As an experiment I’ve switched from using NetNewsWire as my RSS reader to Shrook.
First impressions: it’s slick, quick and nicely designed. It also has a neat synchronisation feature which enables you to keep details of your feed subscriptions on a central server and then sync from other computers. Useful if you use more than one machine to read stuff.
… is the headline on this morning’s Observer column. It’s a sub-editor’s nod to the Grateful Dead, who once recorded the song I fought the law, and the law won.
After a small bout of legal wrangling, Yahoo removed the auctions – once its executives remembered they possessed substantial assets physically located in France.
Spool forward two years, and we find the same company – once a flag carrier for internet freedom – metamorphosing into an obsequious accessory to Chinese political repression. In 2002, Yahoo signed a document entitled ‘Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry’ in which it promised to ‘inspect and monitor the information of domestic and foreign websites’ and ‘refuse access to those websites that disseminate harmful information to protect the internet users of China from the adverse influences of the information’. Since then Microsoft, Cisco and Google have trodden the same grisly path.
Yahoo’s breakneck transformation from libertarian bratpacker to authorised agent of thought control is the salutary tale with which Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu open their book, Who Controls the Internet? (just out from Oxford University Press). Both authors are academic lawyers, and Goldsmith has for years been challenging the myth of internet ungovernability. Now he and his co-author have laid out a persuasive case for this scepticism…
Very thoughtful essay on the software tools people need to escape the ‘data smog’ that envelops most/many modern organisations. The nub is that:
Today, many knowledge workers feel overloaded because they are forced to react to a constant stream of email, phone calls and instant messages. Email, the phone and instant messaging have one thing in common – they are all push work flows. In other words, they interrupt what you are doing. Theoretically, people can ignore all three, but generally, socially, it is difficult to get away with ignoring all three when you are at the office.
That sums up my own experience. Institutional email has become dysfunctional. In my university department, for example, a conscientious person who read, reflected on, and replied to every email addressed to him or her could easily spend the entire working day doing email rather than reading, thinking, teaching or researching. This is nuts. And my personal strategy for coping — which is to ignore most of the email flow — is unfair to my more conscientious colleagues, who sometimes really do need me to pay attention to something they’ve sent. In other words, the strategy works — for me — but is anti-social.
We have to find or develop IT tools that help rather than swamp us. The key idea — encompassed in the quote above — is to step back from push technology and use pull technology which brings stuff we need or regard as important to our attention. The RSS feed is a metaphor for what I have in mind. I need to spend some time thinking about all this (which means that even more departmental emails will go unread).
Hilarious report on BBC Online. Interesting (and significant) sting in the tail:
Prime Minister Phan Van Khai and President Tran Duc Luong had earlier taken time away from the ruling Communist Party National Congress, the most important event on the political calendar, to meet Mr Gates.
Under an agreement signed Saturday, Vietnam’s Finance Ministry became the country’s first government office to use completely licensed Microsoft software.
A statement said the agreement “reaffirms the government’s commitment in copyright protection as the country integrates into the international community”, Reuters reports.
This is significant because it shows that Microsoft is making headway in stopping people pirating its software in the Far East. So the moment when that part of the world begins to realise the true costs of running proprietary software comes nearer. And I think that is good news for those of us who are working to provide a cheaper, more affordable and sustainable alternative.
Neat, isn’t it. Details here.
Oh and here’s how to install a minimalist version of Linux on a flash drive.
Digg.com has had a lot of adulatory coverage in the last few months, with people hailing it as the New Slashdot. Only it was supposed to be better because Slashdot has a group of editors who wield arbitrary power — in that they decide what gets featured and what doesn’t. Digg.com, in contrast, supposedly operated on a totally impartial principle — the position of an individual posting was determined solely by the votes (diggs) of readers.
So far, so interesting. But then an observant chap at ForeverGeek noticed some funny business which suggested that Digg’s editors were apparently moving postings up the list. He posted news of this discovery on his Blog, only to discover shortly afterwards that the blog was now barred from Digg.com.
Curiouser and curiouser. Here’s his account of the whole murky business.
As usual, power corrupts.
Latest research report from the Pew Internet Survey.
The internet has become increasingly important to users in their everyday lives. The proportion of Americans online on a typical day grew from 36% of the entire adult population in January 2002 to 44% in December 2005. The number of adults who said they logged on at least once a day from home rose from 27% of American adults in January 2002 to 35% in late 2005.
And for many of those users, the internet has become a crucial source of information – surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project show that fully 45% of internet users, or about 60 million Americans, say that the internet helped them make big decisions or negotiate their way through major episodes in their lives in the previous two years.
To explore this phenomenon, we fielded the Major Moments Survey in March 2005 that repeated elements of an earlier January 2002 survey. Comparison of the two surveys revealed striking increases in the number of Americans who report that the internet played a crucial or important role in various aspects of their lives. Specifically, we found that over the three-year period, internet use grew by:
54% in the number of adults who said the internet played a major role as they helped another person cope with a major illness. 40% among those who said the internet played a major role as they coped themselves with a major illness. 50% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they pursued more training for their careers. 45% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they made major investment or financial decisions. 43% in the number who said the internet played a major role when they looked for a new place to live. 42% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they decided about a school or a college for themselves or their children. 23% in the number who said the internet played a major role when they bought a car. 14% in the number who said the internet played a major role as they switched jobs.
From Jakob Neilsen’s Alertbox) newsletter…
F for fast. That’s how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.
In our new eyetracking study, we recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. We found that users’ main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:
Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.
Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.
Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.
Obviously, users’ scan patterns are not always comprised of exactly three parts. Sometimes users will read across a third part of the content, making the pattern look more like an E than an F. Other times they’ll only read across once, making the pattern look like a rotated L (with the crossbar at the top). Generally, however, reading patterns roughly resemble an F, though the distance between the top and lower bar varies…
What happens when communications costs approach zero. From today’s New York Times…
“Would you like your Coke and orange juice medium or large?” Ms. Vargas said into her headset to an unseen woman who was ordering breakfast from a drive-through line. She did not neglect the small details —”You Must Ask for Condiments,” a sign next to her computer terminal instructs — and wished the woman a wonderful day.
What made the $12.08 transaction remarkable was that the customer was not just outside Ms. Vargas’s workplace here on California’s central coast. She was at a McDonald’s in Honolulu. And within a two-minute span Ms. Vargas had also taken orders from drive-through windows in Gulfport, Miss., and Gillette, Wyo.
Ms. Vargas works not in a restaurant but in a busy call center in this town, 150 miles from Los Angeles. She and as many as 35 others take orders remotely from 40 McDonald’s outlets around the country. The orders are then sent back to the restaurants by Internet, to be filled a few yards from where they were placed.
The people behind this setup expect it to save just a few seconds on each order. But that can add up to extra sales over the course of a busy day at the drive-through. …
… for a new spasm of demands from clueless politicians for the Internet to be banned/censored/controlled. The reason? Today’s Observer has a report about the 7/7/ London tube/bus bombings which claims that:
A Whitehall source said: ‘The London attacks were a modest, simple affair by four seemingly normal men using the internet’.
The funny thing is that no politician ever calls for the telephone network to be banned, despite the very good evidence that it is used for drug dealing, terrorism and many other nefarious activities…