Year: 2003

Quick thoughts about global undo…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date August 1, 2003

If only I had time to give this the attention it deserves – but alas, I must soon get drunk. Neat Chris from anti-mega has brought into public attention that massive and aggravating UI problem that is what happens when you accidentally quit an application (like Safari) that allows you to have many different pseudo-documents open that are lost immediately without any kind of dialogue when the application quits. The reason I call them pseudo-documents is because the standard behaviour for something that you can edit in an application is to ask if changes should be saved before quitting. That’s not the case with tabs in browsers. If you accidentally press Apple-Q instead of Apple-W (to close an individual tab), you lose all the pages that were currently open in the browser (and – because the windows you have had open recently doesn’t map neatly onto the things in your history you can also lose all information about how to easily find out both what they were and any information about them).

Chris’ answer to this problem is the OS-wide global-undo facility, where you could simply undo your quit. Hammersley’s been talking about it too. I think this is the wrong approach – and not just because I think that it’s not going to happen for the next ten years at least, even if it’s possible – but also because I think there’s a better way.

So here’s my question: Why does your browser lose its current status when it quits? Or to put it more precisely, When I restart my browser, why doesn’t it still have all the pages that were open in it when I last quit? Certainly this should be possible – and it would solve the problem (although it might be considered non-standard behaviour). NetNewsWire doesn’t forget my subscriptions when I restart it – so why should my browser? (It’s not a direct analogy, but it makes a point.)

I’m sure there are a number of privacy reasons why this kind of thing could be a problem, and it might break the ‘session’ / ‘global’ distinction if not handled appropriately – but you could make it a preference that people turned on or off on their own computers, with the sites refreshed when you logged back on again, perhaps? I mean, that should work, right?

Random

Let it all out, Tom… Just let it go…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date August 1, 2003

Here’s a few things that I’ve found on the internet recently and really wanted to be able to write about in something vaguely resembling detail, but let’s just face it, it’s probably not going to bloody happen. Which is a shame. So here are the links, all the links and nothing but the links:

Search for web’s favourite colour
Just how fast is Friendster growing?
Sony Ericsson T610 Usability
(I’ve been wanting to say this myself for a while)
Beautiful Pictures of Earth from the Air
Seriously neat metafilter thread (via Ben)

Random

Post-structuralist Wifi?

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date July 31, 2003

So in the dream I’m back at University and I’m in one of those literature classes that you actually only get at school, where people are supposed to give their massive critical insights on a chunk of a play that’s about twenty lines long. I remember getting extremely irritable when someone cited a massive bastardisation of one of my favourite critics, but somehow the fact that people were applying theoretical approaches to Wifi to literature passed me by…

Journalism Personal Publishing

The Balkanisation of Blogdex…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date July 29, 2003

The last couple of days have seen a Daypop and Blogdex Top 40s that are totally overwhelmed by political articles from the States. If it wasn’t for the fact that many of these articles are concerned with the war in Iraq, you could be excused for thinking that nothing else was happening in the world at at all – even perhaps that there was no world outside the US.

Three years ago – back in the days of Beebo.org’s metalog – it was quickly observed that the various aggregation sites on the internet had a reinforcing effect on people’s browsing – that when they started, the popular links were getting two or three links a day, but that a month later they were getting up to ten or twelve. People linked to good things that they were exposed to – and they decided that aggregators represented an efficient way of finding those good things, prefiltered on the basis of popularity by the community at large. The effect? Sites that appeared on these sites got a significant extra amount of trafic, links, exposure. There’s significant value in this mechanism – it produces a manageable amount of links each day that an individual has a chance of being able to read. It also provides a sense of the overall community of webloggia and what they care about.

The problem comes when these aggregators don’t have enough granularity. Let me put it this way – Blogdex, Daypop, Popdex, Technorati and the like are no longer simple reflectors of a community’s activities – they are also one of our community’s best mechanisms for news discovery. To some extent they’re gradually becoming one of the most significant ways we find out what’s going on in the world around us.

Unfortunately it also means that the country with the most weblogs sets the international community’s agenda. There are only two obvious results of this – (i) that these aggregators will (or have) become less interesting or useful to people who don’t live in America or (ii) that the international community becomes used to the hideous unrepresentation of their own local news and debate. It used to be said that America had no idea of what happened outside its own borders. Can we really be working towards a new way of distributing and discovering media that means the rest of the world has no idea what happens outside America’s boundaries either?

There are a couple of ways that we could address this problem. Firstly there’s sampling – we could create a version of Blogdex that doesn’t work purely on the basis of popularity, but samples geo-coded weblogs from across the world in such a way that we are presented with a balanced world-wide view of what’s important. It’s a nice idea, but I think it’s impractical – for a start the linguistic barriers would make it less useful for many of us, but also because there would an infinity of ways of determining sampling rates across the world, none of which would likely be ‘fair’ or ‘clear’ to people.

No – the most practical way of approaching this problem is to find mechanisms which allow us to balkanise our aggregators – slice their responses – on the basis of metadata. There are many ways of geocoding weblogs in such a way that aggregators could have a sense of your nationality, location, language, time-zone and the like. And above and beyond such meta-tagging there are dozens of directories that include information based around clumping weblogs around interest groups and/or site locations. So I’m putting out a call now for someone to balkanise Blogdex. I want to be able to see the most popular links generated by people in my country – wherever the links themselves are based. I want to be able to slice these links in different ways, to see popular links mentioned on all English language sites (for example) or just those within the European Union. In fact I’d like to be able to see what gay webloggers are reading too. And people within my age group. All of this stuff should be possible, one way or another. I’d build it myself, if I had the expertise required… Can’t someone help me out?

Random

Music from the Diet Coke advert…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date July 28, 2003

It’s been driving me mad for weeks, but now I finally know the music that’s playing in the diet coke advert where the girl is on a train and everything she reads around her seems to be suggesting that she gets down and dirty with the guy opposite her… The song is by the Brothers Johnson, is called “Strawberry Letter 23” and is available on the Jackie Brown soundtrack. Bits of the song sound creepily like “I wanna sex you up”. Other bits sound like Supertramp only with more soul. Weird song. Cool, though…

Random

Friendster insanity…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date July 27, 2003

So someone wants to be my friend on Friendster. Yawn. God I’m popular. Blah blah blah. Except – what’s this – they have a user number of something like 750,000!? My god, how many people are on this damn thing!? So I go digging around in the ‘new people’ pane and the user numbers are around one million two hundred and fifty thousand! That’s insane! So I dig around and figure out you can get your own user number by clicking onto the second page of your list of friends. Assuming, of course, that you have that many friends. (Shines fingernails, looks smug.) And it turns out that my user number is 2175. Which I think demonstrates how awesomely cool I am, until I then figure out that the person I know with the lowest Friendster number is Azeem, which rather puts paid to that theory. (Shit-eating grin to camera.)

It’s such a shame we didn’t figure all this out earlier – I’d love to have tracked this stuff in some way – see a graph of how the member numbers have gone up over time. (Much like Mr Webb did with the Blogger post ids. Which makes me think – did he ever make that public? Hmm. Probably not.) So anyway – now I’ve got all these friends, what am I supposed to do with them? I had a sudden realisation that for many of my friends, I’m the only gay person they know. The whole point of Friendster is that you meet hot cool people through the hot cool people you already know. Then you make out and move in with each other. Which all rather depends on (1) Having cool friends and (2) Them knowing hot poofs. Darn it. This isn’t going to work at all…

Random

Keith Waterhouse on weblogs (redux)

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date July 26, 2003

While digging around in my site to try and find some quotes for a piece I’m presenting at EUvolt today (I’m so bloody busy my ears are bleeding), I stumbled upon an old piece on Newspaper columnists that Keither Waterhouse wrote years ago for The Journalist and which I – rather cheekily – transcribed because it was so pertinent to webloggers. Read it immediately: Keith Waterhouse on Weblogs?

“It is 106 years since Jerome K Jerome related his difficulties in trying to open a tin of pineapple in Three Men In A Boat. Unless you can improve this classic account, keep your problems with packaging to yourself.”

Random

Webb's favourite colour…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date July 24, 2003

My colleague, Mr Webb, has done it again. Today’s project is an attempt to find The Web’s favourite colour. Here’s how it works – you take a photo of your favourite colour with your camera phone and send it via MMS to avit@historicalfact.com. Then behind the scenes, the colours in the photo are completely averaged out, creating a representation of your colour that can be given a hex value. All the colours sent in are averaged out and the background of the page comes gradually to represent the web’s favourite colour…

At the moment, the site’s quite sparse – and the favourite colour appears to be (rather unfortunately) grey. But I get the impression that there’s much more work being done. Obvious things that leap to mind would be a display of the most recently sent in pictures and rolling averages of the last hour, last day, last month. Matt’s probably way ahead of me on all that stuff though, so I’ll shut up before I embarrass myself further…