old.ellsworthlink.net

Google is no longer a naughty word in the Hobokenite Ellsworth household.

Just sayin’…

In keeping with how much we are enjoying and using our phat new camera, we are doing lots of video recording. And, in trying to keep up with how much certain people are asking us for new pictures, I’ve been collecting lots of stuff to post I just haven’t had time to do it. (If you think Colin is busy, you should see his poor parents!)

Anyway, this video features:

• Colin saying two different 3-syllable words
• Colin demonstrating his almost incalculable intelligence by pointing out a difficult shape (after being prompted by his mother)
• Expert usage of a computer keyboard
• A very redneck-sounding laugh-track

Well, actually, that’s the question. How do you read your news? In the last week or so there have been some interesting pieces of news/opinion that have come out in the media world that prompt my curiosity.

One is an opinion piece from AdAge magazine envisioning a world in which Dow Jones folds the print version of The Wall Street Journal in favor of an online-only edition.

The second is an article from Mediapost announcing topline findings from a recent Pew Research Center for The People & The Press survey that basically states that the web is still a secondary medium for news.

One article seems to contradict the other—although, admittedly, the AdAge article doesn’t give a specific timeline of this imagined conversion to Online-only and the Pew Research study shows an unmistakeable flight to the web from “traditional media”…

In any event, back to the question: how do you get your news?

(Disclosure: I am a big geek, so I tend to read websites for big geeks. One of those sites is the “PowerPage” which is designed for power users of Apple’s portable PowerBook laptop systems.)

In any event, this particular posting has kept me chuckling all morning.

(In an interesting aside, several of you had noticed this posting was posted, yanked and then—now—reposted again. Turns out that the posting at the above link was itself misconfigured and the link went to a blank page listing only the title. So I yanked it until it was fixed. Apologies for any confusion. Though I will tell you this whole thing has kept me happily chuckling into the afternoon. Which is saying something given we close on our condo on Thursday. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!)

David Smeigh emailed this link over to Debra and I—though Debra is quick to point out it was TO me and she was only CC’d—saying it reminded him of us.

I send 160 emails a day. Am I a bad person?

Of course reading this article forced me to go back and take a look at my email habits, which I sometimes feel can be a bit obscene. Take Monday of this week (and I should point out this week has not been one of the busiest in recent memory), I sent 55 emails between 9a and 5p. That’s significantly more than the InformationWeek blogger, but I only had a total of 107 recipients, averaging only about 2 recipients per note.

Not sure what all this tells us, but it is a bit interesting to evaluate the extent to which we are clogging up our colleague’s emailboxes… I think I’m okay.

As you may be noticing right now, we are in the middle of updating the blog here at ellsworthlink.net. The look-and-feel you see now is an interim step to what amounts to a mostly under-the-hood upgrade. I will be updating the template you are used to seeing so that it works with the new version of WordPress (version 1.5.1.3), but it may take me a moment or two. As a result of spending time with the long-neglected code side of the blog, however, I may tinker with the look and feel a bit to see if I can come up with something new.

I will also be working to enable the functionality we had before the upgrade such as email alerts and recent comment listings—and hopefully some new things as well. In the meantime, please let me know if you see something that is flat-out broken. I may have missed it.

One of the many daily feeds I read had an interested piece about an 8-minute video put together by the Museum of Media History. I just finished watching it for a second time and see it as undeniably plausible. It’s also pretty interesting in that it is written as a future history of media from the vantage of 2014 (after the “news wars of 2010″)…

EPIC (the evolving personal information onstruct) is the eventual amalgamation of such indsutry giants as Amazon.com, Google, Blogger.com and Friendster, and represents a guess about how we may be consuming media in 8-10 years.

Take a look. I’m curious what you think. (My favorite line: “In 2014, The New York Times has become a print-only newsletter for the elite and elderly.”)

Deb sent me this article; definitively proving why I am such an idiot. (Hint—it isn’t the pot part of this article.)

It does make some interesting points about feeling “tired and lethargic” from being constantly interrupted—I can see that. Since reading the article, I’ve tried to be very conscious about not interrupting my workflow each time I hear the new email chime and I have increased my productivity twelve-fold. Okay, not really, but it has seemed to have an impact.

Also interesting to me that this research was sponsored by HP, which has long touted it “always on internet infrastructure;” I wonder if the gentleman who signed that research check still has a job…