Puffbox

Since last November, I’ve been the proud owner of a widescreen PC monitor, running at 1280×768 pixels. (Purely because of a posting on HotUKDeals alerting me to its bargain price, I might add.) The extra space may not sound much, but it opens up all sorts of possibilities.

I’ve grown to love Desktop Sidebar, which permanently occupies the far right of my screen, showing me RSS feeds, data from Outlook, the weather forecast, system info, etc etc. I used to use it on a standard 1024×768 monitor, but I found it took up too much screen space. It’s a great way to use the extra 256 pixels.

It’s fantastic for the sort of information you always want in your field of vision. For example, I have an RSS panel for the latest top news headlines from the BBC. (You could use it as your primary RSS reader, but I personally prefer a tailored tool for my full RSS reading list.) I also use it for my Outlook tasks; they’re there as a permanent, nagging reminder – and it ensures nothing gets forgotten.

After some flip-flopping, it’s now been confirmed that Windows Vista will have a sidebar. For ordinary users, it could well turn out to be the product’s ‘killer’ feature, and I was amazed when I read suggestions (of questionable accuracy) that it was being dropped from the plans. Google’s sidebar, available as part of their Desktop Search product, isn’t bad, and the latest version has some interesting peer-to-peer ideas.

The word ‘Eudora’ came up in conversation this morning. Ten years ago it was the leading email application. Then came Outlook, Outlook Express, Hotmail, Gmail… etc etc. I hadn’t heard anything about Eudora in a-g-e-s, so I thought I’d check their website and see if they were still going.

They are – and they’ve got one absolutely killer feature in their latest version. We can all think of instances where we wish we’d had this:

BossWatch will alert you to the presence of email addresses that are designated based on your personal communication preferences. These addresses can be designated by name or domain. The magenta Send button text and underlined name in the Recipient field will alert you of the clients address in the reply list.

Sadly, I don’t think this will mark Eudora’s return from the grave. Outlook Express is dead, but there will be a Windows Mail (and most interestingly, a Windows Calendar) built into Windows Vista.

I’ve always been conscientious about (un)ticking the box that says ‘we want to share your details with carefully selected spammers’. So – fortunately – I don’t tend to see very much spam, and if anything, even less since I switched to Gmail as my main email service.

Last week I got hit with a handful of messages, all following a similar format – and hence, presumably, part of the same virus. Full marks to the author, for such creative subject lines, and unusually ambitious grammar!

• These more economically pricestickered curatives are right available.
• Swapping to these health products shop has been an easy arrangement for heaps of customers.
• I really can’t find out a convincing reason not to do this.

and my personal favourite…

• I am sick of paying outrageous price tags for your mitigating products. What is your opinion?

• PictureCloud.com | Create your free picture cloud now.
  Quite a neat trick: upload a couple of dozen images of an item you’ve photographed from various angles, and it stiches them all together into a 360-degree panorama thing. Would be fantastic for eBay sellers. Not sure I’ve got a use for it myself, though.
  (tags: web2.0 photos)
• PicaJet – Popular digital photo management software
  Best photo management tool I’ve found… beats the efforts of both Google (Picasa) and Adobe (Photoshop Album). That’s really saying something. Drag-and-drop subject tagging, and skinnable too. Fab!
  (tags: freeware photos)
• Best Firefox Extensions for Power Users – Listible!
  (tags: firefox)

Further evidence of RSS’s move into the mainstream today, from an unexpected source. Sony Ericsson has announced that its new 3G mobile phone, the K610, will have an RSS reader on board. The guys at Tech Digest got their hands on one during the big 3GSM conference in Barcelona, but weren’t able to find out too much about its RSS capabilities.

Sony Ericsson’s T610 was the phone everybody seemed to have at one point, and the naming of this new model can’t be a coincidence. Tech Digest reckons ‘this is solid mid market 3G fare and should do well for the company. I expect it will be grabbed by most UK networks.’ That means a very, very large number of people are going to have an RSS reader in their pocket, although they may not realise it.

Tech Digest also points out there’s an RSS reader in Sony Ericsson’s new ‘Blackberry killer’, the M600 – although as this bills itself as more of a ‘smartphone’, that’s more to be expected. If anything, it makes the appearance of the software in the ‘mass market’ product all the more interesting.

Wow – it turns out that the little guy can still do a better job than the big corporates.

I’ve been looking for a library program to bring some sense to my photo collection, before it gets totally ridiculous. I tried Google’s Picasa, and whilst it looks gorgeous, it’s missing some critical features – I couldn’t find any easy way to call up only the photos I’d just added, for example. I tried the free Adobe Photoshop Album, and whilst I really liked its keyword tagging, it refused to open a surprising number of my pics (just standard JPGs?!). Both were full of extra commercially-driven features, which I didn’t want.

Today I came across Picajet, which comes in freeware and paid-for versions. And I’m delighted to say, it’s the best of both worlds. Very neat drag-and-drop keyword tagging, easy searching and filtering, everything I was looking for. Plus a few other cute things, like a choice of skins, so you get a say in what it looks like. A very easy way to win your heart as well as your mind. At the moment, it’s a clear winner.

Now I just need to go through all my photos and tag them up… 🙁

Can you pinpoint the moment you first saw the World Wide Web? I can. I clicked my first hyperlink in May 1994, during my final few days as a student. I remember being totally blown away by the ability to press a couple of buttons, and call up a photograph – specifically, a photo of the Irish World Cup squad. Remarkably, you can still find a mirror of the original site. I can also remember the day, about a year later, that I first saw Netscape Navigator version 1.1, with the ability to specify tables and page backgrounds. Suddenly it looked like a creative medium, rather than a coding environment.

So we’re talking a decade, and possibly a little longer, since the web became the mainstream medium we know today. That’s a very important milestone in its development, which organisations need to take seriously.

A child aged 11 in 1995 is now an adult aged 22. A graduate. And probably putting their feet on the bottom rungs of the career ladder. People often joke in conversations: ‘I simply can’t remember what life was like before the internet.’ For many companies’ newest recruits, it’s not a joke. They literally don’t know anything else. There’s a fair chance they have more IT experience and instinct than their line manager… and in a worst-case scenario, more than the head of IT.

(more…)

• Extend Firefox Contest Finalists :: Mozilla Update
  As good a list as you’ll find anywhere of the ‘must have’ (or certainly, ‘must consider’) extensions for Firefox. I’ve tried IE7, and I like what I see… but it’s the extensions which are making me stick with the ‘fox.
  (tags: ephemeral.work)
• Ma.gnolia beta
  Another bookmarking app, more tags, more social networking. Clearly knows its competition, as it offers direct import from del.icio.us! Certainly prettier, but too late to secure ‘critical mass’?
  (tags: del.icio.us websites ephemeral.work)
• Corporate reputations | The blog in the corporate machine | Economist.com
  ‘A new breed of brand assassin, who can materialise from nowhere and savage a firm’s reputation.’ Another nice piece from the Economist on the blogging thing. I can’t think how many times I’ve referred people to the Scoble piece from this time last year.
  (tags: ephemeral.work)

I’ve got some bad news for Chris Shaw, senior programme controller, news and current affairs, at Channel Five. In today’s Guardian, he writes:

This week I encountered a new media buzzword: Disintermediation. Sounds like Dalek talk to me. But apparently it spells doom for the traditional media… Disintermediation means consumers can interact directly with the people running our newspapers, TV and radio… In the disintermediated future, individuals can be both consumers and producers. In theory you – the viewers, listeners and readers – get exactly what you want, when you want it, cutting out the traditional broadcasters and publishers altogether.

This isn’t the future, Chris. It’s already happening – and arguably, it has been happening for over a decade now. Certainly I remember using the word myself, as long ago as 1995. I’m actually quite shocked to see this sort of comment in a piece by a ‘senior’ news person in 2006.

The reason the media needs to use tools like text-message feedback (which, incidentally, I wouldn’t class as ‘disintermediation’) is because they need to earn their status now. If they aren’t perceived as delivering a valuable, relevant and responsive service, people can go direct to the sources for their news. And we do, in increasing numbers.

Exterminate! Exterminate!

Richard at Read/Write Web has pointed to a (rather technical) discussion about ‘disposable RSS feeds’. It’s something I wrote about a few weeks ago – but because I’m not a big-shot blogger (yet), nobody noticed. 🙁

RSS is all about fast-moving information. It may have emerged from the world of blogs, but its application goes way, way further. Every day I see new uses for RSS feeds. If I order an item from an e-commerce site, I want an RSS feed telling me of the order’s progress (and ideally, tracking the package to my door). This information is probably already on a web page in the ‘my account’ area – but I haven’t got time to keep checking that. I just want RSS to alert me, when there’s something worth alerting me to.

The debate isn’t about my degree of commitment to any particular content. It’s about the raison d’etre for the feed. Once my item is delivered, the feed has served its purpose. (I actually agree with Mark Wilson‘s point that ‘we commit more’ as we surf around the web, and find resources we want to buy into. But I don’t think it’s an either-or situation. I see myself doing more of both.)

I need an RSS ‘scribble pad’: maybe a widget sitting on my desktop; allowing me to drag-and-drop feed URLs into it, with the ability to handle password-protected feeds; polling for updates on a very regular basis; and offering one-click deletion for when the feed has served its purpose. I think we’re looking at a relatively small, lightweight app; it doesn’t need brilliant navigation or OPML import/export. These disposable feeds will have a lifespan measured in days; I don’t imagine a big collection growing in there.

(I don’t think Taskable is it, by the way.)