Last week I wrote a mini post called “Gmail Fix” that just pointed to a way to use Gmail to send mail from a different SMTP server. To put it mildly, it has been a massive spam target. Every single day I get a dozen or so comments that ask for various ways to “fix” their gmail problems. Clearly the words “gmail” and “fix” cannot and should not be used in a post title.
NetFlix Values
Catching up on TechCrunch this morning I came across a post about Netflix and its attitudes towards its employees. Inspiring to say the least. They seem to value a culture that puts the company and the people on even footing — a place where you make decisions with the best interests of your life and the company. The slide presentation below is said to be a leaked internal presentation that was designed to shed light on the company’s policies. No matter what it is, it shows that Netflix has figured out that motivated and interested people make a huge difference. Kinda makes you want to work for them too … my favorite statement:
Imagine if every person at Netflix is someone you respect and learn from …
Culture
View more presentations from reed2001.
Could a set of policies like this work in Higher Education? I’m not sure, but I am betting it could. The idea that you are responsible enough to decide how much vacation you need is very similar to the arrangement I had with my faculty appointment while in the College of IST. I doubt we’d extend that kind of practice to everyone, but when taken within the framework of the Netflix environment it makes sense. They make it clear that they have intense expectations of each and every person in the company and if you aren’t pulling your weight it is time to find another place to work. I wonder how this makes people in education feel?
Shifting Music
A really good Op/Ed piece over at NY Times about the death march the music industry is on. Its not so much that people are listening less, its just that they are buying a lot less. Favorite quote being, “This is part of a much broader shift in media consumption by young people. They’re moving from an acquisition model to an access model.”
What is interesting to me is how we’ve worked so hard to defeat piracy by coming up with all these new models — Pandora, single track sales, etc — that we’ve taken away the cushion the industry had back in the day. In other words, we had to buy the album to get the songs we wanted and buying all those songs helped pay for the ones we did want. Those days are over. When was the last time you bought a full CD?
Photo credit, via Flickr thomasmperry
Gmail Fix?
One of the annoyances of using gmail for work is the “sent on behalf of” tagline that some users see (mostly Outlook users) when they receive email from you. Now google has a method that lets you send through your “real” smtp server.
Must Read
I think this is a must read from Educause Review. If you are in Higher Education and if you spend your time in an information technology organization this is important stuff. Love to hear some thoughts.
Getting Safer
Another reminder today that we as a culture (or whatever we are) don’t seem to value our security all that much (note that I said security, not privacy). I watched a couple dozen tweets roll by urging me to go see who’s stalking me on Twitter … I jumped over to find a page that wanted my Twitter username and password so it could show me the last 200 visitors to my Twitter page. First of all, how in the hell would it be able to tell me who the last 200 people who stumbled across my Twitter page were and why in the world would giving it my username AND password help? Scam.
This is just another example of how cavalier we all are on the social web. I’m sure many of you read about the security breach involving Google Docs and Twitter … an illustration that much of our information across the social web is only as secure as our password habits. I know two weeks I was using the same username and password combo at nearly all the social sites I routinely participate in. After reading the Twitter story I changed all that. Here’s a quick rundown of what I am doing … this is not de-facto secure, but I feel much better going forward.
I got a free Dropbox account (if you click that link it includes a promo code for us both to get a little extra storage). What Dropbox does is add a folder to your home directory in Mac OSX that is constantly watched and synced back up to the Dropbox server. There are two things I really appreciate about the service … first, it is really fast. Things sync much quicker than with my iDisk. Second since it is an actual directory here on my machine (or in my cases machines) my files are local and I don’t need to be connected to the web to grab my files. What Dropbox is giving me is a super fast way to keep the next ingredient to my solution working across multiple machines.
I downloaded and installed 1Password. 1Password is a client based password management tool that allows you to create, manage, and use passwords in a secure way. Once installed it adds a little icon to your browser that will auto fill usernames and passwords for you with a click. It also generates secure passwords for you on the fly so I can have different and random passwords for facebook, google, twitter, and you name it.
To put the two together you first have to switch to using an Agile Keychain in Mac OSX. This essentially creates a separate non-system level keychain bundle that can be stored elsewhere — in this case in your Dropbox folder. Then, once that is complete just follow these steps to point your 1Password client to that keychain. Once that is complete you can install 1Password on your other Macs, pointing to your existing keychain being synced by Dropbox so things stay in sync.
The life saver so far has been the iPhone App for 1Password. This has a two layer password scheme for exposing the password text … that is really useful for when you are using a lab machine or one other than your own and you can’t recall the randomly generated 30 character password.
Even if it isn’t an ideal solution, it feels a hell of a lot safer than trusting that no one could ever pull a password recovery scam on me and get access to everything I have across the social web. Your milage may very, but I recommend you come up with a solution that makes sense to you and if we are sharing documents on Google Docs, please work out something so our secrets aren’t compromised. And D’Arcy, I’ll be waiuting for you to follow through with your tweet …
Boring
I’ve switched back full time to Gmail and love it. The one thing I notice is how boring it is to only have to really run a browser … Gmail, Docs, and nearly everything I use lives there. Boring.
Twitter Annotations
After my post about Learning Design Summer Camp, Twitter, and building context from backchannel conversations, CogDog commented with a pointer to an amazing post by Tony Hirst that explains how to overlay Tweets on youtube video. Since my colleague Pat Besong had mentioned to me yesterday that the videos were starting to go up to the TLT YouTube space I thought I’d give it a try. I followed the directions which include using the advanced Twitter search to isolate a series of Tweets, running them through a script, and then uploading them as a CC track in YouTube — worked fairly well with only a few limitations.
I didn’t do the entire series of tweets from the Lightning Round, but I do enough as a test to see it in action. I’ll try pulling this off with a larger session where there were hundreds of tweets blasting around the room. This has tremendous potential in my mind … the ability to reconnect the backchannel to the actual event is an amazing step forward in preserving pieces of the event as it was experienced live. I can envision not only using the Tweets, but also targeting blog posts that reference specific moments by overlaying annotations. This requires some more exploration. Thanks, CogDog!
For now, take a look at the video and don’t forget to enable the closed captioning.