Of course, once I got home I immediately upgraded my iPhone 3G to the latest 3.0 firmware. After the interminable download, sync and install process, I got my first glimpse at the new front page. Almost immediately, I noticed that I not only had a battery icon, but also the percentage of battery power remaining!

My first thought was that it was a new feature of the OS. I was pleased, but not completely surprised, because I had a bit of a secret. You see, once upon a time I used a jailbreak on my phone. It was a heady time for me, running two apps simultaneously, recording video with Qik, and most importantly using a hack that turns the battery icon to a percentage view. And, once I decided to un-jailbreak, all my various interface hacks and other things vanished, except for that surreptitious little battery percentage toggle.

Through a couple of iPhone OS updates the battery hack stayed with me, apparently hidden away in some configuration setting or firmware file. And apparently, that setting triggered a feature that is only meant for the iPhone 3Gs when the firmware installed. Excellent!

What’s weird is that this is distinctly different from how it appeared on older firmware revisions. Gone is the ability to tap on the battery to toggle it to a percent.. now both appear, all the time. And of course, since I don’t have a 3Gs, there is no setting in the Usage menu for me to turn it off. Good thing I like it.

Now how do I tell my iPhone to play music through my bluetooth headset? sigh.

More discussions on this:

Phone 3.0 comes with battery percentage meter – The iPhone User Guide
How to get battery percentage in 3.0- [Archive] – Mac Forums
iphone 3g battery percentage.. am i lucky-
Battery % Hack – Mac Forums

We have had our web experience controlled by the sites we visit for so long that for a lot of us, the web browser defaults no longer even come in to play when controlling what the text on a web page looks like, except in the case where we want to override whatever choice the site we are visiting has made.

This isn’t a rant. I actually think, by and large, that this is a good thing. CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets) allows precise control over the overall look of web sites, and when you are trying to walk that line between clean and detailed, CSS can be the razor that keeps your site from looking too busy or too cluttered. There are many precise tweaks that can enhance the presentability of a site, like the vertical spacing between lines of text.

But, as you have no doubt noticed, this site doesn’t employ CSS to force a particular font type, size, style, or color. Those are all left up to the choices you have made in your browser settings, and if you are anything like me, you probably haven’t even looked at your browser font defaults for years.

Then end result? 10-point Times New Roman, with blue unvisited links and purple visited links.

If you absolutely hate serif fonts (fonts that have little twiddly bits on the letters like Times New Roman), take a moment to go in to your settings and select a different font that is more pleasing. You can choose any font that you have installed, from Helvetica (or Arial for you Windows folks) to something more exotic like Calibri on Windows (the new MS Office default font) to Monaco on the Mac.

All the browsers except Chrome have a font setting in their options. Google Chrome, created with minimalism in mind, forces you to edit a configuration file to change your font defaults. I found where this configuration resides from a Chrome Help Discussion Board:

Using text editor to open:
   ...\Documents and Settings\User_Name\Local Settings
   \Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Preferences

You will find the "webkit": {  "webprefs": { in the file.
Those settings are for WebKit.

In my setting example:
   "webkit": {
      "webprefs": {
         "default_fixed_font_size": 11,
         "default_font_size": 12,
         "fixed_font_family": "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono",
         "minimum_font_size": 12,
         "minimum_logical_font_siz": 12,
         "sansserif_font_family": "Times New Roman",
         "serif_font_family": "Arial",
         "standard_font_is_serif": false,
         "text_areas_are_resizable": true
      }
   }

The minimum_font_size and minimum_logical_font_size prevent Chrome to use
very small font size for display.

Remember to close Chrome first before you edit the file, or the file you saved
will be overwritten by Chome after exiting.

If Google Chrome has the most annoying default font configuration, Safari 4 possibly has the best.  Not only is it easy to find, but if you are viewing a page that uses the default browser font (like this one) selecting a font will immediately update the page with that font, allowing you to see immediately if it’s a good choice or not.

Of course, as more and more sites adopt CSS-heavy themes in an attempt to give you a unique and identifiable look, these settings become less relevant. Maybe that’s the lesson we can take away about Chrome – they’ve already decided that default fonts should be set once (by the developer) and forgotten.

This is part 1 of Scribkin’s I Am Blogger series, which started out with this post.

A lot has been written about, and by, a guy who has seen his reputation in social media grow, often exponentially, over the past year.  He has been writing about technology and new media for just a hair over twice that time period on his own eponymous blog.  Oddly, his income is not based in whole or in part by his blog, as evinced by the lack of any advertising on it.

The man in question is Louis Gray.

You might be wondering, as I have, why he has kept at his hobby of writing blog entries up to three times a day, for at least a year without any significant readership or an aspiration of monetary compensation in the technologies he was covering.  The answer, as far as I can tell, is simple:  He loves to write, and he writes about stuff that interests him.  Fantasy football, TiVo, Apple stuff, iPods.. the list is diverse and changes over time.

Louis may have started his blog as a way to codify his thoughts on these subjects, but he was also ‘home schooling’ – in this I mean that all that writing was practice.  Sure, hardly anyone saw his first 100 posts until well after they were posted.  But when people did start to notice his blog, he had already taken his blogging game to a new level.  Full opinion pieces on technology, new media, and corporate politics.  In-depth statistical reports. Honest assessments of new technologies and software, as well as a number of exclusives.

No wonder people were drawn to his writing.

And Louis has become very popular, probably thanks in no small part to Robert Scoble ‘discovering’ him on FriendFeed and hyping him as only Scobleizer can do for a while. All that attention would go to anyone’s head, and they would probably parlay that fame into a better job, higher-profile gigs, etc.  Louis, however, stayed modest.  He decided to open his blog to other voices, other bloggers.

I should interrupt myself here and explain that, at least in social media circles, it’s fairly common to see ‘guest author’ posts on blogs.  They are a good way to expose an established blog’s audience to a new voice, and afford a little cross-promotion.  But here again, Louis never referred to his contributing bloggers as “guests,” he felt that they have a stake in the welfare of Louis’ blog as well.

For full disclosure, I am an author on Louis Gray’s team.

So Louis is a great guy.  But why is his writing compelling?  First, he has a very conversational tone.  It’s easy to dive in to anything he’s written.  He maintains a clear thread of thought through each piece, and he prefers to write from a perspective that isn’t just a re-hashing of the same news and memes that have been covered on other sites.  Often, he will present a different opinion, or attempt to reconcile the logic made on different sides of the same issue.  He is a mediator as much as he is a pundit.

Most of all, Louis hardly ever writes ‘from the hip,’ so to speak – you can be sure that if he is sitting down to write about something, he has given the matter a lot of consideration, and taking as much information as he has available to him (which usually is a lot more than I notice, I can tell you that!) and synthesized it into a thoughtful, comprehensive post.

Generally, it takes him about 20 minutes to write and less than an hour to post.  Another benefit of all that practice.

I do envy him that.

Word.Line by apesara

A few days ago, I got an email.  This email was from a fellow blogger that I was in the middle of a round of correspondence with.  This particular email.. it made me realise something about blogging, and about writing.

All the bloggers I know would write whether they got paid for it or not. We have a love of writing persuasively, and journalistically, and passionately.  We simply love the language.  And that drive to write means we get a lot of practice becoming better at our craft.

OK, enough waxing poetic about the Muse.  My point is this: We bloggers have power. And blog posts aren’t the only place we can employ that power.  That is what the email I mentioned taught me — as a writer, we can choose to write well to audiences great and small.

This may seem fairly obvious, but bear with me.  You send and receive emails every day.  But how often do you get a really well-written email, that really tells you someone sat down and spent a significant amount of effort crafting it, and then sending it only to you?

It doesn’t happen that often to me.  When I got an email like that recently, I felt, somehow, that I was in the presence of greatness.  As if a president or statesman from a time gone past, a time when fine writing was valued as much for its art as it was for its utility, had set quill to paper and hashed out a missive just for me.

I suddenly realized that this is why the electronic newsletter is still alive, and still great, despite criticism.  This is why writing a blog entry is important, no matter the size of your audience.  And this is why taking time to write an email with the same effort and thought is equally as important.

I’m going to spend a week doing something a little different here on Scribkin.  Although burdened with lack of preparation, I’m going to select  someone each day or two whos writing has made a difference to me in the past year, and attempt to give you my perspective on that person, and why I follow their writing.

As the new year starts, I am increasingly thinking of changing my follow habits that I have maintained since I first logged in on Twitter and FriendFeed. 

Mutual Respect

My attitude was, mutual respect. You follow me, I follow you. I can learn from everyone. I still think it’s a good attitude to have, and I wish it was the right one. But increasingly, especially on Twitter, I don’t think it is. 

I’m going to rant a bit here, just warning you.

For months, I have been using FriendFeed and Twitter actively. At the beginning, I followed anyone who looked interesting and didn’t care about who followed me back. I maintained what I thought of as a fairly altruistic policy toward both services, just concerning myself with finding great people.

More recently, my active search for new great people has begun to taper. First, I found tools for both services that figure out who my ‘mutual followers’ are.. and I have to admit, they have shaken my original innocence.. people who I thought I had connected with weren’t following me. I was disheartened. 

I briefly thought of whining.. but that doesn’t feel right to me. It’s very difficult for me to impose myself on other people. That’s why I can’t effectively use services like Digg and Mixx.

Anyway, I maintained my mutual follow policy. On FriendFeed, I just try to keep myself ignorant of any gaming that happens. I follow those who follow me, and I hope they respect that. Twitter, though, is a different story. With the rise of tools like Twitterless and SocialToo, I can see exactly how much ‘gaming’ is going on.

Gaming

And Twitter gaming is seriously on the rise.

I could (and perhaps will) write a whole different post on how people are gaming Twitter.  But the behavior that is really irritating me recently are these folks that follow a lot of Twitterers and then, 10 minutes to two days later, un-follow all of them in the hopes that a certain percentage follow them back.

Why do they do this?  Because Twitter now has a follow ratio that prevents people from following X number more than they have followers.  It seems fairly arbitrary and people now see it as a challenge to defeat.

It irritates me no end. I’ve taken to blocking the people who exhibit this behavior with me. For example, recently one dude (TheBobBlog on Twitter) had the balls to follow me, send a robot DM when I followed him back, ignore a separate DM that I sent him asking about tumbling his photos, and then un-following me the next day!  BLOCKED.

Ultimately, I don’t want to be reactionary with a new follow/discovery policy going forward.  That’s why I have taken a step back and started thinking about what I really want to do going forward.. and help me in more ways than just addressing the gaming going on.

Two Paths

The way I see it, there are two ways I could go. I can go all-inclusive: Open the floodgates and follow thousands of people on both services a la Robert Scoble and just filter out the stuff I find interesting on the back-end; Or I can go exclusive: Start hand-picking those people I find interesting, go in-depth with them and re-grow my social circle with care.

Either way, I would not actively try to influence who is following me. And I am aware that going to exclusive route can have some negative backlash if folks place a lot of emphasis on mutual follows.

However, I am starting to think it is worth the risk.

Why?  A few reasons:

• I fear I am missing too much from folks I respect as well as new people I follow, due to the increased amount of noise.
• I am spending more and more time just trying to keep up with what is happening in FriendFeed, much less exploring what the folks on FriendFeed are doing on their own blogs and other services.
• I wonder if I am missing opportunities to connect more with great people, as the crowd I follow gets ever larger.
• I find myself getting frustrated just using the social media tools that I found so enjoyable a scant few months ago.

Taking A Risk

So, you might notice a change as I radically upset the balance of followers to following.  And if that’s the limit for you, I don’t blame you.  But I can promise I’m not ‘holing up’ and disconnecting – just the opposite.  I won’t be surprised if I end up following more people than I am now.. but I will have arrived there with a different methodology, and hopefully with more to offer those following me.

If you have ever used Twitter (and who hasn’t, these days), you already know about the service’s famous 140-character limit.  Similar to a cell phone text message, that’s all you get before you hit ‘send.’  Of course, you could break your message up into multiple short messages but the real effects of this limitation are two-fold:

• It forces Twitter users to think of brief, hopefully elegant ways to transmit (or ‘tweet’) their thoughts.
• It forces creative solutions to common problems such as sending an accompanying web address (or URL) with a tweet.

I could probably add a few more points on how this limit also defines how conversations happen on Twitter but that would be a whole different post, which has probably been covered many times by now.

For the Shorties

Let’s focus on the second point though.  Almost immediately after Twitter started picking up steam, URL-shortening services that already existed (and many more specifically for Twitter) started gaining in popularity as well.

These services, such as tinyurl.com, is.gd, tr.im, bit.ly and many more, all do basically the same thing.  They take a standard uncompressed (and hopefully easy-to-read) URL and associate a new, coded, very short URL with it.  They do this by acting as a ‘redirect’ between you clicking on a shortened link in Twitter and ending up on the destination page.

The Pros

The benefit is clear: more of those precious 140 characters is available for actual message, less is taken up by the web address.  There are other benefits as well.  Some of these services allow customization of the shortened url (using a key word for example), and others offer statistics on just who clicked on the shortened URL and when.

The Cons

The drawbacks are also clear.  For one, you have no idea where a shortened URL goes before you click on it.  This has given rise to hugely popular internet memes such as the RickRoll, which basically is a shortened URL pointing to this YouTube video but in a tweet or other location that doesn’t indicate anything about where the link goes.  Walla, click on the link and you get rickroll’d.

Efforts have been made to make the redirect process more transparent, such as adding a custom version of the shortened URL that sends you to the redirect service with a full-text link to click on.. but these hardly get used because people want instant gratification, not the requirement of clicking through to the actual page or waiting 5 seconds, etc.

Another somewhat haphazard solution so far has been browsers and other tools that ‘expand’ the short URLs back to their original targets in-line, or at least show the target in a pop-up.  The problem has been these have been single-shot solutions for the most part, working for one particular service but not the others, and/or only working for certain sites, such as Twitter.

Prediction

So, I am predicting that we are going to see a more concerted effort in the form of a browser plug-in (say for Firefox?  Fingers crossed) or maybe a whole new browser that handles these compressed URLs natively, perhaps expanding them inline or in a popup, no matter what site you are on or what service the URL was compressed with.  In addition, publically available statistics could be gathered from the redirect page at the same time the uncompressed URL is harvested, transmitting that info back to the recipient as well.

I think there is a great need for such a tool, and so I am prognosticating that it is already being developed.  Hopefully we’ll see it soon.

Final Thought

On a final note, I’d just to think out loud, and wonder why Twitter doesn’t improve their 140-character algorithm so that it does not add the characters inside a web URL and, while we are at it, any username mentioned in the tweet (preceded by an at-sign: @) or a hashtag (preceded by a hash-sign: #).  I mean, if you are only giving us 140 characters, why can’t they all count toward message?

Tangent Post from Louis Gray: BigTweet Sends Tweets from Any Web Page (Up to 280 Characters)