Mitch Wagner's Blog

iPhone 2.1: After Two Weeks, It's Still A Work In Progress

My latest on InformationWeek:

The iPhone firmware Version 2.1 got a lot of applause when it first came out, from users who said it fixed major bugs. I've been living with the software for two weeks now. In my experience, the update fixes quite a lot, but there's still a lot of work to be done. And I encountered one big bug that could result in a spectacular loss of data.

The 2.1 software came out Sept. 12, and fixed problems with responsiveness and stability. It was designed to reduce the number of dropped calls, increase the accuracy of the 3G signal strength display, fix crashes caused by programs downloaded from the App Store, reduce time for backups, load contacts and searches faster, and speed up responsiveness of the virtual QWERTY keyboard.

That's what Apple says. What's really going on?

Let's start with the good.

READ MORE

Second Life Tries For A Second Act

My latest on InformationWeek:

The online virtual world has weathered a boom-and-bust cycle. Now it has a new CEO. Can this social networking phenom attract a new wave of consumers and enterprise users?

I first joined Second Life in January 2007, near the peak of the hype cycle. Second Life was supposedly the next technology megatrend. It would transform the face of the Internet and make present-day technology obsolete.

Research shows that Second Life users identify with their avatars, and are more willing to take risks.
(click for image gallery)

Then the hype cycle burst. Second Life didn't change the Internet much. Journalists quit the service en masse to follow the next big trend.

But I didn't leave Second Life. I stuck around. I cut back my professional involvement to an article or blog every few months. But I still spend a few hours a week in Second Life, just playing and keeping in touch with friends.

And Second Life stuck around too. It's profitable, and it's hanging on to a core of dedicated users. The internal economy of Second Life users exchanging virtual goods and services is growing. And, perhaps most important of all, the unquantifiable creative soup of Second Life continues at a rolling boil, with new businesses and activities and art popping up every day.

Linden Lab, the company that created and operates Second Life, is growing up. Founder Philip Rosedale stepped aside as CEO, while hanging on as chairman. Linden Lab replaced Rosedale with Mark Kingdon, an Internet marketing veteran.

Where Rosedale often speaks of Second Life in mystical terms, Kingdon has a Wharton MBA and a solid, practical business background. Organic, the Internet marketing company where he was previously CEO, was failing when he came on board; he turned it around. And he also has 12 years' experience with PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he was most recently a senior partner.

Kingdon must grapple with a number of problems: Making Second Life simple enough for most Internet users to get into it, improving stability of the very buggy service, streamlining the user interface, and dealing with a corporate culture that's often more interested in mystical vision than the hard job of running a business.

Perfect On Paper

On paper, Kingdon has the perfect resume for incoming Linden Lab CEO, as I wrote in April: "The Organic experience presumably makes him comfortable working with idiosyncratic, creative people. On the other hand, the experience at button-down PWC will hopefully help empower him to inject some starch and discipline into Linden Lab."

After starting at Linden Lab in May, Kingdon was mostly quiet his first few months, but he recently surfaced for an interview to talk about the company's future business, technology direction and the health of its economy and community.

Kingdon said the company's main focus is to improve uptime, stability, and retention of people who log in to the service and try it out -- converting newbies into active users.

READ MORE

John McCain: Digital Dunderhead Or Internet Whiz-Kid?

My latest on InformationWeek:

Is John McCain an out-of-touch dunderhead who doesn't know the Internet from a series of tubes? Or is he an Internet-savvy septuagenarian who needs someone else to operate the keyboard for him because of his Vietnam war injuries?

The Obama campaign looked like it scored a coup against McCain this week with a TV ad claiming McCain's computer illiteracy proved he was out of touch and shouldn't be allowed to be president.

But McCain's defenders say their candidate does know how to use a computer and the Internet -- he just needs someone else to operate the keyboard.

What's the truth? Is McCain the kind of guy who thinks the mouse is a foot-pedal and a the DVD drawer is a cupholder? Or does he have l33t skillz?

It depends on who you believe -- and you'll find comments from McCain to support either side of the issue.

READ MORE

New Obama Ad: McCain "Can't Send An E-Mail"

After more than a week of getting pounded by Palin supporters, Obama's forces are hitting back in a new campaign ad, playing on McCain's admission that he can't send an e-mail or even use a computer. Obama says these points -- and others -- are evidence that McCain is "out of touch."

(Via Lifehacker).

The ad plays off McCain's own statement that he doesn't know how to use a computer. It starts with a gallery of images from the early 80s: A greescreen PC, a cell phone as big as your head, a disco ball (huh? a disco ball? That's so 70s -- as is the font that starts the commercial. But forget about that -- we're on a roll here.)

The nostalgic beginning is just a transition to the meat of the ad, which attacks McCain's economic policies, noting that McCain "favors $200 billion in tax cuts for corporations, but almost nothing for the middle class."

READ MORE

CrowdSpring Used Competing Service To Design Its Own Logo

CrowdSpring is a company that allows businesses to use crowds of graphic designers to create logos, images for ads, and other artwork. They boast about how they used their own process to design their own logo, eventually awarding the project to a janitor who taught himself graphic design. It's a compelling story -- but it's not the whole story.

CrowdSpring is a community of graphic designers. When a company wants some design work done, it posts a write-up of what it wants on the CrowdSpring site, and designers do the work and then compete among themselves to see who gets to sell the project and get paid.

I wrote about CrowdSpring earlier this week, in a piece headlined: "DEMO: CrowdSpring Is Like eBay For Creative Professionals." I wrote: "CrowdSpring used its own service to design its Web site and logo. The company bought the logo from a 28-year-old janitor who taught himself graphic design."

But that's not entirely true.

READ MORE

Video: KFC Hires Armed Guard To Transport Chicken Recipe

My latest on InformationWeek:

This is a cute publicity stunt: The president of KFC decided that the famous original recipe lockdown wasn't secure enough, so they hired a Brinks guard to transport the document to a new, more secure location.

Watch the video on Slashfood. (Via Evangeline.)

READ MORE

Are Journalists Persecuting Sarah Palin And Her Daughter?

My latest on InformationWeek:

The story of Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy has got McCain supporters riled up. They're angry at what they see as yet another conspiracy by the mainstream media to tear down a good conservative while giving liberal darlings like Barack Obama and John Edwards a free pass.

Last week, I wrote a blog outlining how bloggers and journalists have an uneasy partnership: Bloggers report rumors, and journalists chase the rumors down, sometimes verifying them, other times reporting the rumors without verification.

In this case, an Internet site reported that the child Sarah Palin claimed was her own was actually her teen-aged daughter's, and the elder Palin was lying to cover up her daughter's pregnancy. Journalists started digging into the report to find out whether it was true, which led to the McCain campaign issuing a statement: The child is, indeed, the elder Palin's. However, the younger Palin is pregnant, and plans to have the baby and marry the father.

The blog post struck a nerve with readers. I think it might have been the most popular post we've run on the InformationWeek Political Tech Blog. Readers had lots to say about the blog and the controversy, much of it critical, of me in particular and the media's role in reporting the story in general.

One of those comments came from a source close to home, Bob Evans, a senior vice president at TechWeb, the company which publishes InforamtionWeek. Bob complimented my overall coverage, and the Palin blog post in particular (thanks, Bob!), but went on to say:

You say--not terribly convincingly--that it was okay for the drive-by media to savage a 17-year-old because...well...why was that okay again? And then, several paragraphs later, you mention that the very same drive-by media ignored reports--for eight months!--that a Presidential candidate had impregnated a staffer while having an affair with her. I would think, Mitch, that your analysis of this complex situation would have touched on the stunningly different approaches taken by the drive-by media in these two cases. Why did they immediately and brutally and relentlessly tear into the life and behavior of a 17-year-old who had only a marginal connection to the presidential campaign, yet totally ignore for eight months---eight months!---the lies and deceit and *relevant* story involving John Edwards? ... Why did the NY Times run three---THREE!!---cover stories on Tuesday about Bristol Palin, but has said next to nothing about Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, or Barack Obama and Tony Rezko, or Barack Obama and how he’ll make the oceans fall and the sick heal?

READ MORE

Daily Kos Publisher Takes Us To Task On Palin Coverage

My latest on InformationWeek:

The publisher of the political blog Daily Kos took us to task last week for our coverage of the controversy over Sarah Palin's teen-aged daughter's pregnancy. His letter raises a different issue: To what extent, if any, does the publisher of a site bear responsibility for the comments posted by a member of the site? Are the owners of Web communities obliged to control content posted by their members?

Last week, I wrote a blog describing how the Daily Kos ignited the Palin baby controversy by publishing a report that Sarah Palin lied about having a baby. Markos Moulitsas, publisher of the Daily Kos called me out in e-mail for getting my facts wrong:

For someone who writes for Information Week, I'd think you'd be a little more knowledgeable about how the blogosphere works. The blog didn't run that report. A diarist on the site, one of 188,000 at last count, wrote a diary on the topic. It never received affirmation of any sort from the site's editorial team. It's an open community. But you, trying to equate the diaries to the site's main editorial voice would be like blaming you for the racist rantings of a random commenter to one of your blog posts, or taking a letter to the editor at a newspaper and attributing it to the newspaper itself.

It's a good point. I was wrong, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to correct the error.

However, Moulitsas raises a difficult issue, one that the publisher of every Internet community must contend with: To what extent are community publishers responsible for the comments and content published on their community?

GET THE REST ON INFORMATIONWEEK.COM

Sarah Palin's Babygate And The Future Of Journalism

The story of Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy is an example of the uneasy partnership between journalists and bloggers. The events make it clear what journalists' roles ought to be in the post-blogger era. But it's unclear whether journalists actually did their jobs here, because this is such an ugly story that it's hard to see past the sordid surface to find out what happened.

Here's what we know: The liberal Democrat blog Daily Kos ran a report claiming that Palin was covering up her own daughter's out-of-wedlock pregnancy and childbirth. They based the report on a whole bunch of circumstantial evidence, including photos of Palin looking svelte in what was supposedly her seventh month, reports of her daughter looking a bit preggers, and reports of Palin's behavior which, the DailyKos's correspondent said, was not believable behavior for a pregnant woman.

Now, I'm a liberal Democrat myself, and there's no way I'm going to vote for McCain. And the more I learn about Palin's politics and career, the less I like it. Still, I was a bit nauseated by the DailyKos report. They didn't have the facts, they were just reporting rumor, and that was a thin basis for putting a 17-year-old girl's sex life up for national scrutiny. Sure, Sarah Palin signed on for this when she agreed to the VP nomination -- anything in her life was fair game. But her daughter didn't sign on for this treatment.

Later, the McCain campaign issued a statement, saying Palin's daughter wasn't pregnant -- at the time DailyKos said she was. But, said the McCain campaign, Palin's daughter is pregnant now, and she's marrying the father.

Is this an appropriate topic for the news? I have to hold my nose and say "yes." Palin based her political career on promoting her views of what family values and sexual morality ought to be. She should, therefore, be judged for fitness in office based on her own family's adherence to those principles.

And yet, dragging a teen-age girl through this filth is just plain sickening. It's one of the reasons I got out of daily journalism 20 years ago. It may, in fact, be necessary work -- but I just don't have the stomach for it.

GET THE REST ON INFORMATIONWEEK.COM

Review: Google Chrome Mostly Glitters

Google's Chrome browser is fast and lightweight, with fresh and welcome user interface innovations. But it's still early beta software -- and it shows.

When Google (NSDQ: GOOG) announced its own open-source Chrome browser Monday, it made no sense. Why build an open source Web browser when Firefox is open source, an excellent browser, and available today? Google's behavior seemed the very definition of reinventing the wheel.

Chrome's interface makes it easy to see where you've recently been, and to return there in just a click.
(click for image gallery)

But Google answers the question in its comic-book-formatted explanation of its new browser technology: Google wanted to build a new browser from scratch, designed specifically to be used with the new generation of Web applications. Many of those applications are, of course, Google's own: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, and more.

Google designed the browser to be lightweight, fast, have a minimalist user interface, and to resist crashing under the heavy JavaScript demands of Web applications.

Google succeeded in its goals. The browser performs well, it's easy to use, it has some really nice user interface features that demonstrate a fresh approach to the old problem of viewing and navigating Web pages.

Many people are going to want to use Chrome as their primary browser. But others, I think, will want to wait, because Chrome has some rough edges, missing features, and stability problems. Chrome is an early beta, and it shows.

Google designed Chrome to be more stable than other browsers, noting that users can't afford a browser crash while writing an important e-mail, or creating an important document in an online word processor. Chrome is designed to be faster than the competition, particularly in JavaScript performance. And it's designed to work with Google Gears, to allow applications to work offline.

Google designed Chrome to be multithreaded. Other browsers are single-threaded, which means they can only do one thing at once. If your Gmail session hangs, your entire browser is frozen.

Chrome is multithreaded, which means that if one tab is locked up, applications and pages run normally in other tabs. And Chrome has its own Task Manager, which looks a lot like the one built into Windows, and which gives separate information on the resource usage of each running tab, window, and plug-in.

Google's browser is based on the WebKit rendering engine that underlies Safari. It runs only on Windows for now. Mac and Linux versions are in development.

When you're installing Chrome, you have the option of importing bookmarks, passwords, and other settings from Internet Explorer or Firefox. (Opera users, you're out of luck -- at least for now.)

GET THE REST ON INFORMATIONWEEK.COM