I wrote a lot less this week than last, unless you count all the tweeting I did at the Demo Fall conference from Monday through Wednesday. Which, I suppose, may not count for much in two months, when a query for the #demo2012 hashtag won’t yield anything on Twitter’s own site, although that should still work on an archive like Topsy. Yet I don’t know of a better way to share my notes in real time and get instant feedback from a wide audience–and, most of the time, come away with a bunch of new followers.

(I was too lazy to archive my tweets about the conference here when I wrote Thursday’s post. Should I do that now?)

10/4/2012: Home Automation On The Cheap Wins Demo, Discovery News

As I did after TechCrunch Disrupt, I picked a few of the dozens of presenting companies to spotlight for Discovery. That audience tends to gravitate towards more sci-fi-ish news, so this list favored Demo debuts that made interesting uses of networked sensors instead of those that relied on mere Web services to make existing tasks easier and faster (though I liked a few of those Demo presenters too). This post also features a breathtakingly dorky photo of me.

10/7/2012: Rural options for speedy Internet still tough, USA Today

I got the reader e-mail paraphrased in this column three weeks ago; two weeks ago, I attended a briefing by Dish Network about its new DishNet satellite service; one week ago, the guy I buy cheese from at my farmer’s market complained about his malfunctioning satellite Internet. That was enough for me to write this column, revisiting the limits of rural Internet access–and why satellite, despite the issues I outline here, looks to be the only option out there for a while. The column also suggests using Google’s Page Speed Insights tool to check a site’s responsiveness; if you were curious, it gives this blog a score of 92 out of a possible 100.

Go Nats!