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June 17, 2011
 

RSS is not-dead

The software’s job is to bring people articles that they’d like, or need, to read. Think of the app as a reader, not as an RSS reader strictly. (How the articles come in is not important. RSS will still play a major role, but it should be invisible to everyone except those geeks who get it.)
via inessential.com

I've been looking for some elaboration on this "RSS is dead" meme that surfaces from time to time. Brent Simmons does a great job of picking it apart here, at the same time putting forward a compelling idea for making the relatively geeks-only arena of RSS much more approachable for the average user.

Filed under  //   atom   netnewswire   rss   socialmedia   socialnetworking  

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June 13, 2011
 

Carriers Pissing Themselves As Texting Growth Falls Off A Cliff

There’s a reason why dozens of startups as well as the big guys like Apple and Nokia are now going after this market: it’s ripe for disruption. Two key factors: complacency and greed.

In other words, the carriers’ calling cards.

via parislemon.com

I'm very, very glad the mobile operators are scared. I've long been annoyed by the complacent raking in of cash, apparently described by a mobile network exec here in the UK as "the closest thing to pure profit you can get".

I hope they sweat it out, and come back fighting for our custom with something really revolutionary. Like, say, fast and comprehensive network coverage.

Filed under  //   cellphone   messaging   mobile   smartphone   sms  

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May 23, 2011
 

'Boycott The Social List' - Soutpiel.net

So don’t log in to The Social List. Why give a damn about your ranking, and why hand your social networking data over to marketers and big business to be aggregated, commodified, monetized?

Instead, watch Adam Curtis’ new documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. (On BBC 2 tonight at 9pm, or of course on iPlayer.) Although it sounds a little technophobic (“A series of films about how humans have been colonised by the machines they have built”) I heard Curtis speaking about the show on Radio 6 yesterday, and he sounded both positive about the power and “wonder” of the internet as well as cynical about some of the higher-level effects, a “darker side” of networking of which the individual users are largely unaware.

via soutpiel.net

 

Filed under  //   internet   socialnetworking  

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April 15, 2011
 

Apple 'is killing the World Wide Web'

Apple's app-based approach to the internet was a much more innovative one, he said, and the popularity of the iPhone and iPad meant that the Cupertino company was starting to wrest control from Google, the firm that has dominated the web for many years now.

"Right now Apple is just killing the World Wide Web. Peope are adapting iPads and iPhones at a rate. Apple will do almost 100 million units this year - I mean, the numbers are staggering," MacNamee said.

via macworld.co.uk

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November 8, 2009
 

The Amazon Kindle and the future of the web

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Something on the cover of The Guardian recently caught my eye: the hook for an article on the Amazon Kindle, soon to be available here in the UK for the first time. 'Why the Kindle will never kill the book' it said, apparently the opinion of Nicholson Baker, a writer I've heard good things about but haven't quite gotten around to reading. 

I shuddered. Always a bit of a let-down when a newspaper I like, and a writer I was hoping to like, wander lazily down the Luddite path. I took my time getting to the article, anticipating the cringing and teeth-gnashing I would soon endure. 

Turns out it's a damn good article. Yes, Baker is certainly uncomfortable with the Kindle and is strongly in favour of the printed book. But to be honest, so am I, as a personal choice. As a personal choice, I will continue to enjoy my traditional book collection, built up over more than 25 years, and will continue to enjoy print as long as it is around. (Ah, that new book smell.) But I recognise that this is an indulgence: things are changing, and should change, if only for the sake of the environment. And while I can't see myself reading many novels on an e-reader, I think they would make an ideal replacement for magazines and newspapers, especially since the latter make a much larger environmental impact.

Baker recognises all this and (sigh of relief) turns out to be surprisingly tech-savvy. Much of the article is in fact a review of the Kindle 2, along with a fascinating history of Vizplex, the "epaper" that makes up the Kindle's display. Needless to say, although he gives it a good effort, he can't enjoy the Kindle, although he comes out with a surprise recommendation: get the Kindle software for the iPhone instead. It's much cheaper, works better, is more flexible, and fills a convenience niche the way other e-readers don't.

Most interesting – and relevant to this blog – were his observations of the Kindle as a proprietary tool to sell Amazon-specific content. 

'The company uses an encoding format called Topaz. There are other ebook software formats – Adobe Acrobat, for instance, and Microsoft Reader, and an open format called ePub – but Amazon went its own way. Nobody else's hardware can handle Topaz without Amazon's permission. That means you can't read your Kindle books on your computer, or on an ebook reader that competes with the Kindle.'

Users are locked in to using Topaz even though it would presumably have been a trivial matter to support PDF and other formats. Revolutionary is the Kindle's inclusion of an always-on data connection with no monthly subscription charge, but this of course is cobbled to the Amazon network for the purpose of constant book buying. Truly revolutionary would be the ability to access live internet content – blogs, news sites, etc – but this of course would conflict with their bu siness model.

This makes the Kindle a 'closed' device. The genius of the thing is its ability to appear as if it's on the cutting edge of tech trends, but the truth is this closed network model goes completely against the spirit of openness that the personal computer and the internet were founded on. I'm thinking here of Jonathan Zittrain's observations in his book 'The Future of the Internet'. Zittrain speaks of the PC and the internet as 'generative' technologies: open, expandable, and encouraging of the user to feel like a participant rather than merely a consumer. 

But recently we see more and more devices and websites moving towards the closed, locked-in model. The iPhone is a good example (although it pains me to say so as I'm an iPhone enthusiast). According to Zittrain:

'The iPhone ... is sterile. ... It's functionality is locked in, though Apple can change it through remote updates. ... The machine was not to be generative beyond the innovations that Apple (and its exclusive carrier, AT&T) wanted.'

Since this was written, the iPhone has 'opened up' enough to allow tens of thousands of third-party applications to be made available for the iPhone. But, crucially, they are only available through Apple's own online store, and each app must be approved by Apple before release. 

Think also of other increasingly closed devices and websites: Facebook, games consoles, pay-on-demand films and TV, etc. It's not too much of a leap of imagination to see the free and open internet shrink as more and more communities and content become locked in to proprietary formats and specialist devices and websites. It might seem unlikely, but the internet as we know it could disappear altogether. After all, that's what we had before the internet: locked in communities like AOL and Compuserve.  

This is a huge subject and one that I will return to on this blog. For now it's enough to note that, while there has been a Sony ebook reader for some time, supporting PDF and a number formats, and while more ebook readers continue to be launched, it is Amazon's Kindle that dominates. As with Apple, it uses it's leverage founded on open, 'generative' technologies, to create new technologies based on closed systems and tight control. If the internet were to disappear, and the Kindle continue to grow, Amazon would be safe: they would no longer need their website because the platform for their sales could be handled solely by the Kindle.

For the moment, I will continue to buy my books in paper form. Partly because I like them that way, but also because the Kindle, despite it's friendly-faced convenience and eco-credentials, makes me deeply uneasy. 

 

Filed under  //   amazon   books   ecology   iphone   kindle   publishing  

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September 24, 2009
 

A history of bookmarks

I had a sleepless night recently. The type of sleeplessness where your mind ticks over frantically, jumping from subject to subject. At about 5am, as I stared numbly at the dawn glow creeping round the edges of the Velux blinds, I tried to work out how old my internet bookmarks are. You know, as you do.

Back in the early 1990s my first computer was a Windows PC (the horror) without a modem. In those days I'd heard of the internet but hadn't actually seen it. In fact, nobody I knew had yet seen or experienced it. My first experience of the net would've been a few years later when I worked for a design and print business, a small studio sharing one dial-up modem between five people. I suppose I would've started bookmarking web pages then, but I would've abandoned those links when I moved to London late 1995.

The starting point would probably be when I bought my first Mac a couple of years later. Could that be right? I would've used Internet Explorer -- Safari didn't exist yet, and I'm pretty sure Firefox didn't either. Over the following 12 years or so I've had various new Macs and have always taken my bookmarks from one to the next. At first by exporting the links from one machine and loading them up on another, and then using Apple's old .Mac service. Recently bookmarking has been transformed by web 2.0 -- it can be variously social networking, life-blogging, an RSS feed, many filtered RSS feeds, a private online archive, or all of these at once. At the moment my bookmarks are synchronised by both Apple's MobileMe service (the successor to .Mac) as well as Xmarks. MobileMe keeps my bookmarks in sync across all my devices (work computer, laptop at home, iPhone) while the addition of Xmarks means everything is synced between Safari and Firefox too, so I can change to any browser on any device and all my bookmarks will be there.

But there's more. I also sync up using the Delicious plugin for Firefox. I can access my links on the Delicious website, or on the Xmarks site, at any time from anywhere in the world. This also means that -- in theory -- all my bookmarks are safe forever. I never again need to export awkward tab-delimited text files to transport links, and I never need worry about losing them.

But this isn't just a 'look how far we've come' story. Over the last roughly 15 years I've carried these links around with me. I might continue to carry them, and add to them, for the rest of my life. The way I bookmark (if I'm allowed to use the word as a verb) has changed in that time. I've organised and re-organised the links into folders and categories. I've weeded out dead links and updated them with new ones. I've tagged them with keywords and meta-data. I could probably find the date each of them was created and filter them in that way, creating a timeline of my browsing habits, looking for patterns of interest or changes in my life. There's something in this, no? D'you see it?

Of course the serious internet progressives and think-outside-the-box types have seen this already. That's how we ended up with things like social bookmarking, after all. And it will continue to develop. Other internet technologies will converge with bookmarking, and perhaps bookmarking will transform completely. But what I'm interested in -- what I pondered that early morning as birds sang and the milk float hummed past the front door -- is what does it mean to have all this information, both right now and decades from now, as it changes constantly, sketching a history of my internet life, amassing data-about-data, tracing my personality?

It sounds esoteric and trivial to say "let's talk about bookmarks", but there's a lot going on there. And to be clear: I'm not trying to give this a dystopian spin. I'm not worried that my bookmarks will be hacked or in some way used against me. My bookmarks are private and as secure as a pen-and-ink diary kept in a desk drawer. No, I just want to know where this might go. What can my database of bookmarks say about me right now, and what will they say in 40 years? How will I use them? What does it mean to have this breadcrumb trail digitised, databased, extensible, filtered, hyperlinked, synchronised, archived? Are my bookmarks worth anything, either personally or as raw data? How long will they live? Will I leave them to my children?

Filed under  //   bookmarks   browsing   delicious   firefox   mobileme   rss   safari   xmarks  

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