Since around 1999, I’ve had my computer connected to my stereo to play music. If I’m having company over and I want to program an evening’s worth of music, I create a playlist. The software and my music collection have both improved in the last decade, but the technology has remained essentially the same.

Until right now. Saturday night I had a holiday party and some friends figured out how to use their iPhones to connect wirelessly to my computer and hijack my playlist. Using DJ mode for iTunes (a feature I didn’t even know existed) they were able to make requests and queue up songs. It just worked.

Using your iPhone as a remote control for a computer might seem like a parlor trick (as if I have a parlor!), but I think it foretells bigger things. For most of your ordinary computing tasks (e-mail, reading the news, playing music), your iPhone is just as powerful—and easier—than your typical desktop or laptop computer. Theoretically, a device like an iPhone could be connected to a larger display and a keyboard and occupy the place on your desk where your computer sits now. When that starts happening, look out. Everything will be smooth scrolling, auto saving, and seamless connections to the network. Hard drives and file trees will go the way of command prompts and IRQ conflicts.

The future of computing is light, fast and collaborative, with users pulling data from the cloud rather than saving it on energy-intensive hard drives whirring away on their desks. It won’t matter where the songs are physically stored, the music will just seem to flow through your iWhatever to the speakers. Which is a little bit scary. I’m not a fan of ceding control of my stuff, and handheld computing usually means trusting companies to store our data. (Will Google, Amazon and Comcast be around forever?) But there’s probably no stopping it. It just makes too much sense.

Apple will keep improving the iPhone, Google is working on its own smart phone, and some viable e-reader/tablet thing is bound to arrive eventually. The handheld device is going to become the machine that connects us to everything. Now, if we could only come up with a name for it that didn’t sound as clinical as “handheld device” or “smart phone.” How about “computer”?

Over the last few days, I’ve been phasing in a new design on Daryllang.com and the History Eraser Button blog. Here are some ideas that influenced the changes:

• I moved everything to a new server.* I now get more storage for less money, and have access to new bells and whistles—notably, the ability to run cron jobs, which are scripts that operate in the background on a timed schedule.
• On the blog, I wanted a layout wide enough to accommodate the new 853-pixel-wide YouTube videos. The template you see here is exactly 903 pixels wide, plus 25 pixels of padding on each side, for that exact reason.
• Increasingly, people arrive at individual blog posts through Twitter and Facebook, rather than following links from the blog’s home page or Daryllang.com. Then they exit after viewing one page. That’s not how most bloggers want it (we want it to be a destination, and we want to be sticky), but readers are not like grazing cattle. They are like bees hopping from flower to flower. This is the reality of the web today. I’d rather accommodate readers than fight them. Thinking along those lines, I removed the top menu bar to make the blog look as clean as possible, and bumped the navigation and other less-important stuff from the sidebar to the bottom of the page. I also removed the Twitter feed from the blog, since it was distracting—and I made it more prominent on my main home page.
• The old home page, centered around a live feed of headlines, was an impressive build given my limited programming skills. But it was cluttered, clumsy and slow. The new design is simpler. (The font treatment was influenced by New York City subway signage.) I also wrote new code that checks the weather report and Twitter without slowing down the loading of the home page.
• I was getting tired of blue.

Of course, every web site should be considered always under construction, so more changes are still to come. My travel page needs some fixing up—a map?—so I’m going to tackle that next. You might find bugs and quirky formatting for a few more days while I keep messing around with stuff, trying to make it better. Please send me an e-mail if you notice anything strange. Why do I bother with this stuff? I find noodling with web pages to be intensely relaxing. Daryllang.com is a sandbox where I can try new things and learn new skills without really risking anything. Thanks for visiting.

* I’m still using OLM.net, a hosting company in Connecticut that has provided consistently good service for 8 years.

This afternoon, I considered writing a blog post about Jaycee Dugard, the 29-year-old kidnapping survivor who’s on the cover of People this week. Pursuing a photography angle, I Googled some phrases related to Jaycee Dugard images.

Do not do this! Unscrupulous web site operators, exploiting the popular interest in Dugard, have seeded Google with stinking heaps of rotten stuff connected to this poor woman’s name. I clicked on a link that looked like a profile of Dugard, but the site launched a cascading series of virus warnings and then tried to transfer an executable file to my computer. (I clicked no and got out of there.) Google Images brought me to a horrific white supremacist message board that happened to have a picture of Dugard on it. And of course, I found all sorts of “news” sites that were just re-posted snips of text from other sites, wallpapered with blinking and irrelevant ads, tapping the gushing sewer pipe of Internet advertising.

I eventually decided not to write the post, for a variety of reasons. But this is a good occasion for another one of my occasional strolls around the Internet media landscape. It looks polluted. We’re having a quality crisis.

(more…)

Yesterday I read an AP story that contained a familiar idea:

“The Associated Press is considering whether to sell news stories to some online customers exclusively for a certain period, perhaps half an hour, the head of the news organization said Tuesday.”

Hey, didn’t I suggest a time-locked pay wall for newspaper sites a few months ago? Yes, I did:

“I propose charging a premium subscription fee for readers who want the news before anyone else. It works like this. All the stories on your newspaper web site that are more than one hour old are free. A subscription fee (say, $50 a year?) grants readers access to the newest stories.”

I won’t repeat my whole post, but if you’re curious you can read it here.

In 2000, I spent a semester as an intern for Accuweather. My job was to call radio stations and read them weather reports in my best radio voice. I often spoke through a clear connection called an ISDN line, which took the form of a black box with a few knobs and buttons, connected to a microphone and headset. A conversation with a radio producer across the country sounded as if we were in the same room.

It was so cool that I knew it was only a matter of time before everyone would talk to each other on high-quality digital lines. Calls would become more personal and intimate—Think of the whispers, the breaths, the inflection of a dry joke. You could play music for friends and family, or share the ambient sound of the birds chirping on your porch. I knew once people had tried it, they would never settle for a regular phone again.

As we now know, I was totally wrong! We’ve grown to hate our phones so much that we’ve reverted back to typing. It’s the revenge of the telegraph.

(more…)

Yesterday I got one of those promotional e-mails Amazon sends out all the time….

So what, right? Here’s what: Amazon is making a recommendation based on a book I purchased in September 2000—Nine years ago!

(more…)

I still remember sitting in my 9th grade science class and seeing, for the first time, a simple explanation of DNA. It blew my mind how elegant a solution it is to coding information: A zipper of matching teeth. Sometimes a mutation occurs that helps a species stay alive and reproduce. It gets copied ferociously, and we call that evolution. It’s beautiful.

In some ways, the spreading of news via the Internet these days is like natural selection. I’m going to single out Twitter here—not because Twitter is the only place information Darwinism is happening, but because it’s easiest to explain. On Twitter, people are sharing millions of facts every minute. Some of these facts get retweeted, copied. The most valuable, urgent and interesting information gets copied with great speed. Definitive, immediate news of mass interest (think: death of a celebrity) spreads the fastest and the farthest. Contrary to my prediction a few months ago, Twitter is surprisingly good at preventing the spread of bad information. Sure, a few people will copy a false rumor or a non-story (“URGENT! Earthquake reported in ___!”), but there seem to be enough influential Twitterers who know how to check facts, debunk false rumors, and consider history and context. Look at Wikipedia for evidence that, generally, crowdsourced editing works way better than you think it should.

We’re moving closer to an information ecosystem in which the fastest, best versions of important stories thrive and multiply.

(more…)

I want to talk about two emotional reactions I felt recently as a result of social networking sites.

1. Twitter Shame

I was at a networking event with some other journalists, and one reporter decided to get provocative. “I just don’t get Tweeter,” she said, deliberately misstating the name. “Who cares what you’re having for lunch?”

Ah, the lunch fallacy. I rushed to Twitter’s defense. “Actually, I find it quite useful,” I said, delivering my well-practiced argument in support of using Twitter for journalism.

And then, suddenly, I ran out of gas. A wave of intense embarrassment washed over me. Am I really this much of a tool? I imagined someone tape-recording the conversation, then playing it back to me later, snickering at my emotional defense of a tech start-up in which I have no stake whatsoever. I felt Twitter Shame.

(more…)

I check Facebook several times a day to see what my friends are posting. It’s fun.

I also like it because it’s free. I’ve never spent any money on Facebook, or as a result of Facebook, and I probably never will. Which, in a theme I’ve written about here before on this blog, is a little scary. Is there a business here, or just a Web site? And would we be OK if one day it collapsed?

(more…)

I made some small design tweaks to the History Eraser Button blog over the weekend. One change was to eliminate comments. You can still read comments on old posts, but no new comments are allowed. Why? Three reasons:

(more…)