My father is 84 years old and grew up, for obvious reasons, without computers and the internet. So I sometimes get requests from him that I can’t accomplish because he does not understand how the internet works. My father will ask me to change something on the Yahoo mail site (I setup his browser to ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...