I have recently made a change to how I use facebook. I think it is a good change that I needed to do but I feel bad about it. I get friended all the time on facebook by people I don’t know but who I am sure I would love to get to know. Many of these are listeners of one of my podcasts. But what I am finding is that facebook is not the place for me to connect to new people. I look at my updates on some days and only the faces of stranger stare back at me. Sure I can hide the updates of anyone that I don’t want to hear about (and anyone who is telling me about their farm game, I mean seriously folks) but then why did I friend them. So the time has come for me to admit that I have fewer friends than facebook says and pay better attention to the ones that I have.

I think that also means I need to pay attention to my listeners but had decided to do that in the way that Facebook recommends using “fan” pages (yes I hate that term).

So if you friend me these days don’t be too surprised if I say:

I don’t think we have met, but please let me know if that is just because my brain is made of swiss cheese.

I am making a change to how I use facebook to change my profile to be just family and friends. I am hearing a lot of smart people I know tell me I was using facebook wrong and I see the wisdom of what they are saying. So please don’t be upset if I don’t accept your friend invitation but if I get your updates I might miss pictures of my new grand niece and I don’t want to accept you and a friend but ignore your updates.

The Amateur Traveler page on facebook is at http://facebook.com/amateurtraveler

Of course, since my 30 year high school reunion is this week, that swiss cheese brain is a really good posibility.

I just got an email from Classmates.com that someone has left me a greeting. And if I will pay them money to upgrade to a premium membership, they will tell me who it is. Of course if I pay them I might just learn it is spam.

I have a 30 year high school reunion coming up next year. For now I will skip over the shock and awe generated by that fact to how my class is reconnecting on the web. It used to be that my class used Classmates to reconnect but as this reunion approaches we are more and more using facebook.

The main reason for the shift is that classmates has put a meter on so many basic functions that more and more people are finding it unacceptable. As someone who works building internet communities and social networks I think that communities have a value and that companies that build them do need to find an economic model. But classmates is starting to feel like the last bank we had. That bank (Wells Fargo) charged us to talk to a teller, to bank by phone and then started to charge us if we used the ATM machine too many times. We would have complained to them but I am sure there was a fee for that as well. So we left. That is the same risk that Classmates is running.

I can google with the best of them… at least that’s what I thought before I saw this interview by Patrick Norton of Google’s Matt Cutts.

I knew how to:

• do a phrase match – use quotes
• exclude specific words – use minus
• do spell checking
• get around spell check – use plus
• do currency conversion – convert 20 dollars to yen
• limit the search to a single site – paris site:amateurtraveler.com

I did not know how to:

• use a fill in the blank type search – mt everest is * feet high
• search only in the .gov domain – site:gov
• do a search for a number in a range between two numbers – 12..30
• get flight numbers
• get the time in zurich
• look up words in a dictionary – define:
• look for specific file types – filetype:
• look up local movies – movies 95129

So if you already have your bachelor’s degree in google search but you want to earn your master’s degree check out this video.

Thanks to Jim Karter at Earn Money Online who brought this to my attention.

LiveWorld (where I am the EVP of Engineering and Operations) announced a new product called LiveBar today. LiveBar provides a simple way to add community to a content page, but we have talked about the functionality of LiveBar elsewhere.

The funny thing about LiveBar we wanted to show this to everyone months ago but we liked it too much. LiveBar did not start as a product, it started as a demo for our new LiveAPI Suite which we announced last month. To sell the LiveAPI suite we wanted to have a demo application that would show off what we could create with it. So we had one of our clever engineers start working on a demo. Our problem was that when he showed it to us we liked it so much that we did not want to show it to anyone, which as you may have figured out is OK for an application but really bad for a demo.

I was just trying out the script debugging in Safari version 4 developer preview tonight and got more than I bargained for. I was trying to find out if I had a script error in my tags for Google’s new AdManager on the Amateur Traveler discussion boards pages (http://AmateurTraveler.com/board). I turned on the web inspector by using the “Show Web Inspector” menu in the Developer Menu. Instead of getting just script errors on my page the web inspector showed me errors in my HTML as well in a very clear and helpful way. In the example below I was missing tags in my HTML and the inspector tells me where it is assuming I meant to have these tags. This is very helpful.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Arthur C Clarke

Watching this video of trick pool shots left me saying things like “I can’t believe it” and “how did he do that?”. We all learned in the Empire Strikes back with Luke Skywalker that if we don’t believe that something can be accomplished then we won’t be able to do it. I wonder how many times I let my imperfect understanding of what can be accomplished limit what I will accomplish.

I have changed the slogan for the Amateur Traveler to:

“Amateur Traveler – The Amateur Traveler is a travel show that helps you find the best places to travel to. It includes both a weekly audio podcast and a twice monthly video podcast. It also includes travel news and resources.”

This is an ongoing effort to refine the description of the site.

When I created the Amateur Traveler site I made what I think is a classic error. The tag line I used at the time was “travel for the love of it”. I was trying to explain why I had chosen the name Amateur Traveler. But what I did not do is explain to someone why they would want to come to this site at all. It is difficult when you are familiar with a website to see if with the same eyes as someone who has never been there.

How many seconds do you have before someone forms an impression of your site?

Try showing your site to someone who has not seen it before and ask them what this site is about and why someone would want to go there. If they can’t tell you, you have a problem.

What is a visitors first impression?

Since a visitor may not stay long on your site their first impression may be their only impression.

What draws the eye of a new visitor?

Show your site to someone and ask them before you show it to point to the first thing that gets their attention. It may not be as accurate as eye tracking software but it is a lot cheaper.

Hampton Inn has published a clever video to YouTube that shows that they are one company that has some understanding of this business of new media. It is a “Ballad of a Traveler” who stayed at a lesser and more suspect establishment. It is not clear from the video that it is an ad until about half way in and frankly by then I was entertained so that fact did not bother me. The entire video is a dramatic poetry reading that at 3 minutes in length would not fit as a TV commercial.

At the end of June I had the opportunity to spend 3 days at the Socrates Society at the Aspen Institute discussing “Media and Our Conflicting Values” with a group of 25 smart people (CEOs, VCs, Entrepreneurs, etc). Our moderator was Michael Powell the former head of the FCC. Before we attended we had homework readings on the founding of the FCC when the Navy and later Herbert Hoover seized the airwaves after the Titanic disaster because signals from the stricken ship were blocked by amateur radio operators. We read cases from the Supreme Court and speeches about the “vast wasteland” that was and perhaps still is television.

We learned about obscene speach like pornography which is not protected vs indecent speech which is protected. Broadcast TV has (local) standards of decency imposed on it by the FCC because it uses the public airwaves. Cable and satellite TV have no such restrictions.

The media landscape has changed dramatically in my lifetime.

Regulation Obsolescence

What regulations are placed on broadcast television are increasingly irrelevant. Frankly I like TV better without people dropping the “F” bomb on me but in my household like so many others I don’t know that my college age kids could even tell me which stations are broadcast TV and which are not. In reality, none of the channels we receive is received via broadcast and therefore not subject to regulation. 95% of the households in the U.S. are in the same situation as they are receiving the signal via satellite or cable.

Audience Aging

According to a recent study the audience for television is continuing to age.

According to a study released by Magna Global’s Steve Sternberg, the five broadcast nets’ average live median age (in other words, not including delayed DVR viewing) was 50 last season. That’s the oldest ever since Sternberg started analyzing median age more than a decade ago — and the first time the nets’ median age was outside of the vaunted 18-49 demo.

What this means is that even though you may sit down tonight before a television with hundreds of channels, half the people who are watching are old enough to remember when there were 3 major networks and stations signed off at midnight by playing the Star Spangled Banner.

Audience Fragmentation

When I was a young child we watched the Ed Sullivan show on Sunday night. In 1962 Ed Sullivan had an audience share of 36. That made it only the 20th most watched show. Today many television executives would probably sell their soul for a 36 share. A share of 6 (6% of households) could easily be the number one rated show. The growth of cable in particular has shattered the hold of the big 3 networks on the audience.

Media Consolidation

Although people are watching more and more channels, most of these channels are owned by a small number of companies. Six media giants: GE, Time Warner, Disney, Fox, CBS, Viacom own a combined 169 channels by my count.

Internet Wildcard

What is television? Is it still television if I watch it on hulu.com? Is it still television if I buy it on iTunes? Is it still television if I get it as a podcast? Watch it on YouTube? Does it matter any more?

It increasingly does not matter to a growing set of consumers. It also matters less then who the creator is. User generated content and new media producers are creating content that can easily be better than the content on major networks. The Internet has given a voice to bloggers and podcasters that can’t and won’t be taken back any time soon.

Probably the best part of spending a few days debating the value of media is that this story is not finished. May you live in interesting times.

It was a hard week for hardware in my house. My trusted TiVo and my MacBook Pro both broke in the same week. The Mac was quickly fixed (a $1700 repair including new logic board for free under AppleCare) and I actually had a new TiVo in the closet. In both cases the real loss (even if temporarily) was not the hardware but the data. This got me thinking about where is my data stored and the advantage of online data storage.

del.icio.us

The first change I have made is a return to del.icio.us. del.icio.us is a popular bookmarking tool that you are probably already using as was I but not for my main bookmarks. I use Safari on the Mac as my main browser in large part because of the hundreds of bookmarks that I have in the browser. I am experimenting with adding all me newest bookmarks to del.icio.us instead.

Advantages of del.icio.us :

• My bookmarks are now backed up on someone else’s hardware
• My bookmarks are now shareable
• My bookmarks become browser independent
• There are plugins for both Safari and Firefox to let me use my bookmarks in an integrated fashion
• I can now tag and describe my bookmarks

Disadvantages of using del.icio.us :

• When I am offline I no long have access to my bookmarks
• I have to decide what information is public. When you watch my bookmarks you get insite to what I am thinking these days. That can be a good thing or a bad thing.

Evernote

Chris Brogan had twittered about Evernote recently which made me look again at this service. It is a difficult to describe service that allows you to put your notes (including pictures of hand written notes or any other pictures) into a database. The database is automatically mirrored onto the Evernote servers on the Internet. The idea then is that you could collect scraps of info on your computer or even from your cell phone. You can then organize or view them from anywhere you can open a browser including your cell phone. The service even has built in OCR functionality so that pictures of a sticky note, for instance, can be searched via a text search. I have just started using the service but could easily see it replacing my current solution (SOHO Notes) for those little bits of information you want to find again.