I was disappointed that the president ducked the opportunity to define American Health Care and instead left us with a mish-mash of fixes to the current system. Reform is not in the details, Mr. Obama; it requires rethinking of the issue; seeing the big picture. By failing to set a defining base of what health care can and should be, the president has played right into the hands of those who profit most from preserving the status quo.

Alternative Visions of Health Care

Health care can be thought of as infrastructure. Like our interstate highway system, it promotes our defense and progress as a nation. We need healthy people to defend our land and to provide the spirit and energy that promotes innovation and competition. That provides a great practical argument for expanding existing insurance programs to cover everyone. There are a number of different ways to structure this. The basic idea is that your health is a vital national interest; not just something useful to a full-time employer.

But we can do better. I believe that good health should be declared a constitutional right. Like privacy, it is a necessary condition for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” In order to protect that right, the government has a responsibility to insure that all of its citizens have access to good health care.

No one should die because they cannot afford health care, no one should go broke because they get sick, and no one’s child should miss a doctor’s appointment because it costs too much.

Let’s add that everyone should get good preventive care to prevent disease before expensive treatment becomes necessary. I’m talking about free, regular medical checkups for everyone! Then a combination of public and reformed private insurance to cover the costs of hospital stays, surgeries, therapy and long term disability.

Can we afford this? Yes! Of course we can. Done right, cost savings and productivity gains will be huge. But even so, what’s so wrong with raising some taxes; or perhaps, ending one of our very expensive wars.

Please help my friend and colleague Howard Greenstein. Howard’s trying to raise money for  Stand Up To Cancer as part of the Charity Smackdown ’09 online event.

For donations of $100 or more, Howard is giving away one hour of his personal time to talk to you or your organization about social media, online marketing, Internet business strategies – whatever.

There’s only one day left in the Smackdown. Please give whatever you can and help spread the word with my thanks and the gratitude of many.

— Larry

What’s the difference if I use just my domain name in a URL or use www.mydomain.com?  One of my colleagues said I should use www because more people understand what that is.

Okay. So what is the ‘www’ good for? Is it a necessary part of your Website’s address? In what contexts should it be used or omitted?

Technically, saying,  www.yourdomain.com, directs the Internet user to your domain’s webserver. Saying: yourdomain.com, directs the visitor to your domain’s network and you’ll figure out which server to use along the way.

Conceptually, the former presents your website while the latter presents your brand. Visually, designers like the ‘www’ prefix for its 3.x.3 symmetry. Practically, it makes no difference.

www doesn’t necessarily denote a Webserver, it’s just a widely used convention. Sixteen years ago, when the World Wide Web only attracted the attention of computer geeks, they would install web server software on a separate test or development machine in their corporate network. Each computer in a network must have a unique host name which is prefixed to the domain name. Typically, whoever first created the network would set the theme and server names were chosen from that theme — Norse gods, British warships, state capitals, whatever. There already were loosely adopted conventions — mail, news, gopher (an early, global information system without hyperlinks.) Somebody named a webserver ‘www’ and others followed suit. Interestingly, the Web’s very first home page did not use www, it used info.

The Web’s http protocol has gained dominance over other Internet protocols and the Web’s conceptual framework is synonymous now with the Internet itself. Most organizations make their Web server the primary entry point into their information domain. Hosting companies do this by default for virtual hosting accounts.

Today, search powers the Web and the Web, for many organizations, is the primary means of delivering their service and promoting their brand. When someone wants to find information about You they are more likely to enter You in a search box, than to type your url into a location field. Mobile users really appreciate shorter URLs. And for audio content, the extra ten syllables are a pain.

Like ‘dubya’, ‘www’ should fade away.

— Larry

Google Chrome is a minimalist’s browser. It doesn’t offer a multitude of features, but it’s very fast and solid as a rock. It relies heavily on tabs when visiting different sites and each tab runs in its own process. This keeps the browser from crashing from a page error or some misbehaved plug-in, and prevents pages in the background from slowing down the foreground window. I like Chrome’s history function. When you open a new tab or window it displays thumbnails and links to your most recently vistited pages.

Chrome offers a single address bar for both URLs and keywords. Google is the default search engine, but it can be switched to others—Wikipedia, Aol, Yahoo, etc. The address bar has a fast auto-suggest function. For flying around the Web from site to site, Chrome is a jet fighter. However, if you mostly stay put on a collection of actively fed “home” pages, Flock may be the browser for you. It’s a mega-cruise ship.

Flock is Firefox on social media steroids. Flock takes a framed approach to visiting the Social Media Web, grabing feeds from places, such as: Facebook, Twitter and MySpace into sidebars and YouTube selections into a headband. Flock works best opened full-screen on a big, wide, LCD display. Beware! The shear number and variety of tool bars, control tabs, bookmarks, menus and search boxes can overwhelm.

Flock, by default, remembers the sites you had loaded when you last quit and reopens them. It also opens a generated page, “My World” that captures all your various feeds, messages and pings.  I like the way Flock integrates with Gmail, and find it useful as an “active desktop” – a one-stop site that I scan every so often to keep in the mix as I’m doing other work. Flock pops-up a standard blog editor when I want to post something and just about anything can be shared with a drag-n-drop action.

The online support documentation provided by the these two new browsers also provide a facinating contrast. Google wrote a Chrome comic book that teaches you how to use Chrome with a technical depth that’s actually readable. Flock has uploaded a series of youTube videos showing Flock’s Features in action. Check it out, you’ll get a better idea of what Flock is like and I won’t have to insert a screenshot here.

Google Chome is only available now for Windows. When it becomes available for the Mac, I’ll probably be using both Flock and Chrome more often than Firefox and Safari.

— Larry

Suzearts is the online showcase for my best friend, Susan Thornton, who creates wonderful images from the land and sky scapes of New Mexico and Fire Island. We put this simple site together in an afternoon several years ago for the New York Licensing show. Today, you can do a lot more to showcase art and music by using services such as flickr and photobucket, to organize and tag your art, and social media services like Facebook and Twitter to promote your work across a web of networks, groups and friends.

Mick Kolodgy Fine Art

is an online gallery of his paintings. I developed the horizontal gallery design with rollover menus at both ends and tied it all together with a compact image caching and navigation scheme written in Javascript. This was fun to build but I can’t advise artists that having your own showcase site is the best way to leverage the Web anymore. There are many web services companies that want and need your content; provide a wide range of options for organizing, displaying and selling it; can boost your search engine juices and connect you to networks, groups and forums of people interested in what you do.

2007 was a busy year with good news and interesting projects.

Best wishes to everyone for a happy new year.

larry