So tomorrow I’m catching a flight on the all-new Virgin America airlines to Las Vegas to attend BlogWorld Expo. The conference looks to be quite interesting, and believe it or not, I have never been to Vegas before.
My employer is paying my way, so I’ll be taking plenty of notes while I’m there, and hope to blog at least some of the sessions.
I’m psyched!
Noted today: a report on the state of PCs in Japan. The interesting part of the report:
“The household PC market is losing momentum to other electronics like flat-panel TVs and mobile phones,” said Masahiro Katayama, research group head at market survey firm IDC.
Overall PC shipments in Japan have fallen for five consecutive quarters, the first ever drawn-out decline in PC sales in a key market, according to IDC. The trend shows no signs of letting up: In the second quarter of 2007, desktops fell 4.8 percent and laptops 3.1 percent.
NEC’s and Sony’s sales have been falling since 2006 in Japan. Hitachi Ltd. said Oct. 22 it will pull out of the household computer business entirely in an effort to refocus its sprawling operations.
“Consumers aren’t impressed anymore with bigger hard drives or faster processors. That’s not as exciting as a bigger TV,” Katayama said. “And in Japan, kids now grow up using mobile phones, not PCs. The future of PCs isn’t bright.”
Is this a sign of things to come? Will the personal computer go the way of the dodo in another decade? Possibly, although it seems to me that Japan is a bit of an outlier when it comes to a passion for cutting-edge gadgets.
Perhaps the takeaway here is a reminder: consumers care more about what they can do than the tools they do it with. If they can do everything they need to on a cell phone, or with a DVR attached to their TV, then those tools will outsell PCs.
As for me, I’m a little old-fashioned. I like a full keyboard and a bigger screen when I’m writing blog posts, editing photos, or reading feeds. But 10 years from now, who knows what cellphones will be able to do?
UPDATE: Tony Hung weighs in with some good points.
So the tech press is on fire today with the announcement of Google’s new “Facebook Killer“, OpenSocial.
There’s a clear benefit for Google: more eyeballs, more advertising revenue, and more industry entrenchment. There’s also one for established brands and thought leaders with big audiences. They can further aggregate (and presumably monetize) their traffic.
What I don’t see as clearly is how all this benefits your average end-user. What does OpenSocial do for me?
…picked a new web host, that is.
In recent comments, I got asked how I decided which web host to switch to once I gave up on Powweb. Truth is, it was not easy, and I very nearly re-upped with Powweb again, on the theory “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” But over the last 4 years, Powweb has gone from being a great company to one that I barely tolerated. I couldn’t bring myself to give them the $$ for another year. So I switched.
Finding a new host was definitely not a one-time project. I collected information on and off over the course of many months, from a number of sources. Those include word-of-mouth reports from other web folks on 2 mailing lists (WWWAC and SF-WOW) and reports from friends (like Glen). That gave me some anecdotal evidence to start with. Another site that was helpful for giving feedback and potential hosting company names was the WebHosting Talk forums.
I tended to avoid the various websites that list or rate web hosts, since many of them gave the impression of being basically advertising vehicles for the hosting companies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but I wanted user feedback more than anything else. Basic web hosting is so much of a commodity these days that I was more concerned with customer satisfaction within the price point I’d chosen (under $100 a year) than the nitty-gritty of exactly how many MBs of disk space or how many e-mail accounts I’d get with my service. I also gave bonus points to companies that had an actual customer forum, not just a one-way support desk.
I looked at Dreamhost, Laughing Squid, Media Temple, Lunarpages, 1 and 1, iPowerWeb, and a few others before deciding that A2 looked good. I did some more digging into A2, looking for reports of dissatisfied customers, outages, etc. Nothing bad jumped out at me. So I filed the information away.
As I said, this happened over the course of several months. Periodically I’d re-check, to see if opinion about a company was trending one way or another (increased outages, reports of slowness / overselling, etc). A2 still looked good.
Eventually, my old contract was about to run out, and it was time to push the button, one way or the other. So I took a deep breath and signed up with A2. And here I am.
That’s a little longwinded, but it’s the story of how I chose a new web host. I hope it helps someone.
I’m settled in at the new web host now — who by the way, is A2 Hosting, and no, there’s no referral link on that URL.
So far it’s been great. The blog and the assorted other web files are all in place. I’ve cleaned out some old stuff I don’t need to keep on the server anymore. I’ve updated my robots.txt to reflect the new site layout. I have IMAP set up on my desktop and my laptop. Everything is running smoothly, DNS seems to have transitioned, and all is right with the world.
I’m even taking advantage of the fact that my new account has more bells & whistles to set up a side blog for recipies. It’s not quite done yet but when it is I’ll post a link.
What’s amazing is how much easier all this has been. When I first set up a website in 1996, this was very much a manual process, and you needed to either have direct access to the server and/or be very comfortable with a command line do stuff like set up a domain name, create a new web hosting account, or customize a website. Today, it’s nearly all web-based and so very painless. I love it. YAY for progress!
In 5 days, I’ll either need to be set up and running on a new webhost, or I’ll have to fork over the money to my current webhost for another year of hosting services.
It’s been a little busy lately, and I don’t really have the bandwidth to get set up on a new webhost. And frankly, although my current host can be a little slow when it comes to server response times, by and large I’ve been satisfied with the service this year.
Still, it would be nice to have an IMAP server for my email. And faster web server response would be good, too. Maybe an easier to use control panel.
I’ve gotten feedback from friends, and searched the web for reviews, and I do have one hosting company bookmarked. I might pull the trigger and switch. But right now the odds are high that come Oct 30 I’ll still be parked right where I am.