Archive for April, 2006
Web 2.0: exploitation 2.0?
There’s an interesting post at Publishing 2.0 about the business models surrounding Web 2.0 and in particular, the hype over user-generated content.
This reminds me of a comment that another of my favorite cynics, Seth Finklestein, deposited on my post about “user-generated content”:
For “User-generated content”, I’m partial to the term “Unpaid freelancers”. The latter seems to capture what many people really mean when they say the former.
Sleep demolition
My wife was rudely awoken at 4am this morning as, stark bollock naked, I wrenched a very large and very heavy mirror from the wall. She asked what I was doing and I apparently answered, in a very pissed-off manner, “I’m taking this off the wall”. Mirror removed and two large holes in the plasterwork later, I announced with some satisfaction, “I’ve taken it off the wall”. At which point I went back to bed.
I’ve no recollection of this, because I was fast asleep at the time.
It seems I’m an occasional sleepwalker, so for example a few months back my wife woke up to find me stomping around the bedroom in a state of extreme irritation because I couldn’t find the secret stairway that led to the garden (a stairway which, of course, doesn’t exist). I’ve no idea why I wanted to go to the garden, or why I needed to do it naked in the wee small hours.
Still, it could be worse. A few years ago a friend told me about her husband’s nocturnal adventures, and recounted one particularly memorable incident where he sleepwalked into the living room, pressed eject on the CD player, urinated into the CD player, closed the tray and wandered back to bed.
Mike Giggler, via email
Mike Giggler is Private Eye’s fictitious letter writer, who upholds the great British tradition* of writing funny letters to newspapers. He would approve of this gem from Mark Bartlett, who wrote to today’s Guardian about a protective case for transporting bananas:
I hope the genius behind the Banana Guard (April 8) is feverishly at work inventing other fruit protection products, as I for one find it extremely distressing when my plums get squashed.
I laughed like a drain at that one.
* I’m assuming it’s a British tradition, but as I only read UK newspapers I may well be unaware of a global comedy phenomenon. Can anyone enlighten me? Is there a German Mike Giggler?
Quiet iPod? Blame Apple
The latest iPod firmware update introduces a volume limiter which, as far as I can tell, you can’t disable from the menus or from iTunes. It’s to protect your hearing, but after 15-odd years of playing in a rock band my ears are knackered anyway and a capped iPod is far too quiet (especially if you’re listening to “nice” music, or prefer it when heavy metal makes your ears bleed).
Incidentally, this kind of stuff - “upgrades” that take away functionality - really bugs me. But I’ve ranted about that before, so I won’t rant about it again now.
Aaaaanyway. If you want to disable the cap, GoPod does it with a single click.
Mr Biffo on self-employment
I love Mr Biffo, in a heterosexual manly way of course. Today he’s writing about homeworking:
When you tell people you work from home, the first thing they usually ask is: “Don’t you find it difficult to get motivated?”
Well, yes. But that’s a given in any job. I’m no more distracted working from home than I’ve been whatever I’ve done. I used to spend my working days at Teletext throwing food across the office, and the few times I went into work at Wembley Stadium it was only to put my own face on the scoreboard, and take photos of it.
Thing is, I’m self-employed. If I don’t work I don’t get paid, and if I don’t get paid I can’t buy beer and comics, and that’s probably the biggest motivator you can get. Short of a large man in a leather harness, standing over you brandishing a threatening wooden paddle, that is.
300,000 words, some of them quite good
I’m sure this is of no interest to anyone but me, but I’m celebrating an anniversary of sorts: my first ever bit of published writing was for .net magazine back in issue 51, and I’ve just finished a feature for issue 151. That’s eight years, 100 issues (give or take a few) and - a conservative estimate, this - 300,000 words. Blimey.
That first feature was about blogging, or journalling as it was called back then:
More and more people are doing it: in 1996 there were around 20 online diaries. In 1998, the Open Pages site alone links to almost 500. Very few of these people are famous, and only a small number are dead.
Ah, the good old days. 35 million Internet users and an incredible 500 online diaries.
It wasn’t just my first feature, though - it was also my first cock-up. Mocking a blood-soaked “woo, look at me, I’m so mad” site, I suggested that the owner wasn’t mad at all. Turns out she was, as her pissed-off partner emailed the mag to point out. Oops.
On a brighter note, I did get to claim in print that the Hitler diaries were written by a small dog.
Free broadband forever
As widely predicted, Carphone Warehouse does a Freeserve and offers “Free Broadband Forever”. 8Mbps, 40GB monthly usage limit, £29.99 connection fee and no monthly cost if you pay line rental to Carphone Warehouse instead of BT and sign up for the £9.99 per month international calling plan.
It’ll be interesting to see if they can cope with the demand and if other firms make half-arsed attempts to copy the deal. Remember the chaos over free dial-up and then flat-rate Internet access?
Webaroo: a lawsuit waiting to happen?
Tech startup Webaroo wants to offer the internet on a Flash drive, according to Networkworld.com:
Webaroo does it, [the firms Brad Husick] says, through “a server farm that is of Web scale” and a set of proprietary search algorithms that whittle the million gigabytes down to more manageable chunks that will fit on a hard drive: up to 256 megabytes for a growing menu of “Web packs” on specific topics — your favorite Web sites, city guides, news summaries, Wikipedia and the like — that make up the service’s initial offerings; and something in the neighborhood of 40 gigabytes for the full-Web version the company intends to release later this year.
“We’ve developed these algorithms that give you a set of meaningful, relevant results for anything on which you search,” Husick says. “In effect, we give you the first couple pages of results.”
That’s all you really need, the company argues, because studies show that most people rarely look beyond the first 10 to 20 results returned by a typical search. With Webaroo you’re being returned not just a list of pages, but the pages themselves — with all graphics intact — as well as key live links from those pages and the pages to which they lead. They’re talking roughly 10,000 pages per “Web pack,” or plenty to provide a meaningful search experience for whatever the subject matter at hand, Husick says.
So it’s site scraping, just like endless offline browsing packages. However, I’m wondering about the “Web Packs”. Could site owners claim copyright infringement? I can’t tell whether Webaroo is paying publishers for the right to include their content in its Web Packs, but if it isn’t I can imagine firms being a bit miffed at the prospect of someone else selling their content.
Why Apple won’t sell OS X for PCs
Over at Daring Fireball, the ever-readable John Gruber states the obvious about Apple: it makes more money from selling hardware than it could ever make from selling software. He writes:
For any idea, ask yourself this: Would it help Apple sell more Macs or more iPods? If the answer is “no”, Apple isn’t going to do it, or, if they do, it’d be a genuinely shocking development.
As Gruber points out, what Apple’s up to with Boot Camp isn’t attacking Microsoft: it’s going after the really lucrative end of the PC market, where people with money to burn buy expensive kit from the likes of Alienware (now owned by Dell). Rather than slug it out in the bargain basement end of the market, Boot Camp could help Apple take some of the most lucrative computer buyers. As I said the other day, Macs are Marks & Spencer, not Tesco Value.
These are no ordinary computers: Apple and Boot Camp, again
I’ve been thinking about Boot Camp some more, and I maintain that it’s a genius move. Inevitably the Apple fanboys are predicting the end of Microsoft and a big headache for Dell, but I really don’t think that’s going to happen.
I do think Boot Camp (and Leopard, when it ships) will give Apple a big market share boost. Being able to run Windows apps when you need to is a huge thing, and I’m almost regretting ordering a new PC. Doubling or even trebling the amount of Macs sold over the next 12 months seems reasonable to me. But Apple as a mass-market brand, taking on Dell? I really don’t see it.
[Usual Apple-related disclaimer: you never know what's in Steve Jobs's head. You can only go on what Apple's doing *now*, because there's no way of telling what the firm will do next. So for example I got a lot of criticism a while back for predicting a headless Mac and a video iPod, both of which eventually appeared, but I - like most people scribbling about Apple - didn't see the move to Intel chips coming. And Boot Camp was a surprise too.]
Apple isn’t Dell. The best analogy I can think of is supermarkets, and particularly food shopping. Dell is Tesco. Apple is Marks and Spencer.
A more concrete comparison: Dell will give you a 2.8GHz dual core PC with a gig of RAM and a 19″ flat panel display for £615 [Update, 11 April: they've just cut the prices. You can get that spec for £439 now - which is really annoying, as I ordered it at the higher price. Bah]. There isn’t an equivalent Mac Mini, so the closest equivalent machine is an iMac. It’s got a bigger screen (20″) and a bigger hard disk (250GB compared to 80GB) but lower RAM and a slower dual core (2GHz). Still, it’s close enough. Including VAT it’s £1,229 - double the price of the Dell.
That’s not a criticism of Apple, though. It’s an observation. Dell, like Tesco, is happy to scrap it out in the high-volume, low margin sector. Apple, like Marks & Sparks, goes for the more discerning shopper. It’s particularly apparent when you look at the top end of the PC market, where Apple has the MacBook Pro.
Dell’s best laptop is the XPS M170, a 17″ machine that’s just shy of £1,500. 2.13GHz chip, 2 gigs of RAM, decent graphics card, blah blah blah. For the same money you can get the basic MacBook Pro, which is dual core rather than single core, so in the right circumstances it should be a screamer. Bringing that up to 2GB of RAM means shelling out £1,800 for a machine with a smaller screen than the Dell, but that’s not the point. The MacBook Pro, like its predecessor the Powerbook, feels high quality in a way that the best Dells just don’t. I like Dells, but their top-line models are Tesco Finest rather than Marks & Sparks.
*adopts languid, sexy voice*
This is no ordinary computer. This is a California-designed, sun-kissed, ultra-shiny computer.
You get the idea.