinking but we’ll have to wait and see.

This year has been a tipping point for Lifestreaming. It has evolved quite a bit from the super geeky bailing wire and duct tape method of being a DIY project I started covering back in 2007. With advancements in technology, primarily through the proliferation of API’s, it has penetrated and mutated its way across the web. But the one place it landed to now become ubiquitous is with Facebook’s creation of the Timeline feature which has brought it to over 800 million people.

There have been many ways of providing a presentation layer for a Lifestream. Early on most methods didn’t provide access to the long tail for a person’s posts. I wanted to see a calendar (or timeline) view to make a Lifestream become more of a historical record of the past. Several services started to pop up using the Timeline method and thus this digital diary metaphor was born. I believe it’s the most compelling form of Lifestreaming for an individual to be driven to create one. Providing the feature using a simple interface in a dominant social network has now brought this to the masses. I like to think that the knowledge gained by the FriendFeed talent acquisition is what helped propel Facebook to do this…and here we are.

During the early days of Lifestreaming there were many debates regarding its value. Initially services tried to become the hub of Lifestreaming activity and it was a bit difficult to realize the ways that content discovery would eventually become the catalyst driving so many people to do it. But over time the proliferation of API’s would bring about more sophisticated ways to take lifestreaming data and provide both great function and beautiful design. We now have many apps that are built on the backs of the Lifestreaming data people share across multiple services. We have social reader apps that aggregate the links we share on social networks, sometimes with some logic to prioritize the viewing order, and beautiful visual ways to display them.

The passive (aka frictionless) method of sharing was made popular this year by having the stream of our music listening habits from Spotify populate our Facebook Timeline. We’ve actually been doing this since 2008 by scrobbling from last.fm but only now is it a big deal as it hits the mainstream. Passive sharing is just starting to scratch the surface of where it’s going. It will become much more prevalent and start automating many of the updates to our Lifestreams.

Most passive sharing actions will come from apps on our mobile phones (soon with NFC) connected to our Lifestream. Path was another new entrant in the Lifestreaming arena with their revamped app release this year. The new version took steps to add passive sharing by posting updates in the background to our timelines based on monitoring our geographical location on our phones. Theoretically they could also monitor the audio to passively share our TV or movie viewing using Intonow technology. We will also see passive sharing coming from the stats behind our workouts, sleeping patterns, weight, and many other health based stats to Lifestreams coming from the growing popularity of Lifelogging devices. These devices will see huge growth as monitoring this data will provide health benefits including added motivation by sharing information socially.

As we move into 2012 it will be interesting to see how the Facebook Timeline evolves with many more third party apps populating it with data. I think the jury is still out on whether the Timeline will be a success depending on the usage and adoption. However, I am bullish on more innovation with mobile apps like Path coming and a new breed of services being launched to aggregate the health data generated from all these new lifelogging devices. It should be quite an interesting year as the Lifestreaming concept continues to reshape itself in line with advancements in technology. As always, I’m looking forward to watching it and sharing my findings with you here.

There was a Wall Street Journal story on Saturday with David Gelernter who conceived the concept of Lifestreaming. It’s a great article and an interesting read where I came to learn several new things I never knew about him. More detail regarding the patent infringement lawsuits against Apple are covered which I touched upon in a recent video interview post about him. A new term he coins and goes into detail about is the notion of collections of Lifestreams in aggregate that he defines as a “Worldstream”.

From the article

Eventually business models based on streaming will dominate the Internet, he predicts. All the world’s data will be presented as a “worldstream,” some of it public, most of it proprietary, available only to authorized users. Web browsers will become stream browsers. Users will become comfortably accustomed to tracking and manipulating their digital objects as streams rather than as files in a file system. The stream will become a mirror of the unfolding story of their lives.

“I can visualize the worldstream,” says Mr. Gelernter, explaining its advantages. “I know what it looks like. I know what my chunk of it looks like. When I focus on my stuff, I get a stream that is a subset of the worldstream.

I too have often thought the business opportunities that could be built around the data generated by Lifestreaming. But we’re still in a phase of getting people to feel comfortable lifestreaming and developing methods to effectively tag and store the data. Facebook is trying to do this with the introduction of the timeline. They’re also trying to effectively catalog this detailed data with the development of the open graph. As lifestreaming and the resulting data becomes more ubiquitous, we should see these services start to come online. This could include vertical based lifestreams such as quantified self personal activity tracking (read paragraph 6 of this post)

In the article we also come to find out that David Gelernter and his son Daniel have created a new company. They’ve started to seek funding to create a product to bring Lifestreaming to the iPad.

From the article

The new venture, for which Mr. Gelernter is just beginning to seek funding, will focus on developing a lifestream product for the Apple iPad. “We like the pad,” he says. “A particular goal is to create a lifestream which aggregates the most popular social network streams, and includes email and stuff like that. It will generate revenues the way Twitter and Facebook do—by getting huge numbers of users, beginning at the place we know, Yale University undergraduates, who love glitzy new software. They tell their parents, who are big shots because their kids are students at Yale.” The new product will spread virally, forming a vast audience that can be sold to advertisers.

This is interesting. Entering the crowded world of lifestreaming apps and services will be very challenging at this stage of the game. I’m very curious to see what David Gelernter will bring to the table to distinguish this product from the rest of the pack.  I look forward to monitoring this and bringing you more news as I discover it.

The new release of the Path app for iOS and Android has created quite a positive buzz. Much of it has been centered around the very beautiful design and UI. But the app has also pivoted down a different path (I know, I should be arrested for this sentence). Path originated as a photo sharing app whose distinction was the limitation of only being able to add 50 friends to your network. The new version has now expanded from simply sharing photos by adding the ability to share location (along with who you are with), thoughts, music, and declaring when you go to sleep and wake up. They also optionally offer the ability to passively share (aka frictionless sharing) new cities you visit as updates to your stream by monitoring the gps in your phone. They’ve also increased the sharing limitation from 50 to 150 to be within Dunbar’s limitation. This post doesn’t cover the full functionality and I’ll provide a link below if you want to read the many reviews on it.

I didn’t use the first version of the app because I was happily using Instagram and the only distinction I saw between Path and Instagram is that I could invoke a “velvet rope” group of friends. I’m pretty comfortable sharing most of my content publicly so this only distinction wasn’t enough of an incentive for me. I’ve now given the new app a sophomore try and the new functionality deemed by them as a “smart journal“  is an interesting new direction. This has been compared to Facebook’s timeline and I’d say that it draws some inspiration from it. The problem is that Path has the challenge of overcoming the network effect for it to become a Lifestream you can share with your closest friends. You’ll have to become an evangelist for the app by giving friends a compelling reason to add yet another social network to their daily routine.

I believe to truly use the app in the spirit it was intended for with tight friends requires an effort to treat it as a journal with private content you don’t share elsewhere. Treating it like any other social network seems to defeat the purpose. I’ve tried to use that app with that in mind, posting unique and more intimate things I don’t share elsewhere. But using the service without having many close IRL friends has left me with an awkward friending dynamic by mainly adding my early adopter tech friends whose relationships straddle that ambiguous line of acquaintance to friend. This could lead to usage that Jon Mitchell at ReadWriteWeb pointed out it as a timeline to worship the self.

But there’s another interesting aspect to Path. It has started to tread a little bit into the world of Lifelogging with the ability to track when we go to bed and wake up. The problem is that it requires you to do this manually as an action within the app. This is tied into the app functionality and far from ideal. I’ve seen many people use this feature inaccurately trying to explain their long bouts of sleeping. A few months ago I reviewed the Bodymedia armband which is one of many Quantified Self devices that are now appearing on the market.  Perhaps the next iteration of Path could be integrated to work with various of these devices to provide a hybrid platform for lifestreaming and tracking that activity.

Here’s a video Robert Scoble did with the Path team. It’s almost an hour long but I’ve set it to start where they do a demo of the app.

Around 9:15 of the demo Robert notices that co-founder Dave Morin has a Jawbone Up which is a new self tracking device similar to the Bodymedia, and Fitbit. Robert asks him about possible integration between the Jawbone Up and Path to which Dave answers “That’s something we’re very interested in”.   Dave talks about the trend around mobile collection of health data including workouts and sleep aimed to make us happier and healthier people. He goes on to say regarding the Jawbone Up “…we see that as a type of data we want to get into Path…it turns out to be a nice way to understand who we should be working with”. He feels that since Path is a private and trusted network that this type of data would be a good fit. Alexia Tsotsis over at TechCrunch also voiced her wish with Path integrating with her Jawbone Up.

These devices of health self awareness are still in the early stages but I believe on their way to hockey stick growth in the near future. With this there will be a slew of new web service opportunities to compliment them. I already see a need for a web service that could aggregate the data from people that own multiple devices. So if we used a Zeo to track sleep, Runkeeper to track workouts, Meal Snap to track our meals, and Withings to track our weight, we could view all of the data in a single place. This would essentially be a Mint.com for health and mark my words we’ll see this type of service coming in the near future. If Path pursues this type of integration at least across a few simple data points with multiple health device integration they could be a first mover in this area and clearly have a distinction between anything on the market right now. This could provide a compelling reason for people to use it.

Here’s my original post about Path on Google+ which also provides links to many of its reviews.

If you frequent this blog then you probably know that David Gelernter originated the Lifestreaming concept and dubbed its name. His original concept has come a long way from its inception in 1996 and a culmination is coming soon when Facebook will bring this concept to 800 Million+ users ushering it into the mainstream.

I just recently came across this interview of David on Big Think from March of last year. It covers questions about the future of technological innovation, print media’s future, and Lifestreaming. The question that was asked is “What is “lifestreaming,” and are modern social networking tools making it universal?”

His answer covered several areas. He begins by discussing the origins of Lifestreaming and then covers how he can no longer talk about its commercialization. He abruptly states how he can’t discuss some aspects due to patents. Apparently there are patents that David doesn’t own surrounding the concept that have resulted in a lawsuit against Apple. He’s heard that this patent dispute is the largest lawsuit in patent history. He describes how these patents revolve around the implementation and user interface design of Cover Flow, Spotlight, and Time Machine. I don’t know anything about these patent issues but it will be interesting to see if Facebook will soon become a target of them as well.

He goes on to state this

Without commenting on the legal aspects, which I’m not capable of doing, those are lifestreams and there are other companies that have done similar things. That makes me angry personally, not because of the money, but because of the deliberate failure to acknowledge work that we would have made freely available as academics and that companies will not acknowledge because there is so much money involved.

This really is a shame. David goes on to talk about how he’s excited about how the Lifestreaming concept has proliferated across personal sites and commercial services and specifically mentions FriendFeed, AOL, and Bebo. I was also humbled by the fact that I think this blog got a shout out in the interview which is great.

He closes the question by returning to the patent issue and states this

It’s not as if we want to stop that activity – shut it down, but we’d like to see credit where credit is due. Not just to me, or mainly to me, but to graduates who’ve actually built the software, worked tremendously hard, published the papers, put them in – you know, made them available, and we’d like to see credit awarded.

You can view a video of the interview on the Big Think site. Note: the Lifestreaming question comes in at 3:45 of the video. There’s also a full transcript of the interview available as well.

I’ve recently returned from DrupalCon Denver 2012 and had some thoughts I wanted to share about the conference and the state of the Drupal Community. I’ve been a long-time fan of Drupal and became very acquainted with the system back in 2007 when I migrated the X PRIZE Foundation website from static html to Drupal 5 (version at the time). It wasn’t a very user friendly CMS and it took me quite some time to get the hang of it, but once I did it was clear how flexible and powerful the system was.

The Similarities between the WordPress and Drupal Communities

Before I began using Drupal I was a longtime WordPress user. I still use WordPress to power my personal websites (including this one). I love both of these open source projects and often get asked which one to use and the answer is still the same it was back in 2007. It depends on what your site is for. For most people who just need a blog or a very simple website I still often recommend WordPress. But if you need a website that requires deep permission levels, commerce, sophisticated caching, and more complex functionality, I recommend Drupal. This is just a high level recommendation and by gleaning more into a sites’ requirements it becomes easier to recommend one or the other.

The evolution of WordPress and Drupal have gone in somewhat similar directions. They both started as open source projects. The founders of both of these projects have created for profit company’s based on their open source software. Matt Mullenweg of WordPress created Automattic and Dries Buytaert founded Acquia. Both companies have also created free hosted versions, as well as fully managed business service versions of their software. Automattic created WordPress.com and Acquia created DrupalGardens. Both projects also host “Cons” and or “Camps” throughout the year were users gather together to share information and help further their respective projects. I just wanted to point out some of these similarities between both of these companies and how their for profit arms have also been instrumental in helping insure the health of their projects. Both Automattic and Acquia also do a great job of contributing back to their open source communities.

Acquia’s Mission and Roadmap Towards Improving Drupal

So back to DrupalCon. I went into this year’s DrupalCon focused on the ways that I can extend the platform to help enable people to more easily create and publish content across our websites. The areas that specifically have been challenging are setting up simple wysiwyg interfaces both for page creation and media asset management, publishing workflows for multiple members on a team, and the ability to publish content between staging and production environments. Our current methods for these have pain points and I was on a mission to find ways to improve them and look to what the future of Drupal had in store to address these issues. Beyond my needs in these areas, I also feel that they are obstacles for other people who are potential users of Drupal.

The first keynote at DrupalCon by Dries spent time focusing on weaknesses in Drupal and specifically 3 things the community needs to focus on what he referred to as “A rudimentary authoring experience”. In a nutshell this referred to to several elements that require work to improve the usability of Drupal for content creators and site publishers. Some other key takeaways from the talk are that Symfony will be used for the framework in Drupal 8 and mobile needs to be addressed much better. This seems to already be in motion as there was no shortage of talks on responsive web design at DrupalCon. Dries’ keynote was the beginning of a pattern I saw emerge from many Acquia employees that spoke on panels at DrupalCon.  They continued to echo and elaborate on Dries’ thoughts about what they need to work on to ensure the successful future of Drupal.

Click the slides below taken from the keynote

Acquia Employee Talks at Drupalcon

The first talk I saw along this theme was with Angie Byron and Chris Strahl titled “Five things we need to create an awesome experience for content creators” which focused on the following issues:

• Authoring and editing for multiple (mobile) devices
• Media management and content repositories
• Content staging and publish / subscribe models
• Page layouts and authoring tools

The talk covered how they had done research around usability among competing CMS platforms from a content creator standpoint. They showed how many of these features are handled on 4 competing systems including Squiz, Plone, CQ5, and Squarespace(v6 beta). They demo’d each of these 4 competing systems and showed where they excel over Drupal with the features and ease of site content creation and editing. In the end they plead their case to the development community to look at these systems and find ways to implement many of the usability improvements within Drupal in the near future as they ready Drupal 8 for release next year.

Another talk I attended was with Kieran Lal & Barry Jaspan. The approach of their talk was from a startup perspective on how Acquia was born and they provided many insights. They discussed the challenges encountered along with the multiple pivots from the original Acquia business model concept. They began by providing simple Drupal hosting solutions and evolved over time into a much more robust managed hosting platform for Drupal. What I liked about this talk is how Acquia has been nimble in learning what the needs of the customer base they’re trying to attract and how they’ve shifted their business model to accommodate them. Many nuggets of wisdom here for startup entrepreneurs can be gleaned from their talk. Acquia now has a very impressive list of clients that they can service much better.

Then I went to see Jay Batson do a talk that was similar with regards to the first one by Angie and Chris except it was done more as a first person view from the eyes of a site publisher. You can learn more about the profile of the “advanced content creator” role he describes here. He explains how the term “Web Engagement Management” is starting to trump CMS and is now being used to describe the overall feature-set associated with the users that fill these content production roles. These features are now essential to people who continually create and manage the content for websites. More and more it’s the marketing department that owns the responsibility of websites and are now the decision makers for web platforms. This is a switch from years ago when IT would own that decision making process. So the critical motive behind all of this is to make sure that the marketing and site content departments needs are met by Drupal moving forward.

The sum of all of these talks by Acquia left me very impressed. They are uncovering the major issues potential clients are stating as they try to sell Drupal and formulating a plan to solve them. By rallying the community around these issues, I feel that they are focused and have a plan to continue being competitive and mature based on the needs of today’s site publishers.

Other DrupalCon Highlights

The “How to build a scalable platform for today’s publishers” talk by Dick Olsson was another stellar talk I found to be extremely helpful with my goals of learning about better methods for content and site publishing. Dick provided a case study and recipe for the modules and methods he’s been using to build out sites for Al Jazeera. He needs to accommodate massive traffic and the ability to publish content quickly in a very intricate caching environment. You can watch his talk regarding those issues, but my focus was more on how he uses Workbench, Deploy, and Panels modules  to effectively manage content workflow and publishing. It was a good talk that showed how these tools can all be used in conjunction very well. I also saw a talk on Panels showing some great new usability features coming soon.

I attended several of the BoF (Birds of a Feather) talks along the content publisher theme and got a lot out of the “Support the Content Creators” talk that was run by Melissa Anderson. Lots of great discussion and sharing of tools and practices which were captured in a great notes doc by Kat.

I love watching case studies from the ground up where an agency covers every step of a web development project with a client. The folks at Treehouse Agency are excellent at telling these stories. I really enjoyed how they provided the under the hood details of their approach and tools used to rebuild the Zagat.com website. They also did a talk on their work to relaunch Energy.gov on Drupal which I didn’t see at DrupalCon but was able to see a more in depth Drupal implementation of the Energy.gov project at BadCamp last year. Here’s the slide deck from that presentation.

Well there you have it. I see nothing but clear blue skies ahead for Drupal.

March is almost upon us and as you monitor social sites you can feel the buzz that is “Spring break for geeks” start to build. I went to my first SXSW in 2009 and really soaked it in and chronicled the pilgrimage. I had a great time and it lived up to all the expectations I had read about it. Last year a backlash was born surrounding the conference and I posted my thoughts defending it.

While I still maintain my feelings from last year, I feel that logistics are now a major concern with SXSW that will be a tough one to overcome. The block of hotels reserved for this year were sold out months ahead. I had to book in January and let me tell you it was slim pickens. Beyond hotel accommodations, my experience last year was that panels have spread out considerably since my first attendance. They now cover fairly long distances that aren’t short walks (or quick shuttle rides due to congestion) and can be challenging to navigate in between panels. Also, if you do make it to your panel there’s a chance that it may have already reached capacity and you’ll have to wait outside with hopes of people vacating so you can enter. There’s no doubt that these issues will be even greater this year. In any case keep this in mind as you plan your schedule for the conference. If there’s a panel you really want to see, make sure that you’re there 20 minutes before it starts.

Don’t go in Blind. Have Your Comprehensive Schedule Ready!

Speaking of planning, this year I’ve setup and tested 3 different web services to do just that. There’s the official SXSW site that offers you the ability to create your own schedule and also has an accompanying mobile app for iOS or Android. I’ve also setup Sched.org which I’ve happily used in previous years. A newcomer I’m trying out this year is Lanyrd. Both Sched.org and Lanyrd have a nice social component where you can connect it to your Twitter account and it will then show you the panels your friends are attending within the service. This can serve two purposes. Both giving you the ability to identify some panels you may not have considered which they’ve shown interest in, as well as a chance to find a location where you can stalk connect with them. So using both services is a good way to let your friends know where you’ll be. Another good reason to use all 3 is that I’ve seen panels, parties, and events that are unique to each of them appearing. So between the 3 you should have the best overall picture. Oh, and I forgot to mention I’m also using Plancast just in case.

When using the above scheduling services I highly recommend that you select at least 2 if not 3 panels per each session during the conference.  The first year some of the panels were hit or miss. In later years I got smarter by planning ahead and giving a panel 5-10 minutes to determine if it was worth remaining or whether I should find another one. By having 2 or 3 selections you have backups in case of a bad panel, congestion, or logistics issues. By having these selections readily available on your mobile device you’ll be ready to act quickly in the event of a bail. Speaking of mobile for a second, make sure you’re more than ready to supply juice to your device to make it through rigorous usage. I bought a Mophie Juice Pack last year for my iPhone which more than provided enough power for me to make it through every day. You don’t want to lose your bloodline to navigate the conference so make sure you’re prepared.

Great All Day Lounges at the Convention Center

There are several areas within the convention center that have on-going activities which make for a great place to network with like-minded folks. I highly recommend the Blogger Lounge which I’ve been attending since my first SXSW. This is a great place to pop in and out of in between sessions or during breaks while at the convention center. You are bound to meet some great folks there. If your work or interests are in the non-profit / philanthropy space then you should head over to the Beacon which similarly will have a dedicated space for the duration of the conference with a schedule of events and ability to network with lots of good folks.

Don’t Do it Wrong

Most of the mystique that revolves around SXSW is based on the surrounding events and parties that occur outside of the convention and panel schedule. Once again your best bet to find these are using the services I’ve already mentioned. But how do you know which one of them are worth going to? Well prior to the conference you’ll see people and friends that have shown interest on those services. But the real proof in the pudding is in people’s actions. Here is where having the right tools to monitor real-time streams becomes invaluable. It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of larger than life parties but I have found that many of the big ones aren’t worth attending. There’s long lines, once you get in they are super crowded, and my biggest pet peeve is that the music is blaring and you can’t hold a conversation with anyone. I do make some exceptions here but my goal is always to connect and communicate with great people. My strategy on parties is similar to panels. There’s tons of them going on concurrently so if you’re not getting anything by connecting with people at the one you’re at within 10 minutes it’s time to plant your head back into your phone to find where to head to next.

There are several things I recommend doing. Make sure prior to heading out that you have befriended people who will be attending on Foursquare. One year I realized that I had many friends on Twitter that I hadn’t connected with on Foursquare. That was a mistake. It has become the defacto standard for location at this point and will help you determine where the people you want to hang out with will be. Speaking of Twitter you should also create a list of attendees you want to connect with and have that list at the ready on your mobile device. Every year there seems to be an app category that gets hype leading up to the conference. Strangely enough and in a meta sort of way, it’s one that you can utilize at the conference. Twitter and Foursquare were born at SXSW and last year it was group messaging / texting that were hot. I successfully used these last year to get a hotel room which I was without upon the plane landing in Austin last year.

This Year’s Breakout App Category

This year’s app category that I”ve gleaned having the most hype around are what I would call passive or ambient location apps. These apps will track your location and then passively push alerts to your mobile device based on your proximity with other people near you. The trigger for the alerts are based on factors that could include one degree of separation friendships (A person that’s a friend of a friend on Facebook) or common interests (Also based on Facebook likes). So the point here is that instead of explicitly checking in or monitoring your friends checkins you can be somewhere and have a very serendipitous encounter with an existing friend or someone new you may want to meet. Before you go all crazy with privacy or stalking concerns you both have to be using the app and opt-in for this magical human collision to transpire. Robert Scoble who’s always on the pulse of top apps at SXSW wrote a good post on the two top contenders in this space called Highlight and Glancee. I’m trying both of those as I’m curious to see the results. You can find other recommended apps Scoble recommends to use at SXSW over on Google+ here.

I can go on and on and this post has already gone on for too long and an area I didn’t cover much of (besides being prepared to torture your mobile device) is other “survival guide” tactics. There are plenty of them out there if you just Google them but I came across this pretty cool one this year which even has an innovative design based on this year’s social darling Pinterest. Well there you have it, my ramblings trying to provide some experience to help you out. I hope that SXSW is as magical for me this year as it has been in the past. I’m worried about logistics and am curious how we shall all fare regarding that once we’re there.

Hope to see you there and here’s a guide to what I recommend and where I’ll be:

My Sched.org
My Lanyrd
My Official SXSW schedule
My Plancast

The iOS address book fiasco that originally broke last week has gotten several new legs over the last few days. I originally covered the issue with a slightly different angle in my post on how Path’s misstep may hurt their upcoming health data features. Path quickly responded and apologized in a blog post but the story hasn’t ended there.

Path’s apology has been received in a mixed way. Many have applauded them on the quick and swift action, while others felt it was disingenuous and only resulted because they got caught. The truth of the matter is that apparently this was a standard practice that was being used by many more apps besides Path as Jennifer Van Grove covered on Venture Beat today.

But this story has taken another turn as well. It has spurred a volley of blog posts that attack tech blogging in general and have me likening the situation to something of a cross between conspiracy theories and a comedy roast. Ben Parr has done a good job curating these posts and trying to put some perspective behind the rhetoric which while in some cases has been amusing, has made my head spin a bit. Interestingly enough, Jennifer’s post illustrates everything that’s right about tech blogging.

Neither of the fires behind these two stories are flaming out just yet. While Address Book (gate?) continues to burn, I think there’s still more fuel that will be sprayed on the tech blogging credibility argument. This will be interesting to continue to watch.

*gets popcorn*

I’ve been on the hunt to find a web enabled media streaming box to add to my home theater. After much research I narrowed down my decision to 2 devices I feel that are the best out there. Those devices are the Roku 2 XS, the Boxee Box. The Roku and Boxee have a set of common features between them so I wanted to thoroughly test both to determine which was the one I’d like to keep. The Roku is a cheaper and simpler device to setup and use, so in my comparison I decided to focus on the  distinct features that the Boxee box offered to see if it was a better choice for me. Below I’ve identified the unique features Boxee offers.

1. You can stream your own videos, music, and photos on it I feel that this feature is a must for any home theater today. We have all now amassed personal collections of photos, music, and home videos. Some of you may have setup other boxes you already have such as an Xbox 360 or PS3 for streaming these files. I was streaming using my PS3 and the PS3 Media Server. But as you may have found, this method isn’t ideal. The Boxee was built for sharing your own media from its inception. They also offer you several different ways to get the content from external sources to it. I’m using the built in SMB sharing to access the files from my NAS. It’s nice not having to have a program running on a computer that needs to be on to share content. So while there isn’t a native way to do this on the Roku, if you’re willing to hack a bit there are several third party apps (private channels) to do this. Probably one of the best options is Plex which is also based on the same XBMC software that powers the Boxee.

2. The remote has a keyboard I feel this is a very important feature that shouldn’t be underestimated when considering a streaming box. I have experienced the frustration of the single letter hunt and peck process of virtual keyboards on enough systems to know that I don’t want to continue wasting time using that process in the future. You will need to type words more often than you think on these boxes. Whether you are logging into a service, or trying to type in search words for a movie you want to find on Netflix, or if you need to type in the url of a website into the browser. You will need a keyboard to do this without losing your hair. And speaking of browsers…

3. It has a web browser So you have a box connected to the internet. Might as well offer the ability to browse the web too right? Well with a Boxee Box you can do this and with the keyboard on the remote you can rest assured that it won’t be an awful experience like it is on other devices without one.

4. You can bookmark videos on the web to watch on it Boxee offers a bookmarklet for your browser that provides a feature called “watch later” which allows you to be on any web page and when you click on the bookmarklet it will add any videos on the page to a view later area of the Boxee box to watch next time you fire it up on your couch. These videos can also be accessed via the iPad app. Wait what? They have an iPad app?

5. They offer a full featured iPad app add-on for free There’s an iPad app that provides access to some of Boxee’s features. This includes the “watch later” videos you bookmark functionality I mentioned above as well as accessing your personal movies, photos, and music. Another feature offered here (and also on the Box) is the ability to see all the videos shared by your friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. You can also start watching something on the iPad and easily resume where you left off on the Boxee Box or vice versa.

6. You can send video to your Boxee Box from an iOS device using AirPlay This is an experimental feature and I’ve had some mixed results but it’s pretty cool. I’ve successfully sent videos from apps that support AirPlay to the Boxee box and this is a great feature that I hope improves over time. I also am not sure if they’ll support the mirroring function that came with iOS to send content to a TV but that would be great too.

7. You can watch live broadcast TV Boxee just announced their LiveTV $49 add-on which adds the ability to watch local broadcast stations (like ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC) for free. This feature will go a long way to attract cord-cutters whose primary concern for eliminating their cable subscriptions is the loss of being able to watch live news and sports programming.

There is one major feature on the Roku that the Boxee doesn’t have. The Roku 2 XS comes with a remote that includes a gyro built-in accelerometer for gaming. Included with Roku is the ever popular Angry Birds. It was lots of fun to kill the piggy’s on my big screen. Roku also aims to bring many more games to utilize this remote. So if this is appealing to you it may be something to sway you into the direction of a Roku.

So there you have it. A little deeper dive into the unique features of these devices. One thing to keep in mind when comparing them is that the Boxee does require a little more work to setup and access all of these features. The Roku is almost half the price so you need to determine whether these features offer enough value for you. Also, If your household has children or slightly less tech savvy users, the Roku may still be a better choice.

Over the last year I’ve started an on-going initiative to try and streamline and simplify my life more. There are many different facets to this which involve taking a look at both physical and mental inventories. I’m consciously analyzing all aspects of my real-world and online behaviors to see where I can improve, consolidate, or remove anything. Now that’s a pretty high level goal that covers many areas and could sound ambiguous so I’ll try to explain it in more detail.

One thing I began doing was trying to determine if I could sell, donate, or throw out many physical objects that I own. I started by focusing on the tornado of strewn things that lived on my bookshelves. I took a look at my books and donated a large number of them. I then started going through all the other non book objects that occupied them. I threw out some of the souvenir and other cute trinkets that lined some shelves. I read on one of the many resources that I frequent that helps with this behavior that we get attached to the memories of many objects and that one way to maintain those memories without clinging these items is to take a photo of them. That’s good advice. I moved on to many other areas throughout my office like cables and old pc gear I had in boxes and many other items and was able to clear out a good deal of wasted space. This is still a work in progress but things now look more organized and neater which I believe also help me reach a calming state without so much chaos strewn around me.

I don’t know about you folks but the file libraries that occupy my multiple hard drives across my network are also an area that can grow pretty unwieldy. I’m actually pretty good at this now but it took some time. I have a dedicated folder where all new content I download ends up. From there it gets distributed to various other directories that are provide organization methods. The same goes for all media (photos and videos) I create. They end up in a holding zone when transferred from my camera and then I go through this raw dump and delete what I don’t want and then distribute to proper directories setup by year and month. Then nightly my local media gets backed up to my NAS as well as an offline backup service I use.

Then there’s the active software and web services that we use. I always determining whether I need to use all the memory resident apps I use and keeping an eye on alternatives. I look to web services that can help me save time and optimize my life. Mint.com has become one such example of such a service. I tie all of my financial accounts to it which make end of year taxes and monitoring of cash flow and investments in a single location a breeze. I was also a very early adopter of online baking services. I remember the days of sitting down for a half hour to write checks to pay bills and put them in envelopes and mail them out. Now I pay bills in less than five minutes. I’m always looking for existing things that I can do which can be optimized. Time has a huge value in life for me and the more I can do to reduce the amount you waste, the happier I am.

So those are just some examples of methods I’ve employed to try and streamline things in my life.  Another area that I can often get lost in, and have had to work on, is the distraction of consuming online content. This takes many shapes from the firehose of daily generated social content and all the link journeys that I’m taken on, to all the great blog and editorial content generated as well. I’ve recently seen posts that discuss the distractions described above.

• Finding Focus by Chris Brogan
• Apparently it’s called Social Network Fatigue by Luca Massaro (with wisdom from Brian Solis)
• The above story is also based on the Attention Crash concept coined by Steve Rubel that has been around for a few years now.
• I also recommend taking a look at the book Focus: a simplicity manifesto in the age of distaction

I recently read this article in the New York Times about a “Haunting Old Photographic process. It was a story about a current photographer who researched a photographic process called wet plate collodion. This photo process apparently was made famous during the Civil War by battlefield photographers. The San Francisco photographer wanted to learn this process so he could apply it for photos he was taking of current veterans that have returned home after serving in the Middle East.

The article showed a few photos of the process and described how it has gained a resurgence over the last year. I found this pretty interesting so I decided to dig a little deeper to learn more. I was able to find this video that shows each step of the detailed process to take these photographs.

This looked very interesting to me and so I decided to keep looking a bit to see if I could find any ways to simulate this digitally in photoshop. I was able to find this link to the Photoshop fine art effects cookbook that provides a tutorial on how to manually create this effect in Photoshop. So that’s a great tutorial for creating the effect using a manual process within core Photoshop but dug a little deeper.

I then came across some pre-built actions for Photoshop by Totally Rad that creates a very similar effect which you can see here. These looked pretty interesting but then I also discovered Alien Skin’s Exposure 3. So I downloaded the free trial to test it out. It’s very simple to get an initial effect using their “B&W – Vintage” filters which offer several varying Calotype presets with the ability to tweak the settings using color, focus, tone, grain, IR, and age. So I played around a bit and was able to get some pretty nice effects as you can see. I didn’t choose the most applicable photo, but you’ll get the point.

As you can see the Alien Skin filters do a pretty nice job. In an age of Instagram I have become fascinated with filters and the various methods to modify photographs to try and get an artistic look from them. I’ve stated before that HDR is the auto-tune of the photography world. I’m sure the purists are notably pissed by all these new wannabe photographers that are sprouting online nowadays but photo manipulation is fun and I only see it getting bigger.

I can tell summer is over, not from the weather or the calendar but when my commute returns to the progressively worse effed up state it was in prior to summer. That’s not to say that summer offers much of a break from it, but even a 10% improvement is noticeable.

I live in Los Angeles and my commute includes what has been ranked as the #1 worst freeway bottleneck in the whole nation. It’s amazing to me as a geek to watch the advancements in technology from my Atari 2600, as a kid to my first brush with a computer the Radio Shack TRS-80, to how online has changed from the single line BSS’s when I was a kid to where we are today.

How is it though that ground transportation hasn’t really gone anywhere in that same timeframe? It’s amazing how much of our lives are consumed moving from point A to point B nowadays at a speed that is even slower than it was 10 or 20 years ago. We’re actually going backwards.

The only saving grace to help with this antiquated non-innovative transportation issue are the technology innovations like, GPS, realtime traffic, and mobile phones which provide some comfort by letting us listen to podcasts or frikkin audio streams beamed over the air.

Being a geek I’m amazingly happy to have grown up during the emergence of computers and the web but I find this lack of innovation in transportation logistics or technology amazing and don’t see how it’s going to improve anytime soon. I think what this all boils down to is that I’m pissed that Back to the Future was a lie. There’s no way in hell we’re going to have hover cars in 2015.

A few weeks ago I was honored to be a guest on a podcast that I’ve been a listener of called Tummelvision. The podcast has 3 great hosts which include Kevin Marks, Deborah Schultz, and Heather Gold. Here’s the topic of the show in their words:

Tummelvision is a weekly salon-style podcast about the art and science of engaging and collaborating in a networked age. Each week we explore how to connect and create a world that puts people at the centre of business, technology and culture with the smart folks creating this new world.

Each week they invite a guest from varied areas to discuss how they “tummel” and share other interesting information about their roles for work, personal projects or other areas. They have varied guests from different fields which make for an eclectic show that both stays fresh and offers interesting topics to learn about. The hosts always make for a very engaging discussion around the topics that surround the guests that often go on welcomed tangents that branch off to other areas surrounding their discussion. It’s definitely a source of delicious brain food that is fed in different tasty chunks each week. I highly recommend it.

When I joined them we covered quite a few varied topics during the first half of the show including higher education, name spaces, and influence. The second part of the show I peel back the curtain to offer some insight to what we do at the X PRIZE foundation. You can visit their website and listen to my show here and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here.

After today’s announcement that Angry Birds was released in the Chrome app store I just knew I had to try running it on my new Sharp 70″ LCD TV (model LC-70LE732u). I recorded a video to show this. Unfortunately even the HD version of Angry Birds doesn’t go full screen to take advantage of the full 1920×1080 resolution of the TV. I think I may also now hold the distinction of being the first person to run this on such a large LCD TV.

The Sharp is a great TV that costed less than every 65″ LCD that was on the market when I purchased it and is fully LED backlit as opposed to most that are only LED edge lit. I’m really happy with it and highly recommend you research it if you’re in the market for a large LCD TV. Here’s a great thread on the very popular AVS Forum if you want to learn more about it.

My first smart phone was an iPhone 3G. While on AT&T I was loaned a Nexus One (Google’s Android phone) and tested it out to get my first chance to compare Android to iOS. As I wrote about this previously, I felt that Android still has some catching up to do before it provides the same seamless experience. I finally decided to upgrade to a new phone when moving to Verizon’s network earlier this year. I struggled on whether to get an iPhone 4 or wait for the upcoming crop of Android phones on Verizon’s LTE network. Well I couldn’t wait so ended up getting the iPhone 4.

This week I was given the opportunity to test out the new Samsung Droid Charge [Disclosure: I'm being given one to keep] which is their first entry on Verizon’s LTE (4g) network. I was very excited to read this favorable review over at Slashgear on the day I was to pick it up. When I finally got one in my hands the first impression that smacks you on the head is the beautiful 4.3″ Super AMOLED Plus display which is the same one they use on their new Galaxy S II. I know that this is either a plus or minus depending on personal needs, but this is my biggest complaint with the iPhone. How could Apple double the resolution of the iPhone’s display and not increase the screen size? It’s not just about having some more real estate, but I have some big hands and I can type much more comfortable on the Samsung. The image produced by the display is stunning and viewing photos and videos are gorgeous on it.

The next biggest feature difference on the Samsung vs. my iPhone is LTE. In the short time I’ve been able to test it thus far I can tell you that the speed is nothing short of awesome. It reminds me of the first time I upgraded from DSL to Cable. The speed at which apps that connect to the network and the browser operates is addictingly fast. Not only do you get that speed out of the phone, but you can also create a mobile hotspot to share that fat pipe or even tether to your computer to tap it. I get impatient now and it feels so slow when I revert back to the iPhone. The iPhone 5 better offer 4G on either AT&T or Verizon because it will be a huge handicap and seem antiquated out of the box without it.

I feel that the Samsung Droid Charge’s screen size and speed on Verizon’s LTE network are the 2 major standout features when comparing this to my iPhone without even getting into any of the Android vs. iOS differences. I feel these 2 issues require serious merit in general if considering a new phone on Verizon or anyone else’s network for that matter. Beyond those two clear distinctions I’m also re-evaluating Android from my last experience with the Nexus one. Unfortunately the phone is running Android 2.2 Froyo and not the newer 2.3 Gingerbread. I do like the Samsung TouchWiz UI which doesn’t get in the way and works better than the app scrolling on the Nexus. The built-in cameras (both front and rear facing) seem pretty good although I haven’t A/B’d them to the iPhone. I also like all the built in photo effects available natively in the OS, especially the panorama mode (see below). Another huge plus is the native android ability to share photos from the camera app or gallery to other apps like Twitter, Facebook, Picplz, Seesmic, Tweetdeck and others. I wish that iOS had this feature. The other feature I need to investigate more is AllShare which on the surface seems like Android’s answer to iOS’s Airplay.

One of the biggest concerns having both the 4.3″ display and using the LTE network is battery life. Since I’ve only had the phone for 2 days I don’t have enough experience to comment much on this except that I haven’t noticed it to be terrible. Day one I ran out at the end of the day and on day two I still had 26% left at midnight but in both cases my usage was moderate and didn’t involve heavy usage of the mobile hotspot which I’ve read is a battery killer.

Here’s more info on battery life from the Slashgear review:

Having seen the HTC ThunderBolt chew through a full charge in short order, we were more than a little nervous about the DROID Charge’s appetite. Happily it seems Samsung has managed to balance performance and power – impressive given the size and brightness of the Super AMOLED Plus display – with us managing 6-8 hours of heavy use before it died. With more casual use, and some tweaking of things like social network updates and other power settings, you could comfortably get through a day. Still, using the Mobile Hotspot app for any length of time chews through the battery in relatively short order.

So I still have some more testing to do and need to see if some of the Android issues that have bothered me in the past have been improved or overcome but overall I’ve been very happy with this phone. My goal will be to see if I can upgrade my Verizon plan to add LTE and Hotpotting so that it can support my usage of both the iPhone and Samsung Droid Charge simultaneously on one plan. That way I can switch between both phones as my daily usage dictates. We’ll see if that’s possible.