I opted to pick up our iPad at the Apple Store in Austin, since we’ll be in that general area when it’s released, and it might be fun to shop for accessories at the same time. We’ve shopped at this store before, and know the parking is exceptionally easy, which is why I picked that one. We may be staying in New Braunfels, which is closer to San Antonio, but what the heck? Either way we’d have to get in the car and drive for an hour, so the direction we head in doesn’t make much difference.

Apparently I was not the only person a little bit excited about getting my name on the list of early adopters. Mashable said there were an estimated 51,000 iPads sold in the first two hours, and 90,000 on the first day of preorders! Not too shabby for a device the pundits kept wondering why anyone would want one. I know why I want one, of course. I’ve got a Kindle DX, and I have been very disappointed with it. While we do use it, most of the time I prefer to fire up Windows 7 in a VirtualBox window and use Kindle for PC to read my Amazon ebooks. When my iPad arrives, I’ll just use Kindle for iPhone on that instead, unless Amazon has a native iPad app ready by then. Color and a backlit screen make the reading experience so much better for me than eInk’s grainy, low-contrast screen that requires a strong reading light. I really don’t understand at all those people who say it’s harder to read an LED computer display than an eInk device or paper. They seem to get their data from the bad old days of CRTs with flickering, unshielded UV-radiant screens. Silly.

As an ebook reader, I certainly expect the iPad to be the best of the breed, but that’s not the only reason I want one. It will be a superb portfolio display, too. And using Reunion for iPhone combined with a collection of family photos, it will be the star of any family gathering. Oh, the possibilities just keep growing….

One of my primary objectives for having this device, especially the 3G version, is to supplement our very pricey VerizonWireless Mobile Broadband account. While that has been a real lifesaver on the occasions, like this past week, when we are in a place without acceptable internet connectivity, only 5 gigabytes of throughput for a month just isn’t enough, not by a long shot. Figure that only two Netflix streaming video movies would use the whole month’s allowance and you’ll understand. We simply use the internet too intensively to be happy with that kind of parsimony. AT&T’s iPad unlimited data plan, which we can turn off when we’re happy with local WiFi, will be wonderful. Phil will be able to watch movies, I’ll be able to get all the video tutorials and podcasts I want, and all the rest, without paying Verizon twice their already excessive monthly fee for using 1/5th more bandwidth, like we have the past couple of months. After all, as many people around the world have said, internet access is a basic human right.

So, we expect to really, really, really enjoy this device when it finally arrives!

It got me to thinking about the differences between these various methods of self-expression and communication. It’s true that all these social media/social networking sites are attractive, but for different reasons, and possibly different reasons exist for different people, or different moods in the same person. I like Twitter for its immediacy and the ease of very short form updates. I like Facebook because it makes it easy to share photos and my Twitter feed, and for the interactions in comments on my page and those of my contacts. LinkedIn is a good place to keep my expanded résumé, and offers what may be more serious discussion forums than I’ve found elsewhere (although I find I don’t have time to follow them). The dozens of Ning networks I’ve signed up for took a lot of my attention for a few weeks earlier this year, but now I rarely look at them.

For me, my blogs are completely different from the networks I belong to. When I do post blog entries, they tend to be longer and better researched than social network posts, which might explain why I don’t write them as often. It’s a bigger commitment of time and effort. Blogs also have a more permanent feeling to them, with several years’ worth of entries available in their archives, while Twitter and Facebook postings quickly scroll off the page, sometimes in just a few hours, and certainly in no more than days. Indeed, some Twitter users, like Jay Rosen of New York University’s Journalism Institute have been agitating recently for Twitter to provide a searchable archive of past tweets, which highlights the fact that such an archive doesn’t exist.

As we used to say on the pre-Web BBS, YMMV (Your Milage May Vary), but for me there’s a time and place for all these expressive outlets, and I’ll keep using them at least until the next greatest thing comes along.

I’ll have more to say about it later, but for now you can tell I’m having fun. So much to read, so little time….

When I got to the meeting place, I saw my friend Piet Hut, who is the group’s founder. He’s in Japan right now, so the time of day was downright normal for him to be out and about. The other person there tonight lives in Australia, so her clock is also on a diurnal schedule. But even us nightowls can always find somebody awake in a virtual world whenever we decide to go there.

Anyway, the person I’d been twittering with earlier, Wan-Qi Kim, is involved in teaching meditation, etc. so I had suggested he might like to visit Kira Café. I think it would be fascinating to introduce these two brilliant men, but don’t know if I can lure Wan into SL to do so, and catch Piet there at the same time. Maybe someday. If it’s meant to be, it will happen.

First, I had to choose a WordPress “widget” to use. There are at least 20 in the WordPress website, and who knows how many more elsewhere on the Web. I settled on Twitter Widget Pro by Aaron D. Campbell, but after installing it I got a fatal error message, so I went to the author’s blog and read the comments about this app. Aaron is good at replying, and sure enough, several other people had the same problem. The solution was to use PHP 5.2+, but according to the readout on my site’s control panel, I was using the latest and greatest… So, it was off to the Knowledgebase on my webhost’s support site. Ah ha! Even though the latest version was shown to be available, the default was to use PHP 4.x! So, I had to rummage around and find the place to make it default to version 5. That done, the widget worked like a charm (aside from being a little slow updating).

So, now that I know what I’m doing, it’s time to add this widget to another blog I’m working on, one for a new ePublishing venture. Oops, sorry, we’re not ready to launch that site yet, so I can’t give you a link, but rest assured that when it is time, I’ll post about it here, and on Twitter and other places as well.

But that leads me to another topic. Since I started a new Twitter account for the new venture, now I’m in the market for a Twitter client that will not only allow all three of us involved to post to its account, but will also let me easily manage multiple accounts I’m using. It could get messy, especially since I’m involved in yet another ePublishing venture and will want an account for that one, too. I found something that looks promising, CoTweet, but it is still in private beta so it could be a while before I can try it. Since the new Twitter accounts aren’t active yet, though, I can afford to wait.

Twitter and WordPress are not the only online communications tools out there, of course. You may have noticed another addition to this site, a collection of icons at the end of each blog posting. This widget was (thank goodness!) very straightfoward to install. It’s called Sociable. The configuration page for that widget offers a plethora of linked icons for an enormous array of social networks, including of course Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as well as email and your printer. As dynamic as social networking tools are, though, new ones are always popping up. No problem! Sociable allows you to create your own icons and link them to sites you choose. It doesn’t get much more flexible than that.

At the same time all this is going on, I’ve been working with a new volunteer at the International Spaceflight Museum who is taking over our exhibit sponsorship auctions on eBay. Our original “auctioneer”, Opal Lei (Second Life name), bowed out after working very hard to not only set up the auctions, but also scripted signs in Second Life that display the sponsor’s name and automatically reset when the sponsorship expires. She also wrote up very clear instructions for her successor, making it not just easier, but possible, for someone to follow her footsteps without going completely crazy trying to figure it all out. She even did an inventory of all our exhibits, which she put in a wiki! Those early auctions kept the museum solvent for months, but since they ended we’ve struggled to pay the bills. So finding a replacement auctioneer has been a true blessing. I just hope we can get his first round of auctions rolling in time to avoid losing the islands, since the rent is due next week. If you’re interested in helping, either by sponsoring an exhibit or simply donating, please visit our website for more info on how to do that. We have a PayPal donor button as well as info on the auctions and even a Google spreadsheet that shows our current (sorry) state of financial affairs.

While mentioning the ISM and communications, I would be remiss to not also mention a new book by a friend of mine, Kimberly Rufer-Bach, The Second Life Grid: The Official Guide to Communication, Collaboration, and Community Engagement. She interviewed me for a case study on how the ISM uses a wide variety of Web tools to manage our world-wide distributed nonprofit organization, and according to another friend, Dave Taylor, the ISM was featured very prominently in the book, perhaps getting the most space of any of the case studies she includes. I’ll find out for sure next week when my copy arrives.

Got all that? Good. I’ll stop writing now and get back to work. Thank you for your attention.

Sparkle is a virtual worlds (VW) client for the iPhone that allows the user to login and communicate via instant messages with friends, and via proximity chat with avatars that are in the same location. Sorry, you probably need to try a VW like Second Life to understand what that’s about and why it is an exciting development. For now, please just accept that being able to connect to Second Life and interact live with others there even when you can’t log in normally is a big deal. For instance, I’ll be able to attend meetings from my iPhone and see what is being said in chat even if I don’t have my computer set up or if I’m in an internet café without my laptop.

Besides Second Life, Sparkle will connect to other grids as well, such as OSGrid or Second Life’s beta grid. Right now, those three are the only VWs available, but I’m sure others will be added as demand warrants. It’s possible to set up any number of accounts for various grids, limited only by the number of avatars you have. In fact, you can even sign up for a new account via Sparkle! Select the approprite service, fill in your account username and password, and there you go.

Choose the account you want to login with from the resulting list, click the “Go!” button, and your friends list appears on the next screen, with those online indicated with highlighted stars beside their names, while offline avatars are shown with dimmed stars. To send an IM to one, you select the name, then click the “IM” button on the next screen. A window with the virtual keyboard appears, and you proceed to communicate.

It seems pretty simple, and it is easy to use, but the implications are really awesome. The only real gripe I have about it is the requirement to use WiFi, but there is probably no way around that. Second Life in particular probably needs more bandwidth than the plain old cellular signal can provide. As it is, people who have very long friends lists (like me) have reported long waits to log in. Genkii’s tech support is working on it, and in fact I’ve had better luck logging in with my main account lately, after the first few attempts when it took several long minutes.

Sparkle IM gets a high rating from me. I’ve been waiting for someone to publish an iPhone app for connecting to Second Life, and this is a good one that works. Thanks, Genkii!

For instance, in late December I discovered a nifty website/Web app called Scrapplet. When I created a free account and started building pages on this site, it was more or less just for fun, to see what was possible. Now, though, I use it for my own organization, mainly to keep track of all the social networks I’ve joined. One of my pages is simply a collection of hyperlinks to each network’s page, so when I have a few minutes to check out the discussions, but don’t want to bother with organizing browser bookmarks (which are only up to date on one computer at a time), I just pull up my “social networks” page and click away. I was even able to quickly sort the network links by topic. Most important, the app works visually, via drag and drop. It’s possible to enhance the pages by adding code, of course, but that’s not strictly necessary. Virtually anyone capable of handling a web browser should be able to create a personal site at Scrapplet. It could be used to quickly prototype webpage designs, too.

Oh, and those online social networks! Obviously, to be active, it’s necessary to be online. Yes, I can see the sites on my iPhone, but except for a few individual networks, they are dependent on full-sized web browser screens, and use lots of visual effects. In at least one, I can’t even post a comment in a group discussion from my iPhone because of the underlying code. Apparently it requires a plug-in not available on the iPhone, like Flash or something.

But the thing that is really irritating is the way flakey internet access is making it difficult to do research for the book I’m working on (about ebook publishing), and to work on my websites. I would like to revamp my old History-eBooks website, and I have been working on it, but being frequently interrupted by crashing routers or bandwidth restrictions make that an uphill battle. In the time I’ve been able to get online, though, I’ve found a new tool for developing blog page themes, WordPress Theme Developer. It’s a free application running on a website, and works very well indeed, but yes, you have to be online to use it. Argh!