But wait.  The Google Chrome OS may give that old PC a second life.  Google is claiming that the Google Chrome OS is being built to target the netbook monitor, but that should mean it should help infuse new energy into any old Pentium 4 PC running Windows XP or even Windows 2000. 

And that’s exactly what I’m planning on doing with an Windows XP system I recently built.  It has decent specs.  A Pentium 4 2.25 GHz Processor with 1 GB of RAM.  I originally purchased it around 2002, then put it into a closet when I bought a new Vista capable desktop.  Just recently, I dusted it off, reinstalled the operating system and put it into use in an office where I’m doing some contract work.  Two big things I’ve found out in the past month:

First, even Firefox tends to bog the machine down.  Sure I’ve got a lot of extensions running, but its pretty clear that much of today’s software wasn’t built with older processors in mind. 

Second, I’ve yet to install Microsoft Office on it.  It’s been a month and to be honest, I didn’t think I’d make it this far without having to cave in and load up Office.  In fact, the Office DVD is currently sitting within my eyesight.  Collecting dust on the corner of my desk.  Instead I’ve been easily getting by with Google Docs.

Go I’m fairly certain I can get by with GMail and Google Docs; Meebo.com for IM; Pandora, Hulu, and Netflix Watch Instantly for entertainment; and the other 500+ bookmarks in my browser. 

I’m with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch:

The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way.

I’ve agreed with that sentiment for a long time.  It’s one of the reason’s I pursued a career in web development.

Now, I disagree with the ridiculous statements that many blogs are making. The Google Chrome OS is not a stake to the heart of Microsoft’s business.  This is a very cool possible step forward for technology.  But not a groundbreaking move that will make a big dent in Microsoft’s OS business.  I think Fake Steve Jobs did a good job of keeping things in proper perspective.

You also may not have noticed, but nobody uses Chrome. I mean think about it. Do you know anyone who uses Chrome? Really?

Now Fake Steve’s post is rich in comedy and snark, but he’s right.  Mainstream America is not using Chrome simply as a browser.  There’s no way their going to flock to a Google Chrome Operating System.

But me?  I’ve got another reason to keep my old PC’s around. 

The client?  HP.

The primary goal of the project?  Not to create fun greeting cards for people, but to encourage the use of ink.  The creative process around that project actually explored the use of colors that required more ink.  When you have to use more ink, then you have to buy more ink.  And thats how HP makes money on printers. 

Inkjet cartridges are to razor blades as inkjet printers are to the Gilette sensor razor.  Inkjet printers are a loss leader.  They are a device to force you to go out and buy inkjet cartridges – the product that holds the real profit margins for HP.

Tabbloid is a service that allows you to take a number of RSS feeds that you read regularly and format the RSS content in a newspaper of magazine styled layout that is delivered to you pdf email attachment every morning.  The idea being that you print it out on your inkjet and read it in your breakfast nook while you sip coffee and munch on a bagel. 

When I first saw Tabbloid, I thought it was a pretty unique service.  I still don’t think it’s half bad.  Not for me probably.  But something that I could see catching on with my parents.  And make no mistake, from HP’s perspective this is good business.  A sound strategy.  Provide something useful for people that help your bottom line.  That’s what business should be about.

I do recommend that you give Tabbloid a try.  I’m not exactly sure why it’s important for me to inform you that Tabbloid wants to force you to buy more ink, but it is.

Alternatively, try Feedly. Which is a similar service but with a screen based content delivery mechanism instead of encouraging print outs. 

And I have to admit, this is going to help.  A lot.  One of my main getting things done strategies is to actually unplug the ethernet cable or turn off the wifi radio.  That works pretty well when I have some web development work to to or when I need to focus on writing a blog post.  But until now, it would never work for dealing with the messages piling up in GMail. 

The video below shows how offline GMail will work and Google’s announcement blog post has the instructions for enabling it.

In case you’re wondering (and you’ve been backpacking in Yosemite all week, away from the massive media coverage MacWorld gets), here’s what Apple bored me to tears with on Tuesday.  Warning: you’re bound to encounter some snark in the following paragraphs.

Updates to iPhoto, iMovie, iToasterOven, and iFootRubber

OK, those last two pieces of software don’t really exist.  Actually there’s some cool sounding things in iPhoto and iMovie that are coming out.  I probably won’t find out anytime soon, because the one piece of computer hardware I really wanted to get my hands on – an updated Mac Mini – wasn’t even mentioned at any point in the keynote.

DRM Free iTunes Music

Finally, the music you buy via iTunes can now be legally transferred to whatever device you would like.  You know, what most of us have been doing all along with the mp3’s we’ve been grabbing via Torrent files for years.  Without a doubt, this is another stake in the heart of the music industry as we’ve come to know it, or more to the point…come to hate it. So it will be more interesting to look back at this point in the history a few years from know, after the music industry has had some time to respond.

New 17” MacBook that costs $2799

OK, this was the crazy thing.  We’re in age where netbooks are the rage.  Laptop prices continue to plummet.  Every other person is losing their job.  Folks are looking to cut costs, get more frugal, and buy things using funds from Coinstar machine visits.  So what does Apple do?  They release a $2799 laptop.  For that price I could buy 4 or 5 Acer Aspire Ones and still have money left over to pay an oversees engineer a few hundred bucks to find a way to mesh all of them together for shared processing power.  Such opportunity here for Apple.  Apple could have blown us away with a $500 or $600 netbook.  The thing would have sold like hotcakes. 

Of course, Apple would say that they already have a sub $500 netbook available for purchse.  Its called the iPhone

iPhone

My contract with Sprint is up in May and at that time, and I’m pretty confident that I’ll be dumping my Treo 755 for an iPhone.  Quite honestly, the Spring contract and the $200 it would cost me to get out of it early is the first reason that I don’t have an iPhone already.  The hatred that folks like Holly spew towards their iPhones is a close second reason.  But in spite of what people tell me it about it being a crappy phone, but a wonderful internet appliance…there is just too much innovation happening with the iPhone for me t resist.  Every week someone tells me about a cool iPhone app – like this one from Urbanspoon – that gets me thinking “how can I live without one?”

So what I’m wondering is what will be the state of the iPhone around May.  Will there have been a software update to add things like cut and paste and video recording?  More storage size for all my mp3s?  Or will they have announced the next version…forcing me to hold off for a few more months?  I’m hoping that the events of next weeks MacWorld will shed some light on this.

Netbooks

Honestly, I’ve been thinking about a laptop for the kitchen counter for a few years now.  I’ve had my eyes and ears open to someone looking to dump an old laptop that I could load Ubuntu, connect it to the web to allow me to do some quick email checking, look up a recipe for Ribolitta, or jump over to Amazon to buy a birthday present while I was thinking about.  The kitchen in our house is not only the place where we cook, but its also the command center.  Having access to the vast resources of the web would definitely help.

But something funny happened while I was waiting around for someone to donate me an old junker.  Netbooks became all the range.  If I were a frequent business traveler, there’s no question I would own one of these 7 inch devices.  The age of cloud computing using things like Google Docs and the growing amount of legitimate online entertainment (Hulu, YouTube, Netflix Watch Instantly) having a computer that runs only a web browser increasingly more sense.

What I’ll probably do on this is wait until the second half of the year.  The iPhone with its Safari browser may solve my fetish of having the web at my fingertips at all times.  And as with all tech, waiting will always get you more for your money. 

Mac Mini

This is another device I’ve considered for a long, long time and I’m interested to hear what updates Apple has in store for it at Macworld.  My fascination with it is as a media server that I can stick right next to my Wii in the living room entertainment center.  Haven’t done so in the past because I’ve felt the Mini had some limitations too difficult to be overcome To be on the fast track to my living room, the Mini ideally would have:

• A Blu-Ray drive.  Currently I’ve got a PS3 to play blu-ray films, but wow does the fan on that thing get pretty loud at times.  Would love to be able to use a MacMini for blu-ray discs, dvd discs, Hulu Video, YouTube, and Netflix Watch Instantly
• Optical audio output to handle surround sound
• A killer remote with a scroll wheel.  I’d like to be able to get my iTunes library onto this thing, but need a way of scrolling through the library quickly an easily.  Currently, I hook up my iPod to my entertainment center via a DLO HomeDock.  It works well with the exception of scrolling through the artists and album library.  When you have 60 GB of music, using a down button to page through lists is totally annoying. 

My Next Nikon

Is this the year that I make the leap to the Nikon D300 or D700?  I’ll be paying attention to what Nikon is up to at the Consumer Electronics Show.  If they announce a successor to the D300 that has movie mode, I may have to consider dropping not only my D50, but also my JVC Everio and Flip Ultra. 

This is part 1 in a series of building an intelligence dashboard using NetVibes. 

What’s an intelligence dashboard?

An intelligence dashboard helps you keep your pulse on…well, there’s a lot of things you can keep your pulse on.  In this series, we’re going to build an intelligence dashboard to assist with monitoring Tesla Motors in various online communities and the web, in general.  There are tons of tools at your disposal to assist with tracking who is talking and writing about Tesla Motors (or another company or keyword).  Some of those tools are http://search.twitter.com (formerly Summize), Google Blog Alerts, Flickr tag search, and Technorati.  An intelligence dashboard will help bring all those sources into a single view.  So instead of having to regularly visit a number of sources, the dashboard will provide one destination that allows you to monitor a firehose of information from all across the web.

Why NetVibes?

NetVibes is a web-based swiss-army knife in many ways.  It is extremely similar to MyYahoo! or iGoogle start pages, but with a large ecoystem of widgets that extend its power.  Certainly, there are many solutions for customizable start pages and power dashboards out there, but I’m using NetFlix for its ease of customization and ability to integrate different types of content. 

I will say that iGoogle is looking more and more promising recently and it might be a tool worth checking out for these purposes.

Let’s get started

First things, first If you don’t have a NetVibes account, head over there and set one up now.

Today, we’re going to add RSS feeds to help monitor Tesla Motors in Twitter, Google Blog Search, and Technorati.  You can watch the video below to follow the steps we take to add RSS feeds of search results from each source into our dashboard.

Basically, the steps to take are:

1. Visit http://www.google.com/blogsearch, search for “Tesla Motors”, copy the link location of the RSS feed for the search results, and add that URL to your dashboard in NetVibes by selecting “Add Content”, then “Add a Feed”
2. Do the same with http://search.twitter.com .  Look for the “Feed for this Query” icon on the search results page to grab the link location.
3. And again at http://www.technorati.com .   The URL of the feed can be found behind the icon labeled “Subscribe”

Once you’ve done that, you now  have a dashboard with 3 different sources for monitoring in a single view.  Pretty easy, huh?  Tomorrow, we’ll add some rich media sources to the dashboard.

Good old handy RSS

As you’ll quickly see, we’re going to use a lot of RSS feeds in this process.  I’m sure you’re pretty familiar with RSS, but If you aren’t check out this video by CommonCraft.

Rather than spend a lot of time on the mechanics of building your own intelligence dashboard during the breakout session, I promised that I would write a blog post about that process.  So next week, I’m going to start a series of posts that will take you through the process of building your own intelligence dashboard to facilitate the stage of listening to the online conversations already taking place.

The dashboard I’ll be building heavily leverages RSS technology.  If you aren’t familiar with what RSS, the great folks at Common Craft have a wonderful video to help explain it.

Yes, it loads super fast.  And that is definitely a welcome improvement from my beloved, but sometimes hated Mozilla Firefox.  Firefox currently takes almost a minute to boot up on my laptop.  True, this may be because of all the extensions I’ve got loaded into Firefox, but still a minute to load a web browser is a frustrating one when all my data is in the computing cloud and Firefox is keeping me from it.

I also like the idea of each browser tab having its own processing space.  Hate it when one crappy website takes down the 15 other tabs I’ve got running in Firefox.  The “Restore Session” feature of Firefox has helped back me from jumping off the top of a building on more than one occasion, but those occasions still exist where you can still find me thinking of taking the stairs to the roof.

The other thing I noticed about Chrome?  I really missed those Firefox extensions.  Especially the Gmail Notifier extension that tells alerts me to new messages in my various inboxes.  Even after 30 minutes I knew that without the ability to extend Chrome, it would be almost impossible for me to switch to it.  I’m sure community contributed Chrome evolutions will come in due time. 

Chrome’s not a bad browser, but…

In the end, I’m not sure I want yet another web browser in the marketplace.

What I’m most afraid of is that web development test plans will become that much more of a pain.  That Chrome will reach significant market share without putting a large enough dent in any other browser.  So what that means is just another browser that I have to plan for testing web sites on and possibly hack at so that it works in everything that people use.  For web site designers and developers, the best case scenario with Chrome is that IE 6 usage finally dies.   We can dream, right?

But what should John Q. Public do?

Remember, I’ve test driven Chrome for about 30 minutes.  But if you’re just looking for a basic web browser and you’re not into all the extensions that live in Firefox, then I  jumping onto Chrome just for the performance gains alone is worth consideration.  If you’re a web developer of power user, I don’t see any way you can abandon Firefox at this time. 

I have never heard of Rick Sanchez before and only stumbled upon his social media integrated newscast on Saturday night when I was channel flipping to find New Orleans evacuation news one of my brief strays away from US Open tennis (which I pretty much watched all weekend).  In addition to excellent reporting, I found Mr. Sanchez on CNN showing familiar Twitter “@” replies on the monitor sitting on his desk.  The next morning, I decided to follow Mr. Sanchez at http://twitter.com/ricksanchezcnn and noticed his recent Twitter activity.  He clearly gets the value of integrating the mediums and interacting…as noticed by his tweet:

what a remarkable tool, cable tv with twitter

I wasn’t the only one to discover Mr. Sanchez’s evolution of TV news this weekend.  And It appears he’ll be debuting a new show on CNN next Monday – “Rick Sanchez Direct” – that intends to integrate Twitter, Facebook, etc.  I’ll be tuning for sure

Perhaps Mr. Sanchez doesn’t deserve extra credit in evolving interactive news.  In the web world, we’ve seen this sort of live interaction building over the years.  Chris Pirillo has been on the cutting edge of interactive live broadcasting for a while now.  And Robert Scoble has certainly (as always) pushing the boundaries by taking advantage of what Qik has to offer with mobile broadcasting.  But somebody had to take the big step at CNN and actually DO IT.  Not only did Rick Sanchez take the first step, but he’s also making it successful.  Actually I’m very curious how fusing Twitter into CNN news happened.  Did Mr. Sanchez and/or his producer bring this to CNN program management?  This would be yet another example of social media infusing the enterprise from the outer layers.  Could Qik and CNN integration be far behind?

This is not a problem unique to WordPress

Some training to help users move along that learning curve must always be provided.  Without training, the solution is incomplete.

It doesn’t matter if you deploying WordPress for your client or you are building an internal only web application or deploying a simple web site for your client.  Some degree of training is always going to be involved so make sure you account for that in project resources, schedules, and costs.  If you think you can get away with building that new site and not doing any training, you’re wrong.  I’ve been building sites of various shapes and sizes for over 10 years and every single one of them involves training at least one person, sometimes hundreds, even thousands.

The clients that I enjoy working with the most are those that are not super tech savvy, but they are interested in using the web as a medium to communicate their message, share their knowledge, or simply tell a story.  To them, the web is a new place they don’t know a ton about, but they are not afraid to learn.  Over the years, I’ve met few people unwilling to figure out how the web works and how they can start using it.  The challenge then becomes, how to people best learn?

Holly and I both have plenty of stories helping folks learn WordPress.  Sometimes it goes well.  Sometimes, not so much.  We’ve used the Codex.  We’ve purchased WordPress for Dummies for our clients.  Those are both excellent resources.  On the web or in print, you would be challenged to find a more comprehensive learning resource regarding WordPress.  But there’s no replacement for actually seeing how things get done, so we thought a set of well organized training screencasts would help address getting our clients moving along that learning curve.  This is why we launched a new site a couple weeks ago – wpscreencasts.com.  As we wrote in our post announcing the site, we did this to assist our efforts in providing training for the clients we deploy WordPress based sites for as well as provide a video resource that complements existing resources like the Codex. 

We may never completely eliminate the calls from our clients asking for simple updates, but we should provide professional solutions.  And a complete professional solution involves training.