tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog

TV Ears - for when the in-laws visit

2009-12-16T21:21:00.000-08:00

My in-laws are in town for the holidays, and one of the ongoing challenges we have is when my father-in-law wants to watch TV. Why? Well, let's just say that he likes the volume up a bit higher than we usually have it - and the kids sleep right above the family room. It can get... noisy.

Ahead of this visit, they ordered TV Ears and had them delivered to our house, a wireless headset system that augments the audio from the TV. I plugged the audio cables from the back of the TiVo into the base station and we were good to go.

Now the audio is nice and quiet for the rest of us, and he has it nice and loud.

The kids are going to sleep much more soundly this visit! :)

Google Chrome Extensions: Blog This! (by Google)

2009-12-09T16:10:00.000-08:00

Posted via the Chrome extension Blog This:

Google Chrome Extensions: Blog This! (by Google): "Add a BlogThis! button to the browser toolbar, which lets you post to your Blogger blog from any webpage with just one click."

Sweet. Nice job, Jungshik!

Matt Stafford wired

2009-12-01T09:48:00.000-08:00

If you've got 6 minutes, watch this video. NFL films routinely wires up players for audio - typically to include snippets of hits or sideline banter in end-of-season highlight reels.

But what happened during the Lions/Browns game two weekends ago was remarkable - and listening to the audio from rookie QB Matt Stafford as he commands a comeback (starting down 21 points) is phenomenal.

Then he gets flattened, as time expires. And, well... just watch it. Really incredible.

Defending bloggers' free speech

2009-12-01T08:49:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, CNN.com published an opinion piece I wrote. It's a topic that's not new to my readers - I've been writing about the striking similarities between pamphlets and social media for years (2003, 2009) and more recently read up on George Orwell's focus on pamphlets as a necessary component of communication for individuals to have the ability to freely express themselves.

I mentioned the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in my op-ed, and I realized yesterday that next Thursday (December 10) will be the 61st anniversary of the United Nations adopting and proclaiming the declaration. December 10 is known as Human Rights Day - if you have any suggestions for the best way to observe Human Rights Day, leave them in the comments.

Parental controls on multiple computers

2009-11-27T23:30:00.000-08:00

Didn't see this one coming: earlier today, Robby (my 7 year-old son) mentioned in passing: "Ricky [my 9 year-old son] knows the password on the computer upstairs." I didn't immediately grasp what he meant - after all, I'd set each boy up with their own account with a password and customized their desktop so they could get access to their e-mail, Club Penguin, etc. The two computers - one XP, one Vista - each had parental controls enabled, with an explicit whitelist indicating which sites they could visit.

Then it hit me: he knew the parental controls password.

Whoa.

Sure enough, one thing (on a fairly short list) Vista's parental controls does well is it provides a report of sites that each account has accessed. Since the account can only get access to sites which have been explicitly whitelisted, this list shouldn't be that interesting. Unless there are new sites on the whitelist! Sure enough, Vista shows you which sites were unblocked in the last week. Gotta give the kid credit: he's discovered a couple adventure games online (no clue where/how - that's a discussion for another day) and logged in as me to whitelist the site so he could continue to play.

Once he had the power to whitelist sites, he had the power to remove the time restrictions on his account. Turns out almost the entire time we were cooking on Thanksgiving day, he was battling ogres and advancing to a level 17 knight with an upgraded sword and a shield with magic powers. (Do I sound proud? I shouldn't, right?)

As I started poking around looking for a better solution, I had a hard time finding something that would work. Here's my wish list:

individual accounts for each child
time-based restrictions, both for time of day and cumulative time logged in
content filtering (i.e., no adult sites) as well as a whitelist/blacklist to enable or disable specific sites
centralized account config, ideally web-based (this allows Robin or I to administer from our own computers, instead of needing to log into theirs - and avoids having to set up duplicate controls on each computer for each user)
traffic logs

Before this sounds like I'm trying to delegate responsibility for managing my kids' online experience: I'm not. I actually want them to explore, and learn to use the machines beyond pointing and clicking on things. (Looked at that way, the whole 'figure out Dad's password and then reverse-engineer the parental controls mechanism so I can get what I want' thing looks like a big success. +1 for me, I guess.)

But Robin and I aren't always looking over their shoulders - whether we're cooking Thanksgiving dinner, or putting their sister to bed, or, yes, hanging out by ourselves - there are times when they're on their computer by themselves and I want them to be safe. The setup we had - XP & Vista's default controls - just didn't cut it. Things weren't centrally managed, there was no ability to restrict the total time on the computer (i.e., 'no more than 2 hours on the computer per day'), and the ability to override settings using the admin account password (which I've since changed, thank you very much!) all made for a less-than-ideal setup.

I asked on Twitter, and got a couple replies but nothing that seemed tailored to what I wanted. I asked on Facebook: nothing. And a couple hours of looking online produced surprisingly little: most solutions were either single-computer solutions or, in a few cases, were hardware based. Then I stumbled on a post on flyertalk.com, of all places, looking to do exactly what I was looking to do. And the recommendation was to a service I hadn't yet found in my online research: Safe Eyes. The key for me? You can install it on up to 3 computers for no additional cost.

I've now installed it on both computers the boys use, and Robin's PC as an administrator. The accounts for the boys are managed by Safe Eyes - so when they log into their accounts on either the XP or Vista machines, the Safe Eyes app logs them in (their Safe Eyes account credentials can be saved, so that they're logged in automatically); if they're logged in during a time when they're not allowed to be online, they get a dialog box telling them that.

Controls are well done: it took about 20 minutes to configure what types of sites are OK (see below), which specific URLs are OK, whether they can IM, etc. The time limits are both time-of-day as well as elapsed-time, and various other controls let you ID specific programs you allow/disallow. A browser toolbar sits on Robin's computer (IE only, unfortunately - doesn't work for Chrome) that lets her add a site to the whitelist with one click - a nice feature if the kids hear about a new site they want to add to their list of visited sites.

(Admin screen showing summary of each account)

(Whitelist setup is centrally managed across accounts)

I had both boys read and sign the "Internet Game Plan" - a good, common-sense list of things that both boys should be aware of as they spend more time online. As tech-savvy as Robin and I both are, it was good to go back over the basics as much for our benefit to make sure that the boys felt comfortable with these guidelines.

Mostly, Safe Eyes is a nice technical solution to a problem that's only partly technical: as I explained to Ricky, by stealing our password he violated our trust. Had he asked us for permission to play that game, we could have looked at it together - but he didn't, and got caught. So we've dialed back his access - and he will earn it back. Safe Eyes will make it easier for us to manage that process, and give him more confidence that his effort will be rewarded.

Couple of things the geek in me would like to see: IM notifications that a kid's time has expired (perhaps asking for an OK to extend the time?), a simple way to see how much time remaining in a day each child has. It's also important to note that Safe Eyes is primarily focused on Internet usage, so if your interest is more towards limiting specific apps, this may not be the right fit for you. (Almost 100% of what we do on a computer is in the browser - e-mail, IM, games, etc. - so this works just fine for us.) Safe Eyes does support "program blocking" - but as near as I can tell, it's for programs that access the Internet, not any app on your computer.

In the end, Safe Eyes is pretty close to my ideal solution. I didn't need to buy new hardware, it's not hard to install, it allows me to manage everything on the web, and it will grow as we let the kids do more online without sacrificing their safety. If I wanted to install it on my Mac to simplify admin even further, though, I'd have to upgrade my license: by default, Safe Eyes allows you to install on up to 3 computers - don't get me wrong, I love their approach... but we have 4 computers. :) They also support up to 10 users across those 3 computers, which seems more than enough for any family.

(Disclaimer: I signed up for Safe Eyes' affiliate program after buying my own subscription. I'm really impressed with the service so far. If you decide to sign up after clicking on that link, Safe Eyes will pay me a few bucks as a referral fee. I've done this for similar services in the past - SitterCity, Click 'n Kids - not for the compensation, just because they're great services. What little money I tend to make simply goes to off-setting the cost of using the services themselves.)

U.S. Caselaw in Google Scholar

2009-11-17T11:03:00.000-08:00

Last night, an important new feature launched on Google Scholar: more than 80 years of US federal caselaw (including tax and bankruptcy courts) and over 50 years of state caselaw is now fully searchable online, for free at Google Scholar.

This project is the culmination of much work, led by a remarkable engineer at Google named Anurag Acharya. Shortly after I arrived at Google, I heard about a small group of people working to make legal information available through Google. Given my background, I was particularly interested to see if there was a role for me - and thanks to Google's culture of encouraging employees finding 20% projects to contribute to, I was able to not only find a role but to dive in.

It's been a thrill to be part of this project, but most importantly it's exhilarating to know that for the first time, US citizens have the ability to search for - and read - the opinions that govern our society. Matt DeVries, a law school roommate, has a great overview of what this means for him as a lawyer here. Tim Stanley, a pioneer in this space who I first met when he built a search engine to index the articles published in the law journal I founded, said simply, "Thanks, Google!" and then did a good job evaluating what Scholar does (and doesn't) do with the opinions. Rex Gradeless, a law student, pointed out that while this may be of interest for lawyers and law students, the real winner here is citizens who've historically not had comprehensive access to this information at all.

It probably goes without saying, but in case it's not abundantly clear: working at a company that embraces projects like this is incredible. This was a labor of love for a number of co-workers (past and present), all of whom instinctively grasped why this is important and how connected it is to Google's mission. I'm very proud to work at Google today.

Daemon Sequel Freedom(tm) available for pre-order

2009-11-10T16:39:00.000-08:00

Could not be more excited about this news: Freedom(tm), Daniel Suarez's sequel to Daemon is now available for pre-order at Amazon. Let the count-down begin: the book is available in just over 8 weeks!

In case anyone doesn't remember me raving about Daemon, here's my original review, and January's follow-up post discussing the soon-to-be re-released Daemon in hard-back.

Paramount has Daemon in pre-production, where the screen-writer who wrote WarGames is co-writing the screenplay.

University of Richmond Law School

2009-11-10T09:00:00.000-08:00

Image via Wikipedia

Though I don't practice law, I'm a proud graduate of the University of Richmond Law School - it was an extraordinary three years of my life. It was there that I really learned how to think critically, learned how to argue (much to my wife's chagrin), and learned how to be an entrepreneur.

Yeah, you read that right.

Law school is hardly where one thinks about being (let alone becoming) an entrepreneur. Yet along with a group of fellow students, I founded a law journal that was the first in the world to publish online - with the Dean's active support and the encouragement of faculty. Publishing a scholarly law journal exclusively on the Internet was unheard of at the time, and represented a gamble for the law school. We (the students) received academic credit for our time - something up until that point only afforded to Law Review and Moot Court participants. The school's brand was closely tied to JOLT's, and it wasn't clear in the early days that this was a venture likely to succeed.

But succeed it has - JOLT now counts more than 400 students as alumni, has contributed to the scholarship in the technology law space, and is very much an accepted outlet for scholars to seek out when looking to publish their work. And some of my best memories of my time at Richmond were those focused on the actual creation of the Journal - working with the administration, recruiting students to join our crazy idea, convincing professors around the country that we really would pull it off and they should submit their articles to us, evangelizing to the press and academia once we'd launched to generate buzz about the Journal. All of those skills I use today - because this was in a very real sense my first entrepreneurial endeavor.

It had never occurred to me before writing this post - but the biggest gift Richmond gave me was the environment in which it was possible to be an entrepreneur. Too often you hear about entrepreneurs who fail, and fail again, and fail a third time before they find the recipe for success. But Richmond created an environment in which it was quite possible to succeed - and that became an invaluable launching point for my career.

I write all of this because the Law School has produced a 10 minute video detailing the school, the surrounding community, and what the students mean to the Law School. It's a great video, and if you're thinking about going to law school, I think it's a terrific introduction to a school that should be on your short list.

(Full disclosure: if you hang on long enough, you'll see my mug for about 2 seconds.)

Twitter list word cloud

2009-11-05T12:09:00.000-08:00

I've been enjoying Twitter Lists in the last week... for those that don't know, Lists gives others the ability to "curate" Twitter IDs into groups. You can see which lists I've been added to by clicking here. It struck me that this is the first time I've had such a view into how others categorize me.

I took the words others used to describe me, and then went to Wordle to generate a word cloud based on those words. (I'll bet someone builds a service to generate these word clouds automatically within a week.)

Gets it about right, actually.

What Would Augsburg Do?

2009-11-05T05:47:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago I attended the fall board meeting for Augsburg Fortress. Augsburg is a publisher affiliated with the ELCA, which is the largest Lutheran denomination in the United States. My connection to Augsburg is a result of a speech I gave to a group of leaders in the ELCA several years ago, and has been a remarkable experience for the last two years.

It’s remarkable for several reasons: it’s my first experience sitting on a board, so that alone makes it a worthwhile effort. But what makes it so rewarding – and so challenging – is the difficulty of being part of a traditional publisher in 2009.

Add to that that my day job – working at a company often blamed for many of the publishing industry’s difficulties – and it has made for quite the learning process.

Last spring, Augsburg’s CEO Beth Lewis asked if I’d consider leading a discussion at our board meeting focused on Jeff Jarvis’s book, What Would Google Do? We ended up delaying the talk, in part because we’d have a new class of board members joining us in the fall and it felt like a better way to kick things off with the “new” board.

On Friday, I tweeted that I’d be leading the discussion, and almost immediately Jeff tweeted right back that he’d love to eavesdrop. A few e-mails later, Jeff and I had it settled: I’d surprise the board by starting off our session by hearing from none other than the author himself – and thanks to Skype video chat, we had him projected full screen and plugged into the A/V so he could speak to us. (Miraculously, the mic on my MacBook Pro even picked up comments from people 30 feet away, making it a completely easy dialogue from 1,000 miles away.)

Jeff had some great ideas to frame the discussion: ask what business you’re really in was the key, of course. But as a brother to a Presbyterian minister, he also had a rather good insight into the challenges faced by leaders in the church: how to admit mistakes, how to foster communities in the midst of declining church membership – he spoke to these challenges as someone more than passingly familiar with the dual challenges Augsburg faces.

Beth asked what is probably the most critical question of Jeff: how do we avoid the “cash cow in the coal mine” – the part(s) of our business that generate revenues today but are neither core to the business nor likely to be a part of Augsburg’s future.

Jeff was blunt: “pretend you needed to get rid of your print business tomorrow. Just turn it off. And imagine that there’s a kid or group of kids in a dorm room today, thinking about how to re-engage people of faith. What are they working on? What are they going to do that will threaten you?”

I wanted to be respectful of Jeff’s time – he was terribly gracious to give up a part of his Saturday morning to chat with us – and we said thanks and then dove in. While I will not go into the confidential aspects of our board discussion, I did warn the board that I’d be blogging the meeting, with the goal of inviting a broader discussion – from Lutherans, from techies, from publishing vets – to figure out if there isn’t a way to be public about the challenges facing us, and hopefully identify some creative paths forward.

Our first step was to throw out the key words that the board felt mattered most from Jeff’s book. More than a dozen words went up... several of the core themes of the book, many of which were obviously applicable to our challenge: trust, transparency, platform, links, beta, imperfect, abundance.

But I pointed out that a biggie – perhaps the biggest – was missing: free. This isn’t easy for an established business to confront: how can we just give stuff away? We talked through the mechanics of free: it’s not what you give away, but how giving things away can expand the market for your other products (and/or create entirely new ones). I recommended Free to the group (one of the many reasons I love our CEO: she had a copy on her Kindle within a minute of my recommendation), and threw out a couple examples from Chris Anderson’s book to talk about how Free can be, as Jeff pointed out in WWGD, a business model.

We also talked about data: what data could we collect – not personally identifiable data, but data about congregations, about product adoption, about customer life cycles (do families whose children attend Sunday School have adults who go to adult bible study more often? Do families who attend adult bible study volunteer more at church, donate more money to the church, or recruit friends to join?) – and how could that data be valuable to others?

What’s exciting to me is that Augsburg is already a company asking “what if?” and acting on it. The best example of this is sparkhouse, a completely new effort funded by Augsburg as an entrepreneurial startup intended to completely reimagine faith-based publishing. And that’s not the only one: Augsburg has built up a number of social networks – see Creative Worship Tour as an example of how Augsburg is connecting like-minded individuals around the world to facilitate interactions and foster community around new ways of managing weekly worship.

While these are great steps, they are by no means guarantees of success. Jeff talks a lot about the news industry: declining circulation, uncertain revenue future, competition from new players who didn’t even exist three years ago. But he could just as easily be talking about the church: membership is down, the average age of congregations is going up, and people are less and less focused on denominations at all when it comes to their faith. Add to that the well-known challenges of being a book publisher today and it’s clear that Augsburg has its work cut out for it.

Which is why I wanted to have this discussion out in the open. In WWGD, Jeff talks repeatedly about “publicness” – and he spoke movingly of a comment left on his blog over that weekend about a widow who lost her husband to prostate cancer. (Jeff has been documenting his own battle with prostate cancer – and his successful surgery and ongoing recovery – for months.)

Someone (or someones) out there will have ideas that we need to be thinking about. If you’re that kid in her dorm room thinking about reinventing publishing and community for people of faith, I want to hear from you. What would an Augsburg platform look like? (I got to define API to the board during our meeting – I doubt there are too many other publishing boards talking about APIs!) Which questions aren’t we answering? Which aren’t we asking?

My fellow board members are going to be hanging out here; I’m hoping that we can foster an ongoing discussion about our future here. Thanks again to Jeff – for writing a thought-provoking book, for giving of his time this morning – and thanks to all of you, whose input and guidance I cannot wait to read.

BlogWorld Expo recap

2009-10-19T17:13:00.000-07:00

I was in Las Vegas last week to attend BlogWorld Expo, and had a terrific time. Events like these are as much about the conversations in the hallways (and, if you're a speaker, the speaker ready room), and this year's BWE was no exception.

My presentation on Friday was about where blogs fit in at a time that everyone's attention seems to be on Twitter; I shared some stats about Blogger that many in the audience hadn't heard before. Louis Gray did a terrific job summarizing my presentation (makes me feel bad, all I did during his was heckle him), and I was quite interested in the Q&A. (Wayne Sutton broadcast my presentation on UStream, and the archived video is on his site here if you're interested.)

I covered some of the same ground in an interview I did with Abby Prince from WebProNews:

More WebProNews Videos

Thanks to everyone who stopped by to say hi, hopefully next time I won't have a wedding to go to and I can stay for the entire show!

My favorite Google Apps

2009-09-29T08:30:00.000-07:00

Inspired by Louis Gray's post about his favorite Google apps (who was inspired by none other than Google CEO Eric Schmidt), I thought I'd capture some of my favorite Google apps - especially those which are lesser-known. (To the many friends who I'll no doubt annoy by not including their products: note that I said some of my favorites. And I'm omitting a couple obvious ones: I live in Gmail, Reader, and Calendar... those deserve their own posts about how I rely on them seemingly every hour of the day. Not today.)

Last week, I was invited to give a presentation to a group of execs from the World Presidents Organization (it's real - I checked!), and the topic was pretty broad: "What are some of the things that wow you at Google?" As I read Louis's blog post, I realized that this presentation was more or less my follow-up to his post. With that, here's what I presented:

Blogger. Yes, I'm biased. But as I near a year of working with this team, it's hard not to love being part of a product that enables millions of people every month to tell their stories - and to have those stories reach nearly one in four people on the Internet every month! Specifically, I love that as soon as I click "publish post" the post is live on the web. No rebuilding, file transfers, or other delays: it's there. (And thanks to Pubsubhubbub, the post shows up instantly on Friendfeed, in my FeedBurner feed, and will soon show up instantly in other places. Hint, hint.) I love having complete control over the look and feel of the blog. And let's just say there are a few things coming in the next couple months that will make lots of Blogger users happy.
Picasa Facial Recognition. When this first launched in Picasa Web Albums, it was almost like a game: my wife and I sat on the couch, seeing pictures of our kids we hadn't seen in years. Now that it's available in the client app, it's been phenomenal to watch it collect and organize the thousands of pictures I've taken over the years. Nobody in the room at my presentation had seen it, and it was the first "magic" moment of the presentation.
Google Voice. There are several cool things here, but the transcription of voicemails is definitely the killer feature. I almost never listen to voicemails anymore (though when GV gets the transcription wrong, it gets it really wrong.)
Google Docs, especially surveys that populate Google Spreadsheets. Another product the audience hadn't even heard of, I showed them how I created a form to survey the parents for an end-of-year gift from the PTA last year. The form took just twenty minutes to build, we then e-mailed it out to all the parents, and within a day we had all the data we needed to make the decision. (For more on creating forms, check out this great post from yesterday at Digital Inspiration.)
Google Scholar. Everyone's done the normal Google ego search. But for anyone who's writen for a scholarly journal, few know that those journals are searchable at Google Scholar. (Here's mine.) One of the execs in the room had written several articles for labor law journals, he'd even forgotten about one we found when searching!
Google Mobile Voice Search. Several had iPhones in the room, and most of the rest had Blackberries. But none had the Google Mobile app, which lets you speak your query and get back location-aware results (say "pizza" and you'll get the nearest pizza joints).
My Tracks for Android. You want to know how overwhelming it is to work at Google? One of my fellow PMs also happens to have been teammates with Lance Armstrong. (Small world, actually - I have seen Lance Armstrong on TV!) So it is that PM Dylan Casey rounded up some engineers and built My Tracks, an insanely cool app for Android phones. (Side note: many in the room kept asking how to get this on their iPhone. Explaining that Android was our OS, and that it was different than the iPhone OS, made no sense whatsoever to them.)
Fast Flip. I really like this effort, currently in Labs. I keep coming back to it, intrigued by the UI - and folks in the room (most of whom were older) immediately caught on to the idea that this is very similar to how they read their print periodicals. I see this getting more traction as other products look at how to incorporate this idea into their own interface.

What about you? Which Google Apps can't you live without?

Free books on your iPhone

2009-09-25T08:31:00.000-07:00

In last week's post about the books I've been reading on my iPhone, I neglected to point out that there are a ton of free books you can "buy" from Amazon. The Kindle app is a free app in the App Store, so go ahead and put it on your phone if you haven't already.

Now go visit this page (better, if you use iGoogle, My Yahoo, Google Reader or another feed reader, subscribe to the feed). This is the current best sellers page for the Kindle, and not surprisingly, books that are free tend to sell pretty well. When you see one that intrigues you, click to buy and it'll be on your iPhone in minutes.

I've got a backlog of at least a dozen books I've picked up over the last 6 months that all look pretty good, and several have been downright outstanding. It's a great marketing tactic for authors - particularly those who have several books available but who want to reach a new audience. And if you're on a tight budget you can't beat the price!

Update: And if you don't have an iPhone/iPod Touch, or you'd really rather have the actual Kindle, the original Kindle (refurbished) is now $149 from Amazon.

Presenting to the WPO at Google

2009-09-24T11:16:00.001-07:00

I'm presenting at Google to a group of execs from the World Presidents Organization. Say hi!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Rodrigo y Gabriela at the Fox

2009-09-24T09:09:00.000-07:00

Robin surprised me with tickets to see Rodrigo y Gabriela last night. They were playing at the Fox in Oakland, which is a stunningly beautiful venue.

I found RyG based on a recommendation on Marc Andreessen's blog a couple years ago. (Marc - what's up with the lack of archives? Where'd all the good stuff go?) Thanks to Rhapsody, we were listening to their album that evening, and we were hooked. How could two people get so much music out of two guitars?!

Last night's show was remarkable on a couple fronts. The opening set was Rocco DeLuca playing a solo accoustic set (note to Rocco: next gig you play, introduce yourself!), and he quickly owned the crowd. Really enjoyed his singing - I just listened to some of the songs on his site (with his band The Burden) and his set was much more sedate (in a good way).

As for the main attraction, they were outstanding. My iPhone videos are admittedly blurry, and don't do justice to the insane finger work both do on their guitars - but I think you get a sense of just how phenomenal their music is. Here they are playing early in their set:

And here's their encore, where they sprinkled in just a bit of Stairway to Heaven (which they covered on their self-titled album) and finished with some help from the crowd:

We had a great time. If you get a chance to see them perform live, it's definitely worth it. Gabriela can make more music with her knuckles than most can make with a whole back-up band. (Here's a video from their appearance on Letterman that shows you up close what she does with her guitar.)

At the very least, they have to be among the top 10 Mexican ex-thrash-metal-classical-guitar-playing-Irishmen in the world, right? Who wouldn't want to see that?!

First post on SideWiki

2009-09-23T16:11:00.001-07:00

Just installed Sidewiki in Google Toolbar on my Mac. A feature I had missed when this was available internally (ironically) was the ability to copy your annotation to your blog; beneath the edit window for your Sidewiki comment, there's a "My blogs on Blogger" element; pick your blog, and then your Sidewiki comment is auto-posted to your blog.

Sweet!

in reference to: tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog (view on Google Sidewiki)

BlogPress Lite is live!

2009-09-22T20:05:00.001-07:00

Use an iPhone and have a blog on Blogger? Head on over to the app store and get InfoThinker's free "blogpress lite", built by them to celebrate Blogger's 10th birthday. Thanks, guys!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Really enjoying Socialvibe

2009-09-16T17:40:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks back, we announced a partnership with Socialvibe. As the blog owner, you get to pick which charity you support in the gadget configuration - then your blog's visitors are invited to do something (for example: rate a video, watch an ad, sign a petition). Each time they do that something, the advertiser who's sponsoring the gadget pledges a certain amount to the charity you've chosen.

I picked charity: water, and in two weeks my blog's readers have raised nearly 7,500 gallons of water for Charity Water. That's really remarkable, and I hope to see the number continue to go up.

What's been intriguing to me has been the effect it's had on me as the blog owner. I've watched the number climb and check the site a couple times a day to see where it's at. I'm thinking about picking a new charity each month to try and spread the love a bit, but also to re-engage prior visitors. It's a fun exercise, and it's quite fulfilling to know that something so simple can have such a meaningful impact on people who need the help.

If your blog is on Blogger, the link above contains the simple instructions to get started. If you're on WordPress, this article does a good job explaining it in more detail and has links to the WordPress setup (Socialvibe is also a WordPress partner). The Socialvibe site has simple directions for getting started on MySpace or Facebook. Give it a try, let me know what you think.

We're hiring

2009-09-16T17:11:00.000-07:00

You may have seen the news that we're getting more active about hiring at Google. We didn't really stop - but as you can see from the jobs listings (US, international) there are lots of opportunities to join and make a difference.

The hiring process remains rigorous, and if you're not confident you're among the best at what you do, this probably isn't the opportunity for you. From my own experience, I can say that you will find it among the most stimulating, challenging, exciting jobs you could have. Interested? Drop me a line, I can try to put you in touch with the right team. (Caveat: I will happily give referrals for people I've worked with or know professionally, but not if I haven't met you or worked with you before. If we don't know each other, please use the "job cart" to apply directly.)

Latest books on the Kindle: On my iPhone

2009-09-15T22:37:00.000-07:00

It was a running gag between Don Loeb and me last year when I bought my Kindle: it's great, he'd say. But I want to read the books on my iPhone. I laughed at him. What sane person would want to do that?

It paralleled my mocking of Don's praise for his Mac... except then I bought a Mac. And then, last week, I realized I'd read the equivalent of 1,500 printed pages on my iPhone. Don was right. Again.

I read both Song of Susannah (560 pages) and The Dark Tower (1,072 pages) entirely on the iPhone, and have read about 2/3 of Chris Anderson's Free (288 pages) on the device. Never once did I switch back to the Kindle.

What does this mean? More than anything, all it really means is that I often stole time to read instead of setting time aside to read. So instead of being uninterrupted for hours, I'd grab chunks of 15, 20, 30 minutes to read a few "pages" on the iPhone. It's not that I don't like the Kindle (I do) - it was just never handy in between baseball games, waiting for the shuttle to arrive, at breakfast, etc.

If given the choice, I'd still choose a larger-form device like the Kindle. I miss the fuller functionality of the Kindle (the iPhone app doesn't include the built-in dictionary, something I grew to enjoy using). But it's notable that even though it was in my backpack the whole time, the iPhone was always more convenient. And I ended up reading 100x more pages on the device than I ever thought I would.

Moral of the story? Listen to Don more often. (He likes his Roku, which is intriguing to me. And of course he happens to think blogging is staging a comeback. The man's a genius, I tell you.)

iPhone and home automation

2009-09-09T08:00:00.000-07:00

When I buckled this summer and picked up an iPhone, I was pretty sure I was doing it mostly for the camera (image and video) and the seamless integration with a number of Google services. I haven't been disappointed on those fronts - but it's been the home automation on the iPhone that's most impressed me.
We moved to California after Google acquired FeedBurner, and the house we bought is in a new development where the builder (Lennar) installed solar panels in every new home. Included with the panels was monitoring by SunPower - for the last two years I've been able to log into SunPower's website to see how much energy we consume each day and how much we produce.

Earlier this year, SunPower released an iPhone app - and it's fantastic. With one click, I can see how much energy we've consumed or produced for the current day/month/year. Hilariously, a few weeks ago our neighbors were walking by and we got to talking about our solar panels (they live in the same model house as we do, but their panels face a different direction due to the arrangement of nearby homes and we were wondering whose panels produced more energy). Robin pulled out her cell phone, and my neighbor's wife pulled out hers - both compared their system's data in real time. (We'd guessed correctly - the neighbors panels produce more energy per day than ours does. And if you're wondering if this was our quintessential only-in-California moment since moving back here in 2007, the answer is yes - yes it was.)

Aside from the eye candy, there's a practical benefit to the app: getting real-time insight into when your home's energy consumption spikes can drive radically different behavior: seeing just how many kWh the dishwasher consumes, or the washer/dryer (all of which are new and are as energy efficient as can be), helped us shift when we used them - thanks to PG&E, we're on a variable rate plan and spend dramatically less per kWh at night than we do during the day. Similarly, we were able to help show our kids the impact things like having the "big" TV on can have (the TV doesn't consume a lot of power, but the stereo that produces the audio sure does). One side effect? They are much more conscientious about when they play the Wii now. :)

The Sonos app is a case where the iPhone app is dramatically better than the product it complements. I cannot rave about our Sonos system enough - though my post from a few weeks after we first got it still pretty much sums up how much I love it. A very minor quibble was the included remote - it's an impressive piece of hardware (it's connecting to the Sonos's private mesh network via WiFi to communicate with each music server), but the UI was frustrating. Searching was cumbersome, as there was no touch screen and you had to use the dial pad to scroll through to find each letter to type out a band name or song title.

The iPhone app, on the other hand, is perfect. From my iPhone, I have complete control over every Sonos zone in the house - and because it's a touch screen, typing in search queries is a breeze. I can control volume for any set of attached speakers, pick which music plays where, you name it - and unlike the bulky Sonos remote, the iPhone is easy to keep in a pocket - which makes switching from radio to Rhapsody to Pandora a snap.

Yesterday I found that Alarm.com has an iPhone app. The alarm company the builder contracted with uses Alarm.com for their Internet monitoring - and though I've used their website a couple times, it's never been that useful for me. But the iPhone app is simple, and useful: one tap to arm the system, one to disarm - and an ability to review past alarm events (arm/disarm by user, sensor activations, overrides, etc.).

I could see this being useful when needing to remotely disable the alarm (to let someone in, for instance) or to monitor alarm activity. On the feature request list, I'd love to see a status window that would show me which sensors were currently in the 'tripped' state (i.e., which windows/doors are currently open) - but I haven't yet poked around enough to see whether that's even possible. (Impressively, if your alarm has any video capabilities, the feeds from those cameras are viewable from the app.)

Last but not least is a nice app called DVR Lite - it's the free version of a for-pay app that's a third-party app built to control your Series III TiVo or TiVo HD. Once you enable network remote control on the TiVo (a feature I didn't even realize the TiVo supported), DVR Lite auto-detects any TiVos on the network and provides you with a fully functional remote for your TiVo:

One of the things that's nice here is, like with the Sonos app, the ability to type on the iPhone screen is far superior to TiVo's Kings-Quest-like up-up-right-right-right-select-down-down-left-left-left-left-select text entry for finding programs. Another nice time saver in DVR Lite is one-click access to TiVo's mobile interface, which makes one-off recording of shows easy (particularly when you're not home to do it on the TiVo directly):

I'm sure there are other apps I'm missing. One I stumbled on that I'll put on Robin's iPhone is the Comcast app (solely to make it easier for her to listen to voicemail at the house when she's not home). What other home automation apps should I know about?

Blogger turns 10

2009-09-03T11:08:00.000-07:00

So... been a tad busy. Still not enough time to catch up, but here's a glimpse into the last month or so:

Blogger was targeted as part of the DDoS attack last month, and I wrote a post on Google's Public Policy blog about our response and what's needed moving forward.
We announced the 10th birthday, and kicked off a series of birthday presents for our users
I announced some significant changes to our DMCA policy, making TechDirt and Plagiarism Today (among others) quite happy
We hosted a press event on Tuesday, where Ev, Biz, Jory, Scott, Louis and Joe joined Siobhan and I to talk about Blogger's first decade. (Scott's write-up is a good review of the proceedings.)
Launched two new partnerships yesterday, SocialVibe and InfoThinker (who have submitted a free app for Blogger users to the App Store) (Side note: I added the SocialVibe gadget to my blog, readers have raised over 2700 gallons of water through Charity:Water. How cool is that?)
Announced a bunch of new stats on the Official Google Blog. (Did you know Blogger reaches over 300 million people per month?)

And there's more to come. Going camping tomorrow, hopefully coming up for air next week.

Ev at Blogger's 10th

2009-09-01T19:57:00.000-07:00

Fun event. Details to follow. :)

-- Posted from my iPhone

Latitude for iPhone - now what?

2009-07-24T15:31:00.000-07:00

In case you missed the news, Google Latitude is now available on the iPhone. Just visit google.com/latitude in your browser and you'll be able to share your location information with your friends, see where they're at on the map, and email/call/SMS them if they're sharing that detail with you. There's an Android version, a Blackberry version, and it also works in the browser on your computer.

One of the challenges to getting value out of this is having friends share info with you. Here's a tip. If you add contacts, select "all contacts" and Latitude will start by showing you all of your correspondents who are already on Latitude (and presumably require less convincing that this is worth doing):

That brings up this screen:

Click the names of the people you want to add and you're good to go - now you'll be able to see where your friends are hanging out.

Last thing to do with Latitude? If you have a blog, add the Latitude badge to your blog so people can see where you are. I've added it to my blog, and this is what it looks like:

The Latitude Badge site includes a one-click add to Blogger, or you can copy the embed code to add it to whatever platform you use. Easy!

Blogger and adult content

2009-07-21T18:30:00.000-07:00

Last week, a Blogger user posted about her impending departure from Blogger. A Blogger "interstitial" began appearing before users could visit her site, warning of potentially objectionable content. Becky believed the interstitial to be politically motivated, and many of the commenters tended to agree with her. I tried to clarify in the comments (search on my name to find the comment) on that post:

To be clear: at no time are any classifications applied to blogs because of their political views. That would be the antithesis of why Blogger was founded ten years ago, and is contrary to everything the team believes about giving our users a platform on which they can speak their mind.

I published my e-mail address on that comment, and in the last week have not received a single e-mail - from Becky or from anyone commenting there. Her post was picked up on Instapundit, and in announcing that she has shut down the blog today, others joined the conversation (Simple Justice, RedState, and Popehat to name a few). The common thread appears to be the conviction that Google was attempting to shut down a blog because we didn't agree with the views expressed on the blog.

To be clear: we wholeheartedly endorse an individual's right to express themselves. As I stated in the comment on Becky's first post, I would hate to lose Becky's voice in the blogosphere, and would be even more disappointed if Blogger's actions in any way contributed to her deciding to stop blogging.

That said, Blogger acted exactly as set out in our Terms of Service and our Content Policy: "there are some boundaries on the type of content that can be hosted with Blogger. The boundaries we've defined are those that both comply with legal requirements and that serve to enhance the service as a whole." We specifically outline the scenarios in which an interstitial will apply, including "image and video content that contains nudity" and point out that "we may put such content behind an interstitial."

We didn't take the blog down. We didn't prevent people from reading it (as evidenced by the many comments left on both of her most recent posts). We have in no way acted to prevent, restrict or otherwise skew the debate happening on her blog or any of the others discussing this that are hosted by Blogger. We simply responded to the fact that a number of posts there do, in fact, contain nudity. Visitors to the site flagged the blog as containing objectionable content, and as set out in our TOS, blogs that contain nudity may contain an interstitial to let readers know what they will find when they click through.

I want to be as clear as I can possibly be: I want Blogger to be a platform to encourage the free flow of ideas. Healthy debate from across the political spectrum is absolutely critical in a free society, and I'm proud that millions of users around the world rely on Blogger to publish their opinions.

Update: On Twitter, @popehat suggests that I should have realized that the people complaining were idealogically opposed to Becky (here and here) and that I should have personally used my discretion (here) to ignore those flags and chosen not to apply our TOS to the situation. As I responded, I can't see how us subjectively applying our standards helps anyone, as it would lead to precisely the situation we're accused of: deciding which ideas we embrace, and which peoples' opinions are worth paying attention to. I'd much prefer to objectively apply our stated policies to each situation, so that everyone involved - our users, the readers of blogs, us - know exactly what to expect.