SOPA and PIPA Cause Me Personal Headaches

Man… I’m in full support of the protest of SOPA and PIPA. In fact, right now AintAGeek.com is blacked out in protest of SOPA and PIPA, just like Reddit and Wikipedia are. But I’m having to write a paper for somethin’ and… low-and-behold, I needed to access Wikipedia for some research. But boom… Wikipedia’s blacked out still.

This is exactly what Wikipedia SHOULD be doing, and this is why I got my own site blacked out darker than Madonna’s roots. But is this blackout effecting me in a bad way? Yes. This blackout is crazy important and needed, but it’s a shame these two damn bills aren’t even passed yet someone like me is personally effected.

Granted, yo… I know how to get around Wikipedia’s blackout via some clever methods, but I’m not. I’m not allowing myself to do that. I want to respect the blackout. I WANT to be effected by the blackout if it’s even gonna’ have purpose, ya know?

And apparently, at least 10 senators have withdrawn their support of SOPA…

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/technology/web-protests-piracy-bill-and-2-key-senators-change-course.html?_r=1

This blackout have PROVEN to be important, even though at the time I’m writing this… 9 pm eastern, the blackout is still going on for many web sites. But this still pisses me off that these two yet-to-be-voted-on bills have completely effected my day-to-day life.

Yo, SOPA… PIPA… screw you and the senator you rode in on. JbB

Wikipedia and Reddit Preparing To Blackout

Starting to see notices on certain web sites, such as Wikipedia and Reddit, that they’ll be blacking themselves out in protest of SOPA. Good for them. There needs to be a lot more awareness of SOPA and PIPA and simply putting little announcements here and there won’t have as great of an effect as blacking out your web site (while explaining to visitors why it’s happening). JbB

Consumer Innovation Trumps Business Innovation

What’s really funny here is the fact that these companies are wanting to adopt iPads (the article says “tablets”, but come on, it’s iPads) and are leading the change rather than their IT departments. 

Small and mid-sized businesses planning tablet buying spree

This… this… is what I love about this new “consumer-based” technology revolution. Never before in the history of computers has there been this kinda’ movement, and it’s exactly the kind of movement that I like seeing. 

No longer do you have business and IT assholes dictating what the rest of the world uses… devices they dictate we, the everyday person, will use long after they’ve been using them and have moved onto the next generation technology. It used to be CEO’s and CTO’s (chief technology officers) of major, pretentious Fortune 500 companies drove where innovation and technology was headed. They, and the IT industry, created a class-warfare type of divide between big business users and everyone else. Big business used to idolize companies such as IBM and later RIM (Blackberry). These tech companies catered to their enterprise segments and really treated their consumers as second-class citizens. 

The poster child for this type of scenario is embodied best by RIM and their Blackberry. This was a company that rose to power fast by giving Fortune 500 managers and IT departments exactly what they wanted: elitism and prestige for the managers and control and complexity for the IT techs. Blackberrys were extremely expensive and their service very costly… unless you bought in bulk and dedicated your entire infrastructure to their technology. This ensured that only the biggest of big companies could afford Blackberrys. In time, RIM created lower-end Blackberrys for your average working person and later consumers, but they were cheap, crappy, overpriced devices. See, CEO’s and CTO’s wouldn’t have been happy if their workers got devices with the same capabilities as them.

This power trip among those in control created a working environment that was hostel towards intuitiveness, simplicity and innovation. Just four to five years ago, nearly all Fortune 500 companies had a strict policy that no emails could be accessed on any mobile device unless it was a Blackberry. Workers were stuck with some of the WORST laptops, IBM’s and their God-awful little eraser head pointer devices, because their CEO’s and CTO’s insisted they were the best laptops.

Workers, consumers and small businesses developed a resistance to change because it was never positive change for them but was always a positive change for someone else (namely the IT department). This became the normal for, what… 20 years? Consumers were left with inferior products while big business dictated the path of innovation (or lack-there-of). 

But then something changed… it all started with the iPhone, a device not only far, far superior to anything big business was using, but a device targeted towards the everyday person and not the business-ruling elite! CEO’s and CTO’s thought of it, and Android phones, as nothing but a toy. But people started buying their own iPhones and started using them for work instead of their company-issued Blackberrys. That’s when things started to change. Soon the CEO’s were using iPhones and Androids and only the CTO’s were the ones left crying bloody murder… well them, and RIM.

Then the iPad was introduced and that changed up the mindset for millions, if not billions, of people. Now, anyone with $500, from a housewife to a college student to a CEO could possess a device that, just a few years ago, should have only been reserved for the business elite. 

This is now where your seeing real innovation happen in business. No longer is business innovation limited to companies grossing millions of dollars but to whoever has the best ideas and who’s willing to take risks. That’s why, even though hospitals ARE adopting iPads at a brisk pace, you got the article above that talks about small clinics taking charge in innovation. 

Damn I love the period of history we live in, in a technological perspective. I typed this entire blog post while chillin’ in bed, on the same device (my iPad) that this article talked about leading innovation. I hope we never move from consumer-led innovation ever again. JbB   

I Don’t Wanna’ Give Fixes, I Wanna’ Give Thoughts

AintAGeek.com used to use Wordpress as its CMS installed on a server of mine. But then I decided to make the move to Tumblr. Tumblr is a service that hosts everything on their own end, even if you use your own domain name. That’s cool, I respect that, but it means that nothing else can be used for that domain name besides email.

This sucks because it means I can’t create an “old” version of AintAGeek.com to leave up for all the articles I’ve written that people are still linking to and relying on. I still have the files on my server, but they can’t be accessed without a domain name to link them to.

But whatever, that’s life. Like, I wanna’ move away from the “tips and tricks” and more into “opinions and thoughts”. I mean, I don’t wanna’ put in my own personal time to create a web site that serves as a utility for people, the same way Yahoo Answers does. Screw fixing people’s problems online, I do that in real life… I wanna’ have a conversation with people, even if it has to be one-way and even if it means a much smaller audience. In all honesty, people can get just as much help from a tech support forum than they can if I post up an article on how to fix or do something. In fact, I don’t even mind posting a link to someone else’s web site on how to fix something versus solving the issue myself.

What I want is to become a trusted voice online, ya know? I want people to get to know me and start to trust in my opinions or thoughts. If I happen to mention something like “This new online service is pointless, don’t use it.”, even if everyone and their brother claims otherwise, I want them to be like “Yo, I’m gonna’ listen to JbB, he’s proven himself right many times before.”.

See, that’s a lot more interesting to me. I’d rather hear someone say “Thanks for recommending this, I love it and would have made a mistake if it wasn’t for you.” than “Thanks for fixing my problem.”.

That’s where Tumblr comes in. I like the idea of no comments on posts. The standard blog posting system is just too rigid and non-social for those who don’t got more than 500,000 visitors a month. So like you’ll enable comments on your posts, but since your talking about topical issues, no one comments on them within that day or week. By the time they finally get around to commenting and an actual discussion forms, you, the author, are done and over with that topic and have written many more since. And then there’s the issue of accidentally ignoring comments on old or obscure posts, making it seem like you don’t care to respond (and by the time you finally respond, that commenter has long forgotten about you). And what’s worse are all these social media buttons and comment this, retweet that… if your like the majority of all blogs out there (aka small), all these “0” counts on comments or social media crap really makes you look (or at least feel) like a failure (even if your getting thousands of unique visitors a month).

And that’s if your relatively small. Comments become a problem once you become popular too. You’ll create a short post that maybe took you 10 minutes but within an hour or day you’ve got hundreds of comments! Wha’do ya do? Do you decide to spend an hour reading and commenting to those people, or do you instead spend that time writing another post? And don’t think getting so many comments are a good thing either. Most of the time, comments will be by those who disagree with you… probably about 1% of your readers. Then those who respond to the disagreeing commenters are people pointing out why they disagree with the disagreers and the cycle repeats over and over and over… and we’re just talking about one post.

Popular articles or posts online that feature comments are really nothing but commenter death match, or if your not popular yet, commenter wastelands. I’d rather have my posts reshared, liked or post a link to it on your own social network or blog and comment on why you agree with it or disagree with it. That’s why I turned to Tumblr in the first place. Wordpress has no such system in place. Sure, there’s Disqus or social media sharing buttons… but shit, I used them from the start and they aren’t the same as Tumblr.

I’m still field-testing Tumblr, but Tumblr has a lot to offer and I want AintAGeek.com to be a lot more social and networked than it was living out on its own in the vast sea of the Internet. JbB