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What is the motivation behind Facebook and other forms of online self-presentation, such as, say, blogging? I posed this question (with respect to Facebook) to my undergraduates. Their answers included a desire for social contact and curiosity about other people (for which, perhaps, self-disclosure is the medium of exchange). Here are some other possibilities:

1. According to Cooley, we see ourselves through the eyes of others, or at least we try hard to. But what others? Whomever we come into contact with, I suppose, for those are the people whose reactions we can gauge. But then online self-presentation poses a challenge, for this is presenting ourselves to people we might not otherwise encounter, and whom we might not ever encounter in person. I conjecture--and perhaps Cooley anticipated this--that we see ourselves through the eyes of whomever we've received responses from in the recent past. Then once a blogger has, perhaps under pressure from a former colleague, presented himself to the blogosphere once and received some responses, he sees himself through the (imagined) eyes of those same people (or at least some typification of that sort of person), and feels answerable to them.

2. Once one has a taste of externalizing one's thoughts and imagining that others care to ponder them, thinking that is not externalized seems kind of pointless, perhaps like singing in the shower after performing in front of a large audience. I've had this experience after reviewing books for journals, of feeling deflated upon then reading a book for no one's benefit but my own. (It passes, unless one feeds the habit by writing Amazon reviews.)

3. Consistent with (2), one acquires the cognitive habit of thinking and experiencing on behalf of an audience, and perhaps of formulating a blog entry as the experience unfolds, so that half the work is done by the time the experience is complete. Whether this diminishes the intensity of the original experience, I won't conjecture. Obviously Twitter takes this to a new extreme.

4. When my students talk about maintaining social contact, I assume they mean contact with high school and college friends, and that a precondition for friendship is, at least in some circles, continuous self-accounting and monitoring of the self-accounts of others. This should probably be distinguished from blogging (or Facebooking) to combat genuine isolation, of the sort that my students are at little risk of but that probably besets folks stranded in the suburbs and beyond. The problem with this formulation is that it portrays online interaction as a last act of desperation, akin to talking to a Wilson soccer ball, whereas it seems that a genuine, if virtual, community readily pops into existence for anyone looking for one. And then who's to say that it's less "real" than a clutch of friends chatting at the coffee shop? As I tell my students: no moral evaluations. No, not even in the footnotes.

* Yes, the site is a joke, operated by a friend of a personal friend of mine, and they have actually hired call center workers to call your mom for you. That part is not a joke. They swear they won't keep the data or use it for any other purpose, they just think this is a funny thing to do.

Have you ever asked yourself, "Where can I get a restaurant kids' meal for free or cheap on a Tuesday within 10 miles of my house?" Even if you haven't, if you have kids of your own or visiting and want to take them out to eat, use KidsMealsDeals.com to find restaurants with kidlet meal promotions on any given day of the week.

Neat resource. I found that the listings are a little sparse for my area, so I hope it grows more in the future.

Lifehacker Reader Scott has to explain all the acronyms in his Word documents in an attached appendix. He's learned to make Word search them out for him, and anyone can use the same trick.

Here's Scott's explanation of how he uses Word (2007) to search out and highlight only the acronyms in his documents:

1. In Word, Open the Find window (Ctrl + F)
2. Check the box labeled "Use Wildcards"
3. In the "Find What" field, put this phrase:
   <[A-Z]{2,}>
   (voodoo explained here)
4. Click "Reading Highlight", and then "Highlight All"
5. Enjoy seeing all of your acronyms highlighted.

Neat trick, Scott—and a good reminder that you can get pretty advanced with Word's search service, saving yourself a lot of hunt-and-replace time on even the things you can't imagine the computer can find for you.

Got your own mystical Word find-and/or-replace code? Share the sorcery in the comments.

Ohhh…and the smartphone rumor mill keeps churning.  The latest, according to Cote Collaborative, is that Apple is considering cutting their monthly service charge for their iPhone by $10.  This is supposedly going to happen when they make their big introduction to their latest and greatest at the WWDC in June.

Obviously with the whole Palm/iPhone competition, AT&T is looking for a way to get in customers that might be thinking the service plan is too expensive.  And at the same time, we have Apple themselves possibly looking to move past AT&T and look around at other carriers (like Verizon).  But, if this price cut thing works and brings in more customers, obviously both Apple and AT&T will be sitting back happy.

The two year contract would be lowered by $240, brought down to $59 a month from the current $69.  This is a 14% savings.  Right now, if you want to buy an iPhone, a two-year contract plus the phone is going to run you a whopping $1,880.  Not exactly small change.  Cote says “This price does not address the whole market.”  And apparently Apple is getting a little concerned that this price barrier exists.  To point, Cote goes on to say “Wal-Mart iPhone sales haven’t met expectations.”  Ya think?

Although there have been some rumors of a nano-iPhone hitting the market for $99, geared for those who would like an iPhone, but can’t really afford one…Cote says…nope.  He doesn’t really expect one popping up anytime soon.  Though he says that playing around with the price plans shows that they do want to do something about affordability.  (Or at least AT&T does).

If the doom mongers are to be believed, parts of the financial services sector have put innovation in IT firmly on the back burner.

Despite its well-publicised travails, the financial services sector is still hugely important to the IT industry. Many others take their cue from the sector’s leaders. If senior decision makers in financial services decide there is no room for innovative IT, others are bound to take note.

Such a decision would be a huge mistake. The IT function is uniquely placed within the business to deliver the kind of efficiency gains business leaders so desperately seek as they grapple with the caustic impact of the worst recession in decades.

Thankfully, the IT chiefs working in financial services clearly recognise that they have to keep innovating. What has changed is the focus ­ from delivering eye-catching innovation to work under the hood, tuning organisational effectiveness through initiatives such as collaboration.

So while budgets may be tight within these firms, IT leaders are adapting, finding new ways to deliver performance-enhancing projects that don’t come with a big price tag.

Should such efforts be dismissed as “incremental innovation”? Hardly: the value of an IT project to the business is not always dependent on the cost. Unlocking internal knowledge and improving employees’ ability to interact with colleagues and customers can have huge benefits.

But those advocating incremental innovation seem to suggest that IT leaders should be setting their sights low. They shouldn’t.

If business leaders look at financial services IT, they should not be misled by talk of cost cutting, and assume that scaling back IT investment is the only sensible course in a difficult economy. Instead, they should understand how IT is once again demonstrating its ability to improve operations, and ensure organisations are able to seize any advantage possible when the upturn comes.

There is no P2P for sharing.  For a class setting, a professor would have to e-mail her students and they could have it on their Kindle DX in that way.  You can’t just ask your friend to send over the file from Kindle to Kindle. 

Why “DX” designation?  It actually stands for deluxe since it is a bigger model.  So I was wrong when I thought it stood for developer xylophone (in retrospect, that didn’t make much sense). 

Amazon plans to do future industries like medical and legal later.  They are just focusing on colleges and newspapers.  High schools and grad schools will have to wait. 

The Amazon Kindle DX has 3.3GB of space and still does not have an expansion port.  The textbook demoed during Jeff Bezos’ presentation (a biology textbook) only weighed in at 10MB.

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