Global Nerdy

Information Architects have come up with a cute little subway map-like chart of the big sites and the web trends they believe they'll define in 2007. I've posted a preview below, and you can click it to see the map at full size:

Information Architects' 2007 Web Trend Map. Click the picture to see the map at full size.

They also make these predictions for the 'net in 2007:

1. Apple keeps its iPod monopoly and increases its OS 5% market share to 5.1%
2. Google scores against Microsoft and Yahoo due to its massive marketing data advantage
3. Blogs bloom, and prepare for the 2008 election
4. Social networks become a place where members make money
5. Newspapers open up
6. Big ad investments start streaming in
7. New Internet focused ad agencies open up
8. Viruses and spam become an even bigger hassle
9. Yet Digital ID initiates a major change that makes the web more reliable, user and investor friendly
10. All in all 2007 is a preparation for the big infolution in 2008

Also worth looking at is their article The 50 Loudest Websites in 2006 and What Made Them Successful.

Let me start off the new year by apparently agreeing with Mike "TechCrunch" Arrington that a list is a good, cheap way of banging out a blog post. In fact, I'll go Arrington one better and say that using his list of indispensable Web 2.0 companies is an even better, cheaper way of banging out my inaugural 2007 blog post on Global Nerdy.

A year ago I wrote a post called “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without” and listed thirteen startups who’s products made a real impact in my life. Those were the products that I loved, and used every day. Seven of the companies are still on the list. Six have dropped off to make room for new products, and I’ve added two more to round out the list to fifteen total products

Arrington then lists his personal creme-de-la-creme-de-la-Ouebbe-Deux-point-Oeuf. I'll start my take on his list by saying that I've never used 800-Free-411 or Amie Street, but they sound interesting enough. Having the customer pay for directory information is all wrong, yet the prices for directory calls seem to be increasing. Glad to see someone try to submarine those fat-and-happy rent-seekers. Amie Street seems less clear-cut to me. I'm not sure why a song's popularity should drive an increase in price—it's not as if supply of that track gets tighter with more downloads. It's an artificially-set reward tied to popularity, not a market-driven price. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know, but it doesn't seem to count to me as an innovative solution to the question of how authors are to be compensated (if at all) for the use of their intellectual property by individuals.

I haven't used BlueDot either. The Flickr-like control over sharing your bookmarks sounds nice but, let's face it, does the world need yet another bookmarking service?

As for the services I have used, I'm 100% with Arrington on the gee-whiz-it's-about-time coolness of Ask City's maps. Frankly, I don't trust any local guides to services, so that doesn't draw me to Ask City, but the ability to annotate and share maps is sorely lacking from Google's and Yahoo!'s offerings here; the nod goes to Ask (for now). I should probably use Flickr more than I currently do, but I never hesitate to recommend the service to friends looking for an easy (and cheap) way to share photos online. I star to wince, however, when I see them add doodads like geotagging; I hope the need to keep pace with all the pretenders to the Flickr crown doesn't hurt their ease of use, as they lard on the latest and greatest feature. Most people with digital cameras, computers, and internet connections don't give a rat's ass about geotagging.

I'm always amazed when I see people using webmail other than Gmail. Why? I've tasted them all; I have Windows Live and Yahoo! webmail accounts, but I'm lucky if I remember to check those things once a week. For me, it's my work email, and Gmail. In fact, I've given over my personal mail management to Google as well, and now Google Apps for Your Domain (GAYD) handles all the mail for scriban.com. A massive mailbox, searchability, available anywhere, plays nice with POP mail and mobile clients, snappy interface…what's not to like?

Newsreading is a chore. NetNewsWire isn't. Like all well-designed Mac software, it simply blows its Windows counterparts away. That said, I don't use NetNewsWire. Work requires that I stay trapped in cross-platform hell, so I can't live my life on a Mac. In the past, I've turned to Bloglines to solve that problem for me, but I think I've hit some kind of mental wall with the two-pane email-style newsreader: I simply can't take the burden of all of those thousands of unread posts in those hundreds of feeds I read. Netvibes has come along at just the right time for me. Starting with decent OPML support, Netvibes' page-and-tile-based UI lets me scan the new stories across more sites at once than I found I could churn through with Bloglines. Even though Bloglines is, in many ways, a very powerful tool, coping with feedglut has become the highest-priority problem my newsreader must solve, and Netvibes does it elegantly.

TechMeme is another tool that helps me prioritize my reading list, along with Megite and TailRank. There is a real danger that TechMeme encourages a tech blogging to become an echo chamber—in observing what's interesting, it also helps define what's interesting—but all I can say is that it currently does a pretty good job of unearthing stuff that I might not have otherwise seen. Although it's more frivolous, Pandora's been equally good at helping me discover new stuff that I actually like, although its success rate feels lower for me than it does for many others. I'll frequently wear out my hourly skips rejecting songs (only to have it retreat to home base and throw some Pixies or Weezer my way, perhaps to appease me).

WordPress is one of those cases where I simply haven't put my money where my mouth is. All things being equal, I'll go with the capable free and open alternative to a proprietary solution. You would think that would mean that I run my blogs off WordPress, but I don't. blogaritaville on scriban.com is MovableType (and has been for years). Global Nerdy runs on BlogWare (ask Joey). I know full well how capable and powerful WP is, and it's well-supported by its developer community, so why not switch? Speaking for scriban.com, it's just laziness.

Which leaves YouTube, Flock, Digg, and Skype, four services/applications I don't use and I don't really get.

I'm waiting for the shock and/or horror to set in.

No, I'm not a hater or a Luddite. Let me explain. YouTube has done a lot of things right, especially with the user experience. It's easy to contribute, easy to share, and their use of Flash means you don't need to download a client to play video. Where I get off the YouTube bandwagon is with the whole fascination with video on the web: I just don't dig it that much. Most of my compute time is at work, and I don't work with headphones, so playing video is low on my list of things to do while online. Moreover, I hate the fact that video content is so linear. With text I can skip and skim and still get a reasonable overview of something. Given the choice between video of a news story or a text version, I'll go with text every time. None of this is to say that I don't enjoy the odd YouTube clip sent by friends. Hell, I've looked up commercials from childhood days spent in front of the TV, but I've never spent more than 10 minutes at a time on YouTube.

I've spent even less time on Digg, but that's a whole different story. Digg sucks. It's supposed to surface interesting news items by using the wisdom of the crowd, but I've never found anything really newsworthy. Instead it seems to be a repository for net curios and ephemera. Digg doesn't compete with CNN, it competes with BoingBoing and, unfortunately, it isn't as well written.

Since voice is about the least interesting thing you can do with a network here in the 21st century, Skype bores me from the get go. About the second-least interesting thing you can do with a network is exchange text messages between two computers. Oh boy. The interest in Skype has always mystified me. Perhaps this is a developed-economy, North-American-centric view, but cheap voice and IM don't seem like a big deal. One day, Google's going to flip their switch on Google Talk and we'll all be calling everyone for free, so why bother caring about Skype?

And Flock? Well, Flock, for me, is one of those situations where the problem they're trying to solve—smoothly integrating both the reading and the writing of the web—is a real one, but in their prepackaged solution just doesn't do what I want. As I've said, I need my newsreader online so I can manage my news intake from anywhere (not just places were I can install the Flock browser). Supporting bookmarking to del.icio.us is great, but what if you're like Arrington, and you use BlueDot? I guess you have to turn to a plug-in for that (in which case, aren't you back where you started when you were using Firefox?). Flock's in a tough position in that no matter what they choose to include or exclude from their product, they're liable to piss somebody off, including me.

Tags: lists, Arrington, Flock, Flickr, YouTube, WordPress, Skype, Netvibes, Digg, BlueDot, Gmail, Pandora, 800-Free-411, Aime Street, NetNewsWire, Ask City, TechMeme

[via Reddit] Apple Computers have had a special “Apple” key since the days of the Apple //e and //c, where the “open-apple” key (which had the outline of the Apple logo on it) was the equivalent of pressing the button on paddle 0, while the “closed-apple” key (which had a solid apple logo on it) was the equivalent of pressing the button on paddle 1.

When the Macintosh was being designed, they added the now-familiar “command” symbol to the Apple key, and the story of why is documented on Folklore.org. Here's a snippet:

We thought it was important for the user to be able to invoke every menu command directly from the keyboard, so we added a special key to the keyboard to invoke menu commands, just like our predecessor, Lisa. We called it the “Apple key”; when pressed in combination with another key, it selected the corresponding menu command. We displayed a little Apple logo on the right side of every menu item with a keyboard command, to associate the key with the command.

One day, late in the afternoon, Steve Jobs burst into the software fishbowl area in Bandley III, upset about something. This was not unusual. I think he had just seen MacDraw for the first time, which had longer menus than our other applications.

“There are too many Apples on the screen! It's ridiculous! We're taking the Apple logo in vain! We've got to stop doing that!”

Links:

• The story on Folklore.org
• The “Command Key” entry on Wikipedia

Regular readers of this blog will recall that I installed Release Candidate 1 of Windows Vista on my company-provided IBM ThinkCentre (you can read about my annoyances with that process here, here, here, here and here) and have been using it on and off since then.

The ThinkCentre has a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor and half a gig of RAM. It's not top-of-the-line, but it's a perfectly capable TPS Report-writing machine; I've seen many people work daily on machines with far less horsepower. It's also a reasonable developer machine; I've used it to cobble together web apps using WAMP5 and little desktop apps using C# and Visual Studio 2005.

Vista comes with a control panel app called Performance Information and Tools that rates your machine's processor, RAM, graphics and hard drive, scoring each individually and calculating an overall score based on the lowest score of your machine's subsystems; this final score is called the “Windows Experience Index“. Here's the Windows Experience Index for the desktop:

When I got the Vista-preloaded laptop from Microsoft, I was surprised at Vista's visual effects; clearly they had been disabled on my desktop since its inexpensive on-the-motherboard graphics chipset yielded a bottom-of-the-barrel graphics score. (I read somewhere that the highest possible score in any category on current machines is around 6.0).

Under XP, the desktop was a decent machine. Under Vista, it feels less responsive. Switching between applications, especially after a long sessions of bouncing between many files in Programmer's Notepad and Fireworks (that's Fireworks MX — it may be old, but it does the job just fine for me) seems sluggish. Logging into my Mac over the network, which under XP varied from reasonable and quick to slowish and iffy was even more of a crapshoot under Vista. Also slowing me down were Vista's new dialog boxes that would pop up whenever a program would try to do anything that might open it to Window's many malware vectors: “Program X wants to launch a helper app — do you want to allow this?” or “Program Y is trying to open a network connection — shall I add it to the 'approved' list in the firewall?” I understand why these dialog boxes are there, but it doesn't make them less annoying.

There's also the matter of IE 7. In becoming more compatible with web standards, it became less compatible with IE6, which still makes for the majority of web surfers out there. IE 7 will run only on Vista and XP with Service Pack 2 (which means that those of you running pirate copies of XP can't run it); many people out there are still on Windows 2000. I need to see what the sites I work on look like in IE6, which is another reason for the downgrade.

As for the laptop, the Vista experience is much better. There's none of the sluggishness that I experienced on the desktop under Vista, networking with the Mac runs smoothly and I'll just have to learn to live with those dialog boxes. I get the feeling that it runs like methed-up snakes on ice under XP.

Here's the laptop's Windows Experience Index:

The practical upshot of this is that I'm going to experience three desktop operating systems in my day-to-day work:

• Mac OS X 10.4, a.k.a. “Tiger” on the 12″ 1.3GHz PowerBook (still my primary box)
• Windows XP SP2 on the ThinkCentre
• Windows Vista on the Acer Ferrari 1000

(Yes, I do use Linux daily, but as a server OS and on machines that I log into remotely.)

Welcome to the first installment of The Tainted Vista Review, an ongoing series of blog entries documenting my experiences with Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows Vista.

For those of you who've been following the tech blogosphere for the past couple of days, the “Tainted” in the title will be an obvious reference: I was one of the bloggers to whom an Acer Ferrari 1000 laptop pre-loaded with Windows Vista Ultimate — the most decked-out edition of the OS — was sent by the troika of Microsoft, their PR firm Edelman and Acer. This giveaway has resulted in controversy; for details, see this blog entry.

Consider this your disclaimer: I took a freebie. Or at least it was a freebie until they backpedalled.

That being said, I don't feel beholden to Microsoft other than having to say “thank you”. I haven't signed any agreements of any sort with Microsoft, Acer or Edelman. Like the optics of the giveaway campaign, the laptop and my opinions are out of their control.

It is my intent to review Vista honestly and without deference to Microsoft, but you've got to know where my Vista and the platform on which it runs came from.

And now, the first post…

Game Development Called on Account of Vista

Although I am not a game developer by trade, it's always something I've wanted to dabble in, even if only as a hobby. Hence, when I heard that Microsoft was developing an IDE that would allow you to write games for the XBox 360 — I won one of these at the recent Ajax Experience conference in Boston — I was very interested. My interest was doubly piqued after watching Rory Blyth's hour-long video posting at the launch of XNA game development framework and the XNA Game Studio Express IDE.

XNA Game Studio Express runs on top of Visual C# Express Edition, so I downloaded that first and installed it without a hitch.

The download page for XNA Game Studio Express says that it's “Only supported on Microsoft® Windows® XP SP2 (all editions) at this time.” Having trudged up the Microswoft OS upgrade path before, I know that this could mean one of two things:

• It will either fail to install or fail to run on anything other than Windows XP SP2, or
• It just hasn't been fully tested on Vista, but will run, although with some possible glitches.

At this stage in the game, I could live with some glitches, so I downloaded the installer. The installation process went smoothly up until near the end, when the installer froze near the end of the process, stuck forever at the part where the status dialog box says “Status: Registering project templates…”.

I took a screenshot at this point; it's shown below…

After a little waiting, I cancelled the installation, which led to this dialog box:

I suppose that I can wait until that future unspecified date when XNA Game Studio Express gets released for Vista, or I can use PartitionMagic and set up an XP SP2 partition so I can try it sooner.

Ferrarigate

If you've been following the technology blogs over the holidays, you've probably heard about Microsoft's latest “guerilla marketing” move to promote Windows Vista: give some bloggers a free Acer Ferrari 1000 or Acer Ferrari 5000 laptop pre-loaded with Windows Vista to try out. The bloggers were given the laptops and had the option of sending them back once they were done with their review, given them away or keeping them.

This giveaway had an unintended consequence: a ruckus on tech news sites and blogs along the lines of Microsoft is bribing bloggers! What didn't help are cases like Brandon LeBlanc, the blogger who failed to immediately disclose that Microsoft had given him his shiny new laptop in his initial post about it. (“I had intended to explain where this laptop came from in a more in-depth post,” he later wrote, but by then, his credibility was gone.)

In response to the kerfuffle, Microsoft is asking the bloggers to whom they sent laptops to either return them or give them away once they're done with their reviews.

To which I respond: “Sure, but did you know I like to review things for a couple of years, just to be thorough?”

Full Disclosure

Yes, I am one of those bloggers.

A Ferrari 1000 laptop arrived at the office yesterday. I picked it up and thanks to the prior obligation of the deVilla extended family Christmas party, didn't even to unpack it until late last night. Only this morning did I get a chance to fire it up and take it for a test spin.

(For the benefit of those of you who are hardcore fact-checkers, you can go to the DHL site and enter this tracking number — 7995316991 — to verify that it did indeed arrive only yesterday.)

A Quick Overview of the Ferrari

In the age of sub-$1000 notebooks, the Ferrari 1000 is a luxury model. It boasts some pretty decent tech specs:

• AMD Turion 64 X2 processor
• 1GB of RAM
• 160 GB hard drive
• 12.1″ WXGA glossy screen
• ATI Radeon Express 1150 graphics chipset
• Separate DVD-RW/CD-ROM drive
• 802.11 b/g WiFi
• Integrated 1.3 megapixel camera
• Bluetooth
• Bluetooth optical mouse
• Bluetooth VOIP handset thingy
• A black chamois that comes in its own little black case, for keeping the laptop nice and shiny

Like Porsche Design products — non-automobile items that have been styled following the automaker's designs that allow you to overcompensate, even if you can't afford their cars — Acer's Ferrari laptops have been styled after the designs of Turin's most famous export. Its glossy carbon-fiber top looks like a Ferrari interior panelling and the bright yellow Ferrari logo smack dab in the middle says “Hey, I paid a premium for this machine”, which is probably right — at the time of this writing, it retails at Tiger Direct for US$2000.

How I Got It

The laptop was sent to me by Aaron Coldiron, a senior product manager at Microsoft and manager of the community and blogger strategy for Windows Vista. I met him back in October at an invitation-only event in Toronto where he an a couple of guys from Redmond showcased some of Vista's features. They handed out Release Candidate 1 of Vista at the end of the presentation, and I attempted to install it on my desktop computer at the office the following day. The results weren't so hot, and I chronicled them in the following blog entries:

• Area Man Attempts to Install Windows Vista; Results Disappointing
• Area Man Makes Second Attempt to Install Windows Vista
• Area Man Makes Third Attempt to Install Windows Vista
• Vista Registration Annoyances
• “Can't Sleep…Vista Will Eat My Network Connection Settings…”

You'd think I'd be the last person they'd send a laptop pre-loaded with Windows Vista, but that's what happened. On December 13th, I got an email from Aaron offering me one. Here's the key excerpt:

It was nice meeting you back in October at the Windows event in Toronto. I was chatting with Claire Rankine on the Microsoft team about getting some hardware out to key community members, and we wanted to include you in this. I'd love to send you a loaded Ferrari 1000 courtesy of Windows Vista and AMD. Are you interested? Hopefully you'll have a much better experience with this pc than you did with the upgrade experience.

This would be a review machine, so I'd love to hear your opinion on the machine and OS. Full disclosure, while I hope you will blog about your experience with the pc, you don't have to. Also, you are welcome to send the machine back to us after you are done playing with it, or you can give it away to your community, or you can keep it. My recommendation is that you give it away on your site, but it's your call. Just let me know your opinion on Windows Vista and what you plan to do with it when the time comes.

I wrote him back, saying:

I'd like to try the Ferrari and Vista and try it under what I call “Tech Evangelist working conditions” — that is, my day-to-day routine. That involves:

• Maintaining three blogs — the Tucows blog, Global Nerdy and The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century
• Helping maintain Tucows' web sites
• Writing technical articles and accompanying demo code, such as the “Duke of URL” (currently in PHP, but I'll be expanding to C#)
• Doing developer relations with Tucows' partners and vendors
• Doing work with TorCamp, ICT Toronto and other organizations who a promoting Toronto as a live/work/play hub for technologists

One of the first things I'd load on the machine are the Visual Studio Express kits and XNA Game Studio Express, which has really piqued my curiosity (especially the XBox 360 dev kits, as I am both a developer and an XBox 360 owner).

And in response, he wrote:

I haven't read any reviews like what you've suggested so it should be fun. I'll get this out to you next week.

And hence I got the machine.

Give It Away, Give It Away, Give It Away Now

As of Christmas eve, the mail server at work has been rejecting my email password, so I haven't received the mail that Aaron has apparently been sending out in response to the flack about the giveaway. According to Marshall Kirkpatrick, it goes likes this:

No good deed goes unpunished, right? You may have seen that other bloggers got review machines as well. Some of that coverage was not factual. As you write your review I just wanted to emphasize that this is a review pc. I strongly recommend you disclose that we sent you this machine for review, and I hope you give your honest opinions. Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding of our intentions I’m going to ask that you either give the pc away or send it back when you no longer need it for product reviews.

I'll email Aaron from my GMail account and see what he's got to say. But like I said, I can review a product for a very long time.

A Dirty Little Blogger Secret

Okay, it's not so dirty, and it's not so secret either: one of the things that keeps me blogging are the perks. A little name recognition here, a couple of books to review there, free passes to wine-and-cheese events, pricey conferences and so on. I simply say up front that so-and-so is giving me free stuff or a free pass and to keep that in mind when reading my review or recommendation.

I'm with Hugh McLeod on this one:

Having both received and given out free stuff in the blogosphere, I'm not sure if I see what the big deal is. I certainly don't have trouble with it ethically, as long as all parties are being upfront about it. And it seems like they are to me.

My experience with blogger product campaigns tells me that, if you're just trying to turn bloggers into product pimps, you will fail. But if you see it as a way of starting interesting conversations with equally interesting people, your chances of succeeding are far greater.

While I've had Vista installed on my office PC for the past couple of months, it's been second banana to my PowerBook. For the most part, the Vista-PC combo at work has been relegated to web browsing on another screen while I've been using the Mac to do all the real work.

By sending me a laptop with Vista pre-installed, Microsoft has actually managed to get me interested in Vista and giving it a thorough look-see to see if “there's really a there there.”

So, in summary:

• I have in my possession a Ferrari 1000 laptop that Microsoft gave me to review.
• In the original email, I could keep the laptop, return it to Microsoft or give it to the community. It was recommended that I give it to the community.
• I have not signed any agreements with Microsoft, legally binding or otherwise. There are no strings attached
• I plan to blog about my experiences with both Vista and the Ferrari laptop.
• I hear that Microsoft is asking us to now either return the machine or give it away once we're done reviewing it.
• I plan to review my machine for a good long time.

If Microsoft reeeeeally wants me to send the machine back, I will — if Aaron can beat me at an accordion-playing contest, Devil Went Down to Georgia style, to be judged by audience applause. I'd be cool with giving away the machine if I lost in such a competition.