To App or Not to App

A few weeks ago, I posted the following to Uncharted’s blog:

From what I hear, smartphones are all the rage. They’re the latest thing. They’re – I think the word is – keen.

I’ll tie an onion to my belt and take your word for it. And John Milligan’s. He successfully used his Android smartphone to take a photo and upload it to his personal profile at www.uncharted.net.

Big deal, you say. Folks have been doing similar things since the time we called nickels bees and could say nonsensical things like “Gimme five bees for a quarter.”

But this is significant.

We want our Explorers to use our website through a mobile world. Why be tethered to a desk to make an update to your profile, upload a photo, or even a story, if you’re good at touchscreen or itty-bitty keyboard typing? We expect our Explorers are mobile now, and will only get more mobile as the future unfolds.

John’s shown us it can be done. Huzzah for him, I say. He makes me want to replace our circa 2001 T-Mobile cameraless cell phone with that nifty little bowling game on it for something newer. Tell me, do they make a smartphone with dials now? I like to make sparks when I place a call . . .

Maybe that last sentiment is more true than I thought.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project (and I’m really beginning to enjoy Pew’s I&ALP for the treasure-trove of information that it is) revealed today that even though social media sites like Foursquare are all the rage among the brainy types, nobody’s really checking in through social media mobile apps.

I have to wonder about that. I check in using Facebook, Twitter, and Good Reads apps, but then again, maybe I am one of the mediocre 4 percent of adults age 30 to 49 who do so.

And it’s not exactly a game for the young, either, for only 8 percent of those ages 18-38 – Uncharted’s principal audience – checks in using apps.

Here’s what the study says:

In its first report on the use of “geosocial” or location-based services, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project finds that 4% of online adults use a service such as Foursquare or Gowalla that allows them to share their location with friends and to find others who are nearby. On any given day, 1% of internet users are using these services.

This is the second survey of the Pew Internet Project to ask about such “geosocial” or location-based services. The current number shows little change from the first time this question was asked, in a May 2010 survey, when 5% of adult internet users said they had used such a site.

Uncharted isn't exactly location-based, but we do use the buzzword "geosocial" in our talk, so it's probably wise to heed the results of the study, or at least take them into consideration as we figure out what to do as we allocate our scarce resources.

Does this mean outfits like Uncharted shouldn’t make smartphone apps? No. But it does mean that as we want to build audiences, we need to look at our users’ behavior and find out if they’re among the few who are eager to use location-based apps, or if they’re content to access our site via other means. If they’re app-hungry, then we direct our resources in that direction. If not, then we take a step back from app-land to see instead what we can do to make our website more user-friendly.

This is especially pertinent for us as even though we do have a programmer on board now, we do not have an app developer. We’d either have to find someone willing to build an app for us for free, or pay for the privilege. As it is now, we may be better served by having our in-house programmer work on making the website better.

So once again we need to go to our users to find out what they’d like before we decide what they’d like before asking them.

Beware Payola

This is actually an idea we’ve pondered at Uncharted: Finding a person, place or thing willing to pay us to promote them as, say, a wonderful place to visit, an outdoor guide/guru/shaman/whatever, or an altogether excellent bit of gear that is essential for any Explorer to have.

Seems we have some homework to do on it, as the Federal Trade Commission says this is a no-no, unless one says in highway-style lettering that said content is bought and paid for.

According to Forbes (via CNNmoney.com) this is a big issue for social media folks like us who are all gung-ho on making money but dumb enough not to think clearly about the legal implications.

The gist of these stories is that disclosure – easy enough to accomplish on a blog posting, or, say, on a story at Uncharted – isn’t as easy to do with limited-character social media like Twitter and Foursquare. Still, the whole concept bears keeping in mind as we ponder what we have to outline as policy at Uncharted in order to stay on the right side of the law.

Roads? Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads

I’ve long complained that in our neck of the woods, it’s pretty easy to get around if you want to go east or west. Going north or south, however . . .

Now it looks like the cities of Rexburg and Sugar City, along with Madison County, are seriously studying how to make going north or south at least in our part of the county a little easier. I’m not sure, however, that their plan is going to make Second East any easier to travel on.

You can see planned routes and the most recent discussion on the routes here (Warning: Boring city council minutes).

Rexburg and the county tout a new corridor to the east of town, connecting either Seventh South or University Boulevard to State Highway 33 east of Sugar City, will help alleviate traffic on Second East in Rexburg. I don’t see how, unless the destinations on Second East – namely Wal-Mart, Albertsons, Kmart, and other shopping centers move with the new road.

I say this because I commute on Second East daily and have witnessed the bumper-to-bumper traffic the cities and county are talking about. However, once you’re north of Wal-Mart, neither Second East, which links Rexburg to US Highway 20, nor Highway 33, the principal route to Sugar City, are crowded at all. In other words, the vast majority of that bumper-to-bumper traffic on Second East is local, not through. Putting in another road east of town will make it easier to get to and from Sugar City, but it won’t do much to alleviate traffic on Second East.

I’m not against the new road, by any means. I’d love a less-trafficked way to get home from the bus stop every night. But I don’t think the powers that be can count on a new road making Second East less traveled, or at least less traveled in large amounts.

One of the reasons I hope a new route is put through to at least Seventh South is because Second East, south of Main Street, is an impossibly slow and pedestrian-clogged route (see yesterday’s rant on BYU-Idaho students). The road has but two lanes and is the only way to get to the south side of Rexburg this far east. And it’s only 25 miles per hour most of the way. It’s not a major road, though the city treats it as such. We need that new north-south route badly, just not for the principal reason the city and county are touting.

Attention BYU-Idaho Students: You Stink at Driving. And Walking. And Cycling.

Some dim bulb of a BYU-Idaho student pedaled his bike in front of our bus tonight.

I was sitting in the front seat, and twitched just as the driver did, trying not to hit the cyclist. I don't know who you are, cyclist, but bear this in mind: Only an experienced bus driver stopped you from getting hit tonight. You were not visible, you on your dark bike with a dark jacket on.

We got off the bus, about ten or so of us. There was quite a stream of cars behind the bus, and our vehicles were parked on the other side of the street. So we waited. And waited. But that's what you do for traffic, right?

Not if you're a BYU-Idaho student. We saw several dart into traffic -- slow-moving, yes, but moving nonetheless, at dusk. We figured that was the thing to do. But being the silly safety-is-drilled-into-us-because-we-work-at-an-industrial-plant types that we are, we waited for the traffic to clear before we crossed.

But that's par for the course at BYU-Idaho. Driving near campus you encounter two things: Stupid pedestrians and stupid drivers.

Some idiot from Washington state passed my wife and I tonight and nearly rear-ended the slow-moving vehicle in front of us because obviously we weren't going fast enough for him. Yeah, you in the white Diamante. Get that pole out of your keister and learn how to drive.

Is the Toyota Dying?

We may be on the verge of retiring the Toyota.

And here’s the thing: I can’t really see us buying another vehicle to replace it. Even though we got a zero percent interest loan on our other vehicle from the First Bank of the Father-in-Law, that was because we bought a car from him. No such luck this time around. And that’s fine.

Do we need two vehicles, I have to ask. Yes, I use one to get to and from the bus every day. But all it does all day is sit on that hill with the other site worker vehicles, until I’m ready to go home. Though it’s kind of a pain for Michelle, she could easily pick me up. And take me there. And if we don’t replace it, I’ll ride my bike to the bus stop when the weather’s good.

Then there are the weekends. On rare occasions we’re off in two vehicles, but more often than not, if we go anywhere, we’re all going together. So we could easily get along with only one vehicle.

Not that there’s a lot wrong with the truck, or at least I hope. The brakes are acting funny, again. Have to take it down to Larsen Repair to get them fixed. But it does have nearly 200,000 miles on it, and you know, even Toyotas don’t last forever. Maybe it’s time to bid it farewell.

Or not. We'll take it to the mechanics on Friday and see if they can do their voodoo again. When it comes to vehicles, better the devil you know, I say.

Who's Gobbling My Bandwidth?

I don’t want to become one of Nexflix’s rabble of helpless victims. And I don’t even use their service.

But according to Sandvine (via Slate.com), one of those really neat-o Internet companies that have a lot of acronyms and Klingonese in their “about” page (see it here) Netflix already gobbles up 20 percent of “downstream Internet traffic” in the United States, and is poised to grow even more as more and more people subscribe to their movie and TV show streaming services.

Will the nation’s broadband network hold, folks? Can it hold out? Can we resist the shiny, candy-like Netflix logo that already beckons us? Stimpy probably can’t.

Sandvine and Slate point out that, more and more, we’re using the Internet for synchronous use, rather than asynchronous use. We’re watching TV or movies as they arrive, rather than downloading them and watching when we want. We’re also using services like Skype (which I use occasionally) and other services that gobble up network bandwidth.

And that could cause trouble, according to Slate’s Farhad Manjoo and a few others he quotes:

Well, maybe there is one dark cloud: Will there be enough available bandwidth for Netflix to keep growing? Wired.com's Ryan Singel points out that in the hours when Netflix hits 20 percent of broadband use, it's being used by just under 2 percent of Netflix subscribers. That stat has huge implications for how ISPs manage their lines. If 2 percent of Netflix customers account for one-fifth of the traffic on North American broadband lines, what will happen when more and more Netflixers begin to watch movies during peak times?

The outcome might actually not be that dire. Theoretically, broadband capacity isn't fixed—as people begin using bandwidth-hogging services like Netflix more often, they'll subscribe to faster Internet lines, and that will push ISPs to build out their capacity.

In other words, they won’t really do anything to fix current capacity, just encourage us to spend more money on more capacity, and then they’ll install it for us. Given I live in the sticks where competition for broadband Internet isn’t all that good, I’m not holding my breath.

I’ve already blogged here about my difficulty in rationalizing paying for cloud storage of my photos (I’m too cheap to pay $25 a year for a professional Flickr account, for example.) And at Uncharted, we’re having a jolly time keeping up with having enough server space for our stuff. I’m beginning to think I could make some money just opening up a local server farm and finding customers. That would be an interesting adventure, because storage capacity for cloud computing, and the bandwidth to access it all, are only going to be bigger concerns in the future.

Rabbit and Skunk and Spooks

I don't have many possessions that are rooted in my childhood, but I have a few. I couple of teddy bears my Grandmother Speirs made for me. A few other really ratty stuffed animals that I can't bear to part with -- and I'm no sissy. A quilt, also from Grandma. She was the only grandparent I knew; the rest had died by the time I came around.

I do have a few books. This is one of them:

I love it now for the reasons I loved it then: The story, the endearing characters (always sympathized with Rabbit, who wanted to get along with people and not necessarily scare them with the costume Skunk foists upon him, but at the same time he doesn't want to disappoint Skunk . . .) and the simple, "I could almost do that" style of drawing. Well done, Robert Kraus.

My kids love it for the same reasons. Though they like the sound effects of the scary ghosts who come to haunt the pair as they cower in Rabbit's house, waiting for the ghosts to go away so they can scare people. We trot this book out every Halloween, and it's a hit.

I know from long, hard experience that these books are deceptively simple. They appear easy to write, but in practice are very hard. You have to put a lot of thought into them, and then express that thought in as few words as possible. Indeed, this blog entry probably is home to more word than Carla Stevens' book. No matter. I will keep trying. While I work on "Considering How to Run," with the goal of having it and a query letter ready to send to agents by the end of the year, I'll also work on a childrens' book on the side. I've already got the title: Dumb Bunnies. I think it's got potential.

Thanks, Aunt Betty

When I was a kid, my Aunt Betty Saltzgiver of Salt Lake City, who knew people who knew people who worked for Morton-Thiokol, the Utah contractor that built the solid rocket boosters and main fuel tank for the United States' space shuttles, had them send me a bunch of photos of the shuttle, the rockets, and just about everything to do with the shuttle, including a little patch I had Mom sew onto my jacket.

I literally wore those photos out looking at them, poring over every detail, wondering what it would be like to be one of those astronauts flying up into space in that magnificent black-and-white bird.

One thing led to another, as life often does. I went on to a career in small-town journalism, followed by another career as a technical writer at a nuclear waste dump. But space always remained that final frontier.

Now Joseph Burkhead, Uncharted's resident pilot, has taken me on a voyage to a shuttle launch -- one of the few remaining launches before what's left of the fleet is retired in 2012. Thanks, Joe. Read his story here.

And thanks, Aunt Betty. I've still got those photos somewhere.

Da Law

For those of you not into belly-button introspection that involves the people of Ammon, best to skip this entry. And understand I’m just having a dialogue with myself as I try to understand this crazy, mixed-up world we live in, though competing points of view.

Read Alma Chapter 30 this weekend as a family, as part of our regular scripture study. That chapter, which introduces a man named Korihor, who actively preaches that there is no such person or thing as Jesus Christ, contains the following passages:

  7 Now there was no law against a man’s belief; for it was strictly contrary to the commands of God that there should be a law which should bring men on to unequal grounds.
  8 For thus saith the scripture: Choose ye this day, whom ye will serve.
  9 Now if a man desired to serve God, it was his privilege; or rather, if he believed in God it was his privilege to serve him; but if he did not believe in him there was no law to punish him.
  10 But if he murdered he was punished unto death; and if he robbed he was also punished; and if he stole he was also punished; and if he committed adultery he was also punished; yea, for all this wickedness they were punished.
  11 For there was a law that men should be judged according to their crimes. Nevertheless, there was no law against a man’s belief; therefore, a man was punished only for the crimes which he had done; therefore all men were on equal grounds.

So, basically, a form of religious tolerance, if you skip over any religions that believe adultery is acceptable. So far, so good; truthfully, if you can get past any anti-religious bias, you’ve got to think this is a good situation: Don’t believe in God or Jesus, that’s OK. You’re not breaking the law.

Korihor, as is his right, uses the defense provided in the law to preach against Christ. He finds some followers. Then he goes to the land of Jershon, where he encounters a different people, the people of Ammon. These are people who are very stalwart in the faith; so stalwart that they promised never to kill another person, even in their own defense. Thousands of them died when they encountered enemies who had no such restrictions. So they’re faithful. They really believe.

They don’t like what Korihor has to say. So they take him to their local religious leaders, who kicked him out. So, by modern standards of tolerance, not so tolerant.

He then goes to the land of Gideon, where he’s also taken to Giddonah, their religious leader, and another individual, who is their secular leader.

Thus follows an entretemps between Korihor and Giddonah, in which Korihor defends his actions and is taken to Alma, the chiefest of the religious leaders, and also to another, who is the chiefest of the secular leaders. Korihor defends his beliefs and asks for a sign that he is wrong. He gets what he asks for and is “struck dumb,” and is no longer able to speak. He asks Alma to pray to God to remove the judgment, but Alma refuses.

So, why ponder this?

Because I’ve been thinking a lot about things. Trying to figure out how to apply the scriptures to my life, to make them come alive and become more meaningful. I’m also trying to figure out how tolerance – and here I have to use the modern definition, which basically is “a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose beliefs or personal characteristics (race, religion, nationality, etc.), differ from one’s own,” according to Wikipedia.

What does one do, however, when tolerance clashes with belief or personal characteristics? Which gives: the belief, or the tolerance?

As a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I face this question. I can think of many moral reasons why homosexual marriage, for example, is incorrect. Should not be tolerated. I cannot, however, conjure up any legal reasons as to why homosexual marriage ought not to be afforded the same rights and protections as heterosexual marriage. I am having a difficult time reconciling the two viewpoints. Which wins here: belief, or tolerance?

Which brings me back to the lands of Jershon and Gideon. The inhabitants of that land did not wish to tolerate Korihor’s beliefs, though there was no law against them. He was taken to leaders fulfilling a dual religious and secular role and met judgment – if you want to believe in such – at the hand of God, not at the hand of society. But in other parts of the land, it appears the inhabitants looked to the law and said, well, there’s nothing we can do. Some listened. Some didn’t listen. But he wasn’t thwarted in any way.

This is the conundrum that those of us on the side of faith face. We know we ought to be tolerant. We look at the laws that, in the past, forbade those of our faith from owning property, sitting on juries, or serving in state legislatures, and we know those laws were wrong. How can we, then, turn around and deny rights to those with whom we have moral disagreements, but not legitimate legal ones? I simply don’t know. Every time I think I’ve arrived at an answer, it slips from my grasp.

So I err – if that’s the right word for it – on the side of tolerance in this issue, and on others. Hate the sin, love the sinner. Do unto others as ye would have done unto you. You know, things that Jesus taught us to do.

But how far does it go? Do I, like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, see my permissiveness, my tolerance reach a point where it can no longer break – until, at the end, I break it yet again?

Stay tuned.

The Post-Rational World

Over the weekend, one of my Facebook friends asked this question in light of the rally to restore sanity/fear this weekend: To whom can we look for rational political discourse these days?

I sense the answer is that we’re now living in a post-rational world.

We’ve been in that world since the implosion of the Democratic Party in Chicago in 1968, since the proto-nomination of Pigasus the Pig as president of the United States that same year in that same town, and since the proto-Silent Majority elected Richard Nixon as president in 1968 as well.

In that year we saw it all: A political party that took itself down in flames because two rational factions within it couldn’t see the ends of their own noses past their own rationality. A gruntled electorate that chose its own rationality over that of the minority and continued to choose that rationality even with the specter of high crimes and misdemeanors having been committed by those they trusted to be rational. And a disgruntled electorate that decided since the parties and the politicians and the whole freaking system were out of order that they’d all be better off if they chose an alternate rationality and elected a pig as president, amidst the pomp and pageantry meant to mock the process they knew they were powerless to win and thus felt powerless to participate in it.

And, of course, we had the national media, suddenly realizing the import and impact of their power and coming to realize that they, too, could become part of the story and help frame the outcome with their own rationality.

So there are a lot of parallels between 1968 and 2010. We don’t have Pigasus the Pig, but we do have Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert whoa re rallying the disaffected who are – let’s face it – pretty much in the Democratic camp. They look askance at the Tea Party – the conservative answer for the disaffected on the right – with the insanity and fear Stewart and Colbert, as comedians, use as their fuel.

Both sides place the blame on, as Time magazine puts it, “a politico-media industry that feeds on conflict.” Maybe they’re half right. But I think most of the blame has to fall on we, the electorate, gruntled or disgruntled, who look at that conflict and base our political decisions not on rationality but on the conflict as mirrored through our own rational lenses, which rightly or wrongly focus on the vague notion that it’s the politicians and the media who are to blame, we’re just the helpless rabble of victims who are acted upon, rather than the actors. We’ve stopped wondering if what we perceive as reality is real or the shadows of reality on the walls of that cave and are instead reading the graffiti on the walls for the entertainment value while the shadows and reality go on about their business without us paying much attention to it at all.

If we stopped listening to the 24-hour news cycle, we’d be better off.

If we stopped reading all the political slop on the Internet, we’d be better off.

If we just up and listened to each other, rather than finding pundits or comedians who share our disdain of the body politic, we’d be better off.

Instead, we’re all off in our little corners, waving our “Don’t Tread on Me” or “OMG Snakes” flags, pretty much like these fellows: