No one, even if they do it all day long, can keep up with all the available and cool new technology. This week, I feel like I’m really behind the tech power curve, so I decided to try to figure out what I’ve done with my time. It�s not like I�ve been sleeping.
In the past three weeks, I’ve purchased a Blackberry Pearl (the best cell phone I have ever had by orders of magnitude) and taken photos with it of my European cruise. It has a 1.3 megapixel camera, and it was tempting to use the phone rather than my Canon to document the ports I stopped at on the cruise.
I have posted those photos to my Flickr account (www.flickr.com), and even blogged some of them, along with photos and video of my daughter’s wedding in September. (You may see more of my daughter�s wedding at www.danielandsamantha.com).
I have downloaded another version of the social browser Flock, which connects me to both Flickr and my blog automatically, making it more efficient for me to do those things.
And, because, I am always curious, I�ve also downloaded and installed the new Internet Explorer 7 browser, and the Firefox 2.0 update. Do you want to know what I think? I think they are all trying to look like Mac OSX; everything is minimalist and blue. And everyone now has tabbed browsing. I�m not sure any one of these browsers could be defended to the death against the others.
Next, I’ve downloaded the new Democracy Player (http://www.getdemocracy.com/downloads) so I can watch Internet video, and watched the new Scoble Show on Podcast.net and Eddie Codel’s Geek TV (http://www.geekentertainment.tv/), where figures from the technology world are interviewed and MORE new technologies are demonstrated. I watched Scoble film Codel interviewing the CEO of Wetpaint (www.wetpaint.com), which is a new software that creates Wikis (editable web sites). By the end of the interview, by dint of assiduous multitasking, I had created my own Wiki.
I listened to the Gillmor gang, where Steve Gillmor (used to be with InfoWorld) chats weekly with Dan Farber, Jason Calcanis, Michael Arrington, and Dana Farber � most of them journalists who have now become bloggers.
Also this month I’ve downloaded the new Google reader (www.google.com/reader) so I can read all my RSS feeds (other people’s blogs, newspapers, etc) quickly and in one place. I have to thank Scoble for teaching me to page through the reader in the old Evelyn Wood Speed Reading fashion by repeatedly hitting the j key.
I have signed up and created an avatar to play the simulation game Second Life, which has a million players (http://secondlife.com/) and is attracting the attention of advertisers like Reuters. Unfortunately, I�ve only been back once to Second Life, because my first life has been too busy. On Saturday night I sat in Scoble�s house watching his son play the X-Box360 game �Oblivion� on a huge home theatre screen with surround sound. It was very much like being at a movie, especially since Patrick is extremely good at this game.
I’ve been trying to do all this keeping up with technology while planning the First Annual Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference, attending the ESS EXPO 2006, cruising the most exotic Mediterranean islands, treating the respiratory infection I got on the plane home, planning next spring’s FastTrac program, and voting by mail for a bunch of ballot propositions that are not what they have been advertised to be.
And I burned a few more hours searching the web for toilets and showers for the bathrooms I�m redoing in my house. (Tip: go somewhere familiar, like the Kohler site or homeclick.com , find a product you like, and then type it into Google. Up will come all the other sites that carry that product at sometimes as much as 50% off. The Internet is a perpetual price war.
Oh, I also have a full time job as mother to a golden retriever who requires a lot of ball throwing.
So there are many aspects of every technology that I have still not mastered, and which I like to think are saved for the future: I still have to figure out how to voice dial on the Blackberry; build a home on the lot I bought in Second Life, and find out how to make good real estate investments there like I do in First Life; and watch more Internet TV.
No wonder you haven’t seen me in person lately :-)
