Change of address

Still trying to encourage people to go over this way. It’s the new mediangler address.

Net Neutrality Again

Yesterday, news organizations and other publishers who’d like to control long-term costs for delivering content online were dealt a blow in Congress.The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, in approving a major telecom reform bill, rejected an amendment that would guarantee “net neutrality.”

Poynter Online – E-Media Tidbits

We should all be concerned.

Please go here: www.mediangler.com

I’m trying to wind this site down and move everything over to a new dedicated site.

Please change your booksmarks to http://www.mediangler.com

Living TV, HG TV and Food Network online

HGTV Video Guide. See also the partner sites: Living.com and Food Network. Streaming TV channels 24 hours a day.

It’s good to see information proliferating in the audio-visual sector. I know my friends in the search community are scratching their heads over how ultimately we will discover this kind of information.

technorati tags:content, new, media

IE 7

I hear people say we are heading for a new browser war. Maybe. It’s important because the browser is our first port of call with the external world, the tool we use to encounter the network of networks. There could hardly be a more important piece of software.

Vista

I was at a Microsoft presentation day, Tuesday, all gearing up for the November launch of the new operating system VISTA, Office 2007 and Microsoft’s collaboration tools and as I’m a user of IE7 Beta, we can throw that in for good measure.

Sure the headlines are going to say it’s a make or break for Microsoft but I don’t buy that one at all. These products are Microsoft’s mature market and there is no make or break. Only on Internet Explorer do I sense Microsoft is vulnerable but IE is hardly a cash cow.

First though VISTA. I’ve already written about Vista in the Irish Times. The aero-glass look and feel is a feature I enjoy. Semi-transparent views mean you can half see a lot of what lies behind any particular screen you might be looking at on the desktop.

Other admirable features are the sidebar where you can keep live applications or desktop gadgets like a weather forecast, and the bottom of screen menu which with a mouse-over gives you a view of all or any live window.

Your activities, then, are accessible in a number of ways.

Aesthetics are going to be increasingly important in screen communications and Vista is a step forward. It’s a comfortable environment for people like me who rely on intuition.

Still, I felt MSFT could be doing more. People want to enjoy their time at a computer and the PC’s functions are migrating to the TV where aesthetic appeal is far more important, so a few jolly features like being able to do something with a buddy on another PC across a broadband network could have been built in at the operating level, particularly by a company that owns Groove. But so far so good.

Microsoft’s information retrieval philosophy in Vista is a step to applaud. I’ve been keeping an eye on Fast company, originator of web search engine Alltheweb but now a highly focused enterprise search company. Fast’s philosophy is simple. Forget people organising data. Index and search it and then present it in ways that make intuitive sense.

Microsoft is trying to do that with its stacks. You can still be an old fashioned heirarchal person and use tree-structure folders to organise your data in Vista, but you can also leave the organising to the search engine.

It will return documents of all kinds in a variety of stacks. Stacks are reminiscent of Mac’s early hyperstack tools. The search engine will organise information for you by, for example author, document type, subject, date. You name it. They all constitute what is in effect a different stack.

The benefit of a stack is it gives you a way to change your relationship with data. Having searched for a document (or rather, having organised your documents) by author, you can create a different stack (date) and drill down to find the document you are looking for, at the same time creating a different context (timeliness, for example).

Great. And it looks good. But here’s the rub. Microsoft doesn’t have an aesthetic philosophy. They talk about listening to customers and rightly believe that to be progress. It means they build features cutomers have asked for. But the consumer world is after more that. Stacks could have been dressed up in a number of different and appealing visualisations. Stacks could give a multitude of visual clues to users. To devise and develop those visual clues you need to be thinking aesthetically and you need to understand the relationship between images, understanding, and pleasure.

This is where MSFT falls down and where Vista is in need of attention from artists and designers from other fields. Perhaps I am quirky in insisting that an operating system needs to be more beautiful. Vista is progress and I think it will move Microsoft forward. Where Microsoft is though is a hard place. Stuck between old engineering disciplines and the new aesthetic world it is slowly entering (IPTV, X-Box, Media Centre). You cannot easily port engineering values to those walks of life where people’s first priority is to groove… did I say Groove? Maybe Ray Ozzie is the artist to Bill Gates code-geek.

Uncertain Knowledge

We know less about the future than we’ve ever done. Because I just turned up on technology voices I though this argument needed a revisit this time for a technology audience.

Tomorrow’s Post

Won't be much of it – I'm in a briefing from Microsoft on Vista and the Office launch. But will get back to you with news on Wednesday.

But hey, in the meantime take a look around, click the tag cloud or browse the categories. The site's starting to take shape.

Podcasts

Pluggd podcast community launched today

Seattle based start-up Pluggd opened their podcast directory for public use today; the company aims to make podcast listening easier for nontechnical users.

That’s the take from TechCrunch. Interesting how podcasting is getting organised. I’m hoping to launch my own podcast series next week which is part of the reason I’m spending a day in Dublin, sitting in with Microsoft Vista developers and then with podcastingireland.ie sorting out the pod.

As a journalist I never did radio but like everybody else now there’s nothing stopping me.

technorati tags:podcasting

New Advertising Models

San Francisco based GoodStorm will soon launch a new program called MeCommerce that will allow bloggers to insert product listings in a javascript and iframe box on their sites and keep 50% of the retail mark-up for themselves.

TechCrunch » Blog Archive » GoodStorm to offer e-commerce widget with 50% revenue split for bloggers

Just shows that nobody and no model is invulnerable. Good Storm is surely a threat to Amazon which gives paltry affiliate fees, and to the affiliate model which Amazon spawned. Companies that use affiliate programmes and performance-based advertising (the current buzz) will have to rethink their margins.

technorati tags:advertising

New Blog Site Update

I'm having problems with column alignment on the new blog site, so please do not go there yet. Hoping it will be remedied by tomorrow.

New Media, Old Values

The internet mob builds a worldwide web of punishment. Judicial forms of humiliating offenders have long been banned but they are making a sinister return online, says John-Paul Flintoff

The internet mob builds a worldwide web of punishment – Sunday Times – Times Online

I was struck also by the report above. I've said before I think the motivation for content co-creation, user content and all the rest, at least for an older age group, is to seek a return to a more moral period in our history. So new technology, old values.

What the Sunday Times records here is going a bit far of course but it does underline the fact that we need to understand change across a wide range of activity and values, which also goes back to something I've written on earlier, the need for the old guard in the IT industry to open up to new values.

technorati tags:values, content

Go Here: www.mediangler.com

I'm trying to transfer the blog over to a dedicated host/domain. The reason is so I can get more control over the look and feel and add in tag clouds and related stuff. Please go here and re-book mark the site. I'll keep this blog up for a few weeks yet and run the two concurrently for a few days at least.

Old Media’s Decline

This is from yesterday's Sunday Times in the UK. Now the Sunday Times is ultimately owned by a competitor of ITV so scepticism is warranted. Still ITV has shipped half its audience over the past twenty years and is now sacking staff.

"Investors switch off from ITV. Falling audiences and ad revenues put channel boss Charles Allen’s future in doubt, write Louise Armitstead and Dominic Rushe."

Investors switch off from ITV – Sunday Times – Times Online

As well as sacking people it's looking at reducing programming budgets. The response is typical across old media companies, reducing capacity in an era of media expansion. In the what we're seeing is companies being allowed toconvey an impression that they are under threat when in reality the are failing to seize opportunity. Who deserves firing?

technorati tags:old, media, new, media

Bias By The Majors

BBCWATCH.COM

"The BBCWATCH reports demonstrate how the BBC consistently fails to adhere to its legal obligations to produce impartial and accurate reporting."

My impression has always been that the broadcast majors have for a long time seen their role as