So after much teasing by friends and in a vain attempt to solidify my geek creds, I finally took the plunge and ordered a MacBook Pro. I’m dumping my Microsoft infrastructure and am going to switch over cold turkey once I get the thing set up. I’m anticipating a difficult few weeks transitioning.

And here’s where I need your help. For readers that have made the switch, what advice do you have to make it go smoothly? For all Mac users, what programs, add-ons, short-cuts, Mac resources (particularly a directory of short-cut codes) do I need? Also, very specifically, I’m looking for something that will let me sync a network share locally so that all files are available off-line. This needs to then sync up the changes when I’m connected back up to the network. And the catch is that this needs to happen against a Windows server.

Thoughts welcome and encouraged in comments and by email.

[late breaking update – as I was writing this my new Mac showed up in the office!]

So it’s really come down to this? News Corp is thinking about inking a deal with Microsoft/Bing whereby not only will Bing get access to News Corp data (WSJ, Fox, etc.) but they’ll also prevent Google from indexing their sites. This sounds like a lose/lose/lose/lose proposition.

News Corp loses – fewer page views, less revenue for their online content, and to the 90% of Internet users who use Google for search their properties will effectively stop existing.

Google loses (sort of) to the extent people miss the data (not sure what will happen when you force a search on Google to a News Corp domain – will they simply return no results?).

The rest of us lose because universal search will cease to be universal (and if MSFT is willing to pay for an exclusive with News Corp others will follow).

And Microsoft likely loses as well by paying for content that they likely can’t monetize and pissing a bunch of people off in the process.

I’ve been playing around with Bing a bunch lately and actually really like it. But proprietary search arrangements isn’t the way to gain market share – better search is!

A few days ago I received a note from Plaxo in my inbox that said in part:

As you probably know, Plaxo was acquired last year by Comcast and is now a business unit of Comcast Interactive Media (CIM). Not surprisingly, given the above focus, we’ve been working on enabling interoperability between Plaxo and other CIM Websites. In advance of rolling out this common identity system, we’ve developed a unified Terms of Service and Privacy Policy that will apply to Plaxo and the other participating Comcast Websites, providing consistent protection and eliminating the complexity and potential confusion of having different terms and policies for each Website.

Among the things that were updated in the policy was the section pertaining to what information Plaxo could use. Specifically they are now able to make use of “Demographic portions of your data (such as zip code, gender, or industry) and usage patterns may be shared with our trusted partners who deliver advertising to you on our behalf.”

I may be in the minority here, but I’m actually happy to have non-personally identifiable information used by third party ad networks in an effort to serve me better ads. And, in fact, I’m shocked at how little information it seems these networks actually know about me. For example, despite all the time I spend searching on Google, on Google docs, Google groups, and other Google sites, I was shocked at how little they actually know about me (see my post on exposing Google cookie information here). I’m involved in a handful of advertising related businesses and I understand a lot about how the advertising ecosystem comes together to try to figure out what ad to show what user. We talk about things like “behavioral targeting” a lot in the industry but it’s surprisingly limited in its overall use and effectiveness (there are a handful of very specific categories that advertisers and networks are looking for – most of the rest of us don’t make the cut). State of the art is to categorize based on location and possibly a cut at your gender (either indirectly based on the demographics of the site you are visiting or slightly more directly based on the usage patters that have been observed). While there are a handful of companies out there that are trying to take this to the next level their reach is so far pretty limited.

So rather than be upset at Plaxo for taking the information it knows about m to build a better business and a smarter advertising ecosystem I say the more the better. I’d like to see more ads about cycling and home building and fewer urging me to attend the University of Phoenix.

In case you were wondering what goods Google has on you check out http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/ from the browser you typically use for web browsing and search. If you scroll down you’ll see what interests Google has you pegged for and get to see the data they have collected on you in your cookie.

For me the most interesting part wasn’t the data they had on me, but looking through the Google interests taxonomy at the bottom of the page.  There are specific tags for individual car brands, for your love of Bollywood movies, pest control, screensavers, etc. It’s an interesting glimpse into how Google thinks about the world (and more importantly into what categories Google thinks it can make money by trafficking).

There’s a clip that’s been making the rounds in the last week of a Tom Brokaw spot from the mid-90′s on "the Internet". I love the quick clip with Eric Schmidt (then of Sun) and the casual walk around with Bill Gates.  I also really like the pitch for the IBM notebook that’s "4 pounds".

The amazing thing to consider is not how quaint some of the technology appears in this video, but how far we’ve come so quickly. This video is only 15 years old. After the video ended I sat back in my office for a bit and considered how pretty much all of the things that are state of the art right now will seem as quaint as the technology in the video (and if they’ll seem as outdated as the technology in the video). Mind blowing.

If you’ve read this blog for a while you’ll know that Sonos is one of my favorite all time inventions.  For those of you living in a closet, Sonos is a system that allows for wireless streaming of music throughout your home with the ability to separately control dozens of music "zones".  You can easily stream music from various online sources (or your own music library) and their controller makes it easy to create play-lists, cue up music and play different tunes in different parts of your house.  If you have ears, you should own one of these.

Last week Sonos announced a bunch of new features – free integration with Pandora (I was already paying for this – it my be the single best feature of the entire system), more internet radio options, integration with Last.fm and … the ability to turn your iPhone into a Sonos controller (seriously cool).

Awesome!

As you know, I’m a big fan of Twitter.  I’ve even gone so far as to call it the new IM.

My wife Greeley has watched on with some amusement as I’ve twittered my life away over the last year or so.  She finally sat down this weekend and read a few months of my tweets.  What follows is a note she sent to me – an "if I’d been twittering too" list of tweets (to be read with heavy sarcasm; I was laughing out loud, but maybe it’s just me…).

Woke up in a shitty mood, PMS?
Contact lenses dry and itchy, off to buy SALINE!
Sale at Safeway on seedless grapes. Nectarines look good, too.
Made peanut butter sandwiches for girls.
Using my new Kenmore vacuum. I’m way more into the canister than the upright.
Defrosting ground turkey for dinner. Meatloaf or burgers? TBD.
I’m concerned that twitter is affecting my ability to blog regularly. Anyone else concerned?
New episode of Mad Men tonight. Weekly struggle with watching on release night or waiting for HD format…
I know I did something today that will interest and impress my followers. Just thinking.

For most technology professionals (really most professionals of any kind) email is so integrated into our work that we can hardly imagine life without it.  Sure, it can be a distraction at times and – especially if you carry a wireless device – hard to escape from.  But it also greatly enhances productivity, allows us to communicate quickly and effectively and to have asynchronous interactions with a great number of people.  I know in my own work life I send and receive between 200 and 300 emails a day.  And since I’m already tied up on the phone or in meetings for at least 5 or 6 hours in any given day, email allows me to be significantly more productive (and to process more information and communication with a far greater number of people) than without it. 

So it’s with much curiosity that I’m watching my friend Mark Solon – a partner at Highway 12 Ventures in Idaho – experiment with an email free summer.  He describes the heart of his thesis this way: If the people who sent the majority of those e-mails knew that I didn’t have an inbox, they would have either picked up the phone and called me or (and this is the heart of it) probably wouldn’t have bothered because it really wasn’t that important after all.  The link above will take you to the article he wrote about the project. I like Mark, but I’m skeptical that this is going to work.  Even with his secretary printing out important documents (board packages and the like), the limits of old school communication in my mind significantly outweigh the upside from people self filtering their communications with you.  Not to mention, I’d be perpetually worried that I was missing something.

We’ll see what Mark has to say at the end of the summer.  I’m curious in the meantime – could you live without email?

[see the bottom of this post for an invite code to a new service that helps solve the problem I'm describing here]

It’s probably passe to say that we live in an information economy.  It’s also probably not correct anymore because really we live in an information NOW economy.  Staying on top of the topics that are important to you and your company has never been more important.  And with the explosion of media sources (particularly on-line) this has never been more of a challenge. 

Back in the day, large companies would outsource the function of knowing what was said of them and their competitors to various "clipping services", so named because they would line up the major new outlets of the day (mostly the large daily newspapers and national magazines) and literally clip out the stores that were of interest to their clients with scissors.  Every week they’d compile these clippings into a briefing and ship it off to their client.  These services weren’t very efficient and they were extremely expensive, but there was little other choice.  While these services have evolved in more recent years to incorporate technology, they’re still expensive and for the most part involve some 3rd party culling through the data to sort for relevance. 

Google Alerts is the most notable exception here – they’ve developed a service that in theory will let you know when any particular key word (really any search string) is crawled by Google spiders.  However in my experience Google Alerts quickly falls down. For starters, I get relatively few hits across my keywords and most of the hits I get are repeat ones (I can’t understand this at all – with probably 60 keywords I get almost no alerts and while I share keywords with some of my colleagues I rarely am sent the same hits that they are). I have other friends with the opposite problem with Alerts – their inbox is flooded with responses.  In some cases so much so that they had to turn the service off completely.  There’s also no good way to aggregate these alerts into any kind of trend data or manipulate them, group them, etc. 

Enter Filtrbox.  Filtrbox was one of last year’s TechStars companies and the the one with which I worked most closely (after the summer TechStars program I participated in their angel financing round).  They’ve developed a system that if you had to describe it in a single sentence is "Google Alerts on steroids".  That said, it’s almost unfair to compare the two as Google Alerts just isn’t designed to provide users with the accuracy, level of coverage, ability to tune and provide feedback to alert terms and the overall representation of data that Filtrbox provides – even now in the relatively early version of the Filtrbox platform.  Filtrbox allows me to set up a series of "filtrs" that contain various keywords so that I can organize the things I’m looking to track.  Every morning I get a "daily briefing" email that lists all the hits from the last 24 hours and online I can use their dashboard to see up-to-date hits in list and graphical form, manipulate the data, adjust the sensitivity of the report (so I see fewer, but more directly relevant hits) and tune the system by providing it feedback on the information it provides me.  Below is a snapshot of their dashboard to give you a sense of what I see every day (in true Web 2.0 fashion, everything in the image below will give me more information as I mouse over it and I can adjust the data I’m seeing on the fly by checking and unchecking keywords or entire filtr groups or adjusting the sensitivity (the slider in the top center of the page).

The service is in private beta, but they’ve given me an invite code that I can use to let people try the system out.  For smaller users, the service will be free (you’re limited in the number of keywords you can use and by the length article history).  For larger users there will be paid "pro service" ($20/month) and for teams of users a group account that enables some additional sharing and other group related functions (for $100/month for the team).  You can sign up for the beta at https://www.filtrbox.com/signup.php?code=foundry.  If I’ve run out of invites, drop me a line and I’ll try to make more available. 

My partner Brad Feld was interviewed yesterday on NPR’s Talk of the Nation on the topic of how companies make money online. You can listen to the broadcast here.  The key take-away ultimately is that is you aggregate enough traffic you have a handful of options for turning those eyeballs into cash (probably worth of a full post about the pros and cons of these various models, but no time today to get that down on paper). 

Brad did a great job and I’m psyched that I now know someone who’s been on TOTN!