Well, I just found Colibri, an application for Windows that does many of the same things. It makes launching an application as easy as typing the first few letters of its name. You can do Google search right from your desktop (note: you can do this will Google Desktop too, but it’s much slower). You can even control your volume settings without taking your hands off the keyboard.

The app is still very new, and is missing some of the features that make Quicksilver great (like the ability to learn keystrokes that stand for certain applications, for example, typing FF to launch Firefox). But it looks very well thought-out, installation is clean and easy, and since I bet it will progress very quickly.
Update: Just discovered that Colibri actually does learn common keystrokes, so you can do things like typing FF to launch Firefox. Yay!

Case in point: I had a meeting with my sister last night at a place I’d never been. She sent me the directions in an email about a week ago. They said that the place was located

in St. Louis Park, just off of
highway 100 and 394. take 94 to 394 west, to 100
south, to cedar lake rd exit. take a right on the
first driveway you see into Parkdale Plaza. The
address is XXXX South Highway 100″

These are not difficult directions to follow, had I noticed them. Instead, however, I noticed the handy little icon on the side of my GMail screen that said “Map This”, like this:

So, sensing that Google Map’s directions to the place would be better than my sisters (and more techy!), I clicked that.

Problem. A sensible human being will notice that Google is offering to map a completely different address (one it had picked up from an earlier e-mail in the chain). So the map I received gave me excellent directions to the wrong place. If I had read my sister’s e-mail, I might have realized that.

Instead, I trusted Google to read her e-mail for me, assuming it would figure out where she wanted me to go on its own. Google is, sadly, incapable of having meaningful interactions with my sister via e-mail. So it got confused and got me lost:

Fortunately, they got the tone right, too:

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite.

Note the first person.

A related (although much more in depth) read is Tom Coates’ essay on the mass amateurization of everything:

…flexibility of publishing creates a fluid and living form of self-representation, the ‘homepage (as a place)’ has become the ‘weblog (as a person)’ that can articulate a voice. And when there are a multiplicity of voices in space, then the possibility arises of conversations. And where there is conversation there is the sharing of information. And conversation about what? Well everything from music and movies and animation and medical information. Weblogs are becoming the bridge between the individual and the community in cyberspace …

For PR, that means a serious shift in voice is coming, because PR should be the bridge between the business and the community. And the community is starting to filter out messages that don’t sound how people talk:

Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Adobe’s ‘FAQ’ Regarding Their Acquisition of Macromedia

[QUESTION] Do you anticipate a reduction in force as a result of this transaction?

[ADOBE] When two successful growing companies join together, the result is a combined organization that creates new and exciting opportunities. The combination will lead to powerful new areas of innovation, new products and solutions, and an acceleration of our respective growth agendas. At the same time, there will be some duplication of employee functions between the two companies, and upon the close of the transaction, we anticipate some level of reduction in force. While we anticipate the integration team will identify opportunities for cost savings, the primary motivation for this acquisition is to continue to expand and grow our businesses into new markets.

[TRANSLATION] Yes.

via John Gruber at Daring Fireball

Obviously, a large merger presents some challenges for the PR professional, especially when it comes to talking about job losses. But what if you have an audience that doesn’t want to hear you obfuscate? And what if they react somewhat sarcastically (like John did, or worse) when you do?

It places a much higher burden on the communicator – you have to speak clearly, personally, and honestly or risk offending an audience that has the power to make itself heard (look at who’s linking to John’s PR send-up.)

“Search company Google is testing software that lets people navigate the Web without opening up an Internet browser, placing itself in a field that Microsoft has designs on–desktop search.

On Thursday, the Mountain View, Calif.-based search company debuted the Google Deskbar. The downloadable software for users of Microsoft’s Windows operating system puts a Google search box in the desktop taskbar. Using the free tool, people can search for information on the Web while in a Word document or e-mail application. But instead of launching a browser, the Deskbar will display results in a small window in the lower right of the screen. ”
via CNET

In which: I get suckered into ordering DVDs of ill-repute; I violate Yahoo’s terms of service; I try to convince you to do the same.

Rumors circulate on the Internet like pieces of excrement in a toilet: they are kept afloat only because stupid people keep picking them up.

I am one of those stupid people. A few weeks ago a friend of mine passed along an e-mail that mentioned an Internet Web site claiming it was giving away mp3 players. Maybe a scam, my friend said, but maybe not. It was tempting.

After all, these weren’t any mp3 players. These were iPods.

Ahhhhhhh.

Yes, those magical white boxes, like little bars of free-hotel soap, were something I’d never wanted until one was offered to me free of cost. Then I wanted twenty. Never mind that I have very few mp3s. My iTunes play-list consists mainly of Italian language-instruction programs. Most of the other songs I refuse to listen to, because they get stuck in my head and keep me from sleeping.

And yet, free things are free things. Ipods are cool and gadgety. Hotel-sized bars of soap are convenient and it’s not a big deal if you lose one under the radiator.

Twenty bars of soap, I can say from experience, are easy to get for free. Just bring a paper bag to your hotel room. The rest will take care of itself.

Twenty iPods have been more difficult.

After doing a bit of research it appeared the offer was valid. The goal could be realized with little more than some e-mail trickery. All you had to do was sign up for a free e-mail account. Then, you signed up at www.freeipods.com using that new account, because it would soon be bombarded with Spam. Of both the real and the electronic variety.

I created chichomydog@yahoo.com. Chicho was the name of a dog we got from the humane society when I was a kid. It barked tremendously. All the time. Tore through its leash. Then its muzzle. After a week we sent him back.

Don’t even start. I still feel horrible about it. So horrible that when I signed up for my Yahoo! mail account I couldn’t give my real name.

To Yahoo! I am not “Bruno Bornsztein” but “Bobana Bobana”. This is because “Bob Bob” was taken. Apparently Yahoo! is not familiar with the American custom of not giving people the same first and last name and using a common first name for both.

In any case, they didn’t say anything.

So, now sufficiently pseudonymized, I returned to the free iPods site, ready to collect my bounty. Would they send it today? Tomorrow? By e-mail?

OF COURSE! Right after I completed a simple promotional offer, requiring the use of both my real name and my credit card. I’d come this far; I couldn’t turn back. So I caved and signed up for the first one that looked reputable: Columbia House DVD. The deal: you get five DVDs for 50 cents apiece, and by doing so you agree to buy 12 more at full price.

I didn’t bother much with the details. I was going to cancel it anyway. “The DVDs will come,” I said to myself, “You will not open the box. You will send them back. End of the affair.”

But I opened the box, and the affair continues. And since I was planning on sending them back, I didn’t choose DVDs I actually wanted to own, I just took the pre-selected ones.

So this Saturday I watched “You Got Served,” one of the worst movies about urban hip-hop dancing I have ever seen (and I’ve seen many). The whole time I was thinking “You’ve Been Served. You’ve Been Served.”

All this and still no iPod in sight. Because completing the DVD offer wasn’t the only requirement. I also have to get five friends to do it.

It has quickly become clear that getting five friends to be as stupid as I was isn’t as easy as it sounds. Most people have more sense.

And that’s where you come in. You could really help me out here. Would you like to be a part of a borderline legitimate pyramid scheme? No really, it works, you just need to do something you don’t want to do, and then trick five friends into doing the same. Heck, they don’t even have to be friends. Trick anybody, I don’t care.

Here, use this link.

Tell ‘em Bobana sent you.

In lieu of a light, meaningless story about some trivial aspect of my life, I’d thought I’d treat you to something more substantial. I don’t claim to be knowledgable about anything, but I am quick to use new technology to help do the things I want to do, so here’s some of what I know:

• There are tools out there that will help you and tools that won’t.
  • Example; you wish to know about the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, a small district in far eastern Russia founded in 1928 as a place for the Soviet Union’s Jews. A Google search will turn up plenty of good information. You are looking for information about a specific, concrete topic, and search engines will be happy to oblige. Here you go, says Google. 414 results.
  • But what if you are looking for information about an abstract topic, something like “health care costs”? A Google search on that gives you 2,820,000 hits. Some will be useful, some won’t, and it looks like you’re in for some major sifting. Blleaggh!!, says Google, spewing vomit all over.
• Now, you can probably refine that Google search (here’s a good guide to getting better results out of the vomit pool), but that doesn’t solve the basic problem; you’re looking for a different kind of information than Google provides. You don’t want to know facts and figures and statistics about “health care costs” (the way you did about the Jewish Oblast). You want to find someone who knows a lot about health care and ask them, “Hey, why are health care costs so high?” This is a very different kind of search.
  • You want human information on an abstract topic. This doesn’t come from web pages, it comes from people. So you need to find someone who knows what you want to know, and ask them (or at least listen to what they’re saying).
  • Fortunately, it’s very easy these days for people to say things on the internet. So the chances are pretty good that there’s a health care expert out there producing content about the health care industry (and probably about health care costs, too). Hey, look, there’s one now!
• Sometimes you’re not searching for facts, you’re searching for sources.
  • You can’t go to Google and say, “Find me someone who I can trust and is smart about health care issues.” But, with a little digging, you can go through RSS feeds, evaluate the competence and authority of the sources, and over time, develop a list of people you trust to inform you about that subject.
  • Bloglines is a good tool (here’s the part about using technology to help you). Sign up for an account (it’s free), and start subscribing to RSS feeds. Keep these in folders by category (like bookmarks) and check them daily (or hourly). When you want to research a new subject (like health care), set up a new folder for RSS feeds about health care. Then subscribe to as many health care feeds as you can find (here’s a start), so you can begin monitoring the subject and filtering out the feeds that you don’t trust or don’t find useful.
  • Use Blogline’s Clips and Blog features to save your research as you go. Every time you find a good post about the subject, clip it or blog it; then you’ll have a running record of your findings that you can easily share with people (like the person who’s paying you to find them).
  • Get a good browser: Firefox is my choice. Why? A good browser can increase your productivity online, especially when you’re doing information searches. Searching, by its nature, involves going off on tangents. There are many ways to get to what you’re looking for, and you never know which link will take you. In Internet Explorer, link open in the same window or in new windows. This means either you do a lot of ‘back’ clicking, or you have 27 windows open in your taskbar, with no idea what’s in each one.

    Tabbed browsing is a feature common to many decent brosers (i.e. not IE) which allows you to open links in tabs. That way, you can save the Google search you started from in one tab, and go off on tangents in new tabs within the same window.

    Firefox also has a ton of other features (like note-taking plugins and bookmarklets) that will make your time online more efficient.

  • Find the right search engine. It might not be Google. A9.com, Amazon’s new search site, takes web results from Google and combines them with statistics from Alexa, Search Inside the Book results from Amazon, and reference results from Guru Net.

The point isn’t that there’s just one, best way to find what you need, but that there is technology out there that can vastly improve your results and productivity. And that if you don’t experiment with all the different options, you may be missing something really useful.

It’s normal for them. They sit where they please.

But still. It was a $50 sweater and I sure hope it was sprayed down at least.

I have a leather belt that was either the a) armpit or b) shin of a cow before it was a belt. It holds close to my hips and prevents the slippage of my pants, but I can’t help wondering if maybe there isn’t an option c. Why does not my belt indicate from which cow body part it derives?

Mind you, I don’t question the quality of this two-inch wide piece of a dead animal. It was a gift from my cousin, who commandeered it for me from my uncle’s leather goods store. He’s bought and sold leather most of his life, so I’m sure he knows a good belt when he steals one. Still, many of the steps this thing went through between the cow’s waist and mine are not particularly appealing:

Fleshing
Hair removal
Liming
Deliming
Bating
Pickling
Fatliquoring

Hair removal alone takes four to six hours. Fatliquoring sounds bad, but it’s really just a procedure to get the moisture out of the hide.

Anyway, this is not some vegan save-the-animals-they-have-feelings rant. I have no problem with covering my naked skin with the dead, pickled skin of a cow. She would eat you too, if she could. Remember that.

Thankfully, these days all the foul stuff is done in a climate-controlled (I hope) factory far, far away. By the time you walk into my uncle’s store to purchase a briefcase or a leather umbrella the worst you may have to deal with is a grumpy Argentine who is impatient for a mid-day nap.

But a few hundred years ago, turning animals and plants into clothing was a very different proposition. Historically, tanning (the process of turning animal pelts into leather) was a horrendous occupation. Most tanners were poor, and they lived and worked in dirty, unhealthy conditions. Hair removal still had to happen, but without modern chemical techniques the best way to do it was to soak the pelt in urine (first they’d let the urine sit for a while till it became ammonia). Or, if your neighbors had some reason not to give away their urine, you could just let the pelt rot for several months, and then scrape the hairs off with a knife.

And then, if you could afford to, you’d slap on a few buttons and maybe a pocket or two, and put the whole urine-soaked, putrefied thing on your back.

Now, things are much better (of course, some people still prefer to do it the old fashioned way). If you’re lucky, the clothes you’re wearing aren’t made of plants or animals at all; they’re some inscrutable assortment of long-chain synthetic polymer molecules (p(- R- O – CO – C6H4 – CO – O -)x).

Polyester is a Middle Eastern fabric; it’s made of petroleum. You can find lots of it (crude oil) in the open-air markets of Baghdad and Kuwait. But making it into a t-shirt involves a fair bit of acid and melting.

So, you have some choices: kill a large, dirty animal and either a) cut off all its hair and put it on your back or b) cut off its skin, soak it in urine/acid, and put it on your back. Or, you can buy a few barrels of crude ($40 a pop), mix in some terephthalic acid, simmer and sew, and then head out to the disco.

When I started something called “New Media Journalism” was the buzzword, and it was always something that intrigued me. So when people asked me what I wanted to do, I’d say some combination of the Internet and journalism. But I distinctly remember having no clear idea what that meant.

Three years ago, New Media meant a newspaper with a Web site. It meant attempting to do something with streaming video. And it meant giving newspaper reporters digital video cameras and recorders. In essence, I thought New Media Journalism would mean figuring out ways for the traditional media to adopt all the new technologies that were becoming more and more commonplace.

That, it turns out, was only part of the equation, and the lesser part, at that.

The change in journalism has been much more profound than a simple adoption of new technologies. Instead, we have seen (and will continue to see) a major shift in the locus of mass communication. New technologies like cheap recording cameras and the Internet haven’t just made it easier for traditional media to reach their audience, they’ve made it possible for the audience to take control of the message.

The old idea of “feedback” was that a newspaper or TV new show would have a number where people could call and leave messages. Or an address people could write to. So, if you had something to say about what big media was doing, or if you just had something to say, you’d meekly send a message off to an ombudsman or public editor and wait and hope they’d print it. In the New Media age, journalist (and journalism students) properly imagined that feedback would be enhanced; that was a good thing. The Internet would allow us to get more opinions and responses from our readers and viewers.

So, how to do that? Well, an e-mail address! Interactive polls! Discussion boards! Look at all that great feedback coming…back.

But letting more people contact their newspaper’s ombudsman is not one of the great triumphant promises of the Internet. Happily, it had more in store for us than that.

After a while, people got sick of waiting and hoping. And they decided they didn’t want their “feedback” posted on a letters page of a newspaper, they wanted an even bigger audience. So they did something that, because of new technology, had become ridiculously easy; they started a Web site.

And that, I believe, has started a real transformation in what the word “journalism” means. Putting aside the question of which are more trustworthy, blogs or old news, there’s no question that blogs are producing at least as much (if not more) content as old news. That’s a staggering shift. On one hand you have hundreds of huge organizations with payrolls and facilities and trained professionals. On the other hand you have millions of individuals and small groups; most unpaid and untrained. And yet blogs can compete with traditional news media outlets in terms of the amount of information they are distributing.

How long before this change reaches the rest of the information market? How long before home-movies distributed compete with Hollywood for the eyes and ears of valuable consumers? How long before academic journals have to compete with academic blogs for control of that niche? What will be the first major discovery to be announced in a blog? Or has is already been announced?

No one was surprised by the information age; we knew it was coming. But what we didn’t realize was control of the world’s new most valuable resource would be distributed from the ground up.

Most of the people I work with are familiar with blogs to varying degrees. A few people regularly read at least one (Kos, Drudge, The Virtual Chase, etc.), but I don’t think anyone (besides me) has one. And beyond that, I don’t think there’s a good understanding or discussion of how our department (which does internal and external communications) is going to respond to the unavoidable rise to prominence blogs have recently enjoyed. I don’t have the answer to that, nor do I think does anybody in the PR/communications/advertising/journalism world. But blogs have revolutionized the way people communicate, and that change is something that can’t be denied or ignored.

So, to begin with, let me contradict myself. Blogs are not what has revolutionized the way we communicate. That revolution began long ago, and it’s origins can be traced back as far as you car to look (TV, radio, telegraph, etc.). But, essentially, it’s the Internet that has revolutionized communication. Everybody has always known this, and always known it would (even back when I owned my first modem for the Mac it was called “Global Village” an allusion to Marshall McLuhan’s theories of modern, global communication).

It’s popular right now to say that blogs are something new and different. Bloggers, in particular, like to set rules about what is and is not a blog. Some say it’s only a blog if it’s updated frequently; others say if there’s any editorial oversight, it’s not a blog. I disagree.

A blog is just a Web site with a catchier name that doesn’t require weird capitalization. That’s it. Just a Web site. Those blog critics who complain about blogs being no better than the mid 90s AOL personal home pages with pictures of people’s cats and flashing GIFs are right. The early Internet was flooded with boring, ill-executed, pointless pages about people’s pets, their kids, their guitars, and even more dorky topics. But in my view, all those pages were blogs.

The only difference between the blogs we read today and the ones we didn’t read in 1995 is that today’s blogs are much, much easier to create. In 1995 creating a Web page (which I use interchangeably with ‘blog’) was a complicated ordeal. You had to know HTML (and most likely you actually had to hand code it, rather than using a WYSIWYG editor)). You had to some Web space, which was remarkably confusing and difficult to get a hold of, unless you were a) a student at a university or b) a geek (and I say geek in the most loving way).

Most people, alas, were either not students or not sufficiently geeks to be able to put together a Web page. So the few personal pages that did exist weren’t very good, or didn’t appeal to an audience, or both.

Today, everything about creating a Web page has changed. Sure, knowing a little HTML still helps, but so does knowing how to speak English in Miami. But the fact is, you can get by just fine without it. Web space, which used to be not only expensive but also confusing (the DNS server’s connected to the … domain name!) is now free and easy. Blogger or a host of other, um, hosting services, will just give it to you. In fact, they’re practically begging to give away Web space. If you want fancier duds (like your own domain name and no ads) you’ll have to shell out a few bucks, but I literally mean a few bucks (my hosting service, Bloghosts, provides excellent support, a great administrative interface, a bunch of email addresses, and 100 megabytes of space for about $3 a month).

So now, setting up a Web site where you can post pictures of your cat, stories about your cat, and even audio clips of your cat is FREE, and it takes just minutes. So, of course, there are a million blogs/websites about people’s cats, and nobody reads them, and nobody updates them, and they are a waste of space and time and even the words I using to write about them.

BUT! But, ever since publishing content on the Internet became easy and free and fast, the cat sites have been joined by hundreds of thousands of sites published by people with real, expert knowledge and honest opinions about what they are writing. Lawyers, doctors, politicians, writers, PR people, small business owners, airplane enthusiasts, cartography geeks. They’re all out there creating good, useful content on a regular basis. People who ten years ago were holed up in their basement designing dot-matrix printers out of Lego’s are now posting their design specs online. You can debate the usefulness of a dot-matrix printer made of Lego’s that uses chocolate for ink, but you can’t argue that it isn’t interesting. And I firmly believe it’s better to have that knowledge out in the open where it can be shared and revised and improved upon, than to have it trapped in some brilliant geek chocolate-lover’s mind.

It turned out that the Internet was not about technology or computers; it was about publishing. It was the next logical step in a series of refinements to human mass communication that has been in the works since Guttenberg pressed the first “In the beginning” into his first bible. Reaching a mass audience (or, in my case, a small but devoted (I hope) audience) is no longer a capacity reserved for those with power or money or very, very loud voices. Creating a Web site is no longer the exclusive domain of geeks and nerds and computer geeks (wait, did I say geeks already?). Anyone can do create one, we just call them blogs instead of Web sites.

Combine that with the power of RSS (which is just a way of standardizing the content on these blogs/websites so that they can be more easily read, searched and republished) and you’ve got an ever expanding, incredibly diverse, and widely accessible representation of humanity’s collective knowledge. If you learn to search it, filter out the good stuff from the bad, and monitor it for changing trends and currents, and your own consciousness becomes vastly enriched and augmented.

The next step, then, is not only to feed from the great pool of human knowledge which is accumulating on the Internet, but to contribute to it. It’s your way of getting your message out there, of communicating it to people who very likely not only are interested in hearing it, but also probably searched to find something exactly like it. I keep telling my uncle, who knows a lot about wine, that he should start a blog/website about that frosty beverage. He could help inform people that wine is not meant to be frosty when consumed, and that most likely those who call wine a frosty beverage are confusing it with beer, which is a malt alcohol and has not at all the same flavor or appearance as wine. Idiot.

My dad (although I don’t like to admit it) is something of an expert in the field of medicine and medical education. I’m sure there are hundreds of people out there who would love to read what he has to say about health insurance, teaching hospitals, residency programs and the like.

I could go on and on, but the point is, everybody’s an expert on something. And even those who aren’t (like me) are still qualified to write about whatever interests them. Because after all, if it’s interesting to you, it’s certain to be interesting to someone else, too.

Unless it’s about your cat. There’s just no audience for sites about cats anymore. None.

What ever happened to the free market? My options for HSI are simple; Comcast or Comcast. DSL isn’t available, so that leaves cable, and apparently it’s a monopolized segment. As we all know, monopolies are bad for consumers because they allow the monopolizer to charge as much as they want (except in some cases, when they allow the monopolizer to charge as little as they want).

They make it seem like you have choices by offering one thousand different plans that can be combined in myriad ways. And you can purchase your internet plan through hundreds of resellers, all of whom have promotions, deals and rebates meant to entice you to buy their particular brand of internet. But in the end it’s all the same, and when your promotional period is over and your mail-in-rebates mailed in, you’re going to be paying $57 dollars a month to Comcast.

Which is why I wish I lived in Chaska. It’s a suburb about an hour south of where I live, and to be honest, I don’t think I could even
find it on a map without the help of the internet. I think I got lost near Chaska once; I remember cows and really nice houses and people selling corn on the side of the road.

Anyway, in September the city of Chaska will start offering wireless internet access to anyone in the city limits for a monthly fee of $16. Now that’s the free market working for the benefit of consumers. It’s wildly cheaper that cable or DSL through the big service providers (Comcast, Qwest, Time-Warner) and it doesn’t require any hardware purchases on the part of the user. Me, I’m going to have to fork over a hundred bucks or more for a cable modem and a wireless router, and that’s just so I’ll be able to have wireless access in the 180 feet surrounding my house. If I lived in Chaska, I’d be paying a lot less for internet access anywhere; at the park, a coffee shop, the library.

If I lived in Chaska,
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum.
All day long I’d biddy biddy bum.

No, but seriously, what’s with Saint Paul lagging behind on all the important stuff? Smoking ban: we’re last to get it. Light rail: Minneapolis first. And city-wide wireless internet access for a reasonable price – something which is clearly feasible even for a city half our size? Not even on the radar in Saint Paul.

Instead I’m going to spend the next few days filling out rebate forms (for the high-speed service, for the cable modem, for the router, and for anything else I can find rebates for) in a vain attempt to bring down the cost of internet access. I’ll console myself with the reminder that I don’t have to drive two hours in rush-hour traffic to get home to a city last featured on the big screen in the Cohen brothers’ Fargo, as the birthplace of an innocent, dim-witted prostitute.

So there. Ya ha deedle deedle.