Daily Cup of Geek

Ah, technology. So much for that. Upgrades are never pretty, so let’s start over and call this 2.0 of the Daily Cup of Geek. I have larger complaints about upgrading Parallels and OSX, anyway. It could have been worse.

It’s been over six months since the last post (The Black Fox blog, sadly, is now dead), and that’s largely because of the general insanity of adulthood. I’ve moved, I’ve gone on vacation, I’ve continued to geek out over technology and media… so what’s new? Pretty much everything, but here are some of the recent highlights…

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Social Networks
Well, to begin… Facebook has exploded. With Microsoft chipping in $240 million (meaning a $15 billion valuation for Facebook), it’s difficult to consider it anything less than an explosion.

But we now have Google & Friend’s OpenSocial, and let’s not forget that Google and Yahoo both want to jump on the Inbox-as-social-network bandwagon. Oh, and don’t forget MySpace… yeah, it’s still kicking. (Along with the dozens of other, lesser known social networks.)

Right now, though, I’m a big Facebook fan. Huge in fact. I love the applications (I have a Zombie army, and am just shy of becoming a Zombie Mogul), the ease of use, and the lack of obnoxious ads, music, and profile customization options (i.e., it’s not MySpace). I keep my Facebook page open on a tab all day at work. I have the Blackberry application installed.

I’m totally obsessed. And I’m not the only one. I know more about several of my colleagues now, in only a few months, than I ever would have learned over the course of several years.

And that’s awesome.

Gmail and IMAP
Gmail supports IMAP! Yay! Specifically, this makes it much easier for me to “unlock” my archived email in Outlook. Add my gmail account to Outlook, select the email I want to move, click and drag it to my Gmail. It does a pretty good job of grouping together conversation threads (with some minor hiccups), and it maintains the original dates the emails were sent/recieved.

And with Gmail’s storage space, I can finally consolidate my archives, not to mention open up access to those old emails — Apple Mail (meaning Spotlight can search them), Gmail, and Outlook are actually in harmony over my archives on this. Hallelujah! Add in the fact that I finally got iChat / Mail / Address Book to sync AND dedupe with Outlook (Exchange) / Blackberry… I am a happy, happy geek. Thank you, Plaxo.

Torrent / P2P Crackdown
OiNK is dead. Demonoid then followed. But The Pirate Bay is still going strong, and more and more torrent sites are popping up. Many are preaching the way of the Hydra, others are turning to darknets.

But Hollywood is on strike and Radiohead went off-label, telling fans to pay what they wanted for their new album “In Rainbows” (and other artists are going off-label, too), so maybe it won’t matter soon anyway.

Viral Marketing, Gone Slightly Wrong
My favorite show, Dexter, launched a brilliant (and it appears, terrifying) viral campaign to promote the new season of the Showtime series about everyone’s favorite serial killer. Think the Snakes on a Plane phone calls, but with a personalized “news clip”. Brilliant.

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For now, it’s back to work for me. Let’s see if I can update the blog as much as I do my Facebook… welcome to the Daily Cup of Geek.

This entry was posted by Bronwyn Lewis, on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 11:46 pm and is filed under facebook, google, hollywood strike, p2p, viral marketing. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.