I haven’t written much here about my passion for using Twitter with the Track feature, mostly because we talk about it on NewsGang Live all the time.

Track opens the conversation in real time on important topics, from the earthquake in China, to the election, to the recent iPhone release. It permits discovery of new voices with fresh thoughts and releases us from the echo chamber.

For about six weeks, Twitter has disabled their track feature, leaving us to use Summize for tracking important topics. It works reasonably well, but as a standalone site couldn’t be integrated into much other than a cobbled together GTalk application called Twitterspy.

With the acquisition of Summize by Twitter, I hope it can be integrated into the API, and the gateway to IM services opened again with Track enabled. That would be the logical next step — let’s see if they go there. At the very least, they should be able to integrate it into the API so that Twhirl and other standalone applications can access it.

There is an online petition set up for Julie Amero, appealing to the state and local prosecutors to withdraw all charges against her and end the nightmare that has been the last 3 1/2 years of her life. Click here to sign it.

Even though it’s been 13 months since Judge Strackbein set aside the verdict against her, it’s not enough. She should be completely exonerated of the charges, and the only way for that to happen is for the prosecutors to formally drop all charges against her. If they don’t go on record with this, Julie will suffer the way she did earlier this year, when she was fired by her employer after someone left a copy of Rick Green’s New Year’s editorial on her supervisor’s desk, and others pressured her employer to fire the woman who “showed porn to kids”.

This is the stigma she lives with, despite concrete, irrefutable evidence that she was the victim of sloppy network maintenance and multiple malware infestations. Please, sign the petition, and tell these prosecutors the time has come to give Julie Amero the justice she deserves.

We’re back from Nashville. There are many stories to tell about the travel, the hotel, and the competition. I will tell them over the next week or so, for sure.

This photo begins the Great Panda Adventure. I bought a new camera — the Nikon Coolpix 550S — because DG and I both wanted a camera we could stick in a pocket and go.

This little camera is a real dynamo. We decided we were going to do a “Panda’s Adventures in Nashville” series of photos by placing the Panda in strange places around the Opryland Hotel and then photographing it. It was some of the best fun we had — thinking of places to put it, then photographing it. With this camera, the lighting didn’t matter, it was easy to compose pictures, and it was a one-shot deal to the perfect picture. It’s a 10MP camera with 5x optical zoom (4x digital zoom but I don’t recommend EVER using the digital zoom on any camera. It just doesn’t work well enough to justify the effort). It fits in the palm of my hand, has a beautiful, well-lit screen, lots of really nice modes for shooting (like backlit subjects, dark lighting, etc), and some really nice in-camera editing features.

Learning to use it took me about 5 minutes. Granted, I have a Nikon DSLR and am used to some of the features, but this camera has many more features than the DSLR does. Even someone unfamiliar with point and shoot cameras can take great images with it right out of the box. I bought a 4GB SD card (SanDisk UltraII) for $29 and have been really pleased with the performance and reliability of that as well. The battery life is pretty robust — I did about 10 minutes of video and 300 pictures where half were flash photos, and played them all back on the camera’s monitor before reaching total battery drain.

If you’re looking for a microcamera, I cannot say enough about this one. I haven’t found one thing I’d change about it, or anything to complain about. It’s not a DSLR, so don’t expect it to perform like one, but it’s got enough range, depth and versatility to consider it an excellent choice for just about any on-the-fly photo opportunity. I get really tired of hauling around the DSLR and lenses with me to places like irish dance competitions, so this was a welcome relief to my shoulders.

Oh, and it was under $200. That was the best part. I was pleasantly surprised at the price, particularly when compared to the benefits.

I’m looking forward to using it at the BlogHer conference in a couple of weeks. (I have much more to talk about with regard to that as well in a separate post).

As for DG, there was no recall at Nationals for her. That was sad, but we had a great time while we were there, and I can honestly say that she did her very best and looked like she belonged up there with that very, very tough group of international competitors. I would have loved for her to come back with a placement and medal (as would she!), but it wasn’t to be. Still, the experience of competing at that level is one that I think will be valuable for her as time goes by, whether or not she chooses to try it again next year. (I think she will, but you just never know…).

Unlike Julie Amero, Michael Fiola won’t face criminal charges for possession of child pornography. But that doesn’t make his case any less egregious, or his life any different today. It doesn’t give him his job back, restore his reputation, or the harm that’s been done as a result of yet another ignorant leap to the wrong conclusion.

Michael Fiola worked for the Department of Industrial Accidents in Massachusetts. On November 20, 2006, Fiola was issued a laptop for use in connection with his field work as an accident investigator. In March, 2007 the laptop was seized and Fiola was subsequently fired from his job for possession of child pornography. The case was also referred to the DA for prosecution.

This time, however, the laptop was examined by a qualified forensic examiner, Tami Loehrs. Her examination and analysis of the laptop concluded the following:

1. The laptop was infected with at least 5 serious viruses and Trojans that caused the computer to be compromised for at least 4 1/2 months — longer than Fiola had possession of the laptop.
2. The Symantec antivirus software installed was outdated and not functioning properly from day one.
3. The Systems management software wasn’t installed properly, so no network monitoring or updates were being pushed to the laptop.
4. Mr. Fiola not only wasn’t responsible for the pornography, he probably didn’t even know about it.

Of course, the DIA didn’t take kindly to the allegation that this was all their fault, and in a fashion similar to Julie Amero’s prosecution, said that with their 3-hour examination of the hard drive and the assumption that one has to DO something in order to initiate such activity it was clearly Fiola’s fault and so he should be fired, he should not get his job back, and he should suffer the stigma of being a kiddie porn downloader for the rest of his life.

This is outrageous. Beyond outrageous. You can read Loehrs’ report yourself. The investigator for the DIA climbs up on his high horse and makes the usual specious statements about how “the network is monitored carefully” and that “the user has to do something to have pornography downloaded, it just doesn’t download itself”, indicating that he has absolutely zero knowledge of how Trojans and viruses work. In fact, one of the times the laptop had activity was a time where Fiola was out for the evening without the laptop. Loehrs hammers home the responsibility of the network administrator here:

It is their opinion that Michael Fiola must be responsible for the activity because it was only happening when he possessed the Laptop out in the field. How else could viruses, Trojans and hackers attack a Laptop? The Laptop must be turned on for the viruses and Trojans to execute or for a hacker to gain access to it. Therefore, the Laptop could only be compromised when Michael Fiola had the Laptop turned on and he typically had the Laptop turned on when he was in the field. He did not need the Laptop at the office because he had a desktop computer at the office, therefore the Laptop was not compromised during those times. In addition, viruses and Trojans typically need some event to occur in order to trigger their execution. For example, when the Internet browser is opened, it may trigger the downloader to download a back door which in turn allows the hacker to gain access. Therefore, when Michael Fiola opens his Internet browser to access a work-related website, checks his email or logs into the DIA mainframe, the trigger is pulled, the virus or Trojan begins its attack and the activity subsequently appears to be caused by Michael Fiola.

Her indictment of their disingenuity is no less scathing:

If the DIA had reviewed the Symanec logs, they would have discovered the numerous viruses and Trojans attacking the Laptop for four and a half months without resolution; that log files were missing or incomplete; that virus definition downloads were failing; that virus scans were only taking 30 seconds to complete. If the DIA had reviewed the SMS logs they would have discovered the numerous errors that began the moment Michael Fiola received the Laptop thereby leaving the Laptop unmonitored and unmaintained for four and a half months. If the DIA had reviewed the temporary Internet files they would have discovered suspicious activity occurring day after day including the appearance of pornography with no preceding event; websites being cached to the hard drive at the rate of 20 to 40 per minute; JavaScript files with malicious code. What should have been a “red flag” to Mr. Glennon and the IT department when they found the Verizon wireless data usage to be four and a half times that of any other user is that the Laptop may have been compromised by a virus, Trojan or hacker.

According to the Boston Herald article, the Fiolas intend to sue the DIA for the destruction of his reputation, career and life. His attorney has a good grasp of the big picture:

“Imagine this scenario: Your employer gives you a ticking time bomb full of child porn, and then you get fired, and then you get prosecuted as some kind of freak,” he railed.

This is happening to many, many people. The combined arrogance of in-house IT folks who don’t want to admit they screwed up someone’s computer and someone’s life and the ignorance of many who investigate on the employers’ behalf leaves real people behind, bankrupt and ostracized.

I hope Mr. Fiola succeeds in his efforts to hold the TRUE culprits available. And I hope Julie Amero is given a new trial, or better yet, has the charges dropped against her. Both are victims of something they could not control, and both found themselves at the mercy of IT administrators’ arrogance (or ignorance), and hot zeal to hand out punishment for it, whether or not the responsible party was punished.

If you know of anyone who has found themselves in a similar situation and are in need of assistance, send them to The Julie Group blog for assistance.

h/t Alex Eckelberry - Sunbelt Blog

This is in response to a commenter on Steve Gillmor’s Techcrunch post, who essentially thinks any time and bandwidth wasted on a discussion of Twitter is nonsense.

For me, the value of Twitter rests entirely in instant communication, accessible anywhere, one to many, many to one. I can get onto Twitter and not follow one single person if I want. All I have to do is fire up GTalk, ask Twitter to track some keywords, and I’m plugged into a real-time news feed.

This is a capture from my real-time Twitter stream this morning. Note particularly the last entry from corvida (one of the newest Read/Write Web contributors), whose family’s home was damaged by tornadoes ripping across the Southeast since yesterday. Corvida tells the whole story here.

This is what my GTalk window has looked like for the last 12 hours. Quiet, followed by bursts of reports of tornado outbreaks, high winds, destruction, people shouting out for help, to locate others, to find a safe place, to share their worries with other people out on the stream.

Unless you have lived through a natural disaster of the type that devastates towns and cities capriciously, you cannot understand the value of being plugged in this way. But Corvida did, and she reached out. Be sure you read her whole story. Twitter reached out in a real way and helped her family, as well as four other families who were in need of food tonight.

This can’t happen in decentralized parallel universes. Or to put it today’s political terms, we cannot have red states and blue states, and still be the United States. In Twitter, of course, there are no states; just places where people are.

The value of Twitter is its universality, which is why it cannot be decentralized; at least, not in ways similar to FriendFeed, which I like well enough as an aggregator but do not consider a place to center discussion. For me, Friendfeed is the storage device; Twitter is the capture device. It scans; Friendfeed holds.

Cliff Gerrish has a great explanation for why Twitter cannot be decentralized:

It’s tracking that makes a decentralized Twitter nearly impossible. Think of a 140 character Tweet as a series of space separated tags to which you can subscribe. In this model, you’re following everyone, or at least everyone who uses that particular tag. This feature radically changes the shape of the social graph underlying the information stream. Since you don’t know who might use a tag you’re tracking, the regular RSS style contract around publication and subscription doesn’t work. Track is not commonly used today, but it’s one of the more interesting features of the service.

While there’s a ton of irony in the content of the Techcrunch comments on Steve’s post, particularly with regard to the number of characters he used to convey his thoughts, I’d suggest that they should go back and re-read what Steve wrote, because he’s right.

Technorati Tags: twitter, tornadoes, techcrunch, steve gillmor, track, corvida

I have had at least three decent, if not inspired, ideas for blog posts this weekend. Every time I start to write them, I have to turn off the wireless modem so Sticks will give up on what he’s doing and go to bed. This is because he likes to stay up till 4 and then drag himself out of bed in the morning and drive the 35 miles to school in a sleep-deprived and groggy state. Obviously, this doesn’t work for us, so cutting off the network is the only way to keep him from being a danger to others when he drives.

That means that if I don’t get it done by midnight it might not get done at all, which is what has happened. If I actually could stop obsessing on the Pennsylvania primary and the reports around it and think about other things, I could open up all the articles I want to open before turning things off, but no…I don’t do that either.

Instead, I will say congratulations to Steve Gillmor for his new partnership with Techcrunch and the re-launch of the Gillmor Gang. Despite the relatively chaotic first show, there are golden moments, and the end is definitely causing a blog post to ferment for me. Think communities, open and closed, vibrant and dormant, online and offline. Lots of thoughts rolling around on that.

In other news, I bought a webcam and am slowly sticking my toe into trying real-time video chats and some other experiments. To that end, I spent some time tonight learning by visiting QueenofSpain’s (aka Erin) show tonight on Stickam, which is a very cool site for real-time video chat (as long as you use IE — can’t get Firefox to work right). The topics? Zappos and politics.

Still, I blame the kids for everything. It’s only right when they insist on causing me grief. It’s either that, or the fact that gas has now hit $4/gallon and I’m walking everywhere.

Technorati Tags: zappos, gillmor gang, techcrunch, rambles

If you haven’t read or heard about it, Loren Feldman (1938 Media) has a new show, which is a parody of Shel Israel’s Global Neighbourhoods show, recently launched on FastCompany.tv. (Shel co-authored the book Naked Conversations with Robert Scoble in 2006).

If it were as simple as a little parody, we’d all be laughing as hard as I was at the puppet’s guest appearance on NewsGang Live today, but it’s not. This is partly because Shel Israel had not registered his own name as a vanity URL (Yes, I’ve done it for the whole family, just to reserve our little piece of the ‘Net), and Loren bought it and is using it to broadcast his shows.

Shel was understandably pissed about someone using his name on a site that wasn’t his work and said so. On Twitter. Broadcast out to everyone, which sparked a debate over personal brand, and ultimately a really thoughtful post about why he reacted as he did, what he took from the critics, and what he learned as a result. It was a truly honest response to some pretty harsh criticism.

Further complicating things, Loren’s show was picked up by a sponsor today and Shel’s hasn’t been. Yet. They are looking for one.

If peace were an objective here (though I don’t believe it is) Loren would transfer Shel’s domain namesake to Shel, buy the available ‘Fake Shel Israel’ domain (at least, available as of this writing), and continue on with what is a very, very funny parody, enjoy his success, fame and fortune.

Another possibility is the one I suggested to Robert Scoble on Twitter tonight: Shel might consider attempting a puppet-napping and interview on his own show, before handing it back in exchange for his namesake site. Or partnering with the puppet occasionally, embracing the puppet as his own, blessing the parody, not killing it.

Loren Feldman is one of those guys who runs hot and cold. His Jason Calacanis parodies were hysterical, the stuff he did over on Huffington Post, not so much. In fact, I ended up unsubscribing because they (and he) had become incredibly unfunny. And then he comes back with a raging act of genius in this puppet, yet once again hasn’t figured out (or doesn’t care) that it can be funny without being mean.

My appeal to Loren: I would enjoy the show more and the puppet even more if you settled the domain name issue. Yes, you own it. Yes, you can use it. But to me, it’s a small thing that can find a compromise solution that is less hurtful to others. It would really bother me to build up your show at Shel’s expense. Since he has made the gesture of standing down on it, perhaps there is a compromise. I hope so.

Here’s one that’s on the 1938 Media site, so I don’t feel badly linking to it. It’s my pal Steve Gillmor, trying his best to be serious:

Technorati Tags: 1938Media, ShelIsrael, Global Neighborhoods, video, puppet, Newsgang, Steve Gillmor

The photos I posted earlier today came straight to the blog from the Blackberry. They suck. That’s because the Blackberry’s camera sucks. The lens sucks, the hardware sucks. There’s no video. What there is, though, is the ability to send a picture to the blog straight from my phone on a beautiful spring morning (that’s turned somewhat dark and cloudy in the afternoon).

Amy Gahran just bought the much-ballyhooed N95 and spent the last 24 hours trying to get it set up for moblogging before the firmware update bricked it. The updates she was posting were driving me crazy — why the problems pairing bluetooth keyboards and headsets? Geez, that’s old tech, should work fine by now, you’d think. But no.

As much as I love my Blackberry, it drives me crazy that the camera sucks and that I can’t send my photos to my computer via Bluetooth because ATT has disabled the bluetooth port that would allow the connection. I can’t play YouTube videos on it (thanks again, ATT), and if I make my own little videos from concerts and the like I can’t put them on the micro-SD card and reliably play them because Windows Media wants to “fix” them first.

Even the iPhone, everyone’s darling, has features I hate. It’s not on the 3G Network (neither is my blackberry…sigh), the touch keyboard is absolutely impossible for me to use because I’m anal about spelling and can’t stand typos. The data/text/voice plan for it is ridiculously expensive, and it’s not flexible when it comes to adding any enhancements to its applications.

And then there’s Twitter. Twitter’s great on mobile — you can use GTalk or just get everything by text, assuming you’re following everyone and have turned updates on for everyone. But sometimes I’ll follow and forget to include turning their updates on, because I have this nice desktop Twitter client that picks up tweets from anyone I follow. When I switch to mobile, suddenly there’s half the tweets — what I call Twitter Lite — which is neither great-tasting nor less filling. It just sucks.

On the Blackberry, GTalk won’t shut up unless I turn off all the sound on the phone. I’ve told it six different ways from friday that I really don’t need to hear a ding every frickin’ time someone tweets, but it won’t get it. So GTalk is only a partial option for me because I can’t sit in a client meeting and have my phone ringy-dinging every two seconds. I have limited texting so GTalk is a good workaround, but for the noise.

Look, I’ve written about this before. All I want is a mobile device that I can use as a phone, take a picture that doesn’t suck and post it to my blog, take a video that doesn’t suck and send it to YouTube, read email, tweets and blog posts, and click on links from those without hanging the whole phone because someone hasn’t adapted their site for mobile (which is a LOT of sites). I don’t want to see the dreaded “502 error” that I get when clicking on a video or audio file, and I want to download the audio for Newsgang Live directly to my micro SD card and listen on my phone.

So to the mobile service providers, please stop being greedy and let me decide how use the bandwidth. Quit demanding that I pay another five bucks to watch your crappy edited video and let me watch what I want. Let me listen to what I want. Get over your control game.

To the hardware manufacturers, including Apple, figure out how to make it suck less. No firmware upgrades that brick phones (can you IMAGINE how Microsoft would be villified if they did such a thing?) Ship it right the first time, provide a pathway for upgrades that justifies anyone forking over $400-700 for a mobile device. Give me a device worth that kind of money in a world where a cheap laptop is $500.

Make it suck less and do it sooner rather than later.

(Did anyone count the number of times I used the term ’suck’? How many?)

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Blackberry, mobile, mobile web, suck less, fix it now, ATT