May
03

Twitter Trounces Traditional Media

Midi Just Sayin', Social Media Add your comment

Been thinking about how news today and in the future will no longer have the ‘big-impact-big reveal’.  Look what happened Sunday night when the television news outlets announced that the White House had called a press conference for 10:30pm.  While the news guys on TV sat there, cameras pointed at an empty podium, and speculated, Twitter was alive with commentary and information and it went absolutely crazy.

By the time the President finally appeared to make the announcement – it was essentially OLD NEWS!  I watched and listened just to see if I could get more details, but I couldn’t get over how anti-climatic the whole thing was.  Granted, a lot of misinformation went scuttling about – but the conversations were rampant and those conversations were good and represented the beauty of social media and it’s ability to engage people like never before.

Even Wikipedia immediately posted Osama bin Laden’s death date next to his date of birth.  Of course, at the time, the rumor was that he was killed a week earlier and that DNA tests had confirmed that it was him so Wikipedia posted his death as a week earlier.  Minutes after Obama announced that he had been killed earlier that day, Wikipedia’s information was updated.  Instantly updated!

Say what you will about social media… but it has SO changed the game.  Plus it allows us to channel our inner comics.   I have to admit, I laughed quite a bit at what people were twittering.  Best one:  Osama is probably cursing his obsession with 4Square location checkins…

Aug
02

Toolbars? More like Slowbars…

Midi etc, Just Sayin', Pearls o' Wisdom, Software Add your comment

During my recent WordPress Workshop, I had a room full of people and their laptops to observe.  I noticed that a lot of people have various toolbars on their webbrowers (unfortunately, 100%  were Internet Explorer – yuck).  Some had two or three different toolbars.  One person in my workshop had four or more.  They also experienced slow internet speed as well as disruption of certain features on certain sites.

When I asked them WHY they had these toolbars installed, they all insisted they didn’t know how they got there.  In most cases, when you download certain programs, they try and get you with the ‘standard’ installation versus the ‘advanced’ installation or ‘custom’ installation.  Built into the standard installation, in most cases, are programs above and beyond what you were downloading – like toolbars.  All the search engines seem to have them – Yahoo!, Bing, Google etc., as do the major anti-virus providers like Norton and AVG, as well as bookmarking sites like StumpleUpon and Digg.  If you’re downloading stuff, a good idea is to select ‘Custom’ or ‘Advance’ installation and you will see all the components that the application is trying to install on your computer.  Un-select the toolbar component before proceding farther.

Be wary.  The more STUFF you have attached to your internet browser, the slower it will tend to run.   Apparently, each toolbar will have a significant effect on your browser load time and overall internet speed.  So the more toolbars you have, the slower your speed. Attached directly to your computer that way, they can have direct access to your browsing habits – and often they report back to the ‘mother ship’ through your internet connection – slowing you down. I don’t know why they block certain functions, but they do.  Even in my WordPress WorkShop, someone was unable to perform some function with a plug-in – once we uninstalled her toolbars, that plug-in operated with no problems.

Want to get rid of them?  If you’re PC like me, simply click on your start button at the bottom left hand corner and open your ‘Control Panel’.  Now, I’m running XP still – so select ‘Add/Remove Software’.  If you have Vista – it’s called something else like ‘Programs’.  Don’t know what Windows 7 calls it but I’m sure it will be something between the two.  Scroll through your list of installed programs and remove all toolbars.  You may have to restart your computer but once you do, you will probably find that your internet speed has improved.

But then again, if you’re like one of my students at my workshop rockin’ an 8 year old laptop running Windows 2003… your problem may be more than toolbars.