Since when is networking anti-social?

Bloody tautologies.
I'm in a critical mood this morning because I was sleep deprived last night, but I've never liked tautologies. There were some other things I was going to complain about, but I thought I'd have a go at tautologies instead. I might have a go at repetition too one day.
Do you think tautologies are evidence of ignorance in the subject matter, as well as linguistically? I suggest they might be: as in "abseil down". Alternatively, they're just bullshitting, as in "social networking".
Take this blog entry as an example. Now I'm not encouraging you to join the mass-debators over at the Telegraph. I've nothing to say about the entry really. You can judge for yourself what news value this brings a newspaper (is this the web equivalent of abandoning the broadsheet?), what value it brings a blogger to be associated with the newspaper, and whether the article itself has any substance.

Blogosphericals

A couple of quick links: can you qualify for a maths degree? The BBC will test you.



If that doesn't stump you, then this image will. Just stare at it and you'll see it doesn't move at all.

Karate 2.0

The more observant among you, who actually go to this blog rather than read it via some feed aggregator, will have noticed a couple of extra features recently. I've added pop-up previews on external links, chat facilities and a featured video from the my double...
There's loads of free stuff you can add like this, with no mark-up required: from live data feeds to online Sudoku.
None of this is particularly new, but I mention it in case you hadn't noticed before and could find a useful application for widgetry, and to get me away from harping on about work.

A few silly links

If you have time to spare because, say, you're under-utilised by systemic failures, you may want to consider playing rock paper scissors with a colleague in a similar position. If so, this is worth reading.
I also thought I'd share this cartoon.
And I know that web design tends to be masculine, but this is ridiculous.

It's a mashed up world out there

This blog is turning into yet another whinge about work: YAWAW, or YAWN. It was never meant to be. So let me pretend that I'm saying something wider about society and the internet rather than just about my terrible employers.
If you're into things webby, you'll almost certainly have read about if not actually read Tim O'Reilly's call for (self-)censorship, which has made the headlines in a number of places. I think what's shocked the internet community is that someone with as much understanding of the web should advocate this approach, when the whole strength of the web has been its liberalism; I use the term with all its implicitly positive and negative connotations.
Generally the internet has grown because it is innovative and free form, permitting the majority of people with the financial means to post content little hindrance to do so. There are of course exceptions, but generally this liberalism has led to rapid innovation of diversity of content, business models and technology. This is particularly in evidence in the much rehashed concept of Web 2.0. Such innovation creates issues for the politically reactionary, but few in our industry would have expected Tim O'Reilly to form part of that group.
You wouldn't expect the leading internet agency in Europe to form part of that group either, but an email to staff suggests otherwise:

[We] have been asked to attend a brainstorming seminar at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on April 19th to explore the subject of how digital media can be used to defend against radicalisation.

The FCO tells us:

Groups such as Al Qaeda use the Internet and other communication media to great effect for propaganda and recruitment purposes.

Leaving aside my doubts about how much Al Qaeda is a cohesive group that distributes mass email and uploads photos of insurgent activities onto Flickr or terrorist mash-ups onto Facebook, let's just consider the company's reaction. It accepts without question that radicalisation is wrong and that the internet should be used to control it, then seeks to engage staff in telling the government why. So we're telling the government how to censor ourselves (coz they sure as hell don't know) while we tell our clients about how radical our thinking is in providing innovative solutions on the internet. We're provocative, we are. You can be too. Unless you're doing something that's not right. We'll be the judge of that though. So, we can create Web 2.0 style forums and develop some of the biggest mash-ups in the UK, but we're in favour of censorhip. That's because we're ethical. But we can still build sites for arms and cigarette manufacturers.
Wow, it's a complex world out there.

How long to hack into your personal data?

Interesting table showing how long it takes to hack a password. I'll be changing all of mine to 9 characters mixed case, I think...

Keeping up with the MySpacers

A couple of posts about work this morning, which doesn't reflect the intended balance of this blog but for which I'm unapologetic.
Our company is launching a new corporate website to reflect its brand, the work it does, complete full service bla bla bla.
The site is (obviously) in Flash and quite funky. But does it work? Let's send an email out in an open source software style to the company and tell them there's a "PHAT" prize for the person who can find the weirdest error they don't yet know about.
There's a bit of a rumble of contentment goes around the office as any automated test produced 100s of errors. Then people start picking the bones through the site and finding more user-journey based errors (ever tried going back in a Flash animation?). So people compare and contrast what they've found and email it back to the project team.
About a week later I got an email from someone in the team saying they couldn't replicate the errors I'd found in Firefox. The team is using version 1.5. Why? Version 2 has been out of Beta for months. And the team have never heard of AdBlock, even though it's the most downloaded Firefox Add-On. Then I discover that this isn't from some bussed-in tester, but from a bleeding "Program (sic) Manager", that is one of the most senior people responsibility for delivery in the organisation.
Is it just me or is this company fucked?

ASBO 2.0

I quite liked this cartoon representation of networking sites. If you use the social sites in question, however, you'll probably have already seen the link...

Underlying insecurities

If you read Bruce Schneier, you'll already be familiar with this story about terrorists trying to bring down the UK internet from the Sunday Times. If you don't, I thought I'd bring it to your attention for the wealth of ignorance about how the internet works.
The comments are particularly funny, on both sides of the coin. Is Telehouse bomb proof? I went to assess it for a central government client in the UK and of course it isn't, but it's pretty secure. Could you take in the twenty or so 4U servers and pack them with semtex as one commentator suggests. Absolutely not. If you've ever tried to pick up a 4U server or seen a data house loading bay you'd know why. Basically, I'd read the article and comments and assume that whatever is said is the opposite of the truth. Apart from a comment by someone called Jon which just says LMAO. That was pretty much my response too.

In ourselves we trust

All right, so this is a little old, but the trends identified in the Edelman Trust Barometer are still worth considering and point to how information will be received in 2007.
The biggest finding of the Trust report -- and it's a continuing trend -- is that people have confidence in people like them rather than subject experts. This explains a lot about trends relating to how content is presented both on the web and in other media:

• Increasing use of folksonomy-led news-sharing sites like del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Furl, or Clipmarks; i.e. what people call Web 2.0.


• The emphasis that all media are placing on User Generated Content (UGC) and blogs. Newspapers are relying on columnists who fill space in the demotic of their readership, while TV programmers believe that serious issues need to be commented on and even fronted by their audience, or people like their audience: witness Panorama dropping Robin Day / Dimbleby-like figures of austere knowledge giving way to more vox pop features where people complain about how difficult some part of their life is and demonstrate little hard evidence.


• Why Jeremy Vine's radio show is the worst piece of broadcasting you can imagine: the least-informed sections of society rant about irrelevant matters, interspersed with horrendous middle-of-the-road music.

There's good reason for promoting the people like me angle: you can develop a sense of community, foster ground-up collaboration that business in particular often loses out on, and target relevant markets more effectively. There is one big drawback however: people who are ignorant will increasingly rely on other people who share similar, comforting ignorance, as Richard Dawkins points out.
There's a reason people are experts: they've invested heavily in discovery and have demonstrated a talent for it in their particular area. If we just trust people like me, we risk stagnating in a stew of ignorance and self-righteousness.
And yes, I am aware of the irony of how this has been communicated.

A sceptic's guide to web strategy

I've recently joined the Strategic Services department in my newly merged company where, I've been told by my new line manager, "there's no place for cynicism". I think he meant scepticism, but contrary to the perception you may have of me, I wasn't being anything but positive at the time. In fact I uttered not one negative word.
But I have to challenge the perception of companies like ours that they're somehow going to challenge the leading consultancies, break into their markets and offer clients incisive advice about their business strategy. There's such a level of naïvety about how clients may -- and should -- react to some jumped up person in their 20s or 30s who has just read Michael Porter's Competitive Advantage and thinks that no one else has, despite the fact it's been taught on almost every business course in the western world in the last ten years.
So we're selling our intellectual property in Situational Analysis, Business Intelligence, Strategy, etc. as though our clients were inept gits who don't know their own business. I say we're selling this, but of course we're not. What we are selling is user research, usability, and brand development because most businesses haven't ever addressed these issues and are confused by them. If our clients really wanted Business Intelligence and felt they couldn't read all the books produced by McKinsey, they'd go out and hire one of the Big 5 or an individual who used to work for them. But to think that anyone with any experience of a consultancy would ask us to come in and tell them how to run their business is foolhardy, to put it politely. We should be finding a niche that clients have limited exposure to but know is important: content management, for example.
This is all borne out by the "strategy" project at the moment, which is probably the least strategic project I've ever worked on. One of those where I say, "I wouldn't have started from here if I were you".
Our web strategy offering should be:

• Are you expectations from your web applications realistic? This applies to both websites and intra/extranet-style applications.


• Does your brand work on-line?


• Which technologies should you be using to deliver your requirements?


• Do you understand what's easy or difficult to do on the web?


• What else can you achieve on-line that you hadn't thought of before?

That's it. Web stuff's not that complicated, but if your head's out of the web, it can be daunting. But thinking you can persuade clients to part with thousands of pounds each day without being sceptical is about as far from a strategic approach to our value proposition as you can get.

Testing 1... 2... 3...

This is my first attempt at posting from on the move, via a 3G connection on my new converged device.
I'm also testing Blogger's mail facility, so if you're my guinea pig now, you should benefit from more posts in future.

Google Gaydar

Not only has Google come to dominate web searching over the last few years, it can now find out people's sexuality. Just go there and search for "ashley cole". Scroll a little further beyond the top few sponsored links and you'll see Google suggesting results for "ashley cole" gay. Could Google's automated searching suggestions be libellous?

Extended browsing

Winners of the extend Firefox contest should be announced next week. Some of these extensions really do contribute considerably to the browsing experience: I particularly recommend from the shortlist the All-In-One Sidebar (which is great even on a small screen if you constantly mess about with your browser), IE Tab (though its concept as a contest entry seems to be shooting the browser slightly in the foot), Viamatic foXpose (even better than tabbed browsing!) and Web Developer (for really advanced browsing).
There are a few other extensions that you should definitely consider in addition to those shortlisted: Nuke Anything Enhanced which allows you to remove objects (such as Flash adverts) from the webpage; OpenBook which enables you to manage your bookmarks better; Print Image, Print / Print Preview and Resize Search which are simple but invaluable tools that will hopefully appear in the core product one day; StumbleUpon, which I've mentioned before and puts a bit of fun into browsing; and Tab Mix Plus, which is one of the best extensions I've seen, albeit it with a bewildering array of configuration possibilities.
Take some time to take a look and improve your browsing experience (notwithstanding this blog of course).

Web 2.0, apparently

The analyst firm Gartner has been harping on about "global-class computing" for some time now, telling us how Google and eBay aren't really web sites but platforms and if we want to move to the next generation of the web, business will need to follow a similar model and think outside the enterprise box.
While it suits Gartner and those of us working in web development to think that the next generation of technology is here and that there is a clear threshold we need merely step across in order to attain super-webdom, Gartner's approach has all the symptoms of a futurologist's thinking. Specifically, it is based on technological possibilities rather than real requirements and is devoid of political insight.
While it's true that businesses should not need to host every application under the sun in order to provide a bit of brochure-ware with no idea of return on investment, there needs to be a compelling reason for people to make use of the always on, available from everywhere super fast web. And what's more — get this — it's actually got to work, securely, for people who don't need to be trained but who can make informed choices about their browsing preferences.
Content and interfaces need to be better. When I start up my application even at OS level, if I'm shopping I want the system to find me the cheapest product availabe. If I'm looking for an authoritative answer I don't want to be taken to Wikipedia. And above all I don't want to open up an application and have a couple of hundred offers for penis-stimulating pharmaceuticals.
The thing that gets me most about these predictions however is that they always forget the most important part of the internet: infrastructure. Anyone reading these reports would think that making a request to a web site or mail server and getting a response was some kind of auto-magical process, unworthy of comment.
Without infrastructure the web is nothing and beyond the shores of the developed world that's pretty much what you have. The entire African continent has barely as many internet connections as Manhattan island. Meanwhile there is dispute over who controls the internet's addressing system which, by a quirk of fate, currently resides with the U.S. government. Most states would prefer to see this control ceded to the United Nations, but not George Bush. He sees a danger in allowing countries which may prevent freedom of speech in controlling internet domains, but actually the fear should be that the U.S. will in future be able to simply cut an entire nation out of the internet: email, web access to uncensored content, everything. I guess it's better than dropping bombs on 'em. Meanwhile, what of the people working behind the screens? Will the global-class players act as such? Will Amazon allow trades union representation and remove the glass ceiling that prevents you from reaching management unless you're male and white? Will eBay recognise a duty to the consumer rather than training all its support staff to deny any errors and lay all the blame with whoever has just lost their money when their credit card details are stolen?
Web 2.0 will need to address such issues if it's not going to become yet another method for making capital, irrespective of social responsibility.

Please release me

I'm still staggeringly busy, trying to do my own job a few months into a new role, covering for a colleague who was beaten up and supporting colleagues who took over my erstwhile duties. This workload and other events beyond it have left little time to comment with any value on subjects I would otherwise have addressed.
But here I am blogging at a desk designed for someone six inches shorter than me at the Queen Elizabeth conference centre in Westminster, attending a software quality and systems conference. This event is no where as boring as it might appear; I'm scrawling in an interval not during a keynote. I've heard a number of interesting propositions and we're promised a giant Scalectrix set later...
But I digress.
Microsoft sent someone here direct from HQ, a team leader on the Visual Studio release whose presentation was well received by most, though by no means all. Should Hackneyed be rephrased Redmond?
This particular team leader revealed that Microsoft has one defect for every ten lines of code, but that 5% of known bugs remain before release. Given that just the test suite of Visual Studio will require a bare minimum of 10,000 lines of code, this means it will be sold with at least fifty bugs; imagine then how many there will be in Longhorn, the successor to Windows XP, or how many were released in the Microsoft Office suite.
The speaker's justification for this state of affairs was the pressure of time to market and that if you have millions of users they will always find a bug. This, I felt, was a complete cop out. I appreciate that they're a lot less complex, but I develop web sites. These too have millions of users, are developed in a scale of months rather than years, but no one charges hundreds of pounds to use them to get a message asking you if you want to report a problem. They just don't return to the site.
Microsoft runs a roughly equivalent number of testers to developers on each project – if only we could charge services at those rates – but there appears to be an assumption that everyone will want to contribute to the company's success. People beat down Redmond's door to work for or partner with one of the world's largest companies, but that doesn't mean they want to pay for a tool that does only part of what it should and will break down once people hack its flaws.
The customer defines quality. If this generic customer ever evolves its expectations then, as with Firefox, Microsoft will inevitably lose its market share, particularly to other products that have similar defects but are free and constantly updated. Why pay to inherit someone else's problem and test it for them? There's hope for open source yet.

The world is flat

There have been plenty of people banging on about Google Earth already. But if you haven't had a chance to see it or you don't want to install yet another beta product from Google on your machine, you can view it in your browser via Flash at this excellent site.