twopointouch

So, apparently Internet Explorer 8 is available for download, according to my twitter colleagues and a certain Mister Gates.

But don’t search for ‘ie8′ with Google, because you’ll get this:

One half of the screen is a search for news about ie8. The next suggests that I was probably searching for IE7. None of the remaining four links, as I scroll down, are any use.

I buy into the idea of integrated search, that results from news, maps etc. be incorporated into your search. But, in this case, half the screen is devoted to trying to persuade me to search for a different product entirely.  Pah! - Page and Brin, your time is up. (Not that I tried any other search engine for this result - we all know they’re rubbish,eh?)

(Here are the links you really need.)

So Microsoft has tendered a bid to buy Yahoo! for $44.6bn.

I understand that Microsoft has to do something to build on its web strategy/presence. No-one uses Live Search, Live Spaces, or any of the rest. (OK. About one percent of people do). To build up any future trade for advertising, web services or development platforms, they have to increase market share.

I understand that Yahoo! has to do something. Their share of the search market is pitiful compared to the almighty Google. Their share of the search marketing budget is about 20% compared to Google’s 70%. And they’d just been forced to lay off a load of staff.

So if they combine forces, they end up with a market competitor?

I don’t think so.

Microsoft’s problem and Yahoo!’s has been that they have not been able to identify what they do well. Microsoft used to do operating systems and business productivity software. They were quite good at that. YMMV.

Yahoo! used to have this great directory of editor-approved, quality websites. Then they diversified. They tried to make yahoo.com all things to all wo/men. That failed disastrously because there’s no such thing. They brought on some cool people and acquired a load of cool sites like del.icio.us, flickr and upcoming. But still it didn’t work for them because advertisers don’t buy cool; they buy results. Yahoo! announced 1400 job losses just last week.

Why didn’t it work and why isn’t MS able to make any inroads on the web?

Because neither of them have a core value proposition when it comes to the web. You couldn’t sum up what either of them do on the web in one sentence. If a business can’t do that, then they are in trouble, normally.

Don’t get me wrong. There are bits within both companies’ web presence that have considerable value. Flickr is a cool photo site. Microsoft’s technet is actually very good, IMHO. Live Spaces is arguably a much better platform than Blogger or Vox.

However, for end-users, if you want good search, go to Google. For businesses, if you want SEM, go to Google. What exactly would you willingly go to a Yahoo or MS website for?

Microo! doesn’t appear to me to provide a compelling alternative to any of that.

Update: Had a good chat with Daryl Wilcox, and it looks like we’ve come to a sensible compromise that will allow Tim to do his job and Response Source to maintain its purity. All’s well, etc.

My staff writer at NMK - Tim Hoang - works for the PR company, Rainier, as well. That’s always something we’ve made very clear. I was (and remain I’ve calmed down now - and DW was very charming.) absolutely furious to learn that he has been banned from using the Response Source service today on account of his PR background.

For those who don’t know, Response Source allows journalists to poll PR agencies for help - "do you know any experts on mobile apps?", "got any case studies on businesses making successful use of MySpace?"; that sort of thing, in our case.

One of our key anxieties in the initial decision to employ Tim - who is a paid & taxed employee of the University of Westminster in this role - was making sure that his PR job would not infringe on his duties as a reporter for NMK. It’s an issue we’ve discussed and thought about for a long time, believe me. There are clearly opportunities for abuse, but they’re ones that Tim and I are very well-aware of and perfectly able to execute professional judgement over. Of the dozens of sources he’s used over the last two months, two were Rainier clients - to add differentiation and substance to stories, when he couldn’t find other people keen to comment. (Ironically, getting more of these other voices was one of the reasons he used Response Source). I agonised about both of them for a little while - I edit all his stories - but concluded that the extra comment had justifiable merit. In both cases, Tim informed me freely of the connection; we were transparent about the connection in the stories; and I approved it. After all, I have very little compunction about using people I’ve met in previous roles as sources: that’s what you do as a reporter.

The reason for the ban isn’t known to me in full and was not disclosed, but RS has apparently perceived a conflict of interests, in response to complaints from some other PR agency(ies).

How exactly would this work? Tim polls other PR agencies for input into a story, and that would be a problem for them for what reason? Do they think that he wouldn’t include input from competitors? So why ask the question in the first place? That he would sneak questions like ‘fancy a new agency?’ into his interviews? I think the yellow-pages might be a better source.

One more thing annoys me about this. I am the editor and publisher of NMK. Why didn’t anyone take whatever concerns they have to me, rather than a third-party? Or to my boss, the director of NMK?

F**king infantile. I will not use Response Source again while this situation continues. I have forwarded this info@dwpub.com - if anyone has a better contact, let me know.

Feeling angry about the smoking ban. Sorry for off-topic.

I have two weeks left before the UK smoking ban kicks in; two weeks to cause havoc and mayhem. Because we smokers are the true face of anarchy in the UK, eh?

No-one ever voiced any objections to public smoking before about 1995. These terribly frail people who start coughing every time you spark up within a 100 feet didn’t exist. No one moaned about the smell. Why is that? What’s happened? It’s not because our society was much more liberal, I think. It seemed like most people were more conservative about a lot of social matters like sex and drugs and public behaviour back then. And not because a significantly larger number of people smoked. The percentage of the population remains about the same, though the number of smoking ABC1s is much reduced. Neither was it because there were fewer facts known about smoking or passive smoking. It’s because there were (and are) far more important fish to fry.

What seems to have changed and have allowed this to happen is the increasing climate of fear. Most British people, the opinion-survey people MORI tell us, are terrified. They are frightened of almost everything: from their food to their children. The biggest fear that the majority have is terrifying prospect of… ermm.. teenagers ‘hanging around’. The ‘hoodie menace’ is everywhere, it seems. We think we’re going to get mugged, robbed, bombed, poisoned and raped. We’re frightened of our young; we’re frightened of anyone different; we’re frightened of our food. Apparently, since the terrorist attacks of 11/9/2001, there’s been a real step-change. British society has become considerably more frightened. And the further away those terrible events are, the more frightened we become. Again, according to MORI polls.

This climate of fear is illusionary, of course. Statistically, we’re actually less likely to come to any kind of harm than ever before. We really have never had it so good. We earn more, are healthier and crime levels are lower than at any time in the last forty years.

So while the dangers of smoking existed before, and were well publicised, no one gave a shit until recent times. Until we decided that danger was round every corner. And oh - how easy it is to exact complete vengeance on one of these stupid hang-ups about something so much less important than climate change, global and local poverty or public services. It took the C21st climate of fear to turn the facts about one drug, among many that are allowed to us, into a public policy that curtails all of our freedoms, smoker or not. Rather than exorcise the smokers, I’d suggest that there are other, larger demons to be exorcised.

/rant

Despite a few years in technology journalism, and about, what?, 40 hardware reviews to my credit, my main interest nowadays in things non-internet is that it works. Things stopped working today and these are the three things I bought from PC World - my first visit in four years - and the story behind them.

Unexpectedly, perhaps - credit is due to the guys and girls at the branch (Fulham). They were really nice. I’ve experienced crap service from PC World in the past, but not this time…

• No one bothered me as I bumbled happily about the shelves.
• They gave my wife (no man asks directions) great directions, took her to the right place, and didn’t try to sell her anything.
• There was no insistence on extra warranties at the checkout!

Back to my purchases:

HP Black Ink Cartridge Model 10: I was really lucky to be gifted an HP Business Inkjet 1000 printer by its product manager at HP UK. The reason he gave it me was because I was sceptical about an inkjet printer as a solution for school classrooms. He was basically challenging me to find fault with the machine. This was about a year-and-a-half ago.

My tests, this much time later, would show that it’s fantastic value for money. This is the first cartridge I’ve had to replace on the machine. That’s a million times (not literally, but emotionally) longer than equivalent machines I’ve had from Epson and Canon. The print quality is easily equivalent to a cheap colour laser, so the running costs must work out loads less.

Is it right for a school or personal business printer? Not for a school, I think - it’s a bit slow compared to the cheap colour lasers you can get nowadays. But, hey, this is a two-year-old printer that I’m still perfectly happy with.

£30 is a bit much for a refill, still.

Elements 250GB External Drive: I needed this because my music is all on my home (Mesh) PC’s hard drive and my PC is three years old. I’ve stopped trusting it. It’s making strange noises. Randomly. I get a message every time I start the machine that one of the chip fans has failed PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE. Every time I press that F1 key, it’s like punching the ‘nudge’ button on a fruit machine. That’s a horrible place to be, and I want to make sure those tunes are still with me when the Mesh passes on to the great landslip in the suburbs.

No idea if the Elements product is any good, but apparently there’s a Western Digital disk inside. There are photos and words and stuff too to be protected.

I will, of course, be moving all of that online before too long, but 70GB+ of music is still one hell of an upload on my BT Internet contract.

These things are surprisingly cheap nowadays - £60 for 250GB of reassurance seems very reasonable.

Nvidia 7300 PNY: Confession time - I love computer games. When I bought this PC, it was ‘rigged out’ with twin 6800 Nvidia GPUs. For those not conversant, the video card manufacturers have come up with a great wheeze to get you to buy two of their products whereby it was alleged that they’d work together to provide superior video performance.

About six months after buying my new machine, it informed me that this wasn’t working. Thanks. I carried on playing my favourite games - Neverwinter Nights, Oblivion and Civ4 - and noticed no difference. SLI - the NVidia version of this dual card technology - was a swizz, I concluded. Didn’t bother phoning in the warranty - what was the point?

Anyway, this morning, I got no display whatsoever. Having tested various bits and pieces, I concluded that one or both of my graphics cards had failed.

So, getting back to PC World, I had the choice between an SLI-ready (two cards, remember) 7600 card at £90 or a cheap-as-chips 7300 card at £60. There were other, very expensive, options. I’ve lost confidence with the whole two-cards-work-as-one concept. My PC is cracking on a bit anyway. There’s an unused Mac Mini in the wings. That extra £30 seemed unnecessary.

PNY? They are a funny company. Big in Europe, as I understand. I remember their marketing manager from a few years ago. Very sharp. Showered editorial guys with free memory cards and spent nothing on advertising. I understand that’s still the case, and that it still works when it comes to publicity.

Future (disclosure - wife worked there with the editor, some friends work there - sorry, everyone, for what follows) has launched tech.co.uk. It’s a site, sorry, “new technology portal” that does “the latest news, reviews, features, blogs, buyer’s guides and forums”. How about that for differentiation? As more and more ad spend goes online, it seems that every publisher needs to push out more and more inventory in order to be able to tell potential advertisers that their sites do a bazillion impressions and are way ahead of the competition.

I wouldn’t like to pass judgement on the quality of the site. It’s been running two days and it wouldn’t be fair. However, I do think that the days of this kind of mega-tech-site are numbered. Without full feeds, I’d rather go to the blogs for impressions about the latest news, and I’d rather go to the better-established and better-connected engadget or gizmodo or Tech Digest blogs for stuff about gadgets. One of the first pieces asks if the iPhone is a white elephant. I don’t know about that, and the article sheds no light, but I do know a publishing white elephant when I see one.

This is a site whose target audience is lazy media buyers.

It’ll probably work, then.

It’s Christmas and time to think of other people. Via Jack Schofield on the Guardian and then Adrien O’Leary are the three most important YouTube videos I have ever seen. (Adrien, I have ripped off your post - but this is too important not to share directly).

There is, eventually, a Web 2.0 angle. Gapminder.org is helping connect public data with private ventures to help make this world a better place.

Update: Thought it would be, but wasn’t sure. This is my last post before escaping computers for *gasp* a whole week. Have an excellent break, people, and thank you so much for making 2006 so very exciting. Ian

Mis-Information Week perpetuates the myth that Web 2.0 is all about AJAX. The standfirst to the article lays the groundwork, suggesting that this is purely about technologies, when surely approaches would be a better way to begin:

To bring your site into the Web 2.0 world, you need to know about Ajax, ActiveX, RSS, and other key technologies.

As the intro confirms, this brave new world of Web 2.0 is supposedly all about appearances: “you ignore the new lingo at your own peril; enterprises that put up plain-Jane Web sites today risk turning away the more discerning browsing customer.” But it’s not just about AJAX. Oh no. It’s also about littering your site with pointless bling: clever developers “spice up content and make their sites more dynamic … Use polls, surveys, RSS feeds, and tag rolls.” (OK, I’ll allow them RSS feeds as important).

Only on page four of four is there a hat-tip to the idea that the way sites work with users might have the least importance: “I also include social aspects and smaller, lightweight components as keys to Web 2.0,” says Tony Karrer, the CEO of TechEmpower.

I have to assume that the piece was either poorly commissioned or subbed rather heavily, since the author, David Strom, is actually a lot better informed than this piece suggests.

Anyway, back to the point. No, it is not about AJAX. It’s not really about languages at all. You could write an application in fridge magnets and it could still be called Web 2.0 if it meets other criteria (lightweight models, perpetual beta, read/write access, collective intelligence, etc). Yes, a rich interface is also an important part of the idea, because that enhances usability - the human angle again, see? And those rich interfaces are something that AJAX facilitates. But that’s all it is, part of the toolbox. No-one, to my mind, has put this point better than Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield:

I’d bet the future is less the Matrix than Soylent Green. Less semantic fuzz than social discovery. Less artificial intelligence than human intelligence. Less automation and more augmentation.

Soylent Green is a 1973 Charlton Heston movie. At the end, he discovers that the new miracle food from the Soylent corporation is made of dead bodies. “Soylent Green Is People!” he bellows to an unhearing crowd in the last line. The same is true of 2.0 applications and sites.

Great post from fellow Good-blogger Kate on the bête noire that is partial feeds. I share her thoughts entirely on this issue. She’s unsubscribing from anyone or anything that only offers partial feeds. Unfortunately for me, since some of my most important news sources (every (?) UK newspaper and the BBC) only offers partial feeds that really isn’t an option.

Kate sums up the arguments:

(a) readers hate it

(b) full feeds actually increase traffic

The second point is, as she says, counter-intuitive, but basically it means that you can hang on to readers who aren’t committed enough to come to your site every day, draw in more occasional readers, and please your regular readers by giving them the choice.

Got my mobile phone stolen by some pasty-faced charver who approached me for a cigarette while I was sat outside a cafe in Richmond. Giving fags to the poor and needy is one of the very few charitable acts I regularly engage in. However, it seems my urban outreach programme may need a rethink if they’re going nick your mobile while you’re distracted.

But that’s not who I’m talking about.

I got online straight away to find the phone number for reporting it lost. I bought it from Carphone Warehouse with an O2 account. The phone number published on their sites is wrong. “You bought your phone through a third-party. Please use the number published on your last statement. bleep”.

Got home. Found the statement and phoned the number for lost phones. No answer. Phoned the customer service number. Got through to a nice chap who put a bar on the phone.

“So how long is it since your phone went missing?”

“About three hours.”

“Ah. I’m afraid you didn’t take out the insurance, so you’ll be liable for any phone calls made since then.”

“Oh… It’s quite hard to report your phone stolen when you haven’t got a phone. And the number on your website it wrong.”

“Hahaha. I can see what you’re saying. Anyway the computer system I use is 48 hours behind so I can’t tell you if any calls have been made on the phone. The best thing is that you phone back tomorrow.”

“Why? I can’t do anything about it can I?”

“Hahaha. Well, it’s always better to know, isn’t it?”

O2 generally get quite good press on customer service, and I know this cunning wheeze of charging customers for getting their phones stolen is not unique to them. A friend of mine received a £300 bill from fellow highwaymen Orange after realising his phone had gone missing after a drunken night out.

Mobile networks. Getting robbed is quite unpleasant. Why do you make it so much worse by treating us as potential criminals by charging for calls made with our stolen phones?