No, Twitter is the new e-mail because of what it does to my psyche.  When I first got email, back in 1988 or 1989, I wanted everyone to have it. I would check it often, even though up until the early 1990s the only other people I knew with email were fellow college students and checking email was so inconvenient, talking over lunch was far more efficient.  To check our email we had to go to the computer center, get onto a computer, boot up our terminal software, log in to the UNIX system, boot up pine or elm or whatever tree we were using then, and read our email in tiny text.

Twitter is far easier to use and, as a result, I find myself checking it constantly, even though I have more fingers than people I’m following.  More to the point, I’m fascinated by the mundane details that people report because, realistically, there’s only so much you can say in 140 characters.  But I want all my friends to be on Twitter.  All my real life friends, anyway, so that I can feel like I’m staying connected, even if they live in St. Louis, Little Rock, or Paris.

But really, is that such a good thing?  I already see email as somewhat impersonal, as something that will never take the place of a phone call (which is why my friend in Little Rock never hears from me).  If he Twittered his life it might be interesting, it might make me feel a tenuous connection, but realistically, isn’t it more important that I talk to him?  After all, we were close all through college, he’s the reason I got involved in politics, and I even flew to Little Rock to be an usher at his wedding (he didn’t come to mine, but we’ll let that slide for now).  Frankly, a phone call works better, no matter how many tweets I can string together.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to see what people are writing on Twitter.

(by the way, one great use for Twitter is to have constant, new, meaningless content on my blog.  Want other uses for Twitter?)

If you’ve been itching to try Vox, or just can’t find enough ways to blog, email me (hint: address is on the Rationale page) and give me one pithy sentence about anything. I’ll send you an invite, while supplies last.

My Vox page, which is currently part of the 130 percent mentioned above.

I have two invitations to Vox, the new, but hopelessly redundant, blog/community by Six Apart, the folks who own LiveJournal and TypePad.

Email me if you want one. (Hint, my email addy is on the rationale page).

Mon propre page Vox.

Update (July 31, 2006): All gone!

I love iTunes. I like how easy it is to browse and to buy. What’s more, I like its simple library interface. It would be very easy for me to standardize my computer audio experience on iTunes. Skip crawling into the arcane structure of my “My Music” folder and just let iTunes do its thing.

Except that I don’t.

You see, I don’t own an iPod. Like thousands of others, including a minority of people at my gym, I own something else. It doesn’t really matter what else because they all play nice with Microsoft and won’t give Apple the time of day (yes, I’m aware it’s the other way around).

Back in the day, before iTunes 6.0, I was merrily giving Apple my cash 99 cents at a time because of a little thing called the Hymn Project. I would buy my songs on iTunes, run them through Hymn and, like magic, I had mp3s I could play on my non-Apple portable music player. I kept the m4p files for a rainy day. Even better, I could listen to them with Winamp, Windows Media Player, Quintessential Player (the beta for the next version looks very promising), iTunes, or whatever I was thinking sounded best that week.

But iTunes 6.0 came along and broke Hymn. It still hasn’t been fixed. So now, if I want to buy music I have to burn it to a disk and rip it back to an mp3. This wastes disks. There’s probably a way to do it without *actually* using a round piece of plastic, but it’s still a pain in the ass.

I could also run it through Audacity and record it as it plays — which brings back memories of making mix tapes with vinyl and cassettes.

Or, I could buy from one of the many WMA vendors.

I’ve purchased music from MSN Music and don’t much like it. It sounds fine, I can play it in everything except iTunes, but the interface and “value added” stuff like celebrity playlists and songs of the week and “essentials” collections aren’t as good. And by “as good” I mean they don’t make purchasing as easy as pulling a package of toilet paper off a WalMart shelf. And tonight, for some strange reason, MSN wouldn’t let me login. The page kept expiring. More important, MSN Music is Firefox hostile. Go figure.

And Windows Media Player is kinda clunky too. I did the burn CD/rip to mp3 trick so that I could play some iTunes purchases in WMP. It played just fine. Then I tried to sync those same files with my non-iPod and they wouldn’t sync. WMP said it couldn’t find the authorization. So, I manually copied the same mp3 files from my My Music folder to my mp3 player and guess what? They played just fine. Stupid WMP.

Before I close I should point out I do know about eMusic, and so should you. They provide DRM-free mp3s of many independent labels and lesser-known artists. And they’re cheap. The base price is $9.99 / month for 40 downloads. That’s 25 cents a song. This has been great for building my punk collection and feeding my Celtic rock fix, but when I want to rebuild my 80s pop collection or when my wife wants to buy mainstream country, eMusic doesn’t have it.

Vive la France!

It’s probably a good idea – certainly a better one than those kiddie leashes that, thankfully, seem to have gone out of style – but something about it seems a little wrong, somehow. Maybe its because I imagine a parent walking through the house calling the kid on the Migo every few seconds to ask “Where are you now?”

This reminds me of something Dan Burden mentioned in his talk on creating walkable communities back in October. Burden said “children need range to roam.” Children today have one-ninth (11 percent) the range of their parents. Burden suggested we need “free range children.” Will devices like the Migo comfort parents enough to let their children range more freely?

Somehow I think the Migo doesn’t do much to let that happen. To my thinking, by stripping down the cell phone to create the Migo, Verizon has also exposed what the cell phone truly is, what “being connected” really means. The Migo is just another kind of leash.

Interesting to me, of users who sought political information online, 91.1 percent sought information about issues or candidates they supported, while 77.4 percent also sought information about issues and candidates about which they were undecided. That’s a lot of people visiting websites for issues/candidates for which/whom they have already made up their minds.

Other interesting tid-bits:

Internet users are more likely to give up their cell phones (39.4 percent) or their televisions (32.7 percent), before they would give up their Internet (27.8 percent).

Sixty-one percent of respondents with incomes below $30,000/year report Internet use.

The number of people who believe information on the Internet is reliable and accurate continues to decline; 48.8 percent of users say that most or all of the information online is reliable and accurate. Frankly, that’s still too high, although many of those folks may be surfing sites more generally regarded as reliable. For example, established media sites and government sites were widely regarded as reliable (78.5 percent and 78.2 percent, respectively).

More than 40 percent say that the Internet has increased contact with family and friends. Only 5.1 percent say it has decreased contact.

One way to (maybe) get in on the action is to sign up here with your Yahoo email address.

I’ve been using the beta since early on and I quite like it. It is still more buggy than I would like, and some of the quirks it has in Firefox it doesn’t have in IE (but I can’t really judge because I rarely use IE anymore), but I think it is a real step forward for Yahoo Mail.

Update (12/4/2005): Yes, they do say Yahoo will be expanding the Mail Beta test. But they don’t say how and they don’t give a timeline.

1. No Author Biographies. Got that one covered, sort of, on my Rationale page. I don’t got into a lot of detail, but I might at some point. Of course, the Electronic Frontier Foundation might disagree with Nielsen about letting the world know who you are (see How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else)).

2. No Author Photo. Got my photo up.

3. Nondescript Posting Titles. Given that blog titles are supposed to be short, I think we should all be cut a little slack here, especially because short, witty titles may not always be informative, but may still spur the reader on.

4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go. I’m somewhat guilty of this, though I’m making a conscious attempt to get better about it.

5. Classic Hits are Buried. (Ahem, not a very descriptive title, is it?) I’ve got maybe two “classic hits,” posts that seem to bring people to my blog. I probably should have a “features” column, but that’s a project for the redesign I’ve talked about before.

6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation. What calendar?

7. Irregular Publishing Frequency. We can’t all be corporate blogs. Sometimes I post, sometimes I don’t. You can depend on one or two posts per week from me. Besides, shouldn’t we all be using RSS anyway, and doesn’t that sort of get around the need to always publish on Tuesdays?

8. Mixing Topics. So what you’re saying is either 1) I should only have one interest in life or 2) I should have an entirely different blog for each of my interests? Isn’t that why we have category lists?

9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss. I probably violate this from time to time, but I think my blog is pretty tame.

10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service. Who cares? Some of the best blogs out there are hosted on Typepad or Blogspot. Some people would rather write than tinker with their domain settings. Yes, I do own uneasyrhetoric.net. But I own it because I like to tinker.

This is a cool function, and kudos to the programmer. But I need yet another widgety thingy clogging up my system tray like I need another hole in my head. This functionality – a keyboard shortcut that pastes unformatted text – should be built in to programs like MS-Word. I shouldn’t need a special program, I shouldn’t need to define a custom key sequence, it should be right there.

Anyone who spends any amount of time cutting and pasting text like I do (I work with a lot of boilerplate) knows that formatting can get lost, changed, or just plain screwed up between Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V. Or, the formatting in document A is not the formatting you want or need in document B. As a result, I spend a lot of time navigating through the Edit menu.

Word is bloatware, sure. But on the list of Word functions I use, this is right up there in the top 10, and, given that someone felt the need to write this little program in the first place, I’m obviously not the only one who does a lot of “Paste Special.”