Earthling

I'm back in the office after a great weekend at BlogHer, and now going through my notes, business cards, and to-dos and catching up with e-mail. As has become my habit after conferences, I'll be publishing the highlights of my notes from sessions and keynotes in their own entries, but I'm realizing there are a lot of little notes I want to get out there quickly. What follows are loose notes from the weekend. So I don't get held up from publishing by today's multitasking, I'll just keep updating this throughout the day:

• I learned a lot in talking shop with Amanda Lenhart, Senior Research Specialist at Pew/Internet. Amanda is something of an emerging rockstar in the field of blog/blogger research, as she produced the recent Pew report on Bloggers. She pointed me to an online version of the survey they used, so that you can contribute your own experiences. Here's a link to her Masters Thesis, titled Unstable Text: An Ethnographic Look at How Bloggers and Their Audience Negotiate Self-Presentation, Authenticity and Norm Formation. I'm looking forward to taking a look at it.
  
• Turns out Ms. Jen, who was on the Canvas vs. Gallery panel I'll write about later, is a long-time EarthLink member. She's a prolific photographer and moblogger. I got to pick her brain about what she likes and doesn't like about blogging tools, EarthLink, and the industry. She gave me some really good suggestions which I'm looking in to today. One was the idea of an "e-mail account/identity for life" product where you'd know you were guaranteed to hold on to your account and everything else forever. (Jen, please correct me if I got the idea wrong in my notes). Premium Mail does part of this, but not all of it. I asked around and found out that we're working on a flexible billing system that will let you choose the billing term you'd like to pay in. That, in theory, would let you specify that you want to pay a lump sum up front. If we do it right, you'd also be paying a good bit less for the courtesy of prepaying us.
  
• I agree with Josh that the user focus and collaborative learning environment made BlogHer a great conference on blogs and social media irrespective of the important gender issues that take center stage. He writes:
  

  When you become too involved in the development side of things you sometimes lose sight of those using the tools. This can range from the bloggers themselves to the consumers of the content. BlogHer brings things back to balance and opens your eyes to the limitations and potential of social media.

  
  

Posted by dave coustan at 10:59 AM |

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A red caterpillar interrupts the very excellent Canvas vs. Gallery session to make a point about performance.

Update: What caterpillar? Elizabeth Perry sketched it and Ms. Jen snapped a cameraphone shot.

Posted by dave coustan at 7:04 PM |

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If you're at BlogHer but not registered for today's sessions, stop by the lounge area in the lobby of the main building this morning. There are a bunch of us gathered here, warming ourselves by the Wi-Fi connection and talking shop.

Posted by dave coustan at 12:16 PM |

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I'm at the BlogHer conference in San Jose through the weekend. This year's theme is "How is your blog changing the world?" If there's blogging to be done from the conference, for me it'll mostly be on day two, Saturday. I'll do my best to catch up to the backlog of comments and e-mails along the way.

Posted by dave coustan at 6:35 PM |

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This is part three in a series of ideas about how blogs can be useful in your life, to give you something to go on beyond the "blogs are great" headlines. Part one was about staying in touch, and part two was about choosing knowable sources.

If you've been watching the CNN coverage of the conflict in Lebanon for the past week, you might have noticed that they've started to lean pretty heavily on eyewitness blogs and YouTube videos to help bring you the story. My TV news watching has gone way down so maybe this isn't new, but I've been surprised to see CNN actually showing user-uploaded video footage with the YouTube website/video player visible in the frame on broadcast television.

It's great that they're adding this dimension to their coverage. And CNN is and will continue to be great for what a huge, well-established international news organization can bring to the table. They can send professional reporters to the scene, go places we can't, cover the beat of international politics, and bring us official announcements and press conferences.

But you don't need to depend on TV news and their editorial capacity to bring you direct reporting and commentary from eyewitnesses and participants. The TV stations only have limited time to present blogs and homemade videos, and they make their own editorial choices about what's appropriate to show and what's not. Why rely on what they decide to show you? The tools to seek this stuff out yourself are all around you on the web. If there's something you're passionate about or want to know more about, bring the millions of blog authors to bear to help you out.

Read on for some simple tips on how to do that.

Continue reading "Why Read Blogs: Roll Your Own News Coverage"

Posted by dave coustan at 1:45 PM |

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I've often had a problem getting non-technical or non-professional web users to try blog search engine/tool suite Technorati. They seem to like it in theory, and think it's fascinating and powerful while I'm in front of their face. But once I walk away from their desk, they've lost either the nerve to use it or the grasp of why they might want to.

Technorati celebrated its third birthday with some significant changes today. Niall Kennedy tracked some of the previous iterations. One of the things they've done is expose more stuff to discover on the home page. On the one hand, this is the kind of thing that helps pull in new users, but on the other hand the more information you surface on a page, the harder you'll have to work at making the user interface intelligible. This will probably be a work in progress. Niall writes:

When Technorati had fewer features it was easy enough to highlight each option and the latest data on the front page of the site. As the number of data exploration options on the site increases I expect more interface tweaks to help users make sense of it all.

I was just in the middle of thinking, "you know, I wonder if this is too cluttery and busy for the average Google-loving american to use," when two items in the What Everyone Is Blogging About box drew my attention:

• Ronaldo Action Figure and
  
• Sex In Space: Getting A Grip On Gravity

So that worked. Since I was logged in, that box appeared just above the fold, but for a new user, that would be the main item on the page. Great idea. Unless Technorati is expecting to replace my RSS reader (Reader.earthlink.net, so not bloody likely) I say they should let "What Everyone is Blogging About" box stay at the top of the page even after I've logged in. It's like a less eggheaded Techmeme and judging from those two stories, the articles behind them are as interesting as the headlines make them seem.

I do like Chris Messina's suggestion that Technorati should build a more powerful experience for the logged-in power-user: "So Dave [Sifry], think about it this way: when I come to Technorati as a blogger and as a registered user, I want Technorati to reorient and rebuild itself around me at the center." But my demands aren't quite as high -- I don't want a DVD player built-in to my TV, and I doubt I'll replace my other information-gathering tools with a Technorati super site. I like it for what it does well, but I'm not looking for an "it's all about me" experience.

Several bloggers are using "the MySpace crowd" as shorthand for who and what this redesign aims its hooks at. Fortunately there's no jarring musical selection or colored type on a colored background. I get the hyperbole, but to some degree it sounds like ivory-towerism to me. Many regular Technorati enthusiasts have probably lost touch with how hard it can be to get someone to change their information search habits. That I've read, no one is yet complaining about any particular features that went away, so what's the big deal? It's almost like we don't want our geek tools to get more widely adopted.

Posted by dave coustan at 2:46 PM |

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The heh level in my myFavorites bookmarks is reaching dangerouly high levels. It's again time to spill them out onto Earthling. Clearly I need to do this more often.

As an aside, if you look at everyone's URL's marked heh, you'll see I'm dominating that tag (I'm Dave C in myFavorites). But I'm all for changing that. By next heh round-up, I hope to see at least a few things in myFavorites tagged heh by some people other than myself. Consider yourself conscripted. Not only does this make my job easier, it also gets some stuff in front of my face that I might not have seen otherwise.

• Series Of Tubes Is The New Internets - Since the last Heh round-up, Senator Ted Stevens has become famous for describing the internet as a 'series of tubes' and an e-mail as an 'internet'. Let's take a lesson from Valleywag with the heads-up that it's no longer cool to make the George Bush "the internets" joke anymore.
  
• A Wider Perspective On Flavor - Web comic Penny Arcade hits close to home with this strip about the overly obscure hints nerds leave themselves to try to remember passwords (warning: some salty language). Once I'm done using my current passwords, I've got a funny anecdote about what hint I usually leave for myself.
  
• A Pause To Praise A Great Game - Long-time 'heh' contributor Jeff wrote up what it sounded like on spanish-language channel Univision when Italy beat Germany in the World Cup semi-finals.
  
• Wilford Brimley: The Beetis - The way Wilford Brimley says "Di-a-beetis" on the old Liberty Medical commercials has always been strange and hi-larious to me. I recently discovered a cache of YouTube remixes of that ad from earlier this year. The one I link to in the title is one of the better ones. How did I miss this when it was going around? Still, no one has managed to create my dream remix, which would be a mashup of Run-DMC's "My Adidas" and the Wilford Brimley Diabeetis ad. Please steal this idea.
  
• Japanese Darth Vader Ad - Not sure what this is, but it's a uniquely Japanese Darth Vader gag.
  
• 50 Worst Video Game Names Ever - Just as it sounds, Game Revolution rounds up the dumbest actual names given to video game titles. One of my favorites is #17 -"Tactics Ogre - Let Us Cling Together".
  
• Nigerian Letter Scammer Convinced To Carve Replica Commodore 64 - Enterprising scam busters have managed to get Nigerian scammers to do all sorts of things by stringing them along as potential victims. Here's a particularly elaborate task. There's a whole forum about baiting the scammers.
  
• Old Pole Position Ad - Back in the birth of the video game era, you could get away with the kind of ad where a voice-over guy yells threatening lines at the characters from off-screen.My favorite comment in the discussion thread: " Who was the guy with the giant hand? Was that God?" [via BoingBoing]
  
• Abominable Snowman With A Junior Consumer Tip - If you lived in New England in the 80's, you saw an awful lot of this public service announcement. I don't know if you'll find it heh-ful if you've never seen it before, but it's worth a try. Here's to hoping more old local PSA's make their way onto YouTube. Also from New England in the 80's - this New England Aquarium commercial.
  

Posted by dave coustan at 11:07 AM |

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Here's a collection of municipal wi-fi-related stuff that's ended up in my bookmarks (currently straddling myFavorites and del.icio.us).

• A Times-Picayune story went over EarthLink's Wi-Fi efforts in New Orleans in some good detail. Some of the highlights -- we're on track for a September 1st launch of the first 15 square miles of coverage, and that we'll continue to build after that date, as we are doing in Anaheim. Prominent local blogger Ernie The Attorney was quoted in the piece. Best wishes to outgoing NOLA CIO Greg Meffert, who resigned earlier this week.
  
• Google (who else?) released a really nice and simple Google Maps implementation showing their Mountain View Wi-Fi network, its access points, and holes in coverage.
  
• In Anaheim, Mayor Curt Pringle announced that the city just started providing streaming video of City Council meetings on Anaheim.net. Mayor Pringle also has a sort-of blog (trackbacks but no comments) in the news and commentary section here.
  
• A couple of weeks ago, Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOm wrote on EarthLink's plan to sell Wi-Fi phones and service for use on our municipal Wi-Fi networks. Today Skype announced that in Q3 2006, they'll be offering Wi-Fi phones as well, though only for use with Skype and on open (unauthenticated) hotspots.
  
• Glenn Fleishman published a counter-editorial to Nortel Executive Richard Lowe's editorial on Cnet about the Google/EarthLink Wi-Fi network plans and 3G vs. Wi-Fi. Note: this is Wi-Fi nerd territory.
  
• Taylor Wimberly runs a blog to cover news about the city Wi-Fi network in Corpus Christi, TX. There's also an official site. EarthLink is in negotiations to provide retail Wi-Fi service on the network .
  

Posted by dave coustan at 2:17 PM |

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I have to admit, I was hoping that Ask A Japanese Person would win, but since they've only managed to get one blog entry out there it's hard to really judge them yet. I hope we haven't seen the first and last video from them.

In the final tally, laptop help blog Ask Laptop Freak handily defeated the other blogs with 21 votes. As the tag line indicates, "Your laptop computer doesn’t work? Need help or support for your notebook? Ask the Laptop Freak!" I'll be adding it to the list of "recommended sites" on the right. Ask A Japanese Person came in second with 16 votes, followed by Ask Leo with 5, and three votes each for Ask Dave Taylor and Ask A Tampan.

Send any suggestions for possible entrants to the next battle or ideas for battle topics to the e-mail address to the right -- earthling at corp dot earthlink dot net.

Posted by dave coustan at 2:51 PM |

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I had seen earlier builds, but I hadn't seen how myFavorites handles importing your data from del.icio.us prior to Friday. Seeing it in action really pleased me, in terms of both the user interface and the way it talks to you. The language is plain and direct and friendly, and the information is organized in a way that's easy to understand at a glance. Here's a peek at it, cropped and resized. Click it to see an un-resized version:

If you're a del.icio.us user now, it's not explicitly called out yet but you can bring your tags and URL's with you. We don't yet bring in the dates, but that's apparently something we could do. To bring your favorites in to myFavorites (heh, not *my* favorites, but myFavorites):

1. in del.icio.us go to settings>>export and hit "export to HTML". That will spit out a file or a screen of data. If it does the latter, save it as source and remember what you called it.
   
2. Now log in to myFavorites, and go to settings>>import bookmarks. Decide if you'd like them all to come in as public or private, and click next.
   
3. On the next screen, use the "browse" button to find the file you created in step 1 on your computer. If it’s a bad file or the wrong file, you’ll notice an error message and you’ll stay on that same page. (update:) Click "next" after you've selected the right file on your computer.
   
4. You’re done. The interface above appears, and tells you everything that just happened.

There's more stuff like this at the myFavorites product blog.

Posted by dave coustan at 1:04 PM |

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With all of the hubbub around myEarthLink Reader, myFavorites, and WebLife on Friday and over the weekend, I've had lots of EarthLink stuff pile up in my bookmarks. I'm not usually a bulleted-list guy, but bulleted list seems like the way to go today. Though it's a round-up, it's about EarthLink mostly, so I'm putting this in the @EarthLink section.

• Some more blog coverage on Friday and Saturday. Here are a few highlights: TechCrunch took a look at EarthLink WebLife over the weekend. Also, our face is apparently changing, which is good to hear. And thanks, Brian.
  
• Sean Bonner, self-proclaimed inventor of the blog gangsign and producer of one of my favorite RSS feeds (site here), got Helio-fied recently. He picked up a Kickflip. If I can find out what his number is, I'm going to try gifting him something. He also found a workaround to get an address book from a Mac to the Kickflip (and myHelio Webmail). I've been using my Windows XP machine to talk between the two.
  
• Helio also has a new tv ad. I saw it on YouTube before I caught it on television. Update: Helio just started airing a second tv ad.
  
• I found some tips on using your Blackberry with EarthLink MailBox, thanks to Russell Shaw over at BBHub.
  
• No winners announced yet in the EarthLink Make Advertising Better challenge, but I did find a few podcasts that talked about it and their entries. Here's Bedtime Stories My Kids Love showcasing their entries. Couple of potential hehs in there -- I think the first one is the best. And here's Christina Talks About Stuff talking about it among other things. It's about 26:50 in to the show. Note: I'm not a judge in the challenge, so I have no sway.
  
• And don't forget to vote in Battle of the Blogs 2.
  

Posted by dave coustan at 3:48 PM |

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Ok, so Reader.

(Note: if you have reviews or thoughts to add to the conversation in addition to writing comments below, odds are we'll see them but play it safe and add this trackback to your blog software.)

The letters RSS can bring anxiety (or blank stares) to many. Our goal with reader was to expose the idea of reading feeds instead of web sites to many more people than know about it today, and do it in a way that doesn't give anybody nightmares. At it's best, an experience with a feed reader should remove several steps in your quest to stay connected with your friends, colleagues, and the world around you. It should bring you information and entertaining content that you didn't know was out there. And it shouldn't bring on additional anxiety. It's an exciting space because it's still new and wide open. No one has yet defined the ideal RSS reading experience, and in fact one size may not fit all.

In a previous Earthling entry, Director of Web Applications Gregg Hartling looked at many of the readers out there and made the following observation:

Maybe there are some basic assumptions in news readers today that aren't requirements for people who aren't power users. I look at one row in particular in the TechCrunch matrix: Mark Feed Read/Unread. Every application reviewed has a check mark in that row. Even as a power user, I've always found the Read/Unread feature in news readers too closely mirrors my email application and is the source of a lot of information anxiety. A day away from my reader and I would have to spend time making sure the hundreds of items that had come in all reached a "Read" state. I began working for my news reader more than it worked for me. I don't cross off articles I read in the Los Angeles Times. Why should my news consumption be the same as my email?

Ours isn't revolutionary in what it brings to the table. In fact, Mr. RSS himself, Dave Winer, has rightfully pointed out that one of the compelling features in our Reader, the "recently updated" list, originated in the software he's built (and before that in actual newswires). When I spoke to Craig Forman, President of EarthLink's Value Added Services this morning, he agreed with Winer about the simple efficiency of a "scrolling waterfall" of news and information. He said it harkened back to his days as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, when he'd read news off of the wire services, with the latest popping up first, in chronological order. Craig said, "It just made it really easy to get a glimpse of what was new at any given time without having to keep up with whether or not you'd read everything yet." I guess that makes Craig a news "edge case" going back several career lifetimes.

Continue reading "Framing Reader"

Posted by dave coustan at 1:03 PM |

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It's been an exciting night and morning watching the discussion forming in blogs around myFavorites and Reader. Before too many hands touch the two intertwined applications, I just wanted to pause to explain what they are, where they're at and where they're headed, and thank all those who have had a hand in their development. This first post will be about myFavorites, and then I'll take on Reader. Get used to checking out each's product blog (myFavorites and Reader) as well, for the latest news and conversation.

If you are writing about myFavorites, please trackback this URL: here (too long to display, right-click to grab) so that we can continue the conversation.

Ok, so myFavorites. It's no secret on Earthling that I'm a huge fan of Yahoo's social bookmarking site http://del.icio.us. It's become about as indispensable to me as e-mail, for keeping track of all of the stuff I find online and that people point out to me. I also use it to discover other people's finds, but the part I can't do without is the ability to categorize and hold on to URL's and find them again later.

EarthLink saw this as a tool that could be helpful to a much wider set of users than even necessarily knows it exists right now. I think once you're exposed to the simplicity and discoverability of a del.icio.us, it's tough to ever want to go back to browser bookmarks again. And in our internal testing, it was clear to me that in addition to individuals, companies can benefit from its use because when you have a pool of like-minded users, the list of bookmarks they create is really valuable. I'd like for us to be able to offer the public a feed of the things we tag as important.

Continue reading "Framing myFavorites"

Posted by dave coustan at 11:55 AM |

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Yes, it's true. We've quietly exposed a new RSS reader and social bookmarking application to a small subset of our users.

Steve Rubel and Dave Winer (update: and Mike Arrington) showed up at the door a few hours early for the prom. Our hair's still in curlers, our dress is full of wrinkles, our complexion is a mess. Horror of horrors! We're glad our dates are here, but first a quick sit-down so everyone knows what the evening's expectations are.

• Hey public, feel free to jump in, sign up, and try out both, but...
  
• We're still rolling out changes and fixing minor stuff. Think iterative.
  
• There's more on the roadmap for each. I'll be going through some of this on the blog..err..tomorrow I guess. And I'll tell you about known bugs too. So if you don't see something you want, we may be in the middle of addressing it.
  
• Please think about using our product blogs for the two: Reader and myFavorites to talk to the product and development teams
  
• If you don't have a free portal account, you can sign up for one here or from the link in the apps.
  

Posted by dave coustan at 7:47 PM |

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The fairly highfalutin terms "duopoly" or "data duopoly" or "broadband duopoly" have shown up on Earthling a few times, and I've also seen them around in net neutrality discussions, and heard them in the public speeches of some of our execs. It's not a term you generally use in polite conversation unless you find yourself cornered with no other option but to discuss economics or net neutrality. I read an article at Ars Technica yesterday that layed out the idea of duopoly really well, and it also linked to another blog entry that sums it up nicely. Now that I'm writing about it, maybe I'll be able to do a better job of explaining it next time someone asks. See if this helps you:

...just about everyone who has broadband gets it from either the telephone company or the cable company. The FCC has affirmatively pursued the policy of creating this situation, and it’s one of the main reasons we need a Net Neutrality policy. There is no real choice. [ Art Brodsky at PublicKnowledge.org ]

The article goes on to point out that in some markets, you get a choice between cable or DSL, but in many you only can get service one way. In the areas where you do have choice between the two, they don't give you much choice as far as price is concerned. Art continues:

Not only are there only two “choices,” in supplier, there’s little evidence of competition on one factor that really counts – price. In their July 6 Insights email newsletter, Kagan puts it fairly simply: “Though the battle for broadband access subscribers is intense, there’s no screaming price war between cable TV and telcos, and Kagan Research doesn’t expect one in the foreseeable future.”

The whole article is worth a read.

So that's what duopoly means -- it's two suppliers of comparable services controlling choice by keeping their prices in step with each other. When EarthLink CEO Garry Betty said at the launch of the Anaheim network that he believes municipal Wi-Fi will provide competition to the broadband incumbents, that's what he meant. Even though 1 megabit service is slower than cable speeds, it's plenty fast enough to be considered "broadband" and at $22 a month it provides a cheaper way to sidestep the cable/DSL duopoly.

Posted by dave coustan at 5:30 PM |

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The blogging platform TypePad had a service outage yesterday. Coming out of that, Kris, a TypePad blogger and EarthLink customer, brought to my attention that TypePad is having problems with its system e-mail messages (telling you you have a new comment, for example) not getting to EarthLink e-mail addresses. If you are an EarthLink customer who uses TypePad, I just wanted to give you a heads-up that we're working on finding out what's going on. So far things look as they should on the EarthLink side, but our e-mail folks are on it as is TypePad and we'll work on getting this resolved quickly. I'll keep you posted.

Posted by dave coustan at 12:08 PM |

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The previous Battle of the Blogs pitted What's That Bug against the LAPD blog. Bugs beat cops 24-10, and as is the custom, the winning blog won a spot over in the "recommended sites" section on the right side of Earthling's home page.

This time around it's more of a battle royale. There are a ton of blogs that specialize in answering reader questions. I've suggested previously that you can use experts (or non-experts) instead of search engines sometimes when you want to ask the internet something. And recently Yahoo Answers has started to do the reverse -- get famous people like Stephen Hawking and Bono ask questions to the regular joes of the internet. But this poll is about people who put a shingle out inviting their readers to ask them stuff, and publish the questions and answers as the blog itself.

In this battle I aim to (a)discover new "Ask so-and-so" blogs that I don't know about, and (b)find out which reigns supreme in the field as far as Earthling readers are concerned. Please familiarize yourself with the combatants before voting, and ask yourself, "Which of these am I most likely to visit again or most often?"

Feel free to add an option to the poll if there's an "Ask" site not listed here that should be included. To do that, click discuss this poll at Quimble and use "add another option" there. The poll will run for one week.

[Inspired by my discovery of the just-born Ask A Japanese Person vlog over on Screenhead.]

Posted by dave coustan at 11:06 AM |

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In case you missed the blog entry on Friday, I had discovered that one of my favorite recent web site finds, What's that bug, is/was an EarthLink DSL customer who had been told he no longer qualified for DSL service though he hadn't moved. I e-mailed Daniel, the proprietor of What's That Bug on Friday, and got to speak to him on the phone Friday night.

As it turns out, Daniel has been an EarthLink customer for years, and switched to DSL last year as the popularity of What's That Bug overwhelmed his ability to read and update the site via dial-up. In the last week or so, since his DSL service became unserviceable, he's been miserable going back to dial-up speeds. He gets over 100 e-mails with photo attachments a day requesting insect identification, and the site is really just a beloved not-for-profit side project to begin with. When I mentioned the virtues of RSS to him, he said that the site is already more popular than what he can handle, and he's not interested in doing anything to increase traffic beyond what he's got now.

Being a broadband addict myself, his frustration was easy to understand. EarthLink through AT&T no longer had the ability to offer him DSL service even though he lives near downtown LA, in an area you'd think would be teeming with broadband choices. Daniel said that we offered him internet via satellite, but that the price was too high for what he was looking for. I haven't heard back from him yet, but as of Friday he was planning to switch to cable internet service over the weekend.

Unfortunately there's no happy ending to this story for us, though if Daniel managed to get broadband access over the weekend I'm at least satisfied that What's That Bug will continue to produce without interruption. But I did find out in the process how a line can become ineligible for DSL even when the customer hasn't moved. Changes can take place in the way a phone line is routed as new homes are built and new service comes on line. Here's an explanation from James in Customer Support (thanks, James!):

"You don't have to move for your loop length to change. There are a number of changes that can occur on the telco side that can affect the total length of your loop even after your installation. Most often this happens in an area where they are adding new houses or a new subdivision. Rather than run a new loop for that subdivision extension, the telco may instead have to extend the local loop to include the new homes. This can extend the total length of a loop without your doing anything."

It sounds like this is what happened in Daniel's case. We're sorry to lose him as a customer, and hopefully some of the new options we're working on will find him and people around him within the coverage area in the near future. One of the advantages of a citywide Wi-Fi network like the ones we're building in Anaheim and Philadelphia is that it gives us the ability to offer broadband internet (and phone) service to the homes within the coverage area, even if they have no phone or cable line going in to their house at all.

Posted by dave coustan at 2:02 PM |

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See that tag line up there? "By a human, for humans." I felt extremely human by the end of the day yesterday. It's mainly two things:

First, I was reminded of how hard it is to stay on top of all of the tiny details of everything we're doing as a company. I was reading some blog entries about our plan to sell Wi-Fi phone service on our Anaheim Wi-Fi network yesterday morning. One of them alluded to the tests showing that the phones are working well "up to 40 miles per hour." I chuckled. It sounded funny. Surely that must be a typo. My face was reddened when I alerted the writer via comment and discovered that's absolutely not a typo and one of the challenges of Wi-Fi phones has been making sure they can work consistently at high speeds. It's because they require some special technology to handle hand-offs between Wi-Fi nodes. And then lots of popular blogs picked up the story about our Wi-Fi phones, and it was clear the miles per hour measure is an industry standard.

I pride myself on being a good generalist, and having enough fluency to speak with intelligence on most everything we're doing. Oops. Time to study up on Wi-Fi phones.

And second, in the "I don't control the universe" department, EarthLinker Glenn Hinckel e-mailed me late yesterday to point out a problem with Whatsthatbug.com, one of my favorite recent web site finds. "What's that bug?" beat the LAPD blog in my first Battle of the Blogs competition. They're the top site on my "recommended sites" list on the right.

The good news is, unbeknownst to me it turns out What's That Bug has been an EarthLink DSL customer. The bad news is, it turns out they are no longer. Glenn pointed out that there's now a message on their site saying that they've suddenly become ineligible for EarthLink DSL service and are having to switch providers, which has temporarily put them on ice. I feel really bad about that and am trying to find out more and help out if I can. I've sent them an e-mail, and I've also asked my contacts in Customer Service to help me research the problem and see if I can find a good solution for them. In the meantime, I'm not going to remove them from my 'recommended sites' list just because they talk about having problems with our service. But if you see that message there, know that I've seen it and am trying to help. I'll keep you posted as I hear more about what's going on.

Posted by dave coustan at 11:36 AM |

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Just before I left for Anaheim, we launched the first phase of a new partnership with Pandora. In case you don't know what that is, it's a music player and music discovery system rolled in to one. The discovery part has some really interesting smarts behind it, employing a blend of human listening and computery algorithms to help you find music that's similar to the specific songs and artists you like. As far as free ways to listen to and discover new music via the web, Pandora is really the best game in town, and I'm excited that we've brought them to myEarthLink.

Our Pandora application (officially myEarthLink Radio powered by Pandora) lives in the music subchannel of the entertainment channel. Look for "myEarthLink Radio" at the top of the page. Type in a song or artist, follow the prompts to set up an account, and let me know what you think of the experience.

We're still working out a few last kinks, most notably that if you already have a login from Pandora itself(pre-EarthLink partnership), it won't work on the myEarthLink version -- or it didn't when I tested it earlier today, anyway. If that happens to you, just create a new login when it asks you to. We're addressing that, and also making it so that you can try Pandora right off the bat without having to create a login. The login is free, but we want you to be able to give it a shot with no more forms to fill out, and as soon as you reach the page. And more importantly, we're working on better and deeper integration into the myEarthLink portal, so that you can get to it from a widget on your home page. Our ultimate goal is to bring the functionality of Pandora into our personal start page experience so that you don't have to go elsewhere to use it.

Read on for more about what it is.

Continue reading "Pandora Comes To myEarthLink"

Posted by dave coustan at 2:45 PM |

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Just a few minutes ago, one of my friends sent me a link to this video message from Amanda Congdon explaining that she'll no longer be part of the show.

Rocketboom is one of my favorite vlogs, and I've also come to know Andrew and Amanda personally after working with them on a series of EarthLink ads for the show -- I consider them both friends of Earthling. It's sad to see them apparently on opposite ends of a decision, and I really didn't know what to make of Amanda's announcement when I first watched it. When I'd met her at Syndicate weeks ago she explained that she was planning a move to LA, but at that time it seemed like things would work out with Rocketboom. Without much context to go on other than the message itself, I've e-mailed both Andrew and Amanda to find out the rest of the story before it took on too much spin. I'm hoping to hear from Amanda as well, but I just got the following e-mail from Andrew. He said it was ok to publish:

Amanda decided she was unable to stay in NYC and informed me, the Rocketboom business and the rest of the team via her videoblog post this morning that she was moving on.

We wanted her to get to Hollywood to pursue her personal opportunities as soon as possible, but her demand to move this week without waiting any longer, without a justification, and without an adequate proposal for a plan for how the show itself would work, we were unable to uproot Rocketboom from NYC at this time.

I certainly wish she would have decided she wanted to stay and give it a little while longer and I also wish her the best and know she will fare well.

I'm nervous for the near term because this was an unexpected fork in the road, but I'm excited for the future once the new route is chosen.

Update: Lots of opinions on Techmeme.

And Video Podcasting News has provided a transcript of Amanda's video -- not sure if this is verbatim.

There's now an official announcement on Rocketboom.com.

Update: Amanda has written at length about this on her blog, Unboomed.

Update: No more updates. I'm not going to follow the aftermath on Earthling any more -- as Brian Oberkirch pointed out to me, the rest of this is none of our business and is best handled in private. I wish Andrew and Amanda the best and hope to see them both making great content again very soon.

Posted by dave coustan at 2:05 PM |

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This is the last of the odds and ends that I didn't get a chance to publish from the Anaheim Wi-Fi Network launch. In addition to uploading the rest of my photos to this Flickr set, here's a bulleted list of miscellany, a la a newspaper sports column. This is also a good place to drop any questions you have about the new network -- in the comments below.

• By the way, the new brand is called Feather. I think it fits nicely. Essentially, when it's a monthly service, it's EarthLink Wi-Fi, or when it's something you use for free (a "Feather nest") or buy on the go, it's Feather.
  
• Yes, we do support Macs on the Anaheim network. I was one of the last Mac testers before the service launch. Here's a step-by-step guide to getting a Mac configured for a secure connection. For security, we use a protocol called 802.1X, and one thing you'll notice is that there are quite a few steps to get this set up on a Mac. We're aware of this -- for some reason OS X Tiger really doesn't make it easy to create any 802.1X connection, not just ours. We're working on a way to simplify the process. Here's to hoping Mac incorporated a better way into Leopard.
  
• More about light poles and Wi-Fi: The Tropos nodes tap in to the photocells at the top of certain light poles for power. You won't see nodes on the green decorative poles around Anaheim. But you'll see them on most types of pole that support traffic cameras. I wonder if there are any blogs devoted solely to light poles and the things that you can find on them. That merits some research.
  
• For even more nerdy detail, check out Tracy's How Municipal Wi-Fi Works article over at HowStuffWorks.
  
• I couldn't get a better image of the coverage map (shiny photo on a sunny day), but here's a bunch of places to get more information: Another Anaheim coverage map, EarthLink Municipal Networks microsite, Feather Portal Main Page, Feather Anaheim Start Page, Anaheim Press Release, Podcast interview with Don Berryman.
  
• Thanks to everyone on the Anaheim Muni team who took time out of their busy launch schedule to show me around and teach me about their work -- including Paul Varnedoe, Maurice Turner, Tom Holbrook, Jeb Linton, Jay Dugas, Don Richards-Boeff, Ellen Hodo Davis, Vince Caramella, Jerry Grasso, Scot Hester, and Shannon Bowen.
  

Posted by dave coustan at 2:45 PM |

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I'm back in the Atlanta office and working on publishing the rest of my notes. Here are some brief highlights from the speeches commemorating the launch of the EarthLink Wi-Fi Network in Anaheim:

EarthLink CEO Garry Betty:

• We've come a long way from a small, regional ISP in a dentist's office to having over 5 million subscribers today.
  
• We believe EarthLink Wi-Fi will provide a significant form of competition to the broadband incumbents.
  
• This is the first wireless network that will provide true ubiquity and low cost.
  
• There are an awful lot of potential end-user types in addition to the individual residential consumer. Vending machines that are Wi-Fi data enabled could change the dynamics of new product development.
  
• We're going to make voice an integral part of everything we offer consumers. In several years, EarthLink subscribers won't remember what it's like not to have voice as part of everything they do on computers.
  

• Today we're with a tentful of pioneers. At Tropos we've been working on the technology inside that box since the year 2000.
  
• 802.11 is the world's most ubiquitious broadband access technology. 150 million Wi-Fi cards shipped every year in the US, and it's growing by 50-75% per year. It's becoming the dominant way we access the internet.
  
• What we use in Anaheim is fundamentally the same technology in your home/office/laptop/gameboy. No new hardware for end-user, no new software. You can use all the same apps. Like the internet itself, it enables endless array of apps for wide variety of users, anywhere, anytime.
  
• It's a unique asset to Anaheim. Mesh of 1500 radios, mounted on streetlamps and 14 rooftops, with a few wired conenctions. No single failure in the case of a man-made or natural disaster. One of these was the last network to go down, first to come back up in New Orleans. The first phone calls after Katrina were made over a network like this.
  
• Unlike cellular base stations, radios are small, low-power and safe. will reach 95% of outdoor and 90% to inside walls. Will support B and G with speeds up to 1mb.
  
• Interesting to note that most of the secret sauce is in the software not the hardware.

• Let's encourage other cities to take the Anaheim model back home.
  
• This project is a reflection of the commitment of our city council.
  
• We don't necessarily believe the traditional models are the way to build to the future. We think it's good and fine to have competition - to compete against the duopolies.
  
• This network will provide a better value -- we know the open access model will bring better value, lower cost, competition to the residents of Anaheim.
  
• We're challenging the way many cities deliver product. Public assets are public assets, owned by the taxpayers. What other value can they bring other than streetlights/lighting? Why not use that space to expand the value of the taxpayer investiment in streetlights, magnifying benefits to city residents.

Posted by dave coustan at 12:36 PM |

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