The only two articles you’ll be able to read on Wikipedia today describe the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. The rest are unavailable due to a widespread blackout on the Internet. You might have noticed Google’s logo expressing their support, shown below. Google didn’t go as far as to shut the search engine down, which may very well put the Earth off its axis at this point, but they do have a SOPA/PIPA petition you can sign.

If you’re unfamiliar with this new legislation under review, it’s worth knowing about. The short version is that it has the potential to violate the First Amendment, censor and cripple the Internet, impose harmful regulations on American business and threaten whistle-blowing and other free speech actions. It is thoroughly documented, so I will point you to TechCrunch’s SOPA coverage for the latest.

Fellow tech entrepreneur Ben Huh, CEO of Cheezburger, has been fighting this battle for months. Go Ben! People took notice when Ben threatened to move his 1,000+ domain names away from GoDaddy if they continued to support the bill. Today, if you try to pull up one of his websites, FAIL Blog, you’ll see the following message before entering the site:

Ben is not alone. While Facebook hasn’t officially joined the ranks, Zuckerberg has. I haven’t been extremely vocal about this for various reasons, but not because I support the bills. I generally feel that ridiculous measures like this written by people who don’t truly understand the consequences will blow over in time. But that doesn’t just happen by accident. It happens thanks to thousands or millions of people who make a stand.

And it’s always a useful reminder of the power lawmakers have, and the attention we must pay to our own power to help them craft policies that positively influence our lives. Someone once told me that technology moves much faster than the law, and this is one of those points of conflict that can emerge.

If you want to help and have about 10 seconds, this SOPA/PIPA petition from Avaaz.org is a good place to start.

Wikipedia Blackout Page

While browsing the Web today you’re probably seeing the response to the Stop Online Piracy Act that has been introduced into the U.S. Congress.  Many major web companies feel that this legislation will have a negative effect on the way the Internet/Web works and some of them (including Google, YouTube and Wikipedia) are taking down, altering, or limiting their websites to raise awareness of the bill.

Most of Wikipedia is down entirely today but you can still read the description of the legislation here.

I was honored to be asked to write an article for our favorite Chicago-family-focused website (and Astek client) Families in the Loop. Find out my top tech picks for parents in 2012:

Viva La Tech! Revolutionary Gadgets for the New Year
by Katie Hawkey, Geek Whisperer, Astek Web

Bob Dylan was righter than he knew when he warbled that the times, they are a-changin’ — and this was before the iPad. Nothing changes faster than technology, and as this new year dawns I can’t tell you how excited I am to see what the world comes up with next. Every year seems to bring… [read more]

I got a text message from a friend on New Years Eve, to myself and another friend.  And then I got the other recipient’s reply.  I didn’t think much of it until I got the above text message yesterday (from a friend with an Android phone) and went to reply that I couldn’t make the birthday festivities.  Before iOS 5 such group texts didn’t show all the other recipients, which is another matter of concern perhaps.  The sender of such a message might assume and want the same behavior as BCC’ing on an email.  When I saw the difference in this text, I wondered if it would reply-all, and if so if there was a way to specifically reply only to the sender.  Not seeing a way, I went ahead and replied.

No one else replied “Hey who is this?”, but researching my suspicion confirmed that all the other recipients would have received my text.  The only way I can see to send a reply directly to the sender would be to draft an entirely new text.  There is also a way to safeguard against this behavior entirely, but it’s annoying because it means that you have to disable MMS entirely.  And I would rather not do that because I want to be able to send photos to people who don’t have iOS devices (iMessage lets you send photos to other iOS users without MMS).  But if you want to do it yourself, you need to turn off both Group Messaging and MMS in your Messages settings (note here that I have left both on):

2011 was an amazing year of learning and growing at Astek. In our industry things change pretty much daily, even hourly. We are lucky to work with so many forward-thinking clients and partners who understand that building real success in this market takes time, discipline, and communication. Oh yeah, and we think life’s too short not to have a little fun along the way.

Early in the year, Rachel and I attended SXSW Interactive, a top-tier conference for all things Web, mobile and social in Austin, TX. One of our top goals was to find the ideal social media management/monitoring/analytics platform with enterprise capabilities and agency pricing. We’ve met some talented people along the way with some pretty cool products, but there is a lot of room for growth in this space. We’ll be rolling out a new social media event product of our own in the coming weeks — stay tuned!

Supporting an ongoing effort to get more social at Astek, we started video recording the strange and mystical things that happen at Astek staff meetings. Here’s a glimpse:

In June, we kicked our relationship with SIPA up a notch and have worked since then to increase their social media efforts. It’s greatly rewarding to work with a group that understands social media are about creating relationships, and just like relationships in the “real world,” there is no easy button or shortcut.

Who is SIPA, you may ask? SIPA, the Specialized Information Publishers Association, is the international trade association dedicated to advancing the interests of commercial information providers (paid content) serving niche communities. These are primarily B2B trade journals, but members also include consumer-oriented Kiplinger and publishers serving other markets. There are numerous SIPs (specialized information publishers) out there serving all kinds of niche community information needs, whether or not they identify themselves with this group.

We’ve been SIPA members for years, teaching and learning along with top publishing talent, and in June we started managing social media for SIPA’s annual publishing conference in Washington, D.C. We applied what we learned at SXSW and other places along the way, creating a robust social media event experience. More recently, it seems like a dream that I was swimming in the Atlantic just a few short weeks ago following the SIPA Miami Publishing Marketing Conference, where we had four Astek team members speaking, learning, and helping.

At the Miami conference last year, I led a roundtable discussion on mobile publishing and met a publisher called The Medical Letter, who needed help building mobile apps on all major platforms (iPhone/iPad, Android, Blackberry). We worked diligently with them and our friends at FanWide to create cutting edge publishing apps and successfully launched the iPhone/iPad and Android versions. In the spirit of mutual learning and sharing, my client and I presented a webinar hosted by SIPA to inform other publishers about how to step into the mobile space.

In the four years I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve seen it grow from an esoteric geek-oriented communication platform to a widely adopted and ubiquitous brand imprint on websites everywhere. Yet many people I talk to still question its worth for driving revenue. As we’ve embraced Twitter as the ideal communication platform for events and conferences, I’ve noticed that finally people are able to grasp the potential for this simple, yet powerful medium for enhancing communication at an event and also bridging the communication gap between cyclical events in ways not before seen at this scale.

As we continue to connect the dots for publishers and other event promoters, we continue our decade-long focus on content management solutions facilitating the digital publishing revolution. Astek’s own CMS, Webany, is ideally suited for the Web-first editorial trend that continues to gain momentum. Basically, rather than thinking about getting your print publication onto the Web, publish in real-time on the Web and build your print publication from there.

We’re so excited that our lady, Webany, is growing up right in the middle of the dramatic shifts in the publishing industry, and is flexible enough to handle them. Haven’t been introduced yet? Just ask. We’d love to show you some of her newest features including robust digital rights management and the ability to export articles and other information directly to Adobe InDesign, the preeminent desktop publishing platform, via XML.

Reversing a publisher’s workflow is not a task to be taken lightly, so we lend our expertise to the process in addition to the technology, which is a combination that’s future-proofing editorial teams around the globe. As publishers figure out the moves that work for them along the way, we enjoy learning and teaching as we go. 2011 brought many clients to Webany, including Wiley Publishing, The Alter Group and Staff Management.

Contributing to our community is a core mission at Astek, so recently we were proud to launch a new brand and website for Promethean Theatre Ensemble, our 2011 Astek Grant recipient. Along the way, we greatly expanded the digital marketing program for The Chicago Dancing Festival and got new websites launched for The Jeanine Sheridan Foundation, DanceWorks Chicago and Chicago Human Rhythm Project (CHRP) as well. Yep, we like to move.

And last but not least is a particularly rewarding combination of app dev and do-gooding. This multi-year project with My25, which is partially funded by the USDA, has engaged Astek to help tackle the growing obesity epidemic in America. My25’s approach is to use software and community tools to encourage better eating through realistic meal-planning based on simple and proven plate portioning techniques. We designed a prototype for the next generation of the software and created this video to help with fund-raising (yes, we spent more time on this than the staff meeting video).

Thanks for being a part of our ongoing exploration and we look forward to connecting you with your goals in 2012!

 This post was featured in epiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other epiphany Articles 

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Or, at least all of the electrons that form the cat videos and pornography zipping around it?

Impossible to calculate exactly but, like most bizarre science facts (the planet Saturn could float on water since it’s only 2/3 as dense, the national debt as a stack of pennies would stretch out of the solar system, etc.) this is entertaining because of the scales involved.

The guys who put this together are called VSauce and their YouTube channel has a lot of other interesting time-waster material.

This month we’re writing about things that inspire us. In our digital world there are countless innovations, so I’m often inspired by new approaches to old problems.

I’ve noticed a shift in how local services are supplied to consumers and businesses. Until recently, websites vying for the holy grail of bringing local customers and service providers together used classified- or forum-type websites that allow service providers to post what they do generically. Customers were expected to sift through these listings or post what they needed and hope for the best. This paradigm is being uprooted due to rapid advances in Web and mobile technology that put the customer in charge.

The bottleneck of traditional marketing forced companies to create products and services they believed people need or want. Or in some extreme cases, companies created products they knew people didn’t need, and simply used their marketing prowess to convince people to buy their products anyway.

Small or independent service providers have largely followed suit, mimicking the marketing strategies and tactics that have restricted corporations to a limited number of products and services that can’t possibly cater to every daily need of billions of unique individuals.

Innovative local marketplaces now enable consumers to articulate exactly what they want or need at any given moment, typically via a GPS-enabled smartphone, and then leave it up to the service providers to find them and in some cases even duke it out for their business.

The wild increase in personal efficiency articulated by The New York Times is possible due to technology that enables people to tell companies what they want rather than the other way around. Now people of all walks of life make their own hours by doing exactly what people need when they need it for the amount they want to pay. This growing wave of independent providers avoid the waste and annoyance of casting wide nets with traditional marketing. This was a battle they’d never win against the corporations, so rather than keep trying they changed the rules of the game.

Here are a few that stand out:

Zaarly – Post what you want done and what you’re willing to pay. For instance, our own Tim McDonald who helped launch Zaarly tells the story of an Illinois man who needed help fishing his keys out of a storm sewer and got it done for $75.

TaskRabbit – “Do more. Live more. Be more.” People post what they need done and TaskRabbit-vetted service providers make offers to do the work, allowing the consumer to choose the best fit based on their criteria.

Agent Anything – Connects busy, hardworking people who need things done with college students looking to make money.

Will these resources help consumers focus on what they need rather than want? Not likely. It’s not hard to imagine dreaming up all kinds of random tasks you ask to have done, just to see if you can get them done for a small price. This is refreshing in a world over-crowded with group deals, coupons, and classified sites providing yet another place for service providers to sell their wares and creating confusion for consumers who don’t know where to begin.

This post was featured in epiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other epiphany Articles

Amazon’s family of Kindle devices has been leading the pack of e-readers for some time now, currently followed by Barnes & Noble’s Nook.  In previous breakdowns of device market share, the distinction has been made between e-readers and tablets, such that the iPad and Android tablets were not factored in as direct competition to Kindle and Nook.  The main distinguishing factor for e-readers is the use of so-called e-ink technology, which allows for text to be rendered onscreen in a way that is easier on the eye, without backlighting.  However, and although R&D is bustling in this area, there is no such thing as a color e-ink screen on the market yet today.

As far as I can tell, Amazon’s new color Kindle Fire doesn’t really seem like anything revolutionary.  In fact, Barnes & Noble released their Nook Color a year ago, with the main difference in the Fire appearing to be more processing power and some new cloud storage offerings from Amazon. Barnes & Noble is now also about to release their Nook Tablet, which seems primarily like a hardware upgrade to the Nook Color.  None of these devices are yet bringing color e-ink displays to consumers, but rather taking the booksellers’ existing e-book distribution technologies to their own proprietary tablet devices.  They are starting to look almost like iPads or Android tablets, but especially the latter as they are all created from stripped-down versions of the Android OS.

So what’s the attraction?  Well, they are significantly cheaper than iPads and popular Android tablets like the Galaxy Tab, although you can find other Android tablets closer in price.  Other than that I’m having a hard time seeing the value.  I would personally rather have an older Kindle with e-ink, or a more fully-featured iPad.  Or, perhaps someday, a full color e-ink Kindle.

A few weeks ago I was standing on the sidelines to cheer on a couple of friends running the Chicago Marathon. They both did very well!

While I was waiting for them to pass, I snapped this photo on my iPhone 4 of a guy wearing a tutu, which just seemed comical in the context of the race.

I uploaded it shortly thereafter from my iPhone to Facebook. Within minutes, a friend of mine spotted my Facebook post and commented, “I know him! That’s awesome!!!”

She tagged him in the photo, which notified him instantly. He responded, “I would have stopped to pose if you asked. What mile were you at? Thanks again for getting it. It’s fantastic.”

We had a bit of conversation and are now friends. This breaks my rule of Facebook friendship, which requires that I have spoken to you in person for at least 60 minutes, but I felt like making an exception.

I have to say as long as I’ve been on Facebook, this is one of the crazier small world moments I’ve had. With more than 45,000 people running, I took four photos and got one of someone two degrees of separation from me. And with Facebook, in a matter of hours I was connected with him.

Maybe oddballs just run in similar circles and another oddball caught my attention.

As we enter an age of facial recognition technology, things like this will become more commonplace. In this case, however, I’m not sure what tech could have recognized the tutu guy.

Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson in 1972

The death of Steve Jobs has been discussed and his life memorialized over the last couple weeks, and for good reason.  Jobs was one of those rare celebrities that the computer industry produces.  He was a very public face for a very celebrated line of products and an evangelist for a way of thinking about how we, as a culture, use technology and integrate it into our lives.

Another computer legend died recently and, while his name recognition is no where near Jobs’s, without his work the current computer world might look very different, especially Apple products.

Dennis Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – October 12, 2011) created both the C programming language and (as one of many engineers) the UNIX operating system, both while employed at AT&T Bell Labs in the late 60′s and early 70′s.

The C Programming Language

Computers are only capable of carrying out a very specific number of simple instructions; they achieve complex tasks by stringing many (MANY) of these simple instructions together. This “machine code” can be complicated for humans to work with directly, especially on a large scale project, and so most computer programs are written in a “programming language” that translates ( or “compiles”) a human-friendly set of instructions into a computer-friendly set of instructions.  Roughly speaking: the friendlier a computer language is to humans, the “higher-level” it is.  The friendlier a language is to computers, the “lower-level” it is.

With C Ritchie created a bridge between the high and low-level. An elegant, structured language easy for humans to speak that translated very fluently to machine language.  It was also very easy to create versions of C for different types of computers.

C has been so successful it has inspired or evolved into many other languages including C++ (its immediate successor), JavaScript (running in your web browser), Java (used in everything from cars, home appliances and ground-control for space missions), ActionScript (the language that makes Flash animations do clever things), and PHP (which runs this WordPress blog).  Of the top ten most popular programming languages in 2011 at least seven of them are descended from C (or are, in fact, C itself.)

The UNIX Operating System

It’s hard to over-estimate the importance of the UNIX operating system.  There are a lot of reasons that it’s become such a workhorse of the information age.  Bell Labs distributed UNIX for free to universities, which meant an entire generation of computer professionals became deeply familiar with it and brought it out into the industry.  Being written in C meant it was easy to port to new hardware.  It standardized a very reliable system of allowing multiple users to access the computer and run programs at the same time.  And, at the same time UNIX was being birthed, an agency of the U.S. Defense Department was beginning to develop the technology that would eventually evolve into the present-day Internet, and a version of UNIX called BSD (“Berkley Software Distribution,” one of those branches of UNIX that evolved from the free university distributions) ran most of it.

And finally: when Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985, he almost immediately began putting together plans for what would become the NeXT computer which was unveiled in 1988.  NeXT’s operating system was called NeXTSTEP and it was based in large part on that same BSD UNIX operating system.  Returning to Apple in 1997 he brought NeXTSTEP with him and it eventually evolved into what is now OSX.

Any OSX user who opens the “Terminal” window is essentially opening a window onto a UNIX command line that any computer science major in 1975 would feel right at home with.