Puffbox

• Wired News: WhiteHouse.gov Uses Cookies, Bugs
  A curious story, this one, since it’s impossible to justify public sector spending without evidence of Value For Money – which in website terms, means traffic. The internet director’s comment – ‘No one even knew it was happening’ – really isn’t smart.
  (tags: ephemeral)

Am I arrogant enough to think people want to read my ‘best of’ list for 2005? Of course I am. I’ll try to be a bit different by choosing some off-the-wall categories and winners.

‘Best-kept secret’ website: HotUKDeals.com

A UK-based forum-stroke-website where bargain spotters post details of any offers or discounts they see on their travels. Thanks to them, I scored my purchase of the year – a 28″ widescreen LCD TV/monitor from Dell – at a price so good that Dell probably regrets it now. If you sign up for email alerts, you’ll get a lot of minor discounts for sites you’ve never heard of… but it’s all worthwhile when a cracker like that comes along.

Regretted purchase of the year: iPod Shuffle (ooh, controversial!)

I used to respect Apple, and the devotion of their fans: no longer. Buoyed by the hype, and the 512MB capacity, I shelled out for an iPod Shuffle – only to discover that: a) it didn’t fit my PC’s USB ports without an adapter; b) iTunes was mandatory but rubbish; c) it started playing up within a couple of months; d) to upgrade the firmware, I had to download a whopping 48MB file containing upgrades for every iPod out there. The iPod Shuffle is now relegated to ‘memory stick’ usage; my new running companion is the TwinMOS Sushi, which I picked up for under £30 in the summer. Lesson: treat (flash memory) MP3 players as disposable, and buy cheap every time.

RSS Reader of the year: Bloglines

Yes, the daddy of them all is still The Daddy. Like Simon Waldman, I’ve really played the field when it comes to RSS client software. Bloglines won me over when I started working half the week at home, and half the week in central London – its PDA-friendly mobile version is a godsend. Over the last few months, I’ve really come round to the idea of web-based applications like Bloglines, del.icio.us, et al – although I don’t yet feel reliant on them. I suspect it’s only a matter of time though.

Mobile phone package of the year: T-Mobile’s Web n Walk

By offering a whopping 40MB of ‘internet browsing’, T-Mobile’s PDA and smartphone-friendly contracts point the way to the mobile future we were promised. With promo periods and online discounts, their Web n Walk 100 and 200 packages are more than comparable with similar talk-only tariffs. Great range of handsets at decent prices, too.

Mould-breaking moment of the year: Google Maps

How did we cope before this? Why do people persist with Multimap? How can they make the API so simple, even for someone like me who isn’t entirely certain what API stands for? 🙂 And the ‘mashups’ – wow. The Gmap Pedometer was an invaluable part in my setting a personal best for 10k in the autumn; I just wish OnOneMap had been around when I last moved house.

Damascene conversion of the year: Microsoft (TBC)

Awarded provisionally, in recognition of its open-minded blogging policy, its embracing of RSS, its recognition that looks are important (cf Windows Vista), and its return to products like Hotmail and Internet Explorer. Windows Live Custom Domains is a stroke of particular genius, letting you set up your own ‘@mydomainname.com’ email addresses within Hotmail. (I’m sticking with Google’s Gmail for now, but I’m secretly hoping they copy the idea.) Mind you, the whole ‘Windows Live’ branding – including the cringy ‘Windows Live Local’ – does not augur well. I know too many people who refer to the concept of instant messaging as ‘MSN’… dropping the name doesn’t seem smart.

Revelation of the year: online video

Having worked in a TV company’s online unit, I was more than happy to write off online video. Traffic numbers were terrible, and it couldn’t justify itself on any kind of cost-benefit analysis. But I’m now on a 2MB broadband line, with a huge monitor… and it actually works. For example: I’m an ice hockey fan, but there’s little or no ice hockey on mainstream UK TV: but the NHL helpfully provides highlights of every single game, free, in more-than-decent 700k quality; and hockeyfights.com indulges every fan’s guilty pleasure. Videoconferencing via Skype or MSN Messenger is a (qualified) success too.

And finally – the ‘how did I cope before?’ award goes to: Sky+

We invested in a Sky+ box (US readers: think Tivo) in the summer, ahead of the birth of our first daughter. We decided that, if we were to be kept up half the night, at least we could guarantee some quality TV to watch. I watch virtually nothing ‘live’ any more; I just have to make sure I record everything I’m likely to want to see. The Custard’s tipsheet is a useful back-up to Sky’s excellent EPG.

It isn’t especially well documented, but you can write your WordPress.com blog using software applications on your desktop PC (like w.bloggar), or in my case right now, your internet-enabled PDA. The key is to quote the ‘path to API’ (or however your software refers to it) as your blog’s address (simondickson.wordpress.com) followed by /xmlrpc.php. Obvious, really. 😉

I’m determined to get to grips with del.icio.us. For now, I’m still having real trouble typing the name, with the dots in the right places. But I’m beginning to see the value of it.

The official del.icio.us extension for Firefox is pretty good. It gives you some lovely big icons in your main browser toolbar – but it has its problems. For one, I couldn’t get Firefox to remember my password… so the big del.icio.us icon just dumped me on the homepage, still two clicks away from my own territory. Plus it didn’t remind me what tags I was already using.

Enter delicious.mozdev.org, which does the things you want it to do, albeit a bit on the ugly side. It shows all your bookmarks in a Firefox sidebar, which makes for a much more familiar user experience. It lists all your available tags when you want to add a new item, and gives you a countdown towards the 255 character limit on descriptions. Only problem? – the functionality hides in the right-click menu. But I can cope with that.

So far, my main finding is that del.icio.us simply isn’t being used by many Brits. Sites you’d expect to be bookmarked by hundreds of UK-based web users, generally only count a few del.icio.us users. Only 250 people have tagged the National Rail site, for example? Just 19 have tagged the BBC Sport homepage? Barely 50 people have tagged the Arsenal FC homepage?

I bet this would have got more attention if it had happened in the US. Google has been offering free internet access to bored passengers at Heathrow‘s Terminal 1, and has used it as an opportunity to talk to people about ‘what they like and don’t like about our products’. Full marks! There is simply nothing more dull than sitting in the departure lounge, especially Terminal 1 where the shopping is pretty poor. And of course, waiting times have increased in the last couple of years thanks to the additional security measures. But it’s going to take more than this to make me fly via Heathrow regularly again. Too much of my life has already been spent at baggage reclaim there. I’ve started going through Southampton as often as possible: much smaller airport, but so much quicker to get through, inbound and outbound.

I’m not a ‘petrolhead’, but I love the BBC’s Top Gear. The sheer passion and enthusiasm of Jeremy Clarkson and co is infectious, and you suddenly realise you’re tuning in week after week.

But an item on this week’s show, the last in the series, was familiar. Apparently F1 world champion Fernando Alonso credited his performance at this year’s inaugural Turkish Grand Prix to practising the circuit on the PlayStation. So they wondered, could Jeremy match his time around one of Gran Turismo’s simulated tracks in a simulated car, when driving for real around the same track in the same car? Simple answer – no. It’s understandable really; if you crash at full speed on the PlayStation, you get another try.

In fact, I tried a similar experiment myself, earlier this year. My wife and I visited Monaco – and emerged from the train station at a place which looked startlingly familiar to me: the foot of the hill just after the start of the Grand Prix circuit. I couldn’t believe it; I’d never been there in my life, but I knew the place like the back of my hand. We ended up walking the full circuit over a couple of hours, albeit stopping for some food and taking a detour to the ‘old city’. With each turn, I became more and more amazed at how good the PS2 version was. I knew exactly where I was, the whole time.

Since switching to Tiscali a while back, I’ve noticed my internet connection suddenly ‘dropping out’ a lot of the time. Maybe once a day, I suddenly lose connectivity. Maybe for no more than a minute or two, but it was getting very annoying. Might be my fault, might be theirs, you never quite know.

So I found a piece of free software called Link Monitor, which sends a ‘ping’ signal to a website of your choice every few seconds, and alerts you when/if the signal doesn’t get through. All the details are logged in a simple text file. The results? – it isn’t anywhere near as bad a problem as it seems, but it is happening relatively frequently: actually, three times in the last 15 or 20 minutes. 🙁 Certainly I never noticed such problems with NTL.

The San Jose Mercury News publishes its list of the Top 10 tech trends for 2006 – and starts with video, which it says ‘will come to the big screen in your living room and to the small screen on your cell phone’. I was always a little cynical about video, after a decade of watching postage-stamp sized pictures. But two things recently have completely changed my mind. I switched broadband provider, upgrading from a 300K connection to 2MB. And I bought myself a 28″ widescreen LCD monitor, at a remarkably cheap price which I suspect Dell are probably regretting.

The bandwidth boost certainly helps: although most online video is still being encoded for lower bandwidths, probably assuming a connection of 512K. (By my own non-scientific assessment, video optimised for a 1MB line passes the ‘good enough’ test. Anything more is a bonus.)

More important, I find, is the large screen size. When I click to view some online video, I invariably find myself maximising the video player to full screen, and pushing my chair to the back of the room. I guess I’ve been too deeply conditioned by thirty-plus years of watching TV from a distance.

I’m still not sure about small-screen video though. My phone at the moment is the HTC Universal, which has an excellent screen with a good VGA resolution, and very good sound quality. Watching video on it is perfectly possible, and I have a few video files stored on the 512MB SD card it came with, but I really don’t find myself watching them. The only good time is when you’re sat on a train; but even then, I’m always a bit self-conscious.

I’ve been following Robert Scoble‘s writings for quite some time: if you haven’t come across him yet, he’s a ‘technical evangelist’ working at Microsoft, who (according to the Economist) ‘might mark the beginning of the end of “corporate communicationsâ€? as we know it’. I’m inclined to agree. His transparent-beyond-the-call-of-duty approach is startling at first, but quickly wins you over. His employer has always had an image problem in the tech community; it’s hard to love a company run by the Richest Man In The World. But as Scoble proves, it’s a company full of well-meaning people who genuinely care about what they do.

Writing on Boxing Day, he does some searches to show the number of Microsoft teams who now engage directly with anyone who cares to listen, or more importantly, who cares to join the dialogue. I was interested to note one almost throwaway point: ‘I use Google cause that’s what most of you are using.’ This, remember, is a man whose job is to evangelise (or let’s face it, sell) Microsoft technology. And this is why it all works. Scoble isn’t shy of admitting ‘we aren’t number one’, and hence he maintains his credibility. Mind you, he isn’t averse to promising great things for Microsoft’s products in the future.

Incidentally, he’s right about the mass of anonymous email addresses. During my time with Microsoft, I remember asking where mail sent to our team email addresses actually ended up. The answer was never especially clear, and the mail generally didn’t make it to the front line.

• Simon Dickson
  My new WordPress-based, work-related blog. Thoughts on running websites in large bureaucracies, web editorial, writing for the web, web trends likely to enter the mainstream, all in layman’s terms.
  (tags: simondickson)
• Guardian Unlimited | Ricky Gervais | Ricky Gervais podcast
  Proof once again that content is king. The hype behind podcasting is long gone, but this proves it has a role to play – if quality people choose to produce quality material. Half an hour of laugh-out-loud stupidity from the guys behind ‘The Office’. Bewar
  (tags: podcasting tv rss)