Dan G

Just reached 3,000+ spam messages a month - probably as a result of using my main e-mail address for some Wikipedia mailing lists.

However, Gmail's spam filters are remarkably good and my account remains completely usable despite the bombardment. Despite many of the mails using random words to try and defeat Baysien filters, I've had very few spam mails make it into my inbox (down to just a couple a week now) and no real messages marked as spam.

Impressive.

Imagine if I had a deadline tomorrow?

Data needs to be portable, not applications. Microsoft Office is very good - no other suite comes close for usability, and these web offerings are a joke in comparison. Almost every computer in the world runs some version of Office, so as long as my data is accessible, I'm sorted.

If there's ever a product that works as well as Office but can run cross-platform on any browser, then sure I'll use it.

All that said, the likes of Writely, Zoho etc. are definitely early steps on the evolutionary path towards such applications. They're just a long way short yet.

I installed Beta 2 to test it. Microsoft clearly know the meaning of the term "beta", the software crashed all the time!

It certainly has promise though. It loaded quickly and had a nice interface, although I was suprised that many of the widgets looked like they had been inspired by Firefox's somewhat ugly default theme. (If you use Firefox, take a look at Qute, the lovely theme used for most of Firefox's development before being dropped for political reasons.)

Personally I use whatever software works best for me. Right now for browsing that's Opera, although I still often use IE6 for some websites that work better with it. It could well be that I'll switch to IE7 if the final version proves stable.

If, like me, you're interested in the size of audience a site is picking up, you're probably familiar with Alexa rankings. Well, viewing them just got a whole lot easier, thanks to alexaholic.com.

Google managed to (accidently?) release some info about "GDrive" (i.e. it mentioned the name, and nothing else). Now Microsoft has come up with "Live Drive". Yahoo already has its bulky and limited Briefcase.

Will these materialise? Will they be any good? What would they need to do to be good?

My ideal would be to browse to an online file storage website on any computer (or mobile device), and then magically have a "virtual drive" accessible to any apps running on that computer, which I could open from and save to as easily as if it were a local drive.

Omnidrive, which thanks to Tony I've been using via the private beta, could well become that solution. However the decision not to launch a public beta was almost certainly the right one - Omnidrive is still quite rough around the edges. I've submitted a ton of bug reports and Tony has been in touch, so I'm expecting things to improve.

One great example of Omnidrive's potential has been on my work computers: just as described above, I log in to the web interface and then open a document in Office 2003, and edit and save it to my Omnidrive as if it were local. But for some reason, that doesn't work on my home PC - any given file just loads as "read-only", and if I try to save it, it ends up in some local cache.

Omnidrive reminds me of Zooomr: a lot of potential not quite realised yet. But it's a much better solution than anything else out there: box.net has a slow, clunky interface (little better than Yahoo Briefcase, just prettier), and GDrive and Live Drive don't actually exist :-).

TechCrunch has a review of online maps. It's not really the most thorough of reviews, but the usage stats are interesting - who knew Yahoo maps was as used as much as Google Maps?

But what the review misses more than anything is the quality of the maps. Windows Live Local, at least in the UK, has far better maps than any of its competitors. Yahoo maps only show major roads. Google maps are distorted and lack detail. Microsoft, however, provide maps of print-atlas quality.

It's also notable that it almost works in in Opera - I expected it to be IE-only. (I wonder if we will see Foldershare get cross-browser compatibility?) However push-pins - and hence directions - don't work.

Windows Live Local offers (at least under IE) some useful sharing features, such as being able to e-mail routes and collections of places of interesting marked with push-pins.

A pity thought that it doesn't seem to recognise UK postcodes nor offer multi-point driving directions.

It always strikes me as odd that with all these giant coporations striving (apparently) to make the best possible product, none of them actually manage to get it right....

Looking through the Firefox crash reports, at least for Windows, the new update seems to be having a lot of trouble with Yahoo! mail - many, many crashes being reported by frustrated users.

Although perhaps the best report involves our favourite non-designed (more on that later) dating website, plentyoffish.com:

"(17594201) www.plentyoffish.com
(17594201) I WAS IMING SOMEONE DAMNIT!"

Poor bloke!

Box.net does seem to be the current market leader in online file storage, so I decided to give their free account a whirl, 10Mb single file upload limit notwithstanding (claimed to be a measure to prevent illegal file sharing, although that makes no sense to me - would stop video, but not audio).

One thing I was really looking forwards to was using their desktop client, Box Desktop. But can I find a download link for it? Can I 'eck! The help is - much like Zooomr's - worse than useless, alluding to the existence of the software but directing one to a help section that doesn't exist.

I get the impresssion from the box.net blog that the software is in fact still in private beta, but it's far from clear and there's no word of a public release date.

The Flash 8 multiple file uploader also doesn't work, just as Bubbleshare's did not - an Opera quirk perhaps?

So as it stands, limited to one-at-a-time uploads, box.net is not a lot of use.

Only two days to the launch of Omnidrive though - and I must say after everything I've read - basically the founder's blog - I'm really looking forwards to trying the beta. I signed up for it a few days back, so I guess I must be pretty low in the queue, but I hope I get an account on Monday. It sounds like it will be the perfect solution to online storage - let's see if it lives up to its' promise....

So I started uploading all my photos to 23. I soon discovered that - even resizing photos to 800x600 - I was still rapidly using up my 20Mb monthly limit. I was also not enjoying using the rather unpolished uploader, and found that in order to arrange my pictures into albums on 23, I had to manually do that after uploading the pictures which was a hassle.

So I opened the official Flickr uploader I'd downloaded previously. Slick and polished; enjoyable to use. And I could put my pictures into sets before uploading them.

So faced with the prospect of having to purchase a pro account from 23 (some $35 versus Flickr's $25), I just and bought a Flickr pro account.

And I must say, I really do prefer the look and feel of Flickr over 23, even if 23 has the more intuitive interface. But I want my photos to look good :-).

Also, Zooomr made some changes this week. (As Kris points out in the comments, Zooomr 2 itself has not been released.) I could see one change on the site itself - a person's photos arranged in a strip of thumbnails above the main picture on a photo page. More significantly, Kris is now using OpenID exclusively for signing up new accounts, which addresses one of the biggest problems Zooomr had (the multiple logins). The "indentity url" business is a little odd - not a normal username & password affair - but OpenID is basically a good system, and Zooomr is a lot more user-friendly for now only offering one sign-up process.

Via Digg I found this gem - XP myths. Turns out many/all of the "go faster" tweaks you here for for Windows XP actually do no good, or even worse.

Particularly interesting was the fact that CCleaner - which you can get via the button on the right - actually slows systems down by deleting "old prefetch files" - bad! Untick that box! Its "registry issues" function is also virtually pointless - there are just no "issues" to fix.

Enlightening! I am of the idea that XP is actually a very well designed system (or, at least after SP2 it is). It seems that Microsoft put a lot of back-end tweaking into it that you're never aware of and you should just let your system get on with it.

Not that you'd notice... but xanga.com does indeed offer RSS! This is the URL: http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=user_name . That's it :-).

Geodog's coverage of the March San Francisco Web Innovators Network is interesting and objective. I particularly like his comments on young people in tiny companies giving themselves "C" titles :-).

Towards the end of the post there's a very handy comparison of the same pictures on Flickr, Bubbleshare and Zooomr. Iseems 23hq is getting left out in the cold - too similar to Flickr? Or is it because 23hq is based in Europe, so can't create the local "buzz" California-based sites can?

It's a little ironic that when a web company could be based any where in the world and the end-user would never tell the difference, being based in the Silicon Valley and being able to "network" face-to-face still counts for so much.

By the way, sounds like Zooomr 2 is launching tomorrow at the April SFWIN event. If I only I didn't live on the other side of the Atlantic...

Foldershare.com looked like a useful application: it enables synchronisation between any web-connected device upon which it's software is installed, and also allows remote-access to the files on those machines from any web browser.

Er, except it's not any web browser. When testing it, I could only access my machine with Internet Explorer - both Firefox and Opera failed. Not much use then.

Foldershare.com is now part of Microsoft's Windows Live portfolio, so I don't expect to see them rushing to add cross-browser compatibility.

If you want to access files on your computer from anywhere (assuming it's turned on and connected to the web), Avvenu seems your best bet.

For online file storage, there are several options. Perhaps the strongest looking is Omnidrive. It should feature the ability to access the online file store as if it were a local drive (e.g. saving directly to it from Word), enable viewing of media through browsers (so you could watch your videos in any web browser), and other niceties.

There are other options for file storage which don't match the promised whizz-bang of Omnidrive, but are available now: box.net ("a big box on the internet to put all your stuff in") does the whole upload what-ever you want and view it from anywhere jig, with 1Gb of storage for free and 5Gb for $5 a month. It offers nice uploading options and (manual or automatic) desktop synchronisation.

There's also orbitfiles, an almost identical service, also with uploader, 1Gb free etc. The one key difference between the two is that for free plans, box.net has a maximum file size of 10Mb, while orbitfiles has no limit.

Interestingly box.net seems to be getting much more traffic than orbitfiles - better marketing, I guess, and box.net also has a much better website.

But if you're just looking for an easy way to back up your files, Mozy is a good option. You get 2Gb free storage (or 5Gb for $20 a year), and the software quietly back up your selected files in the background as needed. You can't, however, access your files from other web devices. The service is funded by sending users weekly e-mails of adverts.

My own preferred back up option is just to have two computers in my house (a laptop and a desktop, as it happens), and use FolderSync to keep my files synchronised (also very useful for synchronising flash drives).

Of course if my house burned down I'd be stuffed! But I don't have the bandwidth to back up all my files online, and it would cost me some $100 a year to back up to box.net (currently the only one of the above options which offers a plan with enough storage space for all my files).

here. Pretty fair. Also mentions the interesting riya (which rejects Opera, boo) and the rather lame Zoto.

Also, why it's called zooomr, something I queried in my original post on zooomr.

OK, through Paynito I discovered the original Sourceforge home of the Java Zooomr uploader, jUploadr. Initially it wouldn't run - while other Java apps work just fine on my system - but after using the create a new envinronment variable fix for Windows I got the thing to work.

However it appears to be a Flickr uploader, not a Zooomr uploader, and if there's a way to get it to upload to Zooomr instead (I believe they have compatible APIs), I haven't found it...

Update Paynito pointed me to the "zooomr-ised" version of jUploadr. It's the one I found - via the Zooomr blog - the first time round, but failed to get it to work, no doubt as I had then not performed the environment variable fix.

It's also a bit weird that a Windows file comes tarred and gzipped! Still, being hidden away at the moment, I guess it's still on Kris's list of Things to Do and will be improved before being made public.

For fairness, it's worth pointing out that I originally tested Zooomr using Opera, my browser of choice. It so happens that my mum prefers Firefox (I believe everyone should test all browsers, and use the one that suits them), so I took the opportunity to test Zooomr on Firefox 1.5.

A few things improved: the icons in the thumbnail pictures now have pop-ups that explain their function. The site also felt faster, especially the Lightmap that run much faster than on Opera. The adverts also displayed in the right places (ie not in the middle of the map!). Photograph pages also seemed to load more quickly - I couldn't spot a page redraw when moving from one photograph in a catalouge to the next, something I could see in Opera.

It's worth noting though that Zooomr is completely broken in IE6. The Inspector, Lightbox and Lightmap all have parts missing and the whole site is generally unhappy. Zooomr really needs to work with all browsers - again, I can't use a site which won't display properly when I direct my IE-using friends towards it.

So same conclusions as before - it's definitely a much more polished product when viewed with Firefox, and the site clearly has immense potential, there's just a lot of work on niggles and cross-browser compatibility to be done.

It took me months - maybe even a year - to arrive at the same conclusions about Wikinews as Jimmy Wales forsaw at a conference (see section 7) back in January 2005:

"For now, Wikinews is doing very little original reporting – despite the recent Belize example. Most Wikinews articles are based on the synthesis, checking, and triangulation of news coming from a number of sources. He says that so far, the stigma against plagiarism and copyright violation within the Wikipedia community has been quite effective in ensuring that stolen material is not posted, and that all sources are duly credited. One possible vision for Wikinews’ future, Wales thinks, might be to become the master-synthesizer of what journalists are reporting around the world on any given news story."

(Emphasis mine)

That prediction was spot-on - that is indeed what Wikinews is now, more than a year later. Of course, it's still very small, but so was Wikipedia after one year. And Wikinews is growing steadily.

Personally, I left the Wikinews project last September for three reasons:

1. NGerda. I couldn't be bothered with trying to control the silly whims of a fourteen-year-old any more. Interestingly, he left shortly after I did, with no apparent explanation. I think the main attraction to Wikinews for him was the baiting of me.

2. Study. I started a new course at university and had much less free time.

3. Disaffection. I believe they are many good-quality news sources out there (AP, Reuters etc.). People could read them, if they wanted to. That market is catered. It just happens that many people don't want that kind of news. They want inaccurate tabloid trash reporting, celebrity gossip and the like... who knows why, but people are free to chose to read want they want.

The last made me feel that Wikinews was a waste of time on two fronts: that quality news was there if you wanted it, but there just wasn't a market for it. But since then I've come to realise that view was too cynical: there is room for Wikinews, providing news which covers all the details of a story available from all the different sources (Wales's "synthesis"), with better fact-checking to boot, and although the demand for such news is maybe small, it exists.

So working on Wikinews is not futile. It's not going to set the world on fire, but there is a demand, and Wikinews meets it.

That said, I can't see myself becoming an active contributor once again. Sure, I do minor tidying now and then on "structural" type stuff, but right now I'm not feeling a strong desire to start writing more stories.

23hq. I thought for a while I'd go for Flickr, but having slept on it I decided that 23hq's much superior navigation and much better free account were winning qualities.

Flickr does indeed have better photographs on it. But I can just browse on Flickr and subscribe to the RSS of those I like there.

Just got to hope now that 23 is a success and plenty of people decide to upgrade their accounts so the company doesn't go bust :-).

I'm trying to decide between two websites to host my photographs on line: 23 (or is it 23hq? The web adddress is 23hq.com...) and Flickr (which everyone knows). (I did consider Zooomr, but see my last post for its failings.)

NB: the terms "sets" (Flickr) and "albums" (23hq) are effectively interchangeable.

23hq has the better (more consistent and more intuitive) navigation: especially the simple series of tabs across the top which makes it extremely quick and easy to navigate around people's photos. Flickr, by contrast, is a little less consistent and not quite so "obvious". But it compensates with some neat touches - the way that, on each picture page, any additional sets a picture belongs to can be expanded out to give thumbnails of the next/previous pictures in that set, which you can then scroll through. In fact, several parts of Flickr have this navigation. 23hq has something similar, but clicking on a thumbnail loads that picture's page, redrawing the whole page in the process - makes browsing a more time consuming. 23hq has a neat "calendar" view of pictures too - a nice touch, which I believe Flickr lacks.

An important issue is what you get with a free acount: Flickr is crippled, while 23hq is not. Flickr restricts free acount users to displaying only their last 200 pictures uploaded and gives them only 3 sets. To be useable, you really needs to buy a pro account at $25. 23hq gives everyone unlimited pictures and albums - their only limit is the 20Mb a month upload quota (same as Flickr's), which should be fairly hard to exceed with careful choice of picture size and compression. You don't really need to upload sizes bigger than 800x600, and handily Picasa - my photograph management software of choice - can export photographs you select in sizes chosen by you.

Both sites also off stand-alone photograph uploading clients - which makes sending pictures a lot easier. Typically, you can just pick the picture you want to upload in Picasa then drag and drop them into the uploader client.

But the one thing Flickr has that 23hq currently lacks is simply quality of pictures - I don't know of any one as good as rebba on 23hq, for example. It's nice to add some good photograpers as "contacts" (both Flickr and 23hq have this feature) and go see what latest pictures they've come up with - you're going to see better on Flickr, at least for the moment :-).

And simply comparing member home pages of 23hq and Flickr side-by-side, I can't help but feel that Flickr is just that little bit more visually appealing...

It's also worth mentioning that Flickr has more social features - things like "pools", where different photographers can submit pictures with common themes.

So which will I go with? I'm going to sleep on it, and decide tomorrow...

It's hard to heavily criticise a brand-new product which is far from being fully developed. But a little constructive criticism never hurt :-).

Zooomr is recieving a lot of attention at the moment. I hope this doesn't go to creator Kris Tate's head - who's just seventeen - and results in him over-looking some things that need to be sorted out.

First up - the log-in system. Zooomr doesn't have it's own log-in system (like, well, 100% of all other websites), instead it depends on an odd system of using other ID systems, for example e-mailing a "temporary password" to your Gmail account (if you haven't got one of those, you need to use one of the other, even less well-known, options).

Once that hurdle is out of the way, you discover there's no bulk uploader, unlike Flickr's or 23's. So it's just one photo at a time... there is, hidden away on the website (not publically linked), a Java uploader client, but it simply doesn't work. Ah well.

Now, once you've got your photo uploaded, you'll notice that on rolling over a picture icons will appear. Well, sometimes they will, it doesn't always seem to happen, which is confusing - consistent behaviour is vital in usable websites. There's also no key to explain what the icons mean (and they certainly aren't self-explanatory), so it's a case of trial and error to work what they do. One function is to pop up a little "Inspector" on the EXIF data which isn't really very helpful, but is cute. Another more useful function is bringing up a large version of the picture with a dark background ("Lightbox"), and some other features...

One of those is supposed to be GeoTagging, which would display on Google Maps where the photo was taken, and show the location of other photos nearby ("Lightmap"). Nice idea, but I can't see where to add the location information. Perhaps you need to have a GPS connected to your camera when you take the picture? Regardless, there's no explanation on the site. Further more, the Google Map also has a Google ad floating in the middle of it when you bring it up. That ain't cool.

Another feature - and this is a good one! - is uploading a "Zooomration". Stupid name, good idea - you can upload those little audio files some cameras record to go with your picture. But the name is so weird it's difficult to tell what it actually is, unless someone tells you. Why couldn't it just be called "Audio Note" or something obvious?

A final nice touch is "People tags" - yeah, you could just add people's names as "normal" tags, but this is a neat way to clearly ID people in a picture. I like.

One thing I haven't figured out though is if there's any way to group pictures into albums/galleries/sets/whatever. That's something really quite important - tagging is nice, but I just want to be able to say to my friends "hey, check out my album of our trip to the beach last weekend" instead of "hey, check out tags beach April 1 me you the dog..."

And, to be honest, there's quite a few nasties. The name isn't too clever for a start Zooomr. OK in text, but try telling someone about it "it's got three ohs and no e between the m and the r". Mmmmm, memorable... The colour scheme of the site itself is also too gaudy - it distracts from the pictures themselves. There's no back/foward buttons (a la Flikr) for navigating one's "photo catalouge" - you must instead click on the small pictures, and wait for the whole page to reload. There's a del.icio.us style "bread crumbs" series of navigation links across the top of the page (e.g. Photos/fred blogs/) - but when you click on an image, the last one is always "Photo View" instead of the name of the picture - what gives? On the Upload page, there's options for "making visible to friends only", but there's no explanation of what a "friend" actually is... I think that's enough for now!

Zooomr has huge potential. It has a healthy upload limit of 50Mb a month and isn't crippled like Flickr (only the last 200 pictures visible on free accounts). I hope Kris keeps working on it and it improves - I'll certainly be keeping my eye on it via the Zooomr blog.

I know it's bad to gloat, but have a look at the Alexa traffic rank for NowPublic vs. Wikinews. Wikinews is doing better.

NowPublic is classic "Web 2.0" - lots of fluff, lots of guff, confusing and little content. It makes me very happy to see the community-created, -designed and -run Wikinews outgrowing NowPublic.

And - oh my! - we're as popular as that darling of Web 2.0, Odeo.com!