Speaking of data displays, the Science Museum in London has this very interesting “Social Media Listening Post” - its a whole wall with a grid (a matrix!) of little text screens that are displaying posts from a whole lot of internet discussion groups, chat rooms etc as they happen, and it also speaks them out via text to voice. See pic below:

Social Media Listening Post

Its in a darkened room, which makes it a bit eerie as the disembodied speaking voices come through - the gaps in the lights in the pic are silhouttes of people, its also weird seeing them move as the screens refresh. Worth a visit.

Oh, Sunday is ending! I feel like rambling a bit about my life before moving onto more work-related posts. And the subject is…. vacations!

Orlando, Florida is the most exciting and fun place I have ever visited here in the U.S when my wife and I went there on vacation 2 years ago. We went to to Universal Studios, where we visited the whole place and saw many exciting action going on all around us.

Continuing on the subject of vacation, but back to the present, I’ve been toying with the idea of seeing the Golden Gate live for a very long time, but never got a chance yet. Now, I have a “reason” to go since one of my freelance clients recently just moved there and invited me (us) to go there. He said he and his wife can take us on a trip around town if we wanted but I think that’d be abusing his hospitality so, if we finally decide to go, we’ll take our own San Francisco tours.

Also my wife is dying to extend our trip to California. She wants to take me to Hollywood, LA since we haven’t t been there yet. And since we’re going to California, I really want to get some Knotts berry farm tickets as I heard their games are simply superb. I think we’ll buy a full package from TrustedTours.com because that way we can get all our tours and tickets in one place and (as usual), I’m trying to save every penny as it is a long trip the one we’re planning to do.

I’ve already took a deep look at their online travel guides to get some idea of the best tour packages, attractions and museums on the US cities we’re planning to spend our vacations on. They also have a very compelling reason to visit their site. If you sign up to their Trusted Tours Newsletter you get a chance of winning $150 Magellan’s Gift Certificate.

Ever since I discovered the photo-sharing site known as Flickr, I just can’t stop uploading and also checking out other people’s collections. But Flickr isn’t “just for sharing cutie photos” as business owners are now using the service to increase their Web traffic and reach out to potential customers. If you’ve never used Flickr before, review the three steps in today’s Tools and Tips article on NFIB.com:

• Determine how you’ll use it. Think about the ways your business uses (or could use) images, and then determine what you want to get out of the site.
• Organize your photos. Assign each photo to one or more sets, and add tags that properly describe it to help others find it in searches.
• Join the community. Connect with current customers who have Flickr accounts, link your business account to your employees’ accounts and network with others in your field.

Like a few million other people I recently bought an iPhone 3G. But unlike a few million other people I bought TWO of them — one for my young and lovely wife. That puts me in the rare position to actually speak from experience about a current networking issue: what’s the deal with these iPhones? Is it the phone or the network that is causing problems? And the answer is: both.

Our experience with the iPhone 3G is not good, though not terrible. It is a fantastic device, if flawed. The main flaw is the phone, rather than the iPod Touch bits that comprise the rest of the unit. Voice service is not good, calls are dropped, and the iPhone won’t work places where my old Nokia N80 easily did. But my iPhone, oddly enough, works better than does my wife’s. This variation is how I know at least part of the problem is with the phone, not just the network.

But the network sucks, too. We switched from Verizon (I know you can’t use an N80 on Verizon, smarty-pants — I have more than one cell provider) which claims the best network but had the nagging problem of delivering the odd voicemail 7-10 days late. Verizon claims never to have heard of this problem but ask a few Verizon users and they’ll confirm. Now that we are full-time on AT&T we might blame the lousy service on the phones except I also got a Samsung AT&T phone for Mimi, my mother-in-law, who is on our family plan. Her service sucks, too, so it is not just the iPhone.

I’m sure AT&T has oversold their network. You can tell because the worst service of all is from one iPhone to the other. If the call doesn’t spontaneously disconnect half the time you often still can’t understand what the other person is saying. Service is somewhat better going to landlines or other mobile providers.

I’m sure AT&T will fix this eventually but I don’t like being treated this way. No wonder they are so hot to keep that iPhone exclusive, since half the iPhone users I know would jump to T-Mobile if they easily could.

Last week’s column about the population of CCIEs and global development raised quite a ruckus — a word I include to confuse the non-native English speakers who saw last week’s column as discriminating against them. We can argue a bit about the numbers and their meaning, but I think it is fairly obvious that: 1) Cisco dominates the Internet core router business, so this is a real issue no matter what your language, and; 2) CCIEs are NOT just network techs. It is an extremely difficult certification to get and typically costs in the neighborhood of $30-40,000 by the time you are finished, sometimes a lot more.

While it may be patently obvious that China and Korea will be more important 30 years from now than India and Japan, that wasn’t my point. Anyone can express that opinion. What I was trying to do was to show a reason WHY that might be the case as evidenced by this CCIE data. Why shouldn’t India be just as successful as China? Their populations are comparable and they both have good educational systems with large numbers of graduates. They both value science and technology. India even uses English as one of its official languages. Both have booming economies with plenty of room for growth. Well this CCIE analysis gives one empirical reason why it should be so. While the Indians are developing their IP expertise, the Chinese are developing their IP networks, simple as that.

Another reason to talk about this subject is because there is far too little actual thinking on the Internet these days. The blogosphere is full of opinions but not very much solid discussion of why things are the way they are. Agree with me or not — I don’t care — but I’ll always make you think. The whole point of this column is getting people to think and discuss.

Now to the problem from last week of how YouTube and similar video services can better appeal to advertisers. I foolishly thought last week’s tease might coax a few bucks out of the bushes at a time when I could use them, but no. So I’ll reveal my solution anyway, even without a reward.

YouTube would love to make lots of money from ads that would play before its 100 million videos per day, but they have had difficulty appealing to traditional advertisers, not because of the quality of the viewers but because of the quality of the videos, themselves. There is a huge variety of content on YouTube and while advertisers are willing to stretch a bit in what they’ll sponsor, they are afraid of making a mistake and sponsoring the wrong videos, like those that contain nudity or other objectionable content. Short of watching all the videos, how do we best avoid this problem? That’s what has Google scratching its GoogleHead.

It all comes down to the quality of the metadata — the data describing each video. I think the answer is obvious and is composed of three parts: 1) notification, 2) structure, and 3) standardization.

I’m probably listing these backward, but I want to get notification out of the way first. Whatever system YouTube chooses to manage its metadata won’t be perfect. There will be errors — the Internet equivalent of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction.” So there should be a facility for viewers to notify YouTube if they feel that there is a significant mismatch between the likely target of the content and the target of the accompanying ad. No condom ads before Dora the Explorer clips, for example. No bacon commercials with vegan cooking shows. Having a way to report such errors will diminish them in both number and importance.

Next comes structured metadata. It floors me that YouTube doesn’t enforce this already. If you ever took a journalism class you learned that the first paragraph of any news story (called the “lead” or “lede” — same pronunciation) is supposed to answer the questions who? what? why? where? when? and how? YouTube could use a form for each video submission that used these categories, possibly minus the highly suggestive “why.” To submit your video you have to fill in all five blanks. Leave any blank unfilled and your video bounces. These five metadata categories really ought to cover the gamut of describing most any video. If they don’t, or if they are improperly used, then we are back to notification and getting users to help fix our mistakes.

Finally there is standardization. Even within the five structured metadata categories there can be great variation in the meaning of the chosen terms. That’s why we need to standardize those terms. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I would rely on the best current system of standardized metadata, which is Wikipedia. Behind each structured entry would be those Wikipedia terms that would seem to be appropriate, along with links to their definitions, just to be sure.

With this system it would take a minute or two longer to submit each video, but what the videos were about would be much clearer to viewers and advertisers alike. Paris Hilton is a “who.” The Paris Hilton is a “what” or perhaps a “where,” though the system would probably force them to be separated. Either way you end up with a hotel if you want a hotel and a sex video if you want a sex video.

Now it’s time to recharge my iPhone (again).

May be this is the question that one businessman least expect. Unfortunately most (we think more than 80 percent) business blogs or company blogs fail to achieve their goals, or to achieve at least a part of those. There are many things which contribute to this much failure of blogs. You never need a blog when,

• It is not based on a theme or idea.
• You don’t have time to publish posts, which can be anything interesting or informative.
• You don’t know how to market it among your customers and other web users.
• You lack ideas for new posts, and going to republish same post (idea) repeatedly.
• Your only goal is to build links to your site; submitting links to web directories and articles to article directories is a much more preferable and fair option.
• Your only goal is to enter some reciprocal linking practices, and/or AdSense income.
• You are going to publish 10 posts for one day and no post for other 6 days.
• You are going to copy paste content (posts) from other websites and blogs.
• Your blogging software is too complicated to handle and the content is not reachable for search engines.