From Slieve League in Donegal, looking towards the Sligo mountains on a glorious February day.
Why are governments so bad at IT?
The Economist has an interesting survey section on this.
Why is government unable to reap the same benefits as business, which uses technology to lower costs, please customers and raise profits? The three main reasons are lack of competitive pressure, a tendency to reinvent the wheel and a focus on technology rather than organisation.
Governments have few direct rivals. Amazon.com must outdo other online booksellers to win readers’ money. Google must beat Yahoo!. Unless every inch of such companies’ websites offers stellar clarity and convenience, customers go elsewhere. But if your country’s tax-collection online offering is slow, clunky or just plain dull, then tough. When Britain’s Inland Revenue website crashed on January 31st—the busiest day of its year—the authorities grudgingly gave taxpayers one day’s grace before imposing penalties. They did not offer the chance to pay tax in Sweden instead…
Internet 2 reinvents phone network
From Technology Review
Internet2, a nonprofit advanced networking consortium in the United States, is designing a new network intended to open up large amounts of dedicated bandwidth as needed. For example, a researcher wanting to test telesurgery technologies–for which a smooth, reliable Internet connection is essential–might use the network to temporarily create a dedicated path for the experiment. Called the dynamic circuit network, its immediate applications are academic, but its underlying technologies could one day filter into the commercial Internet, and it could be used, for example, to carry high-definition video to consumers…
This might be interesting as an academic experiment, but it’s nonsense on stilts in the context of the commercial internet. You cam imagine Hollywood and the multimedia companies slavering at the prospect of ‘premium’ Internet service “with a direct connection from our studios to your home”.
Google hijacks Error 404
Google has released a new version of its browser toolbar designed to hijack 404 error pages. It was spotted by a blog known as Seoker.com.
As Google put it, when you use its new toolbar, “You’ll get suggestions instead of error pages: If you mistype a URL or a page is down, now the Toolbar will give you that familiar ‘Did you mean’ with alternatives, like when you do a Google search.”
In other words, if you key in a web address and the server you’re visiting can’t find that address, the toolbar will, in many cases, ignore the 404 error page returned by the server, displaying one supplied by Google instead. This Googlicious error page will give you alternative urls, but it also includes a Googlicious logo and a Googlicious search box.
Plus, as Seoker.com points out, the search box is pre-packed with words from the url you keyed in. So Google has yet another means of tracking your behavior.
Of course, Google doesn’t see the irony here. With his own blog post, Google search guru Matt Cutts said that if toolbar users and webmasters don’t like this, they can do something about it.
The only problem is that webmasters generally won’t know anything about it because they won’t know it’s happening.
From The Register.
Untruth of the day
“For years, ISPs have built a business on other people’s music. “
Geoff Taylor, Chief Executive of the quaintly-named British Phonographic Industry, commenting on reports that the government proposes to legislate to force ISPs to monitor content flowing through their servers.
Brown & Co swallow copyright thugs’ line
From Times Online…
People who illegally download films and music will be cut off from the internet under new legislative proposals to be unveiled next week.
Internet service providers (ISPs) will be legally required to take action against users who access pirated material, The Times has learnt…
If you wanted a case study in the naivete of British politicians, then this is it. One expected nothing more of the Brown government (which still thinks that Microsoft is cutting edge), but the Cameroonians seem to have bought the RIAA line too. At any rate, here’s what the Times report says.
Ed Vaizey, the Shadow Arts Minister, said: “David Cameron called on the internet providers to address this issue last summer. The credibility of the Government’s latest threat is undermined by the fact that ministers have spent so many years dithering on whether to legislate.”
How Google got its logo
Nice design story.
eBay overhauls its feedback system
From Nicholas Carr’s Blog…
EBay has been struggling for some time with growing discontent among its members, and it has rolled out a series of new controls and regulations to try to stem the erosion of trust in its market. At the end of last month, it announced sweeping changes to its feedback system, setting up more “non-public” communication channels and, most dramatically, curtailing the ability of sellers to leave negative feedback on buyers. It turns out that feedback ratings were being used as weapons to deter buyers from leaving negative feedback about sellers…
This is an intriguing — and sobering — moment.
BlackBerry rage
From Technology Review…
Research in Motion Ltd. said customers in the United States and Canada ”experienced intermittent delays” for about three hours Monday beginning about 3:30 p.m. EST. RIM said no messages were lost, and voice and text messaging services were unaffected.
”It is too early to determine root cause at this time, but RIM does have a team addressing this issue in order to define the problem and prevent it in the future,” the company said in a statement.
The BlackBerry service, which lets users check e-mail and access other data, has become a lifeline for many business executives and is increasingly popular among consumers with smart phones like the BlackBerry Pearl.
Outages have been rare in the BlackBerry’s nine-year history, but when they do hit, subscribers who have become addicted to the gadgets are quick to unleash their fury.
”I’m mad — it’s enough already,” said a frustrated Stuart Gold, who said he gets 1,000 e-mails a day as director of field marketing for Web analytics company Omniture Inc.
Gold, who worked most of Monday on a laptop while traveling, plans to ask his company to buy him a backup smart phone from a rival like Palm Inc., which makes the Treo, in case BlackBerry service goes on the blink again.
”I don’t know what happened, I don’t care what happened. They need to save their excuses for someone who cares,” Gold said…
Solipsism
Robert Scoble visited Switzerland and insisted on telling us about it thus:
What was really fun was having raclette cheese dinner with famous author Bruce Sterling. Of course I intruded on the dinner with my cell phone camera. It’s a 40 minute video, where Laurent and Pierre explain raclette. What’s really interesting is that we had people all over the world who were watching us live. At about 9:30 we sit down with Bruce Sterling, famous science fiction author.
It doesn’t get interesting until about 13 minutes when Bruce tells us the difference between a blogger and a novelist.
At 20 minutes in we discover that Yahoo has rejected Microsoft’s bid so you hear our initial opinions…
Wow! “Famous author Bruce Sterling”, eh? What really struck me was the confident way Scoble thinks that his admiring public would be willing to sit through 13 minutes of aimless chat to get to what he regards as a really interesting bit. Who does he think we are? And, more importantly, who does he think he is?
James Cridland wasn’t impressed, either.
What all this reminds me of is what the Nobel laureate, Herbert Simon, said to a journalist who asked him what newspapers he read. “None”, said Herb, before going on to explain that at his age time was precious and he wasn’t going to waste it on reading stuff to which people hadn’t devoted much time or thought.