Akamai State of the Internet Report
The huge internet storage site Akamai recently released their first “state of the internet” report, where they detail internet traffic patterns. There are some very interesting trends. For example, while the three countries with the most internet traffic were China, the U.S., and Taiwan (no surprise), the next three were Venzuela, Argentina, and Brazil. Turkey’s […]
Ning—Less Than I’d Hoped
I heard Leo Laporte talk about Ning the other day on TWiT Live, so I decided to check it out. Ning’s an online community builder. Think of it as a toolbox with templates for online groups, complete with forums, space for photos and videos, and all that. So, if you want to talk with a […]
Upcoming Events from Upcoming
Seems like every week I stumble on another great service offered by Yahoo!. I’m no fan of its main site, but I love many of its services, including Games, Flickr, and GeoCities. Here’s one I’ve been using a lot: Upcoming. You enter your zip code, and the site returns a list of events happening near […]
Freedom for Your Online Life
I’ve been working on a project called Your Online Life for a couple of months now. It’s a “web guide for the rest of us;” an explanation of current web tech and trends. It’s meant to describe the latest websites and services, how to use them and why you’d want to. My original plan was […]
Fixing MySQL in MacOS X 10.5, Leopard
Techie note: For the past couple days, I’ve been struggling to get MySQL to run in Mac OS X 10.5. It would hang whenever I tried to start it. I finally put this updated preference pane file in ~/Library/PreferencePanes, then went in to System Preferences > MySQL and was able to start MySQL from there. […]
Four Tips for Reading Many Input Streams and Maintaining your Sanity
I keep up with a lot of different streams of input: emails, blogs, comics, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, and IM. I have much to learn, but here’s what I have learned: Skim. Don’t worry about catching every bit of every email. Start by skimming, then pay closer attention if the content rewards it. Keep up. If […]
Tenacity and Tech
So, a few years ago there was this TV channel called Tech TV. And the most popular show on that channel was The Screen Savers, a call-in tech variety show in which two guys and a crew of geeks covered all sorts of technology news and trends and such. Then, Tech TV died. So what […]
RescueTime – Not For Me
I’ve been testing out RescueTime, a service that tracks and plots your computer usage. The idea is that it’ll give you an idea of what’s wasting your time. You install a small app and let it run. Every few minutes, it uploads usage stats to www.rescuetime.com, which you can access at any time to check […]
It’s Ready
I’ve just put the finishing touches on Your Online Life. It’s a web-based course in web trends and technologies, covering a large set of sites and services. You can learn about online photo sharing sites, user-contributed news sites, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and a host more—both how they work, and exactly how to sign up with […]
Self-Publishing on the Kindle
I published my Kindle Fan Guide several months ago, to quite some success. I’ve sold almost 300 copies so far. I learned a lot during the process of publishing it. I had to log in to Amazon’s Digital Text Platform, though fortuately anyone can log in using an existing Amazon account. I then selected the […]