David Strom

Fans of Paul Newman will recognize his character’s famous line in Cool Hand Luke. Never in the history of electronic communications do we have so many choices and yet experience so many communication failures. This was made clear to me recently when I tried to get in touch with a “friend” of mine. I put the word in quotes because I mean it in Facebook terms: someone that I may or may not have met f2f, but want to stay in touch. Let’s call this friend Bob for simplicity. My go-to communication method is email, so I first tried to send Bob a quick email to answer a question. Sadly, I have 9,000 contacts in my Gmail but Bob is one of the many of them who have moved on to another email address. The mail came back undeliverable. That wasn’t a good sign. But even if it got through, it doesn’t mean anything these days: there are lots of folks that ignore their emails, or ... (more)

How Banks Can Text You Fraud Alerts in Real Time

Like some of you, I was in the market to buy a new phone late last year, and went online to the AT&T store to make my purchase the day or so after the new iPhone 4S was available. Smart, I thought to myself: avoid the lines (not that there are many lines here in St. Louis, but still). Took about five minutes to enter all my information and then I was done. I got a confirmation email that my order had been placed, and an estimated ship date a few weeks away. That was fine: I wasn’t in a hurry. But then there were a bizarre series of circumstances. My order was summarily cancelled... (more)

Blogging is far from dead

I took a look around for an article that I wrote today for ReadWriteWeb on new models in Web publishing and was glad to see that blogging is far from dead. Indeed, it is evolving rapidly into some interesting new forms and I wanted to take this opportunity to review some of them with you. If you want to read more or share your thoughts, click on the link above. We certainly stand at a crossroads, as we move from the “golden age of blogging” into whatever we are going to call things this year or this moment. I tend to think of this as the post-blogging era. Jeremiah Owyang wrote o... (more)

MS Office is like your PC’s Kudzu

Is it time to retire Microsoft Office, as my colleague Eric Lundquist says in his latest Information Week column? Much as I would like to, I can’t. Part of the problem is addiction, part comfort, and part because it just works well enough that there isn’t any reason to get rid of it. Office is the kudzu of the computer world: you can’t easily get rid of it, it has grown like topsy to take over other apps, and it holds you in its grip something fierce. Why addiction? Let’s face it, we have enough keystroke and command syntax memory that switching to something else isn’t useful. A... (more)

Advice for job seekers

I was quoted in this past weekend’s St Louis Post Dispatch in Kate Uptergrove’s jobs column here about things you can do, such as keeping your Facebookand LinkedIn privacy settings up-to-date. Words to the wise. ... (more)