I deactivated my Facebook page, much to my daughter’s great relief, I’m sure. I created an account to learn what it was, and I have to say I never really caught its wave. In the end, I guess it is a PHP-enabled blog server for people without the time or inclination to get into blog design, with some social networking tools enabled to help create, maintain, and encourage site traffic.

Facebook facilitates the sort of ‘virtual clubhouse’ that Howard Rheingold lucidly analyzed in ‘Smart Mobs‘ … a technology that provides a sense of privacy with one’s friends. And I understand the particular usefulness of that, particularly for teenagers still under the watchful eyes of parents and teachers and lacking the mobility or means to carve out much real-world personal space. (I’d say I grok it, if only to underscore that my Baby Boomer psyche left this particular experiment a long while ago, although I can still see why it is a tool so relevant for Generation Next).

The FaceBook application platform feels convoluted. It probably has to be to maintain their very-locked-down business model (services like Google AdSense won’t work within application pages, so ‘monetized’ applications seem either hamstrung or impossible).

Certain phenomena have a gradual, long-term toxic effect. Like George Bush’s voice or mercury poisoning. Add to my personal list Microsoft operating systems. I’ve had long exposure to these through their entire evolution, but instead of an evolving technological marvel, they always remind me more of a bloated and stagnant bureaucracy.

The prospect of Vista filled me with all the enthusiasm of a visit to the DMV. I’d catch myself on the Apple web site, choosing a MacBook Pro in the online store, selecting all the options, getting a little sick looking at the $4,200 price tag, but still thinking “Wouldn’t that be great?”

Then, deliverance, and from two quarters: First, in an attempt to either exorcise or kill my flawed and temperamental Dell laptop, I wiped the hard disk and installed the free Ubuntu Linux distribution, and it was like drinking a mugful of Felix Felicis. Suddenly my laptop Just Works and is Fast and doesn’t take 10 minutes and jumper cables to boot up.

But the big change was an iMac 24″, a gift from my Mom. As with any Apple product these days, the design just makes you smile. It is fast and works the way you think it should.

Very few people read this blog, or at least, few read and then link to it, which has caused my blog ranking to drop from the low 100,000s to the point where it is now crowding 2,000,000. But my server logs indicate that the site itself is fairly popular, particularly among those looking for one of the puzzle solvers (see sidebar).

To get the blog stats to reflect the reality would mean incorporating the solvers into the blog itself … right now they are mostly standalone PHP applications. But that causes a problem, since WordPress software is itself a PHP application and does not look kindly on interlopers once it is running. But WordPress also supports an army of plugins that can be installed to add blog functionality, and among these I found James van Lommel’s runPHP plugin for WordPress, which allows integration of PHP code into a Post or static blog Page.

So at the top of the page you will now see a tab for the “Jumble” solver, which has now been blogified using runPHP. After a few hassles fixing my crummy database scripting (I think it was my very first attempt at PHP, so I make allowances), the script ran without modification.

So give it a try, and feel free to link to the Jumble page or this post (hint, hint)! Let’s get those blog stats out of the woods of obscurity and back to the comfortable region of the barely known.

Here at the Renaissance, we’ve long known that a tendency to get interested in a lot of things can be an obstacle to building an audience. No one can figure out what you may want to talk about next. So it is always gratifying when a few of our favorite themes get together on a single subject. Such was the case this past week when politics, computing and blogging came together on the White House’s handling of the current Justice Department scandal.

As Orwell examined in “1984″, Control of Information is a critical tool in the acquisition of power. That tool assumes many forms, among them managing information (talking point memos, sycophantic reporters and media outlets), partial information, misinformation (lies), and this past week, Information Overload, as the White House had the Justice Department handed over more than 3,000 pages of email purported to cover the Department’s activity with respect to the Fired US Attorneys issue.

It was a planned media moment for the Administration: “See how open and honest we are”, but the thinking behind it seemed to be the same I used when writing papers in college … make the paper BIG enough and the professor may find it easier to assume it is complete and will provide a reasonable grade without actually reading it.

But although the current White House organization has proven it is adept at managing the mainstream media, the blogging community has got their number. Besides maintaining intense focus on the issue (unlike, for example, CNN, whose producers can no longer distinguish a Constitutional threat from Britney Spears’s rehab in its Top Headlines), bloggers are bringing new information management thinking to these situations.

For example: 3,000 pages of emails? No big deal … this is a situation just made for distributed processing. Get 30 active participants on the blog, have each take 100 pages and get busy combing through. Share discoveries, ideas, theories via the comment board or IM and bang … within a few hours facts are brought to light that would otherwise take days and weeks and may, for that reason, not get talked about at all because Britney needs another round of rehab and the mass attention has wandered off. Interesting facts and theories develop quickly, like:

- Hey, anyone notice that there’s an 18 DAY gap in the calendar of emails? Holy Rosemary Woods, Batman!

- Question: Is this all of it? Does Karl Rove have any other email accounts, say through the RNC? (”Oh, yeah“, sez Tony Snow). OK, where is the traffic from that?

- And guys, it’s not that we don’t trust you, but … OK, we DON’T trust you. Can we get the email server logs for these days? We don’t propose to read through all the Department’s stuff, but what percent of the total email traffic do these 3,000 pages represent? Are there any deviations from the trend in the daily average? Is there anyone on the cc: line whose responses we may be systematically ignoring? Not that we don’t trust you, but …

I have a love/hate thing with the Apple corporation. They somehow manage to combine olympian design skill with an almost psychopathic attitude toward their customers. It defies understanding.

This past July we bought our daughter a 4GB iPod Nano at the local Apple store. She called me at work three months later to tell me there were ‘lines on the screen’. Now, we’d heard before we bought the Nano that it had a highly polished surface that seemed to get scratched if you looked at it funny, so I just assumed that she’d had it out of its $30 iPod Accessories protective plastic case, and had scratched it.

But when I got home, the highly polished surface was fine. Untouched. However, somehow the LCD screen underneath it, had a series of what looked like lateral fissures in the glass. (Weirdly, the display otherwise worked).

To this moment I have no idea what would cause that, but we took it back to the Apple store on Saturday. When we walked in we were the only people there except for the four aging hippies that were the sales staff (which I can say as I’m also an aging hippie, or at least aspire to that). They smiled when I explained the problem and asked me to sign in at one of their laptops for an appointment at their ‘Genius Bar’ (Christ). “I’m the only one here.” I said. I just got a blank stare back so I went ahead and signed in.

I then go three feet to my right to the ‘Genius Bar’, and the one person in a random crowd of 1,000 that I would quickly identify as Not A Genius steps up, looks at the iPod for 10 seconds and says. “Oh, sorry, since you broke it, it isn’t covered by the warranty.”

“I broke it? How did I break it?”

“You must have broken it. See? The glass is broken.”

“I know the glass is broken, that’s why I’m here. The outer covering of the thing is completely unmarked. It would be nicked or bent or scratched or smudged or something, wouldn’t it? If I’d done something to the outside that broke something on the inside? Right?”

“But you must have broken it. See? The glass is broken. So it isn’t covered.”

“Yes, its broken, but I didn’t break it!”

“You must have. See? It’s broken!”

This went on for 10 minutes … the Chicago Four paced nervously around in the background. A few customers wandered in and then moseyed out as my Encounter with the Genius grew more heated, but it was becoming clear where this wasn’t going.

I left the store steaming, iPod in hand. And driving home I started thinking. Apple always screws this up. My very first ‘real’ PC had been a Fat Mac back in the 1980s, but I quickly veered off the Apple Vision of the Future when I learned that the upgrade path to the new Mac SE was “buy a new computer”.

But twenty years have passed. Steve Jobs returned. The amazing iPods started to appear, and then these beautiful iMacs and then stainless steel laptops running a real, Unix-based operating system. The application software, although expensive, really did seem to ‘just work’. It had to be getting better.

The products are great, but the company still fails at customer service. A journalist friend recently asked my opinion about what laptop he should buy, and when I wondered out loud if the new MacBooks would be a good option, he said instantly, “Nothing Apple. The iPod I bought has a battery that won’t hold a charge, and the people at the local store are making my life a living hell over getting one that works. No chance.”

I also had been scheming for a way to get a top of the line MacBook as my next computer, but our recent experience has altered my plan. I just won’t support a company that makes me feel like a patsy. If your plan is to dominate the high end of the family computer and portable electronic music business, you have to accommodate a high-touch business model and let people know that there is more to your business ethic than a massive marketing engine selling the product line as the superhighway to Cool.

But I am avenged. Driving home I also realized what the leverage was in this situation. If the engineers are the real source of value at Apple, that probably extends, I reasoned, to their software and site design. I went to the Apple web site, found a form to submit my product serial number and description of the problem. Within an hour I had an email that said that this was a known problem and that a mailer was on its way to facilitate the return. The mailer arrived via DHL next day, and three days later we had a brand new, non-cracked Nano. I love it when a plan comes together.

And I am never walking into an Apple retail store again, and I will guide away anyone I can until the stores shut down, or they figure it out and start winning legitimate customer service awards. Until that happens, I guess I’ll have to find some other product that will promise to make me Cool.