I originally created Geek Chic primarily as a way to share things I thought were cool.  Usually snagged from my daily trolling of the internet, I’d post a few gems that caught my eye.  Call it re-blogging, call it regurgitating.  Call it whatever you’d like.  I saw it as an electronic way of curating and sharing a collection of things I thought more people should see.

With the advent of Twitter, the evolution of Facebook and now the more social integration points of Google Reader (my primary means of ingestion / procrastination), there seem to be more and more ways to share things you think are cool with the rest of the world.  And it’s becoming easier and easier — for example with Google Reader, all I have to do is click one button and I can share a post I think is interesting.  Clicking another button, I can instantly post a link to Twitter or Facebook. Done.

So the question arises, what good is this blog?

One answer to that question is my sort of secondary reason for creating this blog.  I occasionally like to rant and rave and share my opinions.  And it’s easier on the people around me, I find, if I post them online so they can stop reading when I’ve started to annoy them.  For those of you who like reading what I have to say, I guarantee that will continue.  But it feels even more narcissistic than Twitter tends to be for me to want to turn this blog exclusively into a soapbox for my rants and raves.  There are enough opinions roaming free on the internet (just look at how many people threw in their 2 cents about the FCC’s Google Voice inquiry).

So the question remains, what is this for?

There is something to be said for the blog format as a means of curating content.  If I want to show off things that I think are interesting, intriguing and cool, a blog is still a better format than the others I mentioned above.  Facebook’s information stream is a complete mess — it’s very easy to track down things that were posted 5 minutes ago, but anything before that is lost.  Facebook is a great way for me to aggregate things from my friends, but not a great way for me to see what any one person likes or has been up to.  Even the profile feed is so cluttered with nonsense that major topics get lost.  So curating is, basically, out the window.  And while Twitter may be better at letting people identify things I think are cool and my (very brief) opinions, it’s not all that interesting to look at.  I’m a very visual person. I like pictures and video.  That’s primarily what I post around here.  Posting links to these things via bit.ly just isn’t quite the same.

Google Reader maybe comes the closest to what I’m trying to do in terms of being able to re-post and comment on content.  The interface is easy, and sharing is a snap.  You can also post notes to your feed (basically the equivalent of a blog post — or more specifically a container for one of my rants). It’s not possible to customize the look of it, which is not ideal for me — I like to design things (event though this blog might not look like it lately) and dig around in the guts of the application to customize it (thank you, WordPress!).  With the shared feed, what you share is what you get.  And you can’t really change or pare down any of the content you’ve shared — so for example if the title of the post is 500 characters of Korean or the post is 5 pages long and you share it, that’s what shows up.  But it’s a pretty good alternative and I could definitely see myself using it more extensively.

So seriously, what is this blog for?

I can’t give you a great answer on that one.  I’m certainly leaning towards posting more of my own content — photos from Flickr and videos I shoot — rather than re-blogging content.  I’ve been meaning to do that for awhile now (you have no idea how many photos I have trapped inside of Aperture.  Be afraid.).  In addition, though, I might try to find some way (read WordPress Plugin) of integrating content from several sources into my blog — maybe pulling in content from Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader and Flickr in addition to posting my own (long-winded) opinions.  If there’s a good way to do it, I think that’ll be the best way to keep doing what I want to do with this blog: curating things that I think are cool (including things I’ve made) in order to share myself and my ideas — my personality — with my friends and the internet at large.  I think that’s what a blog is for — sharing yourself with the world.  I’m interested in continuing to do that, but I want to find a better way to do it.

Anyway, all of that is to say there will be some changes coming to the site. It might be rocky at first figuring out how to get all of these services to play nice with one another, but I think I can do it.

Cross your fingers and look for something new to pop up here any minute now.

Until then, thanks for reading!

-J

I’m certainly of two minds about the recent buzz around the death of the newspaper industry.  I agree with what NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller says at the end of the interview — that firsthand journalism is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT.  And that organizations like the NYT are the only ones who can pay for international journalism on a large scale (when was the last time you heard of any bloggers reporting from Afghanistan?).

But, man.  These guys have to come up with an innovative business model.  And quick!  And I have yet to hear any viable proposals from anyone.

It doesn’t make much sense, IMHO, for the Times to adopt WSJ’s online paying model.  With all due respect to Rupert Murdoch (not much), the WSJ has a completely different audience. And it’s required reading for business types, who all probably write off the paper as a business expense.  Or have their firms buy it for then.  Who is going to pay for The New York Times?  Sure.  Some people will. But not an entire generation that’s used to getting its news for free.

I don’t know about you, but when The Times has tried this in the past and I came across a “you can’t see this article unless you pay for it, buddy” screen, I went to find the story somewhere else.  And in most cases, a similar story had been posted — via AP or wire services — circulated, and reblogged to the extent that it was pretty ubiquitous.

I certainly applaud NYT’s drastic measures to try to stay afloat.  And I certainly don’t have any answers for them as to how to keep their newspaper in business — there are no easy answers.

Is it time for more drastic measures? Cut paper circulation entirely? Charge a lot more for the actual paper — turning it into a luxury item? Cut entire department/ sections? (Opinions — which are a dime a dozen these days, Times Magazine, Classifieds… all of which are limited in reach and/or covered better by the internet).  Probably.

Either way, someone needs to come in and drastically rethink the entire business model.  Looking at it in a positive way, this whole crisis is a great opportunity for The Times.  They are an industry leader.  They have been for years.  Who better to teach the rest of the industry how to do investigative journalism in the 21st Centuary?

Like I said, I don’t have a good answer on this one.  But I certainly hope someone does.  The Times (and other papers like it) is a really important news source.  I’d hate to see it disappear.

Oklahoma Gov. Brad Henry has signed an official order making the song Do You Realize by The Flaming Lips as the state’s official rock song.

“The Flaming Lips are great ambassadors for the state of Oklahoma, all over the world, and they are fiercely loyal to the great state of Oklahoma,” Henry said before signing the order.

First off, thanks USAToday for making my elevator ride more entertaining.

Second, dibs on Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues for New York.  Or really any state.

Read this: Results of the Inaugural Facebook Site Governance Vote

As always, the proof will be in the pudding.  But this sounds to me like FB is going to go with the majority of the 0.32% of active users that voted — and adopt the new user agreement (tossing out the Evil Terms of Service).

While there’s talk in the post about their disappointment at the low turnout, they do acknowledge this is a Faceboook First (as well as an internet first), and are considering lowering the 30% threshold necessary for any future vote to be binding.

First of all, I offer my non-binding, conditional apology to Facebook.  Maybe they’re actually interested in protecting their users’ rights after all.

Second, I still maintain this vote was not nearly as transparent as FB believes it was.  The language was confusing.  The voting period was too short.  And there should’ve been more user notification (eg. ‘Hey! You haven’t voted yet! Only one day left to vote!’) if they wanted this whole process to actually be more democratic.

Still, from the looks of it, at least their heart is in the right place…

I can’t even imagine how many collective broken bones these guys have between them. But the outcome is unbelievable.

via GAWKER

A Cyber-Attack on an American City

The long and short of it is that an unidentified group of people cut 8 fiber cables in Morgan Hill, CA (my hometown) on April 9th and basically everything went down.  Internet, phone, ATMs, emergency services, burglar alarms…

The most disturbing hing about it, I think, is that this is the first I’d heard of it — 2 weeks after the fact.  I partly paid attention because I’m from there.  But still… shouldn’t this have been reported by someone?  Like, maybe, CNN?  Or at the very least, the fearmongering FOX News?

Equally disturbing is the fact that they don’t know who did it.  It seems like they needed to have been fairly familiar with the city’s communications grid to do it.  But I bet a bright high school kid could get the paperwork he or she needs to do that.  Then all s/he’d have to do is organize a group of friends from Live Oak to all cut the wires around the same time.  It wouldn’t take much.

On the more mildly disturbing front (but still fairly disturbing), one of the casualties of the attack on the city’s fiber cables was the hospital’s local network.  Their local network!  Which is a pretty essential thing to have up and running at a hospital, don’t you think?  Who’s idea was it to make a local network in the hospital that was entirely dependent on its connection to the internet?  Is this the only hospital like that?  Or are there a lot more whose network engineers weren’t looking at the bigger picture?

On a mildly entertaining (and fairly educational) note, what did not fail is CB communication.  In order to relay radio calls for emergency services, they woke up the president of the local ham radio club and he and his buddies basically made up for the missing communication services.  This is a good lesson to learn — that it’s good to have a healthy relationship with a fair number of ham radio folk.  They may be the only way people can communicate in an emergency.

Look.  I’m not one to play into doomsday scenarios.  I don’t believe the premise of the latest Die Hard movie, or Fight Club’s ending, is actually realistic.  But I definitely believe we’ve gotten lazy — relying on technology working flawlessly and very seldom exploring possibilities of selective or total system failure.

I would hope that, with the changing of the guard in Washington, that we’d take a bit of time to explore our telecommunication system’s vulnerabilities and the ways that we can compensate in emergency situations.  I’m not saying that we need armed guards at every manhole, but we should definitely have a plan if someone were to stage an attack like this on a larger scale.  Morgan Hill has a population somewhere around 30K (and, all things considered, they seemed to come out reasonably unscathed).  If someone were to stage a similarly coordinated attack on New York — or New England — it would be a big, big mess.

Once again, I’m not saying we should be cowering in fear.  But we should definitely take a hard look at what happened in Morgan Hill and do some serious thinking — and planning — about what we would do if something like this happened on a larger scale.

It’s obviously a possibility.

UPDATE: As my friend Paul pointed out (also a Morgan Hill native):

a) actually this attack was in South San Jose and its effects stretched as far out as Santa Cruz (where Paul lives)

b) Perens’ characterization of Morgan Hill, with all of its ‘brokerages, and investors in the very wealthy community’ was… to be nice… maybe a little bit off the mark.  Anyone who’s been there will tell you — MH is literally 3 freeway exits between San Jose and Gilroy.  If you’re driving south on 101 and you sneeze, you miss it entirely.  And while it’s a town with a healthy upper-middle class, we’re no Los Altos Hills.

So I don’t imagine the attackers would’ve gotten very far trying to ‘manipulate the stock market’ from Morgan Hill when the wires were cut.  I’m sure they could’ve done more damage with an iPhone and a tethered laptop from an uncomfortable booth at Lyons.

A team of eight surgeons at Brigham and Women’s Hospital performed a partial face transplant yesterday, which is only the second time such a procedure has been done in the United States, according to the hospital.

What?  I’m sorry?  Partial Face Transplant?

You learn the weirdest things on that ‘Captivate Network’ in the elevator…

Read the full story on Boston.com

But here he covers Pearl Jam’s ‘Why Go,’  and he’s pretty damn good:

Now of course, this makes sense.  Google owns AdSense, the ad-trafficking network on all of these pages.  And they certainly have a right to send their own ads wherever they’d like.

But…

Doesn’t this verge a little bit on an anti-trust issue?  Google can control the flow of ads to pages that mention the text ‘IE8′ — so that they basically own all ad space next to talk of Microsoft’s product.  Within their network, of course.  But since they bought DoubleClick, their network is huge.  And while they might not be able to put their ads on commercially sold properties (AOL, NYT, etc), I’m sure they’ll send some of their bulk AdSense ads to those pages.  And I’ll bet that if there’s a mention of IE8, there’ll be an ad for Chrome in that AdSense spot.

I’m sure it’s nothing.  Google only recently started advertising for their own products, so I’m sure they’re testing the waters a bit.  And there’s no way the Justice Department will ever figure something like this out until years after the fact.

But it does show a huge potential for abuse of power in Google’s ad network, no?

Only time will tell.

I honestly feel like the interview was editited to make it more salacious than it actually was.  What it was was two men at an impasse.  And I honestly feel like neither of them came off looking much worse than when they came in.

Watch the Full Interview at Comedy Central and decide for yourself.