explodedlibrary.info

my rant on the afr.com fiasco

[6 October 2007 update: This post has been followed up here]

The Australian Financial Review, nicknamed the Fin and sometimes AFR, is perhaps the newspaper of record for the Australian business sector. It used to have arrangements with aggregators such as Factiva, Media Monitors and NewsBank. At some point, it decided that it wasn't making enough money from licensing its content online in this way. In addition, the head of Fair Business Media, Michael Gill, was convinced that AFR content needed to be locked down, "because because one bank used an AFR article to support a prospectus." So AFR decided to develop its own platform for online access to its content and abruptly ended licenses with Factiva and the others.

There's was more information about the afr.com debacle in the second article by Stephen Mayne in Crikey called "Remember the glory days of AFR.com", but sadly that's in the pay section of Crikey and I can't link to that. So I thought I'd add my impressions of afr.com and thoughts about the whole process. I am the first to admit that what follows is not a thoughtful objective review, but a rant. The afr.com fiasco has been a major inconvenience to me and many of my co-workers and faculty and students at MPOW.

I tried out the new afr.com both in beta and since its release on a trial subscription. My first impressions of the beta product was that it was an absolute dog. The current release is better than what I saw in beta, but I still think the product is a dog.

The product has a flash-driven interface. This has a number of effects. It makes afr.com a real memory hog. For example, when I'm running Firefox for Windows I don't use it lightly. I have multiple tabs open, I have various web apps running and maybe the Firefox application is using 90 MB of RAM. When I'm running afr.com in Firefox, that number jumps to 250 MB. The other thing is that the application is very slow. Don't bother trying to do anything quickly in afr.com, especially typing or scrolling or clicking on buttons. The other "feature" of the flash-driven interface is that it's impossible to copy and paste text from afr.com. This is a part of their strategy to eliminate copyright infringement by treating paying customers as if they were thieves.

Even if one pays for a monthly subscription (the cheapest being $A 25/month), it is not an all you can eat package. Usage is metered with credits. It costs one credit to open an article. What struck me as tremendously stingy - or clueless - is that if you do a regular search on afr.com, you do not see any page numbers in the list of results. That exclusive information only appears once you choose to spend a credit to open the article. Don't they realize that page numbers are needed in most citation systems?

I was expecting that afr.com would, if nothing else, be a good way of reading the Fin online, similar to wsj.com, the digital edition of the Wall Street Journal. But there seems no good way of browsing the current issue of the Fin in afr.com. The home page on afr.com seems to contain some articles from today’s paper, but it also contains links to other non-premium publications like Reuters or the Sydney Morning Herald – both of which can be viewed for free elsewhere. I've since learned that afr.com is different from the Digital Edition of the Australian Financial Review. The digital edition is only included with afr.com when people subscribe to the spendy ($A 150.00/month) advanced markets package. Compare that with wsj.com, that's available for $US 9.95/month [yesterday, that amounted to approximately $A 11.92].

I have one positive thing to say about afr.com. At least they bothered making it compatible with Macs. The product does work with Firefox and Safari, except that mouse wheel scrolling doesn't work in either Mac browser.  For some reason, they use the most unreadable font for full-text articles in the Safari browser.

And what's with the advertising? I don't mind ads on products I use for free, e.g. Google or smh.com.au. But afr.com is priced as a premium product. I think that somebody paying for a clunky product should be spared from ads.

I doubt that this going to be a huge problem for me, seeing that I don't intend to use the product again, but the online help in afr.com is very poor. They are large glossy-looking slow-loading pdf files which look and read more like marketing pieces than online help. It's a microcosm of the problems with all of afr.com, they go for bling and end up with something slow and unusable.

Afr.com’s major flaw as a product is that it provides all sorts of miscellaneous research tools, as if it’s aspiring to become its customers new research portal, but it doesn’t provide cost effective (or effective in any shape or form) access to the frickin' newspaper, which is only thing that I think 95% of likely subscribers would care about. But that’s not the only flaw in play here. An esteemed colleague of mine is convinced that in a few years from now, there will be books and business case studies about this afr.com fiasco. How could a supposedly smart company get it so wrong in so many different ways?

I wonder if they thought they could get away with it because they thought, “we’re the Fin, the paper of record in the Australian business community, people will put up with this crap, because they need us.” The answer is no, if you make life too difficult and expensive for your customers, we’ll adapt to life without you. Some day you may realize that actually, it was you who needed the goodwill of your customers and suppliers – and try to win us back. That may work, but maybe by then we’ll have got used to not using the AFR at all.

[14 June 2007 edit: I wrote something else about afr.com here]

when you need to forget the answer to remember the question

If you pride yourself on being competent at finding information, please skip this post. This post is for people who know they screw up sometimes. Oh and by the way, competency can be overrated!

when the internet is down

I'm not usually one to apologize for lack of updates, but I feel that an explanation is in order for the last month. It seems that there is some ongoing issue with my local phone exchange at Springwood, which has been causing intermittent outages in my ADSL connection. At least this is if I believe my ISP, who swear that the problem is caused by the phone lines, not by them.

It's amazing how a thing like this can put a spanner in the works, particularly in my blogging. It's very frustrating to think of a post and not be able to write or post it. It's not the same to draft something offline and then post it later, because often for me, writing and reading and research all go together. If I can't check sources and make links while I'm writing, I don't feel that I'm really writing a blog post - at the most drafting a post offline is like preparation for writing a post.

At least for me, every idea for a post only has a certain window of time to be published, and when that time expires, it is usually time to move on, even if it seemed like a really good idea originally. Things change, and what was interesting a month ago may seem a little stale if it's posted tomorrow.

Anyway, because it's such an almighty pain for me when the internet is down at home and I have no idea when it will return, I have arranged for limited dialup internet access as a backup. It's slow but at least it's reliable.

mobile phones in libraries question

The new MBA students are having their orientation week at MPOW. My question is: Do I come down hard on them whenever I see one using a mobile phone in the library, so that they get used to this policy from the beginning? Or do I follow my inclination to reinterpret this policy to be against disruptive noise in general and so excuse brief and quiet mobile phone conversations?

one of my favourite mods, Ultima V: Lazarus for Dungeon Siege

Dungeon Siege (2002) was an ok-ish game. I liked the free form class system - where characters would specialize according to the ways they used their abilities. The mule for carrying extra equipment and loot was an inspired invention. The music and the landscapes were well done, as were the goblins with machine guns and flamethrowers - except that there were too many of them. But it was ultimately a generic and repetitive hack and slash game with a threadbare plot.

But today I am extremely glad that I have a copy of it, because it enables me to play Ultima V: Lazarus (which I'll be referring to as just Lazarus), which recently been finished for the Mac.

The original Ultima V was published in 1988 on the Apple II. It was not good timing for a game's posterity, because at this time people were already replacing their Apple IIs and Commodore 64s for Macintoshes and PCs.

One of the developers of Lazarus explains the reason for re-making the game:

We're doing Ultima V specifically, rather than, say, IV or VI, for three basic reasons:

First, U5 is old enough that its technology is completely obsolete. Ultima VI-IX are still "playable" with today's computers, but V and those that came before it are very outdated.

Second, no one has ever created any patches or upgrades for it. Ultimas I, III, and IV have all at least been patched, if not completely remade.

Finally, I feel that Ultima V has the greatest potential for expansion of all the early Ultima games--its story is rich, its characters are interesting, and its environments are begging to be seen in modern graphics. [official u5lazarus.com web site, in the FAQ section]

Lazarus is actually a mod for the Dungeon Siege game. It's a very inspired combination - mixing a 2 dimensional turn-based game with well-written characters and a rich story into a 3D real-time game engine.

Lazarus is freeware, but a copy of Dungeon Siege (not Dungeon Siege 2) is needed to use the mod. It is definitely a labor of love. It must have been a massive job. I feel that it's unfortunate yet understandable that it took so long to finish, seeing that Dungeon Siege has been superseded and might not be so easy to find these days. I have only just started exploring this game, but have been impressed by the music and interactions between the different characters. It compares very favourably with modern games, and seems to have a maturity which many of them are lacking.

Further reading:

• Wikipedia entry on Ultima V: Lazarus
• Review of Lazarus
• Lazarus wiki

customer service by chat

So I've just moved. Until I have broadband internet access set up at my new place, please excuse if I'm slow at replying to emails, moderating comments or indeed reading many blog posts. As well as all the unpacking and setting things up for a new household, I am also trying to get reconnected at home.

Seeing that I don't enjoy making (or receiving) phone calls to call centres, I thought that I'd try out the chat system offered by one of the bigger players in the Australian telco market. Big waste of time.

Things were going ok up until the point when I checked to see if they supported Macs - knowing before that they used to have issues with Macs. Just after telling me that Mac OS 10.4 should be ok, the customer service rep. asked me, "which version of windows does it have?" I explained, patiently and tactfully I hope, how that wasn't relevant.

There was a pause for several minutes - and then the chat session was abrubtly ended. I can only assume that he hung up on me. It's a bit of a worry.

I am asking myself - did I waste as much time this way as I would have if I'd phoned them, waited on hold for 5-10 minutes, and then spoken to the same clueless person over the phone? Maybe not, but I am guessing that it would have been easier for me to ask for this person's supervisor as soon as I started having doubts about his expertise. Also, if my experience at Vodafone is anything to go by, it's very rare for a call centre operator to be allowed to hang up on a customer. We were only allowed to do it when they started swearing at us and we had warned them that we would not put up with that sort of language. Released calls were monitored and counted, just like everything else, and always had to be justified. Maybe the online chatting is still so new that it's not monitored as vigourously.

Which is quite short-sighted - after all it would be very difficult for me to post an audio recording (or even transcript) of a call centre exchange on the web - but it was very easy to take a screen shot and post this on the web. It makes me think about virtual reference in libraries too - with a different medium comes different expectations and standards.

using Gmail as a research cache

For some people, the process of research is very organized and methodical. For me research is something creative and instinctive, slightly chaotic and usually a bit messy. I am not saying that one way is better. I know that there are distinct disadvantages to my method, such as the possibility of finding a really good source through some odd combination of luck and insight - only to lose it, never to find it again because of being disorganized. So I've been looking at better ways to be organized - but not in a way which slows me down and causes me to lose my momentum. For me, research is the closest that I'll ever get to hunting. One of the things I like about it is the chase, which is why I hate things which slow me down

I have set up a separate Gmail account for my work and use it as a cache of my research. As I come across articles and sources which seem promising, what I do is compose a new email, paste in the full text and citation/URL of the article and then save it as a draft. It's a very quick process, and so I'm able to move on. The nice thing is that because Gmail is searchable, everything in this research cache is searchable - making it easy to return to the documents to dig more deeply and hone in on what is useful. It doesn't work so well with pdfs, but I can still upload the pdf and store the citation and/or URL. The other nice thing is that I can add to and search this cache whether I'm in my office or at the shared computer on our reference desk.

I am quite confident that because this research cache is personal - and can only be used by me - and because it's do with my work which is for academic purposes, that in most cases, it would be all right. To be absolutely sure, I would need to check all of the license agreements of all of the database which I am likely to use.

Currently playing in iTunes: Benzin by Rammstein

to run ahead

I'm sorry for not replying earlier to the comments on my previous post. I've been wanting to, but then some other things happened. Enough time has passed and this comment has lengthened to the extent that it might as well be another post.

CW: I almost wrote something in my final paragraph about the presentation which you did last week. As an illustration of a good thing. People who are enthusiastic and try to educate and get people excited about using these services are of are absolutely vital to the profession. This opinion is so widespread amongst librarian bloggers that it barely needs saying, but I want to say it anyway. On the other hand, I'm more interested a point that is slightly more controversial. I think that we also need the contrary voices. It should be ok to be sceptical without being called obstructionist or luddite. It should  be ok to say, "Yes, but what about this problem?" This dialogue can be extremely difficult, but it has to happen. I'm learning in my new job is that when implementing new technology in the workplace, the technology is the easier stuff (even when it's being very difficult). The harder stuff is working with people to accept and actually support the changes. A part of me would like to run ahead and be in the revolution, leaving these slow coaches behind - but that's neither possible nor desirable for me. So I decide that I might as well welcome this challenge, knowing that this collaboration will make the final result more solid and better supported in the workplace - and probably prevent me from making some dreadful mistakes.

Please excuse this American western pioneer analogy. Like an annoying song, it won't leave my head until I've written it down. There are some people are make good scouts, they're quick and they can explore these strange new lands we're heading into, understand what's going on and then communicate this to the rest of us. Other people are better at maintaining the wagons and the horses and keeping everything alive and moving - albeit much slower than the scouts. Others are more in touch with the past than the future - their role is to remind us of who we are and how we came to be in this situation. ((I wouldn't be able to say which I would be, maybe a hybrid, like a short-range scout)) Problems only happen when somebody decides that their role is the most important. At one extreme is deciding that the scouts should stop their scouting and be forced to do all their work around the camps, that the future doesn't matter any more. The other extreme is the scouts declaring that everybody should be just like them, ditch the wagons and sprint into the wilderness where the promised land awaits, ready to solve all their problems.

Angel: Like you, I never planned on writing another post about this, but it just happened. Your point about Generation X as a bridge generation was very well made. Of course, it's a given that any statement about generational differences involves over generalizations - but that doesn't mean the topic should be taboo. I had been wondering if this web 2.0 backlash might be more of a Generation X reaction - we were fairly cynical to start with. Then came the dot com bubble and crash - and we now we are seeing similarities between the hype from the late 1990s and Web 2.0, and this worries us.

Walt: Thanks for your comment. Speaking for myself, I think that my positions have become less confrontational as this discussion has continued here and in other places. From sarcastic satire, to a serious rant to why can't we all just get along? My views are often a moving target. That's why I'm better off blogging. I imagine if I wrote a book, my thoughts at the end of the process would be totally different from what I was thinking at the beginning.

my first phish email

I received my very first phish email. Here's how it went (and I had to retype this, because the text was actually an image):

During our regular accounts verification, it has come to our attention that your account details might be out of date or incomplete. This irregularity must be fixed by logging on to your * [I'm not naming the financial institution] Online Access account. This procedure is performed one time only and it does not require further actions on the customer side. After the account has been confirmed by logging in, your regular daily actions on * website can be continued. Follow the link below to login:

[realistic looking URL]

In our efforts to offer a competitive service and maintain a reliable database server, we are performing a regular monthly update on every account enrolled with us.

This is an automated message , no reply or confirmation is required on the customer side.

© FI. Use of the information contained on this page is governed by Australian law.

The design of the email was totally convincing - it could have been written from the FI's style guide. For a half a second I thought about going along with it, after all I have changed my address and have been meaning to tell them about this for some time. Then I remembered the golden rule against phishing: financial institutions never send these emails to their customers.

I rang them and they confirmed that they hadn't sent it. So I forwarded the email to their security section and reported the email to Google as well (Gmail has a report phishing option).

Just last night I had been reading about spear-phishing, where particular individuals are targetted because of the wealth or information which they possess. I'm doubting that spear-phishers would ever go after me, which is just as well, because regular phishing is annoying enough.

why I don't like these labels

Let's ignore the Web and Library 2.0 labels for just a moment. If I think about the individual applications and services which tend to be associated with this technology, I can say that like Fiona on her Blisspix blog, I use a lot of them and generally appreciate what they can do.

My main issue is with the 2.0 labels themselves. Why is it necessary to lump all these disparate things together? After all many of them pre-date the popularity of the 2.0 labels and they did ok before this started. I think being labelled with a contrived 2.0 term actually detracts from what each one of these ideas has to offer.

What I really object to is the language suggesting that Web 2.0 (or Library 2.0) is a revolution which people must either believe in entirely or be a clueless luddite. No, I would rather pick and choose. After all, isn't that one of the common threads in all this technology - empowering people to pick and choose?

The interesting thing about the Web 2.0 backlash is that it's not coming so much from people like Michael Gorman. It's from people who know and use the technology, and are sick of the hype and enjoy a bit of a laugh. Will the backlash take hold? I'm doubting it because when evangelists and cynics clash, the evangelists eventually win because the cynics get bored and move on to question something else. But even so, Web 2.0 will eventually run its course. When it does, Library 2.0 is going to look ridiculously 2005 and librarians will look daggy (definition for people who aren't Australians) for embracing it. ~

Marketing libraries is important and necessary - but this Library 2.0 concept is the wrong message at the wrong time.

Just to make it absolutely clear, I don't hate all things associated with Library 2.0, just the term itself. When librarians implement things commonly under this banner, it is usually a good thing - for the library and its users. It's just got the wrong name - actually any name at all causes more harm than good.

Currently playing in iTunes: A punchup at a wedding by Radiohead

Hipe!3.0 - another Web 2.0 product which will change your life

I have discovered the most amazing Web 2.0 product. To quote from their website:

Hipe!^TM, www.hipe.com.au is an essential tool for our Web 2.0 era. There are lots of buzzwords going around. Hipe!3.0 ^TMallows you to work out what is hot from what is what is just hot air. It is an automated rating system for Web 2.0

It allows you to be an early adopter on the cutting edge, while using the wisdom of crowds to warn you away from the turkeys.

Look up any Web 2.0 product and it will be given one of these three ratings:

• 1.0 Old - this is old news, you wouldn't want to be seen dead talking about this
• 2.0 Hot - this is the sweet spot where you want to be!
• 3.0 Hipe!

There's an extra service for premium members, the Hipe!Words^TM Firefox plug-in. This filters out all the Hipe!Words^TM, converting them all into smiley faces. I have to say, the results were interesting for some of the pages I tested this on. I might need to adjust the sensitivity of the filter.

Another interesting thing about Hipe!3.0^TM is that in addition to accepting PayPal, they accept payment in iTunes Music Store vouchers.

(update: This has never happened to me before, the explodedlibrary must have generated its own mini-Slashdot effect. The hipe.com.au site is having some scalability issues right now with all the increased interest, but I'm sure that this is just a temporary glitch)

Currently playing in iTunes: Difficult by Design by Kylie Minogue

unacceptable flaws in the Google Reader

When Google released its Google Reader, I was very interested in testing it out. I remain a big fan of Gmail, and thought, if the Google Reader is half as good a product as Gmail, it might really give Bloglines a run for its money. Unfortunately the Google Reader is nowhere near being half as good as Gmail is in its niche. It would be generous to say that the Google Reader is one tenth as good.

The Good

First to the positives. I did appreciate the keyboard shortcuts which the Google Reader introduced. They are helpful and necessary. It is unfortunate for Google that Bloglines was able to introduce its own keyboard shortcuts just a few days afterwards, thus eliminating that as a way of differentiating the two products.

The Bad

1. No easy way of marking all items as read

I confess that sometimes I fall behind in my blog reading, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. When this happens, and I find that I have hundreds of unread items, how do I get on top of things? One way would be to doggedly skim through everything, even if it's exhausting, knowing all along that new things are coming in but that I'm still stuck on posts that are days or weeks old. That's my not style. Instead my preference is to do this only for my most favourite blogs, the ones that I really want to keep up with. As for all the others, I just mark them all as read, knowing that I've probably missed some good stuff, but that I'll probably catch an echo of these missed posts later on.

The Google Reader does not have a "mark all read" function - on either a global level or a blog level. There is no option but to plough through all the unread entries. I can only hope that they fix this, because until they do, I would never use the Google Reader to subscribe to a large number of blogs. No, just a small group for here, thank you very much!

2. No refreshing of feeds

This is the very worst problem about the Google Reader, the absolute show-stopper from my point of view. I only just discovered it this afternoon and it's what prompted me to write this entry now. Bloglines is very dilligent about updating the feeds which it subscribes to, so it catches all the edits which are invariably made to a blog post. For example, this is the Bloglines screenshot of my entry from Monday night. It is up to date, and has the same content (albeit with different formatting) as what is on the actual blog right now.

Now look at the Google Reader screenshot, which I took this afternoon. The version it shows is the very first version of this post. It does not contain the extensive edits which I made on Tuesday morning, neither does it show the minor edits which I made 5 minutes after sending the original post. Irrespective of what you think about the practice of post-publication editing, it is a very bad idea not to be able to see the current version of a blog post.

Consider this situation where blogger A writes a post containing significant errors - factual, typographical or otherwise. These errors are corrected as soon as blogger A discovers them, along with a few words of apology and explanation. Normally this would be the end of the story. But blogger B is using the Google Reader, and only sees the original version of blogger A's post containing the uncorrected errors. Blogger B writes a scatching critique of blogger A's post, and nastiness ensues. In the end, both blogger A and blogger B look bad, but I dare say, blogger B would look worse.

Meh

One of the hopes which I had for the Google Reader was that it might re-imagine feed reading in a similar way that Gmail did with web-based email. Google tried a few things in this area, but none of them has really impressed.

For example, ranking subscribed blogs by relevance is very unhelpful. For one thing, relevance to what? Relevance has only meaning in the context of a search. The search statement is what determines the relevancy of the answers. But in the Google Reader there is no search statement, so how can there be relevance? Well, Google says this about relevance in the FAQ, "You can order your list by date or relevance, which prioritizes the items that seem most relevant to you." Not very helpful. Does it have something to do with the blogs being subscribed to? Does this mean that if you have turned on Google's Personalized Search feature, that relevance will be determined by that data? Or will it be determined by the things I write in Gmail? What if I don't use the Personalized Search and only use Gmail as spambait? It's not like I'm after the source code, just some basic explanation of what's going on here.

Whatever the answer is, the relevance ranking is weird, and it doesn't pass my sniff test.

Yes, the Google Reader also has googlish labels and stars. Fix the other problems first and then maybe I'll be interested.

OPML hassles switching from Bloglines to Google Reader

I realize that I am not a fan of the OPML format for distributing RSS/Atom feeds. It's a great idea - and something very necessary, but the way it works leaves something to be desired.

Bloglines has been my main news reader for well over a year now. It's not that I am unhappy with Bloglines, but the release of the Google Reader (in Beta, of course) has prompted me to try it and look at other options.

Maybe it's just me, but Bloglines isn't really all that easy to leave. Here's what their help says about exporting feeds:

How Can I Export My Subscriptions?
From the My Feeds page, click the Edit link at the top of the left panel. There will be a link to export your subscriptions in OPML format.
What's OPML Format?
OPML format is an XML format. For more information on the OPML format, click here. [which goes to a another even less unhelpful site, at least for ordinary users who aren't interested in developing for the OPML format]

I'm wondering if Bloglines is hoping that a lot of casual users will decide that the whole thing looks too difficult and that they'll give up on the foolish idea of trying different blog readers.

For example, why doesn't Bloglines mention that for most people using non-IE browsers, they are much better off right-clicking on that export subscriptions link, and saving the target file, rather than opening it?

Then there's the issue of the Bloglines-generated OPML being incompatible with Google.

I ended up using NetNewsWire 2 (Mac only software) as an intermediary between Bloglines and Google, because I remembered they used to have good import/export features and was curious about testing them out again too. And that approach worked well for me.

It's still too soon for me to have an opinion on the Google Reader or NetNewsWire. After using them for about a week, I should have a better idea.

Currently playing in iTunes: Desired Constellation by Björk

testing MarsEdit and NetNewsWire

Why would anybody want to use (and pay for) a blog editor? It's not like it's impossible to edit a blog without such software. It's quite easy to create and edit posts directly in TypePad from my browser. Sometimes for longer, more considered posts, I'll draft in Word first, for saving drafts and catching the most obvious spelling errors and then paste into the browser. It works OK.

I'm wondering if the main appeal of MarsEdit lies in the fact that it draws these functions together under the one roof and that it works very quickly. I am accustomed to the slight pause that always surrounds opening a new page or anything in TypePad, and so it is quite amazing not to worry about that here. Also that I can switch between different blogs - even blogs created with different software - e.g. LiveJournal or Blogger - very easily.

There's also the integration between NetNewsWire and the editor, allowing the possibility of posting directly from the reader - something I haven't been able to do since I wrote this blog with Radio userland - the only thing about Radio which I've ever missed.

I'll be trying these two applications during the free demo and will see if the subtle improvements they offer make a big difference in my blogging process.

Currently playing in iTunes: Come Into My World (Fisherspooner Mix) by Kylie Minogue

Google - a good tool, or what?

Blogging's been light lately because I'm getting over a cold. Of course I know why I caught this, because I mentioned online how I had dodged this bullet several times lately.

Fascinating discussions on the essence of a library. It puts me in awkward position. I'm generally quite well-disposed towards to Google, and believe that Google and other search engines can complement libraries and vice versa. I think there's plenty of room for both libraries and Google, but Google is a very different beast than a human staffed library. If libraries are redefined in Google's image, the uniqueness of human-staffed libraries will be defined out of existence. Would this be the beginning of the end for libraries - maybe, maybe not.

Here's an interesting Copyfight post that is one link removed from this topic. If librarians are to survive and thrive in the 21st century, we need to avoid the extremes of a) being luddites and sticking our heads in the sand and ignoring these changes and b) giving up and not standing our ground to preserve what only human librarians can do.

light blogging, my temporal wish list

Today I have half a day at work, before leaving on a mini-vacation in Tasmania to catch up with family & friends. Needless to say that I won't have much time for blogging or reading blogs until I get back on Tuesday.

Things I would like to write about today if I had the time: comparing Yahoo! 360 (I've recently received an invite to its beta) and msn spaces and LiveJournal; musings about the intersection of blogs and wikis; the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie (did this actually open in Australia before it opened in the US? I saw it last night).

Meetup's common-place tragedy

Just my luck. I was thinking that Meetup might be a good way for me to find some people in Sydney with common interests. Only last weekend I'd joined a few groups, but now I see that Meetup has shot itself badly in the foot and it might not be long for this world.

The service has been free for most people, with a premium membership option for people who wanted to pay for some extra features. This week Meetup announced a massive price hike - going from completely free to a charge of $US 19 per month for each group. There is also a temporary $US 9/month rate for people who cough up the cash early, but I can't see many taking advantage of that. Rather Meetup is just going to lose most of its active user-base as if it were a sieve.

Yes, Meetup has the right to try and make some money, but it's gone about this in totally the wrong way. These are just my thoughts as someone who's relatively new to Meetup.

Firstly, they leave it to the Organizer of each group to be responsible for paying for this charge - and recovering the costs from the membership. Meetup already had enough problems with attracting and retaining people to fill the thankless Organizer role. So what do they do about it? They charge Organizers for the privilege of doing this unpaid work, and expect them to recoup Meetup's charges from the group members. I can't think of a better way of ensuring that all the Organizers drop like flies than these proposals, and don't expect new Organizers to come running to fill these gaps. Asking a person to do such an unpleasant task as collecting money from people - that is the worst thing they could have done.

Secondly, a price rise from free to $US 19 per month per group is just too high, and this is speaking as someone who is more willing than most people to pay for internet services. A LiveJournal paid account is $US 25 per year - and LiveJournal is such a better site than Meetup. Yes, I know that if a group has 19 members and the Organizer performs a miracle and gets everybody to pay for their share, that's only $1 per month, but I don't accept that this scenario could ever really happen.

Before these changes, I could have possibly had my arm twisted to pay a few dollars a month to use a site like Meetup, but certainly not now - because  Meetup has been hemmoraging active Organizers and members and groups since these changes were announced - at least if my experience is anything to go by. A lot of the groups which I joined last weekend didn't have an Organizer or at least an active Organizer, but every single active Organizer I've encountered has quit (Meetup should know that active Organizers are the lifeblood of meetups, if anything the company should be paying them to stay around!), and a majority of them are setting up Meetup alternatives on Yahoo! Groups.

This is leads me to Meetup's third mistake. It's not as if Meetup members are a captive audience. Much of what Meetup does is emulated on sites such as Yahoo! Groups, which are free. Meetup's way of RSVPing for meetings might be one of the more useful and less common features, but even that is available on new paid services such as getalife.com.au

does anyone know what's going on with bloglines this weekend?

It's as if it has been taken down for maintenance or something - the site is totally down when I try to access it. It doesn't even have that pesky plumber saying that maintenance is going on. Next time I use it, I'm definitely going to download my OPML file so that when things like this happen, at least I'll have a backup of all my feeds.

the iPod zombie trance

I am an iPod zombie too. This Times of London article points out some of the disadvantages of people wearing iPods – both on an individual level and on a group level.

I concede these. There are days when I’ve forgotten to bring it along or recharge the batteries, and I am amazed sometimes by how much interesting background noise there is to hear. Birds, leaves rustling, snatches of conversation on the footpath, bus or train.

On the other hand, sometimes there aren’t any interesting or appealing ambient sounds. Sometimes it’s just the white noise of traffic.

I definitely use the iPod more in Sydney than I ever did in Hobart. Why is it more of a big city thing? Is it peer pressure, being more reliant on public transport, the busier and more stressful lifestyle?

Listening to music is an escape from the drudgery of the world. After a long busy day in the office, and faced with a grueling commute – it is nice to simply tune out and almost be somewhere else.

Yes, I can see why it isn’t a good thing to have a society where everybody is enclosed in their own personal musical cocoon. On the other hand, this is also a reaction to other things going on in society. If the people who are soliciting donations for charities, selling credit cards or just begging are going to be more upfront about interrupting me – when this isn’t welcome – then I am grateful for anything which makes this more difficult. Acting as if I am in an iPod trance is one way of shielding myself from this.

It’s possible that iPods and other mp3 players are creating a world where people are unaccustomed to silence and where abundance of music is taken for granted as just a background.

It doesn’t have to be like this. It’s also possible that the option of having constant music will help us appreciate deliberate silence.

libraries and SEO, two different world views

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the exact opposite of what librarians are about. I don’t mean to draw a good vs. evil dichotomy here, but more of a yin & yang difference. People in SEO see the searcher as the object which exists to serve the subject, the websites of their paying clients. We see websites as the object, which exist to satisfy the information needs of the searcher, who is the subject.

Imagine if libraries were organized by SEO principles, so that we were paid by publishers to ensure that more people used particular books or databases. Instead of titles being arranged by Library of Congress or Dewey, it would be more like a supermarket, with the most valuable shelf real estate going to the most potentially lucrative products. Reference librarians would have to adapt as well. We would dump that tedious reference interview where we tried to ascertain what information a user was really wanting or needing. Instead we would work out which product in our paid-referral section was the most suitable for this person, and then steer them in that direction. If nothing in their question led them to any of these products, we would re-interpret their question, or even correct their question so that it did lead to the outcome that was beneficial to both the library and its publisher-client.

I’m tempted to think that SEO is just a sub-section of advertising, which itself is one area of marketing. Advertising and marketing are also double-edged swords. There are ethical issues associated with marketing harmful products such as tobacco or weapons. There are also ethical issues associated with particular advertising techniques, such as subliminal advertising and advertising to children. Sometimes you get the worst of both worlds, when improper techniques are used to promote harmful products, such as advertising cigarettes to children.

When I speak of double-edged swords and ethical pitfalls, I don’t mean to signal out SEO, advertising and marketing for special treatment. Other people, like librarians, lawyers, journalists, even your regular blogger have some problematic areas of their own, where special care needs to be taken. Also, some good can come from marketing. Marketers have taken some psychological findings and applied and extended them, so that now psychologists have an even better idea of how people think and act. As for advertising, in addition to funding free-to-air TV, radio and many internet services, some ads are so creative and amusing that they are works of art in themselves. Even your regular odious email spam has been recognized for some of its amusing characteristics [thanks Cat for showing that to me]. I’m yet to discover any positive things about comment spam on blogs, although maybe the flattery spam could put a smile on some people’s faces – for just a moment, until they realize what’s happening.

Ideally, there should be room for both the library model (connecting people with information) and the advertising/marketing/SEO model (connecting information with people). There seems to be demand for both approaches. We could do our thing and they could their thing and we could just agree to disagree about which approach was better.

Unfortunately, we tread on each other's toes in the arena of blogs. Blogs of libraries and librarians, and of course every other blog with any noticeable readership, are targeted by comment spammers. Not only is the comment spam annoying, time-consuming to deal with, and would smother all legitimate comments if left unchecked, but it is an unwelcome philosophical affront. When the comment spam leads to the worst extreme porn sites, it feels like a cruel violation.

Comment spam is just one area of SEO, and not all of SEO should be tarred with the abuses perpetrated by comment spammers. On the other hand, if people engaged in SEO want their field to have more respect and credibility, they should be more proactive about reigning in (or at least condemning) some of the unethical comment spam practices which happen under their umbrella. Some bloggers would be surprised to know that many comment spammers resent the very blogs and bloggers whom they target. Why would this be? Because of the interlinked nature of blogs, it is easy for a blogger without any effort – or even intention – to end up at the top of search engines results, undoing a lot of SEO work. Some comment spammers think, if these amateurs are going to muck up our work, we’re not going to feel bad about feeding off their work.

Besides, people in SEO argue, don’t blame us, blame the search engines and the blogging software producers who created the conditions for comment spam to flourish. I hope that the no follow tag will help undercut it, but as I mentioned in my previous post, let's not declare that comment spam is dead yet.

The position of the search engines is rather ambiguous. Although they each try to provide the best search experience for their users, they are all funded by advertising dollars, in some form or other. That is a potential conflict of interest, but it is so widepread that it is no longer remarkable. Maybe they would say that theirs is the middle path between the SEO model and library model, and that they have found the correct balance between the interests of users and advertisers. If that is so, the search engines should remember that the nature of a balance is that is very delicate and can very easily get out of kilter.

hoping that electronic discussion lists remain alive and kicking

[17/2/05: This document has been changed so that all references to "listserv" have been replaced with generic terms such as "electronic mailing list", "email lists" and "electronic discussion list." At the time that I wrote this post, I didn't know that LISTSERV(R) is a registered trademark owned by L-Soft]

I am the first to admit that electronic mailing lists can be very annoying sometimes. There are the inevitable out of office replies. There can be threads as well as people are who are just annoying, and the unsettling possibility that a flame war is waiting around the corner.

With these defects, as well as a few more which I’ll mention, why do I think that email lists still have a valuable place in today’s internet, dominated as it is by much cooler technologies, such as blogs, feeds and increasingly, tags [link to Salon article, viewable by subscribers or (free) day pass holders]?

Don’t even bother with the digested version – the magic of an email list is that approximates an actual conversation that is happening right now. Digests, although they might convey the information, don’t capture this magic. That’s why they are usually so boring and stale to read.

The purpose of digested email lists was to prevent the evil of your inbox being flooded when there's been a busy day (or technical problems), smothering all of your other more important emails. Fortunately, it is now a lot easier to train your email programs to put discussion list emails in a special folder, away from your regular inbox. Alternatively, if you use Google’s Gmail or something similar, the back and forth is automatically threaded under the parent email. This automatic threading cannot take into those instances when somebody decides to continue the conversation by starting a new thread, instead of just replying. But hopefully one of these methods will make it easier to manage being on a electronic discussion list so that it isn’t so annoying.

You may ask, why bother, doing all this work to reduce the annoyance – when it’s so easy to subscribe to blogs in an aggregator, a method which leaves totally in control of the people you’re reading.

And before I continue, I want to make it clear that it is not my purpose to denigrate blogs by saying a few tiny positive things about email lists. This isn’t a zero sum game and there is more than enough room for both types of discourse.

possibly luddite confessions

1. I’ve never bought or sold anything on eBay. On a couple of occasions, I have browsed eBay and have been amazed at the sort of things which can be found there. I hesitate for a few reasons, although now I think that most of my security concerns have been allayed. But all the same, I’m in no hurry to pick up another computer-related pastime.
2. I like to subscribe to the print version of my city’s daily newspaper. Yes, I also look at local newspapers online and even on my mobile phone, but I’ve learned that not everything is published in the electronic formats. There is a difference between reading online and reading in print. The good thing about reading the paper version is that you are not dependent upon headlines to decide whether or not you’ll read an article. It is a experience which is more open to serendipity, finding interesting things by chance and getting out of one’s ruts. When I subscribed to the Sydney Morning Herald, I never realized I was being entered into a competition – and I ended up winning a whole lot of furniture. Which was very welcome for me because I had to give away or sell cheaply all my American furniture, when I moved back to Australia, exactly one year ago today.
3. I prefer to use travel agents to book flights. I have travelled between Tasmania and Minnesota many times. For this complicated international flight, which would involve up to 3 different airlines and several legs, it was always much cheaper and easier to go through a travel agent than going directly to the airline or trying the travel sites. If it’s a simple trip and there’s a good special for booking on the web site, then I will take advantage of this, and now that I’m living in Sydney, I imagine that this will happen more often. But even so, I am very interested to see how travel agents cope in this new environment. Travel agents and librarians (and journalists too) are particularly affected by the disintermediation trends on the internet. I don’t say endangered, because it doesn’t have to be like that. I think that disintermediation has hit travel agents first and hardest, and I wonder if there are any lessons which librarians can learn from the experience of travel agents.

this blog has no follow tags - will it reduce or increase the comment spam?

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about comment spam lately. I haven't been particularly afflicted with it lately *touches wood* but  I've had some interesting comments in a recent post in this blog from somebody defending the practice of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) (a post about this is forthcoming). Then of course there's the news about adapting no follow tags to combat comment spam on blogs.

Because this blog is a TypePad blog, no follow tags have already been implemented. If you don’t believe me, look at some comments, view the source code and do a Find search on “nofollow.” Unlike MovableType bloggers, I haven’t needed to do a thing to implement this. What this means is that any URL that’s posted in a comment won’t get any PageRank benefit from Google – and equivalents with Yahoo and MSN Search, although I don't have any details concerning them. This means that you can link to sites that you hate and not worry that they’ll get any PageRank benefit from your link - not that I'm planning on taking advantage of this.

ambivalenz re online dating

My other blog, ambivalenz, has been struggling since I moved to Sydney. I'm hoping that this post on online dating will breathe some life into it and establish a new, less Tasmania-focused direction for it.

Six Apart and LiveJournal

Six Apart’s acquisition of LiveJournal (see Six Apart’s announcement and LiveJournal’s announcement) is very interesting news for me because I’m a satisfied user of both LiveJournal and TypePad.

I know that the reputation of Six Apart was thoroughly trashed in the blogosphere after they announced their new licensing scheme for MovableType, but I think that a lot of that criticism was unwarranted.

I would love it if further down the track, they could incorporate some LJ-like features into TypePad, such as being able to set up communities and specify granulated viewing permissions for particular posts.

I’m more concerned about how this may affect LiveJournal. If this acquisition means that LJ will still be doing its own thing a few years from now, whereas otherwise this may have been in doubt, this acquisition is a good thing. It’s not as if this is like the sad day when Microsoft bought Hotmail.

very impressed with Firefox for Mac

I've been using Firefox on my Windows machine at work for the last month. I'm not surprised that it runs circles around that pathetic excuse for a browser that's loaded with Windows XP. If you're a Windows user, there is absolutely no excuse not to try Firefox - unless you're not allowed to. You will be kicking yourself for every day that you put it off.

What does surprise me is how well Firefox compares with the other Mac browsers. Yesterday I downloaded it for my iBook and I can say that the Mac version doesn't disappoint. It's very fast, both to load and to use, it has tabs (of course) and most helpfully for me, supports rich text editing which allows me to do WYSIWYG updating of this blog in TypePad (neither Opera nor Safari offer this feature).

I've pretty much decided that I'll be using Firefox on my Mac most of the time. The other two browsers aren't bad. Safari is also very quick but I still don't like its brushed metal interface and don't use many of its unique .Mac related features. Opera 7.5 takes longer to load than both Safari and Firefox, but because I have it, I'll still use Opera when I'm about to start a heavy-duty web searching session. Its keyboard shortcuts are marginally better than Firefox's and allow for faster searching, and it's nice to be able to take those snapshots of browsing sessions and be able to retrieve them at a later time. But for casual browsing, Firefox is more than enough.

The table below compares the main three Mac browsers as I see them. I'm not including Internet Explorer 5.2 (a browser without tabs or pop-up blocking and hasn't received a major update in over 4 years is a waste of my time), Netscape 7.1 (better than IE, but bloatware when compared with its cousin Firefox) or OmniWeb 5 (sorry).

	Firefox	Opera	Safari
Gmail support
Load speed	close 2nd	distant 3rd	1st
.Mac support built-in
Power-search features	close 2nd	1st	3rd
Price	Free	Ad-supported / $US 39	Free
Rich text editing
Tabbed Browsing

not so blasé about Gmail anymore

I was about to write to write that Gmail is a great reinvention of browser-based email, but mightn't be the best solution for everyone, particularly those who rely upon the features of POP email. Thanks to some last minute fact-checking, I learned that Gmail does support POP and it's possible to configure it so that Gmail will keep a copy of all incoming mail, even after it's been accessed with POP. Google doesn't yet support IMAP, and I know that some people prefer IMAP to POP, but not me. Before I was kind of blase about Gmail, but now I've been converted and think that it offers the best of worlds in email.

mini-rant about indispensable remote controllers

Why do some manufacturers of TVs and DVD players design their products so that the device is virtually useless without the remote? *sigh* My flatmate has an otherwise cool DVD/VCR but because he's lost his remote, we can't do anything with it but the bare minimum. Samsung says as much on its website. How many other people have equipment which has been orphaned from its remote and is thereby maimed? Having just been through a major move, I can say that it's fairly difficult to lose a DVD player, but quite easy to lose a remote controller, especially when there are so many of them around. The easiest solution would be if manufacturers always provided a way to access the menu on the actual machine.

tips for coping with information overload

Coping with information overload, especially as an information professional, has long been a favourite topic of mine. Take a look at this post in LiveJournal's blog sociology community.

"NEDS is a type of depression that is brought on by information overload, which leads to an erosion of close personal relationships," Sanders says. "The depression is triggered by a combination of guilt ['I can't absorb all this information'], stress ['I can't withstand all these interrupted demands'], and loneliness ['My life is me and my machine']."

I particularly liked the suggestion that if you and email each other twice in succession, that it's time for us to have a talk, face to face or on the phone. Everybody will have their own ideal point of balance of being sufficiently connected while not being over-exposed to online information or feeling disconnected from the real world or self. Information professionals always have more exposure, so it's important we develop good skills for coping with this.

premium SMS scams

[Commenting on this post is closed]

Mobile phones are an interesting technology. They can be used not just as a means of communication, but increasingly as a payment system. Each advance in communications and payment systems technology is inevitably exploited by the unscrupulous (think of fax spam, email spam, telemarketing, premium 1900 numbers; counterfeit currency, cheque fraud, credit card fraud, debit card fraud, identity theft and fraud associated with PayPal and other online payment systems). Eventually this behaviour is recognized and the public is usually protected from these scams by new laws, different business practices or consumer behaviour or technological solutions. We haven’t got there yet with mobile phones. In Australia, ordinary people are still very vulnerable to premium SMS scams. Email spam is annoying enough. Comment spam on blogs can be quite vile – although I’m happy to say TypePad is much improved in this area. Unsolicited SMS (also known as text - and txt at Vodafone) is particularly annoying, and it is certain to become even more prevalent. But can you imagine receiving unsolicited spam which charges you content charges for the honour of receiving the spam? Essentially, that is what premium SMS scams are about.

first impressions of Office 2004 for Mac - get it for the Project Center!

I have mentioned before (in a post which might have been accidentally deleted) that although I am very much into Macs, I don’t instinctively hate all things Microsoft.

This doesn’t mean that I particularly like Microsoft. I use Windows XP at work (I am contemptuously familiar with that operating system) and Panther at home, and there is absolutely no comparison between the two. XP doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as Panther. Moreover I despise the way Microsoft won the browser war, and then once it had the most popular browser, it proceeded to neglect it so that it is now the most atrophied browser that is also the most popular browser.

All that said, once in a while Microsoft makes some decent software and it deserves credit when this happens.

I am referring to Office 2004 (the newest version for the Mac).

What librarians, cooks and call centre workers have in common

[31/5/07 edit: comments on this post are now closed]

It is a myth that librarians ever had an monopoly on providing information to people, but if we ever did have a monopoly, that’s well and truly going away now. No, this isn’t another “librarians as endangered species” post. This is my version of the other Future of Librarianship theme, that the world is changing and we’d better learn to adapt. It has been very eye-opening to be spending some time in a totally different job, in a very different industry. It is interesting how different the profession looks from my current position outside of it, even though I am still a librarian on the inside.

etiquette on the usage of mobile phones in libraries + other wireless musings

I have definitely not been an early adopter when it comes to wireless/mobile technology. When mobile phones first came out, I thought they were just a luxurious and extravagant toy for the very rich. As they became more prevalent, they started to annoy me more. It seemed rude when people would receive a call and then totally ignore whoever they were actually with. And of course, the irritation of phones going off in movies and plays. Fortunately in Australia, there have always been laws against driving while using a non-hands free mobile phone. I don’t know how many near misses I had in Minnesota because so many drivers were distracted because of their mobile phone.

One of my pet hates as a librarian was when somebody would leave her or his mobile phone on a study carrel, go off to the toilet or to find a book, and then the phone would ring. The phone wouldn’t be answered and so would ring a lot – usually with a very obnoxious ring-tone. This has happened numerous times – once with a horrendous version of Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries blaring for several minutes in the library.

Let me digress to say a few words about mobile phone etiquette in libraries. Some libraries are very unfriendly to mobile phones. This undermines the work of librarians of demonstrating to (mainly) younger people that libraries are relevant, and far from being made obsolete by technology, libraries harness and improve on new technologies with human intelligence.

On the other hand , it is also true that mobile phones can make life unpleasant for other people in the library. Here are a few tips on how to reduce these problems.

1. Always keep your phone with you. This will make it less likely to be stolen and prevent your phone from annoying people should it be called in your absence.
2. Try not to carry on conversations on mobile phones in the library. If you get a call, do one of the following:
a. Ask to text that person back (turning off the text sounds), and have a text conversation. Texting is an effective and unobtrusive way of staying in touch within a library!
b. Carry on your conversation outside the library
c. If you must, have a brief conversation in a toilet cubicle, but don’t get mad or be embarrassed if there are any loud toilet noises (odd as it may sound, this has been an issue in my previous job)
3. Common politeness really, but when you’re checking out a book or are otherwise dealing with a real person, please suspend your conversation on your mobile.

It has been very interesting to return to Australia from the US, and see how much more prevalent mobile phones seem to be here. Especially the use of text messages.

Now that I am working for a mobile phone company, it is time to bring myself completely up to speed with wireless technology applications. I am on a bit of a learning curve here.

Because I get some generous employee discounts, I decided that I could afford to get a much nicer phone. So yesterday I bought a Motorola V525, one of those phones with a built-in camera that can also connect to the internet. It’s been a great little phone so far. I’ve experimented with taking photos, sending text and picture messages, voice-activated dialing, downloading different ring-tones, wallpaper and games (cool games with a lot of colour and sounds). This phone is also Bluetooth enabled, so I’ll be experimenting with that too, once I get my iBook some equipment for this.

I am now pondering the idea of starting a moblog concerning my current job. Either that or updating this one by mobile occasionally.

using the shift key to rip certain copy-protected CDs

Today I had my first experience of a seriously copy-protected CD, Radiohead's Hail to the Thief, released by EMI. I didn't have much luck ripping it onto my Mac - I ended up having to force quit out of iTunes. Apparently there are a number of different copy-protection methods. One method can be circumvented with a magic marker. I didn't think that this method would work on this particular CD, so I looked for other methods. Then I saw this reference to hold down the shift key on a Windows computer for 5 seconds after inserting the CD. This stopped the CD from automatically launching the program which would interfere with the copy protection. I then copied the CD with iTunes, and soon I'll have it in my iPod.

As I've written before, I believe that creators should be fairly compensated for their work, but that copy-protection technology goes way too far, and I have no moral qualms about circumventing it. I've never been interested in downloading music from file-sharing sites. The only thing which would tempt me would be if I wasn't able to rip a CD which I had lawfully purchased. Then I would feel entitled to download an illicit copy.

When will the record companies realize that people like to listen to music on their computers and mp3 players, and it is manifestly unfair to prevent this from happening? It is simply such a stupid thing to do - piss off your paying customers and drive them into supporting your real target, the file-traders.

I'm about to really start ranting, so instead I'll link this detailed explanation of how the shift method works.

connecting to BigPond ADSL on Mac OS 10.3 + bandwidth hogs

I wrote earlier about my difficulties with getting iBook connected with Telstra's BigPond ADSL service. Well, it turned out that Telstra don't support Macs running on OS 10.3 (Panther). Don't ask me why. I was quite miffed when I noticed this in the fine print. Information like that should be in big bold letters under the Mac requirements. Well I'm happy to say it is possible to connect to BigPond ADSL on a Mac with Panther. It was actually quite easy. So easy that I could have been saved a lot of frustration if only Telstra had bothered to slip in a piece of paper with a few sentences giving some direction to Panther users.

This was something I worked out substantially on my own. I called the Telstra technical support this afternoon. I got the usual line that they don't officially support Panther, but the guy knew that it was possible to connect with it, but he wasn't sure how.

That wasn't at all helpful, but unless the guy was totally lying, it was good to know that it was somehow possible. Of course there wasn't anything on the BigPond website about this. So I looked further afield and found this helpful discussion thread. This gave me the information which I needed to try a different strategy, which actually worked! I went into System Preferences / Network and decided to try the "Assist Me" button for the hell of it, and that did the trick. So now I can return to using my iBook for everything.

Now my dilemma is, shall I stick with Bloglines (which I have developed a liking for), or go back to NetNewsWire (which I also like)?

While I'm talking about Australian broadband internet services, I have got to mention one huge difference between the Australian and American pricing models. In Australia, they really punish bandwidth hogs. All but the most expensive plans have a monthly download/upload allowance. The most basic plans start give you 200 MB to last an entire month. If you go over this allowance, one or both of these things will happen: you'll be charged for each MB over the limit; your connection speed is curtailed so that it's hardly any better than dialup.

From my observations, a 200 MB plan will work for somebody who never surfs the web for more than an hour a day (looking primarily at text), and who never goes to graphics intensive sites, never downloads or streams music or videos and never downloads applications (except maybe the absolute necessary patches and updates, if there aren't too many in that month). And MMORPGs like Lineage, EverQuest and Shadowbane are totally verboten.

I admit, I have been spoilt by my experience in the US, where there are no monthly download allowances. Those would never fly over there! Although I recall reading something about American ISPs are starting to worry about bandwidth hogs.

And it isn't fair when the person who is downloading pirated versions of Buffy season six (6 DVDs worth) and other movies is paying the same monthly charge as the person who just looks at the news, checks her email and does some shopping.

In theory, I can accept the idea of download-based pricing. But it's still a pain. Would it make a difference if they just sold it a different way, such as providing discounts and incentives for lower usage? Who knows. It's probably not so much of an issue in Australia, because most people here have never known anything different.

first glance at Opera 7.50

[See this follow up post about Mac browsers]

Opera 7.50 has recently been released. For the first time, Opera for Mac is no longer a version behind the Windows version. Opera 7.50 is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Of  course, Mac users upgrading from Opera 6 will notice more changes than Windows users upgrading from Opera 7.

Opera is still a small download, compared with the other major browsers. I like to use Opera for extended browsing / searching, because it has all sorts of handy short cuts which make browsing more efficient. Things like the z and x short-cuts for the back and forward buttons. Pressing F8 to be tab directly to the address bar, and then being able to go directly into a Google search by typing something like‘g MT “public relations” debacle’. I also like having nick-names for  bookmarks, so instead of using my mouse to click on my LiveJournal bookmark, I can just press F8 and type in my bookmark’s nick-name, “lj” and be there. I like a browser which saves me key-strokes and mouse usage.

It can also be really helpful to be able to continue browsing from your previous session, and being able to undo closing a browsing window.

Of course,  these were all things available in previous versions of Opera, so why upgrade to 7.50? Mac users will appreciate the magic wand for remembering passwords and having access to the full range of skins. The user interface looks more efficient and takes up less space on the screen.

One of the big innovations in Opera 7.50 is that it contains a news aggregator. This is a great idea and will probably be taken up by other browsers. Unfortunately, I found the results to be patchy. In the Windows version of Opera 7.50, I experienced difficulties reading my subscriptions. For some reason, the Mac version worked better. If you experiment with Opera’s news reader, I would highly recommend learning the keyboard shortcuts for marking items as read. The Opera news reader is very basic when compared with software like Net NewsWire (even the Lite version), but it’s still a notable first attempt at combining a browser and news reader.

My other gripe about is that Opera 7.50 is that it now only supports search shortcuts for Google. The previous version would support some of the other search engines like AlltheWeb and Teoma. Even though Google is probably at the height of its ascendancy, the other search engines are still relevant if you want to be thorough.

Opera is ad-supported for people who aren’t able or interested in paying for it (there is an upgrade discount for people who’ve registered previous versions of Opera). The good news is that now the ad window is a lot smaller and less intrusive than in previous versions.

Opera continues to be an innovative and competent browser. Sometimes there can be hassles with using a browser with such a miniscule market share, when too many web designers are only concerned with supporting IE for Windows. Opera’s particular niche is that it’s a power-user’s browser. Its extra features won’t be helpful to people who lack the time or interest to explore and play around with them.