Dan G

Why did I upgrade to the final version... well, how I was I supposed to know they've removed one of the most vital features?

In the old Picasa, when you connected your camera, you had the option of simply excluding shots from being imported. This made it incredibly quick and simple to scan through the pictures you'd taken removing the crap ones (and with digital cameras, there are plenty!) leaving the gems.

But as of version 2.5, the little "exclude" button has gone. Now, you have to import *every* *single* picture, then go through them and delete them by hand. Worse, deleting in Picasa is a two-click affair - once to delete, then again to confirm. And even worse than that, there's a bug that means once you've deleted a picture it skips to the next album in your library.

This has crippled Picasa, and I'm now searching for ways to downgrade to the previous version fast...

UPDATE: after some searching (which led to me adding links above) I've discovered a hidden feature where you can press the "x" key to exclude pictures. Phew. Taking out the exclude button was still a mistake though.

Bloglines received a minor upgrade on Thursday: the "tree" view - the left pane listing your feeds - now updates via AJAX. This means post counts update more quickly, and the system also polls for new posts more often. It also fades in a nice little indicator in the bottom corner alerting you to new posts. The technology appears to be the same that has been powering their edit feeds view.

It's a neat touch. Bloglines was already very easy to use - it is all about reading posts, not being fancy, as so many other feedreaders seem to be about. The clutter of Rojo, for example, drives me mad, and the new Javascript-heavy Google Reader is as slow as molasses in comparison with Bloglines. Reader even has a "loading..." page...

No, Bloglines is the quick and effective way to read posts, and I highly recommend it. For those who love a "river of news" view, just click the top level folder in the left pane and you'll get your river. Why one would want to mix all ones feeds together though escapes me: I find some feeds more interesting than others, so read them more often. Every so often I'll check on the others. I wouldn't want prime posts from Scoble, for example, mixed in with everything from Slashdot.

Well, I'm not, because I live in Europe and won't be getting downloadable video until 2007 - if at all. Hey, there's only 400 million of us.

Anyway, when iTunes 7 launched I was wondering when people would blog about what the service is actually like. Turns out someone did just that on Slashdot nearly straight away. Have a read. It really does sound very promising.

I don't think it'll be long until we are all settling down in front of our iTVs and just picking what we want to watch out of iTunes, when we want it. With the simplicity Apple builds into it's products (witness the iPod), it might actually happen.

Wikimedia has just finished an open election for a new member for the Wikimedia Board. The results are here. (The turn-out is rather disappointing, considering that the election was open to all registered members across the many Wikimedia projects, and voting was very easy.)

I'm pleased Erik Moeller won - he's the founder of Wikinews, which I spent a great deal of time on last year, and Erik is a good bloke.

Here's the soap opera bit though: the election was brought about due to the resignation of Angela Beesley from the board. Erik is Angela's ex-boyfriend...

Angela left Erik and moved to Australia to be with her new boyfriend, Tim Starling, a Wikimedia sysadmin. Tim was the guy who set up Erik's IT permissions in Wikimedia after his victory.

Erik's participation on the board should also be interesting: there's considerable personal friction between him and Anthere, an existing board member, and also Tim Starling.

PS: Angela did send Erik a nice "congratulations" note.

I've been a bit slow accepting how much of an influence video is beginning to have on the web. Scoble has repeatedly stressed how powerful video can be, but I have, to be honest, been largely ignoring video. I've been rating it somewhere around animaged gifs; an annoying distraction that takes a long time to load.

Then I watched my mum browse to a website that had put a small Flash video front and center on their homepage. She quietly watched it and then I asked her about it. Scoble is right; my mum, who is well past retirement, had a much greater understanding of the company from watching the video than she ever would have got from reading the website. In much less time, too.

Video is clearly becoming increasingly important in putting over information. The web has been traditionally text based, backed up with images. But when there's big news, everyone put the TV on. People will read the newspapers the next day for analysis, but they want the video as it gives them the best feel of the event.

I think many companies would be wise to heed Scoble's advice, and use small, simple, well-made videos where-ever they can.

Tech bloggers get pissy again: Michael Arrington has the real story of the Techcrunch/Techcrush. I'll be subscribing to Techcrush, btw, it looks a fascinating blog.

An excellent blog post on the different skins of Vista, complete with roll-over images making comparisons easy.

A beginner blogger reviews all the major hosted services, and rates Wordpress best. Wordpress weren't offering hosted blogs when I started this blog; I might have gone with them. I think she's a bit hard on Blogger though, it is an excellent service. Apart from the spellchecker, that is, which doesn't even know the word "blog"(!).

I spied: Google Earth being used to provide the visuals for a British Airways advert in a prime time TV show. In the same show there was also an advert for the iPod - simply a revolving silhouetted Bob Dylan. How many adverts for non-Apple MP3 players have you seen? The result is Apple's market dominance.

Microsoft will have to really come up with something special to make even a small dent in iPod's sales with the Zune. Here's a good "insider" blog to find out if they will have a chance.

A good post on reducing piles. But not the medical kind of pile, which is what I thought of first...

"Only 5% of the music on an iPod will be bought from online music stores."

Really? How surprising! I would have thought everyone would have dumped their large collections of CDs accumulated over many years and immediately bought all their music again via iTunes... or not.

The story reminds me of the recent Guardian piece saying the iPod is on the way out... because less units were sold after Christmas than in the run up to it. Well I never.

iTunes is, without doubt, a huge success. It has sold 1.5 billion tracks and as Jobs pointed out at Showtime, it's now the fifth largest music retailer in the US and rapidly moving towards position #4.

It's also the case that in the UK at least, CD sales are in steady decline while legal downloads are seeing strong growth. I don't know what the situation is in the US.

One thing many people say is that the price of a download is only marginally less than buying the physical CD, and that doesn't seem quite right. But if you think back to the complaints about the high price of CDs a few years ago, you'll recall that the actual cost of producing the CD is a tiny part of the overall price. So in replacing that part of the cost with the cost of running a major website it's not surprising that downloads aren't cheaper.

What you're paying is profit - a small amount for Apple, some 15c a song, and more for the label. Business exists to make profit; c'est la vie.

Turn to the bloggers.

As you may have heard, there's a military coup underway in Thailand.

Local bloggers are producing the best coverage I've found on the net. Nothing gives you a feeling of what it's like better than reading accounts from ordinary people right there. People are even recording the announcements from the military on their TVs then uploading them to Youtube.

Here are the ones I know of:
*Gnarly Kitty
*Metroblogging Bangkok
*19Sep
*Bangkok Pundit

If you have a lot of digital material - such as the family photos - on your computer, you must have decent back-ups in place. Imagine your computer broke down and wrecked the hard drive in the process (it's happened to me)? Or was damaged by fire or flood? Or stolen? Disaster.

Luckily there's now at least two good online back-up systems - Mozy, offering 30Gb of storage for $5 a month, and Carbonite which costs the same for unlimited space. Both have good client software which looks after the initial back up and then keeping things synchronised.

Of course, there's always the nagging feeling of what happens if your chosen back up provider goes out of business... well, the odds of that occuring just when you need such a service are low, and now with two players at least if one folds you can fall back to the other. But hopefully, web 2.0 businesses are planning a little better and such fears are unfounded...

I still adhere to the "lots of copies keeps stuff safe" principle. I synchronise all my data between my laptop and desktop using FolderSync, and also make periodic syncs to a USB hard drive. I also use the USB hard drive to dump my back ups to my sister's computer when I visit her (and back hers up at the same time) for off-site storage.

Maybe it's a little paranoid but I'm covered if either of my computers fail, or even if the house burns down. Now though, chosing one of these online services (Carbonite would be my choice) is probably a simpler solution :-).

It's priceless how bloggers can argue over seemingly anything.

If you want to go do a vlog, do it. Don't worry about who says what about them, or who even might watch it. Do it because you want to! (But follow Scoble's tips to make a decent job of it).

BTW my still camera (a Canon S70) does excellent sound and video, which I recently used (for example) to send a birthday greeting to a friend abroad. Experiment! It's fun.

PS read the comments of a later post by Scoble to see how silly the debate can get.

If any of you have ever used the Freenode irc network you'll no doubt have known Rob Levin, or Lilo on the network.

He has just been killed after being hit by a car while riding his bicycle.

I'm very anti-car, and this is exactly why.

For those looking for more in-depth info (and not written from memory!), Wikipedia has excellent articles on HDTV and widescreen.

There seems to be a huge amount of confusion over HDTV, widescreen etc.

Widescreen TV is in a 16:9 format, rather than the old 4:3. However, it still uses the same number of vertical “lines” as the old system, 500 for NTSC and 600 for PAL iirc.

Films are usually filmed in super-widescreen (2.35:1), ans any major US TV show is filmed in 16:9. In Europe, 16:9 is now standard for broadcast (and there are very few 4:3 TVs left, either for sale or in people’s homes).

HDTV refers to upping the number of vertical “lines”, either to 720 or, in the highest standard, 1080 (there's also an increase in the number of horizontal lines, but the vertical measure is used to decribe formats). Several major U.S. networks are now broadcasting in this format. You’ll also be able to buy HD content on Blu Ray or HD-DVD soon, but afaik there’s few players and fewer discs available at the moment.

DVDs are 720×480. If the content on the DVD is widescreen, e.g. a film, the 720 remains the same but the 480 gets cut down to whatever is required. It still looks just fine on a large screen though, as you’ve all no doubt witnessed.

Apple’s new 640×480 video looks good on TVs. It will remain 640 in width but will get cut down in height for widescreen content, which all their content on iTunes 7 will be delivered in (about 640×275). You’d be hard-pressed to tell this apart from a DVD.

Finally, I expect the iTV will be fully capable of supporting HDTV (i.e. 720+ lines), but HDTV content has monster storage requirements. You won’t be able to stream it wirelessly whatever the standard used (MCEs struggle unless their practically in line-of-sight with the wireless router; Apple’s kit will be no different). If they’re wired via Ethernet though, it won’t be a problem. It’ll take a night to download the movies though!

Make no mistake though, HDTV will become standard, just as colour did over BW, and 16:9 and digital have replaced analouge 4:3 transmission in Europe.

Things progress!

The iTunes Music Store launched with all of the major record labels - a big coup, and put the store firmly on the road to where it is today - the fifth largest source of legal music in the U.S., and closing in on #4, Amazon, fast. By contrast, iTunes movies has launched with only movies from Disney's Pixar, Miramax, and Touchstone, and of course Disney itself - that is, just one of the major U.S. movie studios.

However another Apple service had an equally small start - TV shows. When Apple started offering TV shows last year, only ABC signed up. Now all the major broadcasters are offering their content through iTunes - some 200+ titles. It shows that growth can be achieved from a small start.

Apple is clearly launching the movie service with only a limited range in the hope that it will be a success, and other studios will feel compelled to sign up or lose out on a revenue stream. The 640x480 resolution is perfectly acceptable to watch, but in no way threatens HD disc sales, so the studios have nothing to worry about there. CD sales have also remained strong in the face of downloadable music, and they don't have the added feature of all the extras DVDs carry, so I expect DVD sales to do likewise.

Even with the small - 75 titles - launch range, I think there will be significant traffic. The range might be small but it covers a wide range of genres - appealing to many tastes - and contains many quality titles. During Job's presentation, I saw films such as The Incredibles, Sixth Sense, The English Patient, Enemy of the State, and Gone in 60 Seconds, for example.

Finally, having seen iTunes 7 and the iTV in action, I can't stress enough what a seamless and rich experience operating them is. The products work together beautifully; I really can't see how Media Center can compete. Consumers clearly like browsing and downloading music and TV shows with just a few mouse clicks, and have them play effortlessly either on their PCs or their iPods. Now they can do the same with movies - and I am sure that they will.

Just a pity none of this is available outside the U.S. It's going to be a long wait until "sometime" in 2007, when video will be available internationally.

Here. It's well worth watching it for yourself.

Yesterday Steve Jobs presented Apple's new hardware and services in California - full coverage here from Engadget.

The two big pieces of news are movie downloads through iTunes 7, and forthcoming piece of hardware - currently known by its development name of "iTV" - that will stream content from your PC or Mac to your TV. Let's look at each in turn, then the bigger picture.

iTunes 7 movies will be in 640x480 resolution, somewhat less than DVD's 720x480, but probably acceptable to the eye. Prices will be a little less than shop-bought DVDs at $9.99 for existing movies and $12.99 for pre-orders and movies bought in the first week of their release, but it doesn't look like you'll get any of the extras you get with regular DVDs. You won't be able to burn the movie to a DVD, but you can store it on up to five computers at any time plus iPods - should take care of back-up duties.

The iTV is a wireless device that takes your music, photos and of course iTunes movies from your computer and displays them on your TV. It will cost $299.

Now, you can already do this - and a lot more - via PCs running MS Windows Media Center Edition and Media Center Extenders available from HP and Linksys, or through Xbox 360 game consoles. For example, you can rip your existing DVDs, or put a TV tuner (up to three, in fact) into your PC and use it as a PVR. It doesn't look like either of these functions will be possible with the iTV.

Yet the HP and Linksys Media Center Extenders haven't been a success. It now seems they are being run-down and Microsoft is concentrating on using the Xbox 360 as an MCE - except many people who would wish to watch their media on a TV don't want a games console.

I think the iTV will fare much better than . Apple is running its business the way you shouldn't - supplying a vertically-intergrated, end-to-end experience and making no effort to work with other companies. You buy an iPod and use the iTunes software to buy music from the iTunes Store. Everything has the same basic look-and-feel - the familiar Apple brand - and Apple also know a thing or two about quality and usability. So it will be with the iTV. Expect to see it heavily promoted, just as iPods are, and expect to see it take pride of place in Apple's many retail stores. Unlike MCEs but like iPods and iTunes, iTVs will rapidly enter the national consciousness, and people will start buying and using them.

PS, interesting to see that ThinkSecret was spot-on with its predictions on what Jobs was going to unveil.

Great big 360 degree panaromas from all around the world. Fascinating.

It's only hours until Apple's invite-only "Showtime" event gets underway (kick-off due 10am local time, click here for other times around the world.)

There's plenty of rumour on what the announcement is going to be. Gizmodo reckons it has the scoop: iTunes 7 featuring Disney and Pixar movie downloads, fed wirelessly to your HDTV by an USB Mac add-on. Pretty much what everyone else is saying!

I'm not expecting quite so much. I can't forget when Google was supposed to announce the Microsoft Office killer, and instead said they were going to offer OpenOffice.org as an add-on when you download the Google Toolbar (wuh?). Hmmm, the blogosphere got that one wrong big-time...

My cynical self thinks a comment on a TechCrunch post (comment number 12) has it right: Front Row for Windows.

I hope I am proved wrong! Find out with live blogging from CrunchGear and, no doubt, many others.

You read the shiney website. Sign up eagerly to the free trial. And the DVDs start coming in - just the ones you wanted!

Then the free trial runs out and you start paying. And the DVDs still come in - they just tend be the ones way down your list. "But it won't be long until a DVD near the top of my list comes in!", you think.

Oh, it will be. Just read the reviews. It's the same story across all the services: they reserve the top DVDs for new sign-ups, and as soon as you're a paying customer the completely degrade your service.

Just to expand on the post below that I copied verbatim from the Facebook blog (I wasn't sure if none members could view it - apparently they can).

The new privacy settings join Facebook's existing, and very flexible, privacy options. You can now decide which of each kind of change you make on your profile - groups joined or left, comments posted, "status" changes etc. - will be posted to the Feed. It's good.

Call me cynical though but I do wonder if Zuckerberg and his team did not already have this coded up before the launch. There has been a massive publicity spike as a result of this - and it's all just as the site's main customers, students, are going back to college! What a co-incidence... Zuckerberg must've known the new features were going to cause a storm, and once the desired level of publicity had been reached... bingo, he could roll out the new options placating everyone and winning plaudits for listening to and communicating with his users.

Here is the open letter he published on Facebook (you see this as soon as you log in):

We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I'd like to try to correct those errors now.

When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we've seen is because of these basic principles.

We made the site so that all of our members are a part of smaller networks like schools, companies or regions, so you can only see the profiles of people who are in your networks and your friends. We did this to make sure you could share information with the people you care about. This is the same reason we have built extensive privacy settings — to give you even more control over who you share your information with.

Somehow we missed this point with Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.

This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn’t made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.

About a week ago I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that’s what I believe in – helping people share information with the people they want to share it with. I’d encourage you to check it out to learn more about what guides those of us who make Facebook. Tomorrow at 4pm est, I will be in that group with a bunch of people from Facebook, and we would love to discuss all of this with you. It would be great to see you there.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

Mark

If you're in Facebook, and like the new features, consider joining this group, which appears to be the largest "pro" group at the moment.

Please don't let mob-rule win.

Furthermore, I think Mark Zuckerburg knows exactly what he’s doing. He knows that there’s no such thing as bad publicity and it’s going to bring new members.

He knows that new members will undoubtedly like the new feeds as they haven’t got stupidly large friend lists, so are more likely to stay with the site (already I personally am using the site a lot more than when it used to be static).

And he knows that even if a million people sign up to the “anti” group, so what? Facebook is too important to college students for them to actually leave it.

Overall, net gain.

There has been a huge backlash within Facebook against the new feeds features, and there's a lot to be learnt.

First, many people are swamped with lists of actions from people they hardly (or don't at all) know - the result of adding as many people as possible. I only list my *real* friends, so all the info I see in my feed is interesting to me.

Second, a lot of people didn't realise how much info they'd put out there, and how many could see it due to adding friends with abandon, until they started seeing what kind of information was coming from other people in their friends network is appearing in their feed. The fact that nothing is visible in the feeds that couldn't be seen by people visiting their profile directly is beginning to sink in.

I think a lot of people are going to quickly start finding the "My Privacy" page and adjusting the settings...

From an eulogy to the great Steve Irwin:

"It’s always tough to say goodbye to a true original. They’re a rare breed. And in this day and age of the mixup and the mashup and a general trend towards homogeneity, the true original is such a precious gift."

So true. Everything these days seems to be re-hashes of an old theme - big movies are sequels, gameshows on TV are just variations on the "reality" theme, everything seems to be about cost and and profitability and all risk taking seems to have dried up.

If you ever find something truly original, cherish it!

I talk about Opera a lot - raving about its performance and handling (makes it sound like a car!) - but I've never been specific about what I actually like about it. Here's a rundown.

*Looks good out-of-the-box. Firefox's Winstripe is ugly, although it's getting a make-over in version 2.0 to make it look a bit less mid-90s.
*It handles tabs well out of the box. New tabs open next to the current tab. It never opens more than one window.
*Close button on tabs - just seems more natural, and I can close tabs without having to select them.
*Duplicate tabs: I can right-click on a tab and chose to have it "duplicated" into a new tab next to the current one. This includes the full backwards/forwards history for that tab. This is great for when I want to "come back for something later".
*The link context menu: If I right-click a link, I can chose to open it in a new tab, or a background tab (for later reading).
*Context menu in frames: If I'm browsing a frame-based website, I can right-click and open the current frame by itself.
*Go-to-URL: I can select any web text web address in a page (e.g. "as seen on volvocars.com"), right-click and chose to go straight to that URL. (Opera also converts full URLs - i.e. http://... - into links).
*Select-and-search: I select some text, right-click and then search for it. In addition, I can chose which search engine to use (e.g. Amazon, IMDB, Wikipedia) from a pop-out list from the context menu.
*Opera remembers what websites I was viewing between shutdowns. I can also save specific "sessions".
*Quick-preferences: These live under Tools->Quick preferences, and allow me to do turn on and off sound, animated GIFs, Flash etc. as and when I need to.
*Zoom: I can enlarge (or shrink) websites as I need to, by percentage. The layout remains the same - it's just like enlarging an image.
*Never crashes, never slows the system down.

Some (but by no means all) of the above functionality can be added to Firefox via Extensions. However I have no wish to trawl through the hundres of available extensions to find the ones I need, nor set their own individual options, nor keep them up-to-date. I'm much happier having it all intergrated directly into the browser. Other things, such as the better performance, can't be added.

If you haven't tried Opera 9, do!

Steorn, an Irish R&D company, claims to have developed a greater-than-100% efficient device, i.e. a generator that creates energy from, apparently, nothing.

This appears to break a fundemental physical law: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form. Many have claimed to have broken this law; all were wrong. Will Steorn be different?

They'd better be. Steorn are an established company, working mainly in anti-counterfeiting technologies. If this claim proves to be untrue, who will contract them ever again? They must be very confident.

You can sign up to receive the results of their indepedent testing here.

Sam Sethi of TechCrunch UK has "written" a post about the UK head of Microsoft's PR firm "not getting" blogs. His source is Tom Foremski.

Briefly compare those two posts. Note how all Sethi has done is copy and paste Foremski's post, changed a few words here and there, and is now claiming it as own work!

Pretty sloppy, really, but kinda what I expected from TechCrunch UK. I really don't understand it's reason for existence - surely with the internet, geographical barriers are now meaningless? So why can't the main TechCrunch blog cover Web 2.0 news from around the world, if it's interesting enough?

I don't particulary want to read about second-rate UK start-ups that aren't good enough to get into the main blog. (To be clear, I am British.)

Firefox 2 beta 2 has been released. Note the many new additions to the browser - the ability to re-open closed tabs, session saving, and a few other bits and bobs. This is in addition to tab-drag-and-drop and a stab at a single-window mode in version 1.5.

These are all already standard features in Opera, and were features that Ben Goodger (lead developer of Firefox - one time?) said the browser would never have as it was "bloat". But even with these new features, Opera still far exceeds Firefox in terms of usability.

In another area it's likely that Firefox will never challenge Opera - performance. The notorious memory leak bug has been declared a "feature", leading to the need for daily restarts of the browser (or your system becomes horribly slow as it consumes all available memory), and in terms of raw performance Opera leaves Firefox standing. Not to mention Opera's better standards compliance - it's the only browser that passes the strict Acid2 test.

I'm amazed anyone still bothers with Firefox. And with the imminent release of IE7, which by all accounts is a very good browser, I doubt anyone will.