Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

The National Research Council just finished a report on Internet traffic that Congress requested seven years ago.

From The Globe and Mail:

The federal competition watchdog has ruled that pump prices rose dramatically last year because of low inventories and high crude prices not because of any price-fixing by oil companies.

We found no evidence to suggest a national conspiracy by gasoline companies to co-ordinate price increases, said Sheridan Scott, commissioner of Canada's Competition Bureau.

The ruling marks the fifth time in the past 15 years that the Competition Bureau has investigated pump prices.

Each probe has come to the conclusion that there was no price-fixing or other anti-competitive activity and that the battle for motorists' business at the retail level remains intense.

Maybe we should be investigating gouging, based on the fact that the price will often shoot up by as much as 40 cents per gallon, as it did yesterday. That must be because of the intense competition.

I guess we should be happy that it is only 90 cents a liter. I find it odd though that the price was 96 cents a year ago when the price of oil was much lower. Maybe that was gouging.

I assume that an oil company would not sell gas at a loss. That means that with oil over $50 a barrel, and gasoline prices that two days ago were 80 cents per liter, the oil companies must be able to make a profit based on that 80 cent price. So that extra 10 cents a liter must be a really nice bonus for them.

Terri Schiavo's parents have agreed to sell their list of supporters to a direct-mailing firm.

(Link from Boing Boing)

Former employees of Abercrombie & Fitch have won a class-action settlement over claims that the company required them to buy and wear its designs. The company will be addressing the settlement by providing the employees with gift cards - so they can but more Abercrombie & Fitch merchandise.

I just noticed this line in an editorial in my local newspaper, The Record:

What this poll means is that from now on politicians of all parties are going to have to appear to be more accountable and watch payments going to friendly firms. Parties should realize that they will pay a price for unduly favouring their friends.

According to The Globe and Mail, doctors in Canada have some concerns with the medical system:

Ontarians are ''on a fairly regular basis dying when they don't need to die'' because of long waits in hospital emergency rooms. The bald acknowledgment came yesterday from Sean Gartner, a 37-year-old emergency physician in Guelph.

Casinos in Ontario, Canada will soon have gambling addiction counselling centers:

The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. is setting up information centres at two of the province's casinos that will be operated by independent counsellors who specialize in gambling addictions.

"All Ontarians share a common interest in reducing the risk of problem gambling, and we recognize (the gaming corporation) has an important role to play to that end," spokesman Alan Berdowski said Thursday in a statement.

The centres are part of a new code of conduct by the government-owned gaming corporation to address growing concerns about gambling addicts.

HP is giving Mark V. Hurd, its new chief executive, quite the welcome:

Hurd's package includes a $2 million signing bonus, a $2.75 million cash "relocation allowance," 1.15 million stock options valued by the company at $6.9 million and 400,000 restricted HP shares worth about $8 million.

In addition to the relocation allowance, Hurd will also receive free housing for a year and a four-year "mortgage interest subsidy." There will also be "no limit on the weight of household goods" he chooses to ship to California, according to the agreement.

In addition, the contract calls for HP to reimburse Hurd for up to a 20 percent decline in the value of 850,184 shares he owns in the firm he is leaving behind, Dayton, Ohio-based NCR Corp.

In addition to the signing money, Hurd's contract calls for an annual salary of $1.4 million, an annual bonus of at least $2.8 million and as much as $8.4 million, and long-term incentive payments of between $4.2 million and $12.6 million per year. HP spokeswoman Monica Sarkar said the long-term incentive payments are not guaranteed.

In the employment agreement, HP said 450,000 of the stock options, valued at $2.7 million, and the 400,000 restricted shares were awarded "to make up for compensation forfeited from" Hurd's previous employer. HP spokeswoman Sarkar said the amounts were based on what Hurd was "leaving on the table" at NCR.

Am I ever glad I don't own HP stock.

According to Statistics Canada, Canadians are watching more news:

According to the government agency, TV watchers in this country saying they are spending an increasing amount time taking in news and current affairs programs, but less on sports programming.

(Link from Angry in the Great White North)

One thought immediately came to mind when I read this post at Angry in the Great White North.

People are actually taking three year courses in Public Relations.

Dare Obasanjo said something about the Universal Inbox, and about Google being a digital information hub, that got me thinking.

Right now we closely associate an inbox with an email application like Microsoft Outlook, and these applications have grown in to task, schedule, and contact managers. With the increasing use of RSS we have another place to look for information - the aggregator. Some aggregators actually make the aggregator appear to be a component of the email application, allowing the user to read their feeds within Outlook.

Yet as Seattleduck points out, it would be nice to collect a lot more than just email, including things like websites, remote files, and more. He recommends tags as a possible solution. I had said that folders already provide that ability, but he provided some good reasons why folders don't always work.

What if instead of thinking about email as the inbox, the email application actually generated RSS or Atom feeds of your email, appointments, contacts, and tasks. You could then subscribe within your aggregator to those feeds. Google already provides an Atom feed for your Gmail account. EVDB, the new events database, provides an RSS feed for events.

The aggregator user could then group these different feeds together as they saw fit, perhaps tagging them, and then also including links to outside services like Flickr or Technorati for those tags. Since RSS and Atom feeds represent published information, a change remotely won't affect what the user sees. There would also be no problems with duplication, because multiple uses of the feed do not constitute multiple copies, but merely multiple references to the same information.

So basically your aggregator becomes your universal inbox, for want of a better metaphor.

Other institutions like banks or travel companies could also generate RSS feeds for our statements or our travel information. The subscription nature of RSS won't eliminate spam sent through email, but as RSS is an opt-in mechanism by default we will be able to control other unwanted intrusions.

Aggregators don't appear all that different from traditional email inboxes, but they can grow in functionality as new uses for RSS and Atom feeds appear.

The use of OPML files would also allow us to switch easily from one aggregator to another as better tools arrive, or to use tools like Microsoft start. You could even publish or make public some or all of your OPML to others so that they can see what you see.

Even Robert Scoble says he spends 90% of his Internet time in his RSS news aggregator.

Just imagine, a single tool, easy to write, and not controlled by any company, based on standards, and easily extensible as new applications come along, limited only by your imagination. And if you want to deliver information to anyone, you just have to syndicate it as an RSS or Atom feed.

[Update: John Battelle is talking about the Universal Inbox too.]

Business 2.0 found some inaccurate information in a story and corrected it in their online edition in a rather unique way, clearly admitting the error:

It was bound to happen. The idea is too obvious and the potential too great to resist exploitation for much longer. A few weeks ago, Tony Perkins, creator of the digerati clubhouse AlwaysOn and now the publisher of its spinoff magazine, outlined for me the suggestion he says he recently made to New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger.

Suppose the Times, he told Sulzberger, rounded up 5,000 luminaries -- op-ed writers and the like -- and gave them, and only them, free rein to blog stories on the Times's own site. Imagine the traffic, he said. Imagine the buzz. "The first guy who does it is going to be the cool brand on the block."

[Editor's Note: Upon factchecking, Perkins says he did not meet Sulzberger and that the discussion of the Times and blogging was merely hypothetical.]

Now Huffington has just about beat any of the mainstream media to the blogosphere. And I'm about to finally find out: Will the return of Tina Brown's diary mean that blogging has grown up, or just gotten old?

Seattleduck asks why we don't tag our desktop:

But why dont we take this to our desktop, and use tagging to get our work stuff organized in some rational manner? Why cant we tag documents? And file shares? And intranet sites? Then tag communications: emails, Messenger contacts, and address book contacts?

[...]

Regarding documents and the desktop, the focus to date has been search, via Google Desktop and MSN Desktop. This is great but once you find that document or email, what next? You end up copying it over to your own folder, or dragging and dropping it, or creating a link to it from within your project plan. The net result is still chaos. We now have discoverability, but no memory. No personalized categorization of the content you actually use.

Unfortunately there is no standard taxonomy for tags or file folders, so we occasionally forget what we called something, or where we put it. The reason desktop search is so useful and necessary is because it helps us find the stuff we lost. Any usable system will required both the ability to categorize, and the ability to search across categories.

The folders we are already comfortable with address all of Kevin's requirements. They can aggregate documents, contacts, other folders, and links or shortcuts to other information. And he can call it "Q2.Marketing.Campaign" if he likes, or he can have a folder called "Marketing Campaigns" that contains Q1 and Q2, which would be even more effective.

Tags are a poor man's metadata, more about categorization than defining the attributes of an item. It is a great way to group items that we can't otherwise organize - as we do in Flickr or Technorati, and is very useful in situations like that.

It's easy to jump onto the next cool idea and forget that sometimes we already have the same tools at our disposal.

From Authentic Voice:

Here at Herring & Waffleman, we strive for the finishing line of the future, that only comes with experience and knowledgeing.

The other day I got a note from Fedex, a gentle reminder that I owe them money. Since I had no idea why I owed them money, I called their toll-free number. I got the standard "all of our agents are busy" line, and finally I was told that I left my name and phone number they would get back to me. Sadly, they didn't even tell me how important my call was to them.

That was two days ago. So I was wondering, since they didn't get back to me by 10:30 the next day, does that mean I don't owe them anything?

I agree with Jeff Jarvis that journalism is something you do, not who you are:

Journalism is not defined by the person who does it or by the medium or the company that delivers it.

Journalism is not a thing. It is an act: The act of informing is journalism. It's a verb, not a noun.

I won't let that detract from his thoughts though, because I get his point. I too harbor that inner desire to "aggregate, select, edit, present, and distribute information" in order to affect people, and to make a difference in the world. So am I a journalist or not? I guess if I achieve that goal then I am. If not, I'll just keep trying.

To want to make a difference. Okay, maybe it is a verb.

Jay Currie proposes extending the Canadian media levy currently on blank media to high speed internet connections. He suggests $2 a month, which is about 5% of what I currently pay. I already pay GST on my high speed service as well.

No offence Jay, but what is with this Canadian need to tax everyone and everything in the name of redistributing income?

I've had high speed service for a number of years now. I do not download music or movies. I buy blank CDs to backup my computers. Why should I be paying a levy to fund artists? I'm already forced to pay for the CBS, the Canadian Film Telefund, and numerous other arts subsidies through my tax dollars. And you state that the levy isn't even being paid out to the artists.

I'm happy to pay for what I use. I still buy CDs and DVDs. I find it convenient and comfortable. So why should I have to pay twice?

Timothy K. Armstrong on MGM vs. Grokster:

MGM closed with its pity-the-starving-artists line, complaining about the lost revenues from hypothesized sales it says would have occurred absent file-sharing.

That's what we're talking about after all, isn't it? A few more sales for 50 Cent, or Britney Spears. We don't really care about starving artists. And we certainly don't care about Fiona Apple:

But here's where it gets funky. "Extraordinary Machine" is an album that Apple finished over two years ago, but which was quickly shelved by the sad corporate drones over at Sony because they didn't "hear a single" and because it doesn't sound exactly like Norah Jones and because they're, well, corporate drones. They dictate cultural tastes based on relatively narrow and often deeply ignorant criteria related to marketing and money and fear of the new and the different. This is what they do.

(Link from Furdlog)

The Globe and Mail mentions a letter supported by more than 80 professors and graduate students at the University of Toronto (Canada's largest university) calling for the censorship of Daniel Pipes, director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum and a pro-Israeli academic.

The letter says that the authors support academic freedom:

"Genuine academic debate requires an open and free exchange of ideas in an atmosphere of mutual respect and tolerance. We . . . are committed to academic freedom and we affirm Pipes' right to speak at our university," the letter states.

"However, we strongly believe that hate, prejudice, and fear-mongering have no place on this campus."

"Although he has the right to speak, we don't think he should actually have a place to speak on campus," the 22-year-old said. "There should be a general awareness amongst the campus community of who this person is and hopefully with that awareness . . . groups wouldn't invite a speaker like this."

Thanks again to kate at small dead animals. She has all kinds of great stuff happening today.

All I could think when I read this was:

Those who can, do.

Those who can't, are liberal.

From a National Post story:

Andrew Miller feels safe in his home. A Mississauga native, he recently returned to the area with his infant daughter and wife after finishing his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The historian and university lecturer said the Toronto suburbs feel far less dangerous than U.S. cities.

Down there, we locked our doors. We were always looking out in the parking lot to make sure no one was breaking into our car, Mr. Miller said. But here, I dont feel anything but safe. We leave our doors unlocked. Certainly, Mississauga seems a lot safer than where Ive lived before.

Mr. Miller obviously never lived where we lived outside of Boston, where we could literally leave our doors unlocked without a thought. Of course he never says if he was a victim of crime, only that he didn't "feel" as safe. I wonder if any statistics would bear that out, though I've yet to see a head to head comparison between Canada and the U.S. Yet I often read about how much safer it is in Canada.

Musing has a much more comprehensive take on the issue.

I received this email on one of my accounts, purportedly from Barclays Bank, but I am not a customer:

D?ae?r Ba?cr?lays Memb?re?,

Th?si? em?lia? was s?ne?t by the Barc?al?ys ser?rev? to v?ire?fy yo?ru? ema?li? a?rdd?ess. You mu?ts? c?elpmo?te t?sih? pr?seco?s by cli?kc?ing on the l?ni?k bel?wo? and ente?ir?ng in the s?lam?l wi?dn?ow y?ruo? B?alcra?ys Memb?hsre?ip numb?re?, p?docssa?e and memo?bar?le w?dro?. Th?si? is d?eno? for y?uo?r p?noitcetor? - b?esuace? s?emo? of our m?ebme?rs no l?gno?er h?va?e acc?se?s to t?eh?ir e?am?il addr?se?ses and we m?tsu? v?re?ify it. To ver?fi?y yo?ru? em?lia? add?er?ss and a?ecc?ss y?ruo? b?na?k acc?tnuo? , cl?ci?k on the l?kni? be?wol?:

Does anyone actually fall for these scams?

So much of the internet is becoming "by invitation only" these days. I wasn't invited to join Yahoo! 360°. After all, I've only been a customer for 10 years, and why would you want to invite a customer? Luckily there are lots of other services out there.

Jeff Jarvis did get invited, but he recounts his difficulty in attempting to use the service.

Did I hear Om Malik say that Yahoo! was on its way back? Didn't anyone tell them that it costs ten times as much to get a new customer as to keep an existing customer?

The U.N. wants to control the internet:

The ITU, a United Nations agency, would like to change that. "The whole world is looking for a better solution for Internet governance, unwilling to maintain the current situation," Houlin Zhao, director of the ITU's Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, said last year. Zhao, a former government official in China's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, has been in his current job since 1999.

[...]

In a series of speeches over the last year, Zhao has suggested that the ITU could become involved in everything from security and spam to managing how Internet Protocol addresses are assigned. The ITU also is looking into some aspects of voice over Internet Protocol--VoIP--communications, another potential area for expansion.

[...]

People say the Internet flourished because of the absence of government control. I do not agree with this view. I argue that in any country, if the government opposed Internet service, how do you get Internet service? If there are any Internet governance structure changes in the future, I think government rules will be more important and more respected.

I thought I'd take a look at Yahoo! 360°. All I found was this:

Sorry, the page you requested was not found.

Please check the URL for proper spelling and capitalization. If you're having trouble locating a destination on Yahoo!, try visiting the Yahoo! home page or look through a list of Yahoo!'s online services. Also, you may find what you're looking for if you try searching below.

This week the Supreme Court, in MGM vs. Grokster, will decide the future of technology as we know it. If the media companies win, there will simply be no technology created in the future that they do not approve of. No VCRs, no TiVo, no iPods, not even computers, unless the media industry have complete control over what the devices do. Customers will have no control whatsoever.

The basis of the case is the fact that file sharing costs the companies hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.

What's next?

Will newspapers sue Yahoo! News and Google News? Availability of news on the internet costs newspapers millions of dollars in lost revenue.

Will oil companies sue the makers of hybrid vehicles? Those vehicles have the potential to cost oil companies millions of dollars in lost revenue.

Media companies have consistently fought the introduction of new technology, even though the eventual acceptance have created new markets worth billions of dollars. Yet once again they appear unable to accept a new technology and a potential new market. Only this time they want to make sure it dies.

Media companies are like dinosaurs. They can't adapt so they will die. And smart people like musicians and filmmakers are realizing that they don't need the media companies to deliver their message anymore.

In the old days the media companies acted as a pipe for content, from creator to customer, with a lot of flow control. They decided what you would get to see and hear.

Welcome to the internet. A new pipe, and you control your own flow, 24 hours a day.

Ok, maybe you shouldn't entrust your next big report or term paper to Microsoft Word's grammar check tool.

The United Nations is coming to Waterloo, Canada, where I currently reside:

About 90 top diplomats, politicians and other international experts from around the world are expected to attend a three-day conference in this southern Ontario city to discuss United Nations reform.

[...]

It will be the first major international conference on UN reform since Secretary-General Kofi Annan released his reform proposals about one week ago.

[...]

"The question for this conference is ... if you have a Darfur on your hands, what are you going to do about it?" Mr. Heinbecker said.
"What can the UN do to make itself more useful?"

I just finished doing a presentation via conference call from my home office to India. Early morning India time and it started out quietly, but pretty soon people got involved and started asking questions.

It's always an odd dynamic when I'm sitting at home in front of a speaker phone while people are listening in a room half a world away. I know my voice sounds different than when I'm in front of a crowd. Quieter, more pensive I guess. It's also difficult to generate exactly the same energy that happens in front of a live audience.

One thing never changes though. I can't help talking with my hands, though that doesn't go through a speakerphone.

I better get a little rest though. I have another presentation in six hours.

This New York Times article discusses the difficulty of remembering telephone numbers, now that numbers have in many places grown to 10 digits, and we have come to depend on myriad electronic devices like cell phones and PDAs to remember them for us. Losing such a device can mean being unable to call someone, or losing a number forever. Even switching to a newer device poses the problem of moving the information to the new device.

In half a century of using computers, where personal contact information is probably the most used form of data, we are in most cases still forced to enter information manually each time into each device. Technology's greatest failure is its inability to find a single common agreed-upon way of storing personal contact information. I have entered information into several systems over the years, and in virtually every case it was completely incompatible with anything else.

Some email systems make a valiant attempt at importing from other systems. Cellphones on the other hand generally require the user to enter the information one number at a time, using as many interfaces as there are different cell phones. At least PDAs provide some sort of desktop synchronization.

I would like to ask a favor of the entire hardware and software industry. Before you solve any more of the world's as yet unknown problems, could you:

• Please define a standard for the entry, storage, editing, and management of personal contact information.
• If you need contact information, please use that standard.

I'm sure that the lost productivity from re-entering contact information into new cell phones alone could run into the billions of dollars.

Techdirt, commenting on an interview with Sony Music chief Andrew Lack on the subject of music downloading, makes the most salient comment I've seen on the subject:

...Lack claims that all he's seeking for in this case is "balance." There's no "balance." The makers of buggies didn't get "balance" when automobiles came along -- and they didn't get to have the Supreme Court cripple automobiles to make the buggies remain competitive either. That is what this case is about. The entertainment industry wants to cripple the internet to make it more like radio or TV. That's "balance" to them.

A poignant comment from Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle:

Did any of them care about Terri Schiavo for the first 14.5 years of her vegetative state? They did not. Did they offer to pay for the extraordinary expense of keeping her alive? They did not. Did they sit by her bedside, read her books, play her music, bathe her bedsores? They did not. There's nothing to be gained from unpublicized compassion.

From the Montreal Gazette:

A parliamentary subcommittee studying prostitution across Canada has asked Ottawa for an extra $200,000 to visit some European cities that allow red-light zones and brothels.

"To go and actually view what's taken place there, and talk to various officials, we thought it was a good thing for the committee to do," New Democrat Libby Davies of Vancouver East said yesterday. "It shows you what is working elsewhere and what isn't."

There are probably lots of people who would have been happy to do this research for free.

Apparently Verizon disabled Bluetooth file-transfer capabilities on the Motorola V710 cell phone because the entertainment companies demanded it:

Verizon says the Bluetooth function was not disabled to prevent picture transfers but rather to satisfy the demands of media companies who don't want their content shared with nonpaying customers.

"I know why we all loved Napster. It was free. When it comes to the cell phone I have to abide by the rules of the content houses," said Jim Straight, vice president for wireless data and Internet services at Verizon Wireless. He said the mobile media market is so new that it will take time before all the technologies and content relationships fall into place in a secure, smooth-running manner.

"Customers get frustrated because they don't see what they want day one. That's understandable. Unfortunately, we have bad guys out there who want to do other things" such as illegal file-sharing.

The irony here is the fact that markets like home video were not created initially by entertainment companies, but were actually an answer to new technology. Had entertainment companies been allowed to kill the Betamax VCR twenty years ago, there would probably be no home video market at all. That may have kept the price of movies high, but would have eliminated a vast revenue stream from DVDs, as the entertainment industry has demonstrated an inability to innovate into new business models.

They missed the opportunity of video rental. They missed, and continue to fight music downloading. They are missing Bittorrent. They have missed, and continue to miss opportunities to lower their costs and increase their revenues. They constantly fight those that have seized those opportunities. They sue their own customers, who are expected to pay without question for whatever they deem acceptable.

And in their classic shortsightedness, it looks like they are about to miss a mobile opportunity. Though in this case, they want to make sure that nobody, not even them, can take advantage of the opportunity. If they were around 100 years ago we probably wouldn't even have radio.

Is it possible that they really are as dumb as they portray themselves to be?

(Link from Furdlog)

This morning's Globe and Mail newspaper had a three quarter page ad for Microsoft Office I hadn't noticed before.

It depicts the current customer as a dinosaur, and suggests that they need to evolve by upgrading to the newest version of Microsoft Office. A little dinosaur couple in the lower left hand are having a conversation:

Male dinosaur: It's time to upgrade our Office 97.

Female dinosaur: Beautiful, man.

If they can't give me cogent reasons on what benefits the upgrade will give me, and why they deserve my money, then they should go back to the drawing board.

And by the way, isn't it just possible that I, as a customer, may be perfectly happy with the version I already have?

Not every billionaire is a likeable guy, but Mark Cuban sure is. He has a content company that stands to profit if P2P file sharing is eliminated completely, but he is going to fund the Grokster defense.

Most people won't even give this a second thought, but next time you use your VCR, TiVo, iPod, or pretty much any technology, you should say thank you to Mark for this incredible gesture.

(Link from CopyFight)

A former newspaper journalist's view on the impending death of newspapers.

(Link from BuzzMachine)

I just took a look at the Foxblocker site, and noticed this line:

With every order placed, FOXBlocker.com will send an e-mail in your name to the TOP 10 advertisers at FOX News letting them know that yet another subscriber has opted out of FOX News. With a little luck and a lot of volume, we can shut the FOX up!

Censorship is the use of state or group power to control freedom of expression. In a modern sense censorship consists of any attempt to suppress information, points of view, or method of expression such as art, or profanity. Censorship is commonly used by social groups, organized religions, corporations and governments. However, there are also numerous groups which oppose censorship.

I always get a laugh out of people who dislike something so much that they wan't to ensure that I can't enjoy it either.

Sam Kimery doesn't like Fox News. He doesn't even think that it should be considered news. So he created an $8.95 device called the "Fox Blocker", so that others can block the channel. contends the channel is not news at all. He also provides purchasers a letter that they can send to advertisers via the Fox Blocker site.

Mr. Kimery dislikes the fact that most of what ends up on Fox News is more opinion than news, though that is pretty much true of all media.

The article notes:

Kimery doesn't use the device himself; his remote is programmed to only a half-dozen channels. Plus he occasionally feels the need to tune into Fox News for something "especially heinous."

Mark Evans notes that Clearwire, Craig McCaw's wireless broadband company has in its terms of service agreement this clause:

"You may not use the Service or take any action that will result in excessive consumption or utilization of Clearwires system or network resources, or which may weaken network performance, or which adversely affects the performance of the Services for other Clearwire customers, all as determined in Clearwires sole discretion."

As a result, some Clearwire customers have discovered they are not able to use Vonage - another troublespot for Vonage, which is in the midst of raising another US$100 million in private equity. Clearwire claims it's blocking third-party applications to maintain the reliability of the network but there is something far more sinister happening: packet favouritism where ISPs give lower priority to traffic piggybacking on their networks. If this anti-competition approach is adopted by more broadband ISPs, it would be a major setback to the Web-services business, which is quickly emerging as high-speed access become more widespread and ISPs look for revenue beyond connectivity.

Of course companies like Clearwire don't size their systems based on the assumption that everyone will use the maximum bandwidth - they assume that you won't and that peak demand will be lower. If everyone suddenly used what they were paying for then the system would collapse upon itself. So these companies aren't trying to protect their customers. They are trying to protect themselves from their customers. That's why we are seeing instances of sudden limits placed on "unlimited" bandwidth.

I think that if these companies are so keen to limit your usage "to protect their customers", then they should also be willing to agree to a mandatory reliability measurement, as defined and policed by a third party. After all, it is only to protect their customers.

The Washington Post looks at desktop search today (free subscription required), examining six popular tools - Ask Jeeves, Google, Yahoo, Copernic, Blinkx and MSN. They make this final comment:

But these programs also shouldn't exist: Their capabilities should be built into the operating system, something both Microsoft and Apple are working on. Windows users have a while to wait -- Win XP's successor, nicknamed Longhorn, won't ship before the summer of 2006 -- but Apple's Mac OS X Tiger should arrive this spring.

Operating systems should have disk management tools, security tools, data management and recovery tools, and other related applications. Yet in the history of Windows at least, all of these and more were at one point third-party applications that were eventually subsumed into the operating system.

In other cases, applications were included that probably shouldn't have been. Browsers and media players come to mind here.

It seems that as needs evolve, companies spring up to satisfy them. If the market grows big enough, it gets added to the OS. Unfortately in some cases this is not done out of any concern for the customer, but merely as a offensive strategy against the third-party company.

(Link from ThreadWatch)

Hugh gives the "beyond lame" award to The Captain, a blog from the folks who bring you Captain Morgan Rum.

What is even more lame (if it is indeed possible to be further than beyond lame) is the fact that you only get to see the blog if you select USA as the country. Otherwise you get the generic site full of ads.

Lawrence Liu recounts something he saw at his local public library, where a less than sophisticated user was unable to attach files from her home PC to the email she was writing at the library, and when she couldn't, closed the browser without saving the lengthy email she had just typed. He suggests when creating usability testing scenarios, always remember to ask, "Yeah, but will this work well at the library?"

While I agree that this is an excellent idea, I also need to point out that we must assume some level of common sense among the users. If I was writing a letter at the library, I wouldn't be able to attach something I had left at home. Why would I assume the use of the internet would change this?

As far as saving an email goes, while features such as autosave could minimize this issue, there still must be some onus on the user to take an action. We expect people to check that the stove is off before they leave the house, or to ensure that the garage door is open before they start their car.

Yet when computers are involved we assume that we must take care of everything for presumed incompetent users.

Computers are incredible tools, but they should not be reduced to the lowest common denominator. We should educate the users, but they must also take some responsibility.

I thought David Weinberger was ruthlessly promoting tags, but his post today leaves his position a bit fuzzy.

I'm not so keen on tags. While I understand that tags can help us find things more quickly, it bothers me that we have created the incredible communications medium of the internet, that allows us to share rich tapestry of language to nuance and convey our ideas succinctly, and we want to reduce all of that to the lowest common denominator of a finite hierarchy of tags.

Where tags do have value is for things like pictures. Since there is currently no way to search for a picture based on the picture data alone, the use of one or more tags allows us find it more effectively.

The use of tags makes an assumption about the language and cultural background of the user though, so the effective use of tags will require some agreed-upon set of tags and their meanings.

Search tools, and semantic analysis tools will continue to improve, meaning that for text the ability to discern meaning will become easier, so I don't want to start to artificially limit my meaning this early in the game.

From Boing Boing:

CopyNight is a site where copyfighters can list their local events by city,