Robert Scoble’s linkblog is a wonderful idea. And, I do get quite a bit of traffic from it when he has chosen to link to me in the past, so I shouldn’t complain about it. But I’m going to anyway.

The reason I’m going to complain is that while I really love the concept of it, in practise I find it largely unusable. Why? Lack of full text posts. My guess is that Scoble himself wouldn’t subscribe to his own linkblog, as it currently stands. He has written many times about the necessity of full text posts, as he and many other people, such as myself, do the majority of their feed reading offline.

The thing that surprises me is that people actually complained about his original linkblog, where he used the full text of posts that he linked to. This is bizarre to me for a couple of reasons:

RSS for me is the best thing to happen to the Internet, and at the same time the bane of my existence. I suffer from information overload, and wish that I could have the ability to view heavily filtered content, and just skim the cream off the top, if you will. Machine-based filtering isn’t at the point where it will be able to detect the odd, interesting post that doesn’t normally conform to my tastes, but an intelligent human being very well could.

So, while I’d love to read Scoble’s linkblog, it’s totally useless to me when reading offline. And that’s a real shame.

Jason Calcanis is giving away 100 free versions of X1 search. What a great way to get the word out!

Well. After having extensively tested X1, Copernic Desktop Search (previous post) and FileHAND as alternatives to Windows XP’s completely pathetic search functionality, I settled on Copernic’s offering as the best of the free tools. X1 is the best functionality-wise, but I can get 85% of the way there for free, so I can’t justify spending $75 USD for that last 15%. Plus, X1 had some sort of strange problem where it would lock my PST file when my computer booted, and I would be unable to open Outlook until I shut down X1. I’m sure I could troubleshoot the problem, but I figure if I’m paying for a product that has formidable free competition, it’d better be perfect out of the box.

Enter Google, the 300 lb gorilla of the search space.

I have yet to work with it extensively, but Google’s new Desktop Search utility is very compelling. Having your desktop search results appear alongside your regular web search results is so intuitive and comfortable that I suspect I will soon start wondering what it was like before this existed.

That being said, I have one beef with Google: their single-minded focus on Internet Explorer. Google’s new desktop search has the ability to search through your browser history, so that you can now search in Google for “that site I saw a few days ago” and have a much better chance at finding it. That is, as long as you use IE as your browser.

True, IE has the lion’s share of the market, but that market share is dropping, FAST. Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, Mozilla’s Firefox browser has become what IE should have become by now. And Internet users are figuring that out in droves. Firefox renders pages faster than IE, has less security issues, and once you’ve used tabbed browsing, you’ll never go back. IE is a dinosaur, and the days where anyone with a web presence could afford to only support one browser are gone.

Google, good show! Great product, now make it support full functionality with Firefox!

X1, Copernic, FileHAND, Microsoft search - nice to have known you. Good luck.

I’m such a geek.

I just spent part of the afternoon playing with my son and listening to Wil Wheaton’s session at Gnomedex. I couldn’t get to Lake Tahoe, but I could still enjoy it streaming over the net courtesy of Doug Kaye’s IT Conversations onto my laptop, then beamed to my living room stereo using the FM modulator I use to listen to podcasts in my car.

I’ve been an off-again, on-again reader of Wil’s site for a couple years now. Wil - if you happen to read this - please turn on full content in your RSS feed. I read over 100 feeds regularly, but I can only do so by reading them offline. I miss a lot of your stuff because it’s not in your feed. There are ways to do it without the bandwidth killing your pocketbook.

Anyhow, I haven’t read either of Wil’s books yet, but after listening to the excerpts he read they’re definitely going to the top of my “gotta get” list. Wil had to be a teenager in front of the world, and writes about it engagingly, humourously, and in a way that somehow allows me to think about the embarrassment I felt at that time of life without feeling embarrassed.

[Update] Wil decided to go to full-feeds!

[Updated October 6, 2004 - see update at bottom]

A period of intense change is going on right now, and a fight is brewing. The fight is between traditional broadcasters of television and radio content, and their consumers who want more control over how they consume that content.

You might say right now that there are two kinds of people: those that have used a TiVo or similar Personal Video Recorder to watch their television content, and those that haven’t. For those that haven’t heard of them, think of a PVR as a VCR on steroids. You can record all of your favourite shows very conveniently, without ever having to change or rewind a tape, and you can fast forward past commercials or change shows at the click of a button. You can rewind or pause live TV - something that becomes second nature and then a necessity very quickly. Basically, you can watch what you want to watch when and how you want to watch it, not when and how the network wants you to watch it.

There are many, many solutions already available for PVRs for television, and the courts are full of battles about them, as you can well imagine. But what appeared to have been overlooked until now was the “other” broadcast medium, over-the-air radio. Video may have killed the radio star in the livingroom, but the radio star just packed his stuff up and moved to the car.

That’s the thing - you can’t watch TV when you’re driving. But look at our highways packed with commuters. How do they occupy their brain “cycles” while stuck in traffic? Radio.

But traditional over-the-air radio is broken in many ways even more than television is. An average listener does not have particularly good odds at finding something relevant to them on the dial, due to the limited number of viable radio frequencies. Satellite radio helps in this matter, but all it really does is introduce more of the “99 channels and nothing on” possibility.

What does this have to do with blogs and iPods? Everything. Adam Curry may be best known as an MTV VJ from a few years ago, but what he should be known for is being a cutting edge Internet broadcaster, or what is increasingly becoming known as a podcaster. His ipodder software is the first in what will likely be a long line of audio content aggregators. He is working closely with Dave Winer - the father of weblogging - on this stuff, and what they’re doing so far is mind-blowing.

But I’m not doing this subject justice. If you want to know more about the coming revolution in audio broadcasting - podcasting - check out this article by Doc Searls.

We’re in for a wild ride.

[Update]

From James H in the comments comes this great link: How Podcasting Will Save Radio

An analogy to the perspective the writer, Tod Maffin, takes in this article might be stated as “How the Automobile Will Save Carriage-Makers”. I think both perspectives are compatible - those in the traditional broadcast industry that embrace podcasting will be saved by it. Those that don’t, won’t.

Great post! Oh, and how cool is it that this comes from a fellow Canadian that works for the CBC?

iloveradio.org <- subscribed.

Breaking news:

Software Testing is not Ethical

NEW YORK — People for Ethical Treatment of Software (PETS) announced today that seven more software companies have been added to the group’s watch list of companies that regularly practice software testing.
“There is no need for software to be mistreated in this way so that companies like these can market new products.” said Ken Grandola, spokesperson for PETS. “Alternative methods of testing these products are available”

According to PETS, these companies force software to undergo lengthy and arduous tests, often without rest, for hours or days at a time. Employees are assigned to “break” the software by any means necessary, and inside sources report that they often joke about “torturing” the software.

“It’s no joke,” said Grandola. “Innocent programs, from the day the are compiled, are cooped up in tiny rooms and “crashed” for hours on end. They spend the whole lives on dirty, ill-maintained computers, and are unceremoniously deleted when they’re not needed anymore”.

Grandola said the software is kept in unsanitary conditions and is infested with bugs.

“We know that alternatives to this horror exist.” he said, citing industry giant Microsoft Corporation as a company that has become successful without resorting to software testing.

Unfortunately, I don’t know where this originated. The jab at MS is fun (albeit totally ridiculous). Hey, it’s Friday!

During my practicum, I worked for a very good cause, Computers for Schools. They are an organization that takes donated computers from corporations, refurbishes them, and installs them in British Columbia elementary schools.

I just noticed this article stating that the B.C. government is going to do a one-time payment of $1,000,000 to boost Computer for Schools’ effort. Considering that they run off of $50,000 annually, this is very significant. Right on!

Lately I’ve noticed more and more of my favourite sites, many which are sites that have had very high PageRank in the past, showing no PageRank whatsoever - not zero PageRank, mind you, but null PageRank. I haven’t seen PageRank be updated for any of the sites I frequently visit for quite some time, either.

Is Google phasing out its public display of PageRank for any given site? It’s clear that Google must still be updating PageRank internally, as it is a crucial part of the algorithm they use to rank websites in search results. Link-back updates have occurred recently, supporting this theory.

So why is it that PageRank seems to be getting stale, and in some cases is just plain broken?

[Update]
I just noticed that Jason Calcanis over at Weblogs Inc. has been wondering the same thing.

Well, I couldn’t possibly have imagined this happening, but my previous post generated a response in the comments from Peter Engrav, the Development Manager for OneNote at Microsoft. He responded kindly, considerately, and with valuable information to help me out of the bind I described. For this I must thank him. Peter, I’d love to link to you, but you didn’t provide a URL in your comment!

This blogging thing is really starting to blow my mind.

Sometimes Microsoft really screws up.

I suppose that’s not surprising, but it’s particularly frustrating when it’s associated to something that they did particularly well. I, like many others, downloaded the free (albeit time-limited) OneNote SP1 beta release, which is the good thing I’m referring to. Microsoft realized that to get people interested in OneNote, they needed more exposure, so they made it available to anyone for free, for a limited time.

I’d been looking for a note taking program for my notes to call home for some time, and I thought I had found it with OneNote. After using it for a short time, I imported all of my notes from previous applications.

Over time, the shine wore off. I found OneNote to be sort of clunky for what I needed, and the “click anywhere and start typing” functionality to be more of a burden than a boon. I’m sure it works wonderfully for Tablet users, and maybe one day when I have a Tablet, I’ll give it another try.

Or maybe not.

It became clear to me that I would not continue with OneNote as my primary note taking application, and that I would need to migrate my information to another note taking tool. What I’ve been looking for is a personal wiki, where I can quickly and easily make links between related pages. In my perfect world, I would have a personal wiki that is easy to edit in on my desktop (which includes the ability to add active hyperlinks to notes that point outside of the program), and have it synchronize to a related application on my Pocket PC. Needless to say, I’m still searching.

But yesterday, when I fired up OneNote to look up a URL I had stored there, I was greeted with a message informing me that the beta period had expired. No sweat I thought, I’ll just copy/paste my stuff out of OneNote into my next tool, when I figure out what that will be.

Today I decided that in the interim, I would go back to using Notebook, a personal wiki that does some, but not all, of what I need it to do. At least I’d be able to continue adding and editing.

To my surprise, I found that not only will OneNote not allow me to add anything more to it, but it won’t allow me to copy the content that is currently in there - my content - to another tool.

Being a geek, I’ve found a way to pull my data out, but it won’t be easy, and it will be very time consuming. Needless to say, this has left an incredibly bad taste in my mouth. I won’t be recommending to OneNote to friends and colleagues after this experience, and I have to say that some of the trust that Microsoft has been trying desperately to build up with their various initiatives has been destroyed, yet again.

I understand that I was fortunate to be able to try the software for free in the first place, and I also understand that Microsoft can’t allow people to continue using it forever for free. But when the time has come to force the user into action, this heavy-handed approach had the opposite effect from what I suspect they were hoping. If they were hoping they’d get me to spend $100 on a simple note taking application that doesn’t really suit my needs just to get my data back, they are sadly mistaken. Furthermore, I’ll think twice about purchasing Microsoft products when viable competition exists.

As you can probably tell, I’m having a harder and harder time considering myself a Microsoft fan these days.

So the news came out Friday of last week that Longhorn is officially scheduled for release in 2006. Most people expected as much, but that wasn’t the “interesting� part. The “interesting� part is that Microsoft has decided to release Longhorn without WinFS, the vaunted new file system that was supposed to give users an easily searchable file system, so you would no longer need to remember where you put things.

While WinFS is definitely a “nice to have�, it’s not on my list of things that I need my OS to do. LookOut or X1 or any number of other utilities can take care of that for me.

To be honest, as a regular computer user, there’s not much that Longhorn is supposed to do that I am at all excited about.

Windows 98 could do almost everything I need a computer to do, except it wasn’t stable. In fact, my parents are currently running on Windows 2000, and are totally happy with it. They were happy on 98, and I had to force them to upgrade to a more stable OS when they got a new machine a few years ago. Will they want Longhorn? They don’t even want XP.

My biggest complaints these days are performance related, and if Microsoft is true to form, Longhorn won’t be giving us any performance improvements, when compared on the same hardware with XP. Is there enough in Longhorn that truly enhances the user’s computing experience to make the performance hit worth it? I seriously doubt it.

I’ve done all of the performance optimization that I can on my current machine, including turning off unneeded services, and the tips provided here, and I still feel like XP is just well, sort of sluggish. This computer, an Athlon 2200+ with 512 Megs of RAM doesn’t feel appreciably faster than a 300 Mhz Celeron machine I have at home with 196 Megs of RAM running Windows 98. Why is that?

While I’d never advocate using an older operating system, I find it frustrating that at the breakneck speed at which hardware performance improves, upgrading to the latest version of Windows virtually guarantees you will see similar if not poorer performance than you did on the previous OS.

MS, you don’t need high-end processors and video cards to make Windows look better than the Fisher-Price look it currently has. There’s nothing I hate dealing with more than Mac zealots, but when they argue that OS X looks better than XP, I find myself looking at my toes.

Come on, Microsoft. Improve the user’s experience by making an OS that can keep up with its users. If you’re really “betting the company on Longhorn”, you might want to figure out what Longhorn is supposed to be all about.

What’s scary is that I’m a Microsoft fan and I feel this way.

Is it possible to outsource / offshore your own job? It seems a developer posted to Slashdot claiming to have done so, according to this article in the India Times. While it appears that this could work beautifully for a developer, I guess a Software Test Engineer such as myself would have a much harder time trying to swing something like this. Plus, it just feels wrong to me. But hey, it’s ingenious, if nothing else!

Thanks to Mike’s List for the link.