Information Research Weblog

Readers will be aware that I've been a Firefox advocate since it was called Phoenix, but I am now totally disenchanted. The problem? Firefox 0.7 was a pretty stable product - extensions worked and, in particular, those for add-ons such as Evernote and Folio were very useful. However, with 1.5 and now with 1.5.01, the installation of extensions appears to be a problem for lots of people. When an extension fails to instal a gnomic message appears referring one to the Javascript Console and there one finds equally, or even more, gnomic messages, such as "No chrome package registered for chrome://disabletarget/content/cusserfox.png." I'm not quite sure what the ordinary user is supposed to make of all this, but I've switched to Maxthon, which seems to work pretty well perfectly all the time, has a better pop-up blocker than Firefox and a better way of handling downloads - no blank pages popping up and then disappearing and then reappearing. So Firefox has probably not only lost a user, but also an advocate.

And, coming up on the horizon is Microsoft's Mozilla-killer, Internet Explorer 7. There's quite a lot of news in the newsletters and Weblogs about the beta release (having read the warnings from Microsoft about what the beta can do to your installation, I wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole myself, but the techie journos seem to be finding that it is a good product. Microsoft does seem to have listened to the users and to have learnt from browsers like Opera and Firefox. My betting is that, once it is released, the rest are going to find it pretty hard to keep what market share they have.

An interesting from one of the newsletters I get - can't remember which, unfortunately. However, the gist of it is that a new report on municipal broadband suggests that:

As of Q1 2006, there were over 100 operational city and regional wireless broadband networks worldwide, more than 40 of which were in the US. At least 300 US cities are in the planning stages with wireless networks, and the number will double in 2006 and accelerate further, making Muni broadband a very real and significant trend beyond mere hype. Despite legal opposition and pressure from incumbent telcos and cable companies, Muni broadband is coming and is here to stay.

While small town rural deployments were the beginning of the wave, the tide is now embracing large urban metropolises. New York, San Francisco, Rome and Paris are among the major cities planning wide-scale deployments, and more will follow. By 2010/2011, the majority of cities and townships in the US will have a municipal wireless network in place. Find out how these networks will evolve and what impact they will have on the telecoms market by purchasing this report.

It would be interesting to hear from readers on the situation in their hometowns.

Last week's Guardian Technology supplement contained an item on the emergence of a couple of 'social bookmarking' sites in the information technology area. The article suggested that Digg and Reddit might well take over the prime spot in IT news sites from Slashdot and pointed to the differences: Slashdot contributions are subject to editorial review, while those in the other two are the result of users votes on what is interesting.

Whatever the pros and cons of that debate, there is no doubt that Digg and Reddit are wonderful places to visit if you want to waste some time, discovering interesting but probably completely useless bits of information. I think I could live without the photo essay on an Argentinian family, for example, but it is a fascinating set of pictures! And for the truly weird, try the 1990 Nintendo catalogue.

There is useful stuff, of course, but you may only come across it by chance if a sufficient number of members of the site have rated it so that it comes high on the list—I'm not going to wade through pages on the off-chance of finding something useful. For example, I discovered that Gmail is finally going to make a 'Delete' button available

I had to stop, however: I just don't have that kind of browse time available!

Thanks to Alistair Norman for drawing my attention to a Techdirt thread on municipal wi-fi systems. Some interesting debate and useful links.

It isn't often that I disagree with Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox pieces, but his latest seems to me to be somewhat off the mark. Jakob is arguing that the paid advertising of search engines is leaching value out of the sites that pointed to, although he does acknowledge that the user probably wouldn't find them in the first place without the search engine.

However, his analysis and prescription for a solution to the problem he perceives omits one very important point: I return to business sites because of the value I experience as a consumer - I won't return because they e-mail me about offers (in fact I'll unsubscribe from such spam), I won't join loyalty schemes because how often do I need a new freezer for heaven's sake? I'm not going to search a product for the seller's URL - which would probably be stuck in some inaccessible location. I just want value for money.

Good usability design can deliver a lot, but it can't replace consumer value.

I've been having some odd problems with Firefox recently: I'd given up, temporarily, on version 1.5 and gone back to 1.0.7 and then, earlier today, for some unknown reason, it crashed and disappeared from the screen. I re-launched it, but it wouldn't load pages and not all of the menu buttons functioned. So... I downloaded version 1.5 to give it another try, but I kept getting the same message about being unable to load extensions because of some java problem; and the information isn't specific enough to let me know what kind of problem.

So I downloaded the Maxthon browser, which runs on the IE engine: it's got tabbed browsing and does pretty well everything that Firefox does and I think it is actually a little bit faster. However, last thing I've done is to download Firefox 1.0.7 again and install it - it now runs OK, but won't launch reply windows for my webmail system. So perhaps I'll have to become an advocate for Maxthon. Is it my imagination, or does Firefox generate a crop of problems with each new release?

On 12/27/05, Tom Wilson said:

>I was quite surprised to discover that the beta version became the
>release version about a week later.

Tom, that's just not true. There were numerous beta versions, and three
"release candidate" builds that each lasted for more than a week. I was
using a 1.5 beta versions for *months*.

Part of the problem with the extensions is that the developers (of the
extensions) have moved on. All platforms (and in this case, Firefox is
a platform) go through this: people write software for the platform,
achieve some recognition and think they've found the key to riches and
fame. When the money doesn't start rolling in ("Why isn't everyone
paying me to write custom extensions? My tab-enhancer rocks, surely
everyone can see my talents!?") they come back to reality. From that
point on, the extensions that were being developed so feverishly in the
past are now maintained and updated with a lot less enthusiasm.

When the Mozilla team made some important and much needed changes to
how extensions interact with Firefox, they didn't really give the
extension authors any renewed hope for fame and riches. (Ok, I'm being
slightly sarcastic with the 'fame and riches' reference, but not
entirely.)

It wouldn't have mattered if Firefox 1.5 stayed in beta for another
year, with zero changes. Many of the developers *never* would have dug
into Mozilla's notes to find out what needs to be changed.

(There's another problem. Lots of these "open source" extensions are
only developed by a single person who's being paid by another single
individual who needed a particular feature. If that person doesn't pony
up the cash to pay for the extension to be updated for compatibility
with Firefox 1.5, then the extension will languish. This happens all
the time.)

Having said all that, could you tell me which extensions you were
missing? I'm still 'involved' with Mozilla, and may know of suitable
replacements.

Seth

I've seen a number reports on this topic, but perhaps the best is the BBC World item. It seems that the Republic of Macedonia (one needs to be specific to avoid confusion with the Greek region of Macedonia) is implementing a country-wide wi-fi network, funded, in part by USAID. The agency has invested in implementing broadband connection in the country's schools and the aim is to use these centres as nodes for further development.

Just drawn to my attention by a mailing from Gerry McKiernan is an article in DLib Magazine, in two parts, on "social bookmarking" - a very comprehensive piece from staff at the Nature Publishing Group. [Click here for Part II.]

Interesting news for those concerned with e-learning. Two of the major suppliers of course management systems, Blackboard and WebCT, are to merge in late 2005 or early 2006. Initially the two products will be maintained, but the plan is to merge the ideas from the products, as well as the companies, into a single product. With a total of more than 3,700 clients in the educational sector, the new company will be much stronger than either could be alone.

My attention was captured by a note about a new book on Google - The Google Legacy: How Google's Internet Search is Tranforming Application Software, by Stephen E. Arnold, which is published by Infonortics.

However, my interest languished when I saw the price - $180.00 €145.00 or £98.43 at today's rate of exchange - for a password to download the .pdf file! I'd have to be mad to pay that amount for a stream of bits, particularly as I'd then have to print out 290 pages of text, at the cost of probably more than one ink cartridge!

It isn't even that the book is some kind of definitive account - it's a speculative work about Google's possible aim of becoming bigger than Microsoft through the development of Web-based services. Very interesting no doubt, but $180.00 interesting? No way! Particularly as John Battelle's recently published book on Google, which also speculates about the future, is also round about 300 pages, comes to me in hard copy for £16.99 - a veritable bargain!

Interenet terminology can be a mite confusing - recently the idea of "Web 2.0" seems to have become in vogue, while "Internet2" has been around for some time. What's the difference? It seems that, simply, "Web 2.0" runs on Internet1, while "Internet2" is about a parallel Internet that can be restricted to scientific and research use. "Web 2.0" is all (or almost all) about e-commerce, which is the last thing on the mind of those developing "Internet2".

So - it's finally official: eBay buys Skype for $2.6 billion in cash and eBay stock. But what is eBay going to do with its purchase? By the look of things on the Skype Website, it seems that the founders (Zennström and Friis) will be staying with the company and reporting to the eBay CEO, Meg Whitman, although that article in Vanity Fair that I mentioned seemed to suggest that they have further projects in mind for themselves.

eBay clearly sees where the advantage of the Skype link lies:

Online shopping depends on a number of factors to function well. Communications, like payments and shipping, is a critical part of this process. Skype will streamline and improve communications between buyers and sellers as it is integrated into the eBay marketplace. Buyers will gain an easy way to talk to sellers quickly and get the information they need to buy, and sellers can more easily build relationships with customers and close sales. As a result, Skype can increase the velocity of trade on eBay, especially in categories that require more involved communications such as used cars, business and industrial equipment, and high-end collectibles.

However, does this mean that Skype users who are not eBay users are going to be pestered by sellers? With Skype central to what is essentially an e-commerce activity, perhaps I'll switch to Google Talk!

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.

Some time ago Chris Kuelzow of Zybic Inc. contacted me for permission to put 'The nonsense of knowledge management' on his company's site and he contacted me again recently to tell me about another document.

Zybic Inc. is an information management company with an interesting product, Enterprise ZE, which is based on decomposing business activity into a number of intelligible units and linking all information 'entities' (documents, e-mail messages, spreadsheets, etc.) to these units. That's a crude representation of the idea, and you can read much more about it in a Zybic 'white paper'.

"The Wall Street Journal reported that eBay was in talks to buy Skype for $2 billion-$3 billion, citing unamed sources.

"We're not commenting on rumors," Kat James, spokeswoman for Luxembourg-based Skype, said when asked about the report."

Thursday also brought me the latest e-mail version of Current Cites, which I recommend to you for a number of interesting items. These include reference to Walt Crawford's 'Investigating the biblioblogosphere' and related postings in various places. One of these drew attention to Google's Page Rank feature (available on its browser bar for IE and Firefox) - using this, I find that this Weblog has a Page Rank score of 6/10, which is pretty good. Information Research has a Page Rank score of 7/10, which is even better :-)

Thursday's Guardian Online magazine usually brings something interesting to my notice and this time it has drawn attention to the Gartner corporation's 'hype cycle'. The link to the 2005 hype cycle report in the Guardian doesn't actually work, but you can find the paper with a little trouble - or, if you read this Weblog, no trouble at all.

Gartner's hype cycles:

...highlight the relative maturity of technologies across a wide range of IT domains, targeting different IT roles and responsibilities. Each Hype Cycle provides a snapshot of the position of technologies relative to a market, region or industry, identifying which technologies are hyped, which are suffering the inevitable disillusionment and which are stable enough to allow for a reasonable understanding of when and how to use them appropriately

The cycle shows the following stages: Trigger Technology (e.g., in 2005 Quantum Computing), Peak of Inflated Expections (e.g., Biometric Identity Documents), Trough of Disillusionment (e.g., Tablet PC), Slope of Enlightenment (e.g., VoIP), and Plateau of Productivity (e.g., Internal Web Services). Much of the detail on this is only available to paying clients, but the general information is interesting enough.

There's an interesting article on Google's strategy for world domination by one means or another on ZDNet. The fundamental point is that with such applications as Google Mail, Picasa, Desktop Search (and the new Sidebar) and Google Talk, Google appears to be copying the Microsoft strategy of creating a rich 'ecosystem' of mutually interacting applications. Worth a read.

...with Google Talk, a Voice Over Internet Chat application that could be a threat to the continued survival of Skype. I haven't tried it yet and will report when I have done so.

Well... now I have used it - briefly, and it doesn't do too well on narrow-band - the messaging is fine, but the voice is pretty poor quality. Obviously broadband is needed, as it is with Skype. In fact, Skype performs marginally better on narrow-band, but it, too, really needs broadband.

A little while ago I commented on an article in Guardian Online about hospital information systems - to my surprise, the item was quoted in this week's issue, in the Blog-back feature. Perhaps we should try to get infinite recursion going!

This week, there's another interesting story about the development of Ethiopia's broadband infrastructure. Yes - you read aright - Ethiopia is investing public money in a broadband infrastructure that will put Internet connection within a 'few kilometers' of every one of its 74 million inhabitants.

To put this in context: at present, only 0.1% of inhabitants have access, while the UK (by no means the highest in the world) has 52% of its households connected. However, Ethiopia has a land area of 1,119,683 sq.km., while the UK has only 241,590 sq.km. At present, with its reliance upon the vagaries of the market, there seems to be little chance that anyone in the UK will be within only a few kms. of an Internet connection, while, through public funding, Ethiopia is going to make sure that everyone is.

The difference of course, lies in the imagination employed. Ethiopia may be one of the poorest countries in the world, but the imagination of its politicians is clearly unbounded by economic dogma. Technology provides it with the potential to leapfrog the development process, while Britain and other rich countries are locked into a belief system that lauds the market above other mechanisms - a strategy that will surely lead to economic decline.

News from ZDNet on Yahoo's new head of research - an interesting short article on where things may be going.

Meanwhile, Google is in conflict with Microsoft over hiring the head of Msoft's Chinese research centre.

Since the whole future of searching depends on having the right brains, look out for more of this.

The UK has a long tradition of disasters in the area of government implementations of information technology, costing, to date, several hundred million pounds. The latest grand plan is that for the National Health Service. You only have to describe the NHS to start giggling at the idea that a centrally designed 'one size fits all' system is actually going to work. In 2001, expenditure on the NHS accounted for a hefty 5.96 of the UK's GDP (approximately £60,000,000 - equal to, in other words, the total GDP of quite a number of small countries!) It employs approximately 1.3 milion people in hundreds of GP practices, hospitals and specialised units. And is busy designing a single NHS IT infrastructure for this lot.

No one gives very good odds on a successful implementation.

Guardian Online this week carries an article about a hospital that the NHS can only dream about. Significantly, the hospital is a stand-alone operation so it has been able to implement systems that fit its needs. The NHS, of course, wouldn't want that to happen. It wants the seamless transfer of information throughout the system - ignoring the fact that as long as the data can be interpreted, systems do not need to be fully integrated. I don't offer any odds myself on much learning from previous experience takeing place.

Things continue to happen on the Skype front - now we have vSkype.

With vSkyp software and a Webcam, you can hold videophone conversations with your friends and colleagues, and send and receive video files.

Damn! Now I've got to buy a Webcam!

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!

Mobile Phones

I see that the European Commission is getting exercised about international roaming rates of mobile phone companies - not before time. Apparently it can cost, per minute, between 58 cents per minute (Cyprus to Finland with a Finnish phone) and €5.01 (Malta to Poland with a Polish phone).

Of course, high charges and lack of transparency in pricing is just one problem of the phone companies. Another is lousy customer service - largely as a result of the computer-based response systems for handling telephone calls.

Recently, I ditched T-Mobile for just this reason - I was trying to find someone to talk to about their monthly packages, to see if I could find anything cheaper, but after going through about four levels of menus, I was getting nowhere, except mad.

I then got a package from Vodafone - but they sent me a text message while I was on holiday (I didn't have the phone with me, because I don't use international roaming) and, as they did not get a reply, they "unregistered" the SIM card. Then they did not communicate with me in any other way to tell me about the problem - no e-mail message, no call to my home phone, no letter. Today, I got the service restored, but only after three calls to different Vodafone numbers, eventually threatening to abandon the contract and sue them for non-supply of service. Fifteen minutes later the phone was working.

Does anyone have a UK mobile provider they can recommend?

CD lifetimes

Thanks to Charles Knight for a useful link. If you have ever wondered about the probable lifetimes of CDs, the answer appears to lie in the dyes employed. And you can pick up a piece of software that will tell you what dye is used on your CDs.

An interesting short article on public Wi-fi in Portland, Oregon and advocated for New York city.

Very interresting. I think the comparison with cars is obvious. Sometimes I try to hide the fact that I have ("access to") a car to make sure I keep my "right" to take the train, the bus or even my bike. When people come to know that I have a car, they say: "Oh! So you can come anytime!" As for cellular phones, I'd like to keep my freedom not to use my car. But some people seem to think that, since you have access to it, then you want to use it anytime.

For those who do not suffer of francophobia: the entire French version of this article can be found at:

http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2005/02/SCHILLER/11911

More news about Google's laboratory experiments - take a look at Google Suggest. Pop a search term in the box and see how various possibilities are suggested in the drop down 'suggestions box'. Note how the contents of the box change rapidly as you input more characters. It's not exactly a thesaurus, more of an alphabetical index, but one that changes automatically as more information is received by the system.

I started to enter the term 'ethnomethodology' and found this list as I got to 'ethnometho-':

ethnomethodology	61,000 results
ethnomethodological	18,100 results
ethnomethodolgy	154 results
ethnomethodology definition	27,700 results
ethnomethology	75 results
ethnomethodology garfinkel	17,500 results
ethnomethodology and garfinkel	17,800 results
ethnomethodological definition	10,300
ethnomethodology garfinkle	430
ethnomethodologist	2,460

So, if I want to know what an ethnomethodologist is and what s/he does, I use the down arrow to move there and click or hit Enter. If, one the other hand, I'm interested in definitions, I have a choice.

This seems to be a pretty slick way of narrowing one's search rather quickly and, according to an item on C|Net, it is the result of using the AJAX technology. As the item points out, this means Asynchronous Javascript + XML, and it has been around a while in various guises, and:

Instead of loading a web page, at the start of the session, the browser loads an Ajax engine — written in JavaScript and usually tucked away in a hidden frame. This engine is responsible for both rendering the interface the user sees and communicating with the server on the user's behalf. The Ajax engine allows the user's interaction with the application to happen asynchronously — independent of communication with the server. So the user is never staring at a blank browser window and an hourglass icon, waiting around for the server to do something.

As Google pushes the envelope, so the competition hots up, with Yahoo releasing Mindset - a search engine with a slider to enable you to sort the output on a scale from 'shopping' to 'research'. It seems to be a trifle crude at present and perhaps they'll introduce more sliders for different characteristics, but it is worth taking a look.

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.

The Mozilla site recently announced that the latest build of Firefox has a 'new' feature - pages are locally cached so that, when the Back and Forward buttons are hit, the page is delivered instantaneously. Just one small point - Opera has had this feature for ages. And there is some doubt as to when this feature will actually get into a full release - at present it's only available on the versions downloaded from the nightly build. Firefox has had a lot of publicity recently, but I suspect that, had Opera been completely free - and free of ads. - Firefox would have been languishing.

I've never been particularly interested in the various standards battles that have taken place over the years - if you wait long enough someone wins and you can then start buying the gear :-) However, on the wireless Ultra Wide-Band (UWB) front there are a couple of contenders currently slugging it out, the WiMedia Alliance and the UWB Forum. WiMedia Alliance is a combination of two other bodies - WiMedia and the Multiband OFDM Alliance SIG (MBOA-SIG) and has recently announced that Microsoft has become a 'promoter member', while the UWB Forum includes big players such as Motorola, Samsung and Siemens. The goal of both is to set the IEEE standard for UWB but my guess is that industry standards will proliferate here as they do in so many other technical areas.

No, I'm not suggesting that they are related, but just that there is news out about the two of them.

First, Janco Associates Inc. reports that in the business sector, Firefox now has 10% of the browser market. However, the total market share seems to be about half of that and if MSoft gets its act together in launching a new version of IE, the growth may disappear. Still, Firefox has lots of advantages in terms of customising by add-ins and 'themes', so companies may begin to adopt it, suitably customised, as company standard.

The picture from the point of view of Information Research seems to support Janco's data: this is a table of the distribution of hits over the browser used - a snapshot taken today:

1.	Internet Explorer 6.x	80.3 %
2.	Mozilla Firefox 1.x	9.1 %
3.	Internet Explorer 5.x	4.5 %
4.	Netscape 7.x	1.5 %
5.	Mozilla Firefox	1.5 %
6.	Mozilla 1.x	1.5 %
	Unknown	1.5 %
	Total	100.0 %

The news from Skype is interesting - the first announcement passed me by, since Skype appears not to have informed existing users. Skype 'Out' has been available for some time: you can call a land line from your computer - at low cost - and I use this for some international calls. Now, however, you can also have Skype 'In' - that is, you can have up to 10 telephone numbers assigned, for different countries in the world, which will allow residents of those countries to call your Skype number and get through to your VoIP phone at local phone rates. Very handy if your friends and relatives don't use computers: and also very useful if you are abroad, without a computer, and want to call home - you can call your own local number and make the international call at local rates. The service costs, of course, the princely sum of €30 a year!