Thankfully, it seems that the house of lords has seen sense over the ID cards issue – more reporting available on the BBC site.

The useability “guru” has turned his sights on search engines now:

Search engines extract too much of the Web’s value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.

Read the full article – http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search_engines.html

Quite an interesting article – Personally I think search engines (and things like del.icio.us, digg.com etc), while useful and interesting, do run the risk of “dumbing down” the web.

Popular sites get more hits / higher rankings and as a result get more visitors, which in turn generates more hits (more diggs, more tags etc). As people turn to “web 2.0” social networking to find sites, this has the definite risk of creating a situation where the less popular parts of the internet will turn into a no-mans-land with no visitors and no chance of getting itself out of the quagmire, because no one is “digg-ing” or taging or linking to the site. Its a shame really.

An additional, unwanted, side effect is the amount of effort some sites have to go to with SEO. A shame that so much time and effort is spent basically trying to trick people into visiting.

Well here we are in the year 2006 and well I remember the hype of the late 1990s when the “paperless office” was the next big thing! (Dont get me started on that web 2.0 nonsense). Towards the end of the decade every one was getting scanners and it seemed a certainty that in a short time everything you would ever need would be available electronically.

Now, everyone who remembers these years will no doubt remember the “joy” of 28.8k dial up modems and internet access that was billed by the minute. However, this did little to deter the online pundits from proclaiming that books were dead and the future was online.

Now, fast forward to today and what do we have?

Has anything changed?

Not really, no. High speed internet connections are almost commonplace. Almost everyone who isnt a luddite or lives in a remote hill farm community has access to upstream speeds of around 8 meg. Amazing. Despite all this, has anything really changed?

Well, MP3 has obviously made its mark. If you listen to the record companies the file sharing demons are destroying the music industry (this has the potential to be come a major off topic rant so I will drop this here) and most people in the developed world have at least 1 mp3 track. Its a good bet that everyone in the west, under the age of 20 owns an MP3 player of some description (phone, iPod etc).

This says to me, that the predicted uptakes of MP3 was spot on. It is great. Instead of a crackly old Walkman with 60 minutes of music on, now we have iPods with 20gb of data (around a millions years worth of music isnt it?). How great is that. Now we can have more songs on an MP3 player than we have time left alive to listen to it!

Anyway, dragging this back on topic.

My question is, why havent we done the same for books? While I have no real “love” of Adobe, the PDF format is great. Even if you hate them you can get millions of books in .lit or .djvu either free or paid for. Almost all new software has its manuals as PDF, magazines give away their back issues as PDF. What a fantastic electronic world we live in.

Except it isnt.

I can listen to my MP3 player on the bus, on the train, on the toilet, in bed, in the gym, ANYWHERE. Yet when it comes to PDF files I am tied to my PC or at best the laptop. The laptop is handy, however its hot, heavy and eats batteries like a demon. Imagine being forced to listen to MP3 like that.

Why on Earth, can’t I walk into a high street retailer and buy a sensible sized eBook reader? Surely its not so hard. I am not talking about a mini thing the size of a watch either, it needs a readable screen. The size of a paperback is excellent for reading, so why not have something about the same size, mostly screen, which lets you read PDFs where ever you are?

Does something like this exist? If so, it needs to be marketed better. If it doesnt exist, then the idea is now my copyright. If anyone wishes to explore developing this let me know. 🙂 I am sure, using something like a transmeta chip, linux and basic text readers / PDF readers this could be a device for under £150. Volume will make it even cheaper.

Can anyone think of anything wrong with this idea?

Leading on from the previous rant about people trying to divert attention from the real issue in debates, this months .net magazine gets a look at.

In the “the Big Question” section it outlines a quote from the Wall Street Journal which quotes Peter Sealey as saying he knows of “no other industry where marketers knowingly introduce a flawed product.” Now Mr Sealey is currently a marketing professor at UCSB and was the chief marketing officer at Coca-cola.

Overall, the “talking heads” (typing heads?) who reply give a reasonable description of the issues involved. None really justify the eternal-beta some software companies live in (can you hear this Google?) but one is interesting. Continue reading →

Well the latest .NET magazine is out now and in it you can see the 12 winners of the 2005 .net awards.

Not much to surprise anyone – 1&1 won the best web host (again) which is more than acceptable as that is who this domain is ultimately hosted with … 🙂

All the others were standard names – BBC, BlueYonder, Blogger, Faceparty, Amazon, Motley Fool, Cheap Flights etc.

Well, it looks official now. Charon (Pluto’s moon) has no atmosphere.

Why any one thought it actually had any is beyond me, and probably no longer open for debate…, however as reported by the BBC.

By watching as Charon eclipsed a distant star last June, they were able to determine that the speed the light (from the star) was cut off signalled the lack of any atmosphere.

You can read more at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4588628.stm

Well, quite soon after this blog comes online we are offered a wonderful example of how people can twist debates.

A common tactic when people come under criticism is to turn it round and attempt to refute the comments by making (an often personal – also called ad hominem) attack on the original.

This is flawed logic. It does in no way show the criticism to be flawed, and to an extent is a subconcious reaction to the criticism being correct. Continue reading →

Although its quite old now – having been published in 2003 – the book “Bad
Thoughts” by Jamie Whyte is a fantastic introduction into philosophical
logic and common fallacies.

If you are interested in this book it can be found on places like Amazon if
you do a search for its ISBN – 0954325532, and new it was going for around
£8.99.

Throughout the book Jamie Whyte uses logic to expose the common fallacies
that surround us day to day – ranging from the false authority given to
victims of tragedies through to sheer evasive lies from the rich and
powerful.

Overall – a great read to say the least.