Summary: One malicious and incompetent monopoly that everyone (where applicable) ought to avoid even more aggressively than Microsoft

O REMOVE any misinterpretations or rumours, nothing has changed at Techrights. The reason there has been so little going on since the seventh of the month is that BT is so bloody awful. When the IRC logs get posted (hopefully this month) some of the details will be made visible, but until then there are these messy notes of mine and reassurance that when all wired connectivity is back to normal, everything in Techrights too will be back to normal. Until then I will carry on coding and complete my 50-page paper about this research project that has occupied a lot of my time. Here is an out-of-date screenshot (it looks a lot nicer by now):

This post would be off topic unless some connection was drawn to items we typically covered here. What the experience with BT shows is that a monopoly — and just about any monopoly for that matter — is a very bad thing. BT has a monopoly on my line and all its competitors must go through BT to rent the line. This gives BT a lot of power and my assertive attempts to cancel the order with BT after nearly 10 hours on the phone (and two entire days waiting at the house for a delivery that never came) are pointless at best. They make it impossible and hold the line as a hostage type of tool, in order to prevent the customer from going elsewhere. As Richard Stallman once put it, when support is a monopoly no wonder it is so bad. It turns out that under my name BT even activated the wrong line, which means that some stranger somewhere is making phonecalls at my expense. What an irreversible mess! Boycott BT. Avoid is like the plague and suggest others do the same.

N.B. – In case anyone from BT reads this, please look up VOL011-479058023564 and VOL011-47251182944. For shame, I want my life back.

Women’s perception of the Web differs

EX as in “gender”, that is. In an writeup titled “Men Are From Google, Women Are From Yahoo”, a certain difference in browsing habit is highlighted. It claims one is be able to tell apart the two genders, whose exploration of the Internet is driven by other motives.

Men and women have different motivations for doing what they do. According to a recent report from Pew Internet and American Life, women view the Internet as a place to extend, support, and nurture relationships and communities. Men tend to see it as an office, a library, or a playground–screw the community, this is about function not family.

Do men hunt and women nest as Jerry Seinfeld once said? Is that why women settle for whatever is on TV while men strive to find out what else is on TV? This is by no means a chauvinistic statement. The woman’s ability to concentrate on the familiar leads to a loyalty which is most rewarding.

Entering the virtual world (screenshot of
Manchester snatched in June 2005, Google Earth, click to enlarge)

The Internet is bound to make most sectors of traditional industry obsolete. Below are several examples, which have begun to prove more realistic than ever before.

• Telephone companies- suffer from VoIP for local and international calls
• Internet Service Providers (ISP’s)- giants like Google can gnaw at their revenue by appealing to a large userbase
• Newspapers – readers opt for the Internet, get access to blogs of many ‘flavours’
• Television – user opts for interactive content, not one-way communication with a finite number of channels
• Reviews move on-line – similar impact to that of digital TV (on-demand menus) on the TV guide — a river that have dried up
• Book publishers – the impact of Wikipedia and free books in PDF format; easy printing and sharing
• Film industry – media ‘ripping’, DRM
• Music industry – same as before with but increased levels of piracy, also due to P2P networking
• Classified services, real-estate (among other middlemen-type services) – superseded by eBay, classifieds service from Google, Microsoft, Craigslist, etc.
• Banking – online banks with neither concrete branches nor assets
• Groceries – as previously predicted (along with other wild guesses), warehouses may replace supermarkets and be managed and accessible via the Internet

What will be the outcome of this revolution? Nothing far-fetched, but nonetheless a noticeable transition. More free content, low-cost services and fierce competition among service providers, primarily left in the hands of giants.

Why I put my cards on the table and wound up using Google

NTIL about 3 years ago I was using Webcrawler as my text and graphics search engine almost exclusively. Webcrawler offered some nice features, without a doubt. I can clearly recall suggestions for completion or extended/refined searches on the side of existing SERP‘s. This assimilates to Google Suggest, which came about much later. In due time, Webcrawler also harvested results from Google, which made the results rather pleasing.

At present, Webcrawler has an interesting feature, which enables the user to see results from all major search engines (crawlers rather) side-by-side. One can see the top 10 from each on the same page. This is nothing like Dogpile (bad name for a business) that is composing results artificially. Rather than getting a mishmash of results, Webcrawler gives a more comprehensive and impartial view that brings together many search engines into one (overloaded and cluttered) page.

A9 is doing something similar to Webcrawler, but it very Google-centric. The user can see results from the Web, alongside images, videos, and more. Speaking of video search, see my previous post on search results bias.

The disadvantages of the approach are speed and visual clutter. Much of the information on the screen will be discarded. Yet, having plenty of information, both textual and visual, might be helpful sometimes, especially over a quick Internet connection where traffic is expendable.

UITE recently I mentioned Google’s negotiations with AOL. There is a $1 billion deal in stake. It turns out the the deal may lead to more graphical (i.e. imagery) ads, which thus far Google have trialled and tested on a mere subset.

Users of Google’s search engine will soon see something they are not used to on the notoriously spare site: advertising with logos and graphics. And the advertisers will not be limited to America Online, whose talks with Google prompted the change in policy, according to two executives close to the companies’ negotiations.

This could break the long-standing tradition of non-obtrusive ads from Google. It will, nonetheless, be avoided by many advertisers who opt for text-only ads. This comes only 7 months after Google ads in feeds were initially introduced. Speaking of unwanted intrusion, feeds are often intended to serve pure content in a minimalist way. Ads are adverse to their true purpose.

My message to Google: “With food comes the appetite? Is the mantra losing its mana?“

WordPress 2.0: coming to a blog near you by Christmas?

recently mentioned rigorous testing of WordPress 2.0. There are still odd bugs here and there; And yet, only hours ago came out a word of gossip. It suggests that WordPress 2.0 will be officially released just before Christmas. I wonder if it is rushed merely because of the important date. There is a typical download rush throughout the holiday. People have time to spare, so they upgrade software or hop on the blogging wagon. Christmas last year was the time of heavy WordPress 1.2 downloads.

Moving on to a different subject, after lengthy use and experience with WordPress, I decided to join the support forums and make contributions on rare occasions. I participated in the mailing lists for a long time (roughly 1 year), but never in the support forums. My first post was addressing to the problem below.

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The WordPress dashboard in its ’2.0 gown’

OR the past few weeks I have been working with the existing revision of WordPress 2.0 (RC2, soon Beta). It is currently on ‘feature freeze’, so it’s primarily a matter of cleaning up all imperfections and minor bugs. The nightly build of WordPress appears to be in a solid state and can definitely be described as “impressive”. My intention is to move this modified WordPress 1.2 blog (as well as another) into a newer and more robust section. There are various limitations to WordPress 1.2, the main one being its adaptability to scale and accommodation for functionality.

I have not made the new installation public yet, but the idea I have in mind is migrating the feeds to the new platform. I will be leaving the old 1.2 installation as-is to serve as a collection of legacy pages. The new installation will not contain older posts as to avoid duplicates. It can be perceived as a successor in a sense.

So what else should you know about WordPress 2.0? [Read on for details]

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