The news is getting out, slowly, via Twitter. I’m returning to Alaska after a failed experiment in St. Louis.

I’ll be back in Anchorage, working as an IT Project Manager for a small firm that works primarily with healthcare and human services organizations — typically nonprofits — as of July 6, 2010. And I couldn’t be happier.

I’m returning to Stephanie, friends, a city and state I know well and work at which I excel for companies I intuitively understand.

I’m also leaving the public media world behind.

I’ve thought deeply about public needs for news and information and how organizations can migrate from broadcasting to participating, but after more than 5 years, I can’t see a way forward for those existing organizations. What’s needed is a massive die-off, a huge extinction event that can reset the clock and force absolute rethinking. Without a rejection of the past, there cannot be an embrace of the future.

That said, I lament leaving behind deeply dedicated and intelligent people working hard to bring about meaningful change in the old public broadcasting system. I wish them success and I hope they prove me profoundly wrong in my conclusions. I won’t discuss my thinking too much here, as I’ll leave that for my Gravity Medium blog. But suffice it to say I’m done toiling to envision a new future for public service media. There is one, but I don’t see it coming from inside the system. Not without CPB rewriting the rulebook from scratch — with congressional approval. That’s a long shot on the best possible day.

In place of working on public media issues, I’m turning my focus to local action and participation in my community in any number of ways. Naturally, I’ll continue to foster development of the Alaska Tweets community. But I’m also exploring the idea of firing up a local version of the Awesome Foundation — either a chapter or a variation-on-the-theme. And I think there’s a need to promote good IT application practices throughout the nonprofit world in Alaska. I can help with that.

In any case, it’s “North to the Future” for me, effective immediately. And let’s hope the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico doesn’t destroy the Alaskan economy in the process. I need it to stay afloat for at least a few years.

While Gotham is at the science fair, I’m banging the prom queen behind the woodshop.

via mcsweeneys.net

I hated Comic Sans until this monologue. Thanks to John Gruber (@gruber) for the find.

The trouble started in January…

Click the link above for the harrowing tale of moving 4,000 miles only to find the job wasn’t a good fit, then suddenly re-entering the job market.

Here I am, less than 24 hours from departure from Alaska and I just wanted to mention that the moving saga will be captured online at a new blog: It Came From the North. I’ll do my best to post stuff of a relocation nature there.

A couple things are already posted. Enjoy!

…while most people have entered the digital world, participation falls off sharply as complexity increases. For example, 93% of respondents have a digital camera, but less than a third use digital photo-sharing tools. Similarly, 92% of respondents have a cell phone, but only 22% have used an internet-based phone service such as Skype.

via marketingcharts.com

The iPad — like the iPhone, like the iMac and all prior Macs — aims for simplicity of use amidst a sea of complex products. It’s what Apple does best and what Microsoft claims it wants to do: give you the power to create and consume media and information with the least effort.

My technically-minded friends are unimpressed with the iPad, and personally I’m a little disappointed at some things that were left out of this first edition (some things seem to have been left out deliberately, like a camera). But the iPad isn’t aimed at us. We can load Linux on commodity PC hardware. We can hack the Windows registry. We manage e-mail servers, not just our own e-mail. It takes a lot to impress or challenge us.

But for the average user — the person that doesn’t care about the difference between a Gigabyte and a Megabit — the iPad fulfills the 93% use case, like a digital camera. It’s a digital lifestyle appliance, simple enough for everyone and powerful enough to be useful in several situations.

I don’t know if it will be an unqualified success, like the iPhone. To me, the iPad is an evolutionary product rather than a revolutionary one. The iPhone revolutionized the smart phone market because it was the first to get it “right” for a broad swath of consumers. Uptake was instant, even when it was just a 2G model with no apps and no cut-and-paste.

iPad uptake will be far slower. But each revision will be better and better and the price will moderate over time. As people are disappointed by netbooks and find they want to consume a variety of media on the go with the least hassle, and with familiarity from the iPod Touch and iPhone, it’s got a serious shot at creating this new category.

Posted via web from jmproffitt

When the White House announced that President Obama would deliver his State of the Union message on Jan. 27—the same day Apple was planning to unveil its new tablet computer—many of us at Slate cringed. “What is Obama thinking?” one of my colleagues joked. “He’s going to be totally overshadowed.”

The idea of a product rollout trumping the president’s annual speech to Congress does seem funny. Maybe the tablet will be a bust. Maybe Obama will rock the world. But the opposite is at least as likely. This isn’t Obama’s fault. It’s just the way the world is going: Technology, as a driver of social change, is overtaking politics.

via slate.com

Sometimes it’s hard to take a wide angle view of what’s happening in our society, whether within our national borders or planet-wide. This piece by Slate’s William Saletan explores just how pervasive and entwined our First World society is with technology. It’s changing how we act, how we think and, of course, how we communicate and share ideas.

And for me, the Apple tablet introduction totally overshadows the pronouncements of our President.

Apple’s tablet will actually change the world, one way or another. Our President, a year into his floundering administration? Not likely to change much.

Posted via web from jmproffitt

Posted via web from jmproffitt

via doctorswithoutborders.org

Spread the word using a variety of banner ads / images from Doctors Without Borders.

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/donate/haiti-share.cfm

Posted via web from jmproffitt

via gigaom.com

This is not good.

I love the iPhone, but it needs competition. While the Android series of phones are interesting, they still aren’t stacking up as serious competitors, either from a unit sales perspective or, more importantly, from a software perspective.

This is the difference between messianic vision for a product or service and simply throwing engineers and marketers into a room together.

When will someone give Apple a run for its money?

Posted via web from jmproffitt

…both of these stories suggest a prime battleground for the next year: as the old TV businesses come to grips with the internet (finally). Just like other parts of the entertainment industry, it will be messy and annoying — and incumbent players are going to make a lot of really stupid mistakes. But, in the end, we should start to get some pretty cool stuff out of it — though, most likely not directly from the incumbent players, but from the upstarts and innovators on the margins.

Posted via web from jmproffitt

It would make sense to fight the next battle, for once, instead of the last one. Sense, though, is not the criteria by which public money is spent in this country—and it hasn’t been for a long time.

Thank you, Anne Applebaum. We need more voices to fight the security theatrics put on by the DHS and TSA while they also spend billions on needless projects at the behest of members of Congress looking for quick reelection spending.

Posted via web from jmproffitt

If you see something, say something. Hmmm. Has that actually worked? Or x-raying shoes? When was the last time a bad guy was foiled because he couldn’t use a good camera to take a picture of a tourist attraction? Why do the authorities at Grand Central Station in New York wear desert camouflage?

Posted via web from jmproffitt

…a risk-free flight has never existed; nor has a risk-free car trip; nor a risk-free ocean liner voyage; nor a risk-free bike ride. To be alive is to face risks.

And don’t get me started on cars vs. terrorist bombings. Ugh. 30,000 to 40,000 people die every year in automotive crashes in the U.S. But there’s no TSA for driving. And should we talk about food terrorists? The companies that produce products known — proven — to be bad for us, but there’s no regulations to stop them or even slow them down.

I’m far more likely to die prematurely in a car or via diet than in any terrorist attack.

Posted via web from jmproffitt

All this money and technology seems to have reduced the risk of future attack. But, of course, the system is bound to fail sometimes. Reality is unpredictable, and no amount of computer technology is going to change that. Bureaucracies are always blind because they convert the rich flow of personalities and events into crude notations that can be filed and collated. Human institutions are always going to miss crucial clues because the information in the universe is infinite and events do not conform to algorithmic regularity.

Resilient societies have a level-headed understanding of the risks inherent in this kind of warfare.

But, of course, this is not how the country has reacted over the past week.

2010 is only a few days old, but this may end up being the most important David Brooks column this year.

Posted via web from jmproffitt

If we were to become a fundamentalist police state that deployed torture at home and abroad against Muslim threats, the war would already be over, and al Qaeda would have won. We fight for certain profound and enduring principles – of freedom of religion and conscience and the inviolable dignity of the individual human being. We cannot defend those principles if we trash them at the same time.

I, like many Americans, largely ignored the discussion on torture in the so-called “war on terror.” I figured the election of Obama would lead to a significant policy and action change.

Sadly, that has not come to pass. We continue to use detention and are haunted by the neocons and neofascists that believe torture and suspension of habeus corpus are the right answers to the asymmetric threat of terrorism. More than haunted, they continue to drive the debate and have gotten Obama to compromise his way into a moral corner from which he seems unable to remove himself — or our nation.

Keep reading Andrew Sullivan. He reminds us of our best principles and admonishes those in Washington and beyond that would have us give up our freedoms in the name of a war that cannot be won by militaristic means.

Posted via web from jmproffitt

Posted via web from jmproffitt

From 1999 to 2009, the world changed dramatically. We destroyed an unprecedented amount, and yet thanks to technology, built an unprecedented amount, too. Indeed, like a man obsessed, I cannot help but look at our modern lives through the lens of broadband. Thanks to that technology, the world today is more closely knit than ever. From 9/11 to the Asian tsunami to the election of Barack Obama to the terror attacks in Mumbai to the uprising in Iran, broadband enabled us to experience such global events together.

A great look back at the past 10 years of Internet time. Well worth reading in full. And this is just the first of 3 parts.

Posted via web from jmproffitt

We were able to find multiple Twitter accounts for all of the top 100 newspapers using common sense searching techniques. However, only 62% of the newspapers included links to at least one of their accounts from their website. In many cases, these links were buried on the site and difficult to track down. In addition, this means 38% of the newspapers are actively using Twitter, but haven’t yet integrated their presence with their website in even a minimal way.

56% of newspapers maintained a directory of their Twitter accounts on their website. This directory from the Los Angeles Times is a good example of the form these listings usually took. Many of these directories were quite extensive, listing dozens of accounts.

I wonder what the numbers would look like for the top 1,000.

Good to see some innovation in this space.

Posted via web from jmproffitt

I just set up a friend’s PC. I haven’t done that in a while.

Wow.

Apparently, a computer is now not a computer, it’s an opportunity to upsell you.

First, the setup insisted (for my own safety) that I sign up for an eternal subscription to Norton. Then it defaulted (opt out) to sending me promotional emails. Then there were the dozens (at least it felt like dozens) of buttons and searches I had to endure to switch the search box from Bing to Google. And the icons on the desktop that had been paid for by various partners and the this-comes-with-that of just about everything.

The digital world, even the high end brands, has become a sleazy carnival, complete with hawkers, barkers and a bearded lady. By the time someone actually gets to your site, they’ve been conned, popped up, popped under and upsold so many times they really have no choice but to be skeptical.

I passionately hate consumer-focused computers and even “small business” Dell machines. I have a standing order for my IT team to erase every hard drive that enters the building from Dell or anywhere else. We load Windows manually, load drivers manually, load our apps manually (well, not “manually,” but it’s all done in-house).

I cannot trust Dell. Or HP. Or Lenovo. Or Sony. They sold out long ago and they prey upon the ignorance and gullibility of average users. Sleazy doesn’t begin to describe their deals.

Posted via web from jmproffitt

Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. The future of entertainment is participation. Each of these futures depends on an open Internet.

I’m not sure Google is necessarily the best representative of “openness,” but it’s a pretty good one — certainly better than most media firms, including public media.

This is a long article, but it’s worth looking over. Rosenburg does a great job of laying out the case for openness in business, politics, technology and more, and he makes a lot of outbound links for reference.

Posted via web from jmproffitt

The publishers seem to be picking a fight with the wrong team: their customer. They are punishing the people who buy their content instead of making it as simple as possible for those customers to hand over their money, instantly, from any location in the world.

I just got my wife an Amazon Kindle last week. She’s a big reader and LOVES it.

But this policy of delaying books by 4+ months from hardback to e-book is nuts. Yet another media industry is fighting with its paying customers.

Morons.

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