Steve Wozniak signs my tray loading G3 iMac, originally uploaded by Kevin Rochowski.

Steve Wozniak recently came to Cisco to give the inaugural presentation for the Technology Leaders Lecture Series, so naturally I took the opportunity to haul my huge old iMac and have it signed by the Woz himself. The fact that this piece of Apple yumminess has less than 500 MB of RAM matters little to either his Wozness or I, as not only can it still run OS 10.3 reasonably well, it can also still run the majority of web apps… slowly.

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To sum up Iron Man in 100 words or less? Tony Stark is an alcoholic genius weapons manufacturer, who after almost losing his life to a terrorists and hundreds of pieces of shrapnel making their way into his heart decides to work for good and designs a suit of armor  that turns him into a superhero.  He sets out to right wrongs, blow up a lot of bad guys and battles the man who set him to be killed and has stolen the plans for his suit and made it bigger and badder. Awesomeness ensues.

Just watch it, you’ll enjoy the ride. It’s *just* on the right side of implausible.

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During Web 2.0 Expo, every company is spending out huge quantities of cash just to get that ever so important attention of yours, which according to some analysts is the basis of a new economy.  Last night was the Digg event (two words - Rock Band), and tonight is “Evolve” with mashable and chi.mp. Each night there are at least 5 different parties going, at least two of which are “launch parties”, where a previously under-the-radar startup makes their existence known. Open bars (or drink tickets at least) are the norm, and web celebrities make the rounds like move stars.

My advice to anyone else out there participating is to simply to get lots of caffeine and drink a lot of water before going to bed. Or of course, rest up early… there’s always another party tomorrow.

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Domain names - the right domain names - are big business so I’m told. Like the early days of the gold rush, prospectors swept in during the late 90’s and snapped up anything vaguely intelligible, their eyes lit up with the promise of thousands upon thousands of dollars resulting from their meager intellectual investment. Today, the pickings are slim - you need only look at the crazy, misspelled or simply made up names of today’s web apps and properties to see that - who would ever have imagined using something called Twitter, YouTube or Google 15 years ago?

And so it was that last week I found myself looking for a domain name. The right domain name. It started off simply enough - I wanted to migrate thunderberry.com to a US based registrar, and to finally register kevinrochowski.com (I’d never even thought of registering it until now - oddly enough, it was still available). I had chosen to use Dotster, which whilst not the cheapest registrar seems to have enough good buzz for me to trust them. I went through the process of transferring my domain, registered the vanity domain… and then my brain started ticking.

I’ve been making use of twitter quite a bit lately, and have some good ideas for for services to go with it. Since I was already registering domains, why not be a little preemptive and come up with some names? It was slow going at first. Most of the easily conceivable combinations with “twitter” and “tweet” had already been taken. Time to think outside of the box a little. What about misspellings? Or something suggestive of the function? Could it be used as a verb? Finally I starting coming upon decent names that were still available.

Within a few hours I already had tweethernet.com, whispyr.com and tweetgenie.com. I paid my 15 dollars per domain and sat back. I still wanted more. What other permutations were there? twitteral.com, twitterfication.com, twitterfixation.com - they all found their way into my shopping cart. I needed to stop. But I was hooked. Then came twitterocracy.com, and more and more… finally, enough was enough. It was like a session of blackjack, putting out those small, innocuous 15 dollar chips on the table and never knowing if they’ll bring you any returns. But it was time to cash my chips.

So having splurged out a little to claim my pieces of web real estate, now what? I suspect a number of my purchased will never amount to anything, and so I have set them to expire after a year if I don’t do anything. But for several of my properties, more interesting fates await. A little exploration, a little deal making… and then finally they’ll be introduced to the world. In some ways it’s a gamble is the true sense of the word - I don’t intend to make money out of this, but I do certainly intend to have fun.

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Apple deigned us worthy of receiving the latest Apple TV firmware update yesterday, so this seemed as good a time as any to share with you my experiences of using Apple TV Take 2 to date.

The first question many of you will want answered of course is whether it’s worth buying. The answer is yes - if you live in the US.

The main rationale behind the Apple TV is to be able to display your TV shows and movies on a nice big screen HDTV, which unless you’re particularly patient and have ripped all of your favorite shows and films into Apple TV compatible formats means Apple Store purchases. The movie rental feature is particularly good, and I’ve already dumped my Netflix subscription in favor of using the Apple TV exclusively. But, if you don’t have access to the US store then these features are either not available, or have a pretty dire selection of content available. And without that content (or aforementioned ripping and converting) you’re left with a box that plays music on your HDTV. Woohoo.

Now, if you do live in the US there’s plenty to cause you to get hold of an Apple TV. The selection of shows is pretty good, quality is high and the complete lack of adverts is a godsend. My girlfriend is a TiVo addict, and even she loves it compared to the wonderbox. Movie rentals work as advertised, and if you’re willing to put up with a delay of up to 30 days from release on DVD then there’s plenty of current movies waiting for you.  On top of that is easy access to podcasts, Flickr and YouTube (if that’s your bag).

So what’s bad with the Apple TV? Firstly, the serious omission of support for subscriptions means you still have to either buy shows individually from the box, or purchase and download subscriptions from your PC and sync them over to the Apple TV. Next, all of the content is at the earliest a day old, and a lack of streaming support means no access to real-time content such as news or sports. Internet radio has also been oddly overlooked, which is a real shame as this is something I make frequent use of in iTunes. On top of that are the bugs which, whilst small, are still annoying enough to make you want to call Uncle Steve directly and give him a piece of your mind.

The Apple TV still has a way to go before I’m satisfied with it as a genuine Digital Age media hub. However,  it certainly is showing promise and the thankfully frequent updates will hopefully bring not just bug fixes but also incremental functionality to the device. Here’s looking forward to Apple TV 3rd Act.

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Consequently, it’s easy to experience increased anxiety as you worry about what you might have missed. The fear of somehow NOT knowing something can become overwhelming. And of course, you just HAVE to check your email, rss feeds, IM and tweets last thing at night before you go to bed. You know, just in case.

What’s needed to overcome this problem is a combination of both habit and technology. The key thing to understand is that not only are you unlikely to be able to keep up with everything, but that you don’t really need to - instead, you simply need to learn how to filter.

Filtering is paring down the information flow to its essentials, taking in and processing only what you need. This is something that we do regularly without even realizing it, such as picking out a face in the crowd or listening to just one conversation at a party. It’s being able to accept that ultimately there’s a lot of junk out there that we really don’t need. Note for example today’s Techrunch post, which bemoans the overload of information on, and about, twitter. It’s simply not possible to listen to 4000 people and hear them all.

Technology can play a role. There are already many applications that seek to consolidate and simplify the information flows in our digital lives. Pownce, Digsby, Friendfeed and Pidgin are all examples of such. However, one area they all lack thus far is including some form of filter mechanism to restrict those updates to things (or people) we really want to know about. Ultimately, the greatest filter is your own mind. It’s up to you to forge the habits needed to reduce the amount of digital junk you ingest - removing RSS feeds you don’t read, reading your email less frequently, following less people on twitter. And reducing the junk coming in makes it much more likely that you won’t have junk coming out.

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I’m going to go out on a limb here and do something that I don’t normally do. I’m going to fly in the face of all those “new iPhone” rumors out there and confidently state that the 3G iPhone is already here - and quite likely in your pocket right now. The 3G iPhone will simply be a firmware update to the existing hardware.

This neatly brings together a number of rumors and information tidbits swirling around the internet. Firstly, we know that the iPhone 2.0 update is coming soon, most likely in July. Next, a couple of reliable sources such as Kevin Rose and Walt Mossberg have hinted that the 3G iPhone is due in the July timeframe. Then, according to this article the Infineon chipset used in the iPhone is actually 3G capable. And lastly, a personal source nonchalantly confirmed to me last night that the update coming in July would in fact turn on the 3G capabilities in the existing hardware.

So, real or bogus? I’ll leave that up to you to decide. But I personally think this is the real deal. Comment away!

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Fifteen minutes after the start time people were already overflowing down the stairs and more were coming up. The wine was flowing, the conversation was likewise and Gary was having to do laps around the venue just to socialize with everyone. SF newcomer Pete Cashmore of Mashable was there, as were Megan McCarthy, Violet Blue (I think) and a host of other Technorati.

It was a great night all around, and the wines (of course) were as great as the insights from everyone there. Looking forward to seeing you here next time Gary!

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I may be a little late to the party, but over the last couple of weeks I’ve been making use of the application that has set many of the technorati’s hearts aflutter - twitter.

For those that have either been living under a rock, or alternatively actually have a life, Twitter is a simple service that allows you to send and receive small, frequent updates answering just one question - “What are you doing?” In place of the more familiar “friending” that you might find on social networks, twitter allows you to “follow” individuals - In essence, subscribing to their updates. If you want to see what you friends are doing, follow them on twitter. If they want to see what you are doing, they follow you. It’s easy to see that this straightforward mechanism actually allows two very distinct types of relationship - one being a bi-directional relationship (friendship) where you both know what is going on with the other, and the other relationship being a one-way “informational” relationship, where you want to be a consumer of ideas and information from someone else.

Okay, so now you know the how. The big question is of course, why?

Having used the service for a few weeks, I can definitely say there is a certain kind of “connectedness” that you feel when you get involved in (or rather, know about) the minutiae of people’s lives. I’ve personally found that large, transient cities like San Francisco are teeming with people that you know from seeing them at other places - or as Nivi puts it, “I know lots of people that I don’t know”. Twitter, in this social group, is a kind of glue that actually allows you to get to know these people better. Suddenly you find when you next see someone, you have something more personal to talk about other than the standard “how’s work?” or “how are you?”

But there’s another aspect that hasn’t yet really been explored in the world of Twitter. With the exception of “private” direct messaging, almost everything said on twitter is open and public. Information about your profile, who you follow and where you are location is easily accessed. The twitter public stream is not just a stream of public consciousness, it’s a rich source of information about the relationships between people and what they’re interested in. Potentially, you can even determine what’s hot and what’s not within certain demographic categories.

The information contained within Twitter, if properly utilized, would be a great source of demographic information for advertisers and would essentially enable a much more targeted, social version of Google’s ad sense. Given the 140 character limit versus the 160 characters of a text message, I’m sure this is something the creators of twitter are thinking about - there’s plenty that can be squeezed into 20 characters. And given how open the information on twitter is, you can be sure that if they don’t do it soon, somebody else will.

Update: Since writing this article, I’ve come across a good article listing the top twitter clients as found by scanning the public timeline. Whilst it’s not as detailed a treatment as I outline above, it’s a good example of mining using the twitter data set.

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