Textiquette

I'm sure the etiquette books will take years to catch up on all the new technology.

Here are some textiquette tips, etiquette guidance for you texters out there:

• First off, you do have a choice to text. Consider the consequences of waiting ten minutes to read and respond to text messages. Does your business or personal relationship depend on instantaneous, on-the-spot decisions? Really? Your life may be better with different relationships.
  
• Don't text and drive. Don't even use your phone. Don't believe me? Here's what Car and Driver had to say: "... the next time you’re tempted to text, tweet, e-mail, or otherwise type while driving, either ignore the urge or pull over. We don’t want you rear-ending us." If you need to text on the move, hire a driver.
  
• If you're walking, the same advice applies, either ignore the urge or pull over. Today a woman stopped to text in the middle of a narrow sidewalk. That annoyed those of us who were left to find a way around her. That wasn't as bad as the guy I saw walk into a street pole while typing. I know I'll see a texter walk into traffic soon.
• If you're shopping, shop. It's also annoying to navigate around shopping carts in the middle of aisles while a shopper writes an urgent love poem. It's even worse to wait on queue to check out while someone saves the world with a text message.
• Don't text during a conversation. There is no simpler way to show that you don't respect the other person's attention or time. If you expect an urgent text, make an agreement before you start the conversation that you'll only interrupt your friend for a text from your best friend who's expecting quadruplets any second.

Your need for information that speeds up your life may end up slowing down everyone else. For instance, access to a phone in a car is great. A conversation with a friend (while someone else drives) makes the trip less tedious, and smart phones can help us navigate through bad traffic with alerts and navigation maps. Unfortunately, drivers who talk on cell phones also increase traffic congestion.

Mobile communications have freed us to find each other spontaneously, to update each other instantaneously, and to find answers to movie quizzes before any of our friends. Good etiquette means taking advantage of this information safely and courteously. The first decision you should make when you get a text message is whether you can wait until later to read it.

Took a Walk in Upstate New York Today

I was fact-checking a scene where my characters walk from the Lake Placid Airport (LKP) to the Olympic Ski Jump Complex. Luckily, I could let me fingers to the walking.

View Larger Map

Amazing how easy it was to get there.

Upcoming Northern California Writing Conferences

Here are some conferences you might want to consider in 2010 if you're an author living in Northern California.

San Francisco Writers Conference
February 12-14, 2010
The Historic Mark Hopkins Hotel, San Francisco
Fee: $645, or $695 with the "speed dating" session with agents
For a list of agents attending the conference, see: http://www.sfwriters.org/pages.cfm?ID=15
For more information, visit: http://www.sfwriters.org/

Napa Valley Writer's Conference
July 25-30, 2010
Upper Valley Campus, 1088 College Ave, St Helena, CA 94574
Fee: $800
Applications due by May 1, 2010 and include a $15 reading fee and a $100 refundable deposit
For more information, visit: http://www.napawritersconf.org/

Squaw Valley Writers Conference
Early August 2010 (dates to be announced)
Squaw Valley Olympic Plaza
Fee: 2010 fees not announced.
For more information: visit: http://www.squawvalleywriters.org/

Posted via email from Steven Damron

Recent Boarding Passes

Doing some research in the Middle East for my second novel. The trip was fantastic, and thanks to Rabih and Randa Alameddine for their hospitality in Beirut. The flight home from Jordan was grueling.

• ME 313 amman to beirut boards at 1600 GMT 12 JAN 2010
• LH 3519 beirut to frankfurt boards at 0110 GMT 13 JAN 2010
• US 705 frankfurt to charlotte boards at 1040 GMT 13 JAN 2010
• US 406 charlotte to san francisco boards at 0001 GMT 14 JAN 2010
• US 406 arrives san francisco at 0455 GMT 14 JAN 2010

Total flight time: 37 hours

Total travel time:

• depart Dead Sea at 1200 GMT 12 Jan 2010
• arrive home at 0600 GMT 14 Jan 2010
• 42 hours
  

Posted via email from Steven Damron

Easier Online Publishing

Simplify your online publishing process: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=254445887014&id=50326492361&ref=nf

Posted via email from Steven Damron

How Android Differentiates from iPhone

After considering the iPhone, I bought a Motorola Droid a couple weeks ago. I read lots of reviews, and it seemed to me that the difference between the iPhone and the Droid boiled down to this: if you use your phone for media like songs and videos, buy an iPhone, but if you use a lot of Google services, buy a Droid.

I was wrong.

Google is integrating Android with telephony technology acquired from Grand Central (now Google Voice) and Gizmo to provide a whole new class of telephone applications. The difference between iPhone and Android boils down to this: if you use your phone for media like songs and videos, buy an iPhone, but if you want a mobile device that's part of your personal communications empire, buy an Android phone.

The first clue was when I was setting up Google Voice and it asked to notify me when number portability became available so I could switch my cell number to Google Voice. Well, maybe the first clue was that I could get a phone number from Google Voice at all.

Google Voice has tons of nice features for managing your voice communications life:

• Interfaces with all your phone numbers
• Routes calls from specific contacts or groups of contacts to specific phones (for instance, business contacts go to business phones)
• Screens unknown callers with a prompt to provide name
  
• Transcribes voicemail, then optionally forwards messages (in text & audio) to email and text
  
• Plays specific outgoing messages for specific contacts or groups of contacts
  
• Provides web-based and phone-based user interfaces

Then I configured my Gizmo VoIP phone in Google Voice. If you don't have a Gizmo account, you'll have to wait until Google re-launches the services. Other VoIP technology will work, but won't be integrated as nicely later on.

What's interesting about VoIP with Google Voice? Free calls. One way to place calls with Google Voice is to select a number from the Google Voice web interface. Google Voice calls me, then connects me with the number I selected on the webpage. When Google Voice calls me on VoIP, the phone call is free. So I can travel anywhere in the world where I can find Internet, and call anywhere in the US for free. Google is leveraging its Internet infrastructure to move the voice traffic market onto IP-based networks.

But wait, there's more. You can make free calls entirely on the Droid. I downloaded the sipdroid application to my Droid, and configured it with my Gizmo number (include the leading "1") and password, and set the proxy server to proxy01.sipphone.com. I'm still working out some details, but in theory I can select a contact from Google Voice on my Droid or on a website, and carry on the conversation on my Droid over VoIP. All for free. Look, mom, no voice line.

Of course, you probably can use most of the Google Voice features on an iPhone. I bet that Google will integrate Google Voice and VoIP functionality much more tightly on the Android platform, though. Making Android devices the mobile piece of an integrated search and communications platform is a smart strategy for Google. Even if Google releases the rumored Nexus One phone under their own brand, handset manufacturers will want to make Android-based devices in order to leverage Google's IP-based telephony infrastructure.

As it turns out, Apple and Google have developed their respective handset technologies to leverage their online strengths. iPhone always will surpass Android phones at using iTunes media distribution. As Google rolls out its Internet-based communications infrastructure, Android always will surpass iPhone at managing online communications.

Google Wave Collaboration Examples

I just got access to Google Wave. It's not too much fun to play with yet because I don't have enough friends or collaborators with Google Wave, so there's nobody to play with, and Google Wave is a collaboration platform at heart.

I posted about Google Wave when is was first announced. Since then, the Wave people have put together a lot of educational videos, and videos showing early applications are starting to show up, too. Here's an 8 minute overview of Google Wave (a reduction from the 80-minute video the Wave team posted when they announced Google Wave):



Some important Google Wave terms:

• Wave - an instance of a collaboration created using Google Wave. I assume this is a log file contained time-stamped information that collaborators are entering and deleting. The file is shared somewhere on the web (at some point Google will let you host Wave on your own server).
• Extension - an application collaborators include in a Wave. A simple Extension that you get in the default Wave client is a polling application that allows collaborators to vote ("yes", "no", and "maybe" are the choices). I assume that a Wave contains one or more instances of any Extension collaborators include in the Wave.
• Robot - a collaborator that is an application (as distinct from an application that collaborators use, which is an Extension). One useful thing for Robots is to provide programmatic interfaces to other services. For instance, Google is developing a Robot called Twave (short for "twitter wave") that allows Wave users to post and read tweets, and filter for keywords. Twave isn't available as of this writing. Google is building a very cool Robot that will translate Wave conversations between collaborators. I can't wait for that one.

To get an idea of possible Wave-based applications, here is a video that shows a customer service application for Wave users to access a customer service cloud built on SalesForce.com:



This blog post describes an SAP collaborative technology called Gravity that interfaces with Google Wave. Here is another video that shows how employees from two companies that have merged might use Gravity and Google Wave to collaborate on combining business processes:



In the future, I think there will be Robots that will help with tasks like legal compliance or ISO 9000 compliance for organizations that use Google Wave.

I'm interested in using Google Wave for start-ups I'm working on (Garth!!!), as well as for the Moab Music Festival, a not-for-profit with collaborators spread all over the map. I'm figuring out what Extensions and Robots might help writers, musicians, photographers, and other creative types work together, too.