Information Research Weblog

The second Pew Internet and American Life report on the future of the Internet is out, and attracting interest. Be careful, however, in accepting the ideas. It is based, in part, on whether or not the respondents accepted the offered 'scenarios' of the future and those scenarios seem to have been rather carelessly constructed. Below are the scenarios that achieved more than 50% agreement.

A global, low-cost network thrives: By 2020, worldwide network interoperability will be perfected, allowing smooth data flow, authentication and billing; mobile wireless communications will be available to anyone anywhere on the globe at an extremely low cost——56%

Mmm. Does that mean that the commercial companies are going to turn into charities? Given the merger and acquisition tendency, I'd expect the 'low cost' to be something of a mirage! 2020 may be just a little too early for this, unless the net becomes a public utility paid for out of taxation, world-wide. That would be the sensible thing to do to ensure coverage and take-up, otherwise it is going to be slow and spasmodic.

Virtual reality is a drain for some: By the year 2020, virtual reality on the internet will come to allow more productivity from most people in technologically-savvy communities than working in the "real world". But the attractive nature of virtual reality worlds will also lead to serious addiction problems for many, as we lose people to alternate realities——56%

Sounds confused to me. Where is this 'virtual reality' that can allow actual physical products to be produced? Real services, external to the Web, to be delivered? The scenario confuses two applications of virtual reality: one in which work is done, which is likely to be only as addictive as work is in the 'real world'; and one in which play is done. It's in the latter that addiction is likely—in fact it's already here.

The internet opens worldwide access to success: In the current best-seller The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman writes that the latest world revolution is found in the fact that the power of the internet makes it possible for individuals to collaborate and compete globally. By 2020, this free flow of information will completely blur current national boundaries as they are replaced by city-states, corporation-based cultural groupings and/or other geographically diverse and reconfigured human organizations tied together by global networks——52%

I have difficulty with the concept of 'access to success'. Success is not something to be 'accessed' and used; it's something to be achieved. This is woolly thinking on the part of the scenario writers. What if an alternative scenario had been posed: The capacity of the Internet to allow communication and interaction is likely to increase feelings of national identity and strengthen the opposition to globalisation. National communities, bound together through the Internet, will establish services that bypass the global corporations and foster strong local suppliers.

Some Luddites/refuseniks will commit terror acts: By 2020, the people left behind (many by their own choice) by accelerating information and communications technologies will form a new cultural group of technology refuseniks who self-segregate from "modern" society. Some will live mostly "off the grid" simply to seek peace and a cure for information overload while others will commit acts of terror or violence in protest against technology——58%

Oh heaven, what a mish-mash of ideas! No wonder it has the biggest proportion of agreement - it's almost impossible to figure out what one is supposed to be disagreeing with. Where, exactly, are these people going to be 'left behind'? We still need bus drivers, shop assistants, welders, plumbers, etc., etc., etc. Just because some of them may not be totally wrapped up in the Net, they are going to be 'left behind'?! What nonsense. And these plumbers, bricklayers, electricians are going to be motivated to form 'a new cultural group' - I must have a word with my builder about that and see what he thinks. Millions of people (in fact the majority of people in the world) already live 'off the grid' and get on with their lives and work without worrying about being in this condition.

I may be giving the impression that I am not entirely sold on the ideas on this report, but do read it! Critically! The more critically, the better: because people are going to be quoting this stuff as what is actually going to happen.

Of interest to US readers of this Weblog and anyone travelling in and around the USA, is the guide to wi-fi connections in US airports. Available from TravelPost.com, it claims to provide, the most complete listing of wireless Internet access, service providers, airport coverage areas and Internet subscription pricing plans available. With TravelPost.com's guide to airport wifi, travelers can easily determine which airports offer wireless Internet access and which airports offer free wireless high speed Internet access.

That's 141 airports from Akron-Canton, where the wi-fi is free to Wilmington, where it is also free, via Atlanta-Hartsfield, where it costs $9.95 a day, Chicago O'Hare ($6.95 a day) and New York, JFK, where it is also free. There's also a handy link beside each entry to a local hotel list.

This week's Guardian technology supplement has a short article by long-time commentator, Jack Schofield, on the recent AOL security lapse that enabled the identification of people using its search engine (provided by Google). Jack raises the issue of using privacy software and services to hide one's identity and provides some links. The most useful of these, at least as far as I could determine is the Electronic Privacy Information Centre which is a page of links to 'Snoop Proof Email', 'Anonymous Remailers' and a variety of other tools. This is a good spot if you want to 'snoop proof' yourself.

I was woken at 4.20 this morning (not my best time of day!) to participate in the ISIC Conference in Sydney, Australia, over Skype. The folk at Univ. of Technology Sydney had set things up so that I could hear the action there and they could hear me. If we'd both had Web cameras, of course, we'd also have been able to see each other.

The reason for this is that David Allen was giving my paper in my absence and I was 'virtually' there to answer questions and, later, to participate a little in a discussion on the future. All went smoothly for a couple of hours - it seems that I was fully audible at the other end and I could certainly hear everything I needed to hear.

And the telecomms cost - zero of course.

I have been using Internet Explorer 7, Beta 2 for the past few days and find it a huge improvement on version 6.0 - this one could be a real Firefox killer. IE7 appears to be totally stable on my laptop in this Beta version, although we may have to wait a month or two for the final version. The new features include stuff that is old hat so far as Firefox users are concerned - tabbed browsing, for example, but the whole interface has been re-engineered to provide more screen space for Web pages. The new positions for some of the old icons takes a little getting used to and the old menu of File, Edit, View, etc. is optional rather than mandatory - I've been keeping it there as an interim measure until I figure out how to do things without it.

There are some things that IE7 does better than Firefox in terms of tabbed browsing - for one, there's a 'new tab' button beside the last tab in the row and a 'close tab' X on each tab - both of these features make it much easier to use tabs than in Firefox. Another feature (which can be provided for Firefox by an extension) is a new 'Quick Tabs' button, which brings up a page consisting of clickable images of. all pages currently open. With many tabs open, this is a Godsend.

Information Week has a feature comparing the two browsers, which concludes:

On a straight, feature-for-feature comparison, IE7 stacks up well against Firefox. If its improved security model lives up to its design specs, malware distributors will find it much more difficult to make a dishonest living, and the tabbed browsing features in the new release should make it much easier to deal with multiple pages.

The biggest hurdle that Internet Explorer has to overcome, however, is one that doesn't fit on any features chart. Its tattered reputation -- especially when it comes to security -- has created an indelible negative impression among the technically savvy users who've enthusiastically adopted Firefox so far. Even if the final release of IE7 improves mightily over the current beta, building that new and improved reputation will be an uphill climb.

That seems to me to be overstating things for Firefox - it's market share has never really it made it to a breakthrough position - the latest statistics show IE with 84.85% and Firefox with 4.23%. The key term in the second quotation of the paragraph is 'technically savvy', and, as the statistics show, the majority of Internet users are not technically savvy - they want something that 'works out of the box' and can't be bothered with themes and extensions, especially when those themes and extensions fail to work from version to version. My guess is that, when IE7 is finally released, Firefox's small market share will nosedive. It won't help that one of the key features of version 2.0, Places, will not now happen.

I've been a fan and advocate of Firefox since it was Phoenix, but I think that Microsoft has finally got its act together on this one.

There's an interesting new report on municipal wi-fi available. Nothing much in the way of analysis, simply answers to questions from people involved in municipal wireless in the USA. There are, however, some interesting points.

Is the love affair with FireFox beginning to die? ZDNet carries a column about the browser headed Firefox is slow and buggy (but I'm hooked anyway) and there's a lot subsequent correspondence from people who experience the same kinds of problems, especially FireFox crashing. Which makes one wonder why these people continue to say... 'But I'm sticking with it'. I've pretty well given up on FireFox after numerous attempts to get my favourite extensions to work with version 1.5 - all to no avail, and enquiries on the Mozillazine discussion lists brought no solution. So I switched to Maxthon - not perfect, but what is? Maxthon runs on the IE engine, but you can switch to using the Gecko engine if you wish. I find fewer problems in loading certain files (e.g., .pdf files) and the pop-up blocker really blocks, rather than simply tucking the pop-up window behind the 'live' window. If you like to play with skins - there's plenty for Maxthon. And, of course, it will load pretty well all pages - not good for Web standards, but...

The New York Times has an interesting article on Internet connection theft: one neighbour stealing connection from another, or even camping outside an apartment block to connect to an unprotected link. Personally, I seem to be surrounded by a wi-fi vacuum, almost; the local church has a wi-fi network but it's invisible from my study - and it is secured anyway.

There's an interesting piece on the growth of the number of VoIP providers in the UK at VoIP Planet, along with some comments on recent failure.

It seems that the biggest provider is Wanadoo, with 80,000 customers in the UK. Wanadoo, owned by France Telecom, got its start in the UK by buying Freeserve from Dixons, but Dixons is back in the VoIP business with FreeTalk. The supermarket Tesco is also in on the act.

With all the competition could it be that the consumer is likely to win at last?

I've just downloaded the new version of Skype - the one that allows video calls - and I find that it suffers from a frequently occurring problem, which I might call, "messing with features for no good reason". In this case, Skype has abandoned its perfectly sensible procedure of listing at the top of the Contacts window all of those contacts who are online, so that one can see at a glance who is there. The new default is to list ALL contacts by name, whether they are online or not - total idiocy. I assume that I may be able to produce something akin to what existed before by defining a 'group' - but what on earth is the point of requiring me to do that when the earlier method was ideal? I sometimes think that software and interface designers never get anywhere near the real world!

Computer Weekly for 31st January carried a double-spread article on the digitisation plans of the British Library. Doesn't say anything to surprise readers of Information Research, but it's a nice overview.

A Firefox developer gives his views on IE7. It's interesting, though, how history gets changed. Here's a quote:

Firefox really brought tabbed browsing into the mainstream. (I didn't say we invented it, that credit belongs to Adam Stiles and his Netcaptor browser,) and it's nice to see IE following our lead here with their own implementation.

Actually, I think it was Opera that 'brought tabbed browsing into the mainstream' - it may have been invented by Stiles, but I've never heard of his Netcaptor browser and I'm willing to bet that 99% of Web users haven't either!

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.