Pretend you’re lying prone on a psychiatrist couch because I know your problem.
You’re part of a group or a nonprofit and you’ve got a Web site, but it isn’t working for you. The soccer club’s Christmas picture is getting mighty moldy and that message from your president is so last year.
It’s causing you extreme anxiety because you can’t reach your Web designer to post news in a timely fashion. Or he wants to charge you a bundle to update the pages. You visit the site, but you’re the only one.
Stop beating up on yourself. You’re afflicted with a condition that’s all too common called Web site drift. It comes on quite suddenly when your Web designer sets up your site, then sends you adrift.
Rather than relive past Web site memories that can only hurt your self-esteem, we’ve got an option for you to consider.
We’ve been running workshops for non-commercial groups and nonprofits to teach them how they can create their own simple Web page on our site to promote their news and events. They can blog, network with members and post photo galleries. This stuff is so easy, they can maintain all of this themselves.
And best of all, it’s free. How’s that in the age of gas prices that are so high they make your nose bleed?
One group that has taken us up on this offer is the 100th Infantry Battalion Veterans Association. Check out the page we helped them create but which they maintain themselves. Members or their families can keep up with up with events and news about veterans. They blog, leave messages and post photo galleries.
Other groups have also taking steps to build their own pages on our site. Once we get several in line, we’ll set up a central page for groups/nonprofits that will point users to the right place.
If you are intrigued by the possibility that you can get a grip on your Web drift, call me at 525-8063 or e-mail at soshiro@honoluluadvertiser.com.
The day is fast approaching when we won’t need to buy software. We’ll find whatever we want free on the Web.
Think my head is in the clouds? Take a look at one of the latest examples of Web applications at 280slides.com.
This beta presentation application could some day seriously rival PowerPoint and Keynote. At some future point, we may look back and see it was a key development in the march away from Microsoft Office and other desktop software.
What is really startling is how robust 280slides is. This is not just a simple presentation app. You can create slides in multiple fonts with a decent choice of background designs.
If you want photos or video in your presentation, you can upload them from your computer or connect to them from Flickr and YouTube.
You can save your slideshow on the site. Then when you are ready to give your presentation, call it up on your browser — provided you have an Internet connection. You can also download your presentation and open it up in PowerPoint or embed your presentation in your blog or Web site.
Of course, you won’t get many of the more advanced features of PowerPoint and Keynote in 280slides, but for simple, straight-forward presentations, it’ll do the job amazingly well.
And did I mention it was free? Try it and let us know what you think.
Nicholas Carr writes a provocative article in the July/August issue of The Atlantic Monthly that posits, a favorite chichi word around here, that Google is making us stupid.
This isn’t based on any reliable research, other than a University College London study of online habits that notes people on the Internet are ADD. It doesn’t quite say this, but it does find that Web visitors don’t read deeply. Rather, they skip from one information source to another like mejiro in search of the perfect fig.
Carr takes the premise beyond the scientific into the murkiness of the anecdotal by asserting that he and others believe they are losing their ability to read anything lengthy. Journal articles, research papers, long books, Proust — all are tough going now.
If he’s right, this has dire implications for any human activity that requires sustained concentration — advanced math, philosophy, languages, medicine and throwing the round ball into the triangle hole at the Punahou Carnival game booth.
I have an alternate theory, but it requires intellectual rigor to own up to it: Carr and the rest of us are simply getting old. And I happen to have scientific proof of this, at least as it pertains to me. I say “proof,” because it doesn’t take much to convince me I’m on a steep decline.
Brain Age 2, the latest version of the Nintendo DS game, was recently installed on my daughter’s console. Based on the research of Japanese neuroscientist Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, Brain Age claims to train your brain to stay sharp with 10 minutes daily of word and number games.
At the outset, you go through several exercises to determine your starting brain age. I thought I was pretty good at video games, but still the animated Dr. Kawashima laughed his head off announcing my brain age was 80.
So it may be true that Google is turning our brains into oatmeal. Or it may be that we no longer have the requisite number of brain cells to read more than three paragraphs into a story.
As for those of you who are young and suffering from the same affliction of shallow, peripatetic reading, your head may have already been reprogrammed by Google. Intervention is your only hope.
First one to e-mail me gets a copy of “War and Peace.”
I sincerely hope you weren’t thinking that you’d see a new iPhone unboxed.
The phone is on my mind as well, but Apple likes to draw out the anticipation and I have no more early access to the phone than you do. So until July 11, we must suffer in common silence, broken by the occasional anguished cry and thrashing on the ground.
Before you hurt yourself, here’s a near-perfect diversion, a Web calendar called 30 Boxes that’s been out for a while but getting good press.
It’s not fully descriptive to call 30 Boxes simply a calendar since it is more than that. You can add events to a calendar that can be shared or not, send reminders to your cell phone, and organize yourself with a to-do list. But like they say in those late night Veg-O-Matic ads, that’s not all.
If you are tired of having your social network pages scattered here and there, 30 Boxes may be what you need. In one spot, it allows you to keep updated on messages or other changes to your Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, etc. accounts.
You’ll need to link back to your pages if you want to send Facebook pokes, for example, but it’s pretty handy nonetheless to see things pulled together.
Invite your buddies to make 30 Boxes a less lonely place. You can add your buddy’s Web stuff to your space. Privacy controls allow you to keep your information secret, at least as secret as one can be on the Web.
Take a tour and let me know what you think.
Next week: 280Slides.com, a Keynote-like presentation application on the Web. Thanks to MacBreak Weekly for this tip.
Between dressing, exercising and eating breakfast, I was hitting the refresh button every few minutes on Engadget this morning just to get the earliest information about the new iPhone.
Even more frantically, Scott Morifuji, our Webmaster, was checking MacRumors, which he says was faster and more literate in putting out the details flowing from Steve Jobs’ speech at the WWDC developers conference in San Francisco.
I can’t explain the obsession we have with this phone, other than it possesses a coolness factor that its competitors can’t touch.
The good news is that the new iPhone will be $200 cheaper than the first version, with a faster Internet connection and built-in GPS. An 8-gig version will cost $199 and a 16-gig will be priced at $299.
The bad news is it won’t go on sale until July 11.
I like that the iPhone is taking on Blackberry and Palm in the business market. Few things would make me happier than to get my business mail on an iPhone. My Blackberry and I have a hate-hate relationship. We’ve never truly bonded.
Lots of folks liked the games that were demo’d, but the application that blew me away was the promise of Associated Press news feeds based on my location coupled with AP’s open invitation to everyone on the planet to send in their videos and pictures. Can you imagine what we might see from a worldwide army of citizen journalists?
Gives me goose bumps thinking about it.
So what do you think? Is this more hype from Cupertino or are we looking at the future of mobile phones?
