I introduced my colleague Alan to the term ‘Abandonware’ today. As a net-savvy individual, I was surprised he’d not come across it before. But, then again, it’s only really current among gamers.

Abandonware is software that has been given-up by its original developers and publishers. Normally, it applies to old games which fans still love, but which their publishers don’t care about any more.

The spiritual home of abandonware is Home of the Underdogs (beware Dragons and possibly viruses), which, appropriately enough, hasn’t been updated for two years. The site hosts binary files for hundreds of old games, manuals and screenshots.

While some of the content is definitely illegal, according to the letter of the law, it’s also a shrine to those old games that you played as a teenager. On balance, it’s definitely a good thing that it exists. Not just so you can get free w4r3z,  but because it keeps the games and the emotions and memories of those games alive. These games, despite the moniker, are not abandoned, but carefully curated and preserved (if the site owner would get off his arse).

Back to Web 2.0, Alan’s observation, just on the basis of the term was that, “a freemium model endgame is suggested” (I think it’s disrespectful to represent someone’s opinion from a single Twitter message. I do so here only to advance the argument. Sorry, Alan.)

Web 2.0 abandonware already exists, surely. I have no idea how Google Docs, for example, could ever make any money. Annoying Microsoft doesn’t seem like much of a model to me. Open Source is ‘cards on the table’ abandonware in some cases. There are interesting examples - when Movable Type went Open Source was that a form of abandonment?, but if there is a Home of the Underdogs 2.0, it won’t really matter very much.

I can still find a working binary download for Computer Quarterback published in 1979 (don’t bother - it’s shit) nearly 30 years after its publication date on Underdogs. I wonder if someone couldn’t make a fortune by starting a Web 2.0 Underdogs for those projects that were loved, but not by the right people.

That’s quite frightening for potential oil-riggers and for people in the oil and gas industry who hire such folk.

I was lucky enough to be at a presentation from Kevin McNulty from Coole Immersive yesterday, part of the Visual Web Convention. They’ve made a simulation game that allows new oil-riggers to get that first six months’ experience for free. That’s to say, the likelihood they’ll have a reportable accident drops to <5% if they’ve used the game. That’s a fairly cast-iron case for games in the workplace, if you ask me.

Earlier in the day, Lord Puttnam gave a challenging keynote suggesting that this field - serious games - was a potential answer to the work he was doing with the climate change commission in the House of Lords. Briefly, his argument was that younger people are more likely to engage with games than any other media - I’d agree with this but suggest that older people are also gamers. Games are also blessed with the ability to offer experiential learning unlike any other pedagogic technique currently available - I think the oil rigger case study shows that’s true. Communicating the things that all of us need to do to avoid the looming disaster that climate change will bring is a tough problem for all professional communicators. We held a private event this week for advertising professionals called Can Advertising Save the Planet? The answer is probably ‘no’, but as communicators, we have the ability and responsibility to make things a little easier and better - the disaster is imminent, after all, but even the lowest of the low can do something to help.

If we are to steer society away from catastrophe and into education, games will have a key part to play.

Unfortunately, as Puttnam admitted, as soon as something is called a ‘game’ then bureaucracy and government recoils. The idea of our government lending public support, and ultimately money, to games, is stymied by its vocabulary. Games are trivial and a social harm in the minds of most bureaucrats and, sadly, most newspaper editors (see the press about the recent Byron Review which, while admitting a need for some governance over which titles were available to younger gamers, was overwhelmingly in favour of video games as a learning resource, if you bother to read the whole thing).

Flipping back to climate change and the emergency we face communicating the facts about it and what needs to be done, then games provide an excellent opportunity. But the flip-side of the problem with bureaucrats then sets in - entertainment providers are terrified of being associated with anything remotely ‘worthy’. Being ethical is, apparently, uncool.  There have already been a few brave attempts - World without Oil, the BBC’s Climate Challenge and others. But the likes of Sony, EA and Microsoft aren’t developing or promoting these sorts of titles. What needs to happen to make the big games publishers alert to their power to change the future?

[Update - Robin Blandford has some videos of what this looks like and a challenge for the rescue industry]

It’s a sort of wiki - but wait, come back! There’s a few interesting differences from the sort of wiki software you might be used to:

(a) the whole thing is contained in a single HTML file - the javascript, the CSS, the data you’ve added.

(b) so you can download it and use it on your laptop or travel with it on a USB key. If you like you can sync that with an online version.

(c) you can use it on any browser - even the iPhone.

(d) it’s written to encourage short posts - Tiddlers - rather than the massive empty spaces found in the MediaWiki software and others.

Apparently, there’s some way to use it as a blog platform, but I’m still working that bit out…

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.)

Step One: Problem Pages

I try to remember to visit the site of my old colleagues at startups.co.uk for news related to starting online businesses. The reporting is good quality and they quite often get stories that aren’t covered in my regular reading. However, they don’t have an RSS feed and so it falls outside my regular updates through Google Reader.

Copy the address of the page you want to generate a feed for to the clipboard. It needs to be the page that lists all the recent stories on the site, or section of the site, not one of the pages for individual stories.

Step Two: Go to FeedYes

The free online service FeedYes creates feeds from pages that don’t offer one. There are various other alternatives, but this one works, so I’ve stuck with it. You have to register to use it, but this takes five seconds, and you could even use a fake email address if you wanted.

Step Three: Create a new FeedYes Feed

It’s the first option in the navigation. Here you enter the address you copied from the site. Also give it a tag, such as ‘internet’ and specify the language, if it isn’t English.

Step Four: Prune the Feed

FeedYes grabs all the links on the page and creates a list. You then click on the first item on the list that is a proper news item, rather than a static link such as a navigation link or special feature. In the next step, you click on the last item that contains news. This allows the service to identify the code that indicates a news item.

Step Five: Save the Feed Address

The service gives you an address that looks something like this:

http://www.feedyes.com/feed.php?f=aJEC6T5Uz0h52Rfj

You can use FeedYes as an RSS reader, but I can’t really recommend that. Instead, copy the address to the clipboard and switch to your normal reader (e.g. Google Reader, Bloglines, or an offline reader) and choose the option to add a new feed.

Paste in the address and …Ta-da! You’re done. You’ll notice that unless you’re very lucky, you won’t end up with a full content feed - it depends on how much is printed on the page you’re working from. Nonetheless, it means that you are now getting updates from sites that otherwise might have fallen off your radar.

If you work on an older site yourself, you could use this method to generate a feed for your own news pages. If that’s the case, I’d recommend putting the feed URL through the feedburner service to give it a slightly more elegant address, such as mybrand.feedburner.com. You can also add niceties such as a custom logo and options like ‘digg this’ and ‘add to del.icio.us’ to each story.

It’s reasonably stable, though annoyingly, it works better on my work PC than the one I’ve got at home. I’ve got five episodes of Dr Who to watch at work and nothing at home - which seems to be the wrong way round. I suspect I need to tweak the security settings on Norton Firewall - it tends to have zero tolerance of new applications.

Video quality is fine - it’s a windows media file encoded to around the same quality as your television, so much better than YouTube. The system involves a fair amount of rigmarole, though. Titles are advertised on the website for the player (IE7 and a plug-in required); you download them into your ‘library’ (a further download) and then watch them in a player application (included with the library), basically a skin for Windows Media player. There’s no streaming - the high quality of the video means that a 30-minute programme might take up 200MB of hard drive space.

The library available is pretty good - I haven’t explored it all by any means, but it includes material from all the digital channels as well as the terrestrial ones. There are probably more than a couple of thousand programmes already available for download. And they’re not just the last week’s offerings, it seems. One of my Dr Who episodes is from the first of the new seasons with Christopher Ecclestone. But it’s a tad random at the same time - I’ll put that down to the beta test wanting to include a little bit of everything.

There’s the much-vexed issue of DRM. The files are protected through Windows Media, are made available on the website for four weeks, and then are only watchable for four weeks after that. This is clearly not great from a consumer’s perspective, especially one that pays the license fee for this stuff to get produced in the first place. On the other hand, (a) the corporation has to raise money from other sources, like DVDs, as well as the license fee; (b) their IP should be protected anyway. I’d hope that the option to re-download - or, better, to simply re-authenticate -material once it has expired will exist. But I won’t know the answer to that for another four weeks.

Apparently, there were three major security flaws in the original 2.2 version, so Wordpress users are to regard this version as a necessary upgrade.

I’d heartily recommend Wordpress to anyone who fancies having their own blog, and anyone that already does with another service. You hear a lot about security problems and so forth, but that’s only because it’s open source and they’re prepared to be transparent about the whole thing. If you get hosting with a decent provider (I use Bluehost, which is cheap-as-chips and has been very reliable) then it’s really easy to install and maintain.

The regular version of Plaxo remains free, but the premium version costs $50 a year. That’s quite a lot compared to premium services of other web apps, but if you fit into the demographic that Plaxo’s aimed at - mobile or work from different locations, tons of contacts built up over many years, fairly hectic schedule - then the peace of mind may well be worth it.

Review of Plaxo
Rated as 4/5 on Jun 27 2007 by Ian Delaney

NB: This post is also an unfinished review of LouderVoice, which collates reviews published on blogs. Apparently, around 30% of blogs contain review-style content. I don’t get any money or anything for it, just wider exposure, I suppose. The rather un-bloglike layout above means that it follows the hReview format and pings their server for collation. I’ll let you know if this leads to hordes of new readers. If it doesn’t, I probably won’t.

PPS. Once I have all my machines connected to the new version of Plaxo, I will be running the update service, just to clear out the dead wood, if anything. Curse me now in the comments

This amounts to the aggregation of 2316 different feeds - though individual author feeds for the Guardian’s Comment is Free admittedly account for 1968 of these. A CiF-less version with 348 feeds is also available.

So what?, you might think, I can’t keep up with 50 or so feeds I already subscribe to.

This is the value. Open a new Bloglines or Google Reader account, import the feeds, and you’ve got a searchable database of the whole UK press any time you want it. If there’s a subject or a person or a business or a brand you care about, then finding out about news stories about them can be done in moments. For free.

via Cybersoc