Adopting Technology vs. Understanding Technology

A while back I wrote about the gap in technology use that separates children from their parents. There are the usual jokes about how it defines who can program a VCR and who can send a txt message. When you grow up around technology you adopt it more easily. But there's a big difference between understanding how to use an interface that someone built for you (cell phones and video games) and understanding how the underlying technology works (DOS Prompts and TTL(Transistor-Transistor Logic)).

It's the same thing that happened to automobiles. There's less and less reason to look under the hood and there's less and less reason to troubleshoot your MP3 player or cell phone. This is not a bad thing. Your phone shouldn't crash. But as a result we have fewer opportunities to really understand the technology that we've become dependent on. So what happens when the technology fails and we've never looked under the hood before? Without understanding how something works, what chance do we have of fixing it?

Today, kids are exposed to branded, packaged technology and they are far better at using it than I am. This is a great thing. They get all the benefits of the technology but don't have to spend all the time I did to get things to work. No one wants to take a computer programming class just to record a TV show or dial a phone. There's too much life to live and too many other pursuits we need to follow. But there is a downside. When something is all packaged up, you rarely get a chance to see the "naked technology" behind it. As we become more isolated from the "naked technology" that does the work, we become more dependent on those that package the technology for us.

I'm certainly not advocating that we do away with modern conveniences or start programming our own cell phones. This is just a word of caution to be aware that as technology becomes more "prepared" we give up control over what we want the technology to do.

Blogging!

Oh the irony… I'm about to cause a total paradox… I'm going to blog about blogging. I'm sure I'm not the first person to do this, but if the people that access this blog are the people I hope they will be, namely my clients, I thought I'd go ahead and put together a short how-to on the subject.

Why Should I care? - Consider Blogging a marketing effort.
I'm sure you're no stranger to the idea of sending out a newsletter to remain top-of mind with your clients and prospects. Blogging is a natural extension of this. Now, many people try o send out newsletters via email. This is a very solid and sound tactic. Unfortunately, it's also a task that al too often gets put off, ignored, and as a result happens far less frequently as it should. This is one of blogging's biggest appeals. Blogging is a relatively coarse medium. There's no need for polish or refinement. It's a come-as you are medium. Just string together a few paragraphs to make a point and you're in business. The tools make it easy, and there's no danger of spamming.

But the big deal is this - People find websites via search engines, and search engines like text information. A great way to get found is by sharing information in a blog. You can provide your contact information right in the blog itself or link back to your website.

How do I get started? – You're already halfway there!
Well it's alarmingly easy, especially if you're already here. You can do as I did and head straight to www.blogger.com. Sign up for a free account, create a title for your blog, pick a design template and start typing. Presto-change-o! You're now a blogger!

Now blogger has it's share of critics and many people feel that www.wordpress.com is a superior product. I'm not as familiar with it, but blogger.com is completely free. It's a good place to get your feet wet in this world of real-time publishing. Good luck and let me know how it works for you!

Rackspace = Fantastic!

I though I'd write a few words about a company that makes me glad I'm in the web design business. Rackspace has been a truly extrordinary company to work with. The quality of their service has been outstanding. Every time I speak to someone there they are happy, up beat, knowledgable-- or have ready access to a person who knows the answers. While the quality of the ingredients (hardware, bandwith, etc.) is top of the line, what stands out is the quality and availability of the people.

That isn't to say that they have a team of all-knowing Internet gods on staff 24-7. I have been able to stump them a few times. (To be fair, these stumper questions were about email management software. Something that was not part of their offering and really doesn't pertain to hosting directly.)

I think the best part of their servce has been their complete willingness to either walk me through operations I was not familiar with or just take over the process and fix things to my specifications. Rackspace is the kind of company that stands for quality in the true meaning of the word and I'm very pleased to be doing business with them.

Noise in the Generational Technocracy Gap

I'm becoming more and more aware that degree of familiarity people have with technology (and by extension the ease with which they adopt it) has less to do with age or generation. It seems that the young and "techno savvy" people who are all about the very latest handheld devices are at a total loss when it comes to functions on a computer (PC or Mac). Also, there seem to be a number of "older" folks who manage to get through the latest gadgets and computer issues with graceful ease, thus defying the adage of the retiree that can't program a VCR.

So what does techno-savvy-ness correlate to if not generational exposure to technology? It's a mixture of logic and experience. Of course you see many bright people struggling to comprehend the basic operations of a cell phone-- but that's hardly surprising. I suppose the situation just strikes me as odd. It seems that more often it's the retirees that are out-pacing the kids at understanding and manipulating technology. Sure the kids know how to make their phones do neat things an how to play video games... but it's the people who were in the technological trenches-- the dark days of the DOS Prompt-- that understand what's going on inside the box, and how to fix it.

Tools and Software

I've been thinking about this for a while and the blogging format seems like a decent way to communicate this type of information. There are a number of software tools out there that make Internet life easier. Here are a few of the indispensable tools and practices.

1- Get rid of Norton System Works and AntiVirus:
A decade ago, Norton was indispensable, now it is a complete burden on your system that creates more problems than it solves and generally mucks up and slows down the operations of your computer.

2- Turn on Windows Firewall:
By this time, if you're a Windows user, you should be running WinXP. Use the native firewall. It's quite good and keeps life easy. For your frequent Internet access points (home and work) you should have a hardware firewall installed. This is far more secure and frees up system resources.

3- Keep your Anti-Virus software up to date:
If affordability is king, try AVG's Free Edition. It's been rated quite well, is frequently updated, and has all the features you could want including email scanning. - It's free so you don't have an excuse anymore.

4- Get Cloudmark:
While this isn't a free solution the Cloudmark Desktop is the best defense against SPAM that I've discovered. The software uses a common set of spam profiles submitted by other Cloudmark users. The only way a piece of email can be labeled as spam is if it has already been flagged as spam by other users. So if you're in the situation like myself where you rely on email for new business, you don't have to worry about email leads being flagged as spam. Only mass-delivered email will ever be flagged. This software is worth every penny!