tagsmith.org

(click image for full patent abstract)

After a long day at work, I came home to find a package that my father had mailed me.  He still lives in the apartment where I lived when I started my halycon Internet career back at About.com in 1997 (year 2000 full time).  On occasion, I still get mail from that era, so I asked him to send it to my current apartment.

In it, were some papers, a check and a piece of mail from the “Official Patent Certificate” company.  ”The ‘Official Patent Certificate’ company, I thought?”  Sure enough it was an offer to frame a certificate of my recently granted patent.

“Recently granted patent?”

Let me explain.  (Pardon some Internet geekiness).

Back when I was working at About.com, I was on the team that was working on an early advertising product called “Sprinks” (Sponsored Links).  Sprinks were an early forerunner to the now ubitiquous Google AdWords and AdSense, and we actually had a pretty decent business in selling pay-per-click advertising to advertisers.  But our big difference was that instead of search keywords (which at the time was dominated by a company called GoTo, which became Overture, which at some point got molded into Yahoo! Search Marketing, and now will probably be completely relevant with the search over to Bing by Yahoo later this year), we aimed to sell advertisers targeted advertisements on a content level.   So instead of buying an ad for a search on “dogs”, we could say, hey, buy an ad on a site that was about dogs.  We’ll display our ad in the midst of their content and it would perform better because it was more relevant (sound familiar? it’s the general concept Google uses for AdSense today).

So, when I was doing the front-end user experience as part of the team working on the product (that we had dubbed ContentSprinks) I designed an interface to help people to buy these particular content placements.  Instead of doing what Google does now, which is scan the content of a page to return a “relevant” set of results, we actually sold particular topics, and the top bidder on each topic would display first on the topics.

During the development process, the then VP of Development (now SVP of Product Development) at About, Kevin Donovan, gave me a single dollar bill, to essentially buy my rights (and the rights of everyone else listed) for the patent application they were about to file. (It essentially didn’t matter, any patents created under the employ of the company were owned by the company as part of my employment agreement, which is a pretty standard practice).  I didn’t know what it was for at first, but I kept that dollar for a long time as a memory of kind of a “cool moment”.

Fast forward a little bit, and in late 2003, Sprinks was sold to Google for something like $10 million and the sale included the right to replace all Sprinks advertising on About.com, and, all of the intellectual property within Sprinks (including the patent I was a part of). It was a hard to scale business, since there were a finite number of topics (or nodes as are also called), and probably made a lot of business sense for About to sell.  But, I couldn’t help but feeling, that even in the early days of Google, this was a “buy them out” kind of move because we had something Google couldn’t proceed to the marketplace with safely (namely what became AdSense) without having the intellectual property as well.  With that, Sprinks became a blip in Internet history.

Over time, I checked in with that patent application to see if it ever went anywhere.  And, I saw it change ownership from About,Inc, to Google, Inc, and then watched as Google filed the same patent around the world.  Once in a while I’d get a letter saying my patent had been accepted in the EU, in China, in various other places.

But it took this piece of “spam” from the “Official Patent Certificate” company to give me a final update – the patent application had finally been accepted and granted a patent, nearly 5 years after being filed, and nearly 8 years after I “sold” it for a dollar.

So, now I am an inventor.   How cool is that?

So, I’m done with the iPhone. And to the estimated 1.5 million of you who bought iPhone 4s yesterday, and the astounding 77% of you who upgraded from a prior iPhone, I wish you the best of luck. The AT&T issues are just too much for me to agree to give 2 more years (with a $350 Early Termination Fee) with the more inept (well, save BP) corporation in America to “figure things out”. I ranted at length about this before over on my Tumblr, so I’ll save the details of that argument.

In preparation for my inevitable cut over to an Android phone (sorry Blackberry, Palm and Windows Mobile, you’re just not right for me), I’ve been playing with an unactivated Droid phone that I got for free last year through the graciousness of friends and I’ve discovered a few things since I first tried the phone out and passed on daily usage of that phone then.

1. The initial Android release that shipped with that phone (1.5 I believe) and the hardware didn’t ever play nice. I remember having to pull the battery to restart it on several occasions.
2. The camera was awful.
3. The phone had great service.
4. There were very few apps at the time.

In the last year, Android has made up a lot of the difference.

I found that most of the apps I use and tasks I need from a mobile every day are ready available and just as good on Android.

1. Twitter (or Tweetie) – yep
2. WeatherBug – yep
3. Foursquare - yep
4. Subway Maps (CityTransit, Exit Strategy) – yep
5. Photoshop mobile – yep
6. Gmail – yes, and with it’s own app
7. Google Calendar – yes, see above
8. Exchange email and calendar – yes
9. Barcode/QR scanners – multiple
10. Tumblr – yes, through a third-party (but it has an annoying bug that makes reblogging a pain in the butt)
11. Camera – it’s vastly improved, but admittedly not as good as my iPhone 3G, and this is hardware dependent
12. Service - miles and miles and miles better than AT&T
13. File system app – yes (iPhone doesn’t have one)
14. Physical keyboard – yes, on this model, though the OS level on-screen one is fine and Swype will help make up the difference on newer Android models

The stability issues I saw have been all but totally corrected with the release of Android 2.1 (and the promise of 2.2 or FroYo) just makes it a better platform. The Android market has a lot of potential in it’s openness, and will someday soon have more potential user than Apple will.

The one biggest drawback of Android has been the media integration and transfer. There’s no denying that the “ecosystem” of iPhone with iTunes is great. (Proof? I did buy an iPad and I loved it. Still do. What’s different? No AT&T. But I digress).

In terms of music, I actually prefer the Amazon MP3 store, which is available natively on the phone and offers a direct download service just as good as iTunes is. I actually buy most of the music I played on my iPhone from there as well.

The biggest drawback of media on Android is file transfer. Plugging in your phone to iTunes and having it sync your music is really easy.

Enter DoubleTwist, which has both a iTunes like desktop client, and an Android app that closely match the iTunes experience. It will allow you to create playlists, and will let you sync only non-protected music onto your iPhone (I converted most of my old iTunes protected stuff to mp3 long ago, and most of my collection is MP3 or M4A), and while it’s not 100% seamless, it’s good enough to replace this as your mobile music device.

So, what’s next? With the launch of the Droid X, the Droid Incredible on Verizon, and the Evo 4G on Sprint, from a pure hardware perspective, the phones are on par, and often exceed those of the iPhone itself.

I’d argue the user experience, while admittedly, not quite as polished (transitions especially), is now really good enough to get away with daily use, and getting better (especially with UX enhancements like HTC Sense).

So, when my contract runs out in about 4 weeks, I’ll be saying adieu to AT&T for good and never look back. And it’s sad that the iPhone gets caught up in that wash, but Apple made a deal with the devil, and after 3 years of awful AT&T service, two generations of iPhones, and 8 actual devices between my fiance and I, it’s time to say goodbye.

Android, you’ve come a long way, baby.

In college, like a whole lot of people, I spent a whole lot of time trying to figure out what the point in learning about the Ming dynasty was, or why I should care about ancient philosophy, or why the social patterns of migrating Eskimos were relevant to my future expected life of building and managing websites, systems and software.

But it all was, and it all is, a framework for inspiration, it just does not click with everyone who takes it. A big part of why I believe the college experience is such an integral part of life is because it’s a 4 year experiment in finding the things and people that inspire us. By adding structure to wayward nature of the ever expanding universe of knowledge, it makes inspiration digestable and obtainable. College plants these roots of inspiration.

To me, inspiration is the trigger for the deeper search for knowledge, for the absorption of information, and, most importantly, the sorting of logical vs illogical, fake vs real, and usable vs important. I believe part of brains are a “soup”, with a combination of emotion, fact, fiction and history, swimming with ideas and solutions. A combination of all of the things that have come before this moment, right now.

In the other part of our minds live empty hooks waiting to be filled with ideas. Philosophies. Stories. Human history. Solutions. Questions.

The “ah ha moment” is when the ideas from this brain soup get hung on the empty hooks in our minds. The moment when you feel like you’ve been there before, and suddenly, the course of your life changes, an answer comes out of nowhere and it just “feels right.” We all have these moments; they are personal and evolutionary changes, both small and large. “I don’t know” to “I know”. “I can’t” to “I can”. “I get it”. The “ah ha moment” instantly makes everything that became before it seem distant, the struggle to discover seem worth it, the difficulty seem easy, and provides the basis and answers for moving forward.

My biggest “ah ha moment” came out of escapes — escape of following in prior footsteps, escape from a boring existence, escape from being merely “average”, combined with a drive to fill my mind with knowledge.

I’ve always been a creative individual, in fact, I was destined to be a “writer”, for whatever that meant, for my elementary and junior high years were full of teachers making comments about the quality of my writing and my “imagination”. And I grew up in a family that was middle-class, and had never had a college graduate until me, and so the future was very much unclear.

And then, my brother, started to tinker with soldering irons and motherboards, and before I knew it, I was hooked on “computers”. Technology just seemed to come to me, I appreciated it’s structure and logical sensibilities, I appreciated the fact that hardware had rules. And I wanted to learn more more about how they worked.

What became most fascinating of all was how computers could be used to create. To discover. To learn. To socialize. Fascinating that images could be digital and editable and manipulatable. Fascinating, how I could put together a document, a “webpage”, that I could express myself in, that could be seen by people around the world. It was the way I could take this love of writing and communicating and mix it with my new found love of technology. The Web was the answer. It was the biggest “ah ha moment” of them all.

So, when it became time to go to college, it was never a question that I should go, but it was a tough decision to define the “why”. I went into college “undecided”, because I wasn’t completely sure, but as I mentioned, college provided the foundation for inspiration. I knew I’d made the right choice. But I also knew, that I didn’t want to be defined by any one thing either. I knew I’d loved history and stories. At that point, few people were teaching “web” courses, fewer still were expert at it. So, given the choice between “computers” and “communication”, “computers” seemed to provide a wider array of opportunities. The writing could come later.

And the adventures this “ah ha moment” have provided me simply amazing opportunities to learn more about just about anything that could be imagined, to meet most of my best friends in the world, to have an opportunity to write again. I teach, I learn, I grow and I share. And all of this, I owe to “the Web”.

My advice — fill your mind with the gifts and fruits of inspiration. Learn as much as you possibly can about things that inspire you. Take a chance on the world, that could change your life. You may never know where it will take you.

Let’s face it, 98% of the information we’re exposed to on a daily basis isn’t worth caring about for more than an minute or two, or frankly, at all. A great deal of this should really be filed under “who gives a sh*t?”, but isn’t.

Don’t believe me? Sign off all of your social networks for 6 hours in the middle of the day, and catch up on the news at one set point, like we used to (read the paper, watch the evening news, i’ll even allow you to use Google Reader here). See how many things that you “missed” actually matter to your in your daily lives.

The openness of the Internet allows everyone to have a voice, but it’s just that that is turning the Internet to a haven for human machines – humans can’t possibly decipher all of the information being presented, but we’re being set up as a node to process it all. Why? Because we believe our peers more than we do computers, or marketing campaigns. It’s still an undeniable fact – the human machines talk to each other in a language prone to emotion, interjection and miscommunication.

The “real-time” factor of information gives it more weight – it’s the eternal breaking news, things without resolution that make our obsession with getting the story, making the first post, and sharing without thought that’s making Facebook overtake Google. Google was computing machines with finite limits and defined ways to calculate. Facebook is human machines interacting with each other in less controllable ways.

Social Media professionals need to understand this. Let’s be realistic – Social Media is the next generation of SEO. The only difference is that instead of a set algorithm that we can understand and tweak our content for, we have to consider the fickleness of personalities and how our content is written appropriately to appeal to small groups of people, who will then champion this information for broader appeal. This is the science of “trending topics”, “recommended on Facebook”, and how Social Media Marketers really need to be thinking about their jobs. But, do these topics have any lasting value? I’d argue they build brand affinity, yes, but to return to the earlier point, only for things that matter to us.

Being a part of the other 2% is really what social media strategies should be aiming for. You need to be part of the authorities people come to for news, entertainment and novelty. The real conversion metric is “How much does your brand matter?”.

Because, if this social media movement is to continue, people will need to give a sh*t. If people don’t care, social media doesn’t exist.

When Ken Burns’ epic documentary The Civil War premiered on September 23, 1990, I was hooked.   Problem was, it took me about 20 years to figure out, “on what”.

I was 11, right at the beginning of the creative development that would shape my life and times on the Internet (still years away), but before I could really understand its impact on my life, I was transfixed by the stories of soldiers North and South, of triumph and tragedy, of epic success and horrific failure. I can look back on that time now and remember the feeling I had when we were watching the documentary. This, for the first time in my life was history living, through inviting interviews with individuals such as Shelby Foote (R.I.P.), Edwin Bearss and James Symington, countless voiceovers including Sam Waterston, Morgan Freeman and Garrison Keillor who told the stories of those who left behind only memoirs and letters, and of course, by use of what has become known as the “Ken Burns’ effect“‘, the panning and zooming of photograph so as to make the subjects of those photos come alive.

And, now, I realized how the visualization of the story made it so much more captivating than textbooks or professors who didn’t share passion for the material ever could. It was one of the first experiences I’d had with history, documentaries and storytelling on a grand scale, and its shaped a whole lot of my life ever since. The sheer humanity of the tale was more compelling to me than comic books or action heroes ever were. Real people, really did these extraordinary things, and the medium told the story as if it had happened yesterday.

I remember the Christmas after the series aired, I got the entire set, on VHS, mind you, and it was an absolutely amazing gift (not to mention the set on VHS cost something like $149 at the time).

I watched it over and over again, to reclaim that magical feeling I had at 11 years old, to listen to those stories again and again, and relate them to the present day, and better understand the social and political impact the war had on the nation that fought it – which came more to the forefront as I got older. The visuals were still inspiring every time, and the stories even more so.

So, when the series became available on DVD a few years later, I was considering the buy, but around that time, I was captivated again by Ken Burns’ Empire of the Air (watch on NetFlix), Baseball, and later New York: A Documentary Film, as written by Ken’s brother, Ric Burns, a film, of which I think needs to be required viewing for someone who wants to really understand and love New York as the modern metropolis that it is today.

That first airing of The Civil War sparked a yearning for knowledge about the history of my city, country and people that has led me to read some amazing books about people like Abraham Lincoln, John Adams, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Robert Moses, and Daniel Burnham and set me into the notion that biography and nonfiction are more compelling for me to watch and read because “it really happened.”

It’s a thirst for knowledge that has helped me to understand and respect, and love, a wide array of amazing people, because, I feel to really understand someone, you really need to understand their motivations, passions and choices, and the circumstances they made them under. Life is funny like that I think, that decisions never seem to come a the right time, but can still offer so much insight about the people that make them, and have a much larger impact on life than anyone can possibly forecast.

So, imagine my thrill when I find out that yesterday, Netflix was offering the entire Civil War documentary available for instant streaming. It felt, yes, like an old friend was coming by for a visit. I still have those VHS tapes sitting on my bookshelf, but the wave of technology had made it impossible to watch (the only VCR I have anymore is attached to an all digital HDTV that doesn’t even have input that would allow me to watch it).

But now, I can sit on my couch, watch The Civil War on my iPad, and reflect on how much as changed in 20 years, and the same time how much things have remained the same.