Rachel Beckman has a funny piece in The Washington Post today: Facebook Ads Target You Where It Hurts.  Because of how much the social network knows about individual users, ads can really sting. It chronically targeted ads at Beckman implying she was fat (“Muffin Top?” the ads asked along with a picture of someone afflicted by said condition).  Then after she updated her profile to indicate she was engaged, she started getting ads asking her, “Do you want to be a fat bride?”  Much too much.  It’s as though the people who produce late night infomercials had access to your diary…   I'm trying to recall if I've seen anything that rises to this level of uggh.  I don't think so... some tone deaf ones, sure, but nothing outright mean. How about you?

Ah, how well I remember the Commodore VIC-20 and writing those early BASIC peek and poke programs to swap on cassette tape by USPS with my cousin Conrad.  Smart of Yeahronimo Media Ventures to buy rights to the Commodore name.  Some of us might be tempted to look into one of these netbooks on the nostalgia factor alone...  CNET says, "The Commodore UMMD 8010/F, announced at the IFA consumer show in Berlin, will sport a 1.6GHz Via C7-M processor and will have an 80GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and optional Bluetooth. The machine will have 10-inch display and a 1.3-megapixel camera. Prices are expected to start at $610." Well, to me, $610 is still a lot to pay for nostalgia...

Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research and the Customer Experience Matters blog, shares from a recent report he did on the usability of the McCain and Obama Web sites.  MCain's site failed on three out of five of thee Forrester criteria, Obama, four out five.  Neither site passed on the privacy and security policies criteria.

Here's a piece from Timothy Lee at Techdirt on NBC's Web video Olympics coverage -- he points out it left a lot to be desired.  I wondered if it was just me that thought so -- most of the events I wanted to watch were not available for streaming, the site was difficult to navigate in terms of finding videos and finding schedules, and the Silverlight plugin requirement was a pain, though it would have been worth it if after installing it there was a big selection of video to watch.  Everything seemed designed to point you away from the Web and back to TV as quickly as possible.

Lee writes, "NBC apparently got about 72 million video streams during this Olympics season, and is touting this as a great success. It's true that this is a lot more than any previous Olympics, but I don't think NBC has anything to crow about. Remember, this is the most famous sporting event in the world, and it got non-stop media coverage for close to a month. Yet in a country with 300 million people, they only got a total of 72 million streams? That's less than one stream for every 4 Americans."

Seems counter to current conventional wisdom, but according to Tech Crunch, citing a new study by Attributor, McCain is leading in mainstream news coverage, and catching up on blogs.  Interesting piece breaking down factors in generating buzz in the blogosphere and in mainstream media Web outlets.

In an Online Spin column ("More On: Is Google Making Marketers Stupid") Joe Marchese writes: "...the Internet ecosystem breaks down because the metrics that marketers demand from Internet publishers are not a true measure of value and can be manufactured to a point, such as clicks and impressions."  Clicks and impressions are of course valid and valuable ways to measure some elements of an ad campaign (or a content strategy), but they don't tell the whole story in terms of reader engagement, follow-through and habituation.  Would love to see advertisers and publishers look to a broader range on metrics; the challenge is the art and agony of complexity in trying to come up with a whole cloth interpretation of reader engagement on a site - that's still farily easy to report and explain.

There was a standing ovation at the 9:30 a.m. Mass today at Ste. Marie Parish for Olympic race-walker Joanne Dow, who has just returned from Bejing, where she competed and finished 31 in the 20K race walk.  She didn’t expect to win (the New York Times quoted her as saying, “there’s not a chance I’m winning”), but win or no, the 44-year old Manchester athlete is an inspiration for her own kids, her parish community, and the city.  I was glad Father Mark made note of her accomplishment. Here’s a piece on Joanne from the July/August edition of the diocesan magazine, Parable.

Today I ran my second 22-mile training run en route to the Oct. 5 Maine Marathon in Portland.  A few interesting things to note – the first and most striking of which is that I felt really good, all the way through and afterward.  As recommended by various training programs, I ran it about one-minute-per-mile slower than my race day goal pace.  And unlike last week, when miles 21 and 22 got pretty grueling (read as legs turned into concrete posts), I had enough kick left this week during the last four miles to pick it up and run it as fast as the early miles.  The factors seem to be better processing of fuel (I'm not having those terrible energy crashes I did when I ran 18 and 19 miles for the first time, and I don't feel mentally and physically wiped out afterwards as I did then), and better hydration.  Despite drinking the same 32 ounces of water during the run as last week, I started out a few pounds heavier in water weight and lost fewer pounds during the run. I ran earlier in the morning, and that helped, but I think a lot of it has to do with how much I hydrated yesterday and last night.  Oh yeah, and I ate a huge slab of lasagna for breakfast right before I hit the road.  I think that helped as well.  I'm still not sure I'm going to hit my goal pace on race day – oddly, the closer I get and the more training milestones I hit, the more I realize what a foolishly optimistic goal a BQ time was to set for a first time marathon.  On the other hand, the progress is enough so I still have this wild hope left that I'll make it.  With about six weeks left to train and taper, and the expectation of weather 20 degrees cooler, fewer big hills than my home training ground here in Manchester, and maybe another ten pounds dropped between now and then… maybe, just maybe.  Cheers to everybody who's going to join me in having a cold one and watching the Olympic Marathon tonight!  Go Ryan Hall! 

I was happy to see that this study of kids' Internet usage shows that at least up to 11, kids aren't heavy users.  They still play with traditional toys and read plenty of books.  I know that in our household, despite the fact that I work on the Web and that Kris and I both use the Internet quite a bit, all three of our kids are avid readers of traditional books (or picture books in the cases of the littlest), and love puzzles, board games, building toys such as K'nex and Legos, imaginative play with dolls and stuffed animals, and of course, roughhousing and running around outdoors.  My hope is as they grow this trend continues ... and that they can approach the Web in somewhat the way I do: it's a tool deeply integrated into my lifestyle, but it is not my lifestyle.

Just finished Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Murakami is a Japanese novelist and distance runner who weaves the two interests together in this plainspoken book on how these two activities feed each other, compliment each other, and seem to appeal to a certain personality type.  Feeling much in common with that personality type, I enjoyed the book immensely (listened to most of it on MP3 while doing a three-hour, 22-mile long run yesterday).  I found it to be empathetic in terms of my running, and motivational for my writing.  Interestingly, I've noticed that as my weekly running mileage has increased over the past year or so, so has my drive to write fiction and poetry returned with something of the insistence it had when I was in college and just out of college.  There is certainly something that relates the two in my mind, and while it may not be exactly the same thread that binds them for Murakami, it's likely from a similar spool.

Philip Rosedale, the founder of the virtual world Second Life is stepping down as CEO. He explains why in this interview at Fast Company. He also talks about how many companies are using Second Life for business meetings, and why. A business meeting in Second Life could go something like this, he says: "We could have had three or four people on the call without having to use a 1-800 number. We'd just show up at a park somewhere in Second Life. Audio quality would be better than the telephone and you would hear the nuances of the voice better. If I wanted to show you a prototype of a new product, I'd just pull it out of my pocket and rez it -- meaning it would just show up and float in front of you. If we were working on cellphones, I could show you a big 3D model of our newest cellphone and we could play with it. If you put people in an immersive space that's also somewhat novel -- in Second Life you can actually rent tiki huts on a beach -- I guarantee you that you would remember the content of this conversation better than you would driving in your car and talking on the phone. I guarantee you would have laughed once or twice when I put on a funny hat or changed clothes with my avatar. The applications just make it more fun to do business. We're in a creative economy now and people have choices about where they work and how they work. Being able to do your work in a virtual workspace that makes it fun and reduces your travel time is a tremendous benefit to a company."

I haven't spent time in Second Life yet -- though many friends and colleauges have. I have to say, I'm curious, especially given this possible application. I find conference calls tedious (at least in format -- though the content and conversation may be engaging), and WebEx presentations and the like suffer from similar limitations in engagement. Hmmm...

Second Life's Web site targets the potential business user with Second Life Grid, which boasts: "The Second Life Grid™ platform enables your organization to create a public or secure private space using the leading 3D online virtual world technology behind Second Life®. Discover how your organization can create its own space for communication, collaboration and community engagement. Use the Second Life Grid to hold virtual meetings and classes, construct product simulations, provide employee training and lots more."  

With marathon training at the center of my workout activities this year, I've joked once in a while about outrunning upcoming birthdays… but given a recent study from Stanford University, it's not entirely a joke (check out the BBC story here). The study, which tracked 500 older runners for 20 years, along with 500 similar non-runners, found that running slows the aging process – that the runners had better odds of living longer and healthier lives. According to the BBC, "Running not only appeared to slow the rate of heart and artery related deaths, but was also associated with fewer early deaths from cancer, neurological disease, infections and other causes. And there was no evidence that runners were more likely to suffer osteoarthritis or need total knee replacements than non-runners - something scientists have feared."  I was glad to see the bit about the knees… I've had more than one non-runner suggest to me that was going to pay for my running now with knee surgery in the future.  As I said at the time, perhaps not, my friends. The study's lead author, James Fries of Stanford, sums it up: "If you had to pick one thing to make people healthier as they age, it would be aerobic exercise."

Here's a cool marketing idea... Nissan has produced a series of training videos for various sports and is targeting them to appropriate Web sites for given athletes.  For example, I came across a skyscraper ad touting the Alberto Salazar training videos on RunnersWorld.com.  After seeing them for about a week I finally had to click.  And they're good, interesting content!  It plays, of course, inside a Nissan-branded player and site.  You can the Salazar videos out here.   From a digital advertising perspective, smart campaign, terrific targeting.  From a running perspective, interesting useful video.

I couldn't figure out why the hard drive on our old home machine (and older Presario) was almost full.  I'd starting getting memory space errors and went through the folders, stripped programs, and run cleaner programs, all to no avail.  The culprit turned out to be the windows/installer folder – which had swollen to almost 20G.   It seems that failed Windows XP SP2 installs can leave a bunch a of duplicate or orphaned .msp files.  Many gigabytes worth!  

The solution (PLEASE NOTE - I'm not a tech support guy; I don't necessarily advocate this solution for you and I don't know that it won't have a different effect on your computer than it did on mine... proceed with caution.) was downloading the Windows Installer Clean Up program, mostly to get the little program inside it Msizap.exe.  Then, instead of running the Clean Up Program, you run msizap.exe from the command  like so: "C:Program FilesWindows Installer Clean Upmsizap.exe" G!  (Make sure to include the quotes and the spaces)

The G parameter tells msizap to remove orphaned files.  Using the process with that, or with other parameters, can lead to all sorts of problems.  (WARNING!)

I ran the command line as above and it freed up 17G. from the installer folder in about two seconds.  Amazing.    Everything on the machine is working right (so far!) and I'm not getting anymore memory errors.

But be careful; I found reference to this solution in a number of places (here are links to one of them, and another).  And all of them had caveats and warnings. I felt comfortable doing this to our old computer because a. the solution seemed to make sense (though I'm not an expert) b. all the data is backed up to standalone drive every night, and c. my next step was going to be to reformat the drive and start with a factory system restore anyway…   

But given all that… it worked, it worked, it worked!

A funny, motivating, slideshow/lecture from a guy named Lane Becker on why you'd want to run a marathon. Wait for the end -- he really picks up speed! (Also, perhaps not for listening with the kids in the room -- the language is sometimes ... enthusiastic...)