The first conversation I had was with an individual I was helping troubleshoot some issues with their computer connecting to a network. As I tried to help her reboot her computer, then find the Task Bar, and then navigate to her Control Panel it started to become very clear I was almost talking in a foreign language.

Are these terms not ones that most people working in an office environment around computers daily would not know?

• Restart / Reboot / Shut-Down
• Task Bar
• Start Menu
• Control Panel
• Desktop
• Right-click

I think all of these are fairly basic tasks that anyone who’s even powered on a computer should be familiar with shouldn’t they?

I might be able to understand some challenges with verbiage, but I’d hope with a little bit of explanation the person would understand what I was referring to fairly quickly.

Not so much.

Image: sxc.hu

Post from: EveryJoe

Computer Basics – Open Discussion

One of the things that immediately makes me start wondering about whether a wi-fi network at an establishment is legit, is whether or not the name of the wi-fi network being broadcast matches or at least is similar to the business name.

For example, I was at a coffee shop the other day and a list of about 12 wi-fi networks within range popped up as available. Within the entire list there was nothing listed that even remotely identified with the business.

The strongest network listed was labeled "linksys", real creative. A personal security step for me is that I don’t connect to a wi-fi network unless I’m sure of the one I’m connecting. In this case, I got up and asked the manager what they had named their network, sadly he didn’t know but he thought "linksys" sounded right.

Dear business owners if you’re offering free wi-fi at your establishment, know a little and train your employees to know a little bit about how things work, at least what the network is named and how to reset the router would be great! And please, name your network something that your patrons can easily identify.

Another little thing I do is to try and avoid doing any financial transactions online over a free wi-fi network. I’m not too worried about hacking for the most part, but this is an area where I just feel that most of the time, I can wait till I’m back at home on my own secure network before doing this task online.

Image: richiec on flickr

Post from: EveryJoe

Thinking Security on Free Public Wi-Fi

My chosen RSS reader has been Bloglines pretty much since the beginning. I probably tried one or two other ones before landing with Bloglines, but I can’t even remember what the name of them even were.

As I was working through some new sources of information this evening, I started subscribing to their RSS feeds. Then I saw an option to subscribe by email and thought that might be a better option these days.

You see I’m always in my email, but I’m not always in Bloglines. Would it be better to just subscribe by email for everything again? I think to do that I’d need to really think through how I’d organize my email Inbox and folder structure to support that influx of additional email. I think I’m averaging about 300 emails a day right now.

How’s your use of RSS going? Is it still the best method for you to stay current on information? Do you use twitter instead? Have you thought about going back to email as the single point of intake for information?

Post from: EveryJoe

RSS Bankruptcy

I wrote recently about how Facebook could use some organization of how your "friends" are arranged. If we think about it, labeling all of our contacts the generic "friend" in Facebook isn’t a very accurate representation of the levels of relationships we have in our lives.

The other assumption that may be misaligned is the idea that I’d be interested in every single update from each one of those individuals. Instead of getting an avalanche of updates about every bit of information imaginable, what if you could categorize your updates?

Think about categorizing your updates into one of the following groups:

• family
• professional
• location
• random
• profile changes
• applications

Imagine when updating your status if you could quickly check the type of update it was. By default you’d post everything as "random", which would be similar to the "Uncategorized" post in a WordPress blog.

Family updates would include things like birth announcements, weddings or any other update about a member of your family or extended family. Professional updates would include changes in your career or job, or just an update related to your profession. Location would be any change to your physical location, which could consist of an actual move to a new town, or perhaps something as simple as an update using a geographic service like BrightKite.

Any automatic update generated from a Facebook application would automatically be categorized as such, making it very simple to not be annoyed by quizzes and other Facebook spam.

The other item that I’m surprised that doesn’t already exist in Facebook is an automatic notification when someone changes any piece of information in their Facebook profile. I new email address, or website, or other item. I think some of these items may generate updates, but it’s not well thought out as far as I’m concerned.

Image: Screenshot of Facebook account settings

Post from: EveryJoe

Needed Improvements on Facebook Notifications

I use Wikipedia as much as I use Google, and often visit the site directly for certain kinds of information, before searching it elsewhere. Even though it is constantly criticized for articles especially about various historical events and personalities, it is resourceful in succinctly providing valuable information about a multitude of concepts.

Not just Wikipedia, but many other sites that came after it, all under the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization. Check out the Wikimedia Projects page to discover them.

Alexa, the website ranking site, ranks Wikipedia at 8. That is very encouraging for the only non-profit advertisement-free website among the top 10 websites of the world. However, it only gets around 8% of the Internet global traffic, compared to around 30% that sites like Google and Yahoo! get. It deserves more.

More people should benefit from this wonderful source. Start becoming a regular user yourself and tell about it to all your friends who are not about it.

Support Wikipedia.

Image Source: Wikipedia.

Post from: EveryJoe

Happy Birthday Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

Google Reader (or any other web feed reader) -
GR is an excellent tool to help process the everyday information that shows up on most of your favorite sites. This can be used to find both the latest nuddy magazine photos and the greatest updates on the Apple/i phone information saga. Convenient? I think so.

PageOnce –
PageOnce has been a big help for me and now that it’s out of strict beta (closed to some), it’s even better. I use it to pull in bank account balances, bill due dates and the latest in my Facebook statuses. You can use it to do the same and keep your life organized on just a few pages.

Mint.com –
Mint has been a lifesaver or me (no pun intended) when it comes to keeping track of my finances. I am able to pull in all my financial services — stock portfolios (like I trade, hah), bank accounts (already know they’re near zero) and credit cards (those just keep rising) — and then get information about each of my accounts. It’s secure, easy and fun to use. In addition to getting account info, Mint also gives suggestions on ways to save money or cut down on debt — always a helpful feature.

Whether you’re an information whore or a drive-by reader, services like these can help you stay organized. Being organized can not only save you time but introduce you to new information. How do you think I found out about LOLcatz? Oh yeah, my feed reader!

Post from: EveryJoe

Organization — Inform one, inform them all.

ReadBurner is a site that deals with RSS feeds. RSS is a great way of keeping up-to-date on almost any website. Any website that’s worth their weight in hosting dollars has an RSS feed to follow. The guys at ReadBurner try to keep the news and information fresh by pulling in RSS feeds from people that share their most loved articles in Google Reader and Netvibes. This means that you can always find out what your friends (all right, you might not even know or like them) or enemies are reading and keeping up with today.

Technorati on the other hand scours the interwebs for the latest and greatest blog posts. They rank both the posts and the blogs that they were posted on to help you find out who is an “authority” in the area that you want to know more about. Different from ReadBurner, they do not limit where they get their information from. They simply wait for people to either ping them or they receive content from links of other blogs. Using a patented (maybe?) system, they keep track of what’s hot and what’s not.

Alltop has taken an even different approach from the first two that I’ve talked about. They take what they consider the most important and special (that apparently includes yours truly) blogs or RSS feeds on the internet and list them in a very simple, easy to browse form. From art to geekery, they have almost any category of information that you might be looking for. In addition to listing the information out, Alltop allows any user to modify what they see on the screen. Don’t want to see that blog on motherhood and sex, just click the little X and it’s gone (at least until you clear your cookies).

It doesn’t matter what way you choose to get your information, just choose to get it. Using the services listed above or any other methods, keep up to date on the news that matters. It will make your life and work that much easier.

P.S. – Come find us and more on Alltop at http://humor.alltop.com or http://oddities.alltop.com. Are they trying to call us odd?

Post from: EveryJoe

Information is the key to success