Skype stats
Skype, the free VoIP service, seems to be spreading like wildfire. These statistics come from Kevin Werbach’s Blog:
* 13M+ users registered
* 1M+ simultaneous users reached for the first time a couple of weeks ago
* almost 2.4 billion minutes. Just to put things in perspective: Vonage has 170,000 customers and passed the billion minutes mark sometime in 2004
* 295,000 users have signed for SkypeOut (Skype has a goal of 5% conversion from the free service to SkypeOut)
What we’re up against
I’ve been trying to forget about the US election result on the grounds that we have to live with it and move on. But then, while clearing out some old newspapers and magazines this morning, I came on Andrew O’Hagan’s wonderful report from the Republican Convention in the London Review of Books. Here’s the passage that really depressed me:
“A certain mica sparkled through the atmosphere of the Republican National Convention: it was the notion that a lack of patriotism was the enemy of democracy, that a love of nuance was a brand of elitism, and that being proud of your country was the only strength that mattered in foreign relations. In this same atmosphere – pungent with intolerance – the notion prevails that foreigners hate America not for its actions but for its values, its ‘way of life’. When people speak of American imperialism this is what they more often mean: not the corrupting, internecine dealings of Halliburton and the Carlyle Group, the cronyist, Saudi-protecting demeanour of the Texas oil barons, shocking though all that is, but the everyday self-certainty that makes America a fighting force against other cultures and ways of life. The delegates have breathed a lot of this stuff into their lungs in recent years, but they wanted more. ‘The Muslims just hate us for our love of freedom,’ said a woman from Iowa wearing a cloth elephant on her head. ‘They don’t have any culture and they hate us for having a great one. And they hate the Bible.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘The Iraqis had a culture for thousands of years before Jesus was born.’
‘What you saying?’
‘I’m saying Muslims were building temples when New York was a swamp.’
‘You support the Iraqis?’
‘No.’
‘You support the killing of innocent people going to work? People who have to jump out of windows?’
‘You aren’t listening to me.’
‘No, buddy. You ain’t listening. These people you support are trying to kill our children in their beds. Where you from anyway, the New York Times?'”
Noam Chomsky
This is a thumbnail of a lovely recent portrait by Sam Javanrouh. You can see the full-size version here.
‘Blog’ picked as word of the year
The BBC reports that “the term ‘blog’ has been chosen as the top word of 2004 by a US dictionary publisher. Merriam-Webster said ‘blog’ headed the list of most looked-up terms on its site during the last twelve months.”
How to say ‘No’ politely
I get sent a lot of email attachments — many of them in Microsoft Word format. I’ve been wondering for some time how to tell my correspondents that this is unacceptable to me (I am, after all, one of the founders of Living without Microsoft!), and have finally got round to drafting a piece of boilerplate text that I can send back. My starting point was a web page written by Richard Stallman which contains some draft text. It didn’t seem exactly appropriate, so I modified it a bit to read like this:
Thanks for writing. However the attachment to your message is in Microsoft Word format, a secret proprietary format that I avoid whenever possible. If you send me plain text, rtf, HTML, or PDF, then I will read it.
Distributing documents in Word (or Excel) format could be bad for your correspondents because they can carry viruses (see http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/macro.html). Sending Word attachments could be bad for you, because a Word document normally includes hidden information about the author, enabling those in the know to pry into his or her activities. For example, text that you think you deleted may still be embarrassingly present. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3154479.stm for a celebrated instance of this.
But above all, sending people Word documents puts pressure on them to use Microsoft software and helps to deny them any other choice. In effect, you become a buttress of the Microsoft monopoly and reduce the incentive for people to explore alternatives. Can I respectfully ask that you reconsider the use of Word format for communication with other people?
The trick is to be polite while being firm, and to avoid being sanctimonious. The aim is to make people think, not to put their backs up. I’m not convinced that this draft manages that. Hmmm…