by Gigi L. Johnson | Jan 31, 2009 | Innovation Shifts
This could happen to me — I can see this now. I make a typo in a database and accidentally write “/” — and suddenly everything goes wrong on my website.
But I’m not Google. They did this around 6:30 am PST today and typed “/” in a database that identifies malware. And around the world, every search for about an hour on Google identified everything as malware, since every address has a / in it.
Twitter buzzed, but wasn’t too helpful. Lots of things were hypothesized. TechCrunch beat all the press to the table out of their Belgian office. Their posts were helpful, not as much from their stories, but from their comments from the whole world pinging in as to the fact that this was happening around the world.
Users were confused in all timezones. Was this my computer? Should I reboot? Should I complain to my ISP?
Google finally ‘fessed up and said no, it wasn’t stopbadware.org’s database. That site was crunched as many users went there for information, so was of no help. No, someone at Google put a “/” in their database. Their quality control folks were able to identify this and fix it in about an hour total. Blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html.
An hour? In Google Internet time, that’s a big outage for a small glitch.
I had another temporal Google glitch last week. The dates in my Google News search on the left hand side were from the 1800’s — really. When I clicked them, it brought up newspaper articles culled from archives and digitized from the 1800’s. After a few searches, that feature went away. (It was cool, and I’m not sure of why this accident drifted in.)
Glad to hear that Google wasn’t hacked. Disturbed at the ripples. Amused at the temporal impact.
by Gigi L. Johnson | Jan 26, 2009 | Innovation Shifts
This Comedy Central piece from Jan. 21, 2009, with Stephen Colbert daring us to NOT mash up his audio book and video of his two-week earlier interview with Lawrence Lessig nearly made me cry from laughing.
Then my co-worker, looking over my shoulder, said, “I’m confused. Is he for remixing rights or against them?”
Or is it for or against free marketing in this free market? Where else will this amazing video go?
Great beats and visuals. I was going to say “dude,” but that’s too old fashioned. I am just not as Down as Rap Master Colbert.
P.S. And http://community.colbertnation.com/ has a place for everyone to NOT upload their remixes and you can see all the remixes that everyone has NOT uploaded. 🙂
by Gigi L. Johnson | Jan 23, 2009 | Innovation Shifts
I put together this montage of views of CES, with lots of messaging about Eco-this and Eco-that, as well as small or thin TVs or laptops everywhere.
Enjoy!
CES 2009 – Consumer Electronics Show
by Gigi L. Johnson | Jan 7, 2009 | Innovation Shifts
One of my friends posted on LinkedIn an excellent “Bargain Hunting for Books” story from the New York Times late last month. If you have the market now to buy used books for $.01 or $.25, does that shift tremendous flow from the new book market? Now, my children have no patience to even wait until a book comes out in paperback, but for the rest of us who have longer lifespans to look back on, have we now unleashed our own libraries’ economic value just as we have unleashed the CD collections and hard drives of people all over the digital music world, just with shipping for $3.99?
Another related item is my current life hanging out in dusty stacks of the libraries. The Los Angeles Public Library, in its struggles to keep its shelves full without spending a lot more money, has cut its borrowing time to two weeks. So I’ve been going onto Amazon’s used books to now look at a buy or borrow strategy for books I’ve been wanting to use on my research on connected education. I love WebCat.org, which can tell me which of many libraries a book appears at, then lets me click right there to see if it is available to check out. The amazingly liquid market for used books reflects well the lack of availability in libraries. A friend hinted, and I don’t have the data to support this story, that libraries are having challenges with “rarer” (fewer hanging around Amazon’s used book market) books being “lifted” from library shelves and appearing on the second hand book market as some folks’ personal revenue. Any facts behind this? I wouldn’t be surprised in that over at UCLA’s stacks, many, many books on the more expensive list that I’m looking for are “missing” and haven’t been replaced by the university. In fact, of 20 education books I was looking for, nearly half had disappeared — the expensive half. Hmmm.
All this while I’m working on a textbook proposal. Reminds me of banking — I was told when I got in during 1988 that I’d missed the “good times.”
by Gigi L. Johnson | May 1, 2008 | Innovation Shifts, Tech+Change
I feel very blessed right now. I am so lucky to have the life that I have.
I spent some time at the gym talking with two people. One has just retired at age 58 after having first been a photographer and then a city councilman — and now is waiting for the world to present his next adventure. That resonated with me.
The other is a friend who has spent the past week at the hospital bedside of a 23-year-old niece (single mother of an 8 year old) who was hit in a head-on collision down by San Diego and smashed her leg. The other passengers were mostly badly hurt, with three reconstructed intestines from the seatbelt damage, but all alive in a very bad crash.
We forget how lucky we are.
Then I just got off the phone with a charming person in biz dev at TokyoPop, who may speak in both of my programs. VERY neat guy in a VERY neat business. What other thing could I be doing for a living that would bring me to such broad walks of life? That would allow me to talk with so many interesting people? How very cool!
And I am blessed by technology and life allowing me to have so many wonderful people as precious piece of my puzzles.
A friend at breakfast this week suggested I should be writing a book about how to change your life and supercharge your business. I’m in early stages of two books: one on how to have a great Digital Family and the other on the megatrends happening in media across all platforms. Maybe that really is my mission and space.
Today I happen to be lunch with a friend who helps people write books today — maybe that’s part of where I am going. Maybe I can affect lives that way best and really have something powerful to say.
Maybe I just need to enjoy today that I am blessed.
Gigi
by Gigi L. Johnson | Jan 1, 2008 | Innovation Shifts, Tech+Change
Happy New Year to all! I’m getting ready to watch the Rose Parade in high def, waiting for my kids to wake up. I’m debating whether I want to watch it with laptop in lap, catching up with some programming ideas I had yesterday.
That spurs thoughts about a Los Angeles Times article today — Michelle Quin’s “Desktops? They’re So Last Year”: It ends with a little girl getting a pink Barbie laptop and sitting next to her mom working. The article isn’t about kids’ lives and laptops, but it does spur my thoughts in that direction.
I recall when friends at Intel were hyping the Centrino chip in 2003, they were seeing a life spread around by wireless connectivity. For 2007, the article says laptop sales rose 21% to 32MM and desktops dropped 4% to 32MM. They quote IDC as saying that portables will be at 66% of corporate (40% in ’06) and 71% of consumer (up from 44%) computers. The article cites that Japan sped past this about a year ago, heading instead to hyper portable phones and other devices.
Lots of citations were shown in the article about parents and families roaming the house — kitchen, TV, etc. — while using the Internet. It also features the hotspot phenomenon, both connectivity throughout the house and around the community.
So what happens to kids, TV viewing, and working with parents? Does this mean that parents are working with their kids more, or that Internet use will interfere just like background TV with the very valuable resource of parent time with kids? Is this the New Normal?
