Blessed be the blog

Chris Norton, July 21st 2006, 10:37AM

A while ago the Web was in the grip of robots. Take two of the classic web searches (no, not those two, this is a family blog) - consumer electronics and celebrities. I'd be searching for a USB powered keyboard warmer and the latest pictures of Brian Blessed, and all I'd get was a hundred price comparison websites and some generic celeb-pic site with only a couple of fuzzy pics of Brian and a hundred links trying to sell me junk I didn't need, USB powered mouse-mat warmers? Useless!

These searches are bound to still have Google spit a lot of the old rubbish back at me, but nowadays the blogging explosion means that quite a lot of information on the web is now back to being produced by real, living, breathing people. Amidst the auto-generated pap, I'll typically be able to read someone slagging off the latest USB powered keyboard warmer (and saying that Apple are about to come out with one that'll revolutionise PC interface heating), and a few reviews of Brian Blessed's astonishing performance on Celebrity Stars In Their Eyes.

The web is being repopulated by real content, now that it's finally possible for totally non-technical types and geeks alike to get involved. As of this week, India can get involved too - now that the Indian government has lifted its recent blogging ban, that's another billion people to contribute some real content to our web. Now, considering I was lying in the last paragraph and can find hardly anything about Brian Blessed's astonishing performance on Celebrity Stars In Their Eyes, I'm hoping at least a few of the billion can get writing about this important matter. Real content! Let's go!

Tags: blogging, content, users, worldwideweb
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Believing the skype

Chris Norton, July 17th 2006, 5:36PM

Much to my relief and much like Pink, I'm not dead. Good day once more, UKFast blog fans.

Voice over IP, or VOIP, is quickly gaining popularity. I have my ridiculous Captain Scarlet-style headset waiting at home, in order to talk to people half the world away about our respective brands of reality TV and chocolate bars, and it seems that millions of other people are sailing with me in this good ship that we know as 'HMS Free Internet Phone Calls'.

As the technology develops, it's fairly certain a lot of telecommunication bods will be running a bit scared, or at least trying to hop onto the Skype bandwagon. I'm not worried about that - they'll be fine, modern life is all about telecommunication, these VOIP systems still use the same sets of wires and all that, and hey the people working at massive telecomms companies can probably look after themselves.

What does bother me about this, and sometimes about internet technology in general, is the inexorable increase of complexity that advances tend to entail. Where art is frequently driven by the pursuit of new levels of simplicity and elemental forces, technological advance piles on complexity after complexity. Put simply, we now have phones that can crash and leave us shouting into a useless black box, and I can't see the rise of VOIP making phonecalls any simpler.

It's the old trade-off, stability and simplicity versus extra features and the wow factor. Ultimately I always believe in progress, but I think I'll always feel unsettled that my phone conversation isn't just passing through a couple of phone company exchanges, but through tens, maybe hundreds of computers. Pass the paper cups and string!

Tags: communities, phones, skype, voip
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The shape of computers to come

Chris Norton, June 22nd 2006, 2:18PM

An article on Slashdot about some graphics-pen based desktop software called 'BumpTop' started me thinking again about interface design (see 'Welcome to Userville'). But then my thinking started to run 'well I wrote that post about software design, better think of something else'. I had to think outside the box - literally.

Because outside the software-displaying boundaries of the computer screen is the computer itself. What does it consist of? Typically a screen, a keyboard, a mouse and a box of tricks with a medusa-head of wires popping out the back. Tech types will tend to view the box of tricks under the desk as the computer itself, and its attendant attachments merely tools plugged into the computer. Non-technical types will often refer to the screen as being the computer - after all, that's where everything happens.

Well I think the whole caboodle needs to be present before you call it a personal computer, and it strikes me that this bitty existence is a bit strange, a bit... underdeveloped. OK, so you have immense power through the ability to get a fancy mouse or a massive screen, but as personal computers continue to move into being consumer items, for heaven's sake the last thing consumers need is complexity. A bit of choice is good, yeah, but if people are going to buy a PC and not change anything, why have a separate monitor and keyboard and mouse and all that?

I think we'll be seeing a lot more of those Apple style combo-computers, where the monitor and main box become as one - and not just because Apple set fashion and are thus copied left right and center. Once those linking wires are got rid of, perhaps we could have some kind of holographic keyboards, and control the pointer by just wiggling our fingers on the desk? Look, we're already partway there.

Tags: control, design, desktop, interface, pcs
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Copy this down

Chris Norton, June 20th 2006, 9:49AM

So the 'Google Generation' (delightful, young people are once again defined by a multinational corporation) are all unabashed plagiarists. Stupid kids! Everybody knows the point of formal education is to learn how to conceal your sources correctly. From high within her ivory tower at Leeds Met University, plagiarism expert Professor Sally Brown is telling us (and I'm giving the prof the benefit of the doubt that she didn't just cut and paste this from somewhere) "They are post-modern, eclectic, Google-generationists, Wikipediasts, who don't necessarily recognise the concepts of authorships/ownerships."

Funny she should mention Wikipediasts (is that term going to catch on? I thought it was Wikipedians - although Wikipedophiles has a certain ring), because yesterday I noticed that The Register has recently indulged in a bit of one of its favourite sports - pouncing on anything that makes Wikipedia look a bit silly: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been telling students not to refer to it. "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia" cries the head 'pediast.

Well, Prof Brown and you teachers faced with another cut-and-paste job from Wale's baby, you shouldn't waste any time worrying that the kids are nicking huge sections of online content and slapping them into their essays. Instead please recognise that, via new technology, information is becoming as plentiful and easy to obtain as air - and then realise the pointlessness of getting a whole class of students to write the same essays again, or forcing people who swim in a sea of information to sit on artificial dry land in an exam environment.

We shouldn't be patching up out-dated assessment methods and telling kids off for rigging them to their advantage, instead we need to develop new ones to teach them more about how to process and filter information - like, should they really trust an encyclopaedia that begins its own page about itself with the line 'no soup for you'?

Tags: copying, google, learning, teaching, wikipedia, wikis
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Google Earth Song

Chris Norton, June 13th 2006, 5:17PM

What's the best thing that Google's ever done? Adwords, that's pretty clever if you're a businessy type. Analytics, that's pretty cool if you're a webmastery type. The search engine itself, that's pretty fantastic if you're any type at all (unless you're in China).

But all that stuff is secondary in my mind to Google's towering achievement (and let's sweep under the carpet the fact that they actually acquired most of the software by buying up the original company behind it), probably the single best piece of computer software since Super Mario World... I speak, of course, of The Almighty Google Earth.

I hardly need to explain it here, it's the world on your desktop and you can zoom in almost far enough to check if you're actually developing a bald spot, or spin around the world in corky 3d-o-vision like you're presenting a child-depressing Newsround report on the plight of Malaysian duckbilled penguins. You can even get it to map out a route to drive somewhere if you like that sort of thing... or go and look at the Big Brother house. If you like that sort of thing.

In short, Google Earth is amazing and literally makes me feel like I'm living in the future, and I've finally had an reason to talk about it because there's a new version out. Look, you can even see UKFast towers on there!*

^{* OK so my links here aren't to Google Earth but its flatter cousin, Google Maps... sadly we're not allowed to use the beast in the office, given its habit of trying to download the whole planet and the attendant bandwidth-eating that ensues...}

Tags: google, googleearth
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