Rogue Wolves

As some of you know, my brother Steve lives down in Southern California near San Diego which is where all the fires in California are burning. I've talked with Steve last night and he and his family are fine. There was a fire about six miles away but it is now contained and they are in no immediate danger and have not been evacuated. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it stays that way.

Before I talked with him I was pretty worried when I found the below google map marking the fires, evacuation areas, etc. He's pretty much surrounded by fires but they are fortunately far away still. Take a look at that map and see how wide spread the fires are. (Steve lives in San Marcos near Oceanside).

I've also been using Twitter to keep track of the latest news. News seems to break there way faster than the media networks. It's a great use for the technology. If you haven't used twitter it's like the Facebook status messages (*) but much more flexible in that you can choose to follow particular people or key words (tags) and be notified of new messages via twitter.com, SMS, Instant Messaging, etc. There is an API to the service so there are many different clients to access the service. Careful if you use the SMS feature because it can potentially send a lot of messages to your cell phone and may cost you some big $$$

(*) If you have no idea what a Facebook status message is, it's basically a simple way to tell people what you are doing, thinking, feeling, etc. It sounds mundane but it is actually a nice light weight way to keep people up to date on what is happening in your world. Twitter takes this a step further.

Examples of Twitter Commands

follow slangevi - this tells twitter to follow this user and notify you of their updates

leave slangevi - this tells twitter to stop notifying you of the users updates

track sandiegofire - this tells twitter to notify you of any twitter messages that contain this keyword

untrack sandiegofire - this tells twitter to stop notifying you of any twitter messages containing this keyword

Anyways, I thought the use of Google maps and twitter as public announcement tools was interesting and thought I'd pass it along.

Here is some Help on Twitter Commands. Note that the track/untrack command isn't listed as its a fairly new feature.

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Today I have the fortune to attend a private researcher session with Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Dr. Vint Cerf at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Cerf is also known as the "Father of the Internet" as he co-designed the TCP/IP protocol and the basic Internet architecture.

Yesterday I attended an open session talk he gave for the Moore School of Business and was lucky enough to ask him a question during Q&A. I recorded the audio of that session and I will post it on this site soon. I won't be posting the audio for the private researcher session unless I find it is appropriate. However, I'll try and post any interesting discussions that arise during that session.

Dr. Cerf is a great speaker and his talks should not be missed.

Writely Blog:

Writely is now part of Google!

Yes, we've been acquired by Google, and we're really excited about this for many, many reasons. But I can hear you saying, "I don't care why YOU'RE excited - I want to know how this change will impact ME!"

Interesting play by Google. Are they really considering trying to take a bite out of Microsoft's cash cow? Maybe in the small business/home user space but I don't think so in big business. There is also the issue of how much traction an online word processor can gain. User's tend to immediately think Microsoft Word when they need to create a document. It will be hard to undo that mind set. Also, online apps are just that...online. What happens when you want to edit documents with no internet connection? Don't tell me I have to pay for Office just to edit my documents on the road? Or install OpenOffice... Two apps for the same task doesn't work. User's want one unified tool.

What would be cool is if they offered a tool similar to TiddlyWiki then you could work on documents while offline but I'm not sure how easy this would be for end users. They would need to know to use the offline version when not online and the actual website when they are. Not pretty. Could the website be cached and some javascript executes that detects if an internet connection exists and put's the website into offline mode using cached pages? Hmm interesting...

I'm not sure where this is going yet we'll have to wait and see. I'm sure Microsoft is watching this closely and hyperventilating and you can bet they have been working on an online version of Office. Maybe Google's plan is just to get Microsoft's knickers in a twist?

Update: Here is an interesting read on the google purchase on CNN Money.com  and an even more interesting read that ties into what I was rambling about.  I like his take on how this could work utilyzing desktop applications for local editing (OpenOffice) and a web application (Writely) for when you are at a public terminal.  As long as files are synchronized between your Internet filesystem and your local file system that could work nicely.