I find it amazing how quickly a person can adopt a technology and, after having adopted it, grow impatient with it when it isn’t used to maximum effect. Take email for instance. In the early days of email I felt the urge to reply to nearly every email I received to let the sender know that I had received it. Today, replies are by necessity only. We are assaulted with emails so we don’t want our fellow emailers to waste our time.
Which brings me to blogs. Now that I have more than 100 blogs that I scan daily, I find it necessary to prune a few blogs from time to time. I have no formula for how I decide which blogs to keep and which blogs to delete from my RSS reader, but there are some traits common to those blogs that I have parted ways with.
After all, because time is a finite resource, there are only so many blogs a person can follow on a daily basis. Which means that every blog I add tends to come at the expense of a blog that I delete. Which means that I expect the bloggers that remain to not waste my time. There may be a billion blogs out there, but from the reader’s perspective, it’s a zero-sum game.
I’m really only referring to those blogs that purport to be about something, like VoIP or travel or Web usability. I subscribe to these blogs to learn more about these topics or issues and I tend to get annoyed when the authors spend more time writing about their personal lives than the actual topics. Occasional off-topic postings are just fine (like this one, for instance) but too much off-topicness and I will consider pruning that particular feed. A year ago, I was much more tolerant than I am today. Either I’m getting more cranky or I’m becoming a more demanding blog reader.
So here is my advice to bloggers who want to avoid being pruned…
Have Something To Add
If all you do is point to other news stories you have to ask yourself – are you adding value or are you just aggregating? Aggregation is fine on occasion (I’ve certainly done my share), but eventually you’ll be made redundant by someone who both aggregates and adds value.
Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid
I love bloggers precisely because they don’t have editors. I like the unfiltered thoughts, ideas and predictions. When I want an edited piece of work I read the paper. However, sometimes I wish bloggers would do a little bit more self-editing. For example…
Don’t blog to tell the world:
1. you are not feeling well today
2. you are tired today
3. you are tired of all the blogging you’ve been doing lately
4. you are going out of town for a few days
5. you just got back from having been out of town for a few days
6. you will be offline for the next two hours
7. your server went down and that’s why we haven’t heard from you for the past two hours
You get the idea. A writing teacher of mine used the term furniture moving to refer to wasted prose. These types of posts strike me as furniture moving.
Anyway, I’ll step down from my soapbox, prune a few blogs and get back to work. I’ve got lots to do as I’m getting ready to go out of town for a few days!
Just kidding.
March 01, 2005
Posted by John Yunker
So it has been about a week since my Cingular Treo 650 gave me a horrible case of buyer's remorse.
As I wrote here a few days back, about a week after I bought the device I realized that the voicemail number would change randomly, and rarely into a number that actually dialed voicemail. Much worse, I found that whenever I tried to dial a phone number the device reset itself. My Treo had effectively downgraded itself into a Zire.
So I went to Cingular, swapped the Gemplus SIM card for the Axalto SIM card and still suffered problems. Some of the folks I've spoken with who had similar problems found that once they exchanged SIM cards their Treos worked just fine.
I was not so fortunate.
It turns out that when I restored all the old files and settings onto my Treo, I also restored a file or setting that caused the same general conflict. So even though I had the new SIM card I had the old problems.
If you're in the same boat, be sure to completely uninstall your old desktop Palm software and then reinstall. And you'll need to do a hard reset of your Treo.
Since I use a Mac I was faced with the daunting prospect of reinstalling both the Palm desktop software and the Missing Sync software. As a workaround, I simply located the actual user backup files on my desktop, deleted them, and then the problem went away.
Fingers crossed. I have not had any random resets since wiping out the old backup files, so I will assume my problem is solved.
But before I put this affair behind me, here are a few anecdotes, rumors and lessons that I picked up along the way:
1. Treo and Cingular cleared rushed the Treo out to market too quickly. And it just didn't hurt customers like myself; dealers were also burned because when this problem first surfaced they simply assumed the devices were broken and exchanged them for new devices resulting in lost sales of those new devices (which are in hot demand). Which leads me to...
2. Do the folks at Palm or Cingular ever take a moment to read the Treo message boards like TreoCentral or Howard Forums. Had they done so, they would have spotted this problem early on and saved me and potentially thousands of others a great deal of frustration and wasted time.
3. And why aren't the dealers reading the same message boards? Some of them don't even read the email they get from Cingular because at least two of them had to be educated by their customers. One customer actually brought in a printout of a message board posting to prove that there was a SIM card issue. When the customers know more about the product than the dealers, something is wrong with Cingular's chain of communication.
4. The Palm and Cingular support Web sites could not be less supportive if they tried. Now, if I have a problem with my Treo, I don't even bother going to their Web sites; I just go to the message boards.
5. I've read a rumor that Palm has a software patch in the works for the the Cingular Treo 650.
6. If you've got a Treo that is beyond SIM repair, you might find that dealer is "all out" of replacement Treos. But they may be lying. Yes, there is a rush on these things but dealers are also reluctant to use Treos as replacements because they want to sell them. One customer resorted to calling Cingular dealers as a prospective new customer; once he located a dealer who had a Treo 650, he told them to hold it and when he arrived to replace his Treo, they couldn't give him the old "sorry, we're all out" routine (which they actually tried).
7. I think if Apple does get into the cellular business, it will do well. It has a distribution network of highly trained employees who really understand computers (as opposed to cellular dealers who typically know less about Treos than their customers). And it builds computers that don't crash. PalmSource hasn't figured that one out yet. I did read that PalmSource is looking at Linux as a future OS; this would be a big step forward in creating an operating system that doesn't crash when a software conflict rears its ugly head.
8. Finally, despite all the trouble, despite all the time spent on hold, I do like Treo 650 a lot and Cingular coverage in Escondido is pretty darn good. Fingers crossed.
Thanks for the all comments and emails.
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Russell Shaw is a specialist in mobile computing, telephony, networking and covers these fields regularly for numerous print and online publications. Russ writes the popular IP Telephony blog on ZDNet and contributes regularly to The Industry Standard blog as well. Author of seven books, Russ' latest book is Wireless Networking Made Easy.
John Yunker is president of 
