info-design

And here we go with an occasional installment on portable computing. Cisco recently announced the end of life for the Flip camera. I didn't get it. I thought it was one of the most Apple things outside of Apple. Pure Digital got it right. What you need and nothing more. I remember pushing video from VCR tapes to digitize. Followed by Firewire connections to transfer the videos. Then this came along. Pop open that USB port and done. Plus, the software was smooth, effortless. Moving and managing content was effortless. When it came time to edit videos, I was back to Adobe Premier, but that was my wants, not a requirement.

I did 5K fun runs with it, even tried out the waterproof case for snorkeling (fail). It was exactly right for what a few years early meant a bag just for equipment on that vacation.

EOL for the Flip. I didn't get it. Neither did New York Times tech writer, David Pogue in his article "The Tragic Death of the Flip." He called out those who attributed the end to the smartphone, those "affluent, East Coast/West Coast, educated, New York Times-reading, Gizmodo-writing Americans." That leaves a pretty big market for all those copy cats to come in and fill the gap that the EOL Flip will leave behind. In Pogue's words, what Cisco ended up saying with the move was "We had no clue what we were doing.”

Work Life

I'm working in the SEO field now. The irony is that I have a lot of visibility into a lot of search-related things, but can't write much about it, just to be on the safe side. However, on something related, I was getting some phantom product postings on one of my entries here, so I turned off the backlinking and they stopped. As you might know, backlinks are one way for search engines to attribute authority to a page and site. This practice of creating spammy backlinks is a known bad practice, recently called out to a broader audience in another New York Times piece.

Labels: equipment, valley history