manticore.ca

I just happened to be reading some Twitter posts and one came screaming at me. Social media is in it’s infancy at the moment and while folks are calling it a game changer in terms of delivering opinion or information to the masses, one really should look to the past for how other game changers have fared.

Now the tweet in question posted an opinion, if the platform was bought, the bandwidth paid for, why should the content be free. So effectively, old school brick and mortar econonomics are being rehashed and being delivered by a free service.

So what is content. Kinda dumb question because it’s either an opinion or it’s a factual dissertation. A movie review is content, the score of the baseball game is content, pros and cons of universal healthcare is content. Content for all intents and purposes is a deliverable.

The sixty-four thousand dollar question, the holy grail, the whole encilada has been to convince people to fork over dead presidents to keep food on the table and pay the rent, in exchange for this content.

For the most part it won’t happen.

The difference between a professional news journalist and the average blogger is really style, consistent type setting, and years of experience pulling off deadlines. They are two separate animals, with the only thing in common is publishing an opinion.

Take me, just a highschool graduate with some vocational training in welding, no where close to being a journalist. Yet here I am publishing an opinion post on a domain that I own, with a host that I pay ten bucks a month for, and typing this as I speak on an iPhone.

After I click save, google will index it and display it on it’s search pages for you the reader to enjoy and the spammers to do what they usually do. What exactly am I saying differently than the professionals, bearing in mind that we are talking content, not gloss, that I should shoot for this being a paid deliverable.

Not that my site is going to give a professional a case of stress, but there are a lot of folks out there just like me giving you an opinion if you want to read it. Add more bandwith, a few more tools and some curious people and we become the fourth estates sum of all fears.

Will some folks get paid for opinion, I would have to say yes. Some things can’t be quantified by the average person, but a select few can. But my guess is that they will not be delivering content per se, but will be a brand that people want their content from. Stock market ouigi boards for arcane financial dealings, I’d have no problem subscribing to the WSJ. Sports picks for the office lotteries, again special content from ESPN would be worth money.

Other than that, Darwin rules the roost.

Information wants to be free, has not changed since it was coined those many years ago and it won’t change in that many years into the future. What will change is how people want to change the way money is made.

How, no idea.

But if there is justice, the person that ultimately finds that holy grail and becomes a billionaire, was laid off in the past year and had an epiphany.

If you have for some reason following Perez Hilton on twitter, then you have been graced with epic rending screams regarding his cell service.

Back in the day, a company called Danger brought out a device called the sidekick and the most recent incantation of the device known as the sidekick2 is probably one of the first cloud devices. Stuff that any other phone would have on local drive is stored in a central server location, some where in the clouds and can be accessed at anytime.

Well what should not have been able to happen, happened. Who knows at this time what actually happened, but Microsofts servers deleted everyones data and folks that know are saying that it’s gone, simply gone.

Hopefully for those customers of T-Mo this is still early and that their data can be recovered, but it’s a faint hope at best. T-mobile has gone into damage control mode, allowing disgruntled customers to opt out of contracts with no fee, providing regular cell phones to others that are staying and halting sales of the device in question.

Other than expecting a class action lawsuit against T-Mobile and Microsoft, the owner of the sidekick, this one is going to send a shockwave through the computing industry.

This should in no way absolve the owners of the sidekick who lost data from any blame. To keep personal and business data on any device, without backing it up to a local hard drive is criminal enough in itself. Perez Hilton replying to one tweet, stated that T-mo assured him that he would never need to do that, and naively he believed them, the result for him is over 2000 contacts of email and phone numbers gone, and in his industry that’s a huge loss.

This is a clarion call for everyone, no matter who you are or the type of data you have, email contacts or recipes , cloud computing is the next generation of personal computing and it’s your responsibility to back up your data to a secured secondary location or burn it to a DVD, it may even spark an industry spin off that provides a means of doing this.

Tux

Well since the auto industry decided to give me a stress break, I find myself thinking about new applications for the iPhone and taking advantage of some of the newer software thats coming out.

Probably the highlight of an otherwise lackluster mac world was the release of iPhoto. Just another photo manipulation and data base program with one difference.

Facial recognician.

For folks that have large collections, the program will scan and locate individuals and place them or rename them to your liking.

While you can find out more via official sources, my point was that this technology can be adapted for other uses. As i was reading my news feeds, i came across an application for the iPhone that will help people identify what birds they are seeing in their back yards.

A fusion of location settings using the built in capability of the phone, plus a database on what should be native or migratory to that geographic locus lets you discover if you have an african or english swallow roosting around.

Now lets take it one step further shall we. Notice the avian in question and take a snap via the iphone camera, oops ya that sucks at the moment but it wont always, besides just upload it after taking a shot with the point and shoot to the web, that should have an account that you set up with the iPhone and you can view it later, work with me here.

Next the photo gets scanned with iPhoto and compares it, so you should have a match on the iPhone telling you what the bird is , native to your region or migratory and is there any warnings attached to this bird from state or local health departments, should the aforementioned bird be diseased.

Kay, i gave you the idea, now go code it.