Last year I bought a Kindle e-book reader and wrote about its strengths and weaknesses. With the release of Apple’s iPad last month, people keep asking me whether I wish I had waited for that instead. The short answer is, no, but now a fellow gadget-aficionado, Tony (aka @thewordpressguy) has drawn my attention to another new device, the TEGA tablet, and has asked me for an opinion*. I am yet to get my hands on either device, but I won’t let that stop me expressing a view!

The history of tablet computers is showing every sign of repeating the pattern of mp3 players. The first mp3 player pre-dated the iPod by about 5 years, but it was not until Apple entered the market that they really began to take off. Two key factors behind Apple’s success were design and the iTunes store. Having owned a Creative Nomad Jukebox and an iRiver H340 before getting an iPod, I experienced first-hand how much better the user-interface of the iPod was than everything that came before (even if it lagged at times in its technical specifications). The iTunes store was even more important. While early-adopting enthusiasts like me may have had the motivation and patience to convert all of my CDs to mp3 format, this would not be true of most people. The iTunes store provided a simple and reasonably-priced way for people to get content onto their iPods. The rest is history.

Just like iPods, tablets have been around for some time before Apple entered the fray. The term was popularised by Microsoft in 2001, but tablets were around in one form or another well before that (you could even include Apple’s less than successful Newton). Just like the iPod, the iPad is no doubt a superbly-designed piece of hardware, with an intelligent user-interface (I am extrapolating from my experience with the iPhone as well as taking into account the plethora of articles I have read about the iPad). Combine that with the App store, which is to the iPad and iPhone what the iTunes store was to the iPod, and the success of the iPad looks assured.

While the iPod came to dominate the mp3 player market, the iPad may stimulate the emergence of a broader range of alternative tablets, much as the Google Android phone is showing signs of being a serious alternative to the iPhone. Based on Tony’s assessment of the TEGA, it could well be an early example of this phenomenon. While it does not offer Apple design, it does have a few other things instead, such as USB, card-reader ports (rather than having to rely on external adapters as the iPad does) and a built in 3G modem which allows you to pop in your own sim card (so no more 3G dongles). What may hold even greater appeal for some is that it is operating-system agnostic: while most people would buy it with Windows 7 installed, it will also ship with Linux.

The release of the TEGA is an interesting development and I am sure there will be more iPad alternatives to come, but that brings me back to the original question. Do I have Kindle-regret? Would an iPad, a TEGA or something else be better?

I do not. The Kindle certainly has its shortcomings, some of which I discussed in my original review, but here’s what it gives me that the alternatives do not:

• electronic-ink display – while the page-turning flicker may be annoying to some, I continue to find it a very easy medium to read, particularly in bright light
• battery life – with 3G turned off (except for when I am making a purchase), I get two weeks or more between charges. The iPad offers an impressive 10 hours, so the gap is closing, but the Kindle retains the lead for now. Clocking in at only 2.5 hours, the TEGA remains a laggard on this score and it cannot be a serious contender until this improves.
• price -  compared to prices of portable computers only a few years ago, with prices starting at US$499 the iPad looks cheap. But at US$259, the Kindle is a lot cheaper. Of course, it cannot do what the iPad can do, but if you are after an e-book reader (as I was) that may not matter. The TEGA is closer to US$1,000 (A$1,187.98) and at that price looks expensive.
• continuous partial attention – on a computer I cannot help flicking from email to twitter to following links, so perhaps I suffer from a touch of CPA. What this means is that a single-purpose device like the Kindle is ideal for me and offers a better, less-interrupted reading experience. It may seem absurd to some to want to impose restrictions on a device, but in this case it is an advantage for me.

As a bit of a gadget-obsessive, I may well succumb to the lure of an iPad one day (perhaps 2.0), or indeed a descendant of the TEGA or something similar. For now though, I will happily continue reading on the Kindle.

* In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that if enough fellow-bloggers post on the topic of the TEGA, Tony will have the option of purchasing a heavily-discounted unit.

This week Fairfax reported on Australia’s broadband pricing “war” in an article appearing in both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age. The publisher thoughtfully spared online readers the egregious chart that it foisted on readers of the paper editions. Judging from this junk (to use the official adjective for low-quality charts), these newspapers should stick to journalism and steer clear of graphics.

The chart in question was brought to my attention by Mule Stable regular @zebra, who also kindly scanned it (and devised the headline of this post), allowing me to reproduce it here. It shows the pricing of a number of broadband internet plans offered by the four largest internet service providers (ISPs) in Australia.

Chart from print edition of The Age (29 April 2010)

It is a busy chart, made difficult to read by a number of ill-advised design decisions:

• the horizontal axis reads from right to left rather than the conventional left to right
• although labeled “Price vs Download”, price is on the horizontal axis, again violating convention*
• repeating the ISP label for every point adds unnecessarily to the busy-ness of the chart and it also makes the legend redundant
• labeling each point with the download limit (although not the price), adds more unnecessary ink

These conventions are arbitrary: we could just as well have developed a tradition in the West of reading from right to left, for example. But once a convention is in place, you have to have a very good reason to break with it. Otherwise, you end up making your chart harder for readers to interpret for no good reason.

But perhaps the biggest weakness in the chart is the labeling of the ISPs. Each has its own colour, but this is not enough for the eye to naturally group them together, which makes it hard to track the pricing trend provider by provider. This is easily addressed by connecting the points for each ISP with lines. Once this is done and the other short-comings are also addressed, a couple of anomalies in the data leap out immediately. Compared to their other plans, the Optus 100GB plan and the TPG 150GB appear dramatically over-priced, costing more than other plans that offer more data.

Improved version: Price vs Download limit

Of course, this phenomenon was there in the original chart, but it was hidden. So much so, that the journalist does not appear to have noticed at all as it went unremarked in the article. This is a good example of the power of good charting technique.

There are a number of possible explanations for the anomalous data points. They could simply be errors, although it is certainly not impossible (or perhaps even unlikely) that ISPs have illogical pricing policies. A more likely explanation is that the data includes apples and oranges: the higher-priced plans may be bundles offering additional services such as VOIP that are not included in the other more basic plans. Perhaps if Fairfax had done a better job on the chart in the first place, the journalist may have been prompted to answer this question for us.

* Typically “dependent variables” (the y of “y versus x”) appear on the vertical axis and “independent variables” on the horizontal axis.

Since the launch of the Mule Stable discussion forum three weeks ago, the number of users has been growing steadily. Some are active contributors, while others prefer just to be observers. New discussion groups are appearing, including one focusing on books, and one associated with the new Sydney-based Digital Citizens initiative. One of the more active groups at the moment is the markets group, where people have been discussing the goings on in the financial markets.  I am keen to see the Stable continue to grow, so do consider signing up yourself!

In the meantime, there have also been further developments at StatusNet, the company behind the open source software that powers the Stable. Earlier in the week, the public beta of their StatusNet hosting service was announced and shortly afterwards,  StatusNet’s CEO, Evan Prodromou, was interviewed by OStatic to explain the thinking behind StatusNet and open microblogging in general. The whole interview is worth a read, but it is really summed up by this remark:

We think microblogging is too big for any one site or company.

Evan also talked about an exciting new development known as OStatus. This is an umbrella term for a suite of technologies which will help make the open microblogging vision a reality: separate communities like the Mule Stable, which can nevertheless communicate between one another. This is in contrast to Facebook or Twitter which operate as “walled gardens”. Google Buzz, WordPress, LiveJournal and Tumblr already implement OStatus to varying degrees and, of course, so does StatusNet and hence the Mule Stable.

But back to the Mule Stable. Following on from the introductory video about getting started on the Stable, here is another video which aims to make sense of the symbol soup of microblogs. If you have been put off by seeing pages full of @, # and !, this video should help make things a little clearer. It lasts around four minutes and this time, for the benefit of speed readers and the visually impaired, I have included a transcript as well. If the video below is a bit hard to see, here is a larger format version.

Demo Video Transcript

Welcome to another Mule Stable demo video, this time it’s all about tagging.

The first time you visit the Mule Stable it can look a bit like a symbol soup, full of # symbols, @ symbols and exclamation marks. But these symbols are in fact a short-hand that can turn posting simple text messages into something a lot more powerful.

In this demo, I’ll run through all the different types of tag symbols you can use on the Mule Stable.

Even though it’s not really a tag, I’ll start with the @ symbol. Sticking an @ in front of another user’s name is a way to direct your post to that user’s attention. As a shortcut, if I click on the “reply” button next to any post, it will automatically start my post with an @, like this…

Now if I go to my Home page and click on my “replies” tab I’ll see all the posts that anyone has sent to me, in my case anything with @mule in it.

The last thing to notice about the @ replies is that they turn the username into a link. Clicking on the link takes you to that user’s profile.

Now on to hashtags. You can highlight the topic of a post by using a hash symbol, for example #music. Just as with @ replies, doing this will automatically turn your tag into a link. Clicking on the link will show you any other posts which used the same tag. Hashtags are a handy way to group discussions on a particular theme.

To get a sense of the tags other people are using, you can click on the Public timeline and the select the “Recent tags” tab. The bigger the tag, the more often it has been used.

Up next are “bang tags”, which allow you to send your post to a particular group. You can see all the Mule Stable groups by clicking the “Groups” tab on the public timeline. Now if you put an exclamation mark in front of the group’s name, it will send a post to all of the members of that group. Like hashtags, bang tags automatically create links, only this time the link takes you to the relevant group.

There is one important difference between bang tags and hashtags to be aware of. Anyone can use a hashtag at any time, but bang tags only work if you have already joined the group. If you are not a member of the group and try to use a bang tag, you’ll just have an odd-looking word, with no link and no posting to the group.

The last type of tag is a friend tag, and this one really starts looking messy! If you look at the people you subscribe to by clicking “Subscriptions” on your home page, you will see you can assign tags to other users as a way of grouping them into, say, friends, family and music buffs. Keep in mind that others will be able to see the tags you choose! Once you’ve tagged a few people you can send a message to all of them with a @ reply hashtag combo (@#). Again, this creates a link and will send the post into their “Replies” timeline.

So that’s it as far as tags are concerned….stay tuned for the next Mule Stable demo video!

Earlier this week, Amazon began shipping the international version of the “Kindle” electronic book reader for US$279. The first generation of the Kindle was released almost two years ago in the US, so it has been a long time coming. But, with the announcement this week of the competing Barnes & Noble “Nook“, it looks as though the era of the e-book reader is well and truly upon us.

The Kindle has a monochrome “electronic paper” screen rather than the pervasive LCD screens found on laptops, iPhones and BlackBerries. Also known as e-paper or e-ink, the electronic paper screen comes a lot closer to replicating the appearance of traditional printed paper. There is no back-light and in fact displaying a page draws no power, it is only changing the display that will draw on the battery. As a result, the battery life of electronic paper devices is much longer than other devices. Amazon claims that, with the wireless connection turned off, you can read on the Kindle for up to two weeks before draining the battery. This also means that the Kindle can display an image on the screen when it is powered off, which is somewhat disconcerting at first. Although the contrast is not quite as high as print (the background is not quite white and the text is a little grey), reading on the Kindle is very comfortable. Better still, the quality does not degrade in strong sunlight as is often the case for LCD screens (although they are getting better all the time). So reading the Kindle outside is just as easy as it is in bed (although you will still need a bedside light).

The book distribution model for the Kindle is tightly bound to Amazon. Users can buy books for the Kindle either via the Amazon website or on the Kindle itself via a 3G mobile network data connection. The book is then downloaded (very quickly) via 3G. Amazon refers to this network connection as “Whispernet” and it clearly hopes to achieve the same user tie-in that Apple achieved with their iTunes Store. The workings of Whispernet also help to explain why the Kindle was limited to the US for so long as the original US model of the Kindle used the Sprint EVDO network, which does not extend outside the US. The new international version makes use of the AT&T 3G network in the US and elsewhere it uses AT&T’s international roaming parters. Users do not pay directly for any data usage on the network. Instead, Amazon has a deal with AT&T to access their network and they presumably factor the data costs into the cost of the books.

Anyone who has ever taken their mobile phone overseas will know that, while convenient, international roaming does incur additional costs one way or another. No doubt until such time as it negotiates additional deals with local carriers, the cost of providing Whispernet will be higher for Amazon internationally than in the US. As a result, there are pricing differences on the Kindle for international customers. I was able to get a good insight into exactly how this works because a colleague has also bought a Kindle but, for some reason, Amazon has his configured as though he is a US customer. While most books appear to be US$2 cheaper for him (there are even books which are free in the US which cost US$2 for Australian customers), Amazon levies a US$2 roaming fee on US customers for using Whispernet outside the US. So, in the end the cost is the same unless he travels to the US to download the books. Interestingly, newspaper subscriptions appear to be the same price for US and international users but US subscribers will pay the roaming fee on top of the subscription fee outside the US.

Exciting though it is for early-adopters, users in Australia will find that the Kindle has a number of limitations. In the picture you can see the front page of today’s New York Times rather than, say, the Sydney Morning Herald because no Australian newspaper subscriptions are available. I have heard that Australian publishers were unhappy with the meagre share of the subscription fee Amazon offered and so walked away from the deal. This may or may not be true, but it sounds plausible if short-sighted. But, when it comes to international newspaper and magazine subscriptions, there are a number that are available in the US but not in Australia, including The Economist. Also, the number of book titles available for the Kindle is still relatively small (around 2% or so of the titles available in print from Amazon). Barnes & Noble are aiming to leap-frog the Kindle by providing access to over 500,000 out-of-copyright titles in the Google Book Project. Furthermore, there are plenty of Kindle editions that are not available in Australia, such as the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers. Anyone who has been following the debate about the parallel importation of books will guess that this is related to the mess that is international book publishing rights. I don’t know how electronic rights work in this scheme, but I can only guess that it is not pretty. As I write, there are 288,816 titles available to Australian users. Admittedly this is up about 1,000 since I checked a couple of days ago, but the internationalisation that the internet is bringing surely has to start to break down anachronistic regional divides and conquer distribution deals sooner or later. As well as missing out on certain titles, Australians do not get access to the full range of features (yet?). For example, for US users, the Kindle offers basic web browsing, but apart from Wikipedia searches, this is blocked in Australia.

To purists, these are minor issues compared to the big one: the proprietary lock-in. The books you buy for the Kindle are copy-protected and so will only be useable on the Kindle (or certain Amazon-approved software readers, which may or may not be available around the world). So when you buy a book you are taking a leap of faith that Amazon will continue to support the format in a way that suits you. Furthermore, Amazon can remotely delete your books at any time, as was revealed in an embarrassing incident when a book was pulled because the publisher turned out not to have the rights. Of all the titles to be at the centre of this controvery, it was Orwell’s 1984. Critics argued that this highlights all that is wrong about digital rights management. In contrast, the Barnes & Noble Nook is built on the open Google Android platform and already some are arguing that the Kindle will rapidly lose ground if it is not opened up.

Lest you are starting to think that I am regretting my new purchase, I am still fascinated to get a relatively early glimpse of what I am sure will be the future of book publishing. The promise of a single device, the size and weight of a paperback which can store 1,000s of books is revolutionary. It can easily hold all the textbooks a student will need for all their years of high school, or all the books, newspapers and magazines that you could ever hope to read on a long-distance trip. In a year or two I am sure I will look at the Kindle and wonder how I could stand such a primitive device, but for now it is a tantalising glimpse of the future. And yes, for all the book fetishists, I still love paper books and have far too many but could never let them go. But that doesn’t stop me loving my Kindle too.

These are all initial impressions, as the Kindle only arrived two days ago, and I am sure that I will discover more good and bad things about it. In the meantime, here is a summary of the key pros and cons. I have split the cons into general limitations of the device and further “crippling” for international users.

Pros

• Lightweight and portable
• Easy-to-read electronic paper screen
• Very simple operation
• Book and periodical purchasing is easy and fast
• PDF documents (and some other formats) are readily converted to the Kindle format*
• Reasonably priced books (most are around US$12)
• Available in Australia (this is the big one!)

Cons

• Closed, proprietary system
• No ability to subscribe to arbitrary RSS feeds (US readers can buy access to some blogs)
• No ability to share purchased books with friends (the Nook apparently does allow this)
• Limited range of titles (to date)

International Limitations

• No web browsing (and no Google search)
• iPhone Kindle application not available
• More limited range of book and periodical titles
• No access to blogs
• No power adapter (USB cable only)

* Amazon does this conversion for you. When you buy a Kindle you are given an email address that looks like yourname@kindle.com. Email a PDF attachment to this address and, for a small fee, they will send a Kindle version to you via Whispernet. Email to yourname@free.kindle.com and they will, for free, email you a link to a copy that you can load via the USB connection.

A few months ago, a new site arrived on the increasingly crowded web 2.0 scene. Posterous offers a medium that fits somewhere between a blog and a microblog (the canonical example of the microblog being, of course, the juggernaut that is Twitter). Maybe it should be called a “miniblog”.

Posterous is not the only site to target the miniblog niche. Tumblr has been been around for a few years and has been reasonably successful in building a base of users who like the ability it provides to easily share photos, links and assorted random scribblings. As an obsessive early-adopter of most things web 2.0, I have a tumblr account (the “Raw Prawn” identity pre-dates the “Stubborn Mule”), but  I have not been very active there of late.

Although Posterous launched only about six months ago, it has already seen healthy growth in traffic since then and has already reached the traffic rank that tumblr had six months ago.

Posterous.com Traffic Rank (September 2009)

Part of the reason for its success is that it is extraordinarily easy to use. There is no need to sign up or create an account, as you would on twitter, tumblr or any other web 2.0 site. Instead, simply send an email to post@posterous.com. Give it a try! Send a snippet of text or, better still, a photo, music file or a link to a youtube video and Posterous will work its magic to send back to you a link to a web page with your content that you can easily share with anyone and everyone. Here is one I prepared earlier. If you live in the US, you can also send posts via SMS from your phone.

Posterous has a raft of other features that put it on a level above tumblr. For a start, it tracks the number of times that a post has been viewed (the power user can even track traffic using Google Analytics). Also, like any good web 2.0 application, it supports tags which can easily be added, edited or deleted after creating your post. There is also an iPhone application that allows you to take a photo and immediately send it to Posterous (to be fair, tumblr has an iPhone application too).

To take full advantage of Posterous, you should “claim” your email address (ok, so at this point you are effectively signing up for the service, but you don’t have to take this step). One of the features this will allow you to access is the ability to “auto-post” to an increasing range of other sites, including Twitter, Identica, Facebook, Flickr and Delicious. Turning on these services is straightforward once you have claimed your address signed up.

What exactly auto-posting does varies with each service. In the case of Twitter, Posterous will send the title of each post with a shortened link to the post. If you auto-post to Flickr, any photos you sent to Posterous will be added to your Flickr account. If you have a blog, the chances are you can repost the entire content of your Posterous post.

Posterous also shares with tumblr and any good web 2.0 a social networking feature that allows you to subscribe to other people’s Posterous accounts. You can see posts you have subscribed to through the “My Subscriptions” link on Posterous as well as receiving regular email updates. Posterous also allows the creation of multiple miniblogs (up to three) within the one account.

Unlike Twitter, Posterous even has a business model in mind, with plans to offer premium services for a fee at some point in the future. This “freemium” service approach has already been adopted by the likes of Flickr, Dropbox and a number of other web 2.0 services. Even for users who never take up these premium services, any means of revenue generation should help the site to stick around for longer than some of the more fleeting web 2.0 sites.

I have only been experimenting with Posterous for the last couple of weeks, but with the combination of extreme ease of use, smooth handling of multiple media types and the auto-posting feature I expect that it has a bright future ahead. In the meantime, keep an eye on the Mule’s Posterous account for posts that do not quite warrant appearing here on the blog.

Posterous Tips

• Add tags to your posts using this short-hand in your email  subject line: ((tag: food, photos)) – of course, you don’t have to use “food” or “photos”.
• Email to twitter@posterous.com if you only want to auto-post to Twitter. Similar email addresses work for other services.
• Email to posterous@posterous.com if you do not want to auto-post anywhere.
• Email to private@posterous.com if you want to create a private post.
• Type #end in the email and no subsequent text (signatures, etc) will be included in the post.
• If you use gmail, you can use gmail’s hyperlink creator to create links in your post (you will need to be using “Rich Formatting”).

I feel I am due for a break from the GFC* and so will instead return to the subject of Web 2.0.

Whenever I come across a new Web 2.0 site/application/service I cannot help but sign up. A quick search for the phrase “welcome to” in my gmail archives throws up about 100 messages, representing only some of the debris of this obsession: sites I have signed up for, explored briefly and mostly never visited again.

Among these, however, is a recent discovery that has quickly become an indispensable tool. Alongside gmail and google calendar, Dropbox is now one of my favourite examples of “cloud computing”. In a nutshell, it provides synchronised offsite storage in an extraordinarily seamless way. For a new service, still only in beta, it is very impressive.

Dropbox is by no means the only offsite storage system around. I have investigated many others, including XDrive, Mozy, Carbonite, and Box.net. Until now, my favourite had been Jungle Disk, which essentially turns space on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) into a virtual drive on your computer, but now I have come to rely on Dropbox.

Getting started with Dropbox is straightforward. It is free to sign up and download the software for PC, Mac OSX or Linux. When installed, the software creates a conveniently located Dropbox folder on your computer (e.g. under “My Documents” on a PC). Any files you create in or copy to this folder are automatically backed up to the Dropbox servers. The back-up is fast (depending, of course, on the speed of your internet connection) and unobtrusive. When browsing through your Dropbox folder, it is immediately clear when the backup is finished as a green tick appears on the folders or files. But it is when you work across multiple computers (e.g. home and office) that Dropbox comes into its own. Changes on each machine are automatically synchronised and, better still, if you accidentally delete or change a file, Dropbox gives you access to all the older versions of the file. If you are using a laptop that is not always online, you can work with the local copies of all of your files, which will then be synchronised next time you are online.

You can also access all of your Dropbox files through a web browser. Once you log into the Dropbox site, you can download the current or older versions of any of your files, create new folders and upload new files. The website also provides some additional features, such as sharing individual folders with other people which provides a straightforward approach to collaboration. Also, any images saved in a folder called “Photos” will automatically appear as photo albums which can also be shared with others.

The first 2GB of storage at Dropbox is free, but after that is costs US$10 per month for up to 50GB of storage. That does make the paid option more expensive than alternative services (I would not be surprised to see the price fall if Dropbox becomes successful). Amazon S3 costs US$0.15 per GB, so 50GB would cost $7.50, while Mozy costs only $4.75 per month for unlimited storage. Nevertheless, so far I am well within my 2GB limit and find Dropbox invaluable as a virtual briefcase, eliminating the need to email documents to myself or copy files to a USB drive. For now I will continue to use Jungle Disk for routine offsite backup as it is the most cost effective solution for data up to around 30GB, but the more I use Dropbox, the more tempted I will be to upgrade to the paid plan.

* Global Financial Crisis

In a recent post on his Sprechblase (“Speech Bubble”) blog, Cem Basman examines a number of different forms of communication that have evolved on the web: chat, forums, wikis, blogs and microblogs. Although the boundaries can be blurred, Cem’s summary of the key features of each of these forms is a useful one.

The original post is in German and, with the help of Google translate and my own rusty German, I have adapted it to produce an English version. I am publishing it here with Cem’s blessing. Cem couches his discussion in terms of his notion of “die Sphäre” (the “Sphere”), by which he means the totality of communication in all its forms on the web.

1. Chats are “private” discussions between two or more invited participants. Discussions are initiated on an ad hoc basis and take place in real time. Chats are private in the sense that there is no public site where others can follow the discussion. The chat is only open to those who are invited. In some cases, chat histories may be saved by the users.
2. Forums provide a mechanism for discussion across a wider group. Forum members post comments to discussion topics which are themselves organized into categories. Forum membership may be public, but may also be restricted by the forum administrator. All forums members can express their opinion on any given topic. Contributions to the discussion appear on the forum in chronological order. Forums facilitate discourse on complex subjects over an extended period of time. Generally, all forum participants can see all contributions, which helps discussions to build and deepen. Forums are organized into rigid hierarchies: category, topic, discussion contribution. Forums are run by third parties, users are participants.
3. Wikis provide a means to “collectively” aggregate knowledge on a single website and make it readily accessible to the public (or to a more limited group of users, such as students or employees). They are a very productive and efficient mechansm for authors to share knowledge with one another. They are structured, but effectively self-organizing by contributors.  Wikis not for conversations or discussion, but for the systematic presentation of information. There may be special pages for discussion about potentially controversial content (although this discussion may also take place on other communication media), but a wiki is first and foremost a tool for documentation.
4. Blogs are currently the richest mode of communication for an “individual” person on the Web. Every blog belongs to the owner of the blog and is solely their responsibility. A blog can be published by a group or community rather than an individual. A blog allows its owner complete freedom of expression and blogs span a full range of styles from formal and journalistic to deeply personal. A blog is essentially a “Netizen’s” online home. Comments on a blog allow others to contribute to the discussion. By means of web links and back and forth between blogs, as well as other forms of communication, blogs can result in extremely complex interactions. I consider blogs to be the heavy-weights of communication on the web. The patchwork of blogs forms the backbone of the “Sphere” and without them it would probably be a far more chaotic place.
5. Microblogging is a fast-flowing form of “public” communication. Microblogs involve users posting very short messages to all of their “subscribers”. When microblogging, you typically only see messages from other people you have subscribed to. This approach is in contrast to a forum, where you see all the messages of all on all issues. Through mutual subscriptions to a circle of “friends”, users can remain in constant contact, always able to keep track of each other’s status. Microblog messages are, ideally, short and concise. A microblog’s steady stream of personal messages is presented chronological order. However, some thematic order can be achieved by means of “#hashtags”. Microblogs do share some characteristics with chat. However they are more public as there is generally a “public” stream which provides a glimpse of all conversations simultaneously and allows users to find new “friends”. Some microblogs do allow users to block their posts from this public view. The term “microblogging” is somewhat misleading: it is really a messaging medium, with only a rudimentary blog-like interface.  “Micromessaging” may be more appropriate, but for now the term “microblogging” has stuck.

As readers of my recent post on the future of microblogging will know, this is a subject near and dear to my heart and one I am sure I will return to in the future.

Note that this text has a slightly more restrictive Creative Commons licence than the rest of the material on this blog. It is also subject to the No Derivative Works requirement.

Google and others have had great success with online advertising, while the provision of the mere “pipes” of the internet has become an increasingly competitive, commoditised business. So, it is no surprise that some ISPs have felt they have missed out on the real success of the internet and are keen to join the party.

The holy grail of advertising is to be able to precisely tailor ads to a behavioural profile of their intended target.  ISPs have one enormous advantage when it comes to profiling web-surfing habits: the one node of the internet that users cannot bypass is their way in, their ISP. Companies such as Phorm, NebuAd and FrontPorch have developed technologies to exploit this advantage and have tempted a number of ISPs to install their systems with the promise of a slice of the advertising action.

The problem is that many people do not like the idea that their web-surfing is being tracked and these systems have been made “opt out” rather than “opt in”. Furthermore, they operate in such a “transparent” manner that most users would be unaware that the profiling is taking place.

I was first made aware of Phorm (previously known as 121Media, creators of a notorious piece of spyware) listening to episode 149 of the Security Now podcast. This podcast featured a fairly technical description of the “cookie dance” that Phorm uses, redirecting your web requests from the destination site, to Phorm’s own site and back again, all with the aim of ensuring you get a tracking cookie file for every site you visit. Phorm uses these cookies to build the profile of sites you like to visit and this profile is then used to deliver you targeted ads. Security Now followed up a couple of weeks later (episode 151) with a less technical interview with anti-Phorm advocate Alexander Hanff from the UK. Despite the fact that the UK and Europe have quite stringent privacy legislation relating to digital media, the communication giant BT has been trialling the Phorm system and triggered a storm of protest as a result.

This led me to wonder whether these “data pimps”, as the Register likes to call them, are likely to appear in Australia. I contacted my ISP, Optus, and this was their response:

Optus does not actively monitor internet use due to the Privacy Act & Law. Having said that, upon request from the proper authorities Optus may be approached to deliver information if any individual account was deemed to have breached the Federal Law.

They then referred me to their Terms and Conditions. The most relevant section there seems to be the following:

We may collect, use and disclose personal information about you, to decide whether to start, stop or limit supply to you of personal credit, the service or the products and services of other Optus group companies. [Italics in original source].

The key would appear to be that they will only disclose information for advertising purposes within the Optus group. It would be interesting to know whether other Australian ISPs will be taking the same strict view of their privacy obligations. Maybe you should ask your ISP…let me know what you find out.