Category: tech

A couple of weeks back, I got my invitation to join the alpha test of measuremap. This was exciting, because I’d seen Jeff Veen give us a little preview talk about it at we05. It looked very nice then, so I was keen to get into it.

It is the nature of statistics tools that you need to build up some stats before they’re any use, so it was a week or so before I could really try out the tools. Once there were some figures to work with (albeit the feeble figures from this humble blog!), I could get a feel for where measuremap sits in the market place.

Well, actually, that’s pretty clear. This is stats reporting for the masses. I can take an apache log file and filter it and gather information, eventually boiling the lines of text to a simple, easily understood graphic. Measuremap does this (for blogs) with a single click. I have several clients who simply glaze over when they view even the relatively user-friendly AW-Stats pages on their sites, but I can imagine them not only understanding measuremap, but playing around with it… making comparisons and learning about the patterns of their visitors. That’s got to be a good thing!

Elegant, fun statistics: bet you never thought you’d see those three words in a sentence! If it’s screen grabs you want, go check out flickr.

I admit it, I was wrong. Some time ago when I first ‘discovered’ social tagging I weighed up the pros and cons of the offerings. Well, there were really only two choices at the time – Connotea was far too highbrow for me – so, was I going to Furl or Del.icio.us?

Sorry, inexcusable pun – I would never make a sub-editor! On the other hand, if you like new toys, you should take a look at flock, a new mozilla based browser, with active hooks for posting to blogs (I’m writing this entry from within the browser) and sharing bookmarks. It integrates with delicious for bookmark management.

It’s very exciting to see the browser integrating seamlessly with a personal online presence – it’s all coming together nicely.

and it is full screen, full motion and it should scare the bejeezus out of the traditional television broadcasters.

An organisation with a solid background in peer to peer networking, participatory culture have just released a beta of a product they call DTV. This is internet television. At the moment it is only available for Mac OSX 🙂 and still has some rough edges, but I found it immediately usable and instantly convincing.

It is the blissful and logical convergence of RSS, BitTorrent and VLC. I can see my broadband usage is going to increase somewhat! I’ll bet the PayTV companies thought this was still years away! Ha Ha!

I was amazed by recent reports about Nikon encrypting the raw files in their high-end digital cameras… what were they thinking?

The glare of publicity has been aimed at this story since Thomas Knoll, the ‘creator’ of Photoshop attacked Nikon for the practice, which appears to impose some ownership by Nikon over a photographer’s creative work. For more years than I know, people have bought Kodak film, had it processed by Agfa chemicals and printed on Ilford paper… that is the freedom that photographers are used to. They are not going to put up with being told to use a particular (Nikon) Image Capture software ($us99) to access their highest quality, raw images.

Sure enough, less than a week later, “A Massachusetts programmer has broken the code“. Implications for big players like Adobe who still don’t want to be sued are uncertain, but it is inevitable that either Nikon gives in, releases the encryption code somehow, or suffers the consequences. If the savage opinions expressed on forums and comments pages are turned into actions, Nikon will have some serious customer relationship rebuilding to do.

I’ve recently joined the wave of web users to try online bookmark tools – specifically del.icio.us – known as a ‘social bookmarking’ tool.

Del.icio.us is simple and, for what it does, it works very well. The social aspect is the real revelation though. You bookmark a page and see that others have also bookmarked it, so you get to explore things that have interested them. I have already found dozens of excellent sites I would never have found in other ways.
Still, I’m a picky bugger, and I find it lacking polish and integration.

I have now dropped del.icio.us in favour of Furl. This is state-of-the-art in online bookmarking. In beta, run by Looksmart and (at the moment) free, it has all the appeal of del.icio.us, but with added extras like: bookmark importing (yay!); page snapshots; export to bibTex, endnote etc.; smarter handling of the social aspects; superb integration with firefox and IE; integrated contact management; several different feeds for my weblog (coming soon!) etc…

While I was ferreting around I found another excellent tool that people might like to explore… Connotea. This is a much more hard-core academic bookmarking tool, though still in development. A level of polish and integration somewhere between del.icio.us and furl, but definitely one to watch. The only problem with connotea was that I felt a bit low-brow posting my ‘fun’ urls, when everyone else on the site was posting scholarly journal articles… the latest postings show up on the front page!

I still feel there is plenty of room for improvement and further integration that would significantly benefit the academic user/researcher/student, but I feel these tools are going to change the way we look for new information, having huge implications for search engines, metadata etc. If you think about it, they are profiling you, then finding other users with similar interests and then offering recommended urls based on that information – you are multiplying your searching and filtering powers for every user that you silently collaborate with. Compelling stuff!

I love Apple’s Safari browser. There is a level of polish not even available in the wonderful Firefox, however, I’ll admit it’s sometimes a little short on functionality. One that annoys me is the lack of a quick ‘send link’ function to email a URL to someone. All fixed now!

Drag my ‘mail this‘ link to your Safari bookmarks bar to provide a functionality similar to that in Firefox/Mozilla. It also works in those browsers if you’d rather a clickable link than the default menu item.