The Paisano®
Renaissance 2.0

I got tagged again. This time by Daniele Rossi whom I thought was a friend and paisan! Hmph. Just kidding. I don’t mind. It doesn’t seem to require as much work or input as some others so why not? So, here goes nothing.

Six random things about Pai?

1. Even though I’m a big computer geek, I love nature and the great outdoors. I especially love gazing at the tops of trees as they sway in the breeze. I blame John Travolta from the movie Phenomenon.

2. I’m a big time sports fan and a big sports trivia buff. I’ve won countless bar bets and big time prizes from sports radio call in shows. By the way, my on-air name is Paisano. I call 790 the zone AM on a regular basis.

3. I love writing all kinds of things. Fiction, non-fiction. Shortstories, poems, novels, screenplays, proverbs, etc.

4. Despite being a big macho Italian man I’m rather light on my feet as a dancer. I LOVE dancing and even enjoy watching those dance shows. My favorite being So You Think You Can Dance. Ssshhh!

5.  Really into cooking and enjoy learning new things from the Food Network! Love Rachel Ray and Giada! Anthony Bordane too!

6. Believe it or not, I love meeting new people more than finding cool new websites! GASP!

Here are the rules:

Okay, for those of you tagged, here (apparently) are the rules, as I was given:
1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on the blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post.
5. Let each person know they have been tagged.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

I will annoy, er I mean tag the following peeps:

MouseWords

HelenMosher

Chris Hebert

Cheryl Smith

Merlene

Jill Foster

In my latest piece for Mashable, “20+ Tools to Make Any Email Inbox More Social”, I shared ways you can enhance your email experience whether it’s Outlook, GMail, Thunderbird or Apple Mail. Some of the tools were covered in one of my posts about Outlook but most of them were new which made writing it interesting. It really is amazing how much you can do these days with your email client no matter which one it is.

I stumbled across this photo of Isaac Asimov, one my favorite authors of all-time and supposedly his first computer, Radio Shack’s TRS-80.
I don’t know how true all of this was but it’s such an interesting photo that I had to share it.

It’s important to note that Asimov was one of the most prolific writers in history.  However, can one assume that the very same technology that he wrote about actually helped him write faster and thus increase his body of work? If we are believe this ad then Isaac apparently ditched his trusty underwood typewriter for this new age machine which was released circa 1977. He was approximately 57 at that time and would go on to write for another 15 years until his passing in 1992 at age 72. He’s attributed to writing and/or editing over 500 books and some 9,000 letters! How many did he complete after getting introduced to the word processor and computer is anybody’s guess at this point.

Still, it makes you wonder how many more works we would all be blessed with if other great writers had the technology we take so much for granted these days. Of course, that’s assuming that technology actually does in fact increase a writer’s production volume. Some would argue that technology not only has impacted the quantity of writing but also the quality of writing thanks to grammar and spell checkers and all of the auto-insertion and auto-correction features available in word processors.

In any event, no matter what the real deal was behind this brilliant piece of marketing, I like the idea that Isaac Asimov, the man behind the I, Robot series actually used technology to create his masterpieces.

Note: Just for grins, here’s a clip from the major motion picture adaptation of Asimov’s "I, Robot" starring Will Smith.

I was tagged by Chris Brogan to contribute a post about best practices for social media marketing in response to Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation. Since I mostly blog about technology I will share my take on this question from that perspective. How does someone from a tech point of view look at social media marketing?

Pai’s best practice for social media marketing involving technology:

1. Be Honest: It sounds simple but it isn’t when it comes to social media. It can be like high school with some of the cliquish things that go on with some circles. Too many people are afraid to be totally honest about things in fear of not being liked by an A-lister (GASP!). I learned that everyone, including those rare mutants known as A-listers appreciates and respect honesty above everything else. I apply the same practice to my reviews of technology and startups.

2. Be Respectful: Always remember that behind all of this technology and all these cool tools are real live human beings. Too often we lose sight of that fact and say things that truly hurt people’s feelings. We need to remember to respect everyone’s dignity no matter how much we disagree with them or what they’ve said or done.

As far as sharing someone else’s work regarding this topic I am pleased to share an excellent post from Jackie Peters  called “Caught in the Echo Chambers”. It still has me thinking deeply about things. It’s so well-written and thought out. Take your time and read it carefully. Great stuff.

I will tag the following who I know will have great tips to share!

Tojosan who’s a master in socializing no matter what the platform online or offline. He also puts his money where he mouth is (huh?). For example, for a great cause (mail our military promotion) he offered to shave his head if they reached a certain donation level. Needless to say, his new name is TojoSANSHair (yea, I coined that one for him).

Purplecar is a writer who also loves social media and uses the tools. Everyone loves Christine and she will have some insightful secrets for sure.

I just discovered that hashtags have been dead since July 10, 2008 and hardly anyone even noticed it. I accidentally stumbled across the corpse when I tried to visit some of the recent hot hashtags that many people on twitter have been meticulously using such as #Gnomedex and #DNC08. At first, I thought they were down because there was just too much traffic. Then it kept failing days later. I decided to investigate further and wound up on their blog which explained what was happening.

In short, Twitter is the murderer. They made some major changes that impacted the way hashtags and many other third party services worked, in this case totally broke the connection and rendered hashtagging DOA. So the fine folks at DowntownCartel contacted Evan Williams and his twitter gang and politely asked if they could get an XMPP feed once again so they could fix hashtags once again for twitter’s members. They were told “sure thing, no problem” but here it is over a month later and still nothing. I contacted the hashtag crew and all they would say is that they are still waiting on Twitter and plan to resurrect hashtags once again as soon as they are given what they need from Twitter.

I understand that Twitter has many major problems to fix and hashtags are low on their priority list. However, from what I understand, enabling an XMPP feed is not that big a deal. Why wouldn’t they do this? It’s in Twitter’s best interest to allow people to use hashtags. It’s a tool that more and more members are using for big events especially.
This data would be useful and actually fun with the new features that hashtags have added like aggregated media which pulls images, videos, links and blog posts related to the hashtag into the same page with all of the tweets with that hashtag.

What Can We Do About it?
I’m writing this with the hope that it might get some attention and ultimately make its way to Evan Williams and his team at twitter. Maybe they’ll realize just how much their members want and need hashtags again and provide what’s needed in order to get this fixed once and for all. Let’s all let them know how much we want hashtags to come back from the dead. Tell Twitter how much you want hashtags back by posting your request on their GetSatisfaction feedback page. If enough of us speak up then they have to listen.

Note: Here’s a primer I did on twitter groups and hashtags

I had the pleasure (or displeasure) of reviewing a new startup called SocialU on mashable.com in a post called Social Networking Air App SocialU wants to be your everything. On paper it looked like a great idea but once you installed it and started using it things went south in a hurry. My piece was not a hatchet job and quite honestly I was too nice to SocialU. I couldn’t believe how rough others were on it such as ReadWriteWeb which actually went as far as personally attacking the way the founder of the startup looked. He later retracted it after someone called him out about it in the comments, which was the right thing to do.

I was disappointed with the service for many reasons such as the advertisements, the silly social dollars concept and the Facebook ripoff of buying gifts from a virtual store, etc. Also, the way it looked and sluggish performance. Still, I will give them credit for trying to create something new and different. No need to get harsh about it like so many others get. I’m not mad, just disappointed.

By now, everyone should know about Hashtags on Twitter. You create a hashtag by using a pound (#) sign along with the keyword of choice (i.e. #iphone) and that message will become a part of the iphone hashtag page.  Here’s the main screen that’s displayed:

The exciting part that many people don’t know about is the aggregated media area of the hashtag page that took me by surprise the first time that I saw it. At the right side of the main screen you will see the following:

The Aggregated Media area pulls all kinds things like photo’s, links, videos and blog posts from the web based upon the hashtag and stores them all in their respective categories. This was done with jQuery & Yahoo Pipes.

While this is an excellent idea and very useful and informative for anyone interested in the subject matter, I look forward to the next step which would be to actually cull all of these bits of data from the actual messages that were sent with the hashtag. For example, all of the images, videos, links and blog posts included in messages sent from the latest #SXSW would all be aggregated together the same way it’s done here.

In the mean time, this aggregated media feature is a nice addition to the hashtag experience. It’s a great example of what web 3.0 and the semantic web will be about. Think massive mash-ups of multimedia and other resources. This becomes especially useful and exciting for large groups of people that want to share information. After all, that’s one of the main reasons why hashtags were created.

By the way, here’s a cool FireFox extension that links hashtags from the Twitter webpage to the hashtag page.

In my latest piece for Mashable called “20 Plus tools and resources for Inventors” I covered the best sites for fledgling Edisons. I always enjoy writing for Mashable but this one was extra special to me because I actually use these tools. I love tinkering and coming up with new inventions or toying with ideas for new websites or businesses. I hoped that my list of links would be helpful to other wanna be inventors out there.

If you ever forget your password for logging into your local computer then you are out of luck. Sometimes you can remember the backdoor administrator login account but most of the time you won’t be so fortunate. Well, thanks to ophcrack you can now discover all of the login accounts and passwords for that computer. It works with windows and linux systems.

You have two ways to use OPHcrack:

1. Create a bootable CD which requires no installation. Just download the ISO file and burn it to a blank CD and you will be good to go. Note: Make sure you change your system settings so that it boots from CD-ROM before your local drive. Usually pressing F2 or F12 at bootup gets you into your system settings.
Download Page for the ISO for XP and Linux or Vista. What? You don’t have a CD burning package? Then download ISOBurn, ISO Recorder or Create-Burn ISO. All three are free.

2. Install ophcrack while you are logged into a system and want to collect all of the login accounts and passwords before shutting down and possibly not be able to login again. Download the version you need here.

What you see is what you get

There’s a graphical windows interface and a plain command line text mode just in case your system has troubles with the GUI.
Here’s what the GUI looks like.

Conclusion

I’ve used it a few times and it works like a charm!

I was asked to guest post again by Sarah Lacy on her blog, this time about the Y Combinator and their Demo Day for summer 2008. She knew that I liked what they did because of this tweet last week. So off I went to cover the semi-annual event and produced a post called “American Startup”. I tried to be as fair and honest as possible but it still generated a firestorm of controversy not only in the comments area on SarahLacy.com but also on TechCrunch because Michael Arrington published this post, “I Don’t Understand Y Combinator Hate”

Talk about a horrible way to start the week! I’ve never experienced so much anger and negative criticisms before so it was a shock to the system. I didn’t know what to do or how to react. I read what I wrote again very carefully and read all the comments again and still didn’t understand how it was all so misunderstood. I did take note of a couple of statistics that weren’t accurate or up to date such as the percentage that the startups give up. I stated that it could be as much as 10% but I was told that the more factual figure was 2 to 10 % so I edited the post and changed that stat.
I did the same for the number of startups they’ve funded from 80 to 100. Again, not a major rewrite or anything like that, just a couple of factual changes to be more accurate. Obviously, I got permission to make the changes from Sarah Lacy herself who agreed that it made sense to do so.

I was feeling down in the dumps from all this until I decided to take a look at the comments on TechCrunch’s site. Why would I do such a thing? Perhaps I’m a glutton for punishment? In any event, I was so happy that I did because I was surprised to see so many positive comments. My favorite comment was this one:

Eventually, I received an email from someone at YCombinator and we had a civil discussion thru a series of cordial emails and I believe we came to a satisfactory conclusion. I learned a valuable lesson thru this experience. I need to remember to double-check every fact and figure and statistic before publishing any article. I also need to make sure that the tone and style of the piece cannot be misunderstood as it was with this one. What was supposed to be a tongue in cheek attempt at being cute and clever with my American Idol analogy backfired big time. Still, in the end, I wouldn’t have it any other way. It truly has taught me a valuable lesson that will help me the rest of my writing career.