In my spare time (when I'm not busy blogging , I am hanging out these days at Decho Corporation.  The name is short for "digital echo", which is meant to evoke that valuable and ever-growing body of personal, digital information we all accumulate and have reverberating through our lives (photos, documents, financial records, contacts, correspondence, professional portfolios, etc.).

Today's ad hoc approach to keeping track of our digital stuff is simply collapsing under the sheer weight of the task as our information legacy grows in size, duration and value, and our lives are increasingly scattered (in a good way) across multiple devices and services.  This new company is a combination of two cloud-based application companies -- Mozy, Inc. and Pi Corp. -- that have teamed up to help you protect, manage and enrich your digital echo. 

Amongst other things, we're the proud purveyors of the Mozy online backup service.  With online backup, there really is no excuse for not backing up your vital information -- it is simple, automatic, secure and your data is protected at a remote location (we also hope someday to make flossing your teeth this easy).

Unfortunately, the risk of data loss is all too real.  Most of us have experienced it in some form.  Hard drives crash. PCs fail and get lost or stolen.  Viruses attack.  And even if you are diligent about backups, disasters can take out both your PC and local backups.  And that's just common risks.  We hear all kinds of scary (yet real) stories that either make people glad they had Mozy or convert them into online backup users.

Mozy has almost a million users, supports both Mac OS X and Windows and safeguards over 10 petabytes of user data (a petabyte is a million gigabytes).  Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal said "I prefer Mozy" when it comes to online backup.  There is even a free version that will protect up to 2 gigabytes - so give it a try.

</shameless product pitch>

We've started a campaign to warn people about some of the less common threats to their most precious information:

(In the event you're not a connoisseur of microwave dinners and therefore don't face this risk, here are some more videos that highlight other risks to be wary of).

In addition to doing esoteric risk assessment, I have been immersed in the world of services operating at multi-petabyte scale.  It is a lot of fun to be groping around in the pre-dawn darkness of the industry frontier.  Hopefully I'll weave some of this learning into the blog going forward.

Addressing the dinosaur divide:

Most of the nearly two billion children in the developing world have inadequate access to dinosaurs. Some receive no paleontology training at all. One in three has never even seen a dinosaur in person.

UPDATE: I am a little embarrassed by this post.  First, the title should have been just "Closing the Dinosaur Divide".  Second, as one correspondent pointed out, there should have been a mainframe joke.  Platformonomics regrets this lapse.

Forget about the politicians, the biggest loser on November 5th will be old media.

The Olympics are over.  The election will be over (and evidently $2.5 billion in political advertising this year wasn't enough to stop a decline in overall media advertising through August).  Old media is already in steep decline and this recession is just getting going.

Like others, I have looked at the New York Times as a bellwether for traditional media's predicament.  Silicon Alley Reporter has been scrutinizing the Times' latest results and their precarious financial situation.  They could default on their debt (and now officially have junk bond status) and the dividend is at risk which ultimately could result in the company being put up for sale ("Hello, Rupert?").  Their online business is doing well, but it can't offset the deepening hole from the (still at least as of this writing) much larger print business.  Something will have to give in the next year.

Most of the rest of the newspapers, magazines and TV broadcasters are not far behind.  It is going to be ugly out there in 2009 for anything ad-supported, online or offline.

Goes to any politician who removes the Do Not Call Registry's self-serving exemption for political organizations.  Do they really believe that people who registered for this wildly popular program (over 157 million phone numbers registered) still want to receive robo-calls?  The phone has been ringing all weekend.

Another ding for Google's acquisition track record:

I used to see a decent amount of ad dollar revenue via Feedburner...

Then Google took them over, and its been a total clusterf*&k ever since...

Utterly embarrassingly dreck. How worthless it is? The revenue dropped about 90%. Gee, why aren't you folks reading TBP clicking on payday loan ads and mortgage broker leads?

Google took a wonderful RSS feeder -- and its still an excellent RSS/email feeder -- and made it irrelevant. Formerly strewn intelligent, higher end advertising, and completely destroyed it. Customer service is a disaster, the interface blows, Adsense is a pain in the ass -- Feedburner has become utterly worthless as an advertising platform. October ads threw off under $500, down 75% from the pre-Google days, despite RSS feeds more than doubling over the past 3 months.

Don't be evil? How about "Don't be sucky?"

The Big Picture: Google Destroyed Feedburner

Ouch.  This is not a stable situation.

JAVA: 4.62 -0.15 (-3.14%) - Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Behold: Sun, if it still has $3.5B cash, is now a negative-net-worth company (at $4.62/share, mkt cap = $3.43B).  Low price for today so far was $4.51.

Peter O'Kelly's Reality Check

It only took on the order of $110 billion in additional "sweeteners" to get enough votes to pass the $700 billion bailout bill (a bill almost certain to be a disaster, we just don't yet know what the unintended consequences will be).

The "sweeteners" took the form of new or extended tax breaks.  One can only assume the legislators believed the use of tax exemptions (reducing revenue) as opposed to earmarks (increasing spending) was a significant concession to our fiscal plight and further evidence of their wise and decisive leadership.

And the "sweeteners" got larded out despite vows not to do so:

"We will not Christmas-tree this bill," [New York Senator Charles] Schumer said. "The times are too urgent. Everyone has their own desires and needs. It's going to have to wait."

"We don't need 535 members of Congress adding their best idea to this bill," [House Minority Leader John]Boehner said. "We need to keep it clean, simple, move it through the House and Senate, and get it on the president's desk."

This historical piece of legislation promises to get the credit markets moving again through such targeted measures as:

• Relief for manufacturers of children's wooden practice arrows from the Federal excise tax on wooden arrows.  Who knew we had an excise tax of 39 cents per wooden arrow?  I can only assume this tax is a forgotten anachronism dating back to previous bold Congressional action in the wake of Custer's Last Stand.
• NASCAR's accelerated depreciation schedule for racetracks is extended by a year.  The $100 million cost to taxpayers is a small price to pay in the name of rectifying the present injustice of amusement park owners having a more favorable depreciation schedule.
• "Increase in the limit on cover over of rum excise tax to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands".  I don't even know what this means, but I assume it helps distraught and financially strapped taxpayers, homeowners and mortgage bankers drown their sorrows in rum.

I can't find a list anywhere that links the "sweeteners" with their Congressional champions/beneficiaries, but I hope someone compiles it so they can be named and shamed.  If the politicians are already worried about their vote on the main bill affecting reelection in November, anyone who adorned this bill with pork should spend the next month justifying their inability to get their noses out of the trough, even briefly.

Amidst a story about Somali pirates capturing a Ukrainian ship carrying 30 Russian T-72 tanks and ammunition is this gem:

The pirates are highly organized. They work in teams. There is even a pirate spokesman (who could not be reached for comment on Friday).

Who says PR is dead?