Apparently March 31 was World Backup Day - a term I initially misunderstood, and took to be impressively but impossibly ambitious. Their message is well worth repeating: your hard drive will fail, and when it does, you'll be a lot happier if you've backed it up.
Everyone I've asked has a data-loss story to share. Here are two of mine, tales of wrenching heartbreak worthy of the full IMAX treatment:
Think about spam, and you probably think about unsolicited commercial email. You know, replica Rolexes, cheap pharmaceuticals, suspiciously low prices on Adobe software and, uh, enlargement offers (which turn out to be total ripoffs that take advantage of emotionally vulnerable people... ahem).
But it turns out it's also an issue in the building-a-better-world world. Nonprofit organizations that get a little caught up in the importance of their message turn to blasting out email to recipients who've never given them permission... and wind up surprised when their domains turn up on spam blacklists.
There's nothing like air travel to drive home just how broadly social media has permeated the marketing psyche. I drew this on my way to NTC last week in DC. At every turn on the trip, I saw Twitter and Facebook icons: littered throughout the in-flight magazine, plastered on the now-ubiquitous illuminated billboards in the terminals, on the cash registers at newsstands and restaurants.
I visited a few of those Facebook Pages and Twitter feeds, and most of them actually do have an active presence: tweets, updates and content designed to engage me.
In times of horrific disaster, we want to reach out and help. That's especially true if we've actually seen events unfold in front of us as they happened, whether it's on live TV or Twitter.
For the organizations and agencies that raise money to provide relief, this is a critical time. Potential donors are seized with the urgency of the situation - and are flocking to their websites.
Which means usability suddenly takes on even greater importance. Add one form field too many, program in an unnecessary intermediate step, put a button here instead of there, and you can lose those donors... and the money they might have given.
Hard to believe it's already been a year since I posted my farewell to Internet Explorer 6. (By "farewell" I meant "Just frickin' die already.")
My post was prompted by the announcement that support was ending for IE6 on Google Apps; since then, IE6's decline has accelerated, dwindling into low-single-digit percentages of browser visits (if that) on most of the sites I manage.
And this week, the latest heavyweight jumped on the let's-kill-IE6 bandwagon: Microsoft, which launched the Internet Explorer 6 Countdown site. It sets a target of reducing IE6 usage to less than 1% worldwide.
There's something about the way people at the top of the heap react when they start to feel the hierarchy shift beneath their feet. It's as though they go through four of the Kübler-Ross stages simultaneously - denial, bargaining, violent rage and depression (actually, that last one looks a lot more like self-pity). Acceptance only seems to kick in once it's wheels-down in the luxurious-place-of-exile of the now-former dictator's choice.
Past generations would be utterly baffled by some of the challenges parents and kids face today.
True, we don't have to write notes to school like "Dear teacher, Monique won't be attending classes today because our entire village was wiped out by the Black Plague," or arrange birthday parties at the mastadon petting zoo without the benefit of Evite or Facebook Events.
The last few years have seen a pretty serious shakedown in the book world. Bookstores closing their doors, publishers merging or shutting down, and overshadowing it all, Amazon and the Kindle. And now the iPad - with its spectacular adoption rate and the Apple-powered negotiating clout behind the iBook store - promises to turn it all upside down and shake hard.
No wonder, then, that book lovers are wondering if the ink-and-paper era is ending. I haven't read so many anguished paens to the tactile feel of paper since I stumbled across a papyrus fetish newsgroup on Usenet.*
Writing the caption for this cartoon wasn't easy for me. Not because the joke needed a particular nuance, or involved any special vocabulary... but because it involves a security keyword.
It's irrational, I know. But I now have a Pavlovian aversion to mentioning anything remotely connected to terrorism or weaponry, because at some semi-conscious level I worry it could get me plopped onto some agency's list. "Sure, he's probably kidding about his 500-foot homicidal robot, but just to be safe — (type, type, type, type, enter)."
The official Oscar nominations are out, and there's a movie up for best picture that has a lot to say about social media and the online communications revolution sweeping the world.
The Social Network? Hell, no. I'm talking about The King's Speech.
Set mostly in the years leading up to the Second World War, The King's Speech deals with the extraordinary relationship between speech therapist Lionel Logue and Albert, Duke of York. Albert has a persistent stammer, an affliction that might have gone largely unremarked in past generations. But this is the era of radio, and when he ascends (a little relucantly) to the throne as King George VI, he must deliver an address to a nation suffering from grave fear and doubt.
