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There was nothing particularly special about Tuesday. It was a pretty mundane run-of-the-mill day. I didn’t travel anywhere, or attend a special event. This made it a perfect day for an experiment I had been thinking about conducting for a while.
We all know that we rarely use the phones in our pockets for actual phone calls, but I was curious to what extent this was true. So I decided I would pick a completely random day and log every activity I used my “phone” for throughout the course of the day.
About a month ago, I was tremendously inspired by this story on NPR about folks around the country creating “Scoutlike groups that concentrate on technology and do-it-yourself projects ” as opposed to following the traditional Boy Scout format for their children. After much searching, I haven’t been able to identify any group in the Nashville area offering something like this. So, I am currently considering starting one from scratch with like-minded parents in the area.
Would you be interested in joining a Google+ Hangout to brainstorm putting together a co-ed hacker scout group in Nashville for kids ages 6-14?
(Start the video at 2:04:36 – embed did’t work properly)
Today I was listening to the most recent TWIT episode, when at the very end Leo hesitantly brought up a recent lawsuit from a company called Personal Audio that has been systematically suing many content producers including the Discovery Channel (How Stuff Works) and the Adam Carolla Show among others.
Personal Audio claims that they invented “podcasting” back in 1996, and in 2011 they won a junction against Apple for $8M.
On the onset, this company seems to simply be a patent troll. But given the success of their lawsuit with Apple, and the fervor at which they’re suing now, I have to wonder if this will have any impact on the industry as a whole. If content producers have to pay a licensing fee to produce their work, I would imagine far less people will get involved in the medium.
What do you think: is this a potentially serious blow to the podcasting world, or simply a flash-in-the-pan patent troll acting up?
Is blogging still relevant?
The appeal seems to have lost its luster with the many social networking options available these days. I think it could still be worth pursuing. But I haven’t made the personal commitment with myself to actually start.
At some point last year I redesigned and relaunched my vanity URL site with absolutely no fanfare, with the intent to start writing more frequent posts. The thing is, I am not a writer as you can tell by the lack of any quality posts over time. In fact, writing content of any kind tends to debilitate me to the point of extreme procrastination. That being said, I’m not sure if I’m unique when it comes down to putting your thoughts down on “paper”.
Back on the borrowed bike for now until mine is either repaired or replaced. It was quite a beautiful morning riding the back roads to and from the Five Points Starbucks in Franklin.