Techreluctant.com

The term “viral video” sounds scary. Is it a video that carries a computer virus on it and can infect your computer? Nope. It’s much less harmful, well, unless you’re the unwitting star of a viral video. Viral videos are online videos, such as YouTube videos, that become very popular and spread like wildfire, usually through emails, blogs and even Twitter and instant messaging. No one knows what makes a video go viral. They are often funny or could be embarrassing for the person in the video. Recent examples are the ruckus that happened during the auditions for America’s Top Model, or my current favourite, Bizkit the Sleep Walking Dog:

So, the next time someone sends you an email with a link to a video and you forward it on, you may actually be helping to create the next viral video. I’d love to hear from you about your favourite viral video.

If you’ve shopped for a digital camera lately, you have probably noticed lots of them touting something called face detection. This doesn’t mean the camera can detect a certain face, although that technology is well underway. It just means that the camera, while in autofocus, can detect a face (or faces)  in a photograph and adjust the flash, focus, and exposure for them. It looks for the pattern of a human face and, depending on the camera and the algorithm it uses, it may scan for just eyes or for a nose, eyes, and mouth . It will only detect faces within a certain distance, again depending on the camera, so in group shots it won’t  focus and flash for the back of the group. It’s only supposed to work with humans, not pets. I have a Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS with face detection and while it works most of the time, sometimes it will think my dog’s ear is a face or that part of the carpet is a face (poltergeist, perhaps?). Regardless, face detection can make your phototaking life a little easier, especially when it works. And if you don’t like, most cameras will let you turn it off. What’s not to like? Now, the face recognition software where you can find all the pictures of Uncle Jim on your computer, based on his face… I’m not really looking forward to that.

You’ve probably heard about twitter. Another new thing to figure out. You just got caught up on this whole email thing, dipped your toe into the facebook world and now you’re hearing about twittering and tweets and all the associated puns. But just what is twitter? To explain, most places define it using that now tired phrase “social networking” and the new phrase “microblogging”. But I like to compare it to the old days when we telephoned one another and you would ask the other person on the other end of the phone, “what are you doing” and they would say “oh, just doing the dishes,” or “watching TV” or, if they’re a smartypants like my husband, “talking to you on the phone”. Well, that is exactly what twitter does. It is simply a place for you to answer the question “what are you doing?” And you better make it short and sweet because twitter posts can be no longer than 140 characters. Now, your next question is why would you care if someone is doing their dishes or watching TV and you would be right to ask it. Some posts are as mundane as what’s for supper and some could be as interesting as announcing a divorce. Others, like me, try to use it as a bit of self-promotion and tell you when there is a new blog post or that they will be at a book-signing or on the radio. I subscribe to (or follow) twitters that give away free iPod Touch apps and they let their followers know of new giveaways. As twitter is developing, more and more people are including links to websites and twitpics (links to pictures) in their tweets (the twitter posts one makes on twitter) . Although I am only mildly interested in twitter, all the links and pictures make me even less interested because they defeat the whole idea of brevity which is the backbone of twitter.

The truth is, if you’re really tech-reluctant, twitter is probably not your cup of tea. But, as I always tell my son, you won’t know if you don’t try. So, if you’re interested, you could just check out a few accounts on twitter to get an idea of it. You can find me at my techreluctant account  or my tchaulk account. There’s also one from CBC NL you might want to check out. And even Jane Fonda (or one of her staff) is twittering. But if you don’t understand what the big deal is, maybe you’d like a laugh at twitter’s expense. Check out the recent Doonsbury cartoons about twittering. Here’s the first of them and you can just click next to follow them.