mediajunk

Is checking your email the first and most repeated task of your day? Do you use internet cafes when on holidays?

Wach out; you could be an email addict. And what would you do if you lost your email for a week?

According to a BBC survey, many people feel that a week without email would be more stressful than moving house or going through a divorce.

Sheesh, those people need to get out more. And the group surveyed was very narrow; I think I'll email the Beeb and complain. Then I'll email the article to all of my friends to see what they think, then email a note to the guy in the cube beside me to see if he's got a red pen that works, then email the...

Update - 31 March 2005: Another new Google patent has been granted, of much more signifance than the one detailed below, and with insights into Google's algorithm.

A new patent by Google has just been granted in the US.

The patent's title is: Ranking search results by reranking the results based on local inter-connectivity, and – as you'd expect from the Mountain View boffins – it's damn complicated.

The purpose of the patent, according to Google, is (partly) "to prevent any single author of web content from having too much of an impact on the ranking value".

The "ranking value" means the score that Google gives to a particular page on the web. Pages with higher ranks show up higher than pages with lower ranks.

Google's patent makes it tougher for any individual or business to claim they can influence Google’s search results.

I can interpret this move in two contrasting ways. The part of me that admires Google’s brand and tradition of integrity tells me this patent will protect the individual webmasters from the big-time operators, making sure everyone has an equal chance of getting listed.

The cynic in me, however, looks at the timing of this patent and sees that, just as Google has introduced its new Adsense service, the ability to influence non-paid-for results has diminished.

But then, Google applied for this patent two years ago, so for now I'll give the world's favourite search engine the benefit of my doubt.

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Another nice plug for mediajunk today: the MSN news "blogspotting" column linked to my post on the blogosphere's glass ceiling.

I *hate* registration pages, but every now and then giving out my email address seems unavoidable.

Many registration pages collect email addresses simply to sell them to spammers. Even pages that claim "your email address will not be used other than for purposes of ..." cannot always be trusted.

My preferrred hack is to create a new address (on a domain that I’ve set aside entirely for this purpose) that will identify the site on which I'm registering.

Let's say I wanted to register on an e-card site called "Coolcards". I'd create an address called coolcards@mydomain.com and have it forwarded to my real address. This way, if I receive spam via coolcards@mydomain.com, I know who’s sold me out.

I've discovered that a lot of purportedly reputable sites pass my details to spammers. I even received spam after registering on a well-known, A-list blogger's site!

I don't want to name names ... but drop me a line if you'd like me to tattle ;)

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I was curious, then, to learn of a new service called Mailinator -- a registration email hack that anyone can use.

Here's the skinny: you register on a site, like Coolcards.com, and when you get to the part that asks for your email address, you pick a username (any username) and add "@mailinator.com" to it.

Let’s say that, on the Coolcards.com registration page, I claim that my email address is heraghty@mailinator.com. After registering, I would go to Mailinator.com and check incoming email for heraghty@mailinator.com. The account would be created as soon as the incoming mail arrives ... but I’d have to be quick, as accounts only last for a few hours.

Mailinator accounts don’t have passwords, so theoretically anyone could check if there’s email for heraghty@mailinator.com. But it’s unlikely that anyone would, certainly not within a couple of hours of my registration. (Of course, I wouldn’t have to pick a name that’s meaningful. I could say that my address is 2e90eWEI5@mailinator.com.)

If you don't get it, rest assured that I didn't either, until I read over Mailinator's FAQ a couple of times. I haven't tried it out yet but it seems like a great idea ... until the registration sites get wind of it, and disallow Mailinator addresses!

So what's in it for the guys behind Mailinator? That, I'm not sure -- which is why I wouldn't advise using this service if the registration process is likely to involve any information you don't want to share, like a password, or your credit card details. The site's FAQ says that anyone who uses Mailinator to exchange sensitive information is "a stupid-head".

You have been warned!

We tend to think that children have a natural penchant the internet. Kids are comfortable with the web; ten-year olds haven't known a world without the internet, just as the previous generation couldn't imagine a world without television. Even ten-year-olds have their own websites – such as Graham Owen, whose site "is devoted to fire trucks, ambulances and aircraft".

But it is wrong – even unfair – to assume that youngsters are automatically brilliant at using the web. Research conducted at Northumbria University in England has revealed that teenagers regularly experience difficulties when using the internet.

The problem, according to Dr Alison Pickard, a lecturer in research methods at the University, is not that teens lack the computer necessary skills; rather, they lack information literacy skills.

Being able to “search, retrieve and use the information” that’s on the web is quite different from being able to find your way around a keyboard (the latter probably isn’t a problem for phone-texting, game-playing teenagers). Teens get frustrated and blame themselves when they cannot find the information they are looking for.

Northumbria’s four-year study shows that the web isn’t just about technology – it’s about information, and communication. Understanding how to refine a search, and knowing how to separate the chaff from the wheat of results, are skills that come with time and practice. An understanding of multiple subjects and different types of information (e.g. government reports, book reviews, academic study, individual opinion, etc.) is also helpful.

The study can also be interpreted study reiterating a point that usability experts have been claiming ever since businesses first went online – that most websites are too complex. There’s no reason why teenagers shouldn’t find the information they want online, if they are given the correct intstructions and guidance on relevant sites. Unfortunately too many designers are caught up with technology, instead of focusing on the user experience.

Hopefully the situation will have changed by the time today’s teenagers become web designers. They will have a better understanding of the pitfalls that lead to user frustration.

The signs are good: little Graham Owen’s site may be short and sweet, but it is simple to navigate. A point that can't be made about all too many "grown-up" sites.

A couple of noteworthy tidbits today:

The New York Times has revealed that Amazon is planning to post texts online.

The Times did not specify how much of a book's text will be made available (a single chapter, perhaps?) – only that Amazon "plans to limit how much of any given book a user can read."

The potential for Amazon's site is huge. Currently a massive library of dustcovers, the site could overtake Google in the area of depth of content.

Unlike Google however, the web's biggest retail brand may require users to register before it can search and read book texts, a move that may inhibit the success of the project.

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Google, meanwhile, forges ahead with small but significant additions to its own site. The latest is an advanced search feature on the News search, which lets you limit your search to publications that appeared on a particular date, or date range, and to specify the country of origin of the publication.

It may not sound exciting, but it's bound to be useful to somebody, somewhere. Good ol' Google.

When evangelizing about blogging (on a typical Monday evening), I like to slip in a modified version of Andy Warhol's prophecy: In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

Many in our society have experienced fifteen minutes -- or some similarly meager timeslice -- of fame, just as Warhol predicted. (Think of Big Brother or other reality TV shows.)

But another kind of fame is emerging, one where the slice of audience is small, not the time. Blogging has the potential to bestow exactly that kind of fame. The community of readers may not be a "mass" audience, but within that community, the blogger holds an important and respected position.

Community-sized fame is an ancient phenomenon rather than a futuristic one. Everybody’s from somewhere, after all, and we all know some big fishes in our small ponds. Here in Ireland, for example, the priest or schoolmaster was once a “famous” individual within his community (as was the druid, going further back).

Blog fame is novel in other ways: the reader community is virtual and geographically scattered (take a look at my guestmap!), while communication – the “oxygen” on which all fame depends – takes place through computers and network connections.

So I enjoyed the following quotation in an introduction to blogs splash on the BBC’s site:

"If you want to reach millions you book an ad on TV," said Stefan Glanzer, one of the founders of blogging system 20six. "If you want to reach one person you use e-mail or the telephone. "But if you want to reach between 5 and 500 people a blog is the ideal tool to communicate," he said.

Exactly. Of course, keeping those 5-500 people coming back is the hard part, eh readers? Eh? Uh, hello … is there anybody out there?

Humanity: Computing's Biggest Problem is a nice little piece in today's ZDNet, which looks at how some of the larger international IT companies are dealing with HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) issues.

While many companies don't take HCI seriously enough, the folks at Intel have pushed the envelope by hiring anthropologists to evaluate how their technologies are used in various cultures.

Intel anthropologist Genevieve Bell made the case for leaving the office to do firsthand, in-person research. "You have to go there and hang out," said Bell, who has racked up a fair number of frequent flier miles travelling to homes in India, Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia and China as part of her study of cultural differences within the emerging middle class in Asia. If she hadn't gone to these places, Bell says that she would never have known that in some areas, people are buried with paper versions of their laptops so they will have technology in the next world, while in other spots, people have monks bless their cell phones. Sometimes, Bell said the findings are disturbing, such as the mobile phone faceplates in Malaysia that show a plane crashing into the World Trade Centre.

I can't decide whether this reinforces or challenges the "global village" paradigm!

Intel are to be admired for taking such a bold step but HCI doesn't have to be sophisticated; you can learn a lot about the usability of your design through testing just a handful of "ordinary" users.

"We don't like to do focus groups," said Marissa Mayer, director of consumer Web products for Google. Instead, Google prefers to first ask employees what they think of potential changes and then throw those alterations out to either a test of customers or, in some cases, just try the change on its live Web site. Sometimes, that's how the company realises that it has a bad idea on its hands. That was the case when it offered broadband customers a thumbnail picture of each Web site with its search results. Of those who got the thumbnails, 5 percent of Google users went to the preferences page and turned off the feature. That's a pretty big thumbs-down, considering that typically only 1 percent or 2 percent of people ever view the Google preferences page.

Ahh ... so that explains where the with-thumbnails version of Google originated.

When I first heard that Google was releasing its APIs -- the code that lets you access the behind-the-scenes areas of the leading search engine -- I thought we would see some great Google spinoff sites within a year or so.

Instead, the results have mostly been gimmicky. Like BananaSlug, which seeds your search query with a random word, so that you get a result from way down the listings.

Yeah, it's fun. For a couple of minutes. But where are the genuinely useful sites built on Google's APIs?

ICQ runs a version of Google that shows thumbnail previews of results.

I don't know where this originated or whether Google will introduce thumbnails in the future, but it seems to be a nice feature.

To display the usefulness and range of its spell checker, Google has listed every single misspelling of the name "Britney Spears" that its search engine detects over a three-month period.

I did a quick count, and realised Google had detected 592 different misspellings of "Britney Spears". I wouldn't have guessed there could be so many wrong spellings of a name that has a total of three syllables. Some are typos, but many seem to be genuine spelling faults.

For example, there were 40134 searches for "brittany" spears; 36315 for "brittney"; 24342 for "britany"; 7331 for "britny"; 6633 for "briteny"; 2696 for "britteny"; and 1635 for "brittny".

Allowances must be made, I suppose, for the fact that a lot of people searching for Britney Spears don't actually speak English.

Nevertheless, I wonder whether the Google spell checker is improving people's spelling -- or further deteriorating it. As with word processors, users may grow to rely on spell checkers doing the "thinking" for them.

But maybe it's not wrong to depend on software to correct our spellings -- rather than, y'know, actually having to use our brains (sheesh, what a drag!).

I'm spell-checking this post, after all. And I confess, I didn't really count the Britney misspellings -- I cut-and-pasted them into MS Excel, and let the spreadsheet count them for me!

Hmmm... maybe I could devise an algorithm to maintain this blog...

I'm blushing today.

Lola Ailina Laranang, a gifted writer and a sincere, inspiring blogger, recently asked me if she could use one of my photos to create a piece of "Flash Fiction".

I protested that I really wasn't a "photographer" but Ailina went ahead and used the picture anyway.

I'm terribly flattered! But don't worry: I won't be giving up the day(-and-night) job.

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MORE FLATTERY JUST IN:
I notice a big spike in my site visitors lately and realized it was from being quoted in Adam Curry's weblog on Sunday. Adam's blog has one of the biggest readerships in the 'sphere, so that was another nice boost, cheers Mr. Curry!

When I talk about the potential for blogs in a business context, people often scratch their heads. "But blogs are kept by individuals; what do they have to do with businesses?"

I usually say that companies are made up of individuals. Promote the people, and you promote the companies.

But there's also a less obvious way in which blogs can be used by businesses -- as intra-blogs. I'm not trying to coin a phrase here, especially not one as ugly as intrablogging, but I'm hoping to draw parallels with intranets.

Just as an intranet is internal to a company, accessible only by its employees, so too can blogs be created for a select group of users, and locked out to everyone else. This private corporate blog then offers a way to interact regularly to other staff members on a given topic, using a many-to-many communications model.

A blog wouldn't necessarily revolve around an individual, either. It could pertain to a project or team.

Blogging software makes web publishing easy. And commenting on posts is easier still. It's less hassle, certainly, than trying to track a bunch of email threads and replies.

This was the experience of Nicholas Tang, director of operations at NY-based Community Connect:

"For several years Mr. Tang viewed this daily surge of e-mail messages as an unpleasant but necessary part of his job managing a team of eight engineers," explains William O'Shea in an excellent article in today's New York Times. "Then, a few months ago, he began using an alternative to e-mail, a Web log."

Mr. Tang's blog has essentially proved a success -- but the Times article acknowledges that switching from email communication to blogging does run the risk of increasing the information glut, not decreasing it. "Opening a pipeline to comments from employees can produce a torrent of information, essentially defeating the purpose of the tool."

Like everything else in the business world then, if you do start a corporate blog, make sure you manage it well.

A piece of advice I've regularly given to clients and friends who engage in blogging, or any form of internet publishing, is to treat their posts as if they were newspaper articles.

Apart from maintaining quality, my reasoning was that, in most countries, information posted on the internet is subject to the same laws of libel and defamation as those that govern the press industry.

As the concept of blogging catches on in the US, however, legislators there are beginning to realize that it doesn't make sense to equate personal weblogs with commercial publications. Thus, "the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish," according to Wired News.

Freedom of speech activists have welcomed the decision:

"One-way news publications have editors and fact-checkers, and they're not just selling information -- they're selling reliability," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "But on blogs or e-mail lists, people aren't necessarily selling anything, they're just engaging in speech. That freedom of speech wouldn't exist if you were held liable for every piece of information you cut, paste and forward."

Does this mean bloggers are free to slag off and slander whomever or whatever they like? No, of course not. The important point of the ruling is that bloggers can be held non-responsible for information they republish. That is, if a blogger can show that he based a post on information from another "reputable" source, then, under this ruling, he is unlikely to be held responsible for the inaccuracy and/or offending nature of that post.

If, however, a blogger takes information from a commercial news source but then changes it to the extent that it becomes a new piece of expression, he could be held responsible for that expression.

I can imagine some tricky cases where the line between "source material" and "new expression" might be hard to distinguish. For now though, this ruling favours bloggers, in one (hugely influential) part of the world at least.