Don't Know Much About Technology

By it's very nature, technology is always changing, and keeping up with it, especially in this day and age, is a pain. Once upon a time, you'd invent something like a typewriter. Years would pass, but the basic design remained pretty much the same. If keyboards were designed by software engineers, you'd have to learn to type every year. Keys would be shuffled around. Functionality you thought you wouldn't need would appear. You'd go back to quill and ink for your correspondence.

If you're reading this, you probably have heard of podcasting, RSS, and phishing. Oddly enough, I know about phishing the best. Phishing occurs when some nefarious spammer pretends to be your, say, bank, and ask you to update sensitive information. They are really "phishing" (a funny spelling of "fishing") for your information, and seeing which customers "bite". This happened to me once, and halfway to typing some sensitive information, I stopped, realizing this couldn't be real.

Had I paid more attention to these scams, I might not have fallen for them at all. The pace of technology astounds.

Podcasting is a relatively recent phenomenon. It combines two words "pod", from the Apple IPod, and "broadcasting". It's said to be the TiVo of audio broadcasting. TiVo is a company that sells DVRs (digital video recorders). You tell it what shows you want it to record (like Friends) and it uses its TV guide data to determine when the shows are on, and records it for you.

Later on, you can watch these shows at your own convenience. Being able to watch programs later than its original broadcast time is called time-shifting. Anyone who's had a VCR (which was available in the late 70s) has had the ability to time-shift. It's only recently that it's been given a name---probably by marketers.

With podcasting, you can use fairly simple equipment, plus a computer, and record and host broadcasts. Listeners download the broadcast on their Ipods (or similar portable MP3 device) and listen to it at their own convenience.

As much as I read about RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, I still don't have a good grasp of how it works. Basically, you have some RSS client. Some websites provide you this service. You register for an account, tell it where the RSS feeds (the place that generates RSS info comes from---sort of like a URL) comes from, and then, when you log into your RSS client account, it gives you links to recent articles from the website.

This is good for keeping up with news, updated blog entries, really, anything that changes every few days, where you want to know about the latest updates. So, I know what RSS is used for, but I'm curious how it all works. It's based on some simple XML, but there's more to it than that. In particular, how does it know to fetch, say, ten weeks worth of stuff when you've been vacationing in Fiji for ten weeks. I'm sure it's simple. Just don't know how it works.

These three terms: RSS, podcasting, and phishing are basically unknown to 75% of the American public. At least, so says the following study. This shows that there is a sizeable portion of the public that just doesn't like keeping up with technology.

This is something to think about when you market technology to such people.