scott d. feldstein

I never subscribed to Apple’s Mobile Me suite of online services (syncing of email/calendar, photo sharing, web hosting and remote file storage). I mean, they charge $100 for it. And I already have Godaddy for hosting, Flickr for photo sharing and a better email address than Apple’s going to give me. But I’m starting to wonder if it’s time to change my mind.

I’d like to put my calendar in the cloud so that my family can know when they can schedule events. That’s a feature I could really use. But the real killer is that new find my iPhone feature. If your phone is lost or stolen you can look on a web page to see where on earth it is, courtesy of Google maps and the GPS radio inside the phone. It even lets you display messages on the phone so that whomever picks it up will know that you are looking for it and how to contact you. $100 is pretty steep, but those two features are very nice. Still, I have questions.

I’d like to only maintain one calendar: the Exchange one I use for work. I don’t mind publishing it to Mobile Me so my wife can look at it, but I want to make sure that the publishing of an external Exchange calendar is going to be automatic and not require a lot of screwing around using Apple’s iCal as a go-between.

Also, I’ve been thinking about Google’s new Latitude service. I’d be able to use it to find my phone via GPS–and it’s free.

Maybe I’ll wait and see just a bit longer.

I’m excited about Wolfram Alpha. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Created by Wolfram Research, it’s a search engine that you can ask virtually anything, in natural language, and receive an answer. That is, you can ask “how many internet users are there in Europe?” and it will answer: 289.9 million. If screenshots can be believed, it will also present you some lovely graphs depicting the respective numbers for Spain, the UK, Italy, France, Germany, etc.

The difference here being that instead of presenting you with a list of web sites which might contain part or all of the information you need, it’s smart enough to present you with the actual answer.

It has been said of Wolfram Alpha that it will be as important as Google. It has also been said that it’s merely “the mechanical Turk of the semantic web.” Which is accurate? We should find out this month when it officially launches.

Me, I think the idea is super cool and I hope they can deliver on it. It’ll be as exciting as the day I realized that my iPhone coupled with Wikipedia were actually bringing Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide into reality. On the other hand, it’s probably just one more step along the path to the inevitable machine uprising. C’est la vie.

Do you hate it?

What about the image up top?

Also, in a fit of pique I did away with my google ads.  They’re ugly and I never really got more than $150 a year from them anyway.

Do you let your search engine of choice filter your search results? I don’t. I use Google and I go out of my way in the Preferences area to turn off the default “moderate safe search.” Why? It’s not that the occasional surprise explicit text or image is the highlight of my day. It’s more because the idea of it rankles me.

In a sense, the internet itself is an enormous document representing everything that we* collectively care about, sans the many filters found in older, professionally-produced media outlets. For this reason and others, it represents an important sea change in publishing and communications history. Never before could we see what the total universe of human interest was. We are sometimes shocked at the prurient or hateful things that thrive there, even as we shout hallelujah that our own skinny-tail pet interests are finally being represented.

Me, I think what I get out of it is mostly meta. It’s not so much that I’m participating in media about some rare and traditionally underrepresented pursuit. It’s more that I feel I’m learning something important culturally with my typing fingers always on the pulse of the global internet culture’s constantly changing beat. It’s intoxicating. And invoking old media rules about what can and cannot be viewed would be an obstruction to this knowledge.

So, click. Moderate safe search off.

(* When I say “we” I don’t mean the entire human population. I mean everyone with access to the internet.)

Ha! Scored another wedding contract today. This in spite of my complete inability to figure out Google AdWords. I make an ad. It gets an average position of between 4 and 6. It gets a couple thousand impressions. And it gets two clicks. Two. Each of which costed me exactly $0.19.

But there’s hope. I bought AdWords for Dummies, and so far it’s pretty good. I just need a couple hours here and a couple hours there to sit down, focus, understand, and do. Maybe this coming weekend.

In other photographic news, I have had an epiphany about my lens collection. I think I should trade out my 50mm f/1.8 for an 85mm f/1.8. The 50 has a lot going for it in terms of image quality, but it seems to lack a clear purpose. I believe that purpose will be much clearer with the 85: it’s a superb portrait lens and is long enough to be useful shooting indoor sports or wedding ceremonies in available light.

But I don’t have to guess. I rented the 85 for a week from ziplens.com. It should arrive in a couple of days.

Catchy title for this entry, eh? Shut up.

First, I bought me some advertising on Google. Now when people search for “waukesha wedding photographer” and other key phrases, they’ll see my ad on the right hand side of their results. I pre-paid $50-worth of ads, but the cool part is they only ding me when someone clicks on the ad. We’ll see how it goes. If the $50 dwindles and no customers have materialized, I’ll rethink this strategy.

Second thing, also ad-related. I got another email today asking me if I’d place a text ad on several of my blog pages. I replied that I had said yes to this before (I didn’t tell him i’d also said no on one occasion), and asked him what the product was and how much he wanted to pay. So we’ll see where that goes. Who knows, maybe placing an ad on my blog for shaving cream will pay for my Google ads.

Third thing. Maybe I should join CoPA, the coalition of photographic arts. They’re all so “artsy,” though. I’m not sure if a utilitarian-minded event photographer like myself would fit in. But maybe it wouldn’t hurt to attend one of their schmoozing get-togethers to find out.