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The “INFLUENCER” in social media.

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I’ve often been invited to link to the current ‘INFLUENCER-DU-JOUR’ from Social Media sites. And ofttimes is a Successful entrepreneur, or angel investor, someone who has hit it big. And in many cases the success is a one off, and the personality at the center, is now an established ‘Expert’ in all things, even outside of their granted success niche.

I have encountered such people, and with rare exception, the success, their victory, has been more a ‘in the right place, at the right time’ event. Call it one time lucky. Mind you some have been very lucky, and struck big. And either by ego, or genuine desire, seek to do it again, or to help others ‘make it’. More often it’s the former, reveling in Ego, lies at the root. I won’t begrudge their Win, I just won’t listen to them any more than I would the next stranger on the street. I read once, that one of the great brokers before the great crash in the 1930’s, claimed he had received ‘Stock Tips’ from his shoeshine boy, at which point, he got out of the market, and saved his own shirt.

I feel that here, too many shoe shine boys.

The CnM Touchpad II – as a practical Pad

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In my previous posting, I mentioned all the things this pad can’t or rather doesn’t do. To make this all balanced, I will put what it can do, into perspective.

For Instance, at a cost approximately the same as a Amazon Kindle You still get The Kindle eBook market.
… but then you get;

You can even play Games on it, who would have thought. And it has not added a single pence to my credit card. But I still don’t have the the ‘Google Market’ even though the calendar, contacts and Gmail still sync up with Google.

Sync Me Up

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How do you keep your connected devices connected?
How many different services do you depend on to keep your ‘stuff’ safe and available from anywhere?
Could you imagine a better way?
I can, and I almost have it working with my ‘stuff’,
now I’m just working on a way to make it easy for everyone else to do the same.

Real Democracy for the Tea Party.

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Before the last big election in the U.S.A. I managed to get on to a great deal of political Email lists, as I’m sure many of you did. And while they all managed to end up in the Junk email box, as I have very little vested interest in U.S. Politics anymore. I have seen a great deal of anguish about the emergence of the Tea Party Movement and the Radical and apparently irrational candidates demands.

I have worried as many that these people represented the worst in U.S. politics, the radical Right Wing elements who are being manipulated by ultra-conservative GOP millionaires. However, and I mean some how, however, they have managed to get off the leash from the directions of their handlers and appear to actually believe in their, from my perspective, misguided ideals. And there by hangs the tail on the political animal.

Democracy! It’s not just for mainstream (managed) Democrat or Republican candidates, those willing to say or do anything to get elected to office. Those who, with party backing, pay millions of dollars to get elected to political positions that really only pay a pittance. Just so thay can exert influence for those who paid to put them there. They are not really representing their electorate who voted for them, not representing the views and opinions of the people they were elected to serve, but those who paid to put them there. And we both know that is wrong.

So from another perspective, if a Tea Party candidate, who might believe in Pink Faeries who deliver chocolate cookies, receives enough votes from people who also believe in Pink Faeries. Then that person has every right, democratically, to server in the U.S. government. They would be doing exactly what they were elected to do, represent those who believe in Pink Faeries. In fact they would have more right to be there than those who were bought and paid for by lobbyist with an agenda.

And the worst case of this Pink Faerie representative in the Senate, or the House, nothing, except that they would not be beholding to anyone, except those who believed in Pink Faeries. Do you, for a minute, believe that legislation would ever be created to effect the U.S. regarding Pink Faeries? Would they be capable of generating the votes in congress to pass such legislation? Then what does anyone have to worry about, with ANY other belief that ANY candidate might profess during an election. They will first have to gather enough votes to get elected, then manage to promote any such idea in congress to a majority vote. And they have the right to try, in fact that it part of the problem with the two party system of politics in the U.S., not enough parties to represent all of the views of the differing sectors of American voters.

So while I don’t believe in the Tea Party, I will defend their right to make the attempt put forth their ideas and views to the vote of the people of the U.S. and discover for themselves the measure of acceptance of those ideals from the voting public. And if they are elected, so be it, this is the voice of the electorate, let it be heard.

Underground War – Whistle Blowers strike back.

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I may be the last to see this, a war, underground and undeclared, but a war. The opponents are a bit undefined but there is a clear and escalating combat in the world. I’m not talking about Terrorists, (although the establishment who is under assault may declare their attackers as such) I am talking about the the established order, The Multi-Nationals, the Big Press, Governments, Military establishments, Religious organizations. The big anonymous bodies that have been abusing their positions to detriment everyone else.

On the opposing side, are all the little people, groups and oppressed, or the perceived oppressed. Your fellow ‘pissed off’ worker setting next to you, who will explode in a fountain of Whistle blowing. A venting of frustration that will result in the next big internet explosion.

The WikiLeaks is merely the first oozing pustule on the face of the corporeal Corporations of the world. The World of Blogging has for many years undermined the world press both broadcast and print to the point that now the majority of the population now refer to the Internet for real news rather than the handful of corporation owned ‘News’ services.

Control has now slipped out of the hands of those who for years have managed the information flow. Evidence of this ‘management’ appears almost daily in the presentations of ignorance passed off as ‘News’. And where ‘Fair and Balanced’ openly bribe governments to maintain control, religious organizations openly attempt to promote such myths as Creationism at the scientific Truth.

The tide has turned, and the failing newspapers are only the start. Watch for more WikiLeaks and Whistle Blower sites springing up, more Lawsuits more Smear campaigns as the giant attempts to swat the Whistleblowers who are biting it to death.

‘an chuid eile’ of the world

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I have been having discussions all over the net about smartphones and feature phones and the vast marketplace for non smartphones in the third world. A market that Nokia is big in, but is not well supported with things like facebook, Twitter and other social networking communications features, due, in part to the lack of more robust networks in those areas. Even during a discussion at yesterdays Cork Open Coffee the subject of community services came up and I was reminded of a New Beta from Nokia called Nokia Listings ( here, here, here. and here ) which is intended to support communications, operating within a weak infrastructure, in a social networking type of framework.

More Pseudoscience in the Press

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This video at the BBC U.S. Site that claims Technology ‘rewires’ our brains Is yet another Pseudoscience attempt to baffle with Bullshit, the viewer. It comes off all Super Tech and is really no better than claiming that “Technology destroys our Brains”. Just more Yellow journalism. The disappointing thing is, that it’s coming from the BBC. This is for the U.S. (read American) audience, so I suppose it has to be Dumbed down to that level of that group.

But it is a sorry thing to watch happen.

iPad Virtual Keyboard censorship

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This thought has come to mind as there are many voices out there who have commented on the iPad’s ‘virtual Keyboard‘. Many have found it hard to type on and found themselves unable to touch type on it as the very nature of touch sensitivity makes it impossible make contact with the ‘keys’. In other words, you can’t type long missives, emails or any other textual input.

What if the iPad is a form of Censorship? Making it hard to comment on the internet, create content, write Twitters/email/Blogs whatever. Because the keyboard it too hard and frustrating to enter anything other than simple search phrases. A consumer ONLY device, made to fill the passive vessels that constitutes the bulk of the internet readership? Content omnivores as Pew Research calls them, an advertising and News consuming only population.

Internet freedom of speech and Irish Neutrality.

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While reading this article 5 Reasons Why Online Freedom of Speech Does Not Exist I was encouraged that a person of Arabic decent wrote it. And is spot on about the real lack of freedom on the internet.

And a thought came to mind that what Irelands ‘Smart Economy’ ought to be, is to create a genuine open internet connection to the world. An Internet free of ALL censorship, blocking, filtering and snooping both into and out to the rest of the internet. Even so much as establishing free VPN connections into the country for people living in internet ‘oppressed’ world areas thus giving an open gateway into a free, and (as) open as anyone could make, Internet. It would not prevent countries from blocking export of banned information into Ireland, but Ireland would not add any blockages. And it would not prevent information from Ireland into censored countries. but it would create a cloud of truly free internet.

I think this could foster an internet ‘Switzerland’ much like Switzerland is to banking. Businesses like Google, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Skype would find this an attractive country to expand and centralize in. It would make Ireland an Internet sanctuary for complete and open exchange of ideas and communications.

Gowalla vs. FourSquare vs. Latitude

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Gowalla FourSquare, and Google Latitude are all Geolocational applications intended to provide your whereabouts to your friends while out participating with life events. Restaurants, sports, shopping or any other activity outside of your home. And while interesting, they bring into question this, if you went to these places, would you want to have your followers join you there? I’m fully aware that the participation in these application ‘games’ are part advertising of the location you are at, and sometimes benefits the user. But it does so by utilizing your active participation, bandwidth, and costs in a new kind of distributed broadcast medium.

If you can truly state that you would love to have your friends meet you at these venues, then this is all very well. The every concept of the RobMeNow.com site makes this a questionable practice. But it also assumes you have Friends 🙂 . ( I personally can’t speak to the matter, as I have none) who care. And it could be helpful to broadcast the quality of the product at site of your adventure, should it prove valuable.

The ever nature of the applications forces me to look for native app for my Nokia N900, even as I question the need for them. That’s good hype! Anyone want to jump in and add any comments?

Google begins to crumble

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With all the press at MWC and for that matter, everyplace else, Google is King of the internet. But it’s crumbling. Right in front of everyone, their entire infrastructure is beginning to fail. Not in the obvious way like a server outage or service unavailability. It’s the control structure.

I’ve never been a big user of Google, I only really got a Google Mail account when I started searching for a smartphone, which may have been an Android model. I had heard that this gmail account was needed to be set up in advance to load contacts and what not. But then the office IT manager thought Google Wave was a great way to keep all our remote activities documented, in other words, a tool to herd cats. Then he discovered Google Docs and gee isn’t that a great way to share document creation. Now there’s Google Buzz …. and then … and then. Google just can’t stop, and beyond that, they can’t integrate either. All these systems seem disjointed to the point I can’t even sign on and get to them, they must each be logged on to, no single sign-on. THE single most important step in services, and they can’t seem to make it work. It’s quite apparent that there is no single share point in the login process where all the services can be accessed, in a way, Google is competing against itself. And to quote verse:

‘A house divided, cannot stand’

Google is crumbling.

They have grown so fast and so broad, they have not built out the infrastructure required to support the entire breadth of their development groups. Which from empirical evidence, seems to need some method of communication, not currently visible to the outside world. To quote again;

The right hand does not know what the left hand is doing

Google is stumbling

Watching fall will not be pretty.

A reply about the Nokia N900

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I was ask to tell someone about my Nokia N900 and I replied:

I blogged about the N900 here, Expansys which turned out to a U.S. N900 with a U.S. Power supply.

However the system, and I have to call it a system as it not just a phone, was bought with the purpose of replacing my then Nokia phone and my Palm T/X. I wanted a computer with a phone. And that is exactly what the N900 is. I have to agree, if you are a power Phone user this is not going to cut it, as an example it does not do MMS, (I’ve never sent an MMS, ever) with the exception that there is a third party developer who had deployed a MMS app that fills this gap. And I guess that is the point, all the gaps, and extensions to the operating system are coming on hot and heavy. It’s really quite surprising. What’s more surprising it the integration of the apps in the communicator. I have to check my inbound call to know if it’s a Skype or a GSM/3G call, as you can not tell via call quality or ringtone. IM from any and all IM systems are combined into a single ‘conversations’ stream sorted by the user you are talking with, reply’s can be via any communication path detailed for the contact you are talking with. The same with shareing, your notes, photos, anything can be shared to any of the ‘social media’ site you have logins to.

I find the most interesting thing is that I can SSH into and out of the system as easily as with any laptop. OpenVPN which is available, but I haven’t tried, is loadable as both server and client. The 2G/3G network connections are treated just like WiFi with no restrictions that I can detect. (dataplan not withstanding) I am even on pay-as-you-go with Vodafone and they either have not throttled me yet, or don’t care, isn’t an issue, it works seamlessly.

The only drawback is power, as you might expect, but I doubt that you would fault any laptop for not running 12 hours on batteries, and this is no difference. I can useably get 14 to 16 hours from it with ‘normal’ use, but playing with lots of widgets on the desktop, and too many beta apps from the development catalog will shorten this. I use a car charger while on GPS traveling, and I’m sure most would. but really, I have all the IM connections running below, 7/24 when on my WiFi connection and it works a treat. I blog, I tweet, I surf, frankly it’s another pocket sized palmtop… with a phone app.

Internet Privacy myths

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One of the enduring myths of the internet is the one involving privacy. This article on CNN titled U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google takes umbrage at the notion that everyones email is secret and private. And while this myth might comfort many, the truth is that email was NEVER private. Every email host, every email relay was able, and in fact, completely open to reading, scanning and snooping, by man-in-the-middle processes and furthermore always has been since the beginning of the internet. And even if everyone was using https or ssh with their email clients while connected to their mail server, it did not encrypt the contents of the email. It may have minimized the likelihood of it being read in the data stream, but unless you were in the habit of encrypting your email with PGP or some other cypher your email and hence your ‘Privacy’ is negligible, hence, the privacy myth.

And while on the CNN article the discussions brought up the same old saw that governments HAD to have backdoors to snoop on email communications to prevent crime and terrorism without the concern that at no time has it proved itself in practice. Anyone wishing to sent communication, and have it stay private can do so, even in the face of a dedicated snoop. Anyone who had even browsed an encryption textbook can create a completely uncrackable code, and I mean uncrackable by anyone, by any means and present their messages in plain text in emails. Hacking them by any government is merely security theater and fundamentally has NO value.

If you seek ‘privacy’ stop sending anything through the internet unless it is encrypted by at least PGP (if not something more substantial). The only thing Google has lost in this privacy issue is the trust of their users to protect their email ‘publications’ on the internet. Now everyone will know that they have another recipient to all their emails, in other words, all the other governments, hackers, scammers and spammers in the internet.