Information Research Weblog

F.J. Devadason has produced an interesting paper on the notion of the Semantic Web - pointing out, rightly, that the Web is already semantic and that, perhaps, what is needed are maps to guide one through the forest, rather than additional codes added to Web pages. Read it here

According to The Association of College and Research Libraries, Information Literacy's website: http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/acrlinfolit/informationliteracy.htm, it provides such a vast of valuable information for librarians, students, and researchers. The layout of the information is clearly organized for first time users and frequent users. The website provides users with the overview, standards & guidelines, resources & ideas, professional activity, and news. When I attending college for my undergraduate degree, it would have been benefical if I knew about this particular website...it probably would have made my research steps much easier.

The website http://www.libraries.psu.edu/ebsl/searchstrategies.htm provides the reader with great tips and ideas when searching for specific information. After reading the information on the website, it actually made my new searches easier with more articles that pertained to my topics. In the first section under Vocabulary Section, it discusses how one should keep a research log. Keeping a research log will save a lot of time by just jotting down little steps for each search. This is very important when you are trying to do a research paper.

My thanks to Associate Editor, Terry Brooks for drawing my attention to WebCite, a newish service that fills a major gap for electronic journal editors - the problem of the dead link. WebCite will look up a non-journal Web page that you have referenced, cache it and give you a new, permanent URL so that the page is retrieved from the cache, rather than from the original source. Many news pages and company pages disappear from the Web or are moved to undiscoverable locations and are, to all intents and purposes, 'dead'.

I am asking all authors to review their papers and, where a linked page has a probability of disappearing from the Web, to use WebCite to creat a permanent URL. This will make life much easier for readers!

The following information is going into the Instructions for Authors tonight:

WebCite  WebCite is a free service that enables you to replace URLs likely to 'die' with URLs that are permanent links to cached versions of the same page. Please use this service for any URLs that are of this character such as links to news pages, company pages, Weblogs, etc..

You can use WebCite by going to the site and clicking on:

1. 'Archive' on the navigation bar at the top of the page. Enter a URL that you wish to archive and your e-mail address. The page will be archived and you will be sent a URL to use in the reference list; or
2. 'Bookmarklet' and following the instructions for creating a JavaScript bookmarklet; or
2. 'Comb' and uploading the file you wish to have reviewed for the identification of appropriate links. (In my experience it is best to click on 'Consider all links' and then select those that you wish to have cached.) WebCite will replace all of your URLs with permanent links to the cached pages.

Use the permanent URL only in the 'live' link to the page, citing the original page URL as part of the reference, thus:

Chris. (2003, March 24). Why a search engine crawler is not at all like Lynx. Message posted to http://www.searchguild.com (Search engine optimization (SEO) forums). Retrieved 8 June, 2006 from http://www.searchguild.com/tpage283-0.html

If you roll your mouse pointer over the live link, you will see that it points to www.webcitation.org, while the original URL is given below.

I've just found out about Browster an extension for Firefox and plug-in for Internet Explorer. The idea is beautifully simple: Browster associates an icon with every link on a Web page - hover on that icon and the associated Web page pops up in a Browster window. This applies, for example, to the internal links in a page as well as external links, so you can hover on the reference links in an Information Research paper and the associated reference list pops up in a Browster window - no more forwards and backwards, to and from the reference list when you want to check on a reference as you read.

This is definitely a 'must get'!

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.

In the early days of the Web, many Internet users thought they would become sophisticated online researchers in the future, but now it seems that everyone is just doing a kind of "search lurch": Enter some words, click through a few search results, and maybe you'll find what you're looking for in a second or two... or maybe you'll just give up and move on to something else.

Four Web experts — Jakob Nielsen, Jesse James Gerrett, Gerry McGovern and Tara Calishain — weigh in:

http://www.phptr.com/articles/article.asp?p=418857&rl=1

Garth Buchholz raises some interesting points and, by coincidence, they are things I've been thinking about myself for some time and, as a result, the April issue of the journal will contain a paper by Terry Brooks which adopts a novel format for the paper. When Terry's paper was accepted I suggested that he might like to look at the idea of 'screen rhetoric' and prepare a special version of his paper that reflected these ideas. Since then, he has been working away on several versions and the latest looks, to my mind, very good.

Whether we can adopt the style for all papers in the journal is debateable, since the mode of presentation would require more work of either the author or the editor. However, we can make the template available and those who wish to use the different style could do so. Watch out for the paper in April.

It's a highly technical field that requires years of academic training and discipline. Many people develop basic skills using this kind of code, but the number of specialists who excel in it are few and far between. On the Web, those who have advanced coding skills in this specialty can command top salaries in roles as diverse as CIOs, eCommerce managers, information architects, Web designers and usability consultants.

What code are we talking about? The English language. Or any language, for that matter.

Our written language is a code, and it is one of the most challenging codes for Web site developers to master, whether we speak about it as “editorial,” “Webitorial”, “digital text”, or simply “eText” for purposes of this article. We may as well consider eText to be alphanumeric as well, because much of our language and what we consider textual includes alphabetic characters as well as numeric characters and various ascii-type symbols.

The three facets of eText

eText content on the Web is one of the most technically layered forms of content because it is actually several things at once:

* eText is Code – It originates in a formal language; it has substantive meaning, it is used for communication; it is subject to interpretation; and it has affective and symbolic meaning;

* eText is Object – It is visual and spatial, appearing as blocks of text, chunks of text, text documents, text logos and text advertisements (promotional text);

* eText is Design – It is recognizable in many different designs and formats, whether through fonts, spacing, styles, colors and other attributes of design. If a picture paints a thousand words, then a picture of a word must paint a million nuances, meanings and subtexts. Each word has a literal, symbolic, cultural and contextual meaning; and the way it is handled as an object and as a design can affect the way it is communicated and the way it is received.

Is there any wonder that eText is one of the least understood and most poorly engineered forms of content on the Internet? So many people who are charged with authoring, editing, designing or otherwise manipulating eText have never been trained to work with its threefold qualities of Code, Object and Design. Those who are writing experts with a strong command of the subtleties of language often do not understand how to handle text as an object on a Web page or as an aesthetic element in a Web design. Those who understand how to design and layout eText for the Web often lack the skills to understand how language can be shaped for substance and symbolism.

That's not to say that you can't engineer eText content without expertise in all its aspects; process-driven content management allows many specialists to work with content and develop it properly for a Web environment; a writer can author the eText, a designer can design it and a Web publisher or Web information designer can shape it for the site so that it works most effectively. The development process, however, should not obscure the fact that, like all digital content, when you change one aspect, it alters the others. This is one of the reasons Web sites created and managed by perfectly competent and even talented staff can end up confusing, unintelligible and unusable. A writer writes in isolation, and doesn't have any input about how the eText will appear when published online; or a designer is handed a Word document but admonished not to make any changes to it for any reason; or a Web editor is faced with either having to change what the author and designer have done, or leave it as it is with minimal changes.

Are we making content re-cyclable — or disposable?

One of the most practical yet ultimately counter-productive trends is toward the re-use of content, which usually means structuring eText content so that each chunk of data in it and each aspect of it can be extracted from its original form and redeployed in another context using dynamic publishing. This reductionist approach essentially treats the code of language as simply a quantifiable mass of data that can be carved up without losing any intrinsic value, i.e. the sum of its parts is greater than the whole. While this may work at a practical level for organizations attempting to 1) improve quicker and easier access to content for different users in different contexts, and 2) extract the maximum value from existing content rather than having to constantly reinvent the wheel with new content, recycling content actually makes it more disposable. It mechanizes human communication and it mutes or eliminates its human complexities and shadings. It's the equivalent of the “voice to speech” software: you can make your PC speak words with a human-sounding voice, but the effect is in human and lacking in originality, nuance, emotion or spontaneity.

What makes eText different than other codes is the human element. eText engineering is not about the automation of language or about turning it into soulless digital output, as practical as that may seem when content managers are trying to find efficiencies for their sites. eText specialists are, by necessity, professionals who have a more sophisticated understanding of how eText moves, motivates, engages, impels and even challenges other human beings.

(Garth A. Buchholz, B.A., C.U.A. is a Canadian author, Web content strategist and Certified Usability Analyst.)

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.

I've removed Firefox 1.5 and gone back to version 1.0.7 mainly because the developers haven't caught up yet and so some 70% of the extensions don't work. There's a lot of comment on the Mozilla discussion lists about this. I think Firefox jumped the gun somewhat since it was originally announced that version 1.5 would be available some time in the early new year. I was quite surprised to discover that the beta version became the release version about a week later. I'm going to wait a few months until all of the extensions are available for such things as NetSnippets, Onfolio and EverNote. I don't use all three of these, but I'm in the process of reviewing Onfolio and not being able to use it with Firefox was becoming a pain.

The new issue will be available on the Website tomorrow. Here's the Editorial:

Introduction

Getting out the first issue of the new volume - which really signals that ten years have now gone by since Information Research first hit cyberspace - has been rather fraught. My Internet connection has been playing up for the past month or so, with first, intermittent disconnection developing into intermittent connection and finally no connection at all. Eventually, after a couple of weeks talking to my ISP help desk, then tests by BT of the ADSL line, only the router was left as the likely source of the problem. So, now it is en route back to Netgear and I'm using the modem that came with the ISP subscription.

The interruptions to service and the time taken in diagnosing the problem have meant that some papers that should have been published in this issue will have to wait until January - my apologies to the authors. Also, at this point, not all of the papers on the site have been properly proof-read; I simply wasn't able to get them to Rae-Ann so that she could do the proofing. Of course, one of the advantages of electronic publication is that we can correct the papers at any time and we shall do so as time goes by. No doubt, however, there are other errors lurking in the system somewhere: if you come across any, do let me know.

In this issue

We have the usual multi-national contributions to this issue, with papers from Greece, Hungary, Spain, Sweden, and the USA. From Sweden, we have a second paper from AnnBritt Enochsson on the use of the Internet by children; from Hungary a study of environmental scanning by companies in Western Europe and, coincidentally, another paper on environmental scanning by Greek companies from a Greek research, Liana Kourteli; and, if that was not enough on the subject, yet another, from the USA on environmental scanning by clinicians in substance abuse treatment clinics. Perhaps this ought to have been a special issue on environmental scanning. Finally, we have a couple of papers in Spanish: one on the extent to which academics at the University of Murcia publish in the international journals, and the other on a scientometric study of academic collaboration by researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia.

It is interesting to note that the papers in Spanish that have been published in Information Research are 'hit' to just about the same extent as the papers in English. This makes me wonder why more scholarly journals are not multilingual. I can understand the problems of accomplishing it, of course, especially for print-on-paper journals, but for open access journals (i.e., true open access, not author-charged) the costs are minimal when collaboration with colleagues abroad is so easily accomplished. The multilingual (or, more correctly, bilingual) character of Information Research surely encourages more native English speakers who understand Spanish to read these papers, while Spanish speakers get the opportunity at least to read the abstracts of the English papers in Spanish, even if they are not sufficiently bilingual to read the entire paper.

Finally...

Readers of the reviews (and I understand that there are some of you out there who are more likely to read these than any of the papers!) will notice a not too subtle change with this issue. Information Research has become an Amazon Associate. Each review now carries a link to an Amazon site, enabling you to buy the book reviewed immediately - whether for yourself or for your organization. If you do click on the links to Amazon, the journal gets a small payment for each book bought, thereby helping us to keep the journal going.

I'm also experimenting with Google: initially, you'll find a search box at the end of the reference list on each paper with the search terms already entered. Just click on search and you'll be presented (on a new page) with output of a search on Scholar Google. Let me know if you think it is a good idea.

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".

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 :-)

Anyone using Information Research, the electronic journal, may find a break in service today and/or tomorrow as a result of the files being transferred from a server at the University of Sheffield to one at Lund University in Sweden.

The technical management of the journal is being taken over by the folk who run the Directory of Open Access Journals and we hope to have some interesting develoopments in the future.

We hope that the transfer will go through smoothly, but bear with us if there are technical hitches.

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.

Nokia has just announced its 770 tablet Internet device, intended for use wherever a wireless connection can be found. It's not a PC in any real sense, just a device for surfing the Internet, listenting to Internet radio and, promised, with RSS feed.

I can see this being the next "must have" toy - to be without one in Business Class airport lounges (not places I frequent much myself!) will be the same as being undressed - very embarrassing. It's quite tiny, however - 141 x 79 x 19 mm, which I translate as 5.5 x 3.125 x 0.75 ins. (approximately :-) ). (I wonder what it is about the old 3 x 5 catalogue card format that keeps it popular - does it follow the Golden Mean? Mmm. I've just checked - it does, the two numbers are side by side in the Fibonacci series. That must be the answer.)

Microsoft vs. IBM is a feature of some of today's news. ZDNet has an item on the possible purchase of Red Hat's Linux by Microsoft as a strategy in its assumed battle with the Big Blue giant. It's all speculation and based on rather complicated issues (to me) of intellectual property rights in Linux, but, who knows?

The same source tells us that IBM is promoting the use of Firefox to its staff (against MSoft's Internet Explorer), making the software available for downloading from its own servers and providing an internal Help Desk. With a reported 10% of staff already using it (that's about 30,000 people, apparently!), presumably the take-up is likely to be rapid. With IBM pushing Firefox in this way, how long will it take other companies to do the same?

Today's Guardian newspaper has a very interesting article by George Monbiot, a regular contributor, which is, in effect, about the quality (and suspect quality) of information available on the Internet. It also carries a warning to the effect that not everyone with a science degree is necessarily a 'scientist' in the true sense of the word.

The story concerns a claim by Dr. David Bellamy, a former university teacher and television presenter, that the world's glaciers are increasing rather than shrinking. Read the article and you will forever distrust anything that you cannot track down to a really authoritative source!

It's a great shame, really, that Bellamy has allowed himself to be misled in this way. He did a great deal of good for biology through his TV programmes, enthusing many for the discipline, and he is a noted environmentalist. Evidently, however, he has not fully understood that anyone can put anything on a Website.

This is not the first time that Monbiot has had a brush with Bellamy - there's more on his Website.

If you haven't yet switched to Firefox, reading the pages from the How Stuff Works site may provide you with some good reasons.

Molly Wood has an interesting little article, Good-bye, computer; hello, world! on the C|Net site. In it she proposes that Google may be developing a strategy of providing Web-based services:

I think Google's going to build a Web-based thin client-type hosted environment-slash-operating system replacement.

...Google has been working with a combination of Web application development technologies that have recently been dubbed Ajax. Ajax, which is short for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, combines JavaScript, dynamic HTML, and XMLHTTP to, in essence, let you build Web-based applications that run as quickly and seamlessly as local software.

[You'll find more about Ajax on the Adaptive Path site.]

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

Readers will probably recall Terry Brooks's short note on Web services from some time back. The subject pops up again on ZDNet in a column from David Berlind on Yahoo offering APIs to its search engine, so that Web services can be built on it by third parties.

Interesting in itself, but Berlind notes that his Weblog shows a Google search:

Although it still refers to the effort as a beta program, Google has been doing this for over two years. For example, if you check out my Transparency Channel, you can see on the lower right-hand side were I have pre-executed a Google search on "media transparency" and included a results box (Google-branded, of course) right on the page. Radio Userland, the blogging solution that I'm testing for review (using my Transparency Channel as the guinea pig) comes with pre-built macros for accessing Google's search APIs via a Web services interface. All you have to do is get a license key from Google (a relatively simple process that requires getting a user ID on Google's systems) and live with the limitation of 1,000 search executions per day. Google has some pretty tight licensing terms. For example, you can't build a commercial service off the company's APIs without asking first (according to the company's FAQ)

The fun thing is that Berlind hasn't done a search for "media transparency", but for 'media AND/OR transparency', with the result that he attributes third position on the output to one 'William J. Bennett' and sixth position to his own Weblog, whereas, in fact, 'William J. Bennett' doesn't appear on the first page of the results and Berlind's Weblog is at fifth position—or, indeed, third position if one removes items two and four, which are pages within sites one and three. Those inverted commas do make a difference :-)

The web works because it is broken and not owned.

Yes there is rubbish on the web but the availability of relevant, accurate information at your fingertips has exploded in ways that even ten years ago most people couldn't have imagined and which have never ever been delivered by "conventional" means.

There were naysayers then, and indeed there still are, but would be cautious about assuming that the collective, applied intelligence of millions of people is more fallable than a small group of experts with the power to confer meaning.

Yours respectfully

Euan

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.

Following a news item in a Google 'Alert', I hit upon an item in the World Net Daily - an online newspaper of sorts, on the suggestion that the UN might take over the 'control' of the Internet.

At the bottom of the article I found:

Related special offer:

Get the U.N. out of the U.S.!

So I clicked on the link and found myself at a site headed Move America Forward, which is devoted to getting the UN Headquarters out of the USA. Without any sense of irony a cartoon shows a jackboot on Florida kicking the symbol of the UN. With the American passion for loyalty to flags and other such symbols, this presumably has a particular kind of resonance with the followers of this movement.

The site appears to be the brain-child of "The Honorable Howard Kaloogian" - 'honour' can mean some odd things in odd places like California, where Howie is a Member of the State Assembly, and no doubt this site is part of his campaign for bigger things. 'Governor Kaloogian' perhaps, even 'President Kaloogian'? Watch out for this guy - if you think that Bush is weird, you ain' seen nuthin' yet!

VoIP

It looks as though VoIP is forging ahead, with Skype announcing a PDA version (Pocket PC rather than Palm, unfortunately), and also a deal with Motorola. Motorola comment:

With over 68 million downloads of their client in the last 18 months, we believe Skype is a natural fit with our vision of simple and seamless connectivity for our consumer customers around the globe.

FireFox

It is announced that Microsoft will launch Internet Explorer 7 as a separate package, and the suggestion is that the success of Firefox has got it worried, since the plan was to keep it integrated with Windows. Molly Wood - columnist for C|Net - suggests that this will kill off FireFox. I wouldn't be too sure. MSoft's reputation for producing insecure, buggy code, which doesn't satisfy W3C standards is unlikely to make people confident about a new browser, even if it has all the goodies that FireFox brings. But FireFox may find it difficult to maintain the momentum.

Check this out

I have fifty invitations to Gmail to give away - anyone want one? It's now my main e-mail package, which I guess says something. :-)

There was a piece this morning on NPR about Skype and other VOIP companies. Here is a link:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4488307


Laurie H. Hime

Skype has just released the latest version of its software and now claims that almost 65 million downloads have been made. Whenever I log-on it seems that one-and-a-half million other people are simulataneously logged on, not that the number of people seems to make any difference. It's a subjective matter of course, but I think that the new software improves the already excellent quality.

Currently, I'm using Skype to keep in touch with colleagues with whom I'm working on a research proposal: as this involves people in Bulgaria, Slovakia, Poland, Spain, Portugal, France, Sweden and the UK, regular telephone communication is clearly desirable and if one can do it freely, the telecomms costs are kept down.

Of course, VoIP is more than Skype and the telecomms providers are well into the game: for example, NetworkingPipeline reports that: "The number of cable VoIP subscribers rocketed 900 percent from 2003 to 2004" that is, from 50,000 to almost 500,000 - a long way behind Skype, but, of course, you have to pay for it :-)

Skype, by the way, can now be used by those using Linux or Mac OS X

I see that the Financial Times, yesterday, was reporting a 20% rise in online shopping over the Christmas period in the UK, so I thought I'd report on my contribution and experience.

First, of course, one has to survey all of the price comparison sites, since most of them only include the stores that pay them. I discovered this a couple of months ago when I was looking for an iRiver mp3 player - it turned out the ShopGenie was the only one that included the high street store, Richer Sounds - and, as the local store is just five minutes walk away, it was actually more convenient to buy the device there. Actually, 'high street' is a bit of a misnomer - the company generally leases properties in cheaper parts of town, presumably this helps to keep its costs down.

However, I was also looking for a new scanner and online reviews persuaded me that instead of going for a Canon (my cameras and my printer are all Canon products) I should replace my old Epson scanner with a new one - the Epson Perfection 4870 Photo. This one draws plaudits for delivering near professional quality output at retail prices, and my reason for switching was to have a scanner that would help me reduce the decades of slides to digital storage. It turned out that Amazon.co.uk had the best price and immediate delivery - so I set it up yesterday and, although I have got to the slides yet, I am very pleased with its performance on, for example, OCR and copying prints. So - stars to Amazon for fast (and free!) delivery, and to Epson for a good product.

Of course, with more CDs to convert to mp3 (or, rather the .ogg standard in my case) and slides to convert, I'm obviously going to need more storage space, so the next thing on the list was a Maxtor OneTouch II 300GB 7200rpm external hard drive. According to one or other of the shopping sites Dabs.co.uk had the best offer, but was out of stock. So, I had an e-mail conversation - or, rather, I tried to have an e-mail conversation, only to end up being told that the only information the company had about possible delivery dates was on their Website - the only problem was that, for this particular product, there was no information. Sorry, Dabs, but your customer relations policy is crap - you're off my list for ever. I then moved on the the next best deal at Technoworld and got all the way through to the point of ordering, when some database glitch sent me an error message - a totally unintelligible error message, of course. Again, an e-mail conversation ensued - this time they really were trying to be helpful, but the error message happened again, so I said goodbye to Technoworld - it you are going to sell online, get some software that works.

Back to the shopping sites and I discover that Komplett actually has a better deal than Technoworld - the order goes through without a hitch and now I'm sitting waiting - not for long, I hope. Interestingly, Komplett is a European company, based in Norway, operating in Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK with a turnover in 2003 of 1,732,000,000 Norwegian Kroner (that's £148,207,359 at today's rate, or $277,310,790 - no doubt 2004 showed an improvement on that.

Finally, blank DVDs - back to Amazon, which turned out to have best price, instead of a number of other places recommended on various discussion groups - delivery is promised for Monday or Tuesday.

From a buyer's point of view is that Amazon has the best interface once one gets to the point of ordering and I have no doubt that its software must have been pretty pricey to develop. Other places I suspect of relying upon off-the-shelf packages of one kind of another and they may be letting the company down. If that interface is not easy to use and glitch-free, the consumer experiences a big turn-off.

The news on wi-fi in libraries continues to increase:

• Today's FT has an article In the clouds over municipal Wi-Fi, which is on municipal use generally, but nods in the direction of libraries
• A PR press release on new developments in Kent.
• Hingham library tech trends for 2005, includes news on wi-fi applications.

And, as for Firefox's increasing share of the browser market - as a result of now having better log analysis on the University of Sheffield's servers, I see that the share taken by 'Netscape' - including Mozilla and Firefox, has gone like this, over October, November and December, 2004.

	Oct.	Nov.	Dec.
Internet Explorer	82.44%	82.90%	77.42%
'Netscape'	8.72%	9.61%	9.93%

It'll be interesting to see what the end of January brings.