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An article on Wired crystalized something I've been thinking about for a while. By all appearances, Facebook and Google are moving toward adversarial strategic positions on the web. On the one hand, you have Google with it's focus on embracing and promoting open standards, open source and open content--all the better to allow them to aggregate it for you. On the other hand you have Facebook, who encourages you to hand over your digital life wholesale where they will use a closed model to create a very seamless experience for you to interact with your friends--all the better for them to sell ads.

If we remove advertising and money from the equation, the implications of the two models are very different. Google becomes a technological libertarian state--which is very true to early and pre-web Internet culture. You choose how you participate online. You can be an observer, offering no interaction at all. You can be a personality, offering your views and opinions for the world to see. You can even be anonymous, and engage others in an antagonistic way.

Facebook, however, encourages you to be you. In fact, it's against the terms of service on Facebook to create a profile around a fictitious identity. The value Facebook brings is connections to people you know, and that makes is difficult to do anything on Facebook as an anonymous user. The Facebook model encourages you to be transparent, and largely reinforces social norms.

Google and Facebook have each become symbols of a much larger battle over the fundamental model of online interactions. When you take openness beyond Google's libertarian-like stance you get anarchy. Site's like SomethingAwful and 4chan represent the Anonymous banner to it's most extreme case. Here people revel in their lack of identity, and compete to see who can be the most shocking, the most vile--primarily for amusement.

Internet culture is pioneered by the anonymous corners of the web. It's been interesting to watch web culture infiltrate mainstream western society, and to see the fabric between the anonymous web and the transparent web draw thinner and thinner. The rapid advancement of memes, and the degeneration of humor are a result of this intermingling.

Of course, the transparent web is causing the opposite effect on regular life. The standard Web 2.0 watchwords of transparency and accountability are more than just buzz terms. When you publish your thoughts, activities and pictures in a way all your social spheres can see, it's much more difficult to be duplicitous. The complexity of telling two parties two different things is greatly increased by the transparent web.

While I don't think either trend will ultimately "win", it is interesting to watch these competing models simultaneously influence the development of the Internet--and by extension human culture.

I have a problem.  Despite my love of web applications, I still use a lot of traditional local apps.  With these apps come an ever expanding proliferation of files.  Since these applications are local, they generate data that resides on a local storage device--and they implicitly expect the latency and throughput of a local storage device.  In short, the do not play well with the cloud.  Therein lies my problem.

I'm a multiple computer user.  On my desk at the office I have a Mac Pro with several large displays attached to it.  It's a great arrangement.  I keep an assortment of communication apps, content creation apps, web browsers, calendars spread across multiple virtual machines open at all times.  It's a sweet setup.  The Mac Pro is fast enough to run everything I want to run at once, and the displays have enough real estate that I don't have to think about window management or arrangement.  Of course all that power comes at a price: it's not portable at all.

So, I have a MacBook Air as well.  The MacBook Air is the opposite of my desktop configuration in that is is completely oriented towards portability.  I have an SSD in mine, so the emphasis is on rapid wake-from-sleep and not storage space.  It does have a multi-core CPU, but it's still not suited to the massive multi-tasking that the Mac Pro is.  I use it for fewer, more specific tasks when I'm on the go.

Additionally, I always have other computers in various states of assembly I use for testing new products or gaming.  Although this assemblage of multiple machines means I have a lot of flexibility, it also means I spend a lot of time thinking about where a given file needs to be.

There are several existing methods to cope with this problem.

1. Use a server. A local network file server is the most traditional approach.  It makes accessing files from multiple computers on a LAN quite easy and fast, but its usefulness fades quickly as soon as you try to access a server from a device that is not on the LAN.  Also, some apps on most platforms can have difficulty treating network volumes as peers of local storage.
2. Use portable media.  A portable hard drive or flash drive is what I'm talking about.  If you keep all your working documents on a portable volume, accessing them is as simple as attaching them to whatever computer you happen to be using at the moment.  Unfortunately, there is no perfect file system that works seamlessly with all operating systems.  Also, it's difficult to maintain a current backup in this situation.
3. Email.  I've seen people email themselves documents to share them across computers.  Aside from the obvious file size limitations of this approach, file versioning and forking quickly becomes an issue that outweighs any possible benefit.

For sometime, I used Apple's iDisk to alleviate the issue.  iDisk is part of Apple's MobileMe service, and be default is web based file storage.  That makes is subject to the latency and throughput issues that plague any Internet file storage--but a feature called iDisk Sync allows you to create a local copy of your iDisk data that synchronizes with your web-based iDisk.  It works with multiple computers, and will copy changed files across all systems.  You can also access and download files from me.com.  Additionally, Public folders make it easy to share large files with other people.  In theory, it's a perfect solution.

In practice the iDisk is slow and prone to version conflicts.  Although it's better in Leopard, iDisk sync is still prone to unexplainable hang-ups and can consume an enormous amount of your processor time.  As useful as I find other parts of MobileMe, iDisk continues to disappoint me.

Then came Dropbox.  Dropbox is very similar to iDisk Sync, but with notable exceptions.  First, the base plan is free.  Second, the application responsible for synchronization is responsive, lightweight and provides more detailed information about the status of sync operations.  It works on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

I started using Dropbox for new clients some time ago.  About a month into it, I ran into a sync issue--none of the files on my laptop were syncing anymore.  I submitted a help request and received a reply from the CTO of the company in a few hours.  The suggestions sent to me were transparent, and acknowledged an issue with the current release of the product.  I was directed to a stable development build, which resolved the issue and gave syncing a noticeable speed boost to boot.  At this point I was using the free version.

Two weeks ago I decided to go "all in."  I moved/merged the contents of the Documents folder on all my various systems, making Dropbox the primary repository of all my working data.  It's been bliss.  I don't have to spend any time thinking about what file is where, or what version it is.  Dropbox helpfully keeps multiple revisions of your files and offers very intelligent conflict resolution in the event you edit a document on multiple computers before the most recent version is synced.

Dropbox is everything iDisk is supposed to be.  I highly recommend it.

I've been an active blogger in the past, and experienced ebb and flow in the amount that I blog, up until a year ago when i stopped completely.  There was no intentional pause, in the same way that I've never blogged intentionally.  I blog when I have something on my mind.  Prior to my year-long hiatus, this blog had built up a regular following.  I assume that's because I wrote about things that interested me, and my fellow nerds found that my random interests compatible.

It took me a long time to remember I even had a blog.  The last two months, I've been peppered with questions from people I know and emails from people I don't about why I'm not blogging any more.  I didn't have an answer.

I'm very busy personally and professionally, but that was true a year ago.  The demands of parenting aren't killing my desire to write.  I'm reading more than I did a year ago, thanks to the Kindle.  Then I realized what changed.

I got into Twitter in a big way.  I was already a pretty serious Facebook user, and the addition of Twitter acted as a sort of creative heat sink.  Any time a thought of interest comes to me, I throw it out to the world in an embryonic 149 characters--then move on.  Facebook and Twitter are more than adequate for sharing links I find interesting, so that killed the rest of my blog content.

I still read blogs more than I read Facebook and Twitter.  Unlike so many of my ilk (nerds in marketing) I use Facebook and Twitter as very personal communication mediums.  I personally know every one on my Facebook friends list, and the people I follow on Twitter are friends as well (aside from a dozen or so people who interest me that I don't know).

That's shifted my online life in a subtle way.  I still draw from the well of thinking by reading people's blogs, but I then share back only with my tribe.  I'm not sharing things with the larger web via my blog (and by extension, Google).  Some of my older posts still get a lot of traffic because they are tech issues that people are looking for answers on.

How common is this socialification of minor-league bloggers?  How do you maintain the mental discipline to talk to your tribe and give back to the world at large.

It's tough stuff.

I've been on 3 diets in my life.  I originally porked up while Jenny was pregnant with Madison.  I joined WeightWatchers and lost it all--getting to the thinnest point of my adult life.  Then Jenny got pregnant with Macey and I porked up again.  I decided to try NutriSystem and got intense migraine headaches for my troubles.  NutriSystem did not work for me.