Monday, August 18, 2003

ahh - trying a different aggregator has helped alleviate my information overload Switching to TypePad will also involve getting a stand alone news aggregator. For the past week I've been experimenting with NetNewsWire, a fine Mac only product. I've been very impressed. Before I used to think that needing a new aggregator was a drawback to switching from Radio, but now I think it's a positive reason to try something else. I love its Post to Weblog feature - which replicates the one thing about the Radio aggregator which I really liked. More interesting, I find that the three-pane design makes it easier to get through all of my subscriptions. If I'm in the mood to see what's been on at one particular blog first, I can do this. If none of a blog's titles appeal to me, I can mark them as "all read" with one click and effectively ignore them. All this is much easier than needing to wade through all the entries of all my subscriptions. And I can arrange my subscriptions alphabetically or in theme-based clusters, rather than just by time (although I understand why some bloggers would prefer this). There are some blogs which I would like to check everyday, while others can wait a week or so - it depends on the quality and quantity of the words, as well as my mood. Anyway, here's something from the blog by NetNewsWire's makers: Wired News: [base "]Maniacally wired netizens who read a hundred blogs a day and just as many news sources are turning to a new breed of software, called newsreaders or aggregators, to help them manage information overload. Many now say that their news aggregator is as indispensable as their e-mail client.[per thou] Interesting article. I think I was slightly misquoted about sales of NetNewsWire. The [base "]five figures[per thou] part refers to the number of users of NetNewsWire and NetNewsWire Lite: the number of users is at least a five figure number. Just wanted to clear that up: not a big deal, really. [Ranchero] 10:41:19 PM

	Thursday, August 14, 2003

a correction about AOL Journals - it's only useless for some people Thanks to feedback from Jason Lefkowitz of theAnt's Eye View, I can tell you that AOL Journals will work with if you use IE 6 for Windows to create or edit posts. Using IE 6 will give you a built-in WYSIWYG HTML editor which will allow you to both link and have titles. So that's the good news. I thought that the way to get the most out of AOL features was to use its browser (the one based on IE), but I guess AOL 8.0 for Windows must be based on an older version of IE, because it had no WYSIWYG editor. Maybe AOL Journals will work properly in the upcoming AOL 9 for Windows. But the bad news is that yesterday's comments are still very true for Mac users. There is no equivalent of IE 6 for the Mac. The Mac AOL browser is based on Netscape / Gecko. I wonder why AOL would let Mac users use AOL Journals, knowing that it won't work properly for them? I suspect they never really thought about it. By the way, you can read Jason's review of AOL Journals here. 11:01:04 PM

	Tuesday, August 12, 2003

should I stay with Salon blogs or switch to TypePad? I find it quite amusing and ironic that less than two weeks after I promised myself that I wouldn't switch this blog to MovableType, I am feeling very drawn towards switching to MovableType's TypePad. Of course, I did give a proviso to this undertaking - "unless Movable Type became idiot-proof." While no blogging software is truly idiot-proof, except possibly AOL Journals (see this amusing piece about them), TypePad seems way more user-friendly than standard MovableType and a lot easier to work with than Radio Userland. So I'm seriously considering defecting to TypePad. So here are my pros and cons about switching to TypePad - Pros: - I don't really like the Radio Userland software that much. Although it's easy enough to start a bare bones blog with it, it isn't very user-friendly IMHO. I find it difficult to understand for customizing and think that the documentation is poor - especially when compared with TypePad. - I haven't really been following the flame wars associated with Dave Winer. But what I've heard makes me feel uneasy about the future of Radio. I worry that Radio Userland is isolating itself in the blogosphere. - TypePad is web-based, so it's very easy to update from anywhere. No more being tied to the one computer! - TypePad offers more gadgets for blogs - which are really easy to implement. This goes back to one of my complaints with Radio - yes, you can do a lot with it, but a lot of it is quite difficult and arcane to configure. - I like TypePad's photo album feature Cons (and there are quite a few): - It's more expensive than Radio. I'm interested in the intermediate $8.95/month option. - I'd also need to get a separate news aggregator (maybe this isn't all bad), which I may need to pay extra for if I want a good one. - I think that initially, my readership would plummet. (but is this really an issue?) - I would leave the Salon blog community, which I like a lot. I would get onto the Salon blog webring, but that wouldn't be the same. The issue is, if Salon blogs is on a sinking ship (Radio), do I show solidarity and stay until things get worse, or do I just seize what seems to be a good opportunity at this moment? - It's not as if TypePad is the only option for me, either. Maybe Blogger Pro will get better under the ownership of Google. Maybe I should support fine Mac only software such as iBlog. And don't forget AOL - for which I'm already paying for. Nobody will probably take an AOL blog seriously, but it might offer a way of communicating with a wider audience. Well there's no rush to do any of this. I'll give myself a least a week before I do anything rash. 1:06:06 AM

	Monday, August 11, 2003

ads with air guitarists and the idea / expression of the idea dichotomy Ads Ape Apple's Air Guitarists. Upstart BuyMusic.com is doing more than just offering a music service that mimics iTunes. Its commercials are strikingly similar to Apple's ads, too. Flattery? Perhaps, but it also could be a lawsuit in the making. By Danit Lidor. [Wired News] [A blog doesn't need a clever name] "The fair-use doctrine does provide a defense to copyright- and trademark-infringement claims," Crowther said. "The critical issue will be whether the BuyMusic.com is a parody of the Apple ads." "When the second work just borrows from the first work to get attention or to avoid having to develop something new or fresh and does not make fun of the original work [sigma] it is not a parody and may not have protection," Crowther said. Parody or not, a copyright-infringement suit wouldn't necessarily be an open-and-shut case. "The dichotomy between 'ideas' and 'expression' is hard to get across," said Blaney Harper, an intellectual property attorney at Jones Day. "Showing average people air guitaring their way through a song against a white background" is not enough to show BuyMusic is copying Apple's expression, he said. I haven't seen these ads, but I admit that they would really annoy me. It would seem that BuyMusic is stealing numerous ideas of Apple. But this happens all the time - in business, in art and science. Stealing an idea (unless it's patented) is different from violating intellectual property rights. This is a really good thing - even if it is infuriating to see BuyMusic use this legal point to peddle its lame Windows knock-off of the iTunes Music Store. It's corny, but the law is meant to be blind, (if people stay within its bounds) it protects the good and the bad, the creative and the exploiters. To change the law to stop the "bad" BuyMusic would be opening the possibility of flooding more of the "good" public domain under a torrent of copyright claims. It could shut down or severely damage the blogosphere. The idea / expression of idea dichtomy is being undermined enough already by contract law, without this happening. So what can be done? Protest this protected form of idea theft in non-legal ways. Try to shame BuyMusic into changing its behaviour. Music (legally downloaded from iTunes): Moby, 18, I'm not worried at all 1:44:32 AM

	Friday, August 8, 2003

Movable Type introduces TypePad New Blogging Service Rolls Out.. If you want to set up your own blog you might want to check out TypePad (which is from the well-established folks at Movable Type).  A shining example of the power of this new blog tool is the PVR Blog, which is a great resource for information on devices like TiVo and ReplayTV and digital recording devices in general. There are 3 levels of service for TypePad, the lowest priced one is $5.00 a month, which includes hosting and a bunch of features (i.e. the ability to publish picture albums etc).  Worth checking out. [Ernie the Attorney] Hmm, looks very interesting ... 5:27:30 AM

	Thursday, July 24, 2003

tinkering with AOL Journals The first AOL journal (blog) I've seen. Via Hylton Joliffe I've clicked through to an AOL Journal called sound & fury. The branding at the top (below the generic AOL nav) reads "AOL Journals: Your Thoughts. Your Blog." I was hoping I could find my way from that blog to other AOL blogs but there doesn't seem to be any central jumping-off point (or blogroll/sidebar, for that matter). [Radio Free Blogistan] I was playing around with AOL Journals yesterday. My attempt was very experimental & silly so I'm not going to link to it. As I expected, it was very easy to set up - there are various templates for choosing how the Journal looks and how functions it has. Updating is also easy - you just send an instant message to the AOL Journal bot. This means that you can use all the formatting that you can use in an instant message, which is quite a lot. But I also a discovered a bug with this. If I add an entry with AIM and then want to edit that entry in AOL to give it a title or information about my mood or the music I'm listening (like LiveJournal), then most of the formatting goes away. If I initially created the entry in AOL, then there's no option to use anything but plain-text - and no HTML tags for bolding, italicizing, changing colours or fonts. This isn't an issue, so long as they fix that bug about editing entries created with AIM - or allow you to give the title, mood and music in the instant message. Hopefully they'll fix this by the time it's officially released. An AOL Journal does provide an RSS feed, but not any news aggregator functions. Because of this, I think that AOL Journals is more equivalent to LiveJournal (albeit not as good!) than software like Radio Userland or Blogger. And I agree that AOL needs to provide a way of locating other AOL Journals. 6:54:24 PM

	Wednesday, July 23, 2003

wondering about big media biases (with a postscript about left & right tactics) I wrote earlier about the unlikely story of how I first experimented with AOL. I’m surprised to say that I still use it from time to time – on a plan which gives me a very small number of dialup access hours. The reason is that now my iBook doesn’t seem to work well with any other dialup ISP. I would be tempted to think that this is something that AOL did to my computer, except that I remember that this problem predated the first time that I used AOL. It’s probably a hardware problem – but because most of the time I use a broadband connection without any problems on my iBook – I’m reluctant to send it in if it’s not really urgent. My first use of AOL coincided with the beginning of the Iraq war. At the time I noticed a real pro-war bias in the way the war news was reported. It’s interesting to see how this has changed lately. Last week, they reprinted Salon’s article about John Mellencamp and patriotism. Am I paranoid to wonder if AOL Time Warner decided to pander to the government’s dogs of war in the lead up to the execrable FCC decision about media ownership, to show the Republicans in power that big media could be supportive of their interests? And that now the FCC rules have been released, AOL Time Warner can be a little more centrist (definitely not left-wing). Postscript: Along with the Salon article, AOL had one of their ubiquitous polls. The question was along the lines of “Who is more patriotic? – a) the Left, b) the Right, c) Neither – each side is patriotic but they have different opinions.” My recollection of the result was that almost 50% answered “C” for neither, 40% answered “B” for the Right and a measly 10% chose “A” for the Left. I chose the Neither answer – because I do think that many of the Right-wingers genuinely care for their country, even if their methods or goals are misguided. My reading of this poll – and be assured that I don’t put too much stock in its results – is that people on the left are more reasonable and are mature enough to admit that the other side might sometimes have a point, or at least a legitimate concern. Whereas people on the right (I choose not to call them Conservatives because they a radical agenda of tearing up long-standing social supports and threatening civil liberties) are more fanatical – and refuse to see any good in their opponents or flaws in themselves. I know, it’s kind of petty to be fighting over the high moral ground but it’s still legitimate point. What do you do against an opponent who refuses to play fairly? Do you to stick to your principles and lose (praying that someday the wrongs will be righted) – or adopt their rough-handed tactics in the hope of beating them at their own game? 9:18:41 AM

Safari, Opera and Explorer It’s a chicken or the egg type question – did Safari come about because Microsoft was not working on new versions of IE for Mac, or did Microsoft stop working on IE for Mac because Apple started competing with Safari? When Safari first came out, I was annoyed. First of all, it had that tiresome brushed metal interface (although I’ve since found out that this can be removed with Metalifizer). Secondly, it made me concerned the other Mac browsers, such as Opera, OmniWeb and Camino wouldn’t be able to compete. Although I like all the software which Apple throws in with its computers, I want there to be a viable market for third party software developers for the Mac. I’ve since come to like Safari. I think that it’s arguably the best free browser for any operating system. It’s very fast – both to load and for browsing. It has tabs and it renders pages very nicely. Overall, I still prefer Opera 6 for Mac for the following reasons. I already paid for it, so might as well get my money’s worth I really, really like some of Opera’s time-saving shortcuts: how you can use the “z” and “x” keys as backwards & forwards buttons; how you select the location bar by just pressing F8 (in this way, it’s much better than Safari, which makes you drag over the whole URL or press Command-L); how bookmarks can be given brief nicknames which retrieve the bookmarked site when entered into the location bar; full screen browsing is easily turned on or off with F11. Opera’s not without its problem. It takes more time to load than Safari – which I can forgive because Safari’s got an innate advantage in this area. The most two severe problems are that less pages seem work in Opera than Safari and that it is more prone to crash than Safari. These are major problems, and if they continue to get worse, I will reluctantly have to switch to Safari. 9:09:17 AM

Safari and internet banking sites Macintouch has had some interesting postings concerning the fall out from Microsoft’s decision to discontinue developing IE for Mac. There is concern because some sites, notably online brokerages internet banking sites, only work with IE. People are worried that if IE for Mac atrophies, Mac users will be shut out of many sites because so many lazy web developers design only for IE. I think that there is a little bit of panic occurring with this issue. There are already sites which only work well with IE 6.x for Windows, not IE 5.2 for Mac. By the way, my credit union’s internet banking and online bill paying works well with just about any web browser. If the big, mean banks and brokerage firms are being troglodytes about only supporting IE, I say that Mac users should take their business elsewhere – especially to credit unions which have lower fees and are usually more responsive to their customers. Now that Microsoft has won the first browser war, it has little incentive to develop IE for any platform. So their announcement about discontinuing upgrading IE 5.2 for Mac comes at the same time that IE 6.x for Windows also goes onto the back-burner, at least until Longhorn is developed. 9:04:00 AM

my thoughts about designing web pages for users of different browsers If you don’t use Internet Explorer for Windows, you are on the margins of the internet. It’s kind of like being a non-American in our unipolar world. The mighty behemoth, IE does what it likes. Standards be damned, its practices are the de facto standards which matter. I’m in charge of a web site and know first-hand how tedious it is develop a site which works tolerably well for almost all browsers, without being intolerably bland. I recently had a discussion/argument with a respected colleague about this issue. He said that there are so many different permutations of browsers, that getting our sites to work for all of them is an exercise in futility which leads to the dreaded Lowest Common Denominator. For me, this is not an all or nothing matter. I try to support what I subjectively think are the main types of people on the web – and the browsers they often choose. There’s Mr and Ms Average – people who use IE for Windows, 5.x and 6.x – the browser that everyone uses when they don’t have a choice (or exercise choice) in what browser they use. Needless to say, it’s got to work very well for this browser. I admit, some people might consciously choose this solid but boring browser. For me, I only use this browser when none of the others works or I might to use some third-party software which only works with IE – such as the Google toolbar. You have to acknowledge the technical laggards of the world – people using IE and especially Netscape 4.x. I’m not saying that a site has to work well for these people, but see how the home page looks and hope that the site is functional. Sometimes minor tweaks in the code will improve performance in these oldies without mucking things up for everyone else. If that’s not possible, use a script to redirect them to a text-only of your home page. This text-only version could also benefit the visually impaired who are using a text-only browser. You also can’t ignore people who are bravely (or stupidly, depending on your point of view) using non-Microsoft software – namely Mac and/or Linux users. I don’t know where the market share statistics come from, but I work in education and see a lot of Macs around and talk to a lot of people who are passionate about Macs. So even if you are a hard-nosed Windows-head, you don’t want to needlessly piss these persistent people off, because they can be vocal in their criticism. If nothing else, make sure that the site works in IE 5.2 or Safari. If you don’t have access to a Mac, send the URL to a friend, acquaintance or relative who has a Mac and ask for feedback. The same goes for Linux, make sure that it works for at least one Linux browser, especially if you know that Linux people will be using your site. Another small but influential group are the geeks who may be using alternative browsers such as Mozilla or Opera. They may very well be your peers. They are also the people who often look at web pages critically. You don’t want them to be sending you emails saying that your web site isn’t working for them. At the other extreme are the AOL users. Although Windows AOL is based on IE, it is not identical. AOL for Mac OS X is based on Netscape 7 for OS X. Although testing maybe difficult for AOL, if you become aware of a problem, try to find out what it is and how it might be fixed. Because there are still a lot of people using AOL as their browser. All this sounds like a lot of extra work, but the only significant task is to get out of the “IE 6.x for Windows or bust” mindset. Because once you start testing your website on a few different browsers, you’ll get a feel for what works and what doesn’t work on the other browsers. These are only suggestions for the minimum. Because I am a Mac head, I’m going to make sure that my web sites don’t work well for just one current Mac browser, but for as many as possible. 8:55:59 AM