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 go there as his home page). Similarly my mother will respond to my reference about some website with “do we have that on our computer?”

The following is the analogy I tried to use to explain how the internet works:

The Internet Is Like Your TV

You have a TV which has a number of channels. You can control which channel you watch by going to channel 2 vs 4 vs 7. In reality channels are much more complicated, like on a radio each one has its own frequency, but we don’t have to know that we only have to know channel 2 is FOX. Each channel is controlled by a different company. Every TV that is hooked up to your cable provider will see the same content on the same channels. If someone buys a TV from Sony or from Magnavox, they still see the same channels and the same shows. Your cable company enables you to connect to these channels but it does not control which shows each channel shows.

The internet works similarly as follows. Each website: yahoo.com, amazon.com, google.com is run by a different company. The address for each website is like the channel number. So there is a lot of complexity that gets you to your email when you go to mail.yahoo.com, but you don’t have to know that, you just have to know that address. Everyone on the internet, like everyone on your cable system, has the same websites that they can go to. Your browser (FireFox) is like your TV. There are different browsers like different TVs made by different companies but they all still connect you to the same websites. What I did when I setup your browser (FireFox) to connect automatically to Yahoo mail is basically just like leaving your TV set on channel 2. I changed what content shows up, what website, when you start it up. But what I can’t do is change what is on Yahoo mail when you get there. That would be like changing what is on channel 2 when you turn your TV to that channel. Only the company who owns that channel, only the company that owns a website, can change what you see when you go there.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.