billso.com

I do like using OpenDNS.

Protection from phishing sites, the ability to whitelist or blacklist specific URLs, community tagged categories… and it’s free.

It only takes a few minutes to change your computer’s domain name settings to the OpenDNS servers, as long as you have administrative rights on your computer. Just read the OpenDNS tutorial and make the appropriate choices. Be sure to reboot or restart your computer after confirming the changes.

Your Internet connection might become faster, too.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• 25 July 2008: Fixing the DNS security hole with OpenDNS
• 24 February 2008: Pakistan blocks YouTube, breaks trust
• 15 January 2008: OpenDNS update
• 3 September 2007: When users block the ads, should web sites block the users?
• 13 July 2007: Speed up your broadband connection with OpenDNS

I’ve claimed for several years now that email is broken. At best, email is the lowest common denominator (LCD) for sending messages to a specific Internet user. Every ISP subscription comes with some kind of email account. Free webmail addresses are easy to get. Many mobile phone accounts come with an email address. Alex Iskold’s post from ReadWriteWeb called Is Email in Danger? discusses how microblogging services like Twitter can overcome the inherent problems of heavyweight email clients like Microsoft Outlook.

Broadcasting with a microblog

Microblogging services are best suited for broadcasting messages to lots of users. FriendFeed, Twitter and similar services are widely used by popular bloggers to publicize their latest posts and mention their daily activities. Most of these services accept text messages and offer mobile versions of their web sites, so they are easier to use than email from an ordinary mobile phone. iPhone and BlackBerry users have better email clients on their devices, but microblogging from these devices seems to work well. 

As I mentioned yesterday in my article called The battle against Twitter spam, microblogging services like Twitter have their own problems. Because email is a mission critical service, it’s almost always available and working. Collecting comments and posts from microblogs can be accomplished with RSS - I use this to repost my FriendFeed activity to billso.com, but it would take a bit more effort to do this as part of an archiving and compliance effort. 

I’ve never been a fan of Outlook. In its easly versions (Outlook 97 and 98), the application would crash at least once a day. Microsoft developed  ActiveSync software to support PDAs, but 10 years later it is still a maddening piece of cruft.  

Look out for Outlook and iTunes

My university uses Microsoft Exchange as its faculty/staff email server, so I occasionally get meeting invitations and Outlook forms in my Gmail my box. All of my university email is auto-forwarded into my Gmail account. Microsoft meeting invitations are useless in Gmail - I have to tap out a reply to accept or decline the meeting.  

To be honest, Apple’s iTunes is following a similar evolution. It start as a music player, but has become a media storefront, disc burner and iPhone application installer. I’d think that several specific lightweight apps would work better than a huge, monolithic instance of iTunes. On a Mac, iTunes performance is barely tolerable. iTunes on a Windows box is a lumbering behemoth. 

Gmail, on the other hand, was designed as a lightweight solution that would work in a standard web browser. I love Gmail because I can search for messages quickly, and I know I won’t run out of storage room for old messages. There’s no reason for me to delete an old message in Gmail. 

Attacking the inbox

One approach to managing a bulging email inbox is to sit down and clear the queue. The Inbox Victory web page tries to make this process fun by letting users post pictures of themselves with their empty inboxes. I clear out my Gmali inboxes a few times a year. 

Luis Suarez of IBM claims that he reduced his incoming email by 80%, thanks to his usage of social networking tools like RSS feeds, Twitter and IBM’s internal clone of Facebook, Beehive. Suarez discussed his  article in the New York Times called I Freed Myself from E-Mail’s Grip.

Suarez admits that his job as a social computing evangelist helped him cut his email volume. He’s supposed to encourage his fellow IBM employees and managers to use Beehive, which is as much a knowledge management (KM) tool as it is a social intranet application. IBMers are supposed to use Beehive to share events, lists, pictures, tips, and ideas across the enterprise, as part of formal and ad hoc workgroups and project teams. 

Image courtesy of gwENvision through a Creative Commons license. 

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• Email and spam
• iPhone
• 7 July 2008: The battle against Twitter spam
• 22 April 2008: Email is still broken
• 10 June 2007: Just say “no” to HTML in email
• 19 April 2007: The great Blackberry blackout
• 22 August 2006: 95 percent of email is UCE
• 4 August 2004: E-mail is broken

Electronic Arts is publishing an authorized version of Scrabble for US and Canadian users of Facebook. It will compete head-to-head against the popular Indian knockoff Scrabulous, which has become a popular pastime on the social networking site.

The developers of Scrabulous, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, may face multiple lawsuits by Hasbro and Mattel, the companies that purchased the rights to Scrabble.

The brothers contend that they are not copying Scrabble - they are merely adapting ideas for a new game. Fair use is a weak argument, as Scrabble has been sold under license in India for several decades. Scrabble is also protected under multiple patents and copyrights around the world. Scrabulous uses the same number of tiles found in Scrabble, along with identical point values, and an identical game board.

The brothers admitted in this New York times article, Online Scrabble Craze Leaves Game Sellers at Loss for Words, that they are earning at least US$25,000 in dvertising revenue from their Facebook game. Here’s a link to the Wikipedia article.

Mattel licensed its own Facebook version of Scrabble in March 2008, but the Facebook app provided by RealNetworks cannot be played by US and Canadian Facebook users. It’s trivial for Facebook to identify these users, either by IP addresses or user profiles. Hasbro owns the Scrabble license for the US and Canada, and has licensed the EA version for Facebook. Both Mattel and Hasbro considered a settlement with the brothers, but the idea was abandoned for fear of creating a precedent. 

See this Associated Press story, Facebook could see a standoff over Scrabble, for more details. 

Image courtesy of allyrose18 through a Creative Commons license. 

Related pages on billso.com

• Copyright and fair use

Helio, the mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) that tried to sell MySpace-branded handsets and service, has been purchased by Virgin Mobile. 

After EarthLink bailed out, SK Telecom pumped an additional US$270 million into Helio in a last-ditch effort to save the struggling business.

The Helio kiosks in Ala Moana Center never looked very busy. I’m not sure how many Helio subscribers signed up in Hawaii, but the nationwide numbers had gone down to 170,000, compared to Virgin Mobile’s 5 million. Young adults seem to carry T-Mobile’s Sidekick or a Verizon phone, although the iPhone may gain traction in a few weeks with its new low price. 

See this TechCrunch article titled Helio Hangs It Up for more details. 

Related articles and pages on billso.com

• iPhone
• 9 June 2008: iPhone 3G
• 13 April 2008: MySpace keeps trying to sell music downloads
• 29 September 2006: ESPN sacked, Helio scrambling

I started blogging back in 2003, and I learn something new every day about writing, attribution, and basic research when I write a story. When i was in art school, my drawing instructors told us to draw something every day. It’s a skill, not a gift. Skills need work and practice.

Friends of mine who do SEO (search engine optimization) consulting have told me that I should be running several different blogs, each with a different domain name. My mobile technology posts could go in one blog, while my Honolulu political posts could appear at alohapundit.com, for example.

I have made one major change in my blogging model. I’ve started writing articles about home office technology, the Mac and small business security for BrightHub.

There are some benefits in writing for a larger web site. At BrightHub, I have three editors that provide feedback and topic suggestions. BrightHub sells ad links to the articles, and maintains the site and its content management system (CMS).

BrightHub keeps the copyright over the articles I write for them, I do earn some revenue on each article. My BrightHub articles are listed in my profile on that site, as well as my BrightHub page at billso.com.

FriendFeed is another service that I use. It’s a social media aggregator that collects my posts, comments and items from other services like Twitter, StumbleUpon, Google Reader and my Amazon Wish List.

I have set up a page at billso.com that lists my recent FriendFeed activity. It’s not as pretty or as organized as my FriendFeed.com page but it was a fun way to do some RSS filtering.

While I enjoy posting a new entry at billso.com every day, I may scale back that commitment so that I can post more articles on BrightHub and other services.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• BrightHub
• 25 June 2008: Honolulu Advertiser blogs need more content and authority