Dan G

Goodbye Opera, hello Firefox

2008-12-28T11:12:00.004Z

Use the best tool for the job. That's a motto of mine. So I find myself back to using Firefox, this time version 3, in preference to Opera after several years with the Norwegian browser.

Why? The latest update to Opera--9.63--introduced so many bugs with Google products as to make them unuseable. Google Mail wouldn't accept any clicks to the UI, and Google Maps simply stalled on loading with the offer to switch to a "basic" html version. No thanks.

Simple truth is that many javascript-heavy apps, including Facebook which I use heavily, run much faster under Firefox than they do in Opera (at least at the moment). I don't know why for sure, but I suspect that the developers of these apps optimise them more for Firefox than for Opera due to the former's larger market share. There's no doubt that Opera has good competitive performance, including in javascript benchmarks, but it just doesn't hack it on the real web.

At the same time Firefox has come a long way with version 3. Memory usage finally seems reasonable and performance doesn't degrade to a crawl after a day or two, as was the case with version 2. Firefox 3 also requires fewer add-ons to bring the UI up to the standard of Opera--I'm only using Tab Mix Plus to get back to Opera's (much smarter) default behaviour for opening and closing tabs, plus Speed Dial to bring back one of Opera's best features. The Speed Dial add-on is nowhere near as polished as Opera's built-in implementation, with far more complex and confusing "options" to wade through and a rather ugly UI, but it gets the job done.

All is not plain sailing though--Firefox 3's bookmarks manager is just dumb. Add a new bookmark and it vanishes into a "recent bookmarks" folder. I just want a simple list when I click "Bookmarks" in the toolbar! Worse, if you use the bookmarks manager to create a new folder to organise some bookmarks and drag them from the recent bookmarks list to the new folder, the bookmarks are then duplicated in recent bookmarks list--madness! If you want to delete the duplicate, you can't tell which is in the recent bookmarks folder and which is in your new folder. Cue much frustration and loss of bookmarks. Thank goodness for delicious.com!

On a similar note I've also dropped Foxit Reader for Adobe Reader 9. Version 9 of Reader loads far more quickly than 8 ever did (or 7 or 6 for that matter!) and the far better quality of document rendering, scaling, and scrolling makes it much the better choice. Plus I like the direct intergration within Firefox--PDF documents load in Reader in a tab, rather than in a new window in a new app.

Keep an open mind folks, and don't be afraid to switch software--use the best!

English village fete calendar/guide

2008-05-10T11:47:00.001+01:00

'Tis the season for village fetes. I love to go to these with my family -- my mum loves the cakes and teas (I don't mind them either), the kids love the games. A nice way to see a nice bit of proper English countryside. We'd always found out about local fetes through a BBC local website "what's on" guide. Well turns out that the almighty and all-arrogant BBC have closed this event guide (it was the only useful thing on their local website).

After a bit of googling I've found the Innocent Smoothie village fete calendar, which seems to fit the bill. Not that many entries on there yet though :-(, but better than nowt. If you know of any village fetes that aren't on there already do submit them!

Cute website too.

BBC News redesign: while developers ignore their users, the users fix the site!

2008-04-02T12:49:00.009+01:00

Today Julia Whitney, "Head of Design & User Experience, Journalism", has posted a second response to the 1,500+ odd complaints about the new BBC News website. Most of it is disingenuous, fingers-in-ears "nah nah nah we can't hear you" fluff, but this part takes the biscuit:

"For those of you who mentioned flexible rather than fixed width, and concerns about the line spacing and the grey type - we'll take these themes into our next set of user testing and listening labs over the course of the next month and a half."

So it's going to take six weeks of "focus groups" to decide that actually, black text on white (as used by the rest of the entire print and internet worlds) is better than low-contrast* grey? Sounds more like a politician trying to hide behind excuses rather than admit they were wrong. And we all respect people who do that, don't we?!

Luckily you don't have to wait that long to fix the site, at least if you're using the Firefox or Opera browsers (IE users are out of luck). A site's design is dictated by something called "CSS", short for cascading style sheets, and these two browsers allow you to over-ride those rules with "local" ones.

What a developer on the userstyles.org website has done is develop a set of rules that "fix" the new BBC News layout. It removes the large black banner at the top and the big grey one at the bottom, sets the page back to left-alignment, removes much of the excess "whitespace", reduces the page width to something manageable, and replaces the grey text with proper black. (What it can't do is restore all those missing story links. Less content in more space. Crazy.)

If you're using Firefox, you first need to install the Stylish plugin. Then visit this userstyles.org page, install the new syle, and voila, a fixed BBC News website is yours to enjoy.

Opera users don't have to install anything new, but have a slightly more complex path to follow:

1. Open Notepad
2. Go to the userstyles page and click "Load as user script"
3. Copy and paste that code into Notepad
4. Save that file as "user.css" somewhere. Be sure to change the filetype from "Text" to "All" before saving -- this is very important
5. Navigate to BBC News in Opera and right-click on the page
6. Select "Edit site preferences" and then click the "Display" tab
7. At the bottom of that tab, "choose" the "user.css" file you just created
8. Click "OK" and enjoy a fixed BBC News page :-).

*I was interested to see if the new grey text broke usability standards, so did a quick investigation. Via 456 Berea Street I downloaded a contrast analyser. To meet minimum standards, text should have a contrast ratio of at least 5:1 and preferably 7:1. Black text on white has a contrast ratio of 21:1, but BBC News's new grey-on-white has a ratio of only 9:1 -- just above the standard, but still much poorer than black-on-white. Other areas of text, such as certain headers(!), have ratios as low as 4:1 -- well below the minimum.

The new site really is a joke. Hundreds of markup errors and it doesn't even meet basic usability guidelines.

The BBC News redesign disaster

2008-04-01T12:21:00.027+01:00

Update: The BBC "responds" to the criticism so far, but actually fails to answer a single point made in the 1,400+ complaints now left on the BBC blogs.

Something very strange is happening in the BBC webdesign department. Usability rules and user experience testing seems to have been tossed out the window in a head-long rush to be new. The revamped BBC News website has so many problems it's hard to know where to begin. However a flavour of its reception can be gained from the comments to the blog announcement, which after just 30 hours has seen over 1,000 complaints about the site! That's despite the problems with commenting to BBC blogs due to their being locked into an ancient version of Movable Type, meaning that it takes minutes for a comment to finish posting, if at all.

~~Other BBC blogs, such as the BBC Internet blog announcement, have seen their comments turned off to hide from the deluge.~~ Nick Reynolds says, in the comments below, that this was to herd the comments into one place, although oddly now there are at least three BBC blog posts on the topic with comments enabled. Make of that what you will...

So what's so bad about the site? Let's start with the mark-up. A w3c validation check shows 347 errors in the "XHTL 1.0" code. Three hundred and forty-seven! That must be some kind of record. Oddly, setting the validator to check against HMTL 4.01 shows only 81 errors. So it seems the BBC coders don't know the first thing about compliant code, or even which doctype to use.

(Update 2 April Martin Belam explains that the legacy CMS the BBC use could well be the cause of such bad mark-up.)

Their CSS fares better -- only five errors and 275 warnings against CSS 2.1. In fact their CSS performance is remarkably good considering the site has 54 kb of code spread over 8 CSS files.

(In total there are 140 seperate objects on the page, including another 54 kb of external javascript in ten files.)

More coding oddities include using pixels to specifiy font sizes rather than the standard ems, that a serif font is specified after verdana making the site rather ugly on many Linux systems, and the fact when the site first launched it didn't work at all in Firefox (tiny text), which opens questions about the BBC's testing procedures. (In fact the site is also broken on the iPhone.)

Other design changes seem odd. The new site is 1024px wide, but has 15% less content (primarily a reduction in the number of stories linked to from the main page, cutting links in the Around the World, UK, and Sections from two to one). This forces the user to scroll and eye-scan over a much larger distance in order to access less content. The space is taken up by increased padding around the remaining elements. I can't find a single design guideline that mandates that.

Despite ostensibly being based on a grid (pdf), very little on the page lines up. The left column, including the banners, features five different horizontal alignments (and six styles of text, including text-as-images). Included in that is the main BBC logo and the large BBC News logo immediately below -- they don't line up.

Vertically, the main and right columns fail to align too, with jumps in the horizontal dividers.

(The right column also features links to videos in the original Real Media format, despite claims that the site now uses embedded Flash video.)

Very little bolding is used for the headers, which for the minor ones depend on ALLCAPS. How very '90s. The reduced contrast and lack of background-highlighting makes scanning for seperate sections much more laborious.

Perhaps the strangest design choice though is the use of grey text, rather than black, on the white background. The reduced contrast makes the site harder on the eye and is one of the leading complaints to the blog announcement. To say that this goes against everything usability stands for is an understatement -- a triumph of form over function.

However the grey-on-white text must vie against the new pan-BBC header bar -- simply a black rectangle with two links and a search box. The search box doesn't indicate whether it's a site search or a web search -- maybe it's just pot luck? Originally there used to be links to the major BBC website sections such as News, TV, and Radio, but they've been swept away. Presumeably the BBC believes that users will instead type into the search box to access these sites, much as many web users now use Google as their "bookmarking" system. Hard to see how this increases site usability.

Overall the site is a disaster in both design and usability. During the recent BBC homepage redesign it was boasted that the site had been developed and deployed in only three months with a minimum of testing and usability studies. This trend of slap-dash, rapid-development seems to have spread throughout BBC webdesign.

Compare all this to their last redesign in 2003. Everything lines up. Consisent fonts are used throughout. The aim of the design was to show more information with less scrolling. Pretty much perfect! (For a flavour of the quite positive reactions that redesign brought, read this thread on Webmaster World.)

Perhaps the BBC have been drinking too much of the web 2.0 kool-aid. Agile programming, release early and often etc. Such memes might suit small, young companies such as 37signals, but not heavyweight players. How often has Google changed its homepage in the last ten years? Even much younger, fully "2.0" sites such as Facebook have stayed away from rushed redesigns.

The most ironic part of the whole debacle is that, in the original blog announcement, the BBC confesses that the majority of users they surveyed before the changes were made had said "leave the site alone"!

Companies: don't blog if you can't keep it up!

2008-01-31T10:55:00.000Z

Take, for example, Adpinion. An interesting new startup where readers rate the ads they see on websites, so the adverts served to them become more and more relevant -- clever stuff.

However Adpinion has started a blog called Button of Judgement (named after the thumbs up/thumbs down button on their ads). In three days this January they made three (good) posts, and then nadda, nothing, zip. That doesn't inspire confidence in their product! How can I trust them to maintain their service, when they can't even maintain their own blog?

I found Adpinion through Paul Stamatiou, who writes a great nerd blog.

Google GDrive: would you trust it with your data?

2008-01-20T10:16:00.000Z

Hell I would. Here I back up my families' and my own data across all our machines in different locations ("lots of copies keeps stuff safe"; more on that later), but really few people do that. Most have their data on one computer -- vulnerable to fire, theft, accidental damage, simple mechanical failure, you name it.

By comparison a remote server adminstered by Google will have *lots* of back-up systems covering it. I'd say that's a lot safer.

Free AOL anti-virus - down the pan

2007-10-16T21:49:00.000+01:00

I've been using AOL "Active Virus Shield" for the last few months, and have been a happy bunny as under the branding it's actually Kaspersky, which rates tops in tests of AV software.

However AOL have just mailed me announcing that they're discontinuing the Kaspersky product and replacing it with one based on McAfee. I have two problems with this. First, I like my software to be stable and not need baby-sitting - I certainly don't want software I have to entirely replace whenever the supplier feels like it (I've been using Microsoft XP since 2002). OK, I guess I was expecting a bit much with free software from AOL, but all the same it's pretty obvious that they tender for their AV supplier every so often and that's no use to me.

Second, McAfee is a piece of crap. I'm not having that on my system!

Wikipedia being edited by US defence industry

2007-09-10T08:10:00.000+01:00

Take a look at this. Steven Trimble is a senior editor on Flight International and he's been using the wikiscanner. It seems a lot of none-too-bright employees of major defence industry companies have been editing Wikipedia to massage their products or trash those of their competitors. None-too-bright as they've not been creating accounts, and so have left their company IP addresses for all too see...

And we're back

2007-09-07T10:59:00.000+01:00

After a good 36 hours, Google Reader is restored to Opera users. What an utter shambles.

Google Reader not working with Opera

2007-09-06T08:58:00.000+01:00

In the last few hours Google have made a change to Reader that prevents it from loading in Opera - Google Reader is broken. As a poster on this Google Reader Help group thread says, Opera is not some obscure browser. Google should be testing more thoroughly than this.

Just imagine if you're company was using Google Apps and they screwed that up like this... you begin to realise why the "online office" has no future.

Fossil website

2007-05-10T13:41:00.000+01:00

Here's an oddity. A website largely untouched since 1998, the shop window for a company that folded seven years ago.

You can even see the pricing for the airplanes in 1998 dollars.

What happened to Wikipedia:Attribution?

2007-05-05T12:19:00.000+01:00

You may remember the introduction of Wikipedia:Attribution. If you edit Wikipedia on a regular basis you may have noticed that the link just below the edit box went back to Wikipedia:Verifiability about a month ago, or some three weeks after was first changed to point to WP:ATT.

What happened? Well, when the switch was first made at the end of February I (and few other editors) were not happy. We reverted the change from having the seperate WP:V and WP:No orignal research to the single WP:ATT, but we were reverted straight away by the user Radiant. I also left a note on Jimbo Wales's talk page alerting him to the changes, but he was away travelling with limited net access. A day later the Essjay storm broke and when Wales regained regular net access, everyone's attention was on that and WP:ATT was forgotten. My note on Jimbo's page was lost in a page-blanking after the Essjay affair.

But then on March 20 Jimbo noticed for himself that WP:V and WP:NOR had been merged, and he wasn't happy. He left this message on the WP:ATT talk page while reverting the changes (and this time, Radiant did not revert, lol). This suddenly brought the whole thing to everyone's attention, leading quickly to a poll where the merge only gained the support of around half the 900 or so people who voted. This was quite a blow to the main architect of WP:ATT, Slimvirgin, who had been working on the merge since last October.

Jimbo's suggestion to resolve the issue was to form a "cross-party working group" (seriously). This seems more of a move to calm the heated debates rather than to actually reach a solution other than the status quo, and it worked. There were efforts to try and pick people for this group and work out what they should actually do but there were arguments over every detail, even over whether they should have terms of reference or not. Slimvirgin eventually tired of the discussions in mid-April and left, though she still tends to WP:ATT from time to time. The "working group" discussions gradually petered out.

What's the outlook? WP:ATT is dead. Far too many people recognise and support the need to have seperate policies, policies that have worked very well for six years now. AP:ATT pretty much worked but wasn't really needed. The "merge" process was badly mishandled - there were no merge tags placed on the the policy pages and only one small invite for community input early in the process, which left a small group of isolated editors working on the project out of the eye of the general editor population. When these folks decided WP:ATT was ready for the prime time they felt they had consensus, but it was only within their subgroup (clique, really). A few people objected but couldn't be bothered to fight the socially inept, stubborn and arrogant editors Wikipedia attracts like Radiant. When Wales noticed the change and came down against it, it was game over.

Throwing a bone to the clique was almost cruel - it would have been better, especially after the results of the community poll, to make it clear that WP:ATT was dead and to help the people who'd invested so much time in it begin to move on.

Unfolding news

2007-04-16T21:44:00.000+01:00

When terrible events happen how the news broke to the world can often be traced in the history of the Wikinews article.

It's so sad to see the true horror become apparent.

Death of a Blog

2007-04-14T22:18:00.000+01:00

One of my favourite blogs - IAG, a brilliant airliner and airline news blog - has retreated behind a paywall; I mourn the site's forthcoming death.

The site's owners - two "old media" types - did some market research before making this decision, where they discovered that only 20% of their current readership would consider paying to access their content. The owners believe that even with just 20% of their readers following them behind their paywall they'll make more money than they currently do with advertising.

This is probably true (except I doubt the take-up will be as high as 20%, people saying they'll pay is one thing in a survey but actually paying up is another), but represents a classic example of going for small short-term gains at the exspense of greater profits in the longer term. Now, their content will rapidly age out of search engines and people will stop linking to their content as no-one can read it - so no-one will find their site anymore. At the same time existing subscribers will drift away - people unsubscribe from sites all the time for a million different reasons. So their (small) paying readership will slowly dwindle to nothing, and they'll go out of business.

If the owners had been smart they'd have adopted the tactics used by all other successful blogs out there. They would have swept away huge mess of advertising that was plastered over their site and used a few relevant, well-chosen, and well-placed adverts, such as those from Federated Media and Text Link Ads. (They could also have used Feedburner's RSS feed adverts.) That would have greatly increased their existing ad revenue.

Then they would have simply carried on as they were - producing great content and growing their audience. Eventually their ad revenues would have far exceeded what they'll ever hope to make with a paywall.

But that's not what they did, so IAG is disappearing from the web. A shame.

Addendum It only took a few minutes of searching to find replacement blog with all the content IAG had.

Old companies fighting the new

2007-04-11T23:04:00.000+01:00

Here's a cracking comment left on Scoble's blog: "old" companies - big ones - are beginning to fight hard against new Internet companies. A great insight.

Myspace blocking Photobucket's video-hosting is a crazy example of this. They probably won't lose existing users who are locked into large existing networks, but they sure as hell aren't enticing new ones. Where's the growth model there?

Newsflash: positive comment about Vista on Slashdot not modded down!

2007-04-10T18:21:00.000+01:00

A rare and beautiful thing. In the World of Slashdot Vista is "defective by design" and never works for uses. (Note that this +5 comment still recieved a negative mod as "flamebait"!)

In the real world the new OS is selling slowly but steadily and by all other accounts is actually working jus' fine.

Killer demo of Windows Presentation Foundation

2007-04-04T13:15:00.000+01:00

An excellent demonstration via PodTech of how Windows Presentation Foundation can be used to produce slicker and much more engaging interfaces for web 2.0 services. The company is thirteen23.

Don't forget that to run WPF apps you only need .NET 3.0 - not Vista. Any Windows XP computer can run these apps. I tried thirteen23's Flickr Nostalgia app on my four-year-old laptop and it ran a treat.

Can Apollo compete with this? I'd like to see a demo that is as compelling. Apollo has being cross-platform in its favour, but with the dominance of Windows in the market is that important? I think not - companies code for the biggest market, and that's Windows.

Sierra, Locke et al. - moving on

2007-04-03T23:04:00.000+01:00

Like everyone else, the blogosphere has a short attention span and this incident will soon slip from the collective short term memory to the long term memory of blog archives.

This marks that transition for this blog here. As well, this is a time to learn. My position, clear from the start, is zero tolerance. People who make or facilitate misogynistic or other hateful posts must not be tolerated - they should be isolated and, if possible, deleted (I'm looking at you - everyone on Digg, those with mod points on Slashdot, everyone who has a blog with comments).

What are other people saying?

Well, we've already seen Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke's statements (note, not joint statements). But let's not forget that this went well beyond the two of them.

Here's Scoble. He states it's a strain to moderate comments on his blog and considered closing the comments - as many other bloggers have. That would be a shame - what conversation would be left? And it would be letting the bullies win, to boot. Scoble then goes on to make a good point that attack/hate blogs are frequently attention seeking (hell I'd never heard of Chris Locke before).

Then he makes an odd statement: "Lots of bloggers hate them [attacks], but know they better not speak out against them. Kathy, last week, got MORE attacks AFTER she wrote that post than before. So, bloggers, if they are in this for the long haul, learn they should keep their mouths shut." What's that about? Give in to these idiots? Not a chance.

Scoble finishes by saying that there's not much we can do. Hell yeah there is, hound these idiots off the face of the internet, that's what we can do. Bullies don't like it when their victims stand up to them. Just watch Locke crawling now.

A few other posts caught my eye. Sessum is tired of people pointing out that she supported Meankids. Well, she should have thought about that before being an idiot. You thought racist, misogynistic crap was good? And let's not pretend that stuff only came out later in the blog's life - check the search engine caches, it was like that from the start.

Finally, I like Tara Hunt's thoughts on these people's motivation. I couldn't agree more.

That's it. Time to move on.

But never forget.

Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke CNN video

2007-04-02T20:05:00.000+01:00

As promised, here it is.

Be warned though, at times it's so simplistic and at times so corny it's almost funny. Locke features for about five seconds.

All in all, pretty worthless.

Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke speak

2007-04-02T12:26:00.000+01:00

Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke have made statements about the affair, with introductory posts on their blogs - Sierra's and Locke's (Locke is using his "Rageboy" ID).

One thing I note is that Locke still claims that he deleted unclebobism himself. So why did wordpress.com bother to put up "this blog breaks our terms of service" notices on a blog that had already "been deleted"? Draw your own conclusions.

Locke's post also dissolves into a standard "protect free speech" post. Writing from a country (the UK) where hate speech is illegal and our society is considerably better for it, I cannot agree.

Sierra and Locke also appeared on CNN today. If I can find a clip I'll post it here.

My own position on the matter remains unchanged. I believe people involved in pathetic hate-blogs like meankids and unclebobism do not deserve to be included in the Conversation. Furthermore, and importantly, comments posted on blogs that are about nothing but the sexualisation of females should be deleted on sight.

Disappointing

2007-04-02T12:23:00.000+01:00

Well, Scoble broke his week-long no-blogging protest to post an April Fool's joke.

Not even going to bother to link.

Kathy Sierra: 72 hours on

2007-03-29T23:26:00.000+01:00

Little new has come to light but the general opinions and thoughts of people have become clearer.

One thing I'm seeing is continued confusion over what actually happened and who is involved. It seems quite common for people to think that this is only about Kathy Sierra - not so.

There was a horrific attack made on Maryam Scoble posted to meankids.org - this, in particular and rather understandably, upset Robert Scoble. That entry was posted by a member of meankids using the name "Rev Ed".

A commenter going by the same name left sexually abusive comments on the second site, unclebobism, but these comments were not directed at Sierra. He did call Sierra a "crack whore", however. Rev Ed, by the way, used Alan Herrell's picture as his avatar.

Furthermore, there was at least one racist post made at meankids - look at the title of the post.

What was was directed at Sierra was picture of her with a noose next to her posted on meankids, and on unclebobism a digitally-altered image of her suggesting sexual violence was shown. Who actually made and posted those images remains unclear (there's no record of the meankids.org image, and posts to unclebobism aren't credited), which brings me on to...

Who was responsible. We know Paynter founded meankids.org and Locke was one of the bloggers there. We know that Locke objected to Paynter's moderation, possibly of the Maryam post, so that once meankids was closed Locke started unclebobism. Beyond those two, the only other blogger we know for sure who was on unclebobism is Paul Ritchie. Ritchie, incidently, is proud to have vandalised Kathy Sierra's Wikipedia entry. He seems to be a bit of a nobody really though.

"Joey", who blogs as the Angry Phuqe, was only involved insofar that he left a comment on the noose image post, possibly referring to the "Kat Herding" character invented by Chris Locke and Jeanene Sessum.

Alan Herrell is a tricky one. We know his image was used as the avatar for Rev Ed, but Herrell himself issued a denial of involvement.

Jeanene Sessum, the fourth person mentioned in Sierra's original post, doesn't seem to be involved at all. She has denied ever being part of unclebobism or any other group blog and no search engine cache searches have shown any kind of link between her and meankids. Pending further evidence, she's innocent.

Then we have the reactions: the "get used to its", the "outraged" (waves) and the "I've had it worse"s.

Finally we have some ideas for what should happen next. Robert Scoble calls for sexist posting to be stamped out. I've called for sexist bloggers to be ostracized. Finally, we have the Stop Cyberbulling Day tomorrow.

What happens next? Well, while Sierra has updated her blog post, she is yet to blog again. Will she? I sure hope so - bullies must not win. Scoble will also post again in a few days. What will his reaction be after silently observing the conversation for a week? And what of the people involved? Will Locke and Sessum post again? When will Paynter post about something else? And will Herrell ever return to the blogosphere?

Slashdot's take

2007-03-28T12:38:00.000+01:00

It's interesting to see what's been modded up on Slashdot regards Sierra. Largely the posts modded up the most are of "the internet is a big bad place and you need to accept that" nature.

Huh?? This behaviour is acceptable? Newsflash: it isn't.

That said, this view probably just reflects Slashdot's roots and demographic - lots of ex-Usenetters, people who have been on the web along time, few or no females.

"Joey" responds

2007-03-28T11:27:00.000+01:00

Load Kathy Sierra's original post then do a find-in-page search for Joey to see what one of the anonymous accused has to say.

Not thinking straight: Paynter is not the bad guy here

2007-03-28T10:26:00.000+01:00

In my previous post I accused Paynter of being complicit as the post attacking Maryam Scoble was made on March 16, and for some time thought Paynter didn't take meankids down until March 24. As I researched more, I realised he in fact pulled the blog on March 17 - the next day, quite possibly in reaction to the Maryam post.

But I didn't process that fully and left my call to ostracize Paynter standing. I now withdraw that statement - Paynter is one of the better guys in all this. Not the best - he is still the founder of a pretty pathetic site - but not the worst.

Chris Locke is.

My view

2007-03-27T22:59:00.000+01:00

I've already posted this in comments on Scoble's blog, and Shelley has picked up on it, so I may as well repeat here what I believe the blogosphere should do as a result of this incident. Scoble asked for opinions and here's mine.

"How about making an example of the people behind meankids and unclebobism to show that this behaviour - I’ve read the posts about Maryam and others now too in Google’s cache - is not tolerated, and blackball them.

No conference invites, no comments on their blogs, comments from them deleted onsight, no links, no dinners, no meetups, nothing. Excise them (Locke, Paynter et al.) from the commumity."

That is, zero-tolerance of abusing women online.

I should add that I made that suggestion in response to not just what was posted on meankids and unclebobism about Sierra - but also what was posted about Maryam Scoble and others too. Not death threats, which I don't believe were made by anyone on those sites, but abusive, perverted, but ultimately pointless attacks made against women in the tech industry.

Even if the two main players (Paynter and Locke) deny that they themselves made the attacks, they provided the platform and turned a blind eye until the complaints came (and in fact it looks like Locke never deleted unclebobism, Wordpress did).

That should not be tolerated. I hope this is the end of Paynter's and Locke's participation in the blogosphere.

(Update Paynter is innocent here - he did delete meankids right after the Maryam post was made.) I don't care that Paynter has since posted an apology to Sierra regarding meankids, the site he started. The post attacking Maryam Scoble was made on March 16, long before this storm broke and the apology was forced from him. Paynter clearly endorsed that post, or he would have deleted it much sooner.

You'll note that I haven't mentioned the other two "accused" - Jeneane Sessum and Allen Herrel. Sessum was not involved in Locke's unclebobism site and I'm not sure what her involvement in meankids was. All that I can tell is that she worked with Locke on the satirical Kat Herding blog.

Regards Herrel, the avatar picture used on unclebobism is Herrel's picture. Herrel did briefly appear to claim a case of ID theft before deleting his blog. That's a long way short of proof that he was involved at all - anyone can steal a picture. Hunt as since stated in the comments to a post on her blog that she has IP evidence, but I don't believe that (my response is on Hunt's site).

Paynter and Locke: what actually happened at meankids and unclebobism?

2007-03-27T14:10:00.000+01:00

Sorting out the time line behind the attacks on Kathy Sierra... (update: link now dead. Kathy didn't want that remaining as the last post on her blog.)

(NB no specific death threats were made on either site discussed here. Those were made in comments on Sierra's blog. )

First a blog called "meankids" was set up by Frank Paynter after Tara Hunt used the term to describe people attacking her in the comments of blog. Meankids was just another attack-site attempting to satire other blogs/companies - you can see a sample of their work in the google cache (don't know how long that link will be active). On this site an unnamed blogger posted an image of Kathy Sierra next to a noose. A member of the site called "Joey" then posted "the only thing Kathy has to offer me is that noose in her neck size". The same person then went on to make several sexual remarks about Sierra.

On March 17 meankids was deleted by Paynter who later stated that he "tore the site down" after a subset of the contributors - including Chris Locke - objected to him moderating their misogynistic posts. Locke replaced meankids with "unclebobism" on wordpress.com, with the same aims. This site appeared to open on March 20, when Paynter first linked to it.

Then, on March 24, a horrific photoshopped picture of Sierra was posted on unclebobism with underwear digitally superimposed over her head. Someone also posted disgusting sexual comments to the blog on a different post. Herrel's name wasn't used, but look at the avatar picture used on unclebobism - it's Herrel's picture. Locke, after being mailed by Sierra, claims he deleted unclebobism. But click this link - it seems that unclebobism was not deleted by Locke, but was taken down by Wordpress.com as a breach of their terms and conditions.

What is abundantly clear is that if the originator of the pictures and threats was not either Paynter or Locke, they know who he his.

Footnote: Painter said on March 17 "MeanKids dropped the curtain last night. The world will little note nor long remember how offensive…"

^*Herrel briefly had a post on his blog with a vague denial that he was behind the comments. A few commenters weren't particularly impressed. Herrel then deleted his entire blog.

Death threats and sexualisation are not acceptable

2007-03-27T12:13:00.000+01:00

Kathy Sierra has had death threats and other obscene things posted about her. This is, of course, totally unacceptable behaviour. The police are investigating and I look forward to the people behind these pathetic comments being arrested.

This has caused much activity in the blogosphere, as you can imagine. Robert Scoble is even stopping blogging for a week to show his support for Kathy - good for him, I totally support Robert.

Frank Paynter, who is one of the people behind the blog where the comments appear, has his say here.

Chris Locke (aka "RageBoy") also responds and explains much of the background. However Locke tries (but fails) to score points where he can. Locke even states that he "didn't think for a minute that they were "threatening", referring to the horrific picture you can see on Sierra's blog.

Reading his explanation for the "meankids" and "unclebobism" blogs he posted on which hosted the attacks on Sierra, it's clear that Chris Locke is an idiot.

Jeneane Sessum, who was also implicated, says she was never associated with "unclebobism" but that's not the accusation - Sierra says she was part of the original "meankids" site. BlogHer, who Sessum contributes to, has a post up.

BTW this pathetic behaviour is endemic in the blogosphere - I guess there are a number of men who retain incredibly sexist views. Just read the comments on TechCrunch about the Ning demo to see.

Why are comments like that ever tolerated? Why did TechCrunch not delete such purile comments on sight?

Why Apple TV will be a success

2007-03-23T12:55:00.000Z

Apple TV will work because people buy it and plug it in, and it “just works”, in the same way the iPod “just works” with iTunes. It is to watching video via the internet what the iPod is to listening to music via the Internet.

It’s a shame that Microsoft, for all the fantastic work they do, don’t get this. They did briefly license Media Center Extenders but they’ve all gone now. They *should* develop a simple WiFi box that just automagically hooks into WMP11 on _any_ computer, but of course that wouldn’t drive sales for Vista Premium...

Mind you, it would be nice if iTunes Europe had some decent content - as yet, no TV shows and no movies.

Reality check on Apollo

2007-03-21T12:07:00.000Z

Marc Canter has some good posts calling Apollo: Yet Another Closed Platform and Apollo supporters speak up, I point out that….

Particularly telling is that it seems that Adobe has done this before, yet everyone forgot it. What's different this time?

And what about Java? Java is a cross-platform runtime that lets people code a variety of apps, from a tool that analyses harddisk usage to excellet JUploadr, which allows you to load your photos onto Flickr or Zooomr from any computer, be it Linux, Windows or Mac. People knock Java for poor performance but those days have gone - go to java.com to get the latest updates, as they're much faster than before.

Apollo - and competitors such as Microsoft's consumer-confusing WPF/E - seem to be about being "rich", i.e. full of glitz and candy like 3D and shadows. To be honest, I could do without that - I'm not a fan of OSX or Aero, as they don't enhance my productivity. I'd rather have a well-written Java app than a fancy but hard to use Flash app.

Alive in the Deadpool

2007-03-20T10:26:00.000Z

TechCrunch has a "Deadpool" which lists failed web start-ups. One of the residents is FilmLoop, a product that makes Flash slideshows of still photos. TechCrunch "added" FilmLoop into the Deadpool with this post, followed up with this, on 12 February.

But a visit to FilmLoop reveals a very-much-alive service. Videos play and the homepage lists new slideshows that are only six hours old.

What gives? Maybe the servers are still running until the money for hosting runs out. But I'll be amazed if there's no sysadmins looking after it, and if your company was wound up wouldn't you pull the power and hosting plugs straight away? No, it looks to me like Filmloop is very much an ongoing concern.

FilmLoop isn't the only example, either. Browster was also declared dead by Arrington, although tellingly he says "everyone connected with the company is being so quiet about this is a little odd, given that the site is down". The site is in fact very much not dead. Browster's (rather sporadic) blog even has a post from the day after Arrington declared it dead.

Wikipedia:Attribution

2007-03-10T14:21:00.000Z

This new page combines the now-defunct pages of Verifiability and No original research. Those two pages were among the oldest of Wikipedia's policies, and along with the Neutral point of view.

The basic idea behind the merger was to clarify these core policies and make them more understandable. A very noble thing, but it came as quite a shock to me to find such sweeping changes made to such established pages.

If you're curious, here's the discussion where the new page was made "official", with the change taking place on or around 16 February.

Ostensibly the new page was to be a straight-fowards merger of the two original pages, but that's not the case - there have been over 1,100 edits to the page since the merge was made.

Wikipedia's policies

2007-03-10T12:40:00.001Z

I've long thought that Wikipedia's policies and guidelines should reflect the consensus of the people who are creating the content. But the reality is that most of the vast array of wikilaw (around 42 different policies) is an attempt to force top-down changes onto the community, even though I doubt that even a tiny portion of contributors have ever read any of them. Personally I never did - I just looked at how existing articles were written, and copied that style.

On Wikinews we have a far smaller set of rules. It could be argued that that's because we're a far smaller community but I don't think that's the case. We simply decided - all of us - that to produce accurate, timely articles everything has to be sourced in a uniform style, no exceptions. Combine that with the universal Wikimedia Neutral Point of View (i.e. all sides presented fairly) and we didn't really need anything more.

That's the joy of Wikinews - the site is still all about the content, unlike Wikipedia which has kind of split into two - everyone who writes and edits articles, and then a subset of editors who write and edit wikilaw (and then wikilawyer over it). I note that there's often little cross-over between the two camps - contributors either work with the articles or the wikilaw.

Which is the most useful group? Well as I said very little of the wikilaw is ever looked at or used, i.e. it doesn't contribute to building an encyclopedia. There's your answer.

Bloggers fact-checkers journalists

2007-03-08T21:04:00.000Z

One of the things I used to write about a lot on this blog was journalism and Wikinews, to which I used to be an active contributor.

One of the main hopes I had for the site - still do, in fact - is that it can avoid the mistakes that media falls into so readily. A good example is the case of the Lebanese ambulance. At the time, all the media fell for what later turned out to be a hoax; Wikinews gives anyone the chance to present news without making mistakes like that.

As it is though it does look like a new phenomenon is beginning - bloggers fact-checking the media. Although it would probably help if they weren't so desperately wordy and drawn out as the Zombietime piece is, although taking 1,000 words when 100 would do seems to be a common failing for a lot of bloggers - the price of life without an editor, I guess.

Live Local update

2007-03-08T15:04:00.000Z

It turns out that the issue is that Microsoft has started blocking Opera from viewing the site, even though it used to be just fine in Opera.

Why do companies do this? Google is equally guilty, blocking access to Docs & Sheets. Yet Opera is the most standards-compliants browsers around, passing the Acid2 test, and also has the fastest Javascript engine.

In fact, Opera users can often gain access to "blocked" sites by changing the browser's ID from Opera to something else (say, Firefox). In this case though doing that still doesn't gain access to Live Local.

Virtual Ubiquity: cheeky

2007-03-01T14:27:00.000Z

There's a new start-up (currently vapour-ware) claiming it will be offering the first "real" word processor for the web. I guess Zoho and Google Docs & Sheets are just imaginary. Worse, Virtual Ubiquity are far from first: they were beaten by ThinkFree, who first released their Java-based office suite quite a few years ago.

Another objective look at Vista

2007-03-01T14:15:00.000Z

If you only read Slashdot, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Vista is some defective-by-design DRM infested white elephant that will either drive you insane or into the waiting arms of OSX. Only, that's not Vista is. At all.

Here's a nice review of more than a year and half of using Vista betas and now the final release. It's not terribly sensationalist but is probably somewhat closer to the truth than the mad ravings on some other sites.

A few bottom lines about Vista:
*Vista looks a lot like XP with a few improvements to the user interface. Bear in mind that Microsoft spend many millions on interface research (witness the breakthrough that is Office 2007) - despite what many Mac-fans say, the Vista interface is very good.
*Aero off-loads drawing the screen from the CPU to the GPU, so performance actually improves.
*It is secure. It's been out in final for more than a month and beta for more than a year, and you can bet *every* malware author on the globe has been trying to break it. They've failed.
*Yes it has DRM, no it does not cripple the system. No user will ever notice it if they stay within the bounds of the law (every heard an iPod/iTunes user complain about DRM?).
*All that said, it's probably not worth upgrading. XP SP2 is rock-solid and secure itself. Wait until you buy a new computer to get Vista.

Why I don't shop online

2007-02-28T10:40:00.000Z

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.

What happened to local.live.com?

2007-02-27T22:42:00.000Z

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?

Global incident map

2007-02-23T10:47:00.000Z

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.

The most stupid security check on the web

2007-02-22T11:19:00.000Z

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?

IMDb gets a make-over - no more anti-marketing design?

2007-02-20T12:22:00.000Z

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.

"Old" vs "New" media

2007-02-17T11:09:00.000Z

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!

US State Department "Myth Busters" site

2007-02-14T17:54:00.000Z

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.

Barack Obama embracing the internet

2007-02-12T21:22:00.000Z

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.

musikCube final finally released

2007-02-12T19:12:00.000Z

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.

Florence Devouard's quote and bloggers

2007-02-11T09:11:00.000Z

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".

An honest appraisal of Vista vs. OSX

2007-02-10T23:00:00.000Z

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.

Guess who provides the best anti-virus software (and for free)

2007-02-10T22:48:00.000Z

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!

Wikipedia short of money? No

2007-02-10T14:36:00.000Z

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!

Good Slashdot comments

2007-02-08T17:53:00.000Z

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.

Opera users: tied of being second-class citizens when it comes to Google?

2007-02-02T20:45:00.000Z

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.

Arrington does a Sethi in launching TechCrunch20

2007-02-02T10:55:00.000Z

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.

OLPC - waste of time and money

2007-02-01T16:04:00.000Z

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.

Revisiting Zoho

2007-02-01T15:56:00.000Z

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.

Trying out Google Reader

2007-02-01T13:24:00.000Z

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.

The truth about Vista DRM

2007-01-29T09:33:00.000Z

A few months ago a "paper, "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection", written by Pat Gutmann in New Zealand, began circulating on the internet. It made all sorts of claims about the DRM system used by Microsoft Vista, such as that playing protected content would then degrade all content displayed on the computer, even things like images, even images (for example) from medical scanners.

This seemed to be very well referenced, but heavily spun against Microsoft, and borderline FUD. I couldn't believe it to be true - it were, it was commercial suicide for Microsoft, and they don't do things like that.

I was waiting for a rebuttal from Microsoft and now here it is. Yes, it is true that unless you use a video card and monitor that both support HDCP, you will not get full HD quality playback for HD video. But why would someone want to use their computer to watch HD material? Are people really going to begin plugging their PCs into their large screen HDTVs? No, no more than people already do the same to watch DVDs - they buy cheap stand-alone players. If you do want to watch HD content on your PC, then you know what to do - use HDCP compliant equipment.

Other than that Gutmann's article is plain wrong - read the Vista blog post to see why.

Electronic paper

2007-01-05T14:00:00.000Z

Electronic paper is going into production (well, plants to produce it are being built). This is exciting
stuff - it's as easy and comfortable to read as paper, yet can update like a screen.

Just imagine that all the world's books were online (maybe they will be one day if Google Books
continues to make progress), and you could download any of it onto a wireless paper screen you could carry in your pocket.

Microsoft's big year

2007-01-05T13:56:00.000Z

I have to admit I find what Microsoft is doing right now is exciting (apart from the failure of the
Zune). IE7 is being widely adopted and is ushering in new functionality most internet users have
never encountered before, in particular tabs and RSS.

Office 2007 is a revolution and will make millions of people's lives a lot easier! I cannot recommend
it enough. It's great to see such a large company being such an innovator.

Finally Vista promises rock solid safety and security. As it becomes more common, I think we'll
see less and less malware and botnet problems. It's a pity it's High Definition playback is crippled,
but who would ever connect a computer to their big HDTV?

How things change: Firefox gets single-window mode

2006-10-27T11:59:00.000+01:00

Recent builds of Firefox - starting with 1.5, I believe, although it's taken until Firefox 2 for it to work properly - have had the option of opening all links in new tabs, instead of new windows.

I've managed to find the what I believe is the first time this was suggested on Mozilla forums, from late 2002. Note how "asa" (Asa Dotzler, a main Firefox player) rubbishes the idea part-way down the post. This same argument was trotted out many times over the years, and only recently has Firefox moved to Opera's single-window model.

Yes, Opera, the browser Asa hates so much!

Signal vs. Noise made me laugh

2006-10-12T23:29:00.000+01:00

The 37signals folks have written themselves a new blogging system, and by all accounts it's lightning fast compared to their old Moveable Type solution.

What's the funny bit? "We decided not to copy over all the old posts to the new system.". Yes, their new system is straining over the colossal load of approximately six, that's six, posts. All the hundreds of old posts and thousands of comments have been dumped to static HTML.

You know what, I reckon MT would be quite fast too if you deleted the database and started again.

Carbonite free trial

2006-10-06T12:35:00.000+01:00

Carbonite, the easy-to-use online back-up system I highly recommend, is running a 15-day free trial.

It's quite cunning - it will probably take that time to upload all your data. By which time, Carbonite clearly hope you'll just sign up to the $5/month service to keep your data safe.

The nasty side of Youtube

2006-10-02T19:47:00.000+01:00

Take a look at this great home-made video of Anousheh Ansari arriving at the ISS a little over a week ago (home-made, as in someone used a camcorder to record NASA TV playing in Real Player on their computer!).

Good, isn't it?

But then read the comments - they're pathetic! The spam is one thing but some of the posts are degrading and pathetic. I wish you could simply turn off comments on Youtube - there are a lot of sad people on there.

Digg vs. Slashdot

2006-10-01T10:45:00.000+01:00

For a long while I was a Digg reader (or rather, subscriber to their RSS feed). However recently I've deleted Digg from Bloglines and added Slashdot to replace it. Why?

The comments. For reasons I don't know, Digg tends to have very short comments, with little in them. Their javascript-heavy comments system takes a long time to render, even using Opera with its class-leading javascript engine. And if you set the comments to only show, say, +5 comments to cut out the dross, you still get a long list of titles of <5 point comments to scroll through. Finally, there seems to be a bug in their system so that, even as a logged-in user, it keeps forgetting what comment threshold I've set.

Slashdot is a breath of fresh air. After joining, I've set the comments to display in flat mode (easy to read), oldest first, with a threshold of 4 (out of a possible 5). This gives me a ready source of informed and intelligent reaction to the original story. I don't need to go searching through blogs, usually every side is well-covered on Slashdot already!

Slashdot comments also tend to be much longer and much more in-depth than the brief throw-away shots Digg seems to engender. Digg also has more visitors, and I think as a consequence has more "junk" comments (every story seems to start with a lame comment dug to -100 followed by several "that's so lame" posts dugg to 20...).

Slashdot has a tradition of more informed commentary and with a flat (or even shrinking) userbase, that tradition looks set to stay.

Picasa 2.5: crippled

2006-09-30T16:20:00.000+01:00

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.

A nice little touch of AJAX for Bloglines

2006-09-30T14:58:00.000+01:00

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.

Watching iTunes movies

2006-09-30T00:22:00.000+01:00

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 a new board member - and there's a twist in the tale...

2006-09-26T10:08:00.000+01:00

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.

The rising power of video

2006-09-25T22:47:00.000+01:00

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.

Notes and news round-up

2006-09-22T22:40:00.000+01:00

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.

Oh, that kind of pile!

2006-09-22T13:02:00.000+01:00

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

Are both the BBC and Jupiter Research daft?

2006-09-20T08:04:00.000+01:00

"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.

Want to know what's happening in Thailand?

2006-09-19T21:44:00.000+01:00

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

Online back-up matures

2006-09-18T19:37:00.000+01:00

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 :-).

Video blogging

2006-09-18T10:52:00.000+01:00

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.

Rob Levin, aka "Lilo", killed by motorist

2006-09-17T09:02:00.000+01:00

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.

More on Widescreen and HDTV

2006-09-15T09:47:00.000+01:00

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

About HDTV, widescreen, and iTunes movies

2006-09-14T21:52:00.000+01:00

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!

Will iTunes movies be a success?

2006-09-13T23:41:00.000+01:00

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.

Watch Steve Jobs "It's Showtime" presentation

2006-09-13T22:47:00.000+01:00

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

Reflecting on iTunes 7 and the "iTV"

2006-09-13T14:20:00.000+01:00

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.

This is cool

2006-09-12T23:48:00.000+01:00

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

Apple Showtime: place your bets!

2006-09-12T11:03:00.000+01:00

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.

Online DVD rental's dirty little secret

2006-09-11T22:28:00.000+01:00

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.

A last word on Facebook

2006-09-08T23:26:00.000+01:00

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.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg responds

2006-09-08T11:15:00.000+01:00

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

Do you like the new Facebook features?

2006-09-06T23:23:00.000+01:00

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.

The Facebook news feeds uproar

2006-09-06T19:32:00.000+01:00

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...

So true

2006-09-06T15:22:00.000+01:00

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!

What I actually like about Opera

2006-09-05T11:21:00.000+01:00

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: Staking the company on "free energy"!

2006-09-02T10:22:00.000+01:00

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.

TechCrunch UK off to a good start: plagiarising already

2006-09-02T09:36:00.000+01:00

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 creeps towards Opera's level of functionality

2006-09-01T10:19:00.000+01:00

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.

The disappointment of Zoho

2006-08-30T21:32:00.000+01:00

Microsoft Office is a suite. So is OpenOffice.org. The advantage is that once you have mastered the basics in one app - say printing, saving, spell-checking etc. - you find that the same methods work in all the other apps in the suite. The same buttons, icons, dialogue boxes and interactions. It's a great time saver and means you can feel right at home with powerful software quickly.

Zoho provide almost a complete online office suite - wordprocessor, spreadsheet, presentations, database - the main guys are there. However in using them I was very disappointed to find that each program had a *totally* different look-and-feel to them - they were, in effect, four entirely separate applications. They in no way felt part of a suite, and do not have any of the advantages outlined above.

I suspect Zoho managed to generate so much software in such little time by having separate groups working on the projects in effective isolation - little or no co-ordination on such matters as the GUI. I sincerely hope Zoho overcome this and work to unify their offerings - if they do, they will have a killer on their hands.

For a good review of Zoho's suite, click here.

Goodbye Flickr, hello Picasaweb!

2006-08-30T08:32:00.000+01:00

Yep, I've changed my mind again. I was with Flickr, but now I'm uploading my pictures to Picasaweb. Why the change? Let me take you through it.

I originally chose Flickr due to its maturity, features and aesthetic design compared to competitors. (I still think Zooomr is ugly). After that, I uploaded over 1,000 pictures to the site.

But Flickr has its downsides too: first, it's very slow to load. Pages take a while to appear from links, and photos load even slower. Second, the pictures are small. Flickr must have big bandwidth costs, and no doubt as a result of that the standard image size is rather small.

Since I made my decision to go with Flickr, Picasaweb was launched. I initially ignored it as I was quite happy with Flickr. However one day I was reading Jeremy Zawodny's blog and upon clicking on some pictures, was suprised to see that they were hosted on Picasaweb. (Suprised as Picasaweb is a Google product, and Jeremy works for Flickr's parent, Yahoo!.) Several things struck me at once: how fast the pages and pictures loaded, how much less distracting clutter there was around the pictures, and how large the images were. This made me want to investigate further.

Picasaweb utilises a new version of the Picasa photo-organising software, which I swear by. It's pretty much the perfect way to store, manage and view your digital photographs. Picasaweb's intergration within Picasa is simplicity itself - you select the images you want to publish to the web, click the new "Web album" button, select a few options (album name, privacy controls, image size etc.), and hit "upload". That's it!

Compare that to what I had to do to get my pictures form Picasa to Flickr: I had to select the pictures I wanted, "Export" them to a seperate folder on my desktop, launch the Flickr Uploadr, open the folder, select all and drag them into the Uploadr (usually having to resize the windows so I could see both at the same time), then add the tags etc. and finally upload the pictures!

Even the current limit of 250Mb of pictures (compared to the 6Gb I have with my $25 Flickr Pro account) is not a big problem. In fact it might even be a plus. I had a tendancy to upload a lot of images to Flickr (as said, over 1,000 since April!) and truth be told a lot of them were rather mediocre. Picasaweb forces me to pick only the best shots to conserve space. (I save more space by limiting uploaded images to 1024px - why do you need more on the web? I back-up my pictures seperately.).

In fact, a years worth of carefully-chosen images has only taken only a little over 50Mb of my quota - so I could, in effect, go for some four years before needing to upgrade my account :-).

The one big thing I miss from Flickr is the embeddable Flash slideshow, which showed the latest 60 pictures you'd uploaded. It was quite nice to have that on my personal blog - and I'd seen people viewing it with interest - and I've had to replace it with little more than a big link to my Picasaweb page. That said, losing the slideshow let me undertake a much-needed redesign of the site :-).

So there you have it. Picasaweb is much easier to use, and better to view, than any of its competition. If you're looking for a way to publish your photographs online, I highly recommend checking it out.

Oi, Amazon, upgrade our site too!

2006-08-30T08:16:00.000+01:00

Amazon.com has a lovely (if "web 2.0") design. I can't say if it's a new design as, being a Briton, I don't visit very often. But it is a good-looking and very usable design.

However amazon.co.uk is still stuck with the old million-of-tabs design. It's ugly, and not as nice a place to browse as amazon.com. I hope we get upgraded some time, and soon, preferably!

Why Office 2007 will rule the roost

2006-08-27T17:30:00.000+01:00

This blog post from an MS Office developer explains how they used human-computer interface theory to design the best possible GUI for Office 2007 (and having used the beta, I say they achieved it).

It goes to show just how far behind all "web apps" aiming to replace tge desktop-based Office suite will find themselves in a year. Many more features, yet much easier to use.

The bizarre tale of "GuillameB" and TechCrunch France

2006-08-25T13:58:00.000+01:00

This is a strange one: someone who claimed to have been "working" for TechCrunch France has "quit" after not getting paid for his work. Except that he seemed to make the job for himself:

This appears to be what happened:

1. Guillaume was asked by Ouriel (the real editor of TCF) to cover for him while he was away.
2. Guillaume is asked by Ouriel to TCF work for translating articles written by Arrington and co. on TechCrunch, but doesn't bother with such little details as finding out what he's going to be paid.
3. Guillaume wait for the paycheck to arrive.
4. It doesn't. Guillaume "leaves".
5. Guillame attacks the main TechCrunch staff, who haven't even heard of him before.

What did you expect exactly, Guillaume? That after volunteering your services you would magically start getting paid without even asking if your help was needed or wanted, or would be renumerated?! The world certainly doesn't work like that!

TechCrunch would make a good soap opera...

TechCrunch getting yet another redesign

2006-08-25T12:31:00.000+01:00

TechCrunch is getting yet another redesign (see note at the bottom of the story). The new design will the one already used on CrunchGear and the new TechCrunch UK, produced by Thissideup, UK design firm.

This is the redesign that has been on the cards as soon as the last make-over was completed. Jeremy Baines (the man behind Thissideup) e-mailed Arrington with some notes, which Arrington then crassly said he would use. This rather under-mined TechCrunch's then contracted designer, Rachel Cuncliffe, who promptly resigned. Michael - rightfully - received a lot stick over his behaviour.

So it's not suprising that Baines has now redesigned all the Crunch offerings. Only problem is, the new designs aren't very good.

The Cuncliffe design features a neat and highly useable menu bar across the top of the page containing all the links you really need (and, equally-importantly, no more). It also contains a neat subscribe-by-email box, and a Feedburner circulation chicklet. This leaves lots of room for the panel of Federated Media adverts straight underneath, next to the main content.

The new design, however, junks all this. The menu bar is still there but has only three links, leaving the rest of the bar (which still reaches across the whole site) as wasted empty space. The About, e-mail subscribe and RSS subscribe links are instead replaced with large clunky boxes in the right-hand side bar (where the FM ads used to be). Advertising is instead restricted to a narrow column of Google Ads, noisly sandwhiched between main content and the info boxes.

The main criticism of Rachel's design was the strong green colour. As I said when I wrote about the May redesign, it may have been "in your face" but it was certainly memorable, which is what you want! It seems that Arrington is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as the new design is much inferior in terms of useability and user experience.

Furthermore, I've already come across a lot of Cuncliffe's and Baines's work "in the wild", and I must say I've universally preferred sites designed by Cuncliffe.

MyKin's road trip saga

2006-08-23T13:13:00.000+01:00

The founders of family social-networking website MyKin have been keeping a blog of their roadtrip in a VW bus to promote their site. Sadly, their trip came to an abrupt end when their bus burned out on the way to Oregon. The blog, however, makes a great read!