Puffbox

Arguably the 'web 2.0' application I'm most looking forward to is a decent online calendar… with synchronisation. Don't get me wrong, I love what Google have done, and 30boxes is very promising too. But until one of them cracks the Outlook problem, letting me sync my local calendar with their web one, it's little more than a theoretical exercise. I can't have a calendar that can't sync.

So I was a bit startled to discover that, actually, Yahoo cracked it years ago. It took some substantial detective work, but I came across a reference to a product called Intellisync – and eventually found details of it on Yahoo's site. And yes, it does what it promises.

Intellisync for Yahoo! synchronizes schedule information from your other personal information managers with Yahoo! Calendar, contact information with Yahoo! Address Book, tasks with Yahoo! To-Do List, and notes with Yahoo! Notepad. Please note that you can also use your Yahoo! Address Book and Calendar with Yahoo! Mail, a free web-based mail service, for a complete and free personal information management solution on the Web.

And it works. I've successfully put a new appointment into my PDA – a T-Mobile MDA Pro, running Windows Mobile 5; synchronised it with my desktop copy of Outlook 2002; and then synchronised that up to Yahoo's website.

Am I ready to switch over to Yahoo? Er, not quite. I still don't quite know what to make of Yahoo. They seemed to buy up all the right innovators, like Flickr and del.icio.us, but I haven't seen any benefits to me yet (despite being a more-than-occasional user of both). And whilst I hear great things about their new mail interface, I can't seem to convert my old-school Yahoo account over to it.

(Update: I found the workaround. The new interface is much prettier… but man, is the advertising intrusive! And as far as I can tell, it's still the same old calendar, despite the hot-stuff new mail app. Disappointing.)

So I'm sticking with Google for now. Gmail still delights and amazes me. Google's calendar works beautifully, up to a point. I'm gradually being won over by Picasa, their photo management app. And they're (hopefully?) close to letting me bring my own domain to my Gmail account – as opposed to a rather primitive masking arrangement like now. Plus, it's still my search engine of first instinct. They just keep getting it right.

Just a quick word to recommend the amazing Freemind program, available free from Sourceforge. I’ve never been a great one for ‘mind mapping’… but I needed a program to help me draw an organisational chart / sitemap, and it was perfect. It’s a bit rough round the edges, as many open source programs are. But boy, does it deliver. Just don’t get put off by the over-evangelical tones of its website.

The great thing about the podcasting of conferences is that you get to stay at home in your pyjamas and pocket the £376 entry fee. If your pyjamas have pockets.

Content 2.0 (ouch) happens tomorrow at London’s RSA. It’s a mixed bag of speakers, and (I fear) the usual talk about the usual things. But I’ll be very interested to hear what the legendary Tony Wilson has to say about this. Get the podcasts from here. Sadly though, it doesn’t look half as good as last week’s Reboot conference in Copenhagen… which was a third of the price.

You've read the blog… now buy the book. Next week sees the publication of Manchester Buccaneers, the diary of a 12-year-old fan from Tampa Bay. It's a project I had some involvement with, and it's an interesting example of new media moving into old media's territory.

It began as a bit of a laugh. The author, Adrian Sherling, is a friend of mine who had a couple of free weeks as he moved from one job to another. The whole Malcolm Glazer thing was big news, and we thought it would be fun to do something to mock the apparently incensed United fans. We knew a blog could be set up in no time… and so it was. A few well-placed messages on fan forum websites kickstarted the traffic, and the next thing you know, it's receiving thousands of visitors per day and getting mentioned in the national press. We even launched our own range of clothing – since, as we all know, there's nothing Manchester fans love more than merchandise – and sold more than a handful of items over the year. Yes, even a pair of hotpants.

Adrian has done a great job to keep it up through the whole football season and beyond, since – as he admits! – it's basically a one-joke project. All the more gratifying, then, to see it getting a quite complimentary review in Thursday's Daily Telegraph ('a rather successful and often very funny spoof''). It's not the first blog to become a book, and far from the sexiest. But it'll be interesting to see how it's received.

Another fascinating piece by Heather Hopkins of Hitwise reveals some truly staggering information. Her blog item today shows that MSN and Yahoo are more or less level in the UK market… unlike in the US, where Yahoo has a significant lead. But I’m more interested in another factlet she drops in:

Google UK, MSN.co.uk Search, Yahoo! UK & Ireland Search and Ask.co.uk Search together powered 82% of all UK internet searches in the four weeks ending 20th May 2006. Combining the UK and .com properties for these search engines that number climbs to 96%.

So in other words, UK users use the UK versions of the search engines in very significant numbers. (Near enough six out of every seven searches, if I extrapolate correctly.) And I wonder what impact this might have on those who think they’re being clever by hosting their websites in the US. The wordpress.com-based site you’re reading now, for example, is located in the US, and doesn’t show up when you restrict your search to UK sites only.

But here’s an even more extraordinary statistic which Heather passed me by email (ta H!). The single most searched-for term on both MSN UK Search and Yahoo UK last week was… Google. According to the Overture numbers, a fraction shy of 8.2 million such searches were carried out on Yahoo UK during April 2006. People are going to a Yahoo search box to find Google. Somebody has got some serious branding work to do.

I bought one of Pure Digital's The Bug DAB radios, and I've been delighted with it. The quirky design appeals to my sense of humour; and the functionality is superb. Sound quality is great too.

In the last couple of weeks, they've released a new version of the system software. But you'll only find details of it here – not on thebug.com, for some reason. Version 2.0 adds a few nice features, most notably an on-screen Programme Guide. Now, as long as you're not expecting Sky+ or anything, you should be pleasantly surprised. It's a dramatic improvement on the previous attempt (v1.3b). Only the BBC channels are properly covered so far, certainly in my area, but realistically you'd only be using it for Radios 2, 4 and the World Service anyway.

The extended number of 'timed events' (ie scheduled recordings) and the ability to scroll at will through the (usually pointless) scrolling messages may come in handy too. The company claims to have improved various aspects of recording to SD card too, but nothing I've particularly noticed so far.

If you haven't upgraded your Bug's software since you bought it, now's the time to do it. It's a quick and painless process. All you'll need is a USB cable – but be warned, The Bug has a 'type B' USB on it, where you're probably more used to seeing 'type A' sockets. You'll need a type A (male) to type B (male) cable. You could probably pick one of these up from PC World for ten or fifteen quid – or from someone like Amazon for well under a pound.

It’s worth reading Ashley Highfield’s speech to the Royal Television Society earlier this week, if you’ve got time. As usual with Ashley’s pronouncements, I find myself half agreeing, half violently disagreeing.

You can’t possibly argue that the BBC hasn’t been beneficial to new media in the UK. I mean, at various times, it has employed a good proportion of the entire UK new media industry. (Although not, so far, myself.) But nobody can come close to matching its depth of resources, its lack of commercial pressures, and perhaps most importantly, its predictability of income.

It absolutely is the industry’s 800lb gorilla. There’s simply no way that a UK-based content company could hope to compete. But let’s be fair to Ashley. His specific quote is:

So far from being a 800 pound gorilla crushing the green shoots of plucky cyber-sowers, I believe we have the potential to have a significant and positive market impact.

The truth is, it could potentially do both. Let’s think of it as an ‘Old Testament’ BBC, smiting those who dare challenge its omnipotence; and a ‘New Testament’ BBC, loving its neighbours. And from over a decade in new media, I think I’m safe to say that the new media people are generally hippy-ish, caring/sharing folk. I guess, though, it depends on the ‘suits’.

A little something to share with you all. I’ve just fired off an email to a colleague. We’re talking about the possibility of building an internal photo library – basically, Flickr for the office intranet. That led to a discussion about keyword quality: what constitutes a keyword, how specific, how many.

My colleague seemed to be saying there was a ‘right’ set of keywords for every photo, and a ‘right’ keyword search query to lead to that specific photo (and no other). My response was that keywords only need to get you close: the image preview should tell you definitively if it’s the photo you want (or not). Or to put it another way:

A thumbnail paints a thousand keywords.

I’m really quite proud of that. Especially since I didn’t get any breakfast this morning.

I see Microsoft has now extended one of the coolest features of its mapping / aerial photo service, ‘Windows Live Local’ (still hate that!) to the UK. Well, selected parts of the UK anyway.

In addition to the ‘road’ (ie map) view and ‘aerial’ (ie top down) view, you can now see 17 places in ‘bird’s eye’ view… which is 3D-ish. Including, quite astonishingly, my otherwise less-than-remarkable home town of Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland. Here’s Bangor Grammar, where I went to school – the memories just flood back. Less parochially, here’s the Millennium Dome, Fratton Park (home of Portsmouth FC), Brighton Pavilion and Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Quick tip: although you can click-and-drag like on the normal maps, you can only drag so far. When you reach your limit, you can click on a thumbnail image to load a new chunk. Oh, and try clicking on the compass to choose which particular 3D perspective you see. Wow.

There’s a lot of commentary today about the business strategy behind Apple joining up with Nike to produce iPod / running kit. Me, I’m a runner… and I don’t currently care about the boardroom stuff, or whether the iPod has become a technology platform rather than just an audio player. I just want one. It’s almost enough to make me buy an iPod Nano, even though I fell out with Apple over iTunes and an iPod Shuffle (both of which I found really disappointing).