Tangent time: A long, long time ago, I was part of Austin’s poetry slam scene. And it used to chap me when people would get up and perform pieces about slam poetry. What do you call that when you write about what you write about? (And yes, I’m sure I’ve been guilty of the same — in fact, did I not just write here about how I used to write poetry? Guilty!)

Anyway, I mention that because maybe it’s just some recent case of heightened awareness on my part, but I feel like I have read about nine hundred articles in the past week about the Internet. And yes, I read them on the Internet. But the difference between reading about the net on the net and hearing poetry about poetry is that I actually find the former fascinating.

Some examples are below. Granted I don’t think any of these are brand brand new, cutting edge uses of the Internet. But they are moving from the margins to the center, catching on to the point that New York Times is reporting on them. In fact, of the following, all but one came to my attention via NYT online and, though it’s the paper of note and all that, most anyone will tell you by the time they get their hands on a story, it’s probably been covered before in smaller media outlets. That is, Times coverage is often proof of arrival in the mainstream.

Transforming Art Into a More Lucrative Career Choice
This story highlights how artists, including a 14 year-old custom guitar maker, are using marketing tools — yes, a lot of Web 2.0 stuff — to actually make a living with their art.

You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?
Exciting, scary excerpt from that story: Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize. But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.

Grandpa’s On the Computer Screen
A whole generation of kids is now growing up with cyber grandparents — that is, they’re communicating with tools like Skype and webcams to share virtual playtime with grandparents who, in an earlier era would have to either visit in person or totally miss out.

In Lean Times, Online Coupons are Catching On
Tips on how to get the very best deals and discounts by tracking down coupon codes for online shopping sites.

Cyber Monday Crashes an Online-Shopping Tradition
Apparently there’s an online answer to Black Friday, supposedly the biggest shopping day of the year. According to this post, online retailers slash prices on the Monday after Thanksgiving so folks returning to work resentfully after four days off will have something to do in their cubicles. But there’s a downside — crashing retailer sites galore.

Citizen Journalists Provide Glimpses of Mumbai Attacks
This is an example — Hurricane Ike coverage was another recent one — of how regular people caught in crisis situations are informing the official media with instant updates. It also shows how Twitter has gone from being sort of silly to capable of being a really powerful tool in an emergency.

A Penny for My Thoughts?
Maureen Dowd’s recent column about how some editor in Pasadena fired his hometown staff and is now outsourcing local news reporting to journalists (some not trained as such) in India willing to write for an nth of a percentage of what their predecessors were paid.

I could go on. There’s the story of how Turkey has banned YouTube and how Google (owner of YouTube) has to decide what to post and what to prohibit. There’s the story about how books, most of them anyway, are going away but how this might not be the most awful thing in the world for writers. (I liked that piece, of course.) And the recently settled case of the woman who used MySpace to torture her daughter’s classmate, which, it was alleged, drove the classmate to suicide.

It is, for me, so cool to be witnessing such rapid growth — some of it obviously painful and deviant but so much more of it productive — of this technology over such a short period of time. Like watching a time-lapse image of a blooming flower back in fifth grade science class.

At the risk of sounding like an old biddy, I remember when technological advances were marked by the invention of a telephone cord that could reach all the way across the room so you could simultaneously talk on the phone and cross over to the eight-track player to turn it down. Now this Internet thing? By comparison? Crazy, crazy horse of a different color.

Tacos & Internet photo by dro!d

Now maybe this is a case of sandbagging — maybe Williams is just pretending to worry the way a friend of mine used to pretend to read romance novels in front of her competitors right before she kicked their asses in high school debate competitions. But Evans sounds sincere enough as he talks about what Twitter is, where it’s going, and what his concerns are.

Like some other social networking sites, Twitter is more concerned (for now anyway) with building users and less concerned with finding a revenue stream. In fact, Twitter just turned down a deal offered by Facebook for $500 million (mostly in stock) to be bought out.

Not only that, but Evans says that, as Twitter works to figure out how to make money, for now the company will keep relying on investors’ cash to move forward and avoid taking on ads. That is, as they try to figure out the best way to generate revenue, they will only spend private funds rather than experiment “out loud” with revenue generating.

Also, Evans totally admits to being wildly worried that any minute now some competitor is going to launch a microblogging site that will, in his words, kick Twitter’s butt.

It’s nice to hear some real honesty out there, especially from a company that, while it only has 25 employees now, seems on the verge of exploding. And still, they have the wisdom not to let hubris get in the way. Or, to put it in Tweet format (140 characters to be precise):

Ev — thanks for telling us what you’re really thinking. Nice change esp in light of all those Wall Street clowns that BSed the world. Bravo.

For starters, Ozar had a lot of gear, which, even after downsizing, proved too unwieldy to store in CC’s locker space. And it was too expensive to simply leave sitting out. But a bigger concern was that, as the space became more popular — it started being used for after-hours events which brought hundreds of non-coworkers into the space. These folks are no doubt for the most part are good people but there’s always that element of concern that arises when one’s work area could potentially be compromised by strangers.

This concern grew as Ozar found the space unlocked on some occasions when it shouldn’t have been and twice found strangers sleeping there. This made him worried for his own personal security, so he called it quits.

And not long ago CitizenSpace in San Francisco some guy — maybe homeless, maybe not — was setting up camp as a free drop-in way too regularly, disrupting others, eating food that wasn’t his, and using the shower. Apparently he’d done the same at the Hat Factory. No one wants to be a jerk about judging folks using the space, but it became pretty clear, pretty fast, that this guy was there to sleep, eat, and bathe, not contribute to collaboration. Eventually, after many attempts to politely get him to scram, the cops were called.

All businesses are subject to unwanted “clients” that have to be dealt with. There are all sorts of responses ranging from compassionate to frustrated to firm to scared-enough-to-call-in-the-cops. It’s a total drag, but it happens. As we contemplate how to best deal with the situation when it’s our turn at LaunchPad Coworking, it brings to the surface those uncomfortable feelings of boundaries — how to make them, how to keep them, how many are too many, and how to be fair.

I’m tired of the fear culture that’s pervaded our country for the past nine years. I want to believe that the vast majority of folks are going to have their hearts and minds and coworking attitudes in the right place when they show up. But I’m also limiting the number of employees who have keys to the place, and I’m installing a scanner so non-key employees can be tracked when coming or going. A police state? Hardly. Just an effort to keep track. We also have set hours, which helps a lot. We won’t have to keep track of who’s got keys since we don’t have 24-hour access.

I guess this is all part of the shaping of coworking spaces, the learn-as-we-go method of figuring out what’s going to work best — to hopefully strike a balance between security and openness. It’s great that so many coworking spaces have an open-door policy for drop-ins, and it sucks that such openness is bound to come with drawbacks.

What are your secuity concerns regarding coworking? Have you found any brilliant solutions?

She says, of corporate career structure:

…organizational hierarchy isn’t what it used to be. That is because, in two short generations, the face of the corporate work force has been transformed, partly by the presence of more women and aging baby boomers in the work force, the arrival of Generation Y and workers’ changing attitudes.

She goes onto describe “Corporate Lattice,” a concept created and implemented by her company. The idea is that growth in one’s career no longer needs to embrace the old ladder metaphor with the goal being to climb up, up, up (or else be stepped on by those more ambitious). Lattice appeals to workers whose vision goes beyond the succeed-at-any-cost model, one in which hours designated for friends, family, and interests outside of work took a backseat. Benko explains:

While a so-called plateau or lateral move, or a move downward, was once viewed as the end of the line, today’s employees are more apt to reach a comfortable level of responsibility and compensation and stay there for a while to balance work and life demands. Later, many resume their upward climb — or not.

Benko packs a lot of food for thought into her piece, including both statistical and empirical proof. I like what she has to say because it lends some corporate weight to an idea often relegated to Style sections of newspapers or feel-better-about-yourself women’s magazines. That is, it’s part of a growing body of information examining how the yearning for life/work balance is not merely the dream stuff of hippies and slackers. Plenty of “normal” 9-to-5ers — and those they work for — seem to be getting the hang of the notion that there’s more to life than work.

This is heartening. It’s heartening on the coworking front because at the heart of the coworking movement is an inherent understanding of the future of work, and how that future is going to include plenty of variations on a theme that for a very long time was overly structured by the clock and overly managed by uptight managers. It’s also heartening in a more general way. We are lucky to be at a place in history that’s like that moment in a time-lapse movie they showed us in fifth grade. The moment when the flower suddenly blooms, the tipping point.

Sure the changes didn’t happen overnight and there’s still a long way to go before 9 to 5 and cubicles become antiquated, laughable moments of the past. But we’re getting there, and right now is a lovely growth spurt moving at a rate we can clearly see as it occurs.

The arrival of Lattice illustrates this point. As Benko says:

This approach provides a framework for organizations and their people to know their options, make choices and agree on trade-offs in four career dimensions — pace, workload, location/schedule and role — ensuring that value is created for both employer and employee. It acknowledges that workers’ priorities change over time.

That’s right, welcome to doggie social networking.

There’s a new radio frequency identification tag that dog owners can place on their four legged best friends for both monitoring and friend-making purposes. Each SNIF tag gives off a unique signal. If your dog is wearing one and comes upon another dog also wearing one, each dog’s tag captures and stores information from the other dog’s tag. Later, the owners can upload the info and find out about each other to decide if they’d like to get in touch.

The tag also allows humans to keep track of their homebound pets while they (the humans that is) are away at work, checking to see if the pup is active, if the dog walker came by, and even sizing up how their dog’s life compares to other SNIF-wearing dogs in the vicinity.

The starter kit sets owners back about $300 and another $90 per year to continue services. Now if we could just get a version of the iPhone that was dewclaw friendly…

And even some of the attempts we do make don’t always pan out so well. For instance, I really wonder about all those reusable bags people are buying. Do they remember to actually bring them back to the store and reuse them? And when they do finally wear out, will they just get tossed out with everything else? Landfills of the future — packed to the gills with environmentally friendly bags!

Sometimes, when we’re lucky, green comes right to our doorstep, making the goal to be planet friendly a little more attainable. Case in point — those new blue recycle-just-about-everything monster rolling trashcans the City of Austin is distributing. I am SO in love with mine. Every time I get to recycle something else and just plop it in, without sorting it or trying to read the tiny number on the bottom of a plastic container, I’m like a little kid heading off to an ice cream party.

Well AlterNet is reporting another new, super-easy-to-access tool you can use to go greener. In Finding the Best, Local Food Near You Just Got Easier, Tara Lohan gives the scoop on the Eat Well Guide. Eat Well is a way you can, without even getting up from your beloved computer, tap directly into local food sources that offer smart, healthy food options that are good for you and the environment. They even provide maps to nearby locations.

I popped over to Eat Well, punched in my zip code (78722) and requested results within ten miles of my home. In seconds, a page came up indicating I had the following choices:

5 Bakers
1 Community Garden
7 Farmers
12 Stores
7 Caterers
8 Farmers’ Markets
2 Personal Chefs
1 Co-op
7 Restaurants

And there were some other options, too, like CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) and educational centers.

To check for accuracy, I drilled down a little. First, I clicked on co-op and, as I suspected, got a link to Wheatsville. One more click and I got a Google Map to the store. (Not necessary since I could find it in the dark, blindfolded, but still, handy for newcomers.)

The dozen stores listed as places to buy locally grown and produced food were all accurate, too, ranging from the PeoplesRx to Whole Foods and Central Market locations and even to the storefront of our beloved Austin Soup-er hero, The Soup Peddler aka David Ansel.

It’s a great site, easy to navigate, with fast, good results. Cool way to get green without having to install a worm farm in your backyard or rig some homemade solar panels because you can’t afford the real deal. And you have to eat, anyway, so might as well take the time to eat right and shop local while you’re at it.

Speaking of which — what are your favorite local green-friedly establishments?

What’s your score?

Typealyzer is far simpler to use than MB, since you just type in a url and get a response pretty quickly. What, exactly, you’re supposed to do with the results is not clear. Oh, they try to make it clear on the about page but I suspect this page was originally written in another language and then run through Babelfish (which we were just talking about in another post.) Or maybe it was written in English — by a drunken Swede. Hard to tell, but here’s just one example of the “helpful” interpretation info they offer on the about page:

If you should cook a fantastic dinner to your friends, you have to keep an eye on the details, the time it takes for the various dishes, that you have prepared all the ingredients and if someone is an allergic.

For what it’s worth, the LaunchPad Coworking blog came up as ESTP, aka The Doers, which, according to Typealyzer, means our site is:

The active and play-ful (sic) type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities. The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

Funny what happens when you type http://www.typealzer.com into the system. You get—that’s right—an error message:

Detected language Thai. The only supported languages are English and Swedish. But stay tuned, we are expanding.

What’s your Myers-Briggs profile? And your site’s?

Voice recognition is nothing new. Call 411 and odds are high you have to deal with some dumbass computer chick who embodies (or, actually disembodies) artificial unintelligence. She asks what you want, you tell her, and she either gets it wrong or doesn’t get it at all, leading to One moment please, one moment please… while you’re redirected to a human, which is what your original goal was anyway. For some reason, this just does not tickle our funny bones the same way well-intentioned, poorly executed Google voice searches do.

On the other hand, the humor is akin to Alta Vista’s BabelFish, the language translator. For that program, you type something in your native language and translate to any number of other languages. If you don’t happen to be bilingual, you won’t be able to catch the errors. But if you take the translation, feed it back in, and request that it be switched back to English, it can get pretty wacky.

For example type in:
Excuse me, is that a cow you’re wearing on your head? Will you please pass the butter?

Now translate to Spanish:
Excúseme, es que una vaca you’ ¿el re usar en su cabeza? ¿Usted pasará por favor la mantequilla?

And now back to English:
Excúseme, is that one is vacant you’ re to use in its head? You will pass butter please?

Similarly, the Google App, while surprisingly successful in many instances, does offer up its fair share of gaffes and misunderstandings. So, while I said, Olivia Newton John and immediately received the official ONJ website as my first hit, when Michael tried Bangladesh, the search returned results for plenty of fish.

I think if you speak into the mic as if talking to a very old, stone deaf relative who doesn’t speak English as a first language, you might have better results. And, neat side feature, during the search the screen displays a visual of your audio — that is you can see a graph of your tones going up and down. Speak too softly and you get a sort of flat line effect.

Julie’s played with it the most, and here are some of her results:

I
I’m thinking there’s a game waiting to be invented in all this. Remember the “Magic iPod Game” invented in honor of those old Magic Eight Balls? The gist of it was, you ask a question out loud in front of friends. Then you hit shuffle on the iPod and a song comes up which reveals your answer. So maybe you ask, Should I break up with my boyfriend? and you get, Hit the Road Jack, and, voila, you show your boyfriend the door. (And later, when he finds out how you came to your decision, he takes a hammer to your iPod.)

So what game can we come up with here with this new app?

In the past few days alone, a number of pieces in the New York Times have scrutinized everything from where the kids might attend school to how much smaller, tighter, and more impenetrable Obama’s security bubble has become. His Chicago home is now a fortress, barricaded three blocks out. He and his wife take thirty Secret Service agents to dinner with them.

And then there’s the tech side of the new President’s life, a side that affects both the personal and the political. Twittering, texting, and YouTubing were all instrumental in the making of the President 2.0. Via these platforms record-breaking funds were raised, the message of hope went viral and, on the private side, Obama could stay in touch with his closest friends easily while on the road for two years.

Looks like most of that is about to change. As reported by Jeff Zeleny odds are very high that Obama is soon going to have to part ways with his Blackberry, a device of which he is more than a little fond. Why? Zeleny writes:

In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

On the other hand, maybe Obama’s Twitter account — reportedly down to a trickle of tweets since the election — might come back to life, provided the messages are innocuous and posted by an aide. And all is not totally eLost: Marshall Kirkpatrick reports that the “fireside chat” — long a presidential communication staple beamed out over the radio waves — will be videotaped and aired on YouTube. Could be interesting to watch the video comments these regular postings inspire.

Meanwhile, poor Obama — could you imagine giving up texting and emailing after being so wired for so long?