Archive for January, 2006

MetroFi with service in several Bay Area cities is switching from a fee based access model to free supported by advertising. The article explains the numbers. The concept could become a model for communities like those in Humboldt looking to provide wireless access. It’s easy and cheap enough to install, harder to find a business model that can be sustained. What about all access goes through a portal that offers advertising for local businesses. I think there may already be something like that available…

On the heels of the latest girl disappears because of technology story, comes this gadget that is being marketed to teenagers. It’s a thumbdrive that lets you lock out whomever you want: “Stop anyone reading your diary ever again!” It comes complete with its own MSN Messenger feature.

Scary! (BTW, the girl who disappeared has been found. Probably will be grounded…)
Thanks to Gizmodo.

The Times-Standard had a news story (I refuse to link to them anymore because they move their links behind a fee based archive after 14 days) today about a Eureka High Homecoming Queen who disappeared. Her parents “…have reason to believe that their daughter may have run away with a man from Fremont who she met online at Myspace.com.”

The article continues later: “Two other cases of missing teenage girls in December have been linked to possible predators on Myspace.com. Cox Internet sent out warnings recently to alert North Coast parents of the dangers that may be associated with the website. Neither of those missing 15-year-old girls have been found or have contacted family or friends.”

I am a Cox subscriber and don’t remember getting such a warning. However, these kinds of things have been cropping up since the Internet began. Today the evil site is MySpace.com, in the past it was AOL Chat rooms. It seems like every month we used to read another report of a teenager being lured into some bizarre, even deadly situation through some online vehicle.

Like all of these stories, they raise an alarm, usually directed at the vehicle of the outrage. In this case myspace.com. But is it really the fault of myspace.com? Or AOL? Is your child in more danger hanging out online or hanging out at the local park? I’ve looked around and haven’t found any studies that indicate what percentage of missing children is the result of online encounters. By far, the greatest source of abuse and kidnapping comes from friends and family members.

Still, the one study I have seen referred to claims that 1 in 5 children are approached sexually online. That’s pretty alarming. And this set of statistics really sounds scary.

So, what’s a parent to do? Here are a few simple suggestions:

1- Talk to your children early and often.
2 - Set rules about what they can and cannot do online.
3 - Monitor what they do online. Learn the lingo so you can tell what they are talking about.
4 - Don’t put a computer with online acces in their room. Keep it in a common area.

Myspace.com isn’t going away. AOL chat rooms are still around. Instant Messaging is all the rage. Technologies and online spaces will continue to evolve. Don’t be a victim by pretending they don’t exist or you’re too befuddled by technology to know what’s going on.

Early this morning on my daily run I heard and saw my first flock of geese this year, wheeling over the bay. Does it seem early this year? It’s not even February. Should they be flying north already? Or maybe they’re still flying south. Can someone explain this to me?

So, the ether is filled with memes. The North Coast Journal just came out with an article on all the local blog activity. Hrmph! Mine was not included. Even though my previous post on local blogs scooped their coverage.

I did learn about the new Times-Standard sponsored blogs from the article and that’s kind of interesting. How did I miss that announcement? They are so new it’s hard to tell how valuable they will be and how often they will be maintained. It’s easy to start a blog. It’s much harder to make it interesting, keep it current and find a readership. I should know….

Humboldt County is getting downright Web 2.0 on me. First I discovered a few local blogs. Now I’ve come across a bunch of wikis focused on some aspect of life on the north coast. In case you don’t want to chase that link to the long definition of wikis in Wikipedia (a wiki!), they are sites that allow collaboration and easy editing of web pages. Some wikis are controlled in that you have to register and be approved in order to edit content. Others are open to anyone, though most are monitored by the wiki’s creator and vandalism can easily be dealt with by reverting to older versions of pages.

Anyway, these local wikis have cropped up on wikispaces.com. You can get a good idea of what’s going on there through a simple search for Humboldt. Digging through the resultsl yields a wiki for dog lovers, a wiki for keeping an eye on landlords, and a wiki for organizing a workshop for painting in the great outdoors of Humboldt.

A search on Arcata yields one for the Arcata area soccer community. And one little wiki about parking Nazis?

Wikis have been around for quite a while. So it’s kind of surprising that these things have just started to spring up now. Perhaps it’s a sign that our area is finally more fully adopting to life on the Internet. Of course, the tools have gotten easier and that makes it great for just about anyone who can type, point and click and wants to have a voice in cyberspace.

No, I’m not talking about whether or not the City of Eureka should allow Security National to develop the land which would include a Home Depot. I’m talking about whether it should be called The Balloon Track or the The Balloon Tract.

The last time this property was in the news, most publications and pronouncements used the term tract, as in tract of land. However, the common descriptive name for the property is derived from the ballon shape of the tract defined by a track that runs around its perimeter. You can see the outline in this photo from the North Coast Journal. This archive from October of 2001 provides a great deal of background on the parcel.

I think this name controversy has got to be settled before we can ever come to agreement on how to use it…

A study is currently under way to determine the economic feasibility and potential strategies for getting a second fiber connection for our region. If you’re not aware, it was only in 2004 that SBC finally completed the only fiber line meaning data could be moved off the overburdened microwave towers. This gave us a faster, larger and for the most part, more reliable conduit for data services.

I say reliable for the most part because a single line will always make us vulnerable to being cut off and having all telecommunications disrupted. As a result, the Redwood Technology Consortium and others have been focused on bringing a second line in to the county. Thus the redundant fiber study now under way.

One of the things we have been saying, half jokingly, is that we need redundancy because with a single line we are one errant backhoe away from being cut off. Well, now appears it’s not really a joke after all. Here’s a quote from a Wired article called “The Backhoe: A Real Cyberthreat”:

“A study issued last month by the Common Ground Alliance, or CGA — an
industry group comprised of utilities and construction companies –
calculated that there were more than 675,000 excavation accidents in 2004 in
which underground cables or pipelines were damaged. And an October report
from the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions found that cable
dig-ups were the single most common cause of telecom outages over a 12-year
period ending in 2004, with the number of incidents dropping in recent years
but the severity and duration of the outages increasing.”

With the Internet and other communications so vital to every day life and even morre critical in an emergency, redundant fiber is not a luxury we can afford to wait for.

Because I run a site that indexes other sites about Humboldt County, I come across a number of sites that I otherwise wouldn’t have a clue about. Several blogs (this site is a blog, btw) have recently been added to HumGuide lately, so I decided to create a new sub-category in the Media category. There are 3 there now besides this one. If any of you know of others, please feel free to submit them to HumGuide.

Fred’s Humboldt Blog has been around since March of 2005. Fred is an avowed Libertarian and his posts reflect his perspective. But Fred has a sense of humor about it all and it’s clear he has a real love for the area we live in.
The two other blogs, Buhne Tribune and the Snollygoster Half-Sheet purport to be focused on critiquing local media. Both of them seem more strident and sarcastic than Fred’s blog. That’s OK. They have more ‘attitude’. But what’s disturbing about them is that neither has an identifiable author. Who is Capt. Buhne? And what is a Snollygoster? I haven’t read every post in these blogs so I might have missed something. But if there is some personal information on these sites, it’s not being made obvious. It’s hard to take the opinions seriously without some context for who is voicing them.

Still, I’m happy to see folks entering the dialogue and hope I discover more blogs in the Humboldt space.

A few weeks ago, the City of Eureka unveiled its ‘new’ web site. I have new in quotes because while it is new, complete with a new URL it has the look and feel of an ‘old’ web site. It was built with a proprietary Content Management System (CMS) by a company called Civica Software which specializes in city government web sites.

Don’t get me wrong, the site is a big improvement over the previous one. Still, given they spent quite a bit of money (I have heard $40,000 but have not been able to confirm this), I would have thought some more thought would have gone in to site in terms of functionality and design. And I don’t want to sound like this is sour grapes because our company, which builds web sites, didn’t get the contract for this one. The truth is, we didn’t even have a chance to bid on it. As far as I know, neither did any other local company. So much for supporting the local economy. That part really does make me a little sour. So, maybe that does color my critique. But you can be the judge.

So, what do I mean that the web site looks old, even though it’s new? Primarily, in terms of design, I think it’s the big clunky looking graphical buttons and headers. That style just has a feel of 1998 about it. but that’s really a matter of taste and so very subjective. Objectively, all the graphics makes for a much slower download time. For people on dial-up this can be painful. Additionally, none of the graphics have alternative text in the code. That means if you are surfing the web with images turned off, or if you are sight impaired and using a screen reader, the headings and the navigation will be pretty much inaccessible. This is not a good thing for a government web site.

I am also dismayed at the non-forward looking functionality of the site. A government site should be all about keeping the public informed: Tell us what’s new, tell us what’s happening. Because RSS (Real Simple Syndication - a service that allows someone to subscribe to a page or a site and have new information delivered to them automatically) is not available on the site, I would have to remember to visit the site on a regular basis to check for updates. Very old school. RSS is a great way to stay current with lots of sites. Use of RSS has not penetrataed to the vast majority of Internet users, yet. But a forward looking brand new government web site would be leading the way.

BTW, you can subscribe to this Blog by clickiing on the ‘RSS’ link near the bottom of the right hand column.

Finally, and this one really got to me: The site allows you to subscribe to announcement mailing lists but these are not automated. If you subscribe, someone at City Hall manually adds you to a list in ther Microsoft Outlook application. If you want to unsubscribe, you have to send this person an email and they physically remove you from the list! I guess the assumption is that not too many people will sign up for these lists, so it’s not too labor intensive. But then, that too is not very forward looking.

Gregg Foster, Executive Director of Redwood Regional Economic Development Center has written a reprise of his article (this link will only work for 14 days, after which, the paper moves it to a fee based archive — a rant for another post) from last year on a technology wishlist that would help economic development in Humboldt County. While his article is consistently upbeat stating progress on every ‘wish’, it’s hard to imagine how difficult it might have been to strike this attitude. Not a single wish has been fulfilled. And while some things have moved ahead, it’s not clear that any of them will ever reach fruition. As a disclosue, I am directly involved with a few of these and I too, try to keep a positive approach. Without it, I would have given up long ago, because progress and change are so slow. And when we’re talking about change in technology, speed is everything.

I only hope Gregg’s optimism is rewarded as Humboldt County’s economic future hinges more and more on technological advances while advancement seems harder and harder to achieve.

This article, a report from the CES describes a new phone that will connect to your VOIP carrier like Skype without a computer. With its wireless capability this means you could make free phone calls from any wireless hotspot with just this phone. If you have Skype, and your conversation partner has Skype, this means free phone calls from your favorite cafe with free wireless access. A killer device for people in communities that have free wireless access grids. One more reason for us here on the North Coast to push for this in our communities. Redwood Technology Consortium is working with Eureka to form a plan for such a mesh here. And further on, we’re working to push wireless to other communities and rural areas that have no broadband at all, yet.

I have enabled comments again now that I figured out about the Akismet plugin. I hope it works. I was getting 50 spam comments per day. Very annoying.

I am thinking of reviving this blog. I no longer have a show to focus on. KHSU has been rather confusing about the fate of the show (Talking Tech) which I did for several months in 2004. On the one hand everyone said they thought it was great, should have done it long ago, will get you another producer, etc. On the the other hand, nothing ever happened. I got tired of asking and really, too busy to pursue it.

I do still have a compulsion, though, to talk about things things in public. There may be a psychological disorder that could be applied to this compulsion. Think of all the bloggers, podcaststers and vloggers who could be diagnosed!

Anyway, in anticipation of this revival, I have upgraded to Wordpress 2.0, I have cleaned out all the old comment spam, and am now requiring registration in order to comment. A necessary evil unless I can find a solid plugin for filtering obvious spam. Of course, just after I upgraded I read some things on TechCrunch that disparages WP 2.0.