September 2004 Archives
For Whatever Reasons (emphasis mine):
New Windows updates, new anti-virus software, new ad-blocking software — regular people are starting to realize that the cycle never ends, that they are never going to successfully secure Windows, and that the easiest and best solution to the Windows security problem is not to use Windows at all.
I told you so ;-).
From the buzz at the WaSP:
GoLive to Join CS 2.0
According to ThinkSecret, a revived GoLive 8.0 will join Creative Suite v2.0 to be released in early 2005. The news item reports Adobe is working to improve the handling of CSS content including a toolbar for adjusting CSS layouts.
Also getting a makeover is the grid element for CSS DIV authoring for easy switching between DIV and T-t-table layout views.
Im looking forward to seeing how it handles CSS in comparison to Macromedias Dreamweaver. Will GoLive have a chance against Dreamweaver? Maybe its too late? Maybe not - after all, Firefox managed to shake up IE and Dreamweaver is not as dominant in Web authoring as IE is in Web browsing.
Macromedia is not yet there, so yes, Adobe has an opportunity in this battle.
Along with my long-standing quest for a web standards-compliant rich text editor, the lack of good support for CSS in the mainstream visual editors that are Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe GoLive is one of the major stumbling blocks for adopting web standards in certain situations, such as a company with its own internal web staff. The first software editor to deliver a good solution, notably one that handles CSS-P properly, will not get unnoticed, as it will remove a big burden for many people who would like to adopt modern methods but don't have the time, the need for or (let's be honest) the capacity and/or the willing to learn the code behind.
I know some purists who will claim that hand-coding pages is still the way to go, but the reality is that the vast majority of the pages out there are not hand crafted but generated by one wysiwyg tool or another, by people who have little to no clue of the underlying code. And there is absolutely no reason why this would change in the future, on the contrary.
Network Computing has published a series of readers anecdotes relating to web analytics in which there are many interesting pearls of wisdom for web managers who like digging into statistics to grasp how visitors use their web sites.
On the difficulties of working with the IT department:
I'm in marketing, not IT, so IT operations are not an issue at all. We choose to drive our Web analytics platform from our marketing group, as IT all too often emerged as a bottleneck. [Matt Belkin, Macromedia]
Having marketing and IT agree on one solution is as likely as pigs flying! [Jerome Coste, Pittsburgh]
On the fibs of ASP vendors in the Web Analytics field:
We can track anything. [Matt Belkin, Macromedia]
Using our solution is a simple 30-minute process, just insert some JavaScript on your pages, and you will instantly have full Web site tracking capabilities managed by us. [Marcus Chung, Sygate Technologies]
On what to expect from those tools:
Web analytics is a behavior tool. It's important to understand that. It can tell you what users are doing, but not why they are doing it. That is why we complement our Web analytics work with attitudinal customer data. [Matt Belkin, Macromedia]
On Log Files Analysers vs. Web Beacons ASP services:
Disk space. Our Web Trends fills a 200-GB RAID with every file NTFS compressed. The logs are only a smal part of the space. [Bill Royds, Ottawa]
We've saved a ton of money by using a hosted ASP (Omniture) and continually benefit from their industry-leading expertise. I loathe the days of having in-house data centers; the maintenance alone was a killer. [Matt Belkin, Macromedia]
I've been using all sorts of web analytics methods and, by experience, can back up pretty much everything that they say in this article. IMO, the best method available today is using a web beacon technology (a small tag embedded into HTML pages, Flash files, whatever can reach a browser and execute a javascript code) either hosted as an ASP service (I've used four different ones as of today) or in-house through something like phpOpenTracker. This is of course not something reasonable for tracking your personal weblog, but once your start having some significant traffic and get serious about understanding how people use your site, this method is way more efficient, accurate and actually cheaper than most of the log analysis packages out there.
Speaking of which, when needs, budget or pointy-haired bosses do not allow for web beacons, there are a few good log analyzers out there. I personally haven't found anything in the "free" range that is satisfying (advices welcome), so I've been using lately commercial products such as Urchin (pros: work with all "modern" browsers not just Win IE, has some sort of web beacon feature to combine best of both worlds; cons: can get expensive, limited "out of the box" reports) and Summary (pros: extensive set of reports, very fast and resource-efficient on server, one of the best "bang for the bugs" out there; cons: not easy to configure, confusing docs, interface not very user-friendly for marketing folks).
The moral of the story (executive summary) is that:
- respective to the site audience and goals of course, web beacons are often comparatively better than log analysis, mainly in terms of possibilities, accuracy and costs
- web analytics are behavioral (how they use your site), it does not read the mind of your audience (e.g. WTF are they doing this? ;-) ).
- you will need to invest a significant amount of time making the most out of those tools, they help but the comprehension of your web site and its audience(s) will not come automagically from a computer
- web analytics (and to me the whole web operation) is not the IT department's business -- and you can trust me on this one!
I just caught the following web conference pitched by Forrester: An Introduction To RSS: Why Companies Should Pay Attention Now:
ForrTel Description
Consumers have started adopting the use of RSS (which stands for rich site summary but also really simple syndication) as a way to easily read content feeds from Weblogs as well as publishers like CNET, The New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. But [sic]
Agenda
- What is RSS?
- How will RSS develop?
- What should content providers be doing RSS?
- What should marketers be doing with RSS?
Vendors Mentioned: BlogAds, Bloglines, Craigs List, FeedDemon, Feedster, NewsGator, Pheedo, Technorati, Yahoo!
Nothing new nor special, but it's interesting to see this pass in front of the corporate eyes, and that Forrester thinks that consumers adoption of news feeds has already happened. I tend to disagree on the adoption though, I think it's just starting, slowly, to grow outside the geek community. That Forrester names this RSS -- i.e. the format which could as well be Atom -- instead of news feeds is a sign that this is still way too geeky for the masses. Have you tried to explain what news feeds and aggregators are to a novice? You know what I mean, then. And news feeds on the intranet are still not ready for prime time.
The French retailer FNAC, specialized in cultural and technological products, has just thrown a big stone in the music majors' garden by taking a trick that's well-known to the hackers and revealing it to the public: how to circumvent the copy-protection and DRM schemes on songs purchased online by burning the songs to a CD, then ripping the copied CD back to the computer into a DRM-free and portable format such as mp3. This way, one can buy a song online anywhere and listen to it on the portable device of their choice. The retailer is telling the public that they can use this trick with songs purchased on music stores including its own, and to add insult to injury, is even offering blank CDs to its clients!
The retailer did this move after being fed up with the autism of majors which are still blindly raising the bar to move the digital music experience a big step backward compared to what consumers want to do with the music they buy and the technologies already at hand. The FNAC makes a big chunk of its revenue by selling CDs and is pursuing an aggressive effort to enter the online music store arena to prepare itself against the decrease of CD sales (which apparently isn't yet going to happen, when 9 cats out of 10 still prefer CDs).
On a related news, it is interesting to note that for the third time, EMI is being sued in France for deception on the quality of its copy-controlled CDs by a consumer association which want the copy-protection features to be removed. And this time, the FNAC is being sued along, which might not be completely unrelated to its growing frustration with the pigopolists!
According to MacMinute quoting MacWorld UK, Apple is accused of 'ripping-off' the British customers with its European Music Store:
"The complaint relates to how much Apple charges UK iTunes customers for tracks - 79p, approximately 1.2 Euros. But Apple's French and German customers are charged just 0.99 Euros - a 20 per cent difference for an identical service." Apple's response thus far to the matter is that they price songs differently depending the "underlying economic model in each country." CA leader Phil Evans said in the story: "There appears to be considerable evidence that the iTunes set up is prejudiced against the UK public and distorts the very basis of the single market. If the OFT agrees it will be another example of the rip-off culture that the British public are often victims of."
As much as I dislike the discrepancies in Apple's prices in Europe, I can't prevent myself to find ironical that the country which has done whatever it takes to protect its interests vs. Europe and keep the best possible relationship with the US, is being ripped-off by its economical raw model. I still wonder how long it will take for the UK to join the Euroland.
I just upgraded to MT3.11 and something went wrong. I still don't know what, but if you try to add a comment, it won't work. I can't fix it right now, so please be patient and go out somewhere (it's the week-end, you shouldn't be here ;-).
Update: everything seems to work fine now. I had numerous FTP problems during the whole week-end which screwed up files at random. The upgrade did go fine, apparently, but nothing worked. I had to upload a full version on top of the MT installation, but each rebuild caused a Can't call method "id" on an undefined value at lib/MT.pm line 770 error. Six Apart support was responsive and helpful, their diagnosis steps helped me figure out by myself that I stupidly forgot to re-upload the plugins. No comment has been lost, I'm rebuilding those entries manually. Still, I wish MT upgrades were simpler.
There is some kind of conspiracy going on in my usual web sources that focuses on life hacks, more life hacks, getting things done, really Getting Things Done, etc.
I realized quite some time ago that the only to-do list that really works with me is my email inbox. I keep telling people that they should stop calling me, leaving voicemails, sending snail mail (if they actually want me to do something that is, I'm not an asocial animal). Just send me an email!
That will last until someone creates something like a personal to-do Atom/RSS feed that I'll subscribe to in my newsreader. That day, I'll be doomed.
According to MacMinute, Six Apart has just upgraded their online weblogging service TypePad to a new version 1.4 and Nokia announced yesterday that their Lifeblog moblogging service will be compatible with TypePad, making it their preferred support. Christian Lindholm from Nokia offers some reflections about this move.
This kind of move is key to the weblogging software/service editors, as by pursuing towards the simplification of the interface they will attract more and more people. One deals with interfaces, not technology, and the simplicity of their "user interface" -- compared to, say, using FrontPage and FTP to publish a "personal page" -- was what lifted them off the ground. Now, with a phone and in a couple of clicks, you can publish photos on the web. You can call a phone number and as easily as leaving a voicemail get an audioblog post published on your site. (Yes, I know about the Audioblogging Manifesto, and love it, but my point is about simplicity of interfaces.) I hear that better WYSIWYG editing is coming to TypePad and Movable Type (it's about time). There are probably lots of ground for new ideas in the UI field, and not just what can render in a web browser.
On a side note, I think that mobile phones operators will just love moblogging wrapped like Nokia does with Lifeblog, as it might finally give some reason to their punters for using the awfully expensive MMS feature on their camera-phone. That's almost a symbiosis.
Since I've got my iPod back in March, I've been using Apple's in-ear headphones with it and I really enjoyed them a lot. The sound/price ratio is, IMHO, one of the best in that price range. (There are better earphones but they're in the 3-digits range.) The only tricky thing at the beginning was to find how to place them properly in my ears, this being absolutely key for a good result, otherwise the basses are inaudible. The small piece of paper that accompanies them, pompously named user's manual, is of no help about that and I found these instructions on Shure's web site much more helpful to achieve the best result.
But recently the sound on one of the headphones suddenly dropped to a very low level. At first I feared I had damaged the cable, which is the biggest risk on those things. Then I found out -- thanks to the mighty internet -- that this is the main symptom of an ear wax pollution. Contrary to some other earphones, Apple's in-ear headphones are sealed and you cannot clean the speakers easily. What I did was to put some ear-cleaning spray solution on a kleenex and gently tap the metallic mesh to dissolve and remove the ear wax. And here I am, problem fixed, my earphones sound like new again. Me happy.
Tristan Nitot of Mozilla Europe says NO to software patents:
Software patenting, already in use in the USA, allows established companies to control the innovation of others.
Microsoft has, for example, applied for a patent on "mouse clicking." This is absurd and will be invalidated by the courts.
But in the meantime, who can oppose such an adversary? Microsoft has spent $5.4 billion in legal costs during the past three years.
The European Union is expected to vote at the end of September on a bill aimed at instituting software patents. We are all concerned and this law must be opposed.
You can help as a blogger, by opening your own debate. You can also post this article on your blog and add your signature. If you are not a blogger you may add a comment at this article.
Yours truly has been a long standing opponent of software patents. Even Bill Gates thinks software patents are bad for innovation!
Fight software patents in Europe! This could actually be a strong benefit for us as it would open a space of innovation for software vs. the U.S.
Yet another interesting job posting at Apple, RF Hardware Engineer - iPod:
The iPod Division is looking for an RF hardware engineer. This person will work as a member of a cross-functional team responsible for design, implementation, and system integration. Needs to have knowledge of communication circuits and interest in physical principles utilized in modern radio communication devices, thorough knowledge of modulation methods, coding, compression or encryption. Also essential is a working knowledge of EM fields and antennas as applied to radio communication devices.
Expect the iPod to finally have wireless capabilities. (It's about time, isn't it?)
I've listened to a Bose SoundDock system yesterday at the Paris Apple Expo, and they are clearly a thing apart from the other sound-speakers docks for the iPod. Great sound, remote control, really plug-and-play, very nice design. They will ship next month for 379 (VAT incl.) in Europe and $299 (exc. tax) in the US. I found nothing on Bose's web site yet.
This said, I must say that my ears are spoiled, as I've been a Linn customer for many years, and clearly this is not playing in the same league (nor price, I admit). I think there is an opportunity for someone to provide an iPod dock that would feature a charger for the battery, remote control and a quality line out to plug into a home stereo. Or may be that exists already?
On a side note, the Bose SoundDock made me realize that all the features such as line out and remote controlling of the iPod can also run out from the dock connector, not just the connector on top of the iPod.
[Update] Corrected the name after Bose finally announces the product by a press release. (But still nothing on Bose web site as of Sept 16, this is silly.)
Six Apart has just released Movable Type 3.1. Just in time for the redesign of this site... :-)
