Check out this photo, then surf to my website at http://www.heavenr.com - once in a lifetime event, and I was there.
They say pictures communicate - I agree. This visual depiction proves that the old is still new and even in the most urbane of settings, these locomotives reminded onlookers and passengers alike that history is always as alive as we choose to make it.
There’s a cheeky new spin on marketing via blogs — and it’s not blog friendly. I received a trackback from a comment that was attached to my Feb. 13 posting: “Network communication to the max.”
When I reviewed the comment, I discovered that it was a advertisement for someone else selling ringtones. As far as I’m concerned, that takes a lot of guts — piggybacking on another’s blog to schlep your social products. Especially when the advertisement isn’t even on topic.
Well, insofar as this is about communications, I guess they’ve stayed within a loose connection. Ringtones are all about communicating after all; if you don’t hear your cell phone ring, you can’t answer it. And, although I didn’t follow their link to determine what genre their ringtones fall into, I guess the cultural mode is that ringtones are contemporary, often themes from movies (my son’s phone plays the “Matrix” theme) or popular television shows.
The trackback, fortunately, offers me the option of removing the comment. In this instance, I left the comment because I decided to compose this blog entry. If it happens again — and I suspect it’ll be a trend, at least for a while — the comment will get my boot. [Ed. note: After the 11th or 12th time I got trackbacks for somebody's "answer" to my message -- stupid, spam, obscene, or whatever else -- now I just delete 'em all en bloc.]
Why do I think it will become a trend? For the same reason that I get 60-75 email messages every day from people selling me … nothing, garbage, stocks that don’t exist, sex potions, Nigerian banking opportunities … ringtones. I don’t use ringtones. Troy’s “Matrix” ring annoys me.
Maybe that’s the whole idea. As a society, we have sublimated the individual to the point where individuals are pushing back. “Notice me” seems to be the [unspoken] watch phrase of the 2000’s. The courts are filled with people shouting … in socially unacceptable non-verbal ways … “notice me; even if only for a moment, and only to punish me.”
I chose WordPress as my forum to get attention. I’m just like everyone else — I want to be noticed. But I can’t, under any circumstances, force myself to intrude on someone else’s space in order to ingratiate myself or satisfy my craving.
Our home telephone is cordless. Lately, it’s started picking up a lot of garble from other units nearby. It’s not unusually to channel hop the whole frequency spectrum and never find a clear signal. A week ago, a women barged into my conversation with my mother, in a perfectly audible voice, and chastised me for “monopolizing her phone time.”
So it should come as no surprise that my blog, and maybe yours soon, have become forums for others to seek notice. And for this, I have no spam filter.
I called the trend cheeky. When I advised him of the trend, my friend Jerry responded by calling it ”cheesy.” Yup!
At the heart of convergence is a desire to link up with, and understand, other intelligent people, potentially in many locations.
This mind-to-mind communications transcends time zones (I've spent late nights organizing functions in Hong Kong and Sydney and come to work way early to coordinate with Germany and U.K.) — in fact, it has the potential of rendering the solar calendar unnecessary.
This converged communications brings one step closer the potential for a truly unified globe, the kind that Asimov and Heinlein predicted. With convergence comes a common language. It could be any language, most likely English or Japanese to begin — but eventually it WILL morph into a completely unique, universally understood language of communications.
As the technology improves and more capabilities are added to the device list, the language may cease to be spoken or written and may become symbolic and visual. Who needs words when streaming media is so much more compelling. And with the massive rendering engines (Toy Story, etc.) becoming more accessible, smaller, and less expensive, we may all someday be able to create our own little visual vignettes.
If we can do business over the airwaves, through wi-fi or the cellular spectrum — or maybe the Next Big Thing, whatever it is — anything becomes possible. Parents are better able to protect children, mobile offices become easier to establish, and the labor force is empowered from wherever is most functional or comfortable.
I'm reminded of two conversations I had at JavaOne, neither related to Java or development. Both are facets of communications that demonstrate
I talked to a content syndicator who wants to (and soon will be able to) push newspaper and television content out to any wireless device that accepts an XML stream. In other words, the publishers suddenly have access to thousands of devices worldwide AND millions of subscribers worldwide have access to any news any time any where.
I met a fellow from a major midwestern (USA) university who is frustrated trying to communicate with his service staff, who spend considerable time in the institution's 23 miles of steam tunnels. The "walkie-talkie" devices work close to the surface but not deep in the physical network. But — their cell phones seem to work from everywhere. He's looking for a way to communicate to all at once, to groups at a time, and to individuals, to send routing information, service orders, even blueprints when appropriate.
It's an awesome challenge but we seem to be overcoming the problems a leap at a time. By the time I retire, I expect global communications convergence. And by the time my children (26 and 22) retire, I expect they will be tied to their work and community in converged ways I can't even dream now.
Check out my online article “A New Paradigm” (http://www.heavenr.com/writing/index.html) for more thoughts.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the convergence of computing and communications — and how incredibly tied to networks we’ve become. There’s a network for almost everything you can do.
There are cell phone networks, technical social networks (SMS, for example), internal/intranet networks, broadband networks, television networks, and networks of roads for transportation. Sometimes these networks are superimposed on each other, which either simplifies things or complicates it.
Railroads, for example, have to track the cargo being shipped, to make sure it is delivered to the right place on time, and to make sure they get paid for the shipment. So they’ve imposed multiple networks on top of each other.
There’s the track — it forms a nationwide physical network of more than 156,000 miles (and connects to Canada and Mexico as well). Cars on this network freely interchange from one railroad company to another. One railroad bills another for use of its cars, yet it doesn’t matter to the shipper whose car shows up at the loading dock.
On top of that is each railroad’s signal system, to make sure the danger of operating multiple trains in multiple directions is abated. As you travel, you see wires strung from poles at trackside. Each wire represents a section (approximately a mile) of track the network protects. When you see the signal light change to red, or yellow, or green, it’s because the train has tripped a sensor and the network is responding, based on known factors of human reaction time, mechanical limitations, and the psychology of colors.
And finally, there is the invoicing/shipment tracking system. This connects the mainframe computer in one yard to the mainframe in another yard. Waybills (bills of lading) for each car are transmitted from yard to yard, and given to the yard crews making up each day’s trains, so Car A from Company A in City A gets to Company B in City B — and to the train crews to make sure the car (and cargo) doesn’t sit forgotten on a siding in City C.
Other social entities do the same thing. Trucking companies, utility companies (look a the huge, Tennessee Vally Power Authority and how it dispatches power throughout its grid, tracks which local utilities get the power, tracks which generating facility created it, bills everyone properly, and keeps itself optimally maintained. Whew!
Don’t forget to see my articles on other kinds of social and physical networks at http://www.heavenr.com.
My boss made a timely comment: “I suggest you keep writing good articles for a specific audience.” I will do that — here the focus will be on communications and computers, the convergence between technology and the way we connect with one another, now and in the future.
To make that more obvious, I changed the title of the entire blog to Convergence. Wikipedia defines convergence as “In the absence of a more specific context, convergence denotes the approach toward a definite value, as time goes on; or to a definite point, a common view or opinion, or toward a fixed or equilibrium state.”
I see this blog AS the context, as the definite point, whether time passes or not (and it always does). I would hope that my approaches, values, opinions, could spark threads of discussion that lead to a common view, a fixed point where we share equilibrium. At least for now.
I’ve had people tell me they think my website (http://www.heavenr.com) is too unfocused — or actually, focused on too many topics. I want to avoid that here, so everything I post will be aimed at convergence … or one of the previously-stated converging interests. Thus it falls into the mathematical definition of convergence: “to claim the existence of a limit.”
Since this blog purports to be about computers, the computer definition of convergence is “a means of modelling [sic] the tendency for genetic characteristics of populations to stabilize over time.” At least that’s what Wikipedia says about evolutionary computing — and that’s exactly what I want this to be about. Not stability, per se, but about the tendency for characteristics to stabilize, or converge. Or evolve.
And Wikipedia (gotta love it) says convergence in a social or language sense is “the blending of two languages that are perceived as having equal social status” — in this case the languages of communications and computing. As far as I’m concerned, they are certainly equal; I can’t do one without the other.
By the way, I include in the term communications both mass and personal. Mass because I want the message to have a long … perhaps limitless … reach to all parts of the Internet and the globe, and personal because at the point where and when my fingers touch the keyboard, it’s just me talking to myself. If this works, if someone (you maybe?) reads and listens, and maybe responds, I’ll call it a success. On the other hand, if I simply succeed in relieving myself of things I want to say (or my socially-acceptable demons), I’ll be happy. I’ve banged my gong, tooted my horn, put on my funny hat, and called attention to myself as well as I know how.
My boss (satoshi.blogs.com/uie/) also said “I am not aware of any quick and easy way to get attention … It took two years for me to get 5,000-10,000 pageviews/day. The average pageview/day in the first year was less than 1,000.” Pageviews, another convergence term (generally assuming one page equals one reader, except at my house where people point at the screen and say with excitement “hey, look at this”). Man, this blogging thing is rich, fertile ground.
Well, not really. In the Grand Scheme, it rates barely a hiccough — especially to seasoned programmers. Still, I experimented a little the other night and stretched my technical skills and vocabulary.
The premise is that I refuse to post email addresses in plain text to websites I manage. It’s just too easy to program a robot that sequentially looks at every page of every IP address for “name at domain dot top_level_domain” using the @ and dot (.) characters for reference. I’ve seen the result of unethical and sometimes unlawful use of email addresses harvested by the spiders of spammers.
So with the help of Chris Hill at IABC’S international headquarters in San Francisco (http://www.iabc.com/), I started using a script routine to embed the email address in JavaScript, where the spiders can’t find it. It literally doesn’t exist until the browser (client) executes the script on your computer. I use this script for every occurence on my own website (http://www.heavenr.com/) and every other website within my control.
The script is quite simple. It creates two variables (a_mail_name and a_mail_domain) into which you place the portions of a legitimate email address on either side of the @ sign. Then it uses document.write() statements to parse together the variables and the rest of a standard mailto: link. I’ve created them with CC variables, BCC variables, subject variables, and body text variables. I suppose I could also break the heavenr.com portion into two separate variables but I never saw a need. At its most basic, it looks like this:
<script language=”Javascript”>
a_mail_name = “heavener”
a_mail_domain = “heavenr.com”
document.write(”<a href=’mailto:” + a_mail_name + “@” + a_mail_domain + “‘>”);
document.write(”<span class=’H6′>”);
document.write(a_mail_name + “@” + a_mail_domain);
document.write(”</span>”);
document.write(”</a>”);
</script>
(Note that this blog’s software forces me to use the character replacements & l t ; and & g t ; in place of the less-than and greater-than symbols (left and right angle brackets) when I’m in edit mode. The strange thing is that when this article is in view mode, the replacements get converted back the way the script uses them — I guess YMMV applies here. If you copy the script, be sure to use the proper angle bracket charaters.) You can also open up pages (view source) at my websites and copy the script.
The other night, I was redoing the website for my church (http://www.redmondumc.com/). I added a page for our new fundrasing program (scrip.htm), so our congregation’s members can download the order forms anytime. For variety, I took a screenshot of one slide from the PowerPoint presentation and dropped it into the web page as a graphic. That slide has an email address, so I thought I should create an image map hotspot so the congregation could send messages, as the presentation intended.
But I stumped myself. How in the world could I justify putting into the hotspot as a readily harvestable plain text email address? It violated my sense of ethics and mocked the standard I’ve set for myself.
The only answer, obviously, was to roll up my sleeves and figure out how to modify the image map and/or the script so they work together. After some nosing around in HomeSite, I found the ticket — embed the map’s anchor/coordinates statement in document.write() statements, like this:
<img src=”scrip.jpg” mce_src=”scrip.jpg” width=”326″ height=”244″ alt=”" border=”0″ hspace=15 usemap=”#scrip”>
<map name=”scrip”><map name=”scrip”>
<script language=”Javascript”>
a_mail_name = “heavener”
a_mail_domain = “heavenr.com”
document.write(”<area alt=’Email questions to us’ + “);
document.write(” coords=’37,146,201,166′ + “);
document.write(”href=’mailto:” + a_mail_name + “@” + a_mail_domain + “‘>”);
</script>
</map>
It wasn’t all that hard, really, but it made me feel happy that I could do it alone … without help. Justice lives on and the email address is only harvestable if a human touches the link. Take that, accursed spambots!
As a professional communicator and trainer, I’m always interested in sharing my ideas with others. I’ve learned that no good idea ever goes completely obsolete. Sometimes new eyes can see new purposes to apply to “old” information.
That’s why my website (http://www.heavenr.com) is a repository for an amazing lot of interesting … and hopefully still relevant … information. A lot of it is in my online portfolio, a collection of my successes — things that have made money for other companies or improved the way they do business.
There’s a link on my home page, or look in Accomplishments under the Career menu item. For the sake of visiting spiders, the portfolio URL is
http://www.heavenr.com/project/portfolio.html.
Feel free to use anything you find. If it works for you, I’d like to applaude your good fortune, so let me know what you did and where I can look.
Well … my first attempt at blogging was a disaster. I had written a really profound statement of my need to learn, coupled with my philosophy, that flowed nicely and stayed on target. Clicked “save” and in the blink of an eye, it was gone. Spent that last hour going through the cache looking for any trace of it. Gone! I could cry. Next time, I’ll copy it to Notepad before committing it.
I’m exploring this whole blogging concept as a way to increase the breadth of communication. I have a website that does well for a “vanity” site (www.heavenr.com/). It gets a moderate amount of attention and has been the perfect showcase for the ideas I wanted to convey. Over the years, it has generated comments and messages from all over the world.
But the upkeep is intense. It needs constant attention, to make sure dates in articles are current, that new information is added, and that links don’t decay and articles don’t go out of date. Between a full time job and all the other activities I’m involved in, there sometimes isn’t enough time left over for my website. When I let it languish, the search engines don’t see the changes they seem to want, and the site drops in ranking and popularity.
As I read more about blogging and the benefits it offers, even to conventional websites like mine, it makes me want to try my hand. Even losing this article the first time around must not deter me from needing to know if I can make it work for myself.
My boss has his own blog (satoshi.blogs.com/uie/). I subscribe completely to his vision of “pervasive applications” where the end user, not the device or program, owns the applications or content he or she buys or creates. If I take a picture, I want to show it, edit it, wrap other content around it anywhere I go, not at home hunched over my laptop and Photoshop. I want my mother to see it as I do, not from a CD-ROM disk. I want my sister to see it from Phoenix, but I can’t count on her having the plug-in I used. I want my co-workers to see it when we’re gathered in the break room and all we have is a cell phone and a set-top box. Brilliant vision!
I saw a similar vision, but what I saw was limited to the convergence of communications and computing. I’ve been a writer since I first discovered typewriters in the seventh grade and never looked back. When I discovered that I could add pictures and … and … sound, even … using the computer, it enhanced my storytelling ambitions. I wrote about it recently in an article I call “A New Paradigm”
(www.heavenr.com/writing/index.html).
Using the best tools I knew at the time, HTML and CSS, I put it together for instant dissemination — to anyone who happened to find it. That’s the drawback. How do I spread the word for people to find it? Blogging, I suspect and hope, is that tool. It may even be the tool to replace the website when I feel pressured by my muse to write such an article in the future.
There are other reasons for testing the concept of a personal blog, beyond simply learning how. As a marketing communications professional, I want to know how to spread the word faster — or to a larger audience. Blogging, so they say, generates community faster than any other messaging medium.
I’m working on my sister’s website (http://www.4rmg.com/). She has a lot of give-away content that was done in FrontPage (and the creator went back to school and doesn’t work for her anymore). As I read through it, it seemed like a lot of blog content — and with the trend to give blog backlinks a lot of SEO weight, I think she should be marketing herself that way.
Whatever I happen to learn from this exercise — or from the responses of others — will make me a better communicator. It will open my writing/storytelling up to a new community. It will … potentially … bring fruits I never dreamed, including personal and professional growth, self-enhancement, and the opportunity to make new friends.
Maybe I did dream them. I just haven’t found the right tool, the right means for expression. Maybe this — blogging – is it.
