Category: Uncategorized

My role model, Guy Kawasaki, has written up an excellent article on how to maximize your LinkedIn account (you have one, don't you?). He says that you can use it to…

• Increase your visibility
• Improve your connectability
• Improve your Google PageRank
• Enhance your search engine results
• Perform blind, “reverse,” and company reference checks
• Increase the relevancy of your job search
• Make your interview go smoother
• Gauge the health of a company
• Gauge the health of an industry
• Track startups
• Ask for advice
• Integrate into a new job
• Scope out the competition, customers, partners, etc

It certainly makes me want to update my profile this weekend.

Links:

• Guy Kawaski's article, Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn
• George's LinkedIn profile
• My (Joey's) LinkedIn profile

That “gnashing of teeth, rending of clothing” sound that you're bound to hear on many sites and blogs concerned with videogames, freedom of expression or both is the outcry over the removal of the controversial Super Columbine Massacre RPG from the Slamdance film festival's videogame competition. Although the organizers of the festival asked SCMRPG's developer Danny LeDonne to enter his game, they revoked his entry in the competition after sponsors threatened to withdraw unless that game was removed from the competition.

If you're curious about the game but have better things to do than play it (personally, I'm not even going to bother downloading this one), there's a review and writeup at Arthouse Games.

Links:

• Exclusive: Columbine Game Kicked From Competition (Kotaku)
• Festival Sponsors Force Super Columbine Game Out of Competition (GamePolitics.com)

I met Bubbleshare CEO Albert Lai in Toronto in 1995, back when he was still a high school kid. I was at my first job fresh out of Crazy Go Nuts University (that's where I met George) and Albert was there doing an internship, seeing what it was like working a new media company that was in the newfangled business of developing interactive media applications. We got along, probably because we were the two guys at the company who came from a technical, let's-make-some-cool-tech-and-money mindset rather than the prevailing arts-degree “my art above all else” vibe. There seemed to be general unease about doing projects for “big business”. Hippies.

I remember later reading about Internet.com's acquisition of the MyDesktop network of sites; he was one of the three teens who made the sale.

A few years later, I ran into him again, this time in a location thousands of miles away: in San Jose, at a gathering of P2P software developers, just prior to the first O'Reilly P2P conference (which would later morph to become the Emerging Tech conference). It turns out that we ended up living in the same condo complex in San Francisco.

A few years after that, I bumped into him again as he was promoting Bubbleshare, an online photo-sharing web application. Bubbleshare is pretty simple to use and could teach Flickr a thing or two. I kept running into him at various TorCamp/BarCamp/DemoCamp-related events, and then…nothing.

Albert usually makes his presence known, so any silence coming from him usually means that he's hard at work on his latest project. That turned out to be the case: the news that Bubbleshare has been acquired has been reported by local tech writers Mathew Ingram and Mark Evans. The acquisition has been made by Toronto-based Kaboose, which runs a network of family-oriented sites.

Mark Evans aptly points out that Bubbleshare always seemed more like a feature than a business; their fit with Kaboose seems like a natural one — family-oriented site and very user friendly online photo album.

My congratulations to Albert and the rest of the Bubbleshare crew. You'll have to tell me all about it at the next DemoCamp!

Links

• Bubbleshare finally gets acquired (Mathew Ingram)
• Kaboose Picks Up Bubbleshare (Mark Evans)
• Speaking of Family Photo Fun, Kaboose Just Acquired BubbleShare (Jeneane Sessum)

If you've been following the blog shooting war between the boosters of XML and JSON and have been scratching your head as to which one to use, Dare “Carnage4Life” Obasanjo has written a great article with an excellent executive summary:

If you're too busy to read them, here's the executive summary. JSON is a better fit for Web services that power Web mashups and AJAX widgets due to the fact…that it is essentially serialized Javascript objects which makes it fit better client side scripting which is primarily done in Javascript. That's it. XML will never fit the bill as well for these scenarios without changes to the existing browser ecosystem which I doubt are forthcoming anytime soon.

Link

Does anyone remember the Simpsons episode in which Doctor Hibbert says ruefully “We've given the word 'mob' a bad name”?

There's a reason that the phrase “design by committee” is an insult, and Kathy Sierra does a good job covering why in her latest posting to Creating Passionate Users titled The Dumbness of Crowds.

Kathy's prowess at explaining concepts and then making them stick in your head is second to none. She's in fine form with this article, which she closes with a memorable catchphrase that's sure to end up on a Successories poster someday:

No matter what, I believe that in our quest to exploit the “We” in Web, we must not sacrifice the “I” in Internet.

Link

In his blog, The Intuitive Life Business Blog, Dave Taylor writes that the ethical non-issue over the Microsoft laptop giveaway is a red herring. By giving away laptops with Vista pre-installed, they do an end-run around two major issues:

• Installation problems
• Hardware requirements problems

“That's the only conclusion I can draw,” he writes, “because if it were a breeze to upgrade from WinXP to Windows Vista, with all your apps backwards compatible, all your data intact, and all your files untouched, you'd be happy to install Vista on your existing PC and enjoy the new OS.”

In fact, I had exactly those problems with Release Candidate 1: it took three separate attempts to upgrade my office desktop from XP to Vista, and my upgrade became a full install (complete with the loss of the data on my XP system) since the installer crashed in mid-process. As for performance issues, I've decided to take that desktop back to XP because it feels rather sluggish under Vista. I don't think that the desktop's processor is an issue — it's a 3.2 GHz P4 — but rather than RAM, which is at a half-gig versus the full gig in the Ferrari laptop they sent me.

I think Dave's hit the nail right on the head with his observations.

Link

You're probably aware — by way of my personal blog — that I am a rock and pop accordion player. It's more than just a muscial instrument to me: it's proven to be a great conversation-starter in all sorts of situations, including tech conferences. One of my favourite memories of those heady days of the Bubble was when I ended up leading a parade of geeks with my accordion up Broadway to the Slashdot/VA Linux funding party, singing The Clash's Should I Stay or Should I Go all along the way. I've come to refer to it as “social hardware”.

It looks as though I can try a new accordion party trick at the next Microsoft event (assuming I ever get invited to them again): playing Windows XP alerts on the accordion. MusicThing has an article with a video of a guy named “TheCanCollector123” who shows how to play XP's musical alerts on a piano keyboard. You'll hear your favourite hits, such as:

• Chime
• MSN message received
• AIM message received
• GoogleTalk message received
• Tada

I suppose I could one-up him by demonstrating how to play Vista sounds on a piano keyboard…

Link