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 If you follow me on Twitter (twitter.com/r), you may have caught me mentioning I’m planning to go “Neo-Amish” for a few days. I hadn’t heard the term until earlier this week when Kevin Kelly, who coined the term many years ago, wrote about bloggers, blackberry addicts or the kind of people who stand in the line at an Apple Store, who decide to abandon the devices they use to stay plugged in. No way am I going to do that permanently, but if I wanted to, hey, no problem, I could do it — no, really.. I could quit using this stuff anytime I wanted to. Cold turkey. Really.
In reality, I’m going to be spending the next several days involved in a project that involves cutting up wood. If all goes as planned, I’ll be making a looped-back windsor chair that looks (if I’m lucky) like the one pictured. It’s going to be a full-time focus for several days during which I’ll be spending time with a very talented guy who enjoys teaching people how to keep from cutting off their fingers while making things like windsor chairs. One way to keep from cutting off ones fingers, I’ve been informed, is to avoid text-message while using a lathe. The same goes for using any power tool while Twittering, blogging, or being obsessed with loading apps onto a new iPhone 3G.
Making a windsor chair, I’ve determined, is very 18th century. So I’ll be “offline” entirely during the project.
For the record, I won’t be gadget free. I’m documenting the experience for a magazine and video project. In other words, I’ll still be digital, just not conversationally.
See you back here on July 21.
I’m in Washington D.C. today, attending the Small Business Summit sponsored by NFIB and eBay. For those of you who help produce events, you may find the media-gallery we’re producing of interest. It is aggregating Flickr, YouTube and Twitter updates several people are adding throughout the conference.
One thing that means is that I’ll be tied up during the Stevenote at today’s WWDC (for regular people, that’s shorthand for saying I won’t be able to hear what Steve Jobs announces about the iPhone today, live, while he’s speaking.)
I’ve seen plenty of rumors over the past few weeks and as many people who read this blog know, I have a two-year-old list of rumors that still has a few items to mark out, some of which I may be able to do today.
As for me, the only break-through feature that will cause me to trade up to the new iPhone is video — specifically the ability to stream video using services like Qik.com. iPhone video iChat is taking the phone to the next level and (as you can see from my two-year-old rumor list) something I’ve wanted for a long time.
Anyway, have a fun day.
P.S. Here are some early morning D.C. photos from a jog I took before the heat (and meeting) sets in.
End of day update: Oh well. I won’t be standing in line for this version — no video iChat and the camera is still on the wrong side of the phone — however, I’m sure it will be really swell to have such a scorching phone. Ironically, I already pay for AT&T 3G as that is what powers my cellular broadband I use on my MacBook Air (indeed, I’m using it now). I’ve been very pleased with AT&T 3G and, while it may just be my imagination, it seems to be moving faster lately.
This is a comment added by Mr. Charles Wilkes to my post the other day about a source for 20,000+ free eBooks. I don’t know if I kin to Mr. Wilkes (I am closely related to lots and lots of Wilkes), but I hope I am just like him when I’m 82:
I got my Kindle last Dec. 4th, love it more and more every day, and now have over 600 books in my directory storedon my 8 GB memory card, with enough room left for more than 10,000 more. But I have thousands of paper books — over half hard bound — that I no longer want, and will never try to read again. I do want my heavily colored illustrated books, since my Kindle cannot replace those — how I wish it could, but it can’t.
My problem then is how do I reduce my regular books which are truly a burden in my home. Obviously I would like to sell as many as possible of these for at least something, or all that I can. I guess there is always EBAY and other auction sites, but they are a lot of work to set up to sell, and then deliver via the mails. And this is not as easy as it once was, since I’m now 82 years old. What I really hate to consider is that under current practices, these will some day end up in a land fill or recycle bins. They contain the knowledge of this world, and many many young people really need access to this, and what with the closing of school libraries and financial problems in supporting public libraries, this is getting harder and harder for them to obtain.
So if any of you have any better ideas of how to give these books a more extended life amont those who would really read and appreciate these, please give me your ideas. I am sure many are in the same position.
Any advice to Mr. Wilkes?
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Berners-Lee Quote (Regarding 15th anniversary of The Web) - What’s exciting is that people are building new social systems, new systems of review, new systems of governance.
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Over on my Hammock People Page, I’ve posted a letter my friend Harvey King wrote to his ‘future-self’…and, as they say, the future is now.
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Other breaking news: Teens say “you-know” in the middle of sentences. Teens think surveys are, like, duh. Teens are beginning to limit all test answers to less than 140 characters.
The storyline is this, people: The economy sucks. We’re in a gut-wrenching recession. Batten down the hatches for the worst economy since (fill in blank). And oh by the way, where are those MREs we stored up before Y2K?
The storyline is this, people: The whole Internet advertising thing is ready for a bust. Sure, online advertising is growing, but with the economy in the dumps, no way is Google going to keep growing.
The storyline is this, people: Small businesses buy lots of those search ads and small businesses are hurting now, so expect to see some fall-off in the growth of search advertising. It’s going to happen. We’re experts, we’re ComScore, and we know these things.
And then, Google has to go and spoil it all by out-performing the storyline and even having the audacity to ignore the storyline.
Quote from the New York Times:
“Google’s first-quarter report comes amid intense interest and speculation over the impact that a slowing economy may have on the Internet search giant and on the online advertising business overall. When Google reported financial results for the fourth quarter of 2007, Mr. Schmidt, told investors that the company had seen no adverse effects on its business from a slowing economy.
The storyline is this, people: There’s going to be a bust in all that search advertising and all those startups who are depending on Adsense revenue to help them “monetize” themselves are going to get flushed out when that crazy money stops flowing.
The storyline is this, people: If Google sneezes, web startups die of pneumonia.
The storyline is this, people: Lots of old-time web people wouldn’t mind seeing that happen.
Unfortunately for them, those wishes are delayed at least another quarter.
People, don’t ya’ll know the storyline?
I’m away from the office a few days. Any non-bookmarking pings will occur over at RexHammock.com or on Twitter.com/r. Photos will be posted at Flickr.com/rexblog. Today, I’m one-day into re-enacting this current (and apparently not very good) movie, except our language has already precluded us from earning a G rating. Happy Easter.
No one asked, but here are the primary ways I’m currently expressing myself online.:
rexblog.com: Professional and business-related focus (media, technology, conversational & new media, marketing, magazines). Once each day, my blog includes a posting that aggregates all of the links I’ve bookmared on del.icio.us/rexblog that are related to those topics.
Hammock.com/rexhammock: My official Hammock Inc. “people page.”
RexHammock.com: Personal passions and random-topic tumble-log.
Twitter.com/r: Stream-of-life commentary in < 140 character posts, and where I "hang-out" online.
Flickr.com/rexblog: Where I post photos.
YouTube.com/rexhammock: Where I post videos.
Last.fm/user/rexhammock: Music I’m listening to.
Facebook, Linkedin, etc.: I don’t really “express myself” on these and other “social networking” sites, but on most of them, you can find me if you search for my name or the username “rexhammock.”
FriendFeed.com/rexhammock: A “lifestream” of everything I post anywhere.
Recently, I re-booted RexHammock.com, a URL on which I’ve been experimenting with Tumblr.com for several months. I had determined that I was under-utilizing it as merely a “lifestream” catcher — a place that collects all the different RSS feeds generated by my various online-expressions on Twitter.com/r, Flickr.com/photos/rexblog, etc. And, with services like FriendFeed.com and even MyBlogLog getting more into being pure-play lifestream platforms, I decided to go back and figure out how to better utilize the very cool features of Tumblr.
As you can see from RexHammock.com, one of the smart things they did was make it drop-dead-simple for me to use my own URL instead of some long / this-and-that account name. And, despite my design-free look on the site, the Tumblr platform has some attractive templates and is very CSS-friendly for those who want to (and can) be creative. I’m trying to master the functions and ethos of the platform and its community, before putting any time into determining what it should look like however. So, in my experiment, you can consider it now in a wire-frame state.
What I have determined is this: I’ll be writing about and pointing to mostly non-work or non-professional-related topics on RexHammock.com. For example, this week, I started off with my review of the Punch Brothers new release and have followed that up with posting quotes from the New York Times and the long piece yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered. (I’m happy to note that if you had read my review on Tuesday, and had listened to a YouTube video I pointed to, you would have been better prepared to understand why such a “different” kind of recording is receiving such attention.)
So, to summarize: On rexblog.com, I’m gradually shifting to focused commentary and links related to magazines, new media (specifically, what I call “conversational media,”) marketing, corporate and association communication. Some of this is cross-posted on Hammock.com and elsewhere. My non-professional interests (stuff my wife & kids & pets do, the world, my hometown, travel, music, photography, books, movies, table saws, humor, tomatoes, Tennessee Titans, Vanderbilt basketball, etc.) are slowly showing up on RexHammock.com.
Posted on February 23, 2008
Over the years, I’ve heard lots of stories about couples meeting online. And I know that an online industry has grown up around helping people connect with others who are of the same mind — or heart — or both.
Yet when I started blogging, the last thing (but definitely the best thing) I ever expected to post one day was a photo of a happy couple who are getting married this weekend who first met because of this blog. I feel like Michael from The Office when I interject myself into this couple’s “how we met” story, but they’ve told me they first became aware of one-another through comments on this blog and the first time they actually met was at a blogger event I co-hosted with the guy on the left, a Nashville lawyer who was a legendary early “persona” blogger who went my the name Mr. Roboto. Yes, that’s Mr. Roboto.
Anyway, I’ll skip the rest of the story and merely say congratulations and best wishes and I hope the weather is swell in Hawaii where you are arriving and preparing for your wedding — however, I know that first, Mr. Roboto will be watching a little basketball game.
Congratulations, David and Lena.
As my online time has been sparse the past few days, I’m only now realizing that Jon Gordon’s Public radio show Future Tense posted the story about about Apple and Think Secret that includes some Rex sound bites.
Thanks to Jon’s amazing editing skills, I don’t sound like a complete idiot — except to those who believe Apple can never do wrong.
I’m back on the grid after two days of un-plugged bliss. It’s odd for me to be outside the range of internet connectivity — in a spot where cell-phone coverage is spotty and I’m beyond any “edge” that AT&T’s Edge coverage may reach. My email’s backed up and my RSS reader is overflowing. I doubt I’ll be blogging much today. However, tomorrow I’ll be posting photos from Nashville’s Boulevard Bolt, one of my favorite community events of the year.
I didn’t realize this blog was on Advertising Age’s “Power 150.” Ironically, I’m ranked 151 (or, at least I was when I noticed it). Also, ironically, there are 360 weblogs on the Power 150. This badge is supposed to show my current “rank.”
 On Monday night, October 22, an amazing cast of roots music singers and players will appear at a concert benefiting Butch Baldassari, a mandolin great who is fighting cancer. The concert takes place in Ingram Hall at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music. I’ve mentioned Butch on this blog before, as he mentored for several years my family’s mandolin player known on this blog as “the 17-year-old.” I sat in on nearly every one of those lessons and took notes and recorded “licks” on my PowerBook. Butch’s collection of instructional DVDs, CDs and books bring back great memories of Butch’s teaching skills.
Performers at the concert will include: Dierks Bentley, Shawn Camp, Kathy Chiavola, John Cowan, Bela Fleck, The Grascals, Tony McManus, the Nashville Bluegrass Band, the Nashville Mandolin Ensemble, Maura O’Connell with John Mock, Mark O’Connor, Ricky Skaggs and Three Ring Circle.
That, my friends, is a lineup to write home about.
The concert begins at 7 p.m. Tickets cost $50 and patron tickets will be sold for $125. All proceeds will go to Baldassari and his family.
I participated on a panel today at Vanderbilt Law School with students way smarter than me. Fortunately, I understood most of the questions, except the one about Arcade Fire and LCD Soudsystem appearing live last night at the Hollywood Bowl. Actually, I understood the question, I just had no idea who Arcade Fire and LCD Soundsystem are. I do now.
Speaking of live music, tonight I’ll be enjoying a sold-out Station Inn performance by the Punch Brothers. I’m sure I’ll be blogging about it tomorrow. Tune in.
The 2008 SXSW Interactive Panel Picker closes tomorrow and, well, there are some panels that I’d like you to consider since my name is associated with them. I’ve attended several times, but this is the first time I’ve had my name thrown into the “picker.”
Technorati Tags: sxsw
In the Mobile Bay (Ala.) area Saturday, an 8 lb, 3 onch, baby was born to my nephew and his wife. While I’m completely too young to have relatives called “great-neices and great-nephews,” I’ll look over that point to wish the youngest Hammock a wonderful welcome to this world.
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