I have been following J. Phil and Corvida on their quest to throttle the RSS feeder fire-hose a bit. I’d participate but I’m still starting from scratch: I’ve only been using an RSS reader for less than a month now and haven’t built my subscriptions up past 70 feeds yet.

That I’m not an RSS fiend would probably surprise some people I know. In general, I’m the source that a lot of my friends depend on to keep track of new technology and services on the web and I do a pretty good job, despite the fact that until recently I haven’t used a feed reader for more than 4 years.

How can any self-proclaimed geek and technophile possibly not be chained to a feed reader, you say? By burning myself out so well early on that I didn’t even have a partial interest in trying again. Back in 2004 I found Bloglines.com. It was exciting, cool, shiny, hip and kept me “in the know”. I subscribed to around 1K feeds within a few weeks in my enthusiasm. After a couple of months checking my feeds turned from fun to a major chore. Categorizing and labeling every feed and post to keep things organized (OCD, I know), “clearing” out each folder only to notice 10 more entries instantly pop up: I finally realized that it was completely stressing me out and quit the whole thing cold-turkey. I had associated the whole concept of RSS with that horrible overwhelming feeling and had no desire to use another reader again.

I couldn’t resist RSS entirely, though, and during my reader hiatus I subscribed to about 10 feeds (off and on) through an RSS to email service called R|Mail, which is now in the deadpool. When I realized it had died, I started using SimplyHeadlines.com instead, a service that emails you a daily summary of the feeds you subscribe to with it. The comforting bite-sized chunks of information, easily scannable in a few minutes a day made me feel like I was still informed, but, as a geek, I’ve always been a bit embarrassed that I didn’t use a reader.

Toluu is what got me interested in readers again. Since I signed up I have been discovering interesting new sites by browsing what other people are subscribing to. I like the idea of having a “home” for my list of feeds (OPML) as well. I started out importing my feeds from SimplyHeadlines, but the Toluu bookmarklet for GoogleReader kept calling me. I was pretty apprehensive when I first imported my OPML into GoogleReader but so far it’s been a good experience. To keep from getting bogged down again I force myself to ignore the folders and tagging and just scroll through new items. Starring things to come back to and sharing things I want to discuss on FriendFeed is quick and painless. GoogleReader is actually working well for me and that’s a relief. I feel some of my geek cred is now restored. I’ve dipped my toes back into the RSS ocean and I haven’t drowned yet. I’m not sure I will let myself subscribe to more than 100 feeds though: I’m still afraid of the overload.

So since I can’t really participate in the RSS Reset project, I thought I would at least list some of the feeds that I am subscribed to and am enjoying now:

Favorites for Web 2.0:

• Museum of Modern Betas *
• TechCrunch *

Favorites for Photoshop / Graphic Design:

• Smashing Magazine
• BittBox

Favorites for Web Development:

• Web Developers Depot
• Ajaxian
• John Resig

Favorite for Life:

• Lifehacker
• Unclutterer

Favorites for lolz and hmmms:

• Lolcats
• Billy Poobah Lives
• XKCD
• Indexed

* always subscribed to these even during my reader-less days.

I’m glad that Toluu pushed me back over to the not-quite-as-dark-as-I-remember-it side! I’m looking forward to seeing what gems J. Phil and Corvida unearth in their experiment. If anyone has any suggestions for things I might like in the categories above, please leave me a comment!

Image via WikipediaMy employer is performing the annual round of security training over the next couple of weeks and everyone received an email announcement today about it containing the following advice:

To help protect your personal financial information, you should have a different and unique password for all online services that you use. Remember, the best passwords use a combination of upper and lower case letters and numbers. An easy way to create and remember a unique password is think of a catchy phrase, and then use letters and numbers from the phrase to create your password.

While most would think that’s great advice, my immediate thought was “that’s insane! I have accounts on more than 100 services on the web! How can I possibly remember unique passwords for each one??”

I am a ravenous beta web application junkie, and I probably use at least 10 web services (email, rss, bookmarking, etc.) on a daily basis which all require passwords. And of course there are passwords that I use at work to access various systems, account passwords on the home computers and network, account credentials for my sidework clients (who depend on me to keep up with them!) and many more I’m sure I’m not thinking of right now.

I replied to the email and asked for suggestions of how to apply the advice in my situation. The response: try a password manager. But I’ve looked at those before and there’s a flaw - they can only store and retrieve your passwords on the computer you install them on. It’s not as if I only would only access passworded accounts from one computer. I have a computer at home (actually 4 to choose from at this point!), a computer at work, a Pocket PC phone, and a wi-fi enabled iPodTouch (when I borrow from the hubby), not to mention I do occasionally go places with computers I don’t own like my family’s houses. If I install a password manager on one computer then how am I suppose to use it on any of the others? Passing this on as a reply to the reply got no response.

My applied solution to the password overload problem has not been elegant. I hadn’t planned this method but it’s what I’ve fallen into. I basically have about 4 “levels” of passwords with about 10 total variations. That’s about as many as my brain can keep up with. Whenever I sign up for something I ask myself a few questions and pick a password:

Level 4

• Attributes: Short, very simple
• Variations: 1
• Typical scenario: usually on a beta service signup
• Questions answered “No”: Do I trust this service to keep my password? Will I ever use this service more than a couple of times?

Level 3

• Attributes: Longer, still simple
• Variations: 1
• Typical scenario: on services I’m likely to use more than once or were highly recommended so I “trust” them.
• Questions answered “No”: Will it be the end of the world if someone figures out my password and logs in as me?

Level 2

• Attributes: Longer, with complicated numbers, symbols, capitalization
• Variations: 3: chars with number, no symbols; chars with number and symbol; chars with number, symbol and capital
• Typical scenario: a service that requires me to use passwords that meet their criteria
• Questions answered “No”: Will this dang thing let me sign up already with level 4 or 3 passwords?

Level 1

• Attributes: Relatively unique, using the whole “sentence as a password” thing to make something really strong.
• Variations: about 5
• Typical scenario: work credentials or a service that could expose my financial or other sensitive data
• Question answered “Yes”: Would it be devastating for someone to get access to this info?

But there’s still all the services that insist that you change your password every cycle (especially at work). I’m guilty of putting a number at the end and incrementing those so I don’t have to remember something new.

There has to be a better way to deal with all this stuff. I’ve thought about keeping a list online somewhere but that seems inherently vulnerable. And, no, OpenID can’t fix this for me. So how do you manage account/password hell?

I find people incredibly interesting. I love learning how they think and why they think the way they do. I like to debate, not to be argumentative (though it often comes off that way) but because I want to see if the other person can convince me that my viewpoint is flawed. When someone proves me wrong with a well-thought-out response I gain both new insight and new respect for them. Being exposed to new information and cataloging it is an addiction for me and I thrive on conversation.

That’s my reason for participating in social media: my whole goal is to be a part of the conversation. Apparently I’m in the minority.

It seems to me that there are two other goals that are much more common: building a reputation for yourself and/or to get the most attention and keep it. Both of those goals involve a lot of rules of conduct and seem to be a lot more work than fun.

Over the past few days I’ve noticed conversations pop up on FriendFeed about the “appropriate” ways to interact with the service. FFeeders have admitted that they alter their behavior now (such as not clicking on “like” and avoiding posting things to the external networks which feed into FriendFeed) simply as to not offend their followers. There are many debates on Blogging 1.0 vs 2.0 where blog authors are expected to follow the conversation wherever it is instead of expecting it to come to them which is causing loss of attention to bloggers’ sites. FFeeders are concerned about the noise that subscribing to many people generates and fretting over how to keep it all manageable.

Who has the responsibility of attention control? Those who post or those who subscribe?

I’ve been reprimanded for declaring that I “like” and share things on FriendFeed without much thought about whether it will distress my followers, but I think the burden of filtering content should be on the subscriber. I subscribe to many people myself so I understand that it’s a hassle to filter out the noise but I would rather people post what’s interesting to them and let me figure out what I want than limit their participation to give me less noise and possibly less insight.

It’s implied that there’s a contract between followers/followees that somehow makes the followee responsible for meeting the follower’s expectations. Who is serving their followers better? Me, by being myself, posting what’s interesting to me, and participating in the conversation or the people who spin cycles in internal debate over what/whether to share because sharing might cause them to lose some followers (and attention)? As a subscriber I already spend too much time discovering what’s important to me and sharing it. I don’t have time to filter out what’s not important to each of many followers.

If I didn’t share in a way that my followers appreciated when they chose to follow me, then they wouldn’t have subscribed. I would rather have a smaller number of followers who are closely aligned with my interests than a larger group that I have to censor myself to keep. Nothing is keeping them from unsubscribing if we no longer share the same interests. Is it realistic to say that if someone chooses to follow me I am under the obligation to provide them with input of consistent quality, quantity and timing?

If everyone is expected to put their followers first, participating in social media is more like a job than for enjoyment. I already have a job (or two) and don’t need any more.

For some people it is a job. For those people interaction is all about building your “Personal Brand” and having the most followers. I don’t begrudge those people laboring over how they participate because they’re making a living off of it. But how many A-Listers can there be? If you’re not going to lose your house because you quit making ad revenue off your blog then chill-out, sit down and share stuff with me. I don’t mind if you throw me a little noise. I just want to have a conversation and maybe make a few friends.

I’ve been inspired recently to resuscitate my months-neglected Twitter account as an experiment because I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion on various blogs and FriendFeed touting all the benefits of being active with Twitter such as crowdsourcing, socialization and meeting new people with common interests. Most of these posters list their favorite Twitter services in a “quickstart” guide and seem to heavily imply that it’s easy to get set up and quickly reap the benefits.

But the Twitter evangelists seem to be either social networking A-listers who generate massive, nearly instant audiences in whatever service they sign up with or they are people who spend several hours a day cultivating their networks by actively monitoring and responding to tweets and putting a lot of original tweets out themselves or both.

The problem is that Twitter can be a pretty lonely and discouraging service if you don’t have any followers and the people you’re interested in don’t follow you back. You can’t have a conversation if no one is listening to respond. How do you even reach out to people that you’d like to have conversations with if they don’t follow you? You can’t direct message them and there’s not even a guarantee that they’ll see your @replies. To be successful at Twitter you have to spend a lot of time making a reputation for yourself and hope that the people you follow notice and return the follow. Chances seem slim unless you put incredible amounts of persistence and ego stroking into it to capture their attention.

And that’s why Twitter won’t ever be mainstream. Early adopters are techno masochists but other people aren’t. We’re often willing to put in an amazing amount of time and effort into new services and put up with a lot of frustration from them with even the smallest amount of perceived benefit. But everyone else is more sensible. They don’t have the time or motivation to build a successful Twitter network, and they never will with its current implementation. I see some of the same problems with the social aspect of FriendFeed, despite opinions to the contrary.

I’m going to keep trying for a while, with some good advice on the how instead of the why, and see if I can get my tweets out of the echo chamber, but I couldn’t honestly recommend Twitter to my coworkers or family members at this point because I know they wouldn’t be willing to spend the time and effort to make it benefit them. I see value in the idea of the service. I think eventually, once we get filters and intelligent agents to be our attention guardians we’ll be able to have good two-way conversations without the whole follower/followee model. At that point, Twitter will just have turned into a framework or protocol, but obviously it’s going to be a while before that happens.

Maybe I’m missing something and the Twitter-ken can tell me what I’m doing wrong. Please feel free to enlighten me!

Lesson reinforced this week: If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Case in point: Dreamhost’s supposed 500GB hosting plans entice you with the promise of lots of space for cheap (about $11/mo) but you can’t use that space for file storage.

I have been trying to make up my mind about an off-site backup service for more than a year now. I kept looking at Amazon S3 but, as cheap as it is, it still seemed expensive, especially because I have around 350GB of data I need to backup. Most file backup/storage sites only give you a tiny amount of space (who only has 5GB worth of data to back up these days??) or charge you hundreds of dollars a month for as much storage as I needed. The main options that were even partially affordable were hosting by Dreamhost or GoDaddy, or Amazon S3.

We have had an account with Dreamhost now for a few years and while it hasn’t been 100% uptime we hadn’t had many other problems with them in general. We have 5 live websites on the Dreamhost account but we’re only using a tiny fraction of the almost 540GB (growing weekly) of available space. I couldn’t justify paying for S3 if we were already paying for the space on Dreamhost.

So I uploaded about 80GB worth of pictures. Within a few days I got a notice that the files weren’t directly related to website hosting and I had 3 options: remove all the files, change the account to a file storage account for $0.20/mo/GB or do nothing and have the account suspended. Doing a bit of research turned up that there was some fine print in the ToS that says they have the option to charge you extra for files that are hosted and not related to website hosting.

I rolled my eyes and started the week-long process of ftping up to my Amazon S3 account instead. It’s actually cheaper by $0.05/mo for storage than Dreamhost’s rate. But it was a busy week and I forgot to remove my files from the Dreamhost account until about 10pm on the deadline day…

Dreamhost suspended our account, cutting off the live websites we were hosting. Now maybe we deserved that for not making the deadline but their reply system for the support emails kept bouncing back our requests to delete the files and restore our account. We supposedly had call-support with the plan we were on but there’s no phone number on the site for you to get in touch with anyone. We were scrambling till we finally thought of submitting a ticket on the website instead of trying to reply to the original suspension email again. Our sites were down for about 24 hours and we are not happy campers.

I’m disgruntled with Dreamhost for several reasons:

• Not making it completely clear on their hosting plan description pages that you can’t use the space for file storage, which resulted in me wasting my time uploading all those files in the first place. Who the hell has 500+GB of files related to their website to host?? Are they really going to let you do something like your own YouTube on a $11/mo web hosting account? I’m tempted to try it just to see if they suspend me for “legitimate” web hosting of that much material.
• Not having some kind of way to contact them by phone in an emergency, especially when we were supposed to have call support on our plan. We found out that it’s really “call back support” meaning you email or submit a ticket and they’ll call you when they get to it. That doesn’t cut it when your sites are down.
• Not having their email support system working for replies. It was barfing on the format of the subject line that was generated, not something we would know how to fix to make sure the email got through. When email is the only means of contact it’s important that the system be robust enough not to bounce back replies to your support tickets!!
• And, as a side issue, I’m still upset that they consolidated all their hosting plans into one option that is half as expensive as the plan we were on but with only minor differences in features, but they didn’t bother to notify us of those differences or that we could be saving money by switching. Since we just always go directly to panel.dreamhost.com and don’t bother to go look at the plan options on the main site, we didn’t know about the changes. We were paying double what we needed to for almost a year.

It’s frustrating because when we’re actually able to GET support from Dreamhost they’re always nice and helpful. It’s just too hard to get someone to respond in a reasonable timeframe from an email or when the email system is not working.

I’m using S3 for backup and after this experience we’ll be looking for a new host soon as well. For all those people who have debated about whether you should use Dreamhost or S3 for backup, the answer lies in a new take on another old addage: “You don’t get what you don’t pay for”. Amazon S3 is the way to go.

I’m probably late to this outrage party but I finally got a chance to put some thoughts together on the “Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006″ HR 5319 IH bill. I wrote up a FAQ about it, and I thought I should also post it here, being the nature of this blog.

I am very disappointed by the passing of that bill. It shows an utter lack of understanding by our lawmakers on the implications of the technology they’re trying to regulate. I don’t think that children should necessarily be participating in MySpace from school, but what makes a site that’s purely about socialization different from a site that has good and potentially educational information needs to be more clearly defined if there’s going to be a Federal law restricting it. Under the loose definitions in the bill, any site that has user profiles is a socialization site.

Nearely EVERY site that has any kind of account system, where you must provide credentials and log in to access content has a profile associated with your account. This includes nearly all the useful sites for children to gather information or teachers to provide as resources such as news sites, forums, sites specifically FOR teaching children like Brain Pop, and even Wikipedia!! Most useful and relevant information on the web is now authored daily or hourly by user participation. What qualifies as a “chat site” anyway? What sites are left but those that don’t change frequently and have static content? Static information is old and obsolete.

I’ve already experienced a situation similar to this that was preventing me from doing my job. I am assigned at project at a government agency currently and needed to use Google Groups to research answers for development problems I was having. Google Groups search is one of the most useful tools available to find information like that (much better than the general Google search in many cases) since there is a plethora of technical forums on the internet. The agency had websensed Google Groups because you could potentially have a social group there. I had to beg and provide much justification before they’d make an exception for me (fortunately they did). Just because a site can be used for social purposes does not mean that there isn’t good and useful information to be found!

The problem is that many of the senators who passed this bill (most likely) know that its preposterous. It will be difficult or impossible to enforce in a reasonable manner because the definitions of “chat site” and “sites with profiles” are too broad-reaching: it will require exceptions to be made on a case-by-case basis. They know this, but they voted on it anyway. Why? Because come re-election time they don’t want their opponent to put an add on TV saying “Senator X voted against a bill that would protect YOUR CHILDREN from SEXUAL PREDATORS!!!”. That’s the only reason. The whole system is set up so that they can’t vote any other way if they want to stay in office. Personally I find this a glaring flaw in our political system. The rest of them voted out of ignorance about modern technology, but what can you expect about a group of sheltered people in their mid 50s or later? They live in such a different reality tunnel from the rest of the world. We desperately need a group of people who understand technology that can counsel Congress on it’s implications. People who understand that the internet is not, in fact, a series of tubes!

Here’s the deal, folks: we can’t protect our children from everything. If they grow up thinking that the world is a nice, friendly, puffy, happy place they will be ill-prepared for real life. They need to be taught early how to look out for danger, and guided (not shielded) away from it. Its a parent’s job to do that at home, and a teacher’s job to do that at school. But we can’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. We need to make sure that our children have access to the wealth of information on the internet for their education, as much or more than we need to set up “protections” that only complicate life for schools and make their job much harder.

I learned several lessons this weekend starting with this one: be careful what you Digg. If it becomes popular, you’re going to piss off a lot of people, possibly even the owner of the site you were trying to promote!

I like looking at Digg because I usually find some pretty awesome things there. My understanding of the purpose of the site is to be a community that allows you expose interesting things you “dig up” on the web to an audience who might also find them interesting. I haven’t played with it as much as TAD, and I have never had a lot of success (digg count) with things that I have submitted myself. Until a few days ago.

I was looking at del.icio.us/popular and there was a link to a site that had a video of some very freaky magnetic fluid moving sculpture art. I thought: “Woah, that’s cool! I wonder if that’s on Digg??”.

I searched and didn’t find a match. I considered posting something about the video on my blog and submitting my post to Digg so that I might get some traffic off of it, but decided not to because I’ve seen so many horribly critical (to the point of abusive) comments on submissions that other people have made about how evil blogs are for “exploiting” Digg to bring traffic to their own sites by “stealing” the content from others. So I submitted the link as I found it. The whole process took about 5 to 10 minutes without a lot of deliberation on my part, and I figured, like most things I submitted, I’d be lucky to get more than 20 diggs of people who shared my fascination. I was very wrong.

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I was looking at a new beta search engine called Browsr that had some potentially interesting features for creating your own private and sharable directories of links. You have to create an account to see what those features would do, so I started filling in the info and then dutifully read the Terms of Service.

I have friends that laugh at me for doing that but I don’t sign up for anything online until I’ve read the ToS, and many sites I’ve ended up declining joining because of the evilness that I find embedded in that document. I’ve even been known to go so far as emailing the site support asking for clarification of points in the terms if I’m still interested in joining the service. About half the time I actually get satisfactory responses, and I also have written documentation to fall back on just in case.

But back to Browsr. There are some evil conditions listed in their ToS unfortunately, so I will not be joining their membership. Browsr is a link aggregator, a collaborative filter, a bookmarking service… it points to things, but it has this in it’s terms:
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