Information Research Weblog

Google

You just know that anyone who could write:

As a company, Google has done wonderful things: it has re-architected knowledge with its search; it has taken the cooties off citizens' media with its ads on blogs.

has to be a 'media commentator and consultant'. "re-architected knowledge" for Heaven's sake - what's that supposed to mean? As for the last bit - it might was well be in Klingon. However, the rest of the article about Google is written by others and is quite interesting. It's a pity the Editor's pen didn't go far enough.

Moving files

I always read the 'Ask Jack' column in the Guardian's Online supplement - lots of useful tips. And this week he has some very useful advice on transferring files to a new PC

Skype

Vanity Fair is not the place I'd normally look for articles on technology but, in this month's issue there's a piece about Skype and it just happens to be one of the articles you can read online for free. To call it a technology article is stretching things ("Night is getting on when three Korean girls in negligée cocktail dresses slip through the crowd, carrying electric violins on their way to the aft stage.") and the writer seems to imagine himself as a cross between Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe - he has a style that is not easy reading but continually straining for effect.

Managing the Internet

Why am I not surprised that the commission set up by the UN to enquire into managing the Internet has come up not with one solution, but four?

Skype killers

With Skype so successful (at any one time, when I use it, there are more than 2.5 million other people using it) it seems inevitable that there will be competition. Two have recently been launched:

The Gizmo Project

This looks very much like a Skype copycat - even the layout of the interface is broadly similar and In and Out services are provided (i.e., you can call out to land lines and have a land line number that others can use to call in to you). I'm in the process of trying to test this one and will let you know what happens.

VoIPBuster

This one didn't get as far as testing! For several days I tried to register but kept getting a message to the effect that 'an unexpected problem' was preventing registration and 'try again later'. Well, there's only so much I'm prepared to put up with and I gave up on it. Others may have more success. [Just in case things had been resolved, I've just tried again, with the same result.]

Google in the dock

Thanks to Charles Knight for drawing my attention to this one. This is a rather complicated story which hinges upon the Internet Wayback Machine archive and a law case in which old Web pages were proving embarrassing. Mmm. You can shred old documents, but when you've put them in the public arena on the Web, that's a little difficult. It will be interesting to see what the Canadian legislators come up with. Of course, it all relates to corporate greed and misdoings—when things go wrong companies will always try suppression and if they can get the legislators to help them, they're laughing and the rest of us are weeping. But aren't parliamentarians supposed to be the representatives of the people? Ha, ha!

This week's Computer Weekly has more items of interest than usual for me. On the front page is an item about problems with a big merger project involving the clearing house system for the banks. Accenture has been called in to try to sort out the problem, and LCH Clearnet is looking for a new IT director. A box on the page points out that 60% to 70% of similar projects fail to hit budgets and deadlines and up to 40% are total failures. You'd imagine that by now some lessons would have been learnt, wouldn't you.

Also on the front page, a short item about Tony Blair's intention to monitor the government's top twenty IT projects. Amazing—he's running the country, invading Iraq (and possibly, Iran, Syria and North Korea), sticking his finger into every ministerial pie and he still has time to do this! Perhaps he should focus.

Inside, we have an item about the Prudential insurance company's hopes of saving £26 million through an outsourcing deal with Wipro (an outfit in India), while two pages further on we have an article on how Bedfordshire County Council is in trouble with an outsourcing deal! Mmm - are Prudential's hopes optimistic, I wonder?

Also in the news: Google's new 'Mini' - an 'integrated hardware/software search appliance' for searching corporate intranets and Websites, while on another page, another article about the use of desk-top and enterprise search engines.

Next, a questioning item as to the delivery of promises about Java, and a different item on how Java is bringing benefits to British Airways. Did the editors plan these coincidental items, I wonder, or did they just happen to happen?

...and, finally, an item about early adopters of technology.

Netscape has beaten MSoft to the punch by releasing its new browser, Netscape 8.0. Still officially in beta, it looks a pretty polished product, with features that are now becoming expected - tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, better security, etc. etc. Plus the ability to add RSS feeds It has a pretty slick looking appearance and, although developed in partnership with Mercurial Communications, obviously owes something to Firefox. In particular, when you click on Themes and Extensions in the Tools menu, you find yourself presented with the pages from Mozilla.org

Attention was drawn, a little while ago, to the fact that Firefox was not as immune to security problems as claimed. Well, Version 1.0.1 has now been issued (not yet in all languages—so English English is not yet available). This version "fixes a few security holes and some other bugs", particularly the security problem relating to Internationalized Domain Names:

The IDN vulnerability allowed an attacker to create a fake Web site on a non-Microsoft browser in order to pull off a phishing scam. A spoofed link would seem to be a legitimate URL in the address bar of affected browsers. But instead of taking the victim to the trusted site, the link would lead to a phony Web site with a domain rendered as the same address under the IDN process. (ZDNetstory)

Mention of languages reminds me—is there any way at all of getting rid of English (US) in Microsoft Word? It causes enormous problems for a journal editor because people use the package without changing the language setting and, even when the default is set to English (UK) it always returns to English (US) as the default when you re-launch.

Interesting news on the progress of FireFox as browser of choice, which comes in an article about a flaw that could encourage 'phishers'. It notes:

A survey at the end of November found that Mozilla-based software, including Firefox, accounted for 7.4 percent of browsers in November 2004, up 5 percent from May.

This is interesting, because, as I have noted previously, IR readers appear to be ahead of the game. Currently, i.e., today, FireFox and Mozilla account for 9.7% of the hits on the top page of the journal

Google has been much in the news as a result of its venture into the digital library - on a huge scale. Today's Observer (one of the so-called 'broadsheet' Sunday papers in the UK, for those who don't know it, and part of the Guardian family) has an article in its business section on Google's latest venture, in which John Naughton refers to Howard Reingold's seminal work on the virtual community:

Many years ago, Howard Rheingold, who was one of the first people to understand the social potential of cyberspace, posed an interesting question: 'Where is the Library of Congress, when it's on your laptop?' To most people at the time, it seemed a meaningless question. What lay behind it, however, was an attempt to think through a profound consequence of a networked society - what Frances Cairncross later dubbed 'the death of distance'.

Naughton also notes:

Once upon a time, being learned involved holding a lot of knowledge and information in one's head. Are we moving towards a world where the important thing is not what you know, but how to find it?

an idea expressed many long years ago by Dr. Johnson (as reported by James Boswell—in 1791):

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."

which is also a very neat definition of the difference between 'knowledge' and 'information' :-)

Google was also the subject of one of Fortune's long articles last week, too. The focus was on the share price and the probability of investors getting their return (the verdict seemed to be, 'Be cautious'), but, among other things it has some interesting stuff on the competition.

Thanks also to Gerry Mckiernan and the ASIS-L mailing list for bringing another Google item to my attention; this time in the New York Times (you'll need to register to read the article, but registration is free).

The article contains a nice story about the irreplaceability of the physical book – for some purposes:

Mr. Jimerson said, 'A scanned image will only tell you some things, and the sheer volume of records makes scanning everything difficult'. But he added that he supported Google's plan in theory. 'I recall the story of a gentleman being in a library and watching a researcher sniff books', he said. 'It turned out that the aroma of vinegar was still embedded in those that had been treated with vinegar to prevent cholera during an epidemic'.

Thanks to Gerry also for another item in the New York Times – this time on Firefox. With Pennsylvania State University telling everyone on campus to switch from Internet Explorer, it would seem that Microsoft has a little problem on its hands – one that may result in a policy switch, unless arrogance holds sway in Redmond. If there is a policy switch it would require IE to be re-written from the ground up, so Firefox may go ahead by leaps and bounds. Try it—my guess is that, if you are an IE user, you'll need less than ten minutes with the new rival (well, not so new, if you've been using it for the past couple of years in its development phase) to convince you to switch.

On 11/15/04, Tom Wilson said:

>Opera has many of the same features as FireFox (and had them
>earlier) and it does some things better; but I like the way
>FireFox does tabs better, even though its inability to stop sites
>from launching windows without the navigation bar is frustrating.

Actually, it can do that, but it's a hidden preference.

In your browser, go to this url: "about:config". (No http: or
anything, just exactly "about:config".)

At the top of the long list of preferences that it shows, there is
a textbox. Paste this into that checkbox (without the quotes):
"dom.disable_window_open".

Double click on the line that says
"dom.disable_window_open_feature.titlebar". That will change the
value from false to true. From now on, when a web page opens a new
window, it will be unable to hide the toolbar.

Seth

I tried that Skype and even put some money into being able to use it to ring
someone, but tried it once and have never got back to it. Mostly because
I'm used to using all the free methods and only occasionally make the effort
to talk to someone on a phone anyway. Guess I wasted a bit of money, or I
need to get back to using it.

And on the general lack of interest in the IR Weblog, I guess I would be
really disappointed if the IR Weblog disappeared. But I guess it's not
being a proper weblog so I guess I won't fight it. I get enough mail and
info as it is and that's part of why I haven't chased why I'm not getting
more!

The decision of Google to get into e-mail has provoked mountains of comment - mostly relating to the advertisement policy. The strategy appears to be that GMail will use automatic analysis of the text of messages to put ads at the side - much as Google now does for searches. CNN.com has a longish article on the subject, while ZDNet UK reports that the UK's Information Commissioner has been presented with a claim that the policy of retaining even deleted e-mail would infringe the UK's privacy legislation. Today's Guardian Online reports that GMail is now open for testers - however, that's not evident from the GMail site, which simply records your e-mail address to send you more information.

Spam is the electronic equivalent of the bubonic plague, spewed forth by rats in Florida most of the time, it seems. However, the fight against it is on and I note that Yahoo! Mail, which I've been using as my secondary e-mail address pretty well since it started up in 1997, is getting its act together. One good thing about Yahoo! Mail is that you can mark an item as spam without opening it and then click on the 'Spam' button - this not only removes it, but transfers it to Yahoo's anti-spam team so that learn more about how to counter it.

Yahoo! Mail is free, up to a limit of 6MB of storage - after that you pay. And if you pay, for Yahoo! Mail Plus, you can now have a variety of addresses so that you do not need to reveal your primary e-mail address. Other mail providers may well think this is a good idea and, indeed, ISPs often provide the possibility of multiple e-mail addresses. Yahoo! Mail Plus starts at $29.99 a year.

Found a long article today in Fortune - not available at its Web site, unless you are a subscriber, unfortunately - but you can read the first page there - about a start-up Internet telephony company called Skype. These are the guys who brought you KaZaa, so peer-to-peer communication is their game and what is telephony other than P2P? However, unlike KaZaa, which was funded out of their savings, Skype has attracted the attention of the venture capitalists who believe that their software for Voice Over Internet Protocol (otherwise known as VOIP) is a winner - to the extent of investing $25 million in the first round, with the second round of funding over-subscribed.

This is serious enough for the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission to be saying that telecom as we know it is finished:

I knew it was over when I downloaded Skype. When the inventors of KaZaa are distributing for free a little program that you can use to talk to anybody else, and the quality is fantastic... - it's over. The world will change now inevitably.

The key is that phrase, 'the quality is fantastic' - VOIP has been around for some time now, but it's been a hassle and the time delays were dreadful and the quality was poor - with broadband use growing and the quality problem apparently solved... well, I'm now among the more than 7 million who have downloaded it, and I'm looking forward to getting set up to use it.

Coincidentally, this week's Time magazine has an article called 'Back from the dead', devoted to the resurgance of interest in, among other things, VOIP. [Thanks for drawing this one to my attention, Alistair... and thanks, Charles, for the link to the inevitable.] The separate bits of the article are on the Time Europe Web site - and the VOIP bit is here.

It looks as though this could be the next big thing!

Ah! A trade mark dispute - a pity really, the Phoenix metaphor that started it led naturally to Firebird - and I've never even heard of the database group that was objecting.

However, from a hint on the discussion forum, I discovered that Firefox will launch if you also have Firebird running and it nicely picks up the Firebird bookmarks and add-ins. Tab Browser Extensions are one of these, so I'll see if disabling them results in Firefox launching every time.

Keep tuned to this station for further announcements.

On 2/9/04, Tom Wilson said:

>Don't ask me why, but the new version of the Firebird browser is called
>Firefox

The reason is explained here
Seth

It's Tom, actually, Rishi - unless you got another message from a Tony :-)

Given the situation you described, with an outsourced IT Department then it would seem that a resolution of the situation is their responsibility, not yours!

As for how you achieve full participation, once a system is designed and installed, that is down to the general management of the organization. If a system of the kind I suggested is approved, given the go-ahead, and supported by management, then management must act in ways to encourage the system's use. With a document management system in place, it would be their job, not yours, to ensure that everyone in the organization used the system in ways that enabled everyone to gain ready access to the shared files.

I find PowerMarks extremely useful for managing bookmarks - it imports from most browsers; you get space on a server so you can backup the list, and download it from another computer. I've stopped using bookmark lists directly since I found it. (I hasten to add that I have nothing to do commercially with PowerMarks!).

Stephen Gourlay

Kingston Business School, Kingston University, Kingston Hill, Kingston upon Thames, KT2 7LB, UK

A couple of days ago, I mentioned Mozilla Firebird as a desirable browser and my liking for it grows. I found that it is delightfully easy in import one's bookmarks from other browsers - IE is very straightforward, but even for Opera, all you need is another very useful open source program, BookMark Bridge. This checks what bookmark files are one your system and then merges them under the desired system. There's some tidying up to do, but it works very effectively.

A list member, Carol Cahill, draws my attention to a couple of items worth looking at:

• PC magazine Feb 17 issue has an article about the value of public library subscription databases "Your library online" by Janet Rubenking
• Today's Seattle Times has an article about Joe Janes' new ischool class on Google: "Google for a grade: UW class to study popular search engine"

A good read from Peter Jasco of the University of Hawaii on the ups and downs of 2003.

...and some guesses from various persons about what 2004 might hold for us.

Finally, IST Results e-bulletin has the following item:

• Need help navigating the Internet? Maybe Mayva can help. Mayva, the first implementation of the AsAnAngel project, is a conversational and customisable virtual assistant for Internauts and cellular phone users.

I'm very impressed by the Mozilla Firebird browzer. It may even displace Opera as my preferred system.

One of the big features is the extent to which it can be customised through 'Tips and Tricks' which allow you to do practically anything by inserting code into one or another of three text files: user.js, userChrome.css, and userContent.css

Try it out, I think you'll like it.

Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru, has a nice piece on 'information pollution' as his first 'Alertbox' of 2004. Much of what he recommends was recommended by David Allen and myself following our project on 'information overload' - in fact, 'information pollution' is a significant element in overload, in our view. Worth reading, and noting!

You'll notice a new button on the page - an orange one with the letters 'XML'. This is the standard button used by sites to indicate the source of their RSS feed. When you click on the button you get the feed for the page as it is at present - but that's not the important thing. All you need to know, if fact, is the URL for the page, which appears in the address bar. Do it now and you'll see that the URL is <http://www.free-conversant.com/irweblog/index/rss>. You need that for your news aggregator, assuming you have one. The aggregator will have some routine for adding new news feeds and will ask for the URL. Once in place, the aggregator will keep you up to date with what's happening on the log.

If you don't yet have an aggregator, you'll find a list of them at Haiko Hebig's Weblog I use NewzCrawler. If you use a PDA in a serious way, you might try MobileRSS

It's been a little while since the last posting here, because I've been in Lisbon for a week, with very little in the way of Internet contact - just a few minutes on the hotel connection.

However, here's an interesting site, brought to my attention by Current Cites - where you will always find something interesting.

The site is that of the 2003 Dublin Core conference It's interesting for two reasons - the content, of course, but also the mode of presentation, using Siderean's proprietary "Seamark" navigation system.

Reflecting on Terry Brookes's Web services column:

Amazon tools will let Office users access Amazon information from within an Office document, using the research pane included in most applications. A writer typing a bibliography in a Word document, for example, could click on the name of a book to get catalogue information or cover art from Amazon.

Microsoft is making a major effort to encourage partners to build online services that exploit the new Office's XML capabilities, with service providers looking at Office as a familiar interface that will encourage greater consumption of Web services. Early backers include Factiva, a Dow Jones-owned online research service, and online payment services from eBay's PayPal.

Another major digital resource - The Lancet - is going digital (with its entire archive) but:

People will still have to pay to access the electronic version, and it is likely to be available in major reference libraries at universities and in cities rather than affordable by private individuals.

John Holgate has drawn the attention of IR-Discuss members to the:

Plumb Visual Thesaurus developed since 1996 in the Princeton University Concept Labs. IMO it's the biggest breakthrough in semantics since Carnap invented 'intension'.

It is interesting that the VT's 'view' of the concept information comes directly from the Princetonian definition:

'a message sent and received that reduces the receiver's uncertainty' (ho hum)

but it also separates out facts/documents/data from 'selective information' (a la Shannon communication theory) and the entropy/ectropy strand beloved of the physicists.

The strange little entity labelled 'info', which is appearing more and more in biology circles is, perhaps fittingly, without a definition.

I suggest you try playing with 'knowledge' and 'experience' for good measure and see how meanings appear to have their own momentum and relationships - like in the world beyond thesauri and dictionaries.

Thanks for that, John.

An interesting item on The Shifted Librarian caught my eye: "When does 'own' not mean 'own'?" It's a cautionary tale about the US library supplier Baker and Taylor who have plans for the electronic delivery of texts using the .pdf format. No problem you think? Well - read all about it for another example of the desire of business to sell you something and hold on to it at the same time.

The same source has a defense of news aggregators. I never realised that a defense was needed: I can't think how I'd scan as much material as I do without NewzCrawler. However, The Shifted Librarian points to an article by one Steve Bell (presumably not the Guardian satirical cartoonist) on a e-zine called Ex Libris in which, among other things, he notes:

RSS and news aggregator enthusiasts will emphasize that these technologies will save you time as they improve your access to news and information. But does the time required to obtain the necessary skills to use them payoff in the long run? I'm suspicious of anyone who claims something is easy and fast to learn and implement, but tells me I need to first read a four-page article that explains how it works.

Read a four-page article? I've installed Newz Crawler and used it for months now without reading anything at all about how to use it. I also used Amphetadesk for a while and that, too, required no reading - you just get on with using it!

Talking of aggregators, I came across an interesting one - SNARF - which lives on your Internet Explorer 'links' bar and which you can pop up at any time - worth a look.

It's been a while since I posted to the log as I'm in Sweden and have been for the past week and too busy to give time to it.

I've also been experiencing server problems - unable to access my Webmail box at Sheffield for the past couple of days, so people may have been trying to contact me with my knowing. My Swedish address will serve for anyone who has been trying to reach me - "tom.wilson@hb.se"

I assume that many of you have been infected by the SoBig virus - I received a message from one correspondent saying that he had had 700 messages in one morning. I don't think I had that many, but I certainly had several hundred over the course of last week. It is no comfort to learn (from BBC News) that this has been the fastest proliferating virus of all time.

News on the search front today: my last entry related to Overture and now we learn (from CNET news) that Google has expanded its index beyond the 3.2 billion pages claimed by Overture. As the report says:

But since then, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google has quietly leaped ahead again, expanding its database to more than 3.3 billion Web documents by Thursday this week, according to its home page. A Google representative confirmed the change.

"Google raised the number on its home page to accurately reflect the number of Web pages it offers consumers," a representative wrote in an e-mail. The search company's worldwide index now includes 3.3 billion Web documents, 800 million Usenet pages and 400 million images.

On another front, the legal system hit a new high in the UK this week as a result of the Hutton Enquiry. Its Web site is attracting 'upwards of 80,000 visitors a day', according to the Guardian's Online supplement. The transcripts of the hearings into the circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly make fascinating reading as politicians, their public relations staff and journalists dance around the questions put. The big news, of course, related to Tony Blair's appearance before the Inquiry earlier this week - the jury is out on that performance but from what I read it was an assured performance with all the glibness of which the man is capable - whether anything he says these days can be trusted, is another matter, and the polls suggest that the public appreciation of him has waned considerably.

There news and screenshots of the latest versions of MSoft's new (three years down the road?) operating system, code-named Longhorn, at WinSupersite.com. The thrust appears to be more and more towards multimedia integration - so I guess that's another zillion features that the typical user will make little us of!

Enough for now! Have a good week-end

The Overture search engine, bought by Yahoo!, now has an index, courtesy of FAST - also bought by Yahoo! - of, it is claimed, more than 3.2 billion Web pages. (News from Research Buzz)

Ah, but can one find "Information Research", you ask? Well, it seems that it can. My usual test is to see whether the journal comes in the top two or three when searched for as a phrase or as just the two words. Overture turns up trumps - IR is the first listed 'additional' site. The first site returned is always a sponsored site, i.e., one that is paying to be listed.

There's a twist, however, the IR index page only comes up number 2 on the US listing. If one selects UK as the country, there are three 'sponsored' sites and the fourth site is the redirection page for IR on the Department of Information Studies site at Sheffield. One can play games like this all day: when I searched from the Netherlands page, the first mention of the journal was at number 3, but that was the catalogue entry at the Royal Library. From the Japan page I found no mention at all. Obviously, these country pages cover sites in the country, rather than international sites - except for the USA, which, I suppose, is thought to be international?

The Research Buzz item asks how Overture is going to wean people off Google - good question. Yahoo! has spent a lot of money acquiring search capabilities so, presumably, it must have a cunning plan.

It seems that Northern Light is planning to bring back its public-use search engine. A note on the Web site says:

If you're looking for the Northern Light web search engine, it is not currently open to the public. We are planning to bring it back later this year. If you would like to be notified when it is available again please sign up for our mailing list.

I used to use Northern Light quite a lot, but it pulled out of the public-use market, for some reason or another and concentrated on seeling its search engine to corporations. Given how the search engine arena has changed since Northern Light 'died' I wonder what motivates the decision to relaunch.

I spotted this item on the ResearchBuzz weblog

This was in response to an item on the Avant Browser, which seems to have been erased.

It is also available at http://download.com.com/3000-2356-10216118.html?tag=lst-0-1 which I'd like to recommend as a very handy one-stop shop for downloads (I'm sure however that quite a few of the reviews are "puff" pieces).

I will give it a try but it will have to go some way to beat Opera (7.11) as my number one. What I find really handy about opera is the "note" function that allows me to quickly build up notes from multiple websites without the use of MS word or some other text-editor to "dump" them in.

David Weinberger's JOHO page has been out of action for a little while, but now it is back. We might call JOHO a pre-blog Weblog, but for the fact that David also produces a separate Weblog. However, what I'd like to draw attention to is a couple of items in JOHO that are interesting: everything else is also interesting, but these two attracted me most.

First, David draws attention to a keynote address to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference by Clay Shirky on groups and group interaction through 'social software'.

Second, David Weinberger's own comments on social software are worth reading. An example:

Could a term be more vague? It could be taken to include everything from email to instructions on how to hold hands. But in fact it's coming to mean something more specific: low-tech, easy-to-use tools (many of them familiar) that enable groups to decide for themselves how they will work together. But, "decide" is misleading here since it implies a high degree of explicitness. The most important aspect of social software is that it's emergent.

But wasn't 'groupware' designed for the same purpose? Is groupware now 'social software'? It shows just about the right amount of 'syllable inflation' to be the new buzzword!

Last week's issue of New Scientist (I've only just got round to reading it) drew my attention to a 'bull' eradicator from Deloitte Consulting. It's a Word add-in that will assess the bullshit rating of your prose. I haven't tried it yet, but the account made it seem promising.

My e-mail brought me a message that put me in touch with an interesting resource available at The Chalfont Project - a management consultancy outfit. On the site are some articles on various aspects of management by Dr. Leandro Herrero - readers of the pharmaceutical industry magazine SCRIP will recognize the name. I can recommend all of them as a 'good read', but readers of this Weblog may be particularly interested in Victor's leaving and his IQ goes with him

Ah well - midnight! That's enough for tonight.

An interesting account of Forrester's predictions for broadband in Europe, which puts Britain in the second tier, behind the Nordic countries and the Netherlands. The reason? Cost, of course - and that is down to BT's continuing assumption that you make more money by charging fewer people more, rather than charging a lot of people less. They'll never learn!

Long live Mozilla? With AOL's abandonment of Netscape, and the laying-off of fifty Netscape coders, it looked as though Mozilla would also go down the plug hole. Apparently not. Up rises the 'Mozilla Foundation'. Elsewhere, doubt is cast on the ability of the new Foundation to make much of a dent in IE's dominance. However, as always, time will tell.

Browsing around that last topic brought me to another Weblog, which has a couple of interesting short notes on Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firebird browser. The author, Joel Spolsky, suggests that Firebird meets all of his browser requirements and, with a download of only 6.8 Mb, it's worth taking a look at. I shall report later.

Teleworking has been around a long time as a concept, but the numbers of people who can be defined as teleworkers has never seemed to grow sufficiently to fulfil the promise - mainly, it seems, because people like the social interaction that work brings. However, that may be due to change - a report from AT&T reports that 80% of companies survey now say that they have people who regularly work away from the office. 'Working away' means at least 20% of the time - which I guess means that every senior manager and every salesman is a teleworker. A more rigorous definition of, say, 75% of a person's time, would clearly knock that overall proportion down a bit. On that basis, I'd claim to be largely a teleworker these days. AT&T's press kit also includes Ten Telework Tips.