Dan G

I first bought something over the internet in 2000 (some rare CD singles through eBay), and then started buying from the likes of Amazon and start-up online electronics shops. Then, after a few years, I stopped^*. Why?

It's just such a lousy experience. The headline with online shopping was originally that products should be cheaper - all you need is a website, a big warehouse somewhere, and few people to process orders. No expensive retail units, no shop staff, no heating and lighting and so forth. Minimal overheads. But I came to notice that online savings were typically very slim - and often wiped out by delivery costs. And have you ever seen a website that is upfront about how much it will charge for delivery? So often you have to "register", "put the item in your basket", then "go to checkout", enter all your payment and delivery details, only to finally see the calculated shipping and realise it wipes out your savings.

But there's much more. Online, you can't see or handle or try out the goods. That's a big plus for the high street. You can't check that the item you're getting isn't defective before you even take it home. You can't ensure that the postman doesn't drop it (I once had a box delivered crushed and with one side ripped off).

Delivery can be a nightmare. Once a package was well overdue and I had to contact the delivery company myself (this should be the retailer's job). They told me it had been delivered. At what time, I asked them. "4am" came the reply. Asked them if that sounded like a reasonable time. "Er, no, I guess not". After about an hour on the phone they looked in their delivery warehouse, saw the parcel still on the floor and sent it out on a car, a mere week late. Pathetic.

Then there's returning the goods. You get your new DVD player or whatever and it doesn't work, or someone has dropped a TV on it and it's smashed. You have to arrange for someone to collect it. You have to be in. You have to pay the returns postage and wait for a refund on that too. If you're lucky you get replacement or your money back a week later. If you'd gone to the store, you could have been watching DVDs for the past fortnight...

My mum is now an avid home shopper. Last week she bought my sister a painting for her birthday. When it arrived it was creased. So she went into town and bought two better paintings for the same money, and is trying to return the damaged one. The delivery guy has just been and gone - "wrong paper work" - and now my mum is trying to contact both the delivery company and the retailer to sort the mess out.

Like me, she will never buy online again. Why on earth would we want to? The "old" model of going to a shop, inspecting the product, handing over some money and taking it home with you there and then works somewhat better. And if there's a problem you take it back to the store and either get a replacement or refund on the spot.

^*Actually I still buy DVDs online - they're robust enough to survive delivery and it's hard to imagine circumstances in which they'd need to be returned, and do tend to be cheaper online. But that's it.

I used to be able to go to local.live.com and get a Google Maps-like interface. Microsoft presented, in my experience, better maps and aerial imagery, but with a rather slower and more cluttered interface (I think that sums up Microsoft vs. Google pretty well!). Wikipedia has a good article complete with screenshots.

However when I go to the URL now, I get redirected to intl.local.live.com which just presents two strange search boxes - "what" and "where". I have no idea how to just get an aerial view of my house, for example. Entering "my house" and then my postcode, the first idea that came into my head, just gave an error message. Trying my postcode alone just gave an annoying message asking me to put something in the "what" box. Why should I? I couldn't be bothered to try anything more - back to Google Maps (who have greatly improved their route-finding, I notice).

Has the old local.live gone? If not, where is it hiding?

A remarkable Google Maps application. I initially thought it was a mash-up using Google News but according to the About This Site section the news stories are selected and posted by hand.

Quite remarkable to see what's going on around the world. Beware that the default display is the last 14 days though, so to get a "live" view select last 24 hours in the drop-down just below the ads block.

To become an "contributing photographer" and hence get maybe the chance to make a few dollars on your photographs, iStockPhoto requires you to upload a jpeg scan of a "government-issued" piece of identity - preferably either your drivers license or passport.

Is further comment necessary?

The Internet Movie Database - one of the oldest of the "big" sites on the net - has had a redesign, and has lost it's original style, which by now was looking distinctly "retro". It was still using the original Internet style of a serif type face and blue hyperlinks, with only basic formatting. A few moths ago there were internal changes - a move to using CSS - but the original theme had been preserved. Now it's gone.

The IMDb had become known as an example of "anti-marketing design", though more by accident through ageing than by design. Scoble said "We trust [these sites] more when they look like they were done for the love of it rather than the sheer commercial value of it."

Interestingly the doyen of anti-marketing design was Plentyoffish.com, but that's had a make-over too (though it still looks a bit crap). Seems the lure of anti-marketing doesn't hold forever.

Scoble has a list of points of why New media is better than Old, and I couldn't disagree more.

1. The media above can’t be changed. A newspaper can’t magically change its stories, even if society decides something in them is incorrect. My blog can be updated for all readers nearly instantly if someone demonstrates that I was wrong on a post.

TV and radio can change their stories in the next bulletein. With newspapers I have to wait a day at most, sometimes less (papers have multiple editions). That's quick enough for me.

2. You can interact with my blog. You can leave a comment. Call me an arsehole. Etc. Etc. With the above you can’t interact at all.

I can write letters to newspapers and call in to radio shows.

3. You can get some sense of the popularity of my stuff in real time. How many comments does each post get? How many links does each post get? I can see in Wordpress how much traffic each item gets. You can visit Digg to see voting on my blog’s items. Or, TechMeme to see which blog items got most links in the past few hours.

I don't care what's popular. I'm only interested in, er, what I'm interested in!

4. With the “new media” you can look at my archives and see all posts. Try doing that with a newspaper. Yeah, you can, if you pay the San Jose Mercury News a fee. But it’s not as easy as it is here.

Most British papers have complete archives. BBC News does too.

5. Here on my blog I can mix media. A post could contain text, audio, video, or photos. Not so on newspaper or magazines.

Mixing media is good, I'll give Robert that one.

6. Here on my blog I don’t need to convince a committee to publish. Not true with other media forms. Imagine you walked into CNN and said “hey, I have some cool video, can you publish it?”

The committee is there to maintain the desired type and quality of output - no bad thing.

7. The new media is infinite. The media above all has limitations in terms of either length (a TV station only has 24 hours in a day — over on YouTube, I guarantee they publish a lot more than 24 hours of video in a day) or in quantity (try to convince USA Today to publish a 40,000 word article, or, 500 articles on the same topic).

If I want a 40,000 word article I'll buy a book. It will be better researched and written that anything online, because people will have been paid to make sure that is so. Youtube will never compete with broadcast TV.

8. The new media is syndicatable and linkable and easily reused. I can link to your media here, for instance, a few seconds after you publish it. Try doing THAT with any of the above media. Not to mention, my words here kick into an RSS feed which you can then republish using something like Google Reader, if you’d like, or you can copy a sentence out of my post, paste it into your own blog, and say something about what I just said.

I don't have a huge desire to reuse media, but I can link to pretty much any newspaper article, radio show or piece of video via their websites.

9. The new media can be mashed up with data from other services. Check out that Amazon advertisement over to the right. Did you realize that isn’t on my, or Wordpress.com’s, servers? It actually gets served up from some organization I don’t control. Amazon could, if it wanted to, replace the image there with a different book. Or, something else. Many people are putting widgets on their blogs that display various things from places they don’t control.

Not of interest.

At the end of the day I'll always prefer professional quality "old media". And I'd suggest that Podtech is "old media" too. It could easily be a TV show, it's just being delivered via the net instead of the airwaves. Although if it were a TV show, it would have to be edited down to fit a set time slot - and we'd benefit as it would cut out the boring bits!

An interesting site. While I'm sure most of the traffic there is for the 9/11 information, there's plenty more besides.

Of course, a conspiracy theorist would never believe a word from a government, but there's no convincing them. For the rest of this, this is a very good site.

Senator Barack Obama is doing some very smart things with his website. His announcement video is said to be the best filmed, and having a high-quality video can only leave a good impression in viewer's minds. He prominently promotes his videos on his site - making sure Firefox and Apple users have alternates if needed - but also has a YouTube channel, so people can embed his videos in other sites too. Neat.

But perhaps the most interesting part of his site is the social network. This enables supporters to do all the usual social network things - establish a profile, make connections with other people, plan events (not to mention doing fundraising!). This is surely a very powerful way to gain and mobilise supporters.

At last. I've been using the 0.9x betas for more than a year, and was wondering if a final would ever be released. Well, now it has, and courtesy of a digg story looks to be getting the attention it deserves.

If you don't like the tiny fiddly interface of Winamp 2.x, or the massive resource hogging of iTunes, or the bizarre random skins every other music player seems to "feature", this is for you. It joins the likes of Firefox and GAIM in striving to have a very simple, very user-friendly interface. There's everything you need and nothing you don't, meaning anyone finds it simplicity itself to use.

It's good.

I'm a little confused.

Philippe Mottaz quoted Devouard as saying:

"At this point, Wikipedia has the financial ressources to run its servers for about 3 to 4 months. If we do not find additional funding, it is not impossible that Wikipedia might disappear"

But now Laurent Haug quotes:

Me: “When we prepared this speech, Florence told me that Wikipedia has enough cash to pay for its server for the next…”

Florence Devouard: “Three months. Roughly.”

Me: “and if we don’t do something, Wikipedia won’t be here in three or four months. That’s a radical idea, it’s not going to happen but…”.

FD: ”...three months is a bit negative. [...] We have somebody making plans for two years in the future, I think we will survive in the next three months”.

That's two very different interpretations, apparently of the same discussion. I can't be completely sure which is correct as I wasn't there myself, but Haug does say he was transcribing video taken at the time (which may be posted later).

This isn't a glowing example of good blogging. In fact the original post - which has caused a stir in the blogosphere - seems to be nothing more than tabloid journalism, "lurid or sensational".

From TechCrunch: Vista vs. OSX. This is by the most down-to-earth, hype-free and objective review I've seen. I'm particularly impressed that it doesn't get sucked into the "OSX is so much easier to use" mantra, because it isn't. OSX is in fact completely baffling to first-time users. What do the three coloured dots (that colour-blind people can't see) do? How do you launch a program? Open a drive? Switch between tasks? With Windows it's completely intuitive - the minimise and close buttons are obvious, "Start" couldn't be clearly (and listing the most commonly used programs is a smart touch), and the task bar is immediately obvious in function.

Mac fanboys like to attack Windows at every chance but in fact there's a lot wrong with OSX and a lot right with Windows.

AOL! AOL's free anti-virus offering is based on Kaspersky. Kaspersky ranks number one in both effectiveness and speed of supplying updates.

So there you have it - the best AV software is delivered by, of all people, AOL!

Florence Devouard (known as Anthere on the projects), the Chair of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation (which operates Wikipedia amongst other projects) has said at LIFT07 that the project will close in 3-4 months unless they get more funding. (Update actual quote via Scoble. So Devouard never said Wikimedia was that short of cash. But I still don't agree with their finacial planning - read below and the update.)

I don't buy that for a moment. Wikimedia has just finished a $1m fund raising campaign, and gets a steady $30-40,000 a month in donations besides that. They are not short of servers nor cash to buy new ones.

In fact that September order is their latest - they haven't spent a penny of the $1m yet, but Wikimedia is running just fine. Their traffic growth is far from unmanageable, too.

Update Erasoft 24 below led me to "What we need the money for", from the Wikimedia Foundation. However I'm struggling to agree with the report, which suggest that 300 new servers will be bought in February, more than double the existing total (Devouard says 350, Nagios says 295). Why does Wikimedia need to *greatly* more than double its server power so soon? (Many of the existing servers are quite old, e.g. single core P4s.) Wikimedia's Ganglia monitoring shows average CPU loads of 55% and a peak of 70% (but look at the Kennisnet figures - the existing machines are barely being used!).

Buying so many servers when the site does not appear to have any load issues at the moment seems unwarranted. Performance per dollar is constantly dropping so the Foundation would get much better value later on. Then there's the rackspace costs.

I ask the same questions about buying more bandwidth - why go to 10Gb? The traffic graphs I linked to above suggest such a large pipe wouldn't fill for years, so why buy it now? Also the same of hiring more people - why does the Foundation need to increase staff costs by three times, from $32,000 a month to $100,000 a month?

If I'm wrong on any of this, feel free to explain why in the comments!

I've said in the past that I read Slashdot in preference to digg because of the vastly greater quality of the comments. Here's some particularly good examples - have you ever wondered what happened to the nuclear bomb-proof internet, and advice if you really want to hide something on your computer, and an interesting insight into OSX vs. XP.

Even "Mask as Internet Explorer" isn't enough sometimes (and of course lowers Opera usage stats). Instead, here's a clever piece of Javascript that opens up many Google apps which previously blocked Opera.

There's a remarkable post on TechCrunch. Michael Arrington criticises DEMO before announcing his own competing conference (also launched by Jason Calacanis).

Strangely this seems to be exactly the same thing Sam Sethi did on TechCrunch UK, which resulted Arrington firing Sethi (and leaving TechCrunch UK dead in the water, thanks).

The organisers of Under the Radar were sufficiently annoyed at the criticism Arrington is levelling at them to send out an e-mail:

"It’s funny because he’s basically accusing conferences like ours of lacking an honest vetting process. As much as we’d like to comment, it would look really bad if we did. But – it sure would be cool if someone goes to bat and defends the honor of Under the Radar…after all, we’re all putting in a lot of work vetting and selecting companies.

We of course understand though if any of you feel uncomfortable writing a post about this... nobody wants the wrath of Arrington J."

It's nice to see an alternative conference format, but I do disagree with a number of Arrington's points. I don't think UtR are lying when they say work hard on vetting companies, and I'm sure Chris Shipley isn't lying when he says Demo has a rigorous selection process.

More than anything though Arrington misses the point of Demo. It's not a launch pad to the public - no expensive conference with 60+ demonstrations could be. Yeah a couple might get picked up by bloggers and the media but it's not going to be many. No, companies go there to get funding, as Scoble points out. That's why the 60+ companies, presenting in rapidfire succession, are so keen to go.

TechCrunch20 will no doubt show twenty good startups (altough with just twenty over two days, the demonstrations might get a little long, and the halls are going to be mighty quiet), but it's not going to be anything special purely because participants don't have to pay a fee.

I found a review of the user interface of the OLPC, and I couldn't agree more.

Two points made by the author, Harry Brignull, stand out. One is that the interface largely throws away the well-known WIMP interface used by, well, everything: "The whole ‘breaking away from the desktop’ smacks heavily of academics who have finally found an outlet for their wacky ideas".

Another point is that "What kind of foundation are we giving these kids when they eventually get faced with a ‘normal’ desktop?". Indeed. These children will be using Microsoft or Mac desktops if they ever get jobs involving computers. How will their experience with this weird interface help that?

Brignull is not alone in his criticism.

But really the OLPC is just one big waste of money. Gates was absolutely right not to support this machine. Anywhere where there's enough money to provide power and internet there's enough money for computers, and one per child is hardly a big deal. More to the point though, there's pleny of places where the last thing people need is a computer - places where people live in abject poverty. They don't need high-tech, they need practical tech.

Zoho's announcement of their new Notebook service at Demo 07 made me take another quick look at their suite of online applications.

They've maturued nicely since I last looked - their word processor, spreadsheet and presentation apps all load cleanly and work properly on Opera, even if they do take a while to load (longer than Microsoft Office takes to start). What really disappointed me though is that there's still no consistent user interface between each of the applications. Each looks totally different, and often works differently, to the others. It's nothing like the consistent interface presented by, say, MS Office. I'm sure it wouldn't be hard for Zoho to work on this and it would be a big step forwards.

On the utility of online apps generally, my views remain largely the same. They're great for people who have internet access and need to do the occasional wordprocessing or (say) accounting, or for accessing documents when away from your own machine (perhaps the one you're using doesn't have Office installed).

But for any serious work local applications still rule, especially Office 2007. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Every so often Robert mentions his love for Google Reader. After about the millionth post on the subject, I'm taking a look for myself.

I've exported by Bloglines subscription to Reader so I can do a side-by-side test. Reader seems slower to load, constantly popping up a little "Loading..." sign, and then taking its time to list posts. But other than that the two readers aren't that different. Both list your subscriptions in a frame on the left, both display content on the right (with Reader you can chose a headline-only "list view" or a Bloglines scrolling-page-like "expanded view". Both also feate "blog this" and "emal this" functions. You can move through a Reader list of posts by pressing the j key to move, but on Bloglines it's just as easy to scroll with the arrow keys.

One thing I do like is that Bloglines strips out post formatting. I have a friend who blogs in yellow text (on a black background on her blog), but the RSS feed is hence illegible in Reader (yellow text on white background!).

But Reader does look better, for sure. Bloglines design isn't the prettiest and Reader uses the tired-and-true (and well-loved) Google look and feel to great effect. Reader also has a better "settings" interface, allowing quicker access to basics such adding and changing folders.

I think I'll be running with Reader for a bit. Try it yourself if you haven't.