Puffbox

PC World is making a big deal of providing the ‘best of both worlds’. But have they thought it through?

Let me tell you a story. I’ve started seeing blue screens of death, a relative rarity in XP to be fair, and I think my hard disk is about to give up. In the past, this hasn’t been a big worry. But with work material, digital photos and a sizeable collection of music on there, it’s time to take backup seriously. I decided I needed an external hard disk.

I thought I’d check PC World’s website to see what I could lay my hands on immediately. Of course, a web-only retailer is almost always going to be cheaper, but you know how it is: today could be the day the disk gives up, only for the new HD to be delivered tomorrow. I was quite surprised to find PC World’s prices were very competitive. Maybe not the rock-bottom lowest, but then again, you might pay a few quid extra for the confidence of buying from a name supplier.

Here’s where the ‘best of both worlds’ thing kicks in. You can make your purchase over the web, at a web kind of price, and travel to your local store to collect the item. The web prices are, often, dramatically cheaper than the off-the-shelf prices. In the case of external HD drives, maybe 20, 30 or 40 quid knocked off a £100 purchase. That’s too big a disparity.

Picture the scene. Two people walk into a store, go to the same shelf, lift the same item, take it to towards the exit. One of them whips out a sheet of A4, proving he has already paid – and paid a heck of a lot less than the other guy is about to. Mr Walked-In-Off-The-Street isn’t going to be too chuffed, for a start. And I bet you that next time, he’s going to go straight to the web.

But isn’t PC World’s reason for existing, the fact that it has a shop in the local retail park? Doesn’t it rely on the non web-savvy consumers for its business? So what is it doing, turning all its customers into web-first people? Once people realise how easy, and how much cheaper it is to buy online, won’t they stop coming into the shops at all? Particularly when they see – on your own website – how much you’ve been ‘overcharging’ them?

Maybe PC World sees its future in logistics and warehousing. It’s certainly a curious way to run a chain of shops.

Google just has a habit of getting things right, don’t they? Esther Dyson thinks it’s ‘blind evolution… they don’t really see where they’re going (and) neither do we.’ But it keeps delivering. (Thanks to Lloyd for the link.)

Today’s hot news is the integration of instant messaging within Gmail – without the need for Google’s IM/VOIP client software. On reflection, of course, this is the most natural thing in the world. Don’t you find yourself, all too often, firing emails back and forward to someone, when an IM session would be much smarter? Er… so why didn’t everyone else think of it? And full marks for just doing it, without a teaser announcement.

I use Gmail for (pretty much) all my email these days. This is why. I’m sorry for even thinking about switching to the new Hotmail, guys. Just give us something like Windows Live Domains next, please.

• 30 Boxes
  The online calendar app with all the buzz.
  (tags: web2.0)
• Sifry’s Alerts
  Technorati chief David Sifry has as good an overview of the blogging business as anyone. His website tracks 27.2 million blogs, a figure that is doubling every five and a half months. His regular ‘state of the blogosphere’ reviews are full of good data.
  (tags: blogging ephemeral.work)

There’s no doubt what the most intriguing media launch of the year will be. There’s now a likely launch date of ‘late April or May’ for Al Jazeera International, the English-language channel from the (in)famous Arabic news network. A piece in today’s Guardian announces Rageh Omaar as their latest signing, alongside David Frost, Stephen Cole and Osama bin Laden. 🙂

I’m genuinely surprised to see they haven’t changed the channel’s name. English-language culture is so used to being dominant, it’s going to sound odd hearing someone say in English, with the most Home Counties of accents, ‘you’re watching Al Jazeera International’ (or even ‘AJI’). And being realistic, the brand doesn’t start with a clean reputation – fair or otherwise. The Guardian reveals:

‘During the course of a day, AJI will follow the sun around the globe, broadcasting for four hours from Kuala Lumpur, 11 hours from Doha, five hours from London and four from Washington. Each team, more or less, will determine its own news agenda.’

… which sounds like a fascinating concept, although not too far removed from the practicalities of something like Sky News, with its various shifts through the day.

Most intriguing will be its use of external contributors. It could – conceivably – become a model of delegated, if not exactly ‘citizen’ journalism. Its website for contributors promises:

‘Al Jazeera International Programme Department will not have legions of in-house producers. Instead we want to make the best freelancers and independents a part of the organisation. To enable this we have created this extranet commissioning system which will allow and encourage journalists worldwide to pitch stories and receive rapid decisions… Underlying all this is the channel’s mission to explain the world through the eyes of real people. From the specific to the general, the camera on location to the debate in the studio. But witnesses, on camera, come first.’

What impact will it have? Well, you can’t exactly argue with Al Jazeera’s brand recognition. 😉 Its web presence ranks among the world’s top 250, although the English-language web service only accounts for 8% of its total traffic. It’s going to be a hard sell, but they have a good balance of old faces and new thinking. With no legacy to hold it back, and a maverick reputation to maintain, it’ll certainly be interesting to observe, if not to watch.

Just spending a bit of time cruising round the various US sports sites, to see who’s doing what with Superbowl coverage – when I noticed that Foxsports.com is offering readers the ability to create blogs. Fairly bog-standard as blogs go, really: and most disappointingly, no (evident) particular attempt to tie the blogs to Foxsports.com content, in either direction.

I’m glad to see this happening, but I expected much more (although to be fair, it looks like the project manager recognises it’s only a first step). Imagine how it could be. The big content sites get lots of extra content, lots of extra ad impressions, and the goodwill of the blogosphere. Bloggers get lots of lovely photos and audiovisual to complement their passionate ranting, which – frankly – is usually more fun to read than the usual bland match reports. Readers have a natural ‘speakers’ corner’ destination for when they want something a bit more ‘juicy’, a bit more ‘us’. The brand is seen as ‘ours’, not ‘theirs’, and in step with the whole ‘2.0’ zeitgeist. Everyone’s a winner.

Sooner or later, a content site will work this out. Allowing readers to create amateur blogs alongside professional editorial, with the usual blogging techniques to tie the two together. Movies seem to be the most natural topic for this: lots of content, lots of copyright-released media assets to offer your bloggers, and everyone has an opinion. There’s even a natural revenue model, in the form of profit-sharing on cinema ticket or DVD sales. Amazon/IMDB, what’s keeping you?

No doubt which web-based calendar service is getting all the hype: 30boxes just opened the doors on its beta phase, and at first glance, there’s some merit to the industry buzz. I really like the way you only have to fill in a single text field to create an entry: ‘Trip to London tomorrow 5pm’ will create an appointment in your calendar for the following day. It’s Web 2.0, so naturally there’s RSS left, right and centre. A nice touch to let you browse back in time through your Flickr photos.

There’s a fundamental problem with these calendar services. You’ll only appreciate how good they are when you put your whole life in their hands. And are you prepared to risk doing that with an untested beta product? Well, yes. There’s enough immediately visible in 30boxes to suggest that it’s the one to watch. But until there’s a way to sync up with Outlook, and thence to my Windows Mobile PDA, I’m no more than an interested onlooker in this space. As soon as someone cracks the sync’ing, though, I’m ready to jump at it with open arms.

Dave Winer says he knows what RSS needs to break through; Robert Scoble says it already has. I’m with Dave on this one… I’m not sure Robert’s wise to take a gathering of web 2.0-literate blog-savvy cognoscenti as a representative sample. (Frankly, I’m surprised that only 80% of the attendees at a conference like LIFT were hooked into RSS.)

Having seen the new IE7 beta, I’m more convinced than ever about the potential for RSS, and the likelihood that Microsoft’s products – Vista and Internet Explorer, via the Windows RSS Platform – will carry it into the mainstream. The next couple of months are going to be very interesting, as developers discover what can be done with the centralised Common Feed List and Feed Store.

It was one of those light-switch moments when I first saw an illustration of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing The Chasm theory. He breaks the ‘product life cycle’ for new technology into five chunks, with a big chasm between the ‘visionaries’ and the ‘pragmatists’. Think of any new technology, and it’s easy to identify the ‘crossing the chasm’ moment: the iPod’s impact on digital music distribution, for example. I suspect we’ll come to see the release of IE7 as being the moment RSS crossed the chasm.

By the way, Dave is right to point out the potential disconnect with online tools like Bloglines. So I’m delighted to spot this in a post by one of Microsoft’s RSS team:

When you discover and subscribe to feeds in IE7, it adds them to the Common Feed List and the new subscription is available to other applications. Not only can the user benefit from multiple applications using the Common Feed List, but we expect that over time, online services will provide tools that synchronize the Common Feed List with their services. This will allow roaming of the user’s subscription list not only between applications, but also between computers.

As more and more of us work from home, or multiple office locations, this is going to be critical. Glad to see it’s already being considered.

I’m genuinely shocked by the apparently small numbers of people in the UK using RSS. Every global study I’ve seen recently has shown Bloglines to be the most popular tool for RSS consumption. Helpfully, Bloglines tells you how many members are signed up to (almost) every feed. I’d say that makes the Bloglines community as representative a sample as you’ll get (without really trying). When you dig around the numbers, it’s quite startling.

The most popular single feed on Bloglines, after Bloglines’s own (for which data isn’t published), is Slashdot – with just short of 60,000 subscribers. The BBC’s main international news feed is #6, with over 35,000 subscribers. How many does the main UK news feed have? As I type this… just 844. The international sports feed has 3,237 subscribers, the UK feed only 149.

Either Brits don’t like Bloglines, although I can’t think of any reason why not, or any alternative mopping up the UK marketplace… or Brits don’t do RSS. Weird.

Doing some unexpected research on international use of character sets (thanks again, IE7!)… and I came across something called AlertInfo, which I hadn’t heard of before. Basically, it’s an open-source RSS reader for the French market, produced by an organisation called Geste – ‘groupement des editeurs de services en ligne’. You don’t exactly need an A-level to translate that, do you? 🙂

Nothing spectacular about the software, at first glance. What’s remarkable is that it’s an initiative supported by a large number of competing French media players – such as newspapers Le Monde, Le Figaro and Liberation – with the apparent aim of extending RSS takeup, in the interests of the industry as a whole. Can you see that happening in the UK?