Category: Technology

After having played around with my first Nokia device (the Nokia N800) for about a month now, I can say that Nokia makes some darn snappy gadgets. 

The N95 looks like the real JesusPhone to me, and the thought of bundling it as a utilitarian device for the purpose of mobile journalism opens all sorts of future doors…

The rise of the cameraphone has certainly changed the face of journalism, and old-guard wire service Reuters isn’t about to get passed by — the company has entered into a long-term partnership with Nokia to develop new mobile reporting technologies, and the two companies have recently completed trials of an N95-based “Mobile Journalism Tookit” that takes moblogging to a whole new level.

Engadget

I’ve been reworking to “rebrand” this site a bit as my homebase since I’m so scattered across the various social networks and places like ReveNews.

So, I wanted to give this place a little personality and spruce it up with a new look and feel.  I’m a big fan of white space in design as you can probably tell.

Let me know if you see any bugs or have any problems!

Sam Harrelson

Dave Winer (early blogging, podcasting, syndication pioneer and all around scripting god) has put together a new disruptive (and better in my opinion) means of reading the New York Times.

Great stuff…

NY Times outline

NY Times outline

There is an interesting piece in the NY Times today on the problem of web analytics.  Briefly, the web might allow for radical transparency of authorial intention, statistical reports and click counting… but when you try to hammer down the attention value of individuals using or viewing web pages, it gets very murky.

This won’t get better until advertisers realize that performance is a much more accurate thing to measure than interaction or eyeball interaction.

But far from solving the squishy-numbers problem, the Internet seems to have added more confusion. Many advertisers pay Web publishers each time their ad gets an impression, meaning that it is viewed by a reader, but each company uses its own methodology to count impressions.

“One of them can be right, or the other one is right, but they can’t all be right,” said Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer at Turner Broadcasting System. “It’s interesting that people keep talking about it as much more accountable than other media, but we’re not finding that to be the case yet because there’s no agreement on metrics or accounting methods.”

How Many Site Hits? Depends Who’s Counting – New York Times

http://research.uchicago.edu/highlights/resources/media/roth_512k.mov

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is coming to completion (if that’s possible for a dictionary of this scope!) after 80 years of hard work:

Martha Roth, Ph.D., Professor of Assyriology, discusses the final volume of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, a comprehensive lexicon of ancient Akkadian dialects 86 years in the making. Roth has served as Editor-in-Charge of the project for the past 11 years.

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary: The Final Chapter

Um… yes.

I was fortunate enough to take a couple of courses on Shakespeare from the great Dr. John Cobb at Wofford College.  Prof Cobb was beyond phenomenal and his presentation of Shakespeare changed my life and helped me understand the power of word, language and literature.

Evidently that’s not the case for almost half of NC college students (unfortunately):

According to a study by The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy study, 48 percent of North Carolina colleges and universities do not require English majors to take a Shakespeare class to graduate. The center is a Raleigh-based nonprofit.

CITIZEN-TIMES.com: Schools mixed on requiring Shakespeare-devoted classes

DSCN2211 on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

ConvergeSouth is a tremendous conference held in Greensboro, NC that you should definitely attend next year.  It’s hard to classify since there is a mix of students, middle age folks, bloggers, old folks, whites, blacks, hispanics, asians, social progressives, tech geeks and people who are dedicated to the causes of good barbeque and citizen journalism (or both).

I led a workshop on “affiliate marketing and web.20 convergence” at the conference and had a full room and tons of questions and insights from the attendees.  I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but by the end, I was wishing that we had two hours to converse rather than the allotted 1 hour.  I guess that’s the sign of a good crowd and conference, though.

There’s a film festival tonight and I’m sad that I won’t be able to make it.  However, I wish my new friends Farrah and Mitchell Davis good luck as they present a film tonight.  It was great to also meet people like Francis Shepherd and gain a few new friends on Twitter and Facebook (Jason Calacanis led a great workshop on the social force that are platforms like Twitter and I think he made a few new converts).

I’d also like to thank Sue and the great folks at ConvergeSouth, North Carolina A&T and the City of Greensboro for having the guts and vision to put on such an ambitious and diverse conference.

I’m presenting a workshop that’s sort of a “how to” on affiliate marketing and “web2.0” (blogs, video, etc).

You can see the slides from the presentation here:

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=ahndmmnhz3b_2475n7xvp

I’ve been loving Tumblr since the early part of this year. In a nutshell, it’s a tumblelog service which allows you to aggregate feeds from various parts of your online existence (like Flickr, blogs, YouTube, Digg, etc).

You can see my Tumblr page at http://www.samharrelson.net

We’ll see what the new Tumblr has in store soon it seems!

11-1-07 « Davidville

I was amazed at the last Buncombe County Democrats convention that there was such a strong presence of delegates who wanted to pass a measure stating that the NC State Gov’t should not require vaccinations of children based on fears of heavy metal poisoning, autism, etc. 

I’ve followed some of Robert Kennedy Jr’s work in this area, but I have to tell you that I’m not convinced.  Anna (who is a physician) and I have had many conversations about childhood vaccinations, especially since the birth of Mary Hudson.  Sure there is some corruption by the big pharma companies, but in general, I’d rather have MH protected from such preventable things as the whopping cough (which seems to be prevalent here in Asheville b/c of the number of children that aren’t vaccinated by choice). 

Here’s a fun riff on the subject:

On the other hand, pharma-funded think tank wingnuts say the real problem is baseless lawsuits by money-grubbing autistic kids. Either way, you just know the issue is screwed up when Mississippi and West Virginia come off sounding like the reasonable ones.

Crazy Hippies Pose As Jesusfreaks To Avoid Vaccinating Their Kids — Daddy Types

JANES (Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society) is online at the Jewish Theological Seminary!  Lots of fun Assyriology and Hebrew Bible material to dig through!

Thanks to PaleoJudaica for the tip.

JANES, the Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society, was founded in 1968 at Columbia University, and has been housed at the Jewish Theological Seminary since 1982. Over these approximately forty years 30 volumes have been published under the editorship of JTS professors Ed Greenstein and David Marcus.

Articles have been written on all aspects of the Bible and Ancient Near East covering areas such as art history, archaeology, anthropology, language, linguistics, philology, and religion. There are articles on Assyriology, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hittite, and all areas of Hebrew and Aramaic and on almost every book of the Bible.

JANES at the JTS

Since Google owns my email, feed reading, docs&spreadsheets, web history, attention data, calendaring, etc I could proclaim them as a deity as well (thanks to Larry McGehee for the link):

The Church of Google – Googlism – Proof Google is God!
We at the Church of Google believe the search engine Google is the closest humankind has ever come to directly experiencing an actual God (as typically defined). We believe there is much more evidence in favour of Google’s divinity than there is for the divinity of other more traditional gods.

» The Church of Google

Holy Bibble is by far my favorite (web) comic.  Today’s episode is great:

Laban’s Signs

Interesting new book-in-progress by Siva Vaidhyanathan with the subtitle “How one company is disrupting culture, commerce, and community – and why we should worry.”

This reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s excellent piece called “Scroogled” which supposes what would happen if (when?) Google goes evil. 

Fun stuff to ponder as I surf through my GMail and Google Reader and GCal and Google Notebook and Google Desktop and… well… you get the point:

This blog, the result of a collaboration between myself and the Institute for the Future of the Book, is dedicated to exploring the process of writing a critical interpretation of the actions and intentions behind the cultural behemoth that is Google, Inc. The book will answer three key questions: What does the world look like through the lens of Google?; How is Google’s ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of knowledge?; and how has the corporation altered the rules and practices that govern other companies, institutions, and states?

The Googlization of Everything

This my new favorite song.

Who else but They Might Be Giants could bring Ashurbanipal into a pop song?? I give it 5 awesome’s (out of a possible 5).

Thanks to Laughing Squid for the link to the video and also to The Mesopotamians t shirt!

They Might Be Giants – The Mesopotamians
http://lads.myspace.com/videos/vplayer.swf
Add to My Profile | More Videos

The book (Steven Holloway’s excellent work Orientalism, Assyriology and the Bible) where I was footnoted for the first time (Prof Ben Foster of Yale’s Ancient Near Eastern Dept cited my work Asia Has Claims Upon New England) was just reviewd by the Review of Biblical Literature.

How I found this book is a great story… I was in Nashville this past Spring for the regional meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature / American Academy of Religion meeting and hit the bookstore that had been set up at the conference. While scanning a book table, I noticed the unusual cover and read the title. Immediately, I knew I had to have this book (not too many non-journal publications on Assyriology these days). I had to wait until the last day of the show to pick the book up because it was the only copy the publisher had with them and they wanted to keep it on display. So, as my group was headed out of Nashville, I stopped by and picked it up and began flipping through the pages. I noticed that one section was written by an old Yale Prof (well, I never had a class with him, but I did take a class with his wife and I did bird sit for them one summer). As I skimmed through his article, my name caught my eye and I had to do a triple take before I realized I had been footnoted by a top Professor in the field of Ancient Near East studies. It was quite a moment for me… it’s the little things, you know?

Nonetheless, I can’t say this is good bed time reading for the general public, but if you’re into history or 19th Century “western” perceptions of ancient history, this is a must-read:

Description: “Orientalism” refers both to the academic study of the Orient and to Western scholarship that clings to stock images of the timeless East and oriental despotism. This landmark collection of essays, the first in its field, is written by seasoned art historians, Assyriologists and biblical specialists; it is organized under four rubrics:

Review of Biblical Literature

Just picked up Macy from the vet’s office after her surgery for a torn ACL.  She’s doing great and has officially joined the stitch club with Schaefer and Sylvia.  With all of our pups’ surgeries, amputations and blocked intestines, we’ll be more than prepared for Mary Hudson’s schoolyard bumps and bruises that will inevitably happen!

ConvergeSouth is happening this Friday and Saturday down the mountain in Greensboro, NC. I’ll be speaking there on affiliate marketing and web2.0 stuff, but there will be some real luminaries from the tech world there as well. Should be a blast!They’ve even put together a spiffy map if you’re in town:

ConvergeSouth 2007 Venues:Google Maps

Let me know if you’ll be there and we’ll grab a coffee.

While downloading mail from GMail via pop today (something I do every month) I got this wonderful screen on my GMail acct (which, of course I use for work and personal mail):

That’ll learn me, eh?  Especially after I left a few glowing comments about GMail on Andrew Wee’s post about GMail memory usage.

I’m chocking on the irony here, folks.

Anyways, if you want to reach me please use the me@samharrelson.com address.

I’ve been using the release client of Ubuntu 7.10 (the final release is due this Thursday) for the last few days and think it’s a great step forward for the Ubuntu distro. Lots of great features (better power management, integrated Compiz, better monitor resolution, new Gimp, Tracker search etc) make this my favorite distro so far.

Just wanted to note that this morning there was a huge update in the repositories for all sorts of programs and the Ubuntu desktop. So, if you’re already using 7.10, prepare to hand over some cycles to the update manager!

I’ve been following the Ellington Hotel / Condo issue here in Asheville for a while and I still don’t understand the various arguments from the critics (“the building is too high!” “it will cause too much traffic on Biltmore!”, etc).  While I am a fan of sustainable growth, it doesn’t seem as if the Ellington will add anything unbearable to the Asheville skyline or the already crazy traffic on Biltmore.  The locals know how to avoid all that anyway 🙂

ASHEVILLE – For opponents of The Ellington hotel and condominium building, a key question as the project goes to City Council tonight is whether city streets can handle the additional traffic. For backers, the answer is clear: no problem.

Seems like more political pandering by city council members seeking re-election to me.

CITIZEN-TIMES.com: Ellington critics question accuracy of traffic study

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Macy tore her ACL on Sunday while doing her favorite thing in the world… chasing squirrels around the yard.

She’s undergoing surgery on Tuesday morning to repair the tear, so keep her in your thoughts if you don’t mind.  She’s not happy about being benched or going through rehab.

Put me in Coach on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

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Steve Rubel writes on his MicroPersuasion blog that there is a looming recession in the pay per click advertising business and gives 5 reasons why he thinks this is so:

For the last several years, search engine marketing has been on a tear. While the big advertisers sat on the sidelines in the beginning, they have lately been ramping up their spend on pay-per-click advertising, primarily on search engines but also affiliate sites like those that run Google Adsense.

However, I am calling a top to this market now. Here are five reasons why a pay-per-click advertising recession looms. (If you depend on Adsense for the bulk of your revenue, this applies to you as well.)

Steve is an always thoughtful writer and one of my favorite bloggers, so you should definitely head over and read his 5 reasons.

Nonetheless, I have to disagree a bit (not just because I work for a paid search agency).  I’ll keep it short and sweet and say that Steve is correct in his 5 reasons as to why pure search marketing on a PPC metric will hit a glass ceiling (if it hasn’t already).  However, smart marketers and advertisers have already noticed this trend and have positioned themselves to evolve with the marketplace. 

This is especially true with his #2 (“Transition to CPA”) and  #3 (“Rising Costs”) reasons.  However, there is still a promising market for the search companies and agencies wise enough to blend PPC into a CPA or affiliate model and insure performance metrics that work out on the back end.  Rising costs are definitely an issue for the PPC world to tackle with, especially in the realm of ad networks like Commission Junction with their respective commission structures.  The trick there, as many search agencies have already figured out, is to go direct.

So, I agree with Steve that the PPC model in its pure state will see a cap or even downturn.  However, smart marketers and advertisers have already seen the writing on the walls (or search results) and have moved to make their businesses flexible and wide enough to deal with these market changes.  Look for those agencies to rise to the top.

Awesome…

Mary Hudson- week 1 on Flickr – Photo Sharing!