world wide telescope
If you haven’t heard about Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope you should go check it out here. It looks very cool and will change the way kids interact with astronomy.
Archive for February, 2008
Increasing interaction with your blog
I am amazed it has been such a long time but I took a conscious decision to stop being picky about the design/layout of my posts back on August 3rd and removed my own requirement to have an image on every post.
The reason for the decision in the first place was simple - I removed posts I hadn’t got round to sorting an image out for because they were no longer timely or interesting - in effect I was censoring myself. Since then 99% of posts have just been text and the volume and frequency of posts has increased.
But has it devalued the look and feel of the blog? I think in some small way it is not as easy to read, certainly longer posts. For long posts, it is just too much text - I like visual aids when moving through text 
As I look through my RSS feed, there are a lot of people who write long posts that I find myself skimming. Some with images, some without. I find that if an image catches my eye I may give it more attention than a post without images so for longer posts at least it should improve interaction with your readers.
So do I go back to adding photos? I think it’s a question of using quality images rather than using one every post and more important still, not letting the lack of an image stop you from posting in the first place.
why google did unity
Nicholas Deleon talks about the new Unity venture being pursued by Google and a bunch of other companies which will increase the bandwidth capacity across the Pacific. He says:
“One quick thought I had: how often do you, average American Internet user, connect to Asian servers? Unless YouTube or Wikipedia has servers there, it does seem weird to me to suggest all this Trans-Pacific Internet activity when I’m mainly browsing CNN and Drudge and other U.S.-based sites.”
I think Nicholas misses the point.
If this were about the average user using the internet, then the communications companies would be building this pipeline on their own. Google’s problem is that it has so much information. I am betting a lot of that information gets moved around all of its servers globally, whether that is Google pushing data out from their US servers or vice versa. The amount of information they have is increasing exponentially and will continue to grow.. so now they need to work with the telecoms companies to sate their own need for bandwidth. Not just users.
AOL just will not be a serious competitor to Google, Yahoo or Microsoft
Reading Dylan Fuller’s post on AOL CEO, Andy Fulco, talking tough:
“I hope they beat each other’s brains out over search and leave the display market to us,†he said to the Interactive Advertising Bureau annual conference. “I think it’s a mistake. But I think Napoleon said never interrupt your enemy when they’re in the middle of making a mistake.â€
Dylan is right there are some cool products being talked about. But this is how to lose users.. go along to the Xdrive website and click the link for more info about their new ultra cool Xdrive Desktop Lite app - a 404 error.
So I download it instead.
I already have an account.. I can log in via the website just fine - but I just get a login error via the Xdrive Lite app. I know it is in beta still but surely they can do better than this?
AOL are lucky Google’s Gdrive is not out yet and Microsoft’s version (Skydrive) is currently unusable - you have to select individual files to upload to their online storage - thats great when I have a few thousand files.
[update] ah - they fixed the link now and updated the front page design entirely - much better, there is also no advert either on the front page interestingly. For me though, the product still just doesn’t seem to work as advertised. I selected a directory and dragged it to the app. It should sync right? Well the list of transfers shows all the files but after it syncs some files, it just seems to get stuck - files are no longer being uploaded. I don’t know why.. some form of error message of status bar would be useful! Incidentally this was the same issue 4 months ago when I last tried Xdrive 
bbc persian and google shared items
Take a look at some stats on rssmeme.
Not sure what to make of this, but I thought it was interesting to see that BBC Persian was the 46th highest source of items shared on Google Reader*. The English BBC News site is nowhere to be seen. Even the NY Times which seems have got to grips with new technologies quicker than most is at 49.
*This is only the Google Reader shared feeds indexed by RSSmeme not everyone’s.
