I’ve been waiting for cell phone number portability for a long time. I currently use AT&T as my carrier, but have been disappointed with their service, particularly in downtown Washington DC. Today’s Washington Post reports on the upcoming change that requires cell phone number portability between providers.

Put it on your calendars now — November 24 — the day the cell carriers are required to provide this service. Yes, they say it will cost everyone more money, but in the long run, this is really going to force them to compete. People like me who have stayed with their carrier for a long time will be able to try different carriers without losing their phone numbers. Those carriers who provide the best service will win.

This is not like the local and long distance service. The quality of service provided by the carriers is obvious — dropped calls, lack of cell towers, etc. People will start to move around to find the phones that work best where they work, which is a good thing.

But here’s another interesting tidbit. The same regulation will also force wired carriers to allow their numbers to move to wireless carriers. This means that if I moved out of state, I could transfer my home phone number to a cell phone and then retain that number when I move. I could essentially retain a persistent local calling number for those folks where I used to live. Or I could ease the transition to my new phone number by keeping a cell phone with the old one for six months or so.

I think there’s more to this, however. I predict that this will blur the distinction between local and long distance phone calls as well as area codes. After some transition period, I believe that all calls will become local, just as Verizon, MCI, and probably others offer unlimited long distance service now. If all service transitions to this, then all calls become local and area codes become unimportant. We’ll still have ten digit phone numbers, but they will no longer correspond to a particular geographical area.

How we retain phone numbers will be an interesting side effect of this. Area codes keep people focused on seven-digit strings of numbers, not 10. While everyone in the US has a social security number consisting of nine digits, few of us remember more than a couple of them. In contrast I have dozens of phone numbers stuck in my memory, likely because there is great commonality in the first three digits of those numbers.

I have to wonder whether the FCC really thought about this potential issue. I’m not sure they did, but either way, I think economically this will be a good thing for consumers. Of course, only if our memory holds out …

Just read this on News.COM —

“We are a conflicted industry,” [Disney Chairman Michael] Eisner said. “Hollywood studios spend enormous sums of money encouraging people to see its films and TV shows and then spend more money devising ways to control and limit how people can see its films and TV shows. Disney (is) mindful of the perils of piracy, but we will not let the fear of piracy prevent us from fueling the fundamental impulse to innovate and improve our products and how they are distributed,” Eisner continued.

This comment came as Disney revealed its new set-top box, movie on demand technology that uses “spare bits” within the video broadcast stream to download first run movies. These spare bits are created by adding a digital data stream to the analog broadcast system that can run at up to 4.5 Mbps. I can’t wait to see if they can get this off the ground.

As I’m sitting here in a forum discussing the use of blogs, I’m listening to a speaker talk about how those of us who only post every couple of weeks aren’t really taking full advantage of blogs. Being an example of that, I thought I’d go ahead and make my first April post.

Blogs have become fascinating examples of social software. Personally I set this up so that I didn’t have to continually edit HTML in order to add my $0.02 on some particular topic, but it seems that blogs have taken the role today that USENET used to have. In the previous decade, most of the discussion between people was done through USENET and newsreaders. When the technological sophistication of the userbase decined as a result of the massive influx of users, USENET migrated first to the web (was DejaNews, now Google Groups) and now, it seems, into Blogs.

In the old days, individuals would create new news groups for particular topics, often crossposting to several different newsgroups to get answers and discuss issues. (People also used, and still continue to use, e-mail lists for the same purpose.) But with the emergence of the web and the appeal of adding a web-based publishing aspect to this, micropublishing has finally emerged.

Where we were previously mapping the web, now there are some efforts to map the blogs. Take a look at Technorati, where you’ll find out who links to whom in the blog world. Is this important? Not totally clear to me yet. It used to be considered important that we find out who the most linked to sites were. We were discussing this years ago while I was at IBM as part of an effort to build a new search engine. Yet it seems that key words and ranking in DMOZ are actually still more important.

No conclusions yet — just a marker to continue to think about this ….

Reuters reports on a 13-year old British girl who turned in an essay written in texting shorthand, the abbreviated and phonetic code used when sending SMS messages on cell phones. The British instructor couldn’t understand what appeared to be a coded message and the cell phone texting was craze berated as a something causing a decline in literacy.

Or is it really? Throughout history, language has evolved along with society. George Orwell in 1984 created many compound and abbreviated words to show this evolution (e.g. miniwar for the Ministry of War, “doublethink”). The word “okay” was the subject of an NPR piece not long ago, describing how that word evolved and what the origins might be. We continuously change nouns into verbs as modern tools become integrated into our culture (William Gibson’s new book “Pattern Recognition” uses the name “Google” as a verb within the first few pages of the book). Is it too hard to believe that texting won’t eventually begin to change the way we write?

Our language will continue to evolve as the tools we use change the way we work as well as the way we communicate. Certainly the telephone changed our long distance communications from that of well thought out, lengthy letters to the brief conversations that might occur if we were face to face. E-mail has also changed the way we communicate, causing the emergence of emoticons and unusual punctuation (e.g. _underlining_ and SHOUTING). Similarly, instant messaging and chat have evolved a new, brief set of communications (BRB — be right back, ROTFL — rolling on the floor laughing). Space constrained SMS is no different.

The unusual thing about this article is the lack of awareness of the 13-year old to switch to a different communications mode when the medium changed. But that’s not absurdly unusual. How many articles or papers have you read that felt more “conversational”? Do you e-mails sound more like things you would have said out loud or are they more like well thought out letters? How poor has your spelling gotten since your word processor tells you what you misspell?

We are continuously being changed by the tools around us. Perhaps it won’t be long B4 blogs R in txtng 2.