Category Archives: Internet

Internet, Software, Technology

Should Google push on with social search?

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socialsearch

I have been pleasantly surprised that this blog is coming up in the search rankings for a series of random search phrases at the moment (front page for ‘low emissions cars’ for one reader, apparently). I promise I don’t do any SEO wizardry – I haven’t even had time to update my blogroll! – but I think my polymath tendencies and prolific blogging is working in my favour in Google’s eyes.

It is interesting that Google is increasingly changing the way it manages search to try to link in with your ‘social graph’ – what your network of contacts is seeing, finding and sharing. Google has been notoriously bad at creating social graphs itself (Buzz, anyone?), but what they have got they want to harness to this end. Indeed, it’s so serious about this that they’ve this week announced Google+ – it’s own social network.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I like the mass-consensual authority of Google’s PageRank, using determined authority worldwide as the means by which it draws you to content – I’m happy for the ‘database of intention‘ of the search world to be different to that of the social world. If I want a social recommendation, I will ask – on Quora, or – more likely – Tweetdeck or Facebook. It’s a different style of interaction.

That said I’ve not really seen it play out yet (largely because Google’s Social Graph capabilities are so limited), and Rory at the BBC is trying to test if this is really the case. So will have to wait and see what happens.

I know from Google’s point of view that social search is a necessary strategic move – reports are coming in of a decrease in overall web traffic as people move to Facebook. So to maintain its ad revenue, it needs to maintain relevance in an increasingly social web.

Internet, Technology

Churchill on the Internet

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Well, not really, obviously, but given my recent posts on various aspects of technology – in which Apple keeps rearing its beautiful, well-designed head – I thought it might be adapted.

Churchill reportedly said:

"Show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains."

It strikes me that a similar analogue applies to openness on the Internet. At its core – openness is a good thing. It opens up consumer choice and lets those able to achieve ludicrous ends.

But in my old age (over 30 – therefore possibly not a digital native anymore!) – the practical realities of making everything work together in an open environment is just too much work. Hence the appeal of Evil Apple – with their closed, perfectly designed systems, you can’t do everything. But you don’t need a degree in software engineering to make it work.

I still believe that openness is a good and necessary thing. But I’m an increasingly practical, time-constrained man with too many hobbies for purely open technologies. So I’ll settle for a well-designed, well-executed closed system most times….

I’m still a liberal though. So in Churchill’s view, I’m either an idiot or… still young in some regards… or both.

Internet, Miscellany, Observational

Digital ancient

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I had an email from Yahoo! the other day thanking me for being a user for the last 12 years.

I mostly use it as a spam-catch these days but find it astonishing that I signed up for it that long ago. In times before that – I had a Hotmail account (which I still use for IM) – that’ll be going back 17 years.

Holy heck, I seem to be old. Does this mean I’m no longer a Digital Native? Or that there’s some kind of ghastly Digital Native 2.0 out there?

As edgy and down with the kids as I try to be perhaps I should accept the crushing inevitability of it all, get a pipe and smoking jacket and start being irate at young people these days…

Dadblogging, Internet

Curious Emily

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In a strange sort of way, I’m looking forward to Emily getting to the "But why, Daddy…" phase of child development.

30 years ago, when I was growing up, my parents invested heavily in encyclopaedia. How else to satisfy the curiosity of three precocious children? Other than providing the best answers possible to the extensive and occasionally tedious litany of questions about the world.

Tony Buzan, when we met him a few months back, made a big thing about the intellectual capacity of children being disproportionately greater  – before traditional education systems (and probably tired parents) drill it out of them. I don’t want that for Emily if we can manage it – I’d love for her to continue to be curious about the world for as long as possible.

Which is reason #3984 that I’m grateful for the Internet. It’s amazing and probably taken for granted that we now have persistent access to the world’s knowledge. All you need is an understanding of how to search and how and when to trust information (not trivial in itself), and virtually any (likely) question can be answered. Unless she proves to be a philosopher or particle physicist, in which case she’ll find more questions…

I just need to be careful that I don’t shortcut my answers too much… "Because, the Internet," might turn her into a Daily Mail reader*….

 

* If this doesn’t make sense now, keep hitting refresh on Chris’ Daily Mail headline generator until it tells you the Internet causes cancer, or some other ill. I think that headline actually happened earlier this year. Mental.

Internet, Software, Technology

Windows Live Writer for Mac? Blogging clients for Macs

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I’m learning a few things about Macs these days, and one of them is that free blogging clients are not quite as easy to find as they are for Windows. Marsedit, one of the major options available through the App Store, costs the best part of 30 pounds!

Thanks to the WordPress Codex, though, I’ve found Qumana. Nowhere nearly as powerful as Windows Live Writer and I need to work out the keyboard shortcuts… but its a start, and free!

 

Internet, Software, Technology, Update

Evernote feature request

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We should have recovered from the migration issues I mentioned recently now, so thanks for bearing with me.

I introduced Amanda to Evernote today whilst kicking off the gargantuan list of things we want to achieve whilst I’m off on sabbatical. She’s generally a propoenent of pen and paper when it comes to this sort of thing but the write once / have anywhere nature of Evernote appealed.

I have a feature request, though: please can you integrate with Google Docs so I can share an individual ‘note’ with someone else, preferably without forcing them to sign up to Evernote themselves? Would be a nice feature.

I’m dealing with some jetlag after the flight back to the UK so an increased rate of bloggery will return soon. Have a couple of queries out about Outcasts given the massive interest I’ve had in my posts about it, however neither the BBC nor Kudos TV are currently responding to me, so it might be a while…

Internet, Software

Jetpack.me & WordPress support

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Given the ludicrous traffic levels I’ve had over the last few weeks I’ve been a bit more than usually interested in my traffic stats, and check both Google Analytics and WordPress.com stats (enabled via a plugin) to get a sense of what people are reading. A bug disabled the WordPress stats and a forum post suggested I email WordPress support – which I duly did, received prompt, polite, accurate responses from a few admins there, and was pointed in the direction of a new plugin set – Jetpack.me – which adds an HTML5 stats dashboard (checkable on iPhone/iPad) and a bunch of other features to a WordPress self-installed edition, powered by the cloud – including URL shortening, sharing tools, embed tools and more.

Good on ya, WordPress folk – thanks! And if you run a WP self-install, you should check out Jetpack – a very useful package!

Internet, Technology, Television

Battle of Internet TV platforms: Panasonic Vieracast vs Sony Qriocity

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So, TV manufacturers are embedding Internet capabilities in their TVs and set-top boxes. I’ve recently had experience of a couple of platforms – Qriocity via my brother’s new Blu-Ray player, and Vieracast via my Dad’s Skype-enabled TV.

So: what is Qriocity? Well, the full Qriocity platform enables TV, film and music on demand – a la Spotify Premium crossed with iTunes. It’s priced comparably with iTunes and pretty easy to use. However, the real kicker here is that YouTube, iPlayer and various other Internet TV services work seamlessly (other than the fact a remote is not in any way optimised for typing into an Internet TV search bar), rather than Qriocity itself. This is awesome – easy access to everything from iPlayer HD to a bunch of other services. V. impressed.

Vieracast, by contrast, brings up a series of apps that let you access network-enabled widgets, of which Skype is one. Skype on a TV should be a good thing but – it’s not HD, so looks mediocre, you can’t use your normal Skype account if, like me, you have “too many” contacts, and its fiddly to configure for the same reason that the Sony remotes are rubbish for search – typing on a TV without a keyboard is tedious. Other apps are pretty limited, responsiveness is a bit sluggish, and on the whole it is a slightly underwhelming experience. Not to mention that the TV doesn’t come with a built-in wireless card so we had to hunt for a networking solution (the one supported brand of wireless card, a Netgear jobbie, isn’t widely distributed in Malaysia).

Therefore: de facto winner of this shootout is Sony…!

I’m looking forward to seeing what Google TV has to offer and will resist the lure of Jobs and Apple TV here. My media centre does most things you’d want from an Internet TV service, but I can appreciate it in principle… for other people. Not so much for me…

None of these service socialise TV watching – I think these is still a multi-device experience- watch on TV and couchsurf on iPad or laptop. I remember Joost trying to do real-time social TV but it was too complex for most people to handle and I’ve not heard hide nor hair from them in some time… and I’m certainly not counting Ping as having achieved anything on this front to date.

Internet, Software

Guerilla browser warfare

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Other than moderate contempt for Internet Explorer, which I’ve found to be slow, tedious bloatware since about IE4, I’ve always tried to be even handed in recommending browsers to people. “Try Chrome or Firefox or Opera, whatever suits you…” I’d say. And people ask me, because, well, that’s the kind of thing I tend to have a view on.

I’ve realised something over the years. People don’t want a choice. Some people do, sure, but most people are happy with the status quo. This is one of the reasons why the Microsoft antitrust ruling giving people a ‘browser ballot’ choice was so meaningless – what’s the bet that the vast majority of people just chose the one they’d heard of – so mostly IE? It’s ronseal name helps it too – after all, why would you think that “Chrome”, “Opera”, “Firefox” or “Safari” had anything to do with browsing the web?

Whilst I do continue to have a fondness for Firefox (and a polite indifference to the nice people at Opera, who I’m sure make a very good browser), I now pretty much just tell people to use Chrome. And when I’ve been fixing my parents’ machines, I’ve:

  1. hidden the desktop shortcuts to IE
  2. set up browser syncing with Chrome across each of their desktop/laptops
  3. set up the browser toolbars with vital shortcuts that I know they’ll use daily
  4. installed the IETab extension so if any website doesn’t work they can still sort it
  5. set default search to Google and activate Instant on the smartbar
  6. imported their IE bookmarks

…and so the guerrilla browser warfare kicks off. We’ll see what happens, if they get stuck or even notice…

Why Chrome? Well, it’s amazingly fast, browser sync is awesome if you use a Google Account, password saving actually works, and you get a bigger browsing area than most. It has an intuitive interface, is regularly and automatically updated so easy for people like my parents to use, and supports the latest web standards. In addition, the extensibility of Chrome (as with the add-on capability in Firefox) amps up its potential massively. The fact that new Google Apps / Google features tend to work first in Chrome is a nice bonus.

Why not Safari? Well, in truth, I haven’t used it that much. The lack of a ‘smart’ search bar offends me since every other browser now does have one, and I wouldn’t know where to start with extending it or browser sync (short of Xmarks, which I’m sad to say I abandoned when news of its closure hit (but before news of its salvation a few weeks later). My general principle against the Jobs behemoth has definitely wavered of late, so it’s not a matter of principle – interest to know if other people would knowingly choose Safari over Chrome…

Disclaimer: My agency represents Google’s Enterprise division in the UK. I’m not directly involved and don’t have any special insights. These views are all my own based on years of being unofficial tech support for people and my general deputy CIO experience.

Internet

Social reading

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My Google Reader subscriptions have gone slightly unread since the sabbatical started – it’s been pretty busy getting around Malaysia and doing all the thing we’ve been trying to do – so I miss my social reading circle. On Google Reader myself and a few friends and relatives share stories – including my friend Damian, my colleague Scot, my cousin Ashvina, my brother Arvind and a few others. Chris and Tom, whilst massively digital, have favoured delicious for social bookmarking so unfortunately our Greader sharing  hasn’t quite clicked (although I do follow their bookmarks via RSS…).

I enjoy this social filtering of news for the same reason I enjoy watching the same films or reading the same books as people I know, trust and respect – it’s fun to have things in common to discuss, and to have a shared social/cultural context. My friends and family often share points of interest, of course, which means the filtering is generally more interesting than not.

Unfortunately, the act of using Google Reader and RSS subscriptions lies beyond the ken of most people I know, and the majority of my friends that share links (in itself a minority) do so on Twitter or via Facebook – which I sometimes catch, but due to the volume of stuff that passes through my Facebook newsfeed and my Twitter friends lists,  I miss most of these. I almost never read stories that are forwarded to me by email, incidentally – when I’m getting through my email the emphasis is productivity and that means prioritizing emails that require some kind of action (a reply, forward, action on my part). I probably need to get the hang of Readitlater.

I’m not sure what I need to make this work better. The downside to convergence to a single platform like Facebook for all your digital interactions is restricting noise. I want personal updates from my friends on Facebook – pictures, events, news, engagements, babies etc. I want news shared via Google Reader. I like debate, insight and breaking news via Twitter and the blogosphere. But whilst I can change my own social media strategy, I can’t change the world. I can but lament that RSS as a technology seems to be something that people see as complex, and so resist using, and continue to quietly evangelise Google Reader to everyone I meet…

Incidentally, I quite like that in the Kindle apps sections of books that have been highlighted by other readers are indicated as you’re reading it. Quite nice to have vital passages or particularly interesting bits pre-selected for additional attention… Social reading of books seems to be the way things are going too!

What do you think about social reading?