Rhodri Marsden

Directing amateurish movies has never been so much fun

2009-08-18T16:45:36Z

The mission of Xtranormal, according to their website, is to bring movie-making to the people. Indeed, they say that it's going to be the most important communications process of the 21st century.

Cameraphones with MPG capabilities probably do more for the medium than Xtranormal, to be honest; its USP is to let you to turn text into a movie. You type, point and click, and the stilted action reveals itself onscreen via some three-dimensional but curiously one-dimensional character. There are many online innovations that you can imagine looking dated in a couple of years time, but Xtranormal achieves the remarkable feat of being incredibly cutting edge and looking dated almost simultaneously.

But apply creative genius to the medium, and you can get something rather special. Behold the effort of Mr Quickly, whose Amazon reviews are also quite something. Yummy. Yummy yummy.

Suffering from website envy?

2009-07-22T12:42:32Z

Two friends of mine had a major spat a couple of years ago over their respective website designs. The fact that they didn't much care for each other in the first place didn't help the situation, but one of them claimed – with some justification, it has to be said – that the other had swiped the overall look of her website and indiscreetly applied it to his. His attitude was very much "No I haven't"; hers was "Yes you have", and eventually he was reluctantly forced to change his to "well yes, I have, but so what?"

Anyone who publishes stuff on the web gets website envy. Most website designers, when briefed by their clients, will be given a load of URLs and be told to incorporate that kind of background, that kind of navigation, that kind of font, that kind of colour scheme and so on. Website designers themselves generally learn their skills not through weighty tomes bought at great expense from the computing section of Waterstones, but by getting their hands dirty, viewing the source code of other people's websites, seeing how it works, nicking the good bits and then applying them to their own designs. This magpie approach is so widespread that those doing it scarcely give it a second thought. And you can't blame them – after all, the whole ethos of the web is about freedom, sharing, adapting, reworking and re-presenting. And imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right?

Some companies aren't quite so sanguine, it seems. The web hosting provider Fasthosts recently revealed that it is having to deal with an escalated number of content disputes involving websites – almost doubling over the past 12 months. There have been accusations of swiping designs, images, whole chunks of text; Fasthosts are putting it down to tight economic conditions forcing businesses to avoid the expense of employing designers and copywriters, and just cobbling together their own versions of other websites on the cheap. But a far bigger factor is surely our slowly changing attitude towards copyright in general. These days, if you see someone slap a copyright symbol at the foot of their website, it almost looks laughable; you can understand why they've put it there – they've spent time, effort and cash creating their online presence and don't see why anyone else should use bits of it for free – but you'd have to be on another planet to think that letter c in a circle strikes fear into anyone's heart in this day and age.

In an ideal world, of course, people who work in creative industries (Note: the author of this blog works in creative industries) would have their considerable talents deeply respected, we'd be carried shoulder high by cheering crowds at the end of our day's work to a waiting chariot, and the average person would no more steal our work than they'd steal a Rolls Royce. But it's not an ideal world. Don't swipe other people's website designs wholesale, but if you do, well, you'll probably get away with it. Just as my friend did.

Sorry? You want 500 words on Michael Jackson?

2009-06-26T09:29:47Z

I'm not sure that I'm up to the task, to be honest. I mean, I'm not used to grandly pontificating about the cultural significance of the passing of a pop star. I'm not sure that I can draw sufficient parallels with the unusual lives of other famous people who have unexpectedly died, skirt around the paedophilia accusations without saying something inappropriate, or indeed remember the name of his last album. And I usually write things about technology, I mean, I like music and everything, but my last attempt at rock journalism ended up with me submitting an incredibly lacklustre review of a Morrissey album because I couldn't believe that anyone would care what I thought of it (which wasn't much.)

But maybe it's my duty to dredge up some vague memories about what Michael Jackson means to me, but only if you think it would be useful. Uh... I can remember sitting in the kitchen at my grandmother's house in Cumbria in 1980 and hearing "Rock With You" on the radio and thinking it was quite good, but maybe that's not sufficiently overwrought to chime much with weeping readers, so I'll have to make something up instead. OK... My first wife announced that she was leaving me while a re-run of Lenny Henry's spoof "Thriller" dance routine was playing on the television. I was run over by a car whose megabass stereo was blaring "The Earth Song" at deafening volume. I was brought around from the subsequent coma by repeated playings of "I Want You Back." This is what I'd like you to think that Michael Jackson means to me.

I could quickly sum up the story of Michael Jackson's life in order to use up another hundred words, but you're probably better off heading over to Wikipedia, because that's only what I'd have to do in order to make perfectly sure I got 100% of the facts absolutely straight. Look, here's the link, I couldn't have made it any easier for you. That gives me more time to put this next thought to you – and brace yourself, because you might not have considered this: although the world has lost a great entertainer, the medium of recorded sound will, without a shadow of a doubt, ensure that we'll be able to enjoy his music today, tomorrow, perhaps even the next day. In that sense, Michael Jackson will live on, although in the more usual sense he certainly won't.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to trivialize the death of a man who was really, really good at singing and dancing. I adore the "Off The Wall" album. I'm listening to it now. It's breathtaking, although it sags a bit on side two. I just wonder whether I could have made a more fitting personal tribute to the man by sitting quietly and listening to it, without simultaneously typing some five hundred words of unutterable horseshit.

The quest for real-time search

2009-06-24T13:54:24Z

A couple of years ago, someone predicted that Twitter would become "the pulse of society", and I remember thinking something along the lines of "nah, that's not particularly likely, because it's just full of people dispensing pithy one-liners or, more often, moribund observations about the weather." But as keying in status updates across services like Twitter, Facebook, Brightkite and others becomes a habit for millions, there's little doubt that this wealth of data slung online is starting to reflect behaviour, mood, opinion... and, yes, the weather. Against the odds, it's beginning to have some inherent value. You might even find yourself wanting to plough through it all to try and find something.

"Bog off," more uncouth readers might be thinking, "why on earth would I want to get any information from random members of the public keying in tedious stuff from their smartphones on a whim?" But real-time search isn't so much about turning up specific information – although events in Mumbai, Tehran and elsewhere have undoubtedly provided that – it's more about taking temperature; scanning down a list of results and using it to gauge people's feelings about news stories, websites or even Iceland's dubious new Chicken Tikka Lasagne. Of course, it's hard to know the exact demographic of those who post status updates and whether it reflects public opinion generally, but it seems likely to be a more accurate barometer than, say, reading lengthy and vituperative comments on blogs and news sites which are, in the main, bashed out in fury by the same small group of people, week in week out.

Google is the undoubted king of search, but it's yet to gear itself up for real-time results; for example, you need to click through to their advanced search page if you want to specifically look for something that's been added in the last 24 hours. Co-founder Larry Page recently admitted that this was a weakness that they were addressing, but in the meantime there are services launching regularly that aim to compete with Twitter's own slightly temperamental search engine (which itself used to be an independent service called Summize, bought by Twitter about a year ago.)

Tweetmeme and DailyRT combine Twitter search engines with lists of the most popular web links to have been recently tweeted and retweeted, while OneRiot opens that out to other social media sites such as Digg. Topsy and Scoopler provide a simpler, Google-style interface, while Collecta should, in theory, give you what appears to be a real-time update for your search – although it doesn't appear to be working at the moment.

To my shame, my main use for these search engines in the past week has been to gauge what people are thinking about the person I know in the Big Brother house. Pity me. The recent Twitter comedy gig (described as "a chaotic failure" but quite fun in parts) worked nicely on Tweetgrid with the comedians scrolling up the left-hand panel and the crowd reaction in the right (although, predictably, people didn't obey the rules. Because people never do.) Like me, you might be ambivalent about the opinions of random individuals. But a service that distills those opinions into something easily scannable, well, that can verge on interesting. Believe me.

The folding plug

2009-06-24T12:55:22Z

I was just in the middle of writing a more lengthy post about real-time search, when someone sent me a link to this video. For those of us whose love affair with the British mains plug never really got off the ground – and let's face it, that's pretty much all of us – this is a brilliant idea that a) I can't believe anyone hasn't thought of already, and b) I hope makes the inventor a much-deserved pile of cash. Behold:

What's the point in online petitions?

2009-06-18T12:50:02Z

I'm aware that in even posing this question I'm setting myself up to be lynched as the kind of cynic who believes – in a non-committal, couldn't-really-care-less kind of way – that there's barely any point in doing anything, that expending any effort over and above the bare minimum is a terrible waste of precious energy that could be better allocated to lounging around and complaining bitterly about stuff. But actually, I've got nothing at all against petitions. It's often the only way that we're able to make our feelings heard about certain issues; I certainly remember signing some, and thinking yeah, I hope that a few kilos of A4 with my name buried somewhere in the middle will actually make someone take notice of this problem. What I'm not entirely sure of the value of petitions whose signatures are accumulated on the internet.

The one that made me scratch my head this week was this anti-BNP petition that has been widely linked to since Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons were elected to the European Parliament. The plan is to hand in the signatures to the European Parliament on the day that they take their seats, to give the resounding message that several thousand of us do not, in fact, support the BNP's policies. Now, there's obviously nothing wrong with taking a stand against racism, and I find Griffin, Brons and the BNP as loathsome as the next man (and my next door neighbour is from the United Arab Emirates) but the 75,000 signatures currently on the petition is somewhat dwarfed by the 14.5 million British people who have already expressed their distaste for the BNP by placing an X next to alternative candidates in the European elections, not to mention the 30 million who were sufficiently unmoved by the BNP's manifesto – or, indeed, anyone else's – to bother turning up to the polling station in the first place. That's 44.5 million who could conceivably say "not in my name" about the BNP, but the way democracy works is that you have to turn up and vote, and most people didn't bother. The petition isn't going to change the result, and the European Parliament aren't going to care less about a petition signed by a few thousand Brits about two confused racist MEPs when they've had over fifty MEPs in their ranks for the past five years whose politics are markedly to the right of mainstream conservatism.

"But why didn't these people use online media to mobilise their friends to get out and vote?" you might ask. Well, some did try. But the kind of people who monitor social media and have friends who are interested in politics weren't the ones who needed motivating. As one wag said the morning after the election results: "I don't understand how the BNP got two MEPs elected, after people on Twitter told people who weren't going to vote BNP not to vote BNP." And that's the point. Social media has connected us very firmly with people who think similarly to us. With the help of friends, we can persuade hundreds if not thousands of people to express their agreement with all manner of stuff (including the statement that the BNP do not represent Britain) which is why constructing an online petition is so tempting. It looks superficially impressive, as if you've mobilised a huge army of passionate recruits. But you haven't. Creating and signing online petitions requires so little effort that it barely requires anyone to think about the issues. Petitions such as this one, railing against Government plans to introduce limits to sound levels in live music venues, collected over 80,000 signatures. But there were no such plans; the whole petition was borne out of confusion and Chinese whispers. Perhaps the most famous petition on the Downing Street website concerned road pricing; we'll never know what percentage of the 1.8m signatories immediately put their names down as a reaction to being told "you will have to pay for something that was previously free", but you can bet it's pretty high, and few will have bothered reading the cases for and against.

The vast majority of online petitions are as insubstantial, fleeting and ephemeral as most other web content, and you get the feeling that those who receive petitions – not least those in Downing Street – are well aware of this. You can't blame those who feel strongly about issues for collecting signatures online, but if they really wanted to impress the lawmakers, they might be better off doing it the old fashioned way, and accosting people on street corners with a pen and a ream of A4 paper.

The net's impact on the Queen's English

2009-06-10T13:11:11Z

There's a post over at Everything2 which addresses the slow erosion of the proper order of fullstops, commas and quotation marks in online discussion. Apparently, keen to avoid mistakes being reproduced when placing code in quotation marks, geeks have taken to always putting fullstops and commas outside the quotation marks regardless of context. Serious stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. It's the kind of thing that might get Lynne Truss worked up into a frenzy, but it's something of a surprise to see the story gaining over 1300 thumbs-up over at digg.com – particularly when far worse breaches of the English language occur on every corner of the internet on a daily basis.

I've been doing something of a study on this topic in the past few weeks – well, I say study, it's more like spending idle moments messing about on the internet. Omegle is a website that puts you in touch, anonymously, with another random visitor, and allows you to pass the time of day chatting to them about whatever topics take your fancy. For some reason I find it slightly compelling – despite the fact that the likelihood of me having a wide-ranging, mind-expanding conversation is incredibly slim; by my rough estimates around 25% don't speak English at all, and another 50% don't speak it as a first language. But that 50% seem to eclipse the remaining 25% of us in their standards of written conversation.

I know it's only a ridiculous chat room and analysis of its contents doesn't really stand up to any great scrutiny, but in the weeks I've been wandering over and trying it, I've developed a foolproof way of ensuring that you're going to end up talking to someone with a brain, and sadly it involves standards of English grammar. My opening gambit is generally: "Hello." Note the capital letter and the fullstop. If the reply comes back with either a capital letter, or a punctuation mark of some kind, I reckon I'm about 75% likely to have a conversation that doesn't subside into urgent enquiries about whether I might be feeling horny. The vast majority of respondents type "hi" – which generally prompts me to disconnect, which I know is slightly brutal, but you can be around 90% certain that "hi" is unlikely to be followed up by anything of substance.

People who ask "Where are you from?" are the kind I don't mind passing the time of day with, but you're far more likely to get someone saying "from?" or "where?" (or, worse, "from" or "where".) Then there's the dreaded "ASL?", or "asl?" or "asl" – an abbreviation for "age? sex? location?" – which is the most bludgeoning opening gambit imaginable, and one that I'd dearly like to see its users try and deploy in a bar or a nightclub. There's only one group of people who ask "asl", and that's men who need to establish with some urgency that the person they are talking to is female, so they can begin to construct elaborate sexual fantasies while stabbing at their keyboard with sweaty fingers.

My conclusions, shot through with exceptions, caveats and general fallibility, are that nice, intelligent, interesting people can spell, and they use capital letters and punctuation. Everyone else is a dribbling cyber-sexual predator. Probably.

The two BNP victories were despite their vote going down

2009-06-08T08:20:26Z

Apologies for straying from the usual technology-related matters on this blog, but having woken up this morning and being confronted with a barrage of posts on Twitter like this one ("Okay people ... what happened there? I turn my back for 5 minutes and the North of England goes fascist."), and general despair and fist-shaking at the people of Yorkshire and Humber or indeed NW England, let's just look at the stats, taken from the BBC website.

In the two regions where a BNP MEP was returned, the actual number of people voting BNP has gone down since 2004. In Yorkshire and Humber, their vote shrank from 126,538 to 120,139. In NW England, it was down from 134,959 to 132,094. The reason the BNP got in was the massive slump in turnout that depressed the votes for the major parties and increased the BNP's percentage share of the vote overall: turnout was down from 42.6% to 32.3% in Yorkshire and Humber, and down from 40.9% to 31.7% in NW England.

It was notable last week that people on Twitter were becoming irate because of the constant badgering of other users to ask them to vote. While the BNP vote increased in the UK overall – indeed, it increased in every other region than the two that actually returned MEPs – people were right to badger. Because the BNP's new European statesmen exist purely because of disillusionment with Labour, Lib Dems and Tories.

Wikipedia bans Scientologists – but should they?

2009-06-02T11:30:26Z

When I saw the news the other day that Wikipedia had banned contributions from IP addresses used by the Church of Scientology in response to them relentlessly pushing a pro-Scientology agenda on the website, my first reaction was that it was fair enough. True, stories like this one don't make me feel well-disposed towards Scientology, but this isn't about the existence or otherwise of Operating Thetan Levels – it's simply about repeated violation of the terms of service of a website in order to further ones own agenda. If you ignore the terms of service, surely it's right that the service is withdrawn?

I was called on this pretty quickly by someone on Twitter, who questioned whether this was really the most progressive move from Wikipedia, and raised the inevitable issue of censorship. Ideally, of course, everyone would be free to furiously bat their various views on burning topics backwards and forwards across the internet until the end of time; those patient enough to get involved could wade in, and the rest of us could happily ignore them all and get on with our lives. But the problem with these kind of slanging matches taking place on Wikipedia is that, sadly, it matters.

For whatever reason – probably through skilful search engine optimization techniques, but I daresay conspiracy theorists have their own ideas – Wikipedia pages are ranked incredibly highly on Google. In fact, if you want to find a Wikipedia page, you may as well search for it on Google to save yourself some time; a study a couple of years ago revealed that over 96% of Wikipedia's pages rank in Google's top 10 when you search for the titles of those pages. So despite all the things we know about WIkipedia – that it's an unreliable source of information, it's prone to being vandalised and edited by people who don't know what on earth they're talking about – it has become the premier source of knowledge on the web. So no wonder that organisations are as keen for information about them on Wikipedia to be as glowing and positive as it might be on their own website.

Let's be honest: if you see something less than positive or even untruthful written about you online, and you have the opportunity to change it, you're going to change it. I've removed such stuff from my own Wikipedia page (which, I hasten to add, I didn't create, but thank you to whoever did) and while it has become fashionable for the media to excitedly expose stories of people altering their own Wiki pages, the fact is that the practice is endemic. The small group of volunteers who police Wikipedia aren't going to be able to detect all such activity, and in many cases these changes will actually improve the reliability of the information thereon.

But you can see from this Wiki page the colossal onslaught that Wikipedia's moderators were having to cope with from the Church of Scientology. This isn't just the tweaking of a few articles, it's a sustained campaign of endlessly reverting changes that they didn't agree with. Of course, for every revert that they made, there was a change that an anti-Scientologist made to cause it, neither are remotely helpful, and one would hope that Wikipedia applies the same rules to both camps, regardless of "religion". The real question is: is Wikipedia more useful to us if the moderators just allow us to watch an article become a battleground, such that we can arrive at our own opinions? Or will the majority of people visiting that article just believe whichever version of the truth happens to be present on the page at that particular moment? If it's the latter, the Wiki moderators job suddenly becomes incredibly onerous. If I were them, and looking at the hoohah surrounding the Scientology episode, I'd be tempted to believe the former, and just let everyone get on with it.

The online business models that definitely didn't work

2009-05-27T18:38:27Z

With the news that Facebook isn't quite as highly valued as it used to be, that Twitter is continuing to prevaricate over exactly when it might bringing in any substantial revenue, and with doubts blasting from all sides about the ability of online ventures to subsist on the meagre proceeds of online advertising, it might be worth reminding ourselves of a few online business models that once seemed eminently viable, but crashed as commonsense finally prevailed.

The success of both Flooz and Beenz was dependent on the idea that the internet required a shiny new currency to trade with. No-one working for these companies was brave enough to point out that people prefer their purchases to involve fewer currency transactions, not more, and that the web is merely an extension of the existing economy and not some seperate entity floating somewhere in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. Few consumers could be persuaded to use cyber-currencies, and retailers weren't that keen on accepting them. Paypal's understated stroke of genius, meanwhile, was to sensibly stick to using dollars and pounds instead.

Countless startups noticed that city-dwellers were increasingly time-poor and wanted their every desire quickly transported to within arm’s reach, but you can't deliver low-cost items for free and expect to turn a profit. Kozmo.com was the most publicised American disaster, but British companies such as Urbanfetch also floundered as their cute concepts of providing free cookies with every order, or giving no-questions-asked refunds, quickly began to haemorrhage large sums of cash. Fickle consumers would place tiny orders to “see if it worked” and then never use the service again.

iCrunch was one of many disastrous music business ventures; even now, with iPods hanging off every other belt and CDs slowly replaced with hard drives or merely streams of data across broadband connections, the music industry hasn't really got the hang of flogging digital music to the masses. So the faith that dotcom startups had ten years ago was, in retrospect, almost naively charming. In 2000 iCrunch splurged large sums of money in advances to independent labels and bands to secure their digital rights. Spearmint, a niche indie act that I co-managed, received an upfront payment of £10,000 for the right to sell their catalogue online. The band only ever received one statement from iCrunch; precisely one mp3 was sold for 99p before the company went under – by which time the advance had long since been splurged by the band in a delighted frenzy.

Digiscents spent two years trying to persuade companies and consumers alike that the web experience would be considerably enhanced if smells could be "transmitted" over the internet. For it to work, it required the end user to buy an iSmell personal scent synthesizer. Despite this exotic item being featured on the front cover of Wired magazine in 1999, people generally had no interest in buying an iSmell personal scent synthesiser, preferring to spend their cash on a bigger monitor or a multi-function mouse instead. Today, if we want our web surfing to give us olfactory stimulation, we have to provide it ourselves. And most of us seem quite happy with that.

There are countless other examples of terrible business ideas that have bombed since the dotcom bubble. Nearly all of them are unified by being incredibly unpopular with the general public. Social networking platforms, by contrast, are magnificently popular – but how, and when, are they ever going to prise any money out of us? Or are they simply doomed to sink in the same way as all the above did?

Overwhelmed with information? Just let it go

2009-05-27T07:05:41Z

I've had a slight epiphany in the past couple of months while posting infrequently on this blog and working on a book, which I'll now quickly give the obligatory plug. Because while I was contracted to write 5000 words a week to meet a grim deadline, it left very little time to indulge in the usual routines I'd set up to absorb information from the web. RSS feeds I monitor to keep up with technology news or friends' blog posts were amassing ominously with a terrifying count of unread items, and as the number of people who seemed worth following on Twitter grew almost exponentially it became impossible to keep up with the flow of information they were producing. But the epiphany was quite simple and blisteringly effective: I didn't need to worry about it.

The whole notion of Twitter changed almost instantly; instead of being something I tried desperately to catch up with, it was like a room at a party that I occasionally wandered in and out of to see if anyone was saying anything of interest. If I missed something, well, hey, I missed it. No big deal. It didn't sit very squarely with my personality – you know, an anal completist who amasses series of DVDs and collects entire discographies by bands I like, and has a hatred of being late to parties or social events in case anyone says anything interesting before I get there. But once I'd decided to do it, Twitter became managable, and I started applying it to the rest of the web, too. I embraced the principle of just letting things go.

We all have to implement filters, of course. Even if you don't laboriously set them up in email programs, RSS readers or programs like TweetDeck, our brains are having to learn to scan down a page, take in the information we want and ignore the stuff we don't. But even well-respected, web-savvy people get worked up about being overloaded with information; Suw Charman Anderson, a well respected Web 2.0 consultant, takes several paragraphs to explain to PRs when they should and should not send her an email, when she'd be far better off just setting up an email address for them and occasionally glancing down the subject lines for anything remotely interesting. I don't blame her for ranting; I'm sure I've felt the same way from time to time. But rather than work yourself into a frenzy, surely it's better to just let things go?

Yahoo Pipes is an astonishing tool that more people should make use of; you can take any RSS feed and manipulate the data, filtering it using all manner of parameters and have it spit out the results as another, slimmer RSS feed. For example, the number of stories slung on digg.com everyday is terrifying, but Pipes allows me to only get notified of the stuff that has been Dugg more than, say, 400 times. Even that's getting a little much, to be honest, but I'm learning to just let things go.

This idea of the web being redefined as a constantly moving stream is something that a few people have been talking about recently. One thing that this changes is the critical importance of the time you might decide to post something on the web. Those of us who've used LiveJournal for many years will be familiar with the ephemeral nature of the stream already; you might post something at 2am on a Saturday morning and no-one would see it, but post that same thing at 1pm on a Monday afternoon, and it might elicit 50 comments, purely because that's when people drop in. You can see the same thing happening on Twitter – peaks and troughs of activity depending on who might be sat in front of their computers. But it's something that anyone publishing on the web is going to have to start thinking about. Static web pages will be like museum pieces, and streams of information are the future. But as people like myself become increasingly unconcerned about missing stuff, it's the services that let us quickly and easily filter their streams – without us having to go to the trouble of using Yahoo Pipes – who'll surely come out on top.

160 characters – is it all you need?

2009-05-05T20:38:39Z

The LA Times ran a story a couple of days ago which shed some light on the reason why the humble text message, or SMS, was restricted on its inception back in 1985 to 160 characters. There were technical reasons why the messaging protocol could only cope with 140 x 8-bits (or 160 of the GSM's 7-bit character set) but the burning question was whether this would be sufficient space to convey anything useful. Friedhelm Hillebrand, one of the researchers on the project, spent some time tapping out random sentences and questions, and came to the conclusion – despite the doubts of some colleagues – that 160 characters, including spaces and punctuation, would be "perfectly sufficient" for people to literally get their messages across. And so SMS was born.

Of course, the advancing technology of mobile phone networks has allowed us to cheat the system by allowing concatenated texts, where theoretically as many as 40,000 characters could be sent by a phone over 255 seperately-sent messages, and reassembled in the right order at the other end. In practice, however, between 6 and 8 texts is the usual maximum – which is fortunate, because tapping out a 6,000 word essay using only your thumbs would take its toll on your eyes, thumbs and patience.

But the interesting effect of the 160-character limit is how, during the process of mobile phones becoming integrated with services such as Twitter and Facebook, that it has become a natural, standard length for communicating a single thought – although Twitter only allows 140 characters because it reserves 20 characters for your Twitter name. No concatenated messages for Twitter users; stringing one post across multiple tweets is a breach of etiquette akin to farting in a library. (Although one person is attempting to post an entire novel on Twitter, with 1900 updates at the time of writing; it has to be said that it's not the best use for the medium, not least because catching up with the story involves scrolling up and reading everything backwards.)

There are those who say that 140 characters simply isn't enough – but if you feel that way, there's nothing stopping you writing a blog somewhere else and linking to it. Or just cheating the system by using a service like TweetShrink. (Although that can reduce your lovingly constructed post to a mangled mess of the "c u l8r" variety.) Personally, I find a tiny sliver of delight in the haiku-like simplicity of the 140 – not least when you achieve what people seem to refer to as a "twoosh" (using exactly 140 characters per post). Placing those kind of specific constraints on your creativity can often bring out interesting results, I think. Although, admittedly, that's not always the case.

What comes after the Pirate Bay?

2009-04-28T12:43:50Z

Following the verdict in the Pirate Bay case 10 days ago, many people were pondering what on earth file-sharers were going to do in a post-Pirate Bay world. Of course, it's not something that anyone needs to address imminently, because the site's still very much up and running on servers based in Belgium and Russia – a setup intended to be stubbornly resistant to attempts to take it down.

But when the torrent site Oink was closed down in October 2007, it didn't take long for its users to migrate to new sites such as waffles.fm and what.cd – and you could reasonably assume that a successor to the Pirate Bay would immediately take its place if it ever disappeared. What's more interesting is what might succeed torrenting.

Downloading media using torrents is, when it comes down to it, something of a drag. First you look on a website such as the Pirate Bay to see if they have what you're after. Then you download the torrent file which you suspect might be the right one. Then you open that torrent file in a program that's often needlessly complex in its user interface, see if anyone else has the same torrent running, and then wait. Then when the file has eventually downloaded, you discover that it's either not what you were looking for, or that you can't open the file. It's these kind of barriers in between the search for material and getting hold of it that makes services like BBC iPlayer or Spotify so attractive; one of Spotify's stated aims was to try and dampen the effects of piracy by just making it easier to listen to music – and in the limited territories where it's operating, that's undoubtedly happening. Ownership is removed from the equation, so there's no longer anything worth "stealing".

But for those who spurn streaming media and are for some reason intent on collecting terabytes of data on their hard drives, there are a couple of emerging projects of note. Researchers at Harvard are working on Tribler, which combines the clever torrenting protocol with the removal of first step of the torrenting process – i.e. having to visit a website to look for the torrent files. In that sense it slightly resembles something like LimeWire from the user perspective, because you're tapping your queries direct into the application. (And, it has to be said, the user interface is similarly clunky.) And then there's the Pirate Bay's iPredator, currently being roadtested, which (unsurprisingly) concentrates on security issues; with the Pirate Bay being so conspicious and garnering such interest from copyright enforcers across the globe, iPredator uses a type of VPN to maintain anonymity and ensure that channels of communication are kept open – for a small fee per month.

But even as I'm writing about illicit ways of collecting huge quantities of media, I can't help feeling that it increasingly just looks like pointless narcissism on the part of those who indulge in it. Amassing libraries of music and video may have been moderately exciting when it first became possible, but as streaming services develop and the idea of ownership becomes more old hat, you can't help feeling that torrenting – or whatever succeeds it – will simply become more trouble than it's worth.

Amazon "censorship": Explanations emerge

2009-04-14T09:44:12Z

Following the furore over the deranking of various adult-themed books from Amazon's various websites, it's taken until the end of the Easter break for Amazon to come up with an explanation – leaving plenty of time for people to falsely and anonymously claim that they were responsible.

Seattle PI have had a response from a spokesman; it turns out that 57,310 books had their categories universally altered by a chap working at Amazon France who was tapping away on a keyboard without being quite sure what he was doing. In other words, human error.

Which raises a few interesting issues. The first is put quite neatly over at LawClanger: "If it turns out that such an embarrassing incident could have arisen from a single coding error, and that Amazon's infrastructure allowed the error to pass undetected, propagate around the world and then take days to fix, then it rather makes the world's best-known online ordering brand look like a massive house of cards." (According to another piece over at Seattle PI, employees were firefighting the mess from home on Easter Sunday.)

Secondly, the Amazon policy that led to the books being removed from searches, which was restated over the weekend by customer service reps who were clearly unaware of the scale of the error, is obviously still in force. Various authors of niche adult literature have been complaining about the policy since as far back as February – but as it only affected a handful of books, the complaints weren't widely heard. It'll be interesting to see whether the astonishing outpouring of anger over the policy will continue, now that the likes of Brokeback Mountain have got their rankings back.

But thirdly, and probably most interestingly, is the swirling, unstoppable power of Twitter users once they get a bee in their bonnet about something. For a while on Sunday, it seemed utterly possible that a multinational bookseller had bowed to pressure from the religious right – but in the absence of a clear statement from Amazon (which we now have) the speculation was allowed to spiral out of control. Perhaps Amazon would have done better to use the Twitter medium themselves in order to explain what was happening, rather than allow #amazonfail to become one of the most popular hashtags over the Easter weekend. (Now being replaced, hilariously, with #sorryamazon.) But at the height of the fury, any suggestion that it might be an error rather than an outbreak of New Puritanism were quickly slapped down by those who stated that no, no, this is simply homophobia.

There's no doubt that cyberactivism can be deployed in an endless variety of positive ways. But when fury spirals in this fashion, fuelled almost entirely by other people's fury, at something that was pretty benign, it starts to become incredibly depressing – not least because rational people who would normally rail against hair-brained conspiracy theories suddenly found themselves propagating one.

Of course, you might decide that Amazon's policy still stinks. You might think that Amazon deserves to be boycotted anyway, regardless of its attitude to sexual content of books. But there's no doubt that many people are regretting the amount of emotional energy they poured into #amazonfail, that could have been used to rant about the excessive packaging on their Easter eggs.

Amazon under fire for censorship

2009-04-13T10:17:11Z

At the end of last week a couple of writers who were monitoring their sales rankings on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk were perplexed to discover that their books were no longer ranked. Now, most things I've produced that have ended up on Amazon are ranked so lowly – somewhere over 100,000 – for their position to be almost meaningless, but Amazon rankings aren't just the book equivalent of the Top 40 singles chart; if you're removed from the rankings, you're also removed from the bestseller lists, and – crucially – removed from many search results. Your book is effectively relegated to a dusty room at the back of the shop, and will only be found if you're specifically looking for it. And perhaps not even then.

What did these two books have in common? They addressed issues surrounding homosexuality. And over the weekend, hundreds of other books also began losing their sales rankings and disappearing from searches, including ones written by markprobst. An enormous but presumably not exhaustive list is being maintained at meta_writer on this page; it includes books as mainstream as Stephen Fry's autobiography and a critically acclaimed biog of Oscar Wilde, while over on Amazon UK, a book such as Ultimate Burlesque by Emily Dubberly is still on the site – but you try searching for it from the front page: it's not there. Amazon's response to the outcry has been the following email from their customer services department:

"In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature."

But books such by porn stars such as Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson have escaped the cull, while a guide to feminism for young women doesn't. As you might expect on such a colossal website, anomalies like these can be found everywhere, and people on Twitter have been uncovering them in their hundreds, following the lead of writers such as Zoe Margolis whose books have also suffered from deranking. The problem appears to be one of tagging: if a book is tagged "gay" – such as Stephen Fry's autobiography – it's out, but had it been tagged "memoir", it would have survived. Similarly with Margolis's book "Girl With A One Track Mind", which is deranked in its US version (tagged "adult") but not in its UK version (not tagged "adult"); even bestselling books that have been turned into hugely popular motion pictures have been deranked, and wouldn't appear on today's bestseller lists.

According to Publisher's Weekly, Amazon are now contradicting their earlier statement by describing the deranking as a "glitch"; but understandably, many suspect that this is a furious backpedalling in the face of widespread outrage. But if it does turn out to be a policy change, one can only furrow ones brow and imagine what kind of pressure from what kind of organisations could have possibly led to it?

Fancy an electronic book, for free?

2009-04-08T14:20:44Z

If I was interested in getting hold of a book, it still wouldn't immediately occur to me to try and look for it online. I'm more likely to go to Amazon or Abebooks, search for it, buy it, and wait 10 days for it to drop on my doormat. Music, TV and radio shows, films, software will happily whizz down my broadband pipe, but any document that's longer than 9 or 10 pages that arrives in my Downloads folder still seems to be in the wrong format, and should really be printed out and stapled in the top left hand corner. Which probably represents a minor ecological catastrophe, but there you go. Long chunks of text still feel as if they're meant to be read while sprawled on my front on the floor, or while sat in a deckchair on the beach, but usually the former, what with me living in London and all.

Anyway, the success of Amazon's Kindle in the US is obviously marking a change in attitudes towards books in electronic format, because it has provided people with something that actually makes PDFs, DOCs and the like reasonably pleasant to read. Unlike a document viewer on a computer screen. We still don't have the Kindle in the UK, but we do have neat apps like Stanza app for the iPhone which will read a range of text-based files. (Although not Amazon's DRM-enabled content, natch.) So now all we need is something to read. Which, perhaps, is where scribd.com comes in.

The site has been knocking around for more than two years, and was originally touted as "YouTube for books". Which sounds reasonably promising as a Web 2.0 plan – but of course far fewer people are interested in reading "The Gambler" by Dostoyevsky than watching a pedestrian indie rock band lark about on treadmills, and it has only recently started making tech headlines again – unsurprisingly because of pirated content.

As a site for free-and-easy document sharing, it does its job brilliantly, although much of the content consists of personal contributions that would be equally at home, if not more so, in HTML format on the internet. What it's perfectly set up for is the exchange of books, and so that's what people have been doing. Thing is, books tend not to knock around in PDF format (unless a disgruntled employee of the publisher has leaked it) so we get such bizarre spectacles as J K Rowling's latest book being downloadable, but clearly having been scanned, laboriously, page by page, by someone with a lot of time on their hands and a burning ambition to deprive her of a few quid.

The Times recently reported that publishers and authors were furious that their books appeared to be available for download on the website; Scribd rebutted the claims, pointing out that copyrighted material is removed on request. (That's also the case on YouTube, of course, but that doesn't stop millions of TV clips being readily available.) The most interesting point in the Times piece is where literary agent Peter Cox said: “These people are pirates. We don’t have to give in to this. We can’t afford to make the same mistakes the music industry did." It's unclear whether the quote refers to Scribd as pirates, or the people who are merely using the service to exchange copyrighted material, but one thing is abundantly clear: the supposed option of not making "the same mistakes as the music industry" isn't even an option. Books can be converted into zeroes and ones. The ability to read books in that format is becoming more widespread. And the distribution method is ready and waiting. Record companies and music rights holders leapt into furious legal action too, I seem to remember, but it didn't do them much good. I'm not saying it's a good thing – I'm a writer, after all – but the value of the book, as an object, is undoubtedly going to slide, and slide. Purely because of their slow transition to electronic format, books have held out longer than newspapers, music and video. But this minor furore over scribd.com feels like a rather profound turning point.

*

In an unrelated footnote, according to Gender Analyzer, this blog is 84% likely to be written by a woman. The Independent is written by a man, but The Times is written by a woman. I think they need to tweak their algorithms.

Oh, I wish I hadn't sent that email

2009-03-31T10:40:02Z

In your average office building, there are few incidents as fascinating and laden with Schadenfreude as when someone accidentally sends an email crammed with lurid personal revalations to the entire contents of their address book, and then attempts to make use of Outlook's "Recall Email" feature in a desperate attempt at damage limitation. While the unfortunate sender is desperate to put the genie back in the bottle, a good 1/3 of the recepients will have already opened it, read it, saved it, forwarded it or printed it off, while anyone outside the building who isn't hooked up to the same Microsoft Exchange server will be able to read and re-read it at their leisure, without fear of it being clawed back out of their inbox. "Recall Email" is undoubtedly a nice idea but, as someone on Wikipedia points out, it doesn't actually work very well in practice... a bit like the Cone Of Silence.

Anyway, Google Labs, following on from their Mail Goggles feature which requires you to complete a number of arithmetical problems before drunken late-night emails get sent (although I prefer this prescient 8-year-old invention) have now introduced an optional Undo Send feature, which gives you a 5 second window after hitting the Send button for you to assess whether you've accidentally cc'd in your boss, or attached a JPG of yourself in crotchless tracksuit bottoms. Some say 5 seconds isn't sufficient; others say that 5 days wouldn't even be enough. Anyway, if you're prone to acting without thinking first, it may be the safety valve you need. My favourite hot-headed email sender is described nicely over at Slashdot:

I used to work for a company where The Managing Director frequently used to send (usually offensive) emails to the wrong people by accident. His usual error was to insult someone behind their back and accidentally include them in the cc field. Whenever this happened, he used to come hurtling down the stairs and rip out the Ethernet cable from the mail server in an attempt to stop the mail going out.

At first I thought he was trying to outrun the electron charge as it traversed through the network cabling, but it turns out that at some point in the past, someone had reconfigured the mail server to delay all mail by 30 seconds, just so he had time to rip out the Ethernet cable in an emergency.

Street Maps hits the UK

2009-03-19T10:27:38Z

Three weeks after I noticed that Seety had beaten them to it with their Street View-like service for inner London, Google appear to have finally launched Street View in the UK, allowing those who have been screeching about the privacy implications to finally have a look to see if Google's camera caught them putting out the bins with their hair in curlers.

It seems that the following areas are covered:

Swansea - Cardiff - Bristol - Oxford - Southampton - London M25 - Norwich - Birmingham - Coventry - Cambridge - Derby - Nottingham - Sheffield - Scunthorpe - York - Leeds - Bradford - Manchester - Liverpool - Newcastle - Belfast - Edinbugh - Glasgow - and, strangely, while the majority of the service is urban areas, there are huge swathes of Scottish countryside covered around Dundee and Aberdeen.

I would write more about it, but I'm busy looking at stuff. Just head to maps.google.com and drag the little yellow figure on the left onto the map.

Another Facebook redesign, another hernia

2009-03-16T13:35:05Z

The backlash has already started over the introduction of the new Facebook layout, not that that's remotely surprising. Dare to disrupt the expectations of visitors to your website with so much as a minor tweak of the hue of the sidebar, and someone will start to draw up a petition or threaten picketing. "It's too complicated," yelled hundreds of thousands of users last time this happened, late last summer; their fury at the widened redesign to better incorporate all the various elements of Facebook was unleashed on dozens of newly-created groups on, er, Facebook, where they vented their considerable spleen until they suddenly realised one day that they'd all got used to it.

The redesign seems to have been driven by one thing and one thing only: the popularity of Twitter. A report came in from SXSW yesterday with the startling news that "status updates are a new form of communication" – as if we weren't aware of this already; Twitter's explosive recent growth seems to be pre-occupying everyone, and the Facebook status update, once a small cherry on the top of the cake, has suddenly taken centre stage. No longer is it supposed that you're posting a little note about what you're doing – "Rhodri is staring into the middle distance" or "Rhodri wonders whether plants have feelings" – instead it has become all about microblogging, with "what's on your mind?" or "write something" becoming the prompt. All links, photos and updates posted by you and your friends appear in that one feed on your homepage; if someone is annoying you with their inane ramblings, you can just remove them from the feed with a single click. Easy.

In many ways, it's actually more pleasant than Twitter to use. Comments underneath your posts are threaded, rather than part of a disembodied conversation strung across several posts that's almost impossible to keep track of. Links are previewed, so you don't just see a tinyurl link heading to goodness knows where, you see an image and a description of the destination website. Of course, Twitter's simplicity and lack of bells and whistles – along with the dubious pleasure of endlessly trying to get a response out of Stephen Fry – is part of its appeal, but Facebook's streamlined interface, coupled with these little enhancements, leave me in the annoying position of actually wanting to use it more. And perhaps inevitably, as we don't really have anything different to say on Facebook than we do on Twitter, people like me are irritatingly posting the same stuff on both, for slightly differing audiences – and perhaps using a service such as ping.fm that's specifically designed for that purpose. This duplication is bound to continue until we eventually drift one way or the other for our microblogging kicks. And for that, I offer my sincere apologies. I'm a fence-sitter, what can I say?

"Find a new business model" says YouTube. How?

2009-03-10T16:04:08Z

When interviewed about the imminent removal of music videos from YouTube's UK-facing operation, Patrick Walker, YouTube's director of video partnerships, said: "The record industry needs a new business model." This phrase is trotted out whenever the music business make a dubious move, and it's generally uttered rather smugly by people who don't have an answer as to how a viable business model might actually be constructed from what is essentially the free distribution of music. The fact that we're sitting here watching the music industry rapidly decline is a fairly big hint that no such model exists; everyone is delighted to use services such as Spotify, but if everyone were listening to streaming music on demand, you can bet that the music business wouldn't be adequately funded by a few ads for Xbox 360. The sums don't add up. For YouTube / Google to shrug its shoulders and ask the music business to come up with a viable solution to the problem of people using YouTube as a free jukebox is perfectly understandable – they're a business too – but what's galling is that everyone seems to have sympathy for YouTube (a service that we all love to use because it costs us nothing) and no-one has sympathy for the music business (an entity that asks us to part with money in exchange for stuff). We accuse the music business of selfishness and are happy to dance merrily on its grave, while we exhibit similar selfishness in simply wanting to get something for nothing.

Of course, major labels have been guilty of overcharging for CDs, of wasteful use of resources, of operating a bloated, often hideous enterprise. But every single creative industry, from writers to film makers to musicians to animators, is having to adjust to a new reality where people expect to be entertained for free. This blog post might not be particularly entertaining, you might even find it profoundly irritating, but you haven't paid to read it. If you forget how "Living On The Ceiling" by Blancmange went, you could go to YouTube or Spotify now and listen to it. You can go to torrent sites and download pretty much any film or current TV programme you want, for free, in an hour or two at most.

And of course, that's great, isn't it, we get to expand our cultural outlook without haemorraging cash. And because of this massive luxury that technology alone has afforded us – not for any other reason, not because of a change in attitudes, not because we value our favourite songs or films or writers any less, purely because of the digitising of media – people now say "the future of the media is freedom", as some kind of Robin Hood-esque rallying cry. OK, that's fine, but it takes time and money to produce stuff to entertain people, to make a record, to produce a video, to knock a newspaper feature into shape, to take your band on the road. Now, you might conceivably think that people in creative industries don't deserve to be paid, that it's a poncy job, that it's not critical to our lives in the same way that food producers or doctors are. And if you really believe that, fair enough. But say so. Don't throw your hands up in despair and ask media producers why on earth they can't sustain their activities if you're not prepared to give them some cash in return.

The PRS may have become the evil organisation in the press and blogosphere today, but they're only trying to get what they feel is a fair deal for their members (the vast majority of which are not big earners) in a climate where their earnings have slumped, regardless of the recession. It may be a pointless, toothless fight – but if it were your own livelihood at risk, you'd probably want someone fighting on your behalf, too.

What's the point of Dreamweaving?

2009-03-09T13:48:11Z

Over the weekend I saw a post on Twitter from someone I know who was using Dreamweaver and asking for HTML help with *td* tags. It was like being transported back a good 7 or 8 years to a time when the majority of websites were painstakingly constructed in programs such as GoLive and Dreamweaver, with page layouts assembled using tables and, dare I say it, frames. Website updates had to be managed on your computer and then uploaded, and manually creating a blog-style system with archive pages and date stamped entries would have been substantially more effort than it was worth.

An article at the end of last week in PC Pro talks about "the death of Dreamweaver", and makes this very point – that the vast majority of today's websites use pre-prepared templates in content management systems such as Blogger, Wordpress and LiveJournal – but also that the need for people to acquaint themselves with the intricacies of coding no longer exist. To which I'd probably say, well, not really.

If someone were about to make the somewhat tardy decision to construct their very first website, they might well have grabbed a copy of Dreamweaver by legit or non-legit means, and started using it to lay out a page and style text. As novices, they'd be creating unnecessarily bloated HTML code behind the scenes with such no-nos as *font* tags – because no-one has told them that there's a more efficient way of doing things using CSS. But while some people might conceivably continue to wade through a Dreamweaver manual chapter by chapter, or attend HTML evening classes, learning by trial and error is way more effective. You create your website, you realise that it looks appalling compared to most others, and then you set about tweaking it. You view the source code on other websites, you get a feel for how pages are constructed, you steal that code and adapt it to your own needs. You come to understand the beauty of CSS, and that Dreamweaver is, in fact, pretty good at helping you construct your style sheets.

The PC Pro article seems to suggest that Dreamweaver encourages bad design, but it's a pretty complex piece of software and, as with so many things, you only really get out what you put into it. It's pretty expensive to use merely as a text editor to cut and paste code, but there's enough extras in there to make it useful – particularly its ability to render PHP. I'm clueless when it comes to PHP, but Dreamweaver lets me tweak other people's WordPress templates, discover how they work and compile my own from scratch. It doesn't make me an expert, but it does let me build carefully tailored websites rather than making do with a shell constructed by someone else for a totally different purpose.

Of course, you're not going to create a "kickass" website or an eye-popping Wordpress template without some moderate flair for layout, and Dreamweaver won't ever give you that. But it does allow us to learn the rudiments of coding – and I'm guessing that it'll continue to do so.

Wholesale online plagiarism - what can you do?

2009-03-05T11:44:14Z

Yesterday, in an idle search for feelgood web attractions that I know always give me a lift, I went looking for Roy Orbison In Clingfilm, a series of slash fiction parodies written by a chap called Michael Kelly under the pseudonym Ulrich Haarbürste, in which each tale delicately but tortuously unfolds to leave Roy wrapped head to foot in PVC. A choice excerpt from the story in which Haarbürste poses as a doctor:

I start from the feet and work my way up. It is strange for him to be naked as I wrap him but I suppose it would be too suspicious were I to ask him to put his trademark black clothes back on. I am like an Egyptian priest enshrouding his Pharaoh. Soon, Roy Orbison is wrapped up in Clingfilm. I let out a soft mew of content and mutely acknowledge that all things work for the best in this world.

It's very funny. Sadly, the stories were no longer on Kelly's website; I thought that might be because they've been collected together in a slim volume and put on sale – but actually, the whole of Kelly's website at www.michaelkelly.fsnet.co.uk has been deleted. A couple of minutes of sleuthing discovered his new online home, along with a collection of furious rants about the deletion of his long-running website by Orange, who own the FSnet and Freeserve domains.

Kelly – who also wrote the Misery Lit pastiche My Godawful Life, published recently by Pan McMillan – discovered that some pieces he'd uploaded to his own site had been copied and pasted onto someone else's blog and passed off as their own work. Further investigation established that Kelly wasn't the only one who'd been plagiarised. Aside from obvious stylistic anomalies, a cursory referral to the Internet Wayback Machine at archive.org clearly shows that the pieces had all been written before the miscreant had posted them – so Kelly reacted as many would: with blind fury.

The contents of this blog which is devoted to his spat with the person in question are pretty heavy going, expletive-filled and have the marks of a tedious personal vendetta; many would argue that such is the nature of online prose, with RSS and bots lifting content and automatically posting it elsewhere, that placing text online immediately leaves you open to that kind of thing, and that it's pointless to get cross about it. But this wasn't just copy and paste; text was appropriated and edited to make it sound slightly more autobiographical. Kelly pointed this out extensively on his site. The person being accused (or someone close to him) eventually complained to Orange about Kelly's rant. Orange gave Kelly a warning, and told him to remove it. Kelly was furious, but obliged by removing the material and replacing it with a note explaining why it had been removed. Orange weren't satisfied, and shut his website down.

Should Kelly have got so angry? I probably wouldn't have, not least because the reposts were read by far fewer people than the originals, and I try and keep a lid on my blood pressure. But you couldn't deny that he had the right to do so – and the facts of the plagiarism are so blatantly obvious that Kelly probably never imagined there'd be any comeback. He was wrong. Should Orange have deleted his website, based on a complaint which wasn't properly investigated? Certainly not; clearly Orange's resources don't extend to getting involved in what they imagine is a tedious, unimportant online argument. But Kelly's a struggling writer, that site was his shop window, and it's been removed because of one frivolous, malicious complaint.

Sadly, the lesson to be learned from this doesn't really help Kelly; if he'd chosen not to use free webspace with his ISP, and instead had his own domain and a chunk of server space, his site would never have been jettisoned by an uncaring multinational – and even if his hosting company had got cold feet, he could have just seamlessly switched to another one without much website downtime.

But what you can't ever prevent is someone copying and pasting.

Closing the YouTube loophole

2009-03-03T15:55:24Z

For as long as YouTube has been around, there seem to have been websites and tools that have let you grab the embedded videos and download them to your computer. A quick web search throws up a few dozen of them instantly – but one of those, on the TechCrunch website, was blocked by YouTube a couple of weeks back. It's not clear why TechCrunch's was singled out, especially as nearly all the others, including KeepVid, are still up and running. But it's thought to be linked to the appearance of this page on your YouTube channel: Purchased Videos.

Google, in an attempt to get their wildly popular YouTube service to claw back a bit of much-needed cash, are slowly rolling out a scheme where users enrolled in their partner program can offer videos for download, in mp4 format, for around $1 using the Google Checkout service. What's not immediately obvious is why people would choose to spend their hard-earned cash in this way. For starters, it's inconceivable that someone, somewhere, won't be able to come up with a way of continuing to prise embedded content away from web pages and onto hard disks for free; despite the TechCrunch block, if it were easy for YouTube to call a wholesale halt unauthorised downloads, you can bet that they'd be doing it already.

But more brow-furrowing is why, when services like Spotify are heralding a move towards streaming and away from localised content and ownership of media, YouTube would be running in the opposite direction and urging us to collect videos in neatly organised folders. "But then you can watch the video whenever you like!" they might say – but I can already do that, on my computer, by going to YouTube. "Transfer it to your iPhone and watch it while on the move!" they might continue – but the iPhone has a YouTube application, and while its use is limited by internet connectivity, that's becoming so omnipresent that the only people who might be desperate to store the videos are frequent flyers, or people who dwell in subterranean caves. You could conceivably suggest that the files could then be burned to DVD and watched in the comfort of your living room – but by the time the mp4 files have been re-encoded and burned onto a shiny silver disc, you'd have been better off hooking up your computer's video out to your TV in order to watch it straight from the website. If it's not hooked up in that way already.

It's a common impulse, particularly among men, to collect and hoard media; you can see on services such as SoulSeek that the heaviest filesharers are people who feel disproportionately proud to own tens of thousands of albums, TV series and films that they may never actually watch. But that impulse is slowly disappeaing – at least it is with me. And now that YouTube has almost single-handedly got us used to watching streaming video across the web, why would we want to take one step back in the opposite direction, and pay $1 a time for the privilege?

The emotional shift to a new web browser

2009-02-26T14:34:10Z

If you spend as much time online as I do – and the very fact that you're reading this might suggest that you do – you'll know that changing your web browser can feel like a fundamental shift in your behaviour. Everything we experience online is filtered through its interface, and while certain elements are pretty consistent between IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera, there's enough contrasts between them for us to feel slightly disorientated when we make the leap to a new one.

The beta of Apple's Safari 4 was released a couple of days ago, and because I have an almost psychotic compulsion to install free software, I downloaded it and gave it a spin. The press release boasted that it was now the "fastest, most innovative" browser; I'm always amused by this notion of speed increases in browser software, as if the rapidity of rendering pages is ever going to matter more than the rate at which data is squeezed down our broadband connections. But as soon as I launched it, it did feel faster. Within 5 minutes, I'd exported all my bookmarks from the comparatively sluggish Firefox, imported them into Safari, and set it as the default browser on my system. There. Allegiances switched, as simply as that.

I do miss things about Firefox. I had a nice is.gd extension installed, which gave me a button on my toolbar which automatically shortened URLs and copied them to the clipboard; while I have a Javascript bookmark to do a similar thing in Safari, it actually takes me away from the page I'm looking at which is slightly annoying. I thought that I'd suddenly be swamped with adverts, as I'd had an Adblock extension installed on Firefox – but was delighted to discover that you can install one for Safari, too. The new tab arrangement in Safari (instead of being below the address and bookmark bars, they sit right at the top) is obviously irritating the hell out of some people who are now desperate for it to be restored to the way it was – but I actually quite like it. Oh, and I miss the customized search box in Firefox that lets me search direct in Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon and so on – but there appear to be add-ons for Safari that will let me do that, too. [Edit: doesn't appear to work with Safari 4. Agh.]

After going back to Firefox and setting it up as my secondary browser – uninstalling all the plugins, deleting all the bookmarks and removing the history – I suddenly discovered that it felt just as fast as Safari 4 now does. Uh. Well, I'm not changing browsers twice in one week, that would just be too flighty and capricious.

They got there before Google did

2009-02-23T11:01:45Z

It was last July when a hoo-hah broke in the British media about Google Street View. It had been available for many city areas in the USA for over a year, but the news that Google's 360º cameras were suddenly on the streets of the UK, literally taking photographs of stuff that you could, er, see yourself if you could be bothered to walk down the same street was greeted with huffing, puffing, and about a dozen letters of furious, clueless protest to your favourite sensationalist tabloid newspaper.

Seven months on, the images still haven't been added to Google Maps but, amazingly, a service called Seety has beaten Google to it by launching a Street View-like service for central London – and cheekily using the Google Maps API to base it on.

I've only been toying with it for about 20 minutes, but the area they've covered so far seems to go as far west as Shepherds Bush, as far north as Holloway Road, east as far as Dalston Junction and south as far as the Oval. It's perhaps a sign of the congested nature of London streets that the photos are often obscured by buses and vans – here's a nice one of the front of the Oval cricket ground – which makes you wonder why they didn't snap the pictures during early mornings in summer. Then they wouldn't have had to worry quite so much about the privacy implications, either; there's plenty of people clearly visible in the photos – here's a load at the Abbey Road zebra crossing, albeit with their faces partially blurred.

One immediately noticable thing is how quickly such photos become outdated. This area of Shepherd's Bush now has a shiny new shopping centre, but Seety have launched their service with the whole thing depicted as a building site. Still, I guess we'll have to put up with that kind of thing until the fantastic onward march of technology gives us live cameras trained on all Britain's streets and streamed to the internet 24 hours a day. Which would genuinely give people something to huff and puff about.