Four Reasons the Pre Might Save Palm

By Ken Stewart of ChangeForge (Twitter/FriendFeed)

In Palm’s recent keynote, Jon Rubinstein and Ed Colligan announced Palm’s bold new smartphone, the Pre. After what seemed like an eternity of languishing products and dying market share, Palm announced it’s intent to fight its way back to life.

While recent numbers indicated that PalmOS barely even appeared as a blip on the radar of worldwide smartphone sales (Gartner results Q3 2008), Palm may have itself a game changer. But does a piece of hardware, or even their new WebOS, constitute a lifeline for the battered Palm? Not a chance; their win must come from much deeper within.

When Apple introduced its revolutionary iPhone and OS, they knew competition would be on their heels. Soon after Research in Motion released its lukewarm attempt to compete, the BlackBerry Storm.

In watching Palm’s keynote, what sets them apart is not their product, but the platform on which they stand – a paradigm shift in how to impact your life and maybe their destiny. Colligan lists 4 key things that set Palm apart.

1. Know your competition:

Another innovator, SouthWest Airlines, understood that its greatest competition was not other airlines, but ground transportation. It understood that people flew to save time, and that people chose ground transportation because it was cheap and you could leave at your choosing.Colligan points out that Palm knew it was not competing with the personal computer when it launched, rather Palm’s competition was pen and paper, at that time. A thought process like that is what hallmarks the game-changers in any industry.

2. Simplify people’s lives:

People’s lives are complex and fast-paced. We have information stored in many different places and are often torn between merging the data to achieve congruency and silo-ing the information to attain some level of separation in the varied facets of our lives.

From offering conduits which connect your disparate web services together to mechanisms which avoid duplicate data, Palm seeks to help you view your content holistically – while allowing you the option to filter and compartmentalize as you see fit.

3. Make the technology invisible:

"Fingers, not buttons. Pockets not processors," Colligan quips, exemplifying their focus on making the device interact with you and not forcing you to interact with the device.By optimizing the user experience, both in hardware and software, Palm strives to achieve a state of just being. Whether seeking to interact with the platform as a phone or full-featured information kiosk, the Pre could very well offer options to students of efficiency the iPhone might have missed.

While hardly minimalist, Palm subscribes to the notion of, "Technology that works well should get out of the way."

4. Know thyself, and to thine own-self be true:

"Mobile is in our DNA," Ed boldly states. Palm knows who it is and what it does; the Pre is an attempt to not simply state what Palm does, but what Palm does better than anyone else!Until this announcement, Palm had been quietly fading away, until most had written it off. Rubenstein and Colligan deftly dodge the long absence with talk of what Palm does well, which partners are in place, and how focused they are on the Palm developers and ecosystem as a whole.

So not only is Palm being true to itself, they are hoping to once again revolutionize the way in which the smartphone market is thought of. They acknowledge that while product is important, Palm’s platform is the stage upon which success is built. Only time will tell, but the future looks bright for Palm and the Pre. Their most certainly is a steep mountain to climb in a combative market that won't pull any punches.

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Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. To learn more about Ken, visit his about page. You may also find Ken on FriendFeed, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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Disgruntled NFL Fans Take Out Frustrations On Wikipedia

Like any good sports fan, tonight, I've been watching the NFC divisional playoff game between the Arizona Cardinals and the Carolina Panthers. The Panthers, despite a regular season record of 8-0 at home on their way to the playoffs, saw their season end, as the Cardinals put on a drubbing, winning 33-13. Making the problem worse was the Panthers' quarterback, Jake Delhomme, who turned the ball over an amazing six times, including a fumble and five interceptions. And while Arizona led by doing the damage on the field, angry Panthers fans have done even more damage, defacing Delhomme's Wikipedia page.



Delhomme's Wikipedia page has lain relatively dormant going into the playoffs, seeing only the occasional update for career statistics, and additions for the recently completed season. But as the game started to slip away, with the Cardinals going into halftime with a 20 point lead, his page started to be vandalized, with changes taking place practically every ten minutes over the last two hours. The changes, which you can see in the page's history, range from false definitions of his last name, including "pussy juice" and "asshat", to pure complaints about tonight's game.



One comment, since deleted, says, "Jake Delhomme sucks so much that he made is team lose to the Arizona Cardinals in 08. He sucks horribly!" (sic). Another adds, "Jake the fake sucks and I hope he gets fired!!!!", while a third refers to him as "the worst Q.B. in the league!" This of course, is not true, given his 15 TDs and 3,288 yards in the regular season, according to the still-intact NFL.com.


Wikipedia's live editing feature can no doubt be tantalizing to people who want to muck with a famous person's reputation. Stephen Colbert has had lots of fun encouraging watchers of the Colbert Report set up new pages on Wikipedia, or alter existing ones.


As noble as Wikipedia's initial goals were, to replace the encyclopedia online with a group-edited repository, its open rules have left it open for any nutjob to write that Delhomme "can't seem to do anything against the cardinals today. he's a female dog.", or change the pronunciation of his name to "Del-HOMO". It's no secret why many teachers, including my wife, tell their students to stay far away from using the site as a reputable source.

And if you're a professional athlete, be sure you never have a bad game, just to save face online.

10 Ways to Maximize Your Google Reader Link Blog

I've been sharing articles I've read in Google Reader for the better part of two years. I don't know exactly when I started, but I'm fairly sure I'm nowhere near finished. And while I admittedly started sharing to a link blog without having a clear goal in mind, I'm finding that this massive shared items repository is becoming an incredibly versatile information hub that benefits me, the authors of articles I've shared, and the consumers, be they friends in Google Reader, or in many other locations.

I believe that while Google Reader has grown in visibility, arguably becoming the most popular RSS reader on the Web, the utility of shared link blogs is less known. Here are ten ways you can maximize your Google Reader link blog - most of which I'm doing, and probably didn't anticipate when I first started sharing items into the ether.

1. Act as a trusted information filter.

Regardless of how fast a reader you are, there is no possible way you can read every single news source and blog on the Web. Neither can anybody you know. And regardless of how closely your feed match percentage is on Toluu, there are feeds you read that your friends don't. By sharing the best items of what you read every day from Google Reader, you are hand-selecting the best of the Web and "endorsing" those items to your link blog subscribers.

Do so with some regularity, and you might be surprised as to how people come to rely on your manual intervention and news discovery. I first became cognizant of this in February when "SeekGround" reported "I discovered that I had shared more of louisgray's shared items than anyone else's in the last 30 days". In May, Duff's Device similarly wrote: "I saw another article that I received from Louis Gray'sGoogle Reader Shared Items again. Thanks for keeping on top of the world for me Louis. :-)"

As of tonight, ReadBurner reports I have nearly 8,500 articles shared on my Google Reader link blog. While there are others who have shared more total items, I know that I have shared those items I believe are most interesting to me, and others I believe are following along.

2. Share your items with Google Friends.

Though Google hasn't nailed the "what is a friend" issue, you can add friends through GMail and Google Talk. If they are also Google Reader users, and share items, you can opt in to seeing their Google Reader shares, and they can see yours. If they subscribe to your shared items, your shares are mixed in with all the other feeds on their list. Of course, if you don't want to see their lists, click "Hide" next to their name, or "Show" to bring them back.



3. Embed your Google Reader link blog to your own blog or Web site.

When I first started sharing to my link blog, I had this odd feeling I was sharing posts and nobody knew about it. After all, the link blog URL isn't the most intuitive on the planet. But you can embed a widget on your blog to display a subset of your recently shared items, and visitors to your blog can click out to items you've shared.

4. Add your Google Reader link blog to your Google profile

Your Google profile is a fairly blank slate, for you to add or delete as you please. While it's very common for people to add links to their Twitter page, their blog or their LinkedIn profile, I'd suggest it's just as important to add your link blog to the page. Mine is here.

5. Share items to Facebook, FriendFeed or Socialmedian.

2008 was the year of personal news aggregators, which took updates on your services from around the Web and put them all in one place. While this trends was best exemplified by FriendFeed, Facebook also offers the option to feature your Google Reader shared items, and Socialmedian will pull them in as news, going so far as to check the shares by topic to place them in the right categories.

You can see my Google Reader shares on FriendFeed here. And to avoid duplication of items, if I share items from louisgray.com, I manually delete them from FriendFeed. Takes seconds, and reduces the noise. (My Socialmedian page is here...)

6. Add your share count to ReadBurner, RSSmeme or Feedheads.

Feedheads, the pioneer in tabulating popular Google Reader share counts, was joined by ReadBurner and later RSSmeme, in early 2008. As some people are turning to ReadBurner and RSSmeme as a democratically sorted Digg or Techmeme, sharing items you like will add your vote to the list.

Be sure to add your feed to ReadBurner here.

7. Replace your bookmarks with Google Reader shared items.

At the end of the year, I said that RSS Has Practically Eliminated My Need for Browser Bookmarks. As I thought about it more, it's my Google Reader Link blog that is essentially my rolling bookmark list, highlighting those items which are the best, and which I will want to return to. While Delicious is also a good Web-based bookmarking system, the link blog is a good way to find recent items of interest.

8. Expand the visibility of lesser-known sources.

Sometimes, I get in a routine of reading my RSS feeds and then sharing, without thinking about how the shares are effecting the downstream author. But I've gotten e-mails saying the shares have generated attention beyond what I expected. Last month, one blogger wrote, "When you pop an article on (the linkblog), I'll get 60-70 hits and get pumped to the first page, that is pretty averge for the support you give me." Earlier this week I got a similar e-mail from a second author, who wrote an e-mail titled "Thanks yet again", adding "Your Google Reader share really lit up that discussion."

In a tech blogging world where there are so many different sources of news, and so many people writing about the exact same thing, you can make a difference by choosing lesser-known sources of news, and highlighting the best content, not just the loudest. I've tried to share items from those who have done original reporting or are thinking differently than the echo chamber, and it in turn can deliver greater visibility.

9. Use your linkblog as your "to comment" list.

As part of my online new year's resolution, I said I would be making more time to comment on other blogs through the year. But as you know, my full-time job doesn't work all too well with browsing the Web and making comments throughout the day. Instead, I've found I'll go back to my own Google Reader linkblog, and open the items in a new tab, and go through to add comments one by one, left to right, so I've given the authors feedback and participated.

10. Create your own leaderboard of news sources.

Google Reader tracks statistics on what your most-shared news sources are over the last 30 days, which can report on who you've found most interesting in the last month. Given each person's individual tastes, the results can be very different than more public leaderboards which tend to feature those who are most popular and have a deeper subscription base. While my own link blog does tend to feature popular sites like TechCrunch, Scobleizer and ReadWriteWeb, I can see that I've also shared a high number from lesser-known sites, including TechWag, Regular Geek, The Future Buzz, Andy DeSoto and Chuqui 3.0. And if you're stat-oriented like I am, you can check in and see how this changes over time. (See my blog leaderboard from last July)

So... are you sharing your Google Reader items? I am. You can find mine here. For the betterment of the community, it'd be great to see your shared item links in the comments.

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DISCLOSURE: I am an advisor to ReadBurner.

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Looking For a Job? Yes, Indeed!

By Phil Glockner of Scribkin (FriendFeed/Twitter)

For the past few months I have trying to discover more local social media blogs and bloggers. I live very close to Austin, Texas. You might think that, with SXSW and all, there would be a lot.. but the going is slower than you might think. Anyway, a good place to start is with geekaustin and Austin Startup.

It was from the second blog that I learned about Indeed, a great new job search site based, you guessed it, here in Austin.

Indeed has been described as "the Google of job search" and I find the comparison apt. Indeed initially presents you with a very simple search page, just asking for a job title or keyword, and a location.

However, more powerful tools lie behind the facade. Once you have your search underway, there is a very flexible search refinement tool that lets you adjust salary requirements, job type, company and more. Note that I have not mentioned the following things that most other job search sites require:

• Create an account
• Create a profile
• Upload a resume
• Indicate your availability to work
• Keep an old version of your resume floating around forever
  

You have probably figured out the downside of this as well -- Indeed is not in the business of submitting your application for a job. Once you find a job you like, you click through and follow the instructions to apply for the job you want. However, this does free up Indeed to find jobs from as many different sites and services as possible, which gives you a more comprhensive picture of what is available.

Since Indeed is focused only on search, they also have a few tools to track job data. They have charts and graphs that monitor both salary ranges for job titles according to region, as well as cool keyword use over time.

Say for example that you have experience with RSS feeds, you can search for 'RSS ATOM' and end up with a chart like this one:



Now you might notice that the number of jobs looking for 'RSS ATOM' experience is a very small percentage of the total. But what it more interesting is how fast it is growing as a requirement!

As a more humorous example, check out Twitter skills:



In this view I selected percentage growth over percent of total.. but the trend is clear, jobs at Twitter or jobs requiring knowledge of Twitter are growing exponentially.

Indeed will allow you to create an account for the express purpose of saving searches, and bookmarking the last time you visited in order to give you a custom view of only the new jobs posted.

Overall, I really think Indeed fills a unique niche, not only for finding a new job, but for a quick 'reality check' on a current job in terms of regional salary and demand.

Read more by Phil Glockner at Scribkin.com.