Communication 2.0: Pokes, Pings, Push and Pull

I'm beginning to wonder whether our new communication technologies are actually too good for us to use properly; like taking your first driving lesson in a 4 litre highly tuned rear wheel drive sports car that you're just bound to crash.

"The Medium is the Massage" was the title of a book by Marshall McLuhan, in which he said that any medium is, in a way, more important than the content in terms of how it affects it's audience. He illustrates his point by talking about a lightbulb; which might not have any information or "content", but it's still a medium; it creates a space that would otherwise be empty, and it shapes how it is used. (The title actually arose from a misprint, but deciding that it was supportive of his point; after all, the title wouldn't have been changed in such a way in an aural medium, or one without typography, so McLuhan let it stick.)

McLuhan's point was that any information that a medium contains is secondary to the effect of the medium itself; in the case of the light bulb, as a light source in the darkness which creates a space. People can do whatever they want with that space, but whatever they choose to do with it won't be as significant as the fact that the space exists in the first place.

Well, the medium of a "poke" on Facebook seems to be for human beings pretty much what a 'ping' is to IT nerds.

Will the Cookie crumble?

It's easy to think that the internet is something like a one-way mirror; you can look in, but that unless you're posting comments, sending emails etc. that nobody can look back at you. Well, that's not really the case.

When you want to look at a web page, the server that it's on needs to know what information to send out, and where to send it. So, for example, for your visit to this site, there is some information that you have had to send, which can easily be recorded. echo "

Your user agent (that is, the is type of operating system and web browser that you're using to see the page) can be identified as ". $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] . "

";
echo "

The page you came here from was ". $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] . "

";
echo "

Your IP address is ". $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] . "

";
?>

Many websites rely on the ability to "remember" certain information. For example, when you log into a website, it's obviously important that when you go to a different page on the site, it somehow knows that you're still logged in under your own account. If you add something to a shopping basket then leave the site, it's helpful if it's still there next time you visit the site. If you choose to personalise a website in a certain way- for example, to change the number of results per page that a Google search shows you- then you want it to stay that way when you come back again. Or if you see an advert that leads you to buy a product, then the advertiser wants to know, because that's the only way they can judge whether they are getting value for money from their advertising. (Especially if they are the kind brand who cares about their image and doesn't want to litter thousands of websites with flashy and obtrusive advertising…)

To make this "memory" work, most sites will use cookies.

Cookies are simply small text files that are saved on your computer. You can see what's stored in them- you will have a "cookies" folder somewhere on your computer which you can look in to see what cookies are being stored on your machine, and you can look at what information is stored in them by opening them up in a simple text editor like Notepad. Usually, these will mostly be things like unique numbers which correspond to an entry in the web servers' database, identifying your computer with your online identity.

As is usually the case with technical matters, the level of understanding about cookies amongst most consumers is probably best described as "confused."

When will "New Media" stop being new?

Media is simply the space through which information passes. As information technology has created new ways for people to communicate and pass on information, "new media" have appeared; new spaces which will shape the messages that are passed on.

One definition of New Media is 'where technology meets communication.'

Another is 'digital media.'

Yet another is 'interactive media.'

All point towards the world of information technology and the ability for many-to-many communication; for the audience to be able to speak back to the producers or broadcasters, and enter into a dialogue or conversation.

My own generation may have memories of casting a critical eye over pictures sent into "The Gallery" in Tony Hart's Hartbeat (now in an online form!), or remember the Saturday morning television TV jingles to encourage viewers to phone in to ask guests questions, play games and enter competitions (at a time when they were simply London numbers, rather than premium-rate lines.) So, is the new idea of "interactive media" fundamentally different to television show's competitions, phone-ins and Points of View's letters?

Well, yes.

The nature of TV, newspapers, magazines, cinema and "traditional media" in general is that it's all built around the idea of sending a message out to the public/audience/consumers. Sure, amember of the audience can speak on the phone, or have their drawings shown to the country, but you can't get a situation where every member of the TV audience can see their own content.

McWifi for the masses?

In 1961, Arthur C. Clarke said that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

In an age where devices with 160Gb and a colour screen can fit into the front pocket of a shirt and be taken in people's stride as regular a day to day device, wireless internet connections are (to me) the area of technology where magic still exits. The fact that on the latest iPods, I can watch videos on a screen which takes up more of my field of vision than my TV but is thin enough to fit into a suit pocket without spoiling the lines impresses me- but it's when I'm near an internet hotspot and I can instantly watch one of hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos that I'm still amazed; especially when considering that just 5 years ago, broadband internet penetration in the UK was at just 7%, and the restricted bandwidth meant that the idea of just streaming audio was difficult to take seriously- let alone streaming video.

Information Technology tools for real life

It occurred to me recently that I don't really know who taught me to use computers and the internet. I can remember being told that ctrl+z undoes whatever you've just done and immediately realising that it was going to be the most useful keyboard shortcut I would eve know, and when I was first told what the internet and what a browser was, and I know the resources that I've used the most in learning how to write HTML, CSS and PHP (W3Schools.com and php.net, in case you were wondering.) But in terms of things like how to actually browse the web, what browser to use, how to best use a search engine and so on, most of my knowledge has come incrementally, from a range of different sources, and is probably the result of spending too much time sat in front of a computer.

So for a bit of a change and to try to save you from having to slowly pick these things up by spending too much of your time in front of a computer, I thought that rather than posting news and opinions on the world of information technology, I'd try posting something of a bit more obviously practical use; some web-related tips and tools for day to day life that I've picked up over the last ten years or so, which should be useful for people other than web-obsessed geeks.

(This is mainly based on what I've set up recently, having started working in a new computer at a new job— suddenly finding myself without all the bits and pieces that I consider to be my day-to-day essentials, and found myself feeling surprisingly lost without...)

Net Neutrality and the limitations of the Web

The web as a medium, compared to television or other platforms, has its own particular set of problems. The restrictions mainly lie in the technology behind it.

Ultimately, the internet is built on a "many-to-many" principle; instead of one pathway between any two points on the network, there are many alternatives. Where many pathways converge at a single point, there can be problems.

Server Strain

A site like YouTube can certainly provide television-like content, and the distinction between online video like YouTube and television broadcasts are being blurred; devices such as the Apple TV, which send YouTube videos directly to a television set, while IPTV provides television broadcasts over the internet.

However, even YouTube would probably struggle to provide a single live, nationwide or global event in the way that television can.

The most watched YouTube videos have yet (at the time of writing) to break the 60 million views mark- that's the total number of people across the world who have watched it over the course of 18 months. Compare that to record breaking TV broadcasts, such as the Eastenders Christmas 1986 episode when 30.15 million viewers simultaneously watched Den Watts divorce Angie in the highest rated soap in British TV history, or when 32 million households watched the 1966 world cup final. (Although even these figures pale in comparison with the most watched film, with an estimated 2 billion views worldwide.)

The future of mobile phones

There have been a couple of stories recently that have got me thinking about mobile phone technology and where it's heading.

The first one was the announcement of the iPod Touch; essentially an iPhone without the phone, or to look at it another way, a touchscreen iPod with wireless internet capabilities. This led to speculation about whether it would be able to connect to a microphone and run VOIP software like Skype, which allows telephone calls to be made over the internet. There are rumours that the iPod Touch has bluetooth capabilities, although whether the hardware is actually present as it is in the iPhone isn't yet confirmed (it seems unlikely though.) However, even if it isn't then it seems that there's no technical reason that it couldn't be able to pair up with a headset of some sort and be used to connect to the internet as a VOIP telephone.

Obviously, that sort of competition would be somewhat disappointing to the mobile telephone networks, as VOIP is much cheaper than using a land line to make calls, let alone mobile calls (especially long distance calls.) It would also significantly undermine the partnership between Apple and various cellular netoworks in selling the iPhone— announced earlier this week to be released in the UK in November on the O2 network. But, if speculation is to be believed, it seems that Steve Jobs wouldn't be too bothered by ruffling some feathers.

Apple and online media

While the web and the internet have become widely used over a relatively short period of time, there is still a tendancy to associate them solely with computers. However, internet access of some description on mobile phones has been widely available for several years, from the WAP phones of the 1990s to GPRS, EDGE and 3G technologies today.

According to this years Ofcom report, while around 2 out of 3 UK households have a computer and just over half have a broadband internet connection, 93% of UK households own a mobile phone (for the first time, more households now have a mobile phone than a land line). On a worldwide scale, in many developing countries it has proven cheaper and easier to install wireless mobile networks than nationwide cable networks, so mobile internet connections are more prevalent than cables.

However, despite this increasingly wide availability of mobile internet access, the mobile web has yet to really take off in mainstream usage. One reason for this is that data costs on most mobile phone plans are very expensive, which discourages users from using them to browse the web, making it difficult to attract users or inform them about sites that could be of use or interest to them.

There are two exceptions to this broad generalisation; Blackberry mobile phones are becoming increasingly popular, particularly with business users who need to be in touch with colleagues and clients and want or need constant access to their email. For personal use, sports news websites are popular. Both of these uses of the internet involve a need or desire to follow events happening, as they happen. When a sports fan is out and about, unable to watch a game on television or follow it on a radio, the mobile web via their mobile phone offers an alternative and unobtrusive way to follow the progress of a match and experience the highs and lows in a way that watching a replay or hearing the final score can't compare with.

Other than these uses, which involve relatively low volumes of data and low bandwidth, but do require "always on" connectivity, the mobile web has yet to really take off.

Information Overload: Spam

Following on from an earlier post (about how the problem of Information Overload of the 21st Century is becoming as much about the quality of information as it is about the quantity); there is another type of information that has stopped the problem of Information Overload being overcome.

Any email address that's visible on the web is virtually guaranteed to start receiving Spam emails. Blogs gets indexed by search engines; automatic processes can check through indexed sites and fill in online forms, for example to add comments on blog sites with links to drive traffic to sites (usually sex related), so any public blog will receive comments and pingbacks from unrelated sites (usually sex-related), either trying to gather links to improve their Pagerank, trying to attract visitors to their site, or simply to send more generic emails to any email addresses they find. (Which sometimes makes me wonder if more machines than people read my blog...)

When I get back from a weekend away from the city, computers and the internet, I tend to come back to about 30 or so comments on my blog; all spam, mostly selling prescription drugs, but one or two directing to pornography. That might not seem like much, but considering that I've put very little effort into promoting my blog, it makes me much more sympathetic when I see blogs which have shut down comments due to floods of spam. I'll also have a few dozen emails that are pure junk, which I have to sort through before I can start checking my "real" emails. It seems that the more efficient I get at using the web, the more time I have to spend sorting through spam.

Advertisers vs. Consumers and the future of online advertising.

Once you're connected to the internet, you have access across the network; one of the principles it was built on is that traffic can travel freely through any one of myriad pathways. The World Wide Web has been free since CERN made it freely available to all in 1993.

Historically, web browsers have been given away for free; Netscape's browser was freely available for noncommercial use, while Netscape made their money from selling server-side software. Internet Explorer was given away for free with the Windows operating system, it's development being funded by other parts of Microsoft's business. Firefox is a free, open source web browser that is steadily increasing it's market share ("Open-source" means that the source code is also freely available; so that anyone with sufficient programming knowledge can modify the browser to work the way they want it to, or offer improvements to be included in future releases.)

It's not a surprise then, that there is something of an expectation that content on the internet will be free; you don't expect to have to pay to visit a website, or to read an article. The news is free, weather forecasts are free, and reading about other people's thoughts is free. Where websites do charge money for access, it's usually for some sort of premium service with a free alternative, such as a free trial for 30 days, or a free but restricted membership with a paid-for but unrestricted or advert-free alternative.

However, websites aren't free to run; apart from the time taken to put a website together, the site also needs a computer to act as a server (which needs to be kept running and it's software up to date), a connection to the internet (which needs to be paid for), and of course power to keep the whole thing going. The way website owners cover their costs depends on the nature of the site; perhaps the site is an integral part of an online business, such as an online shopping company where the website would be a part of the operational costs, or possibly a part of a branding or advertising project funded by a marketing budget. Where there is no obvious revenue source, website owners often cover their costs (and sometimes make a profit) by selling advertising space.

There has been some fuss recently about a website that's appeared, encouraging website owners to block users of the Firefox browser; http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com. The site includes an explanation as to why users have been redirected to their site, along with instructions for website owners explaining how to block visitors using the Firefox browser and redirect them to the WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com site.

Vinyl vs CDs

On the 17th August 1982, the worlds first Compact Disc was manufactured at a Philips factory in Germany; a copy of "The Visitors" by ABBA.

To mark the 25th birthday of this piece of technology today, I'm reposting this article I wrote for an old website in 2002. My favourite thing about it is what it doesn't say, as opposed to what it does— as it was written about a year before the iTunes Music Store opened, apart from a passing reference to MP3s I've completely ignored the (at the time almost entirely illegal) music download market which seems to have replaced the tape player/walkman, and presently appears to be the best bet to replace the CD.

I remember the first record I ever owned. I had yet to form any musical opinions or tastes of my own, so the fact that it was a compilation of what someone somewhere judged to be the best singles that they had aquired the publishing rights for that year meant it was pretty much ideal for me at the time.

It also happened to be on CD, which shows that I can't really hark back to the golden age of when records were records and expect to be taken seriously by anyone. On the other hand, it also shows that this isn't just some nostalgic rant about the good old days; 2002 was the 20th anniversary of CDs release onto the market.

But that doesn't change the fact that vinyl is the best available format for a record to be on.

Butterflies breaking wheels.

There's an effect in chaos theory called the Butterfly Effect— often described as how the movements of a butterfly in Brazil can cause (or prevent) a storm in Texas. It refers to how a tiny effect can have a massive consequence, and has been the subject of books, films and television programmes.

In the age of Web2.0 and user generated content, there's something new about the effect of traffic flows on the Internet.

In the earlier days of the web, when websites tended to be 'closed shops' with possibly one or two external links to related websites, the web tended to be, from the users' point of view, a bunch of connections from the user to the websites. It was almost as though we, the users, were sat at the hub of an international network, with thousands of connections reaching out across the web. (There's a certain irony to how this illusion comes from an anthropocentric view of a global decentralised network— not unlike the pre-Copernican idea of the Earth being the centre of the universe simply because it looks like everything revolves around us.) We were aware that there were other links connecting everything to everything else, but they weren't particularly important or relevant to us.

Now, in the so called Web 2.0 era, where content is frequently contributed or edited by users, or information is pulled from a number of different sites onto a single page, the truly erratic nature of the ebbs and flows of traffic over the internet has become more visible to web users; it no longer feels so much as though we're sat at the centre of our own web, but just a part of the flow of traffic.

The Day the World (wide web) Stood Still…

(…for about an hour and a half…)

The meteoric rise of Facebook continues to astonish me. No doubt it's in part due to my own demographic positioning; apparently living in London (the largest geographic group on Facebook with around 840,000 members- which is around a tenth of the city's population) and being in the fastest rising age group (25 and over), it makes sense that I'd naturally be seeing a lot of my friends joining up and talking about it.

Earlier this week, after an apparent security glitch, Facebook closed down for a while (about 90 minutes or so, it seems.)

Now, there's a number of websites that I've visited regularly over the years that I've been using the internet, ranging from functional tools like search engines or web-based email, to social sites like chatrooms or discussion forums (the Web 1.0 version of a Facebook group, I suppose), to the newer Web 2.0 sites like Digg and Flickr. I've followed the progress and speculation about films, TV programmes, bands and festivals. As a result, there have been a number of times when I've gone to a website and been momentarily horrified to find it temporarily closed down.

But I can't remember a single instance where 90 minutes of a site's downtime has been as newsworthy as earlier this week, when Facebook closed down for about an hour and a half for "upgrades." I had pretty much expected to read stories about it on sites technology-oriented sites like Digg.com (which had a couple of stories speculating on the reasons behind the downtime) but I was a bit more suprised to read about it in the Metro this morning. (Not that I normally read the Metro I might add, but I'd just finished the book I was reading at the time…)

Information overload in the 21st Century.

There is a truly mind-boggling amount of information out there on the web. Apparently Google's index is thought to contain more than a hundred trillion words, and is being added to at a rate of about 10-20% a month (although parts of it are dying off, so the actual growth rate is somewhat smaller.) This is around a thousand terabytes of information.

To put this into perspective, the largest library in the world is the United States Library of Congress, with more than 134 million items, including 20 million catalogued books, 60 million manuscripts, 4.8 million maps and 12.5 million photographs. It's estimated that the text held in the library (ignoring all the maps, photographs and illustrations) would constitute around 20 terabytes of information.

Currently, the English Wikipedia alone has over 1,850,703 articles, and the combined Wikipedias for all other languages greatly exceeds the English Wikipedia in size, giving a combined total of more than 1.74 billion words in 7.5 million articles in approximately 250 languages. The English Wikipedia alone has over 609 million words.

Is the music industry killing music?

An article on the BBC website poses the question; are free CDs killing music?

Yesterday, the Mail on Sunday gave away copies of Prince's latest album, "Planet Earth." The album is also being given away for free to those attending his concerts at the 20,00 capacity O2 arena, where 21 nights have been fully sold out.

As a result of the giveaway, Sony BMG (the album's distributors) have withdrawn the CD's UK release, scheduled for the following Monday. This means that for fans in the UK not attending the O2 concerts, buying the Mail on Sunday will be the only (legal) way to get a copy of the album.

This isn't the first time Prince has challenged the usual practices of the music industry. In 1995, he changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol in protest at his record company's ownership of his name as a trademark— he reverted to the name "Prince" when his contract with Warner-Chappel expired. On his 2004 Musicology tour, he also gave away free copies of his Musicology album at gigs. In June 2006, Prince was honored with a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his "visionary" use of the Internet that included becoming the first major artist to release an entire album—1997's Crystal Ball—exclusively on the Web. Orders for Crystal Ball had been placed on Prince's then-website, 1800newfunk.com, but the album was also released shortly to traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.

Although free CDs are a regular appearance as giveaways with magazines and newspapers (usually compilations, although occasionally "classic albums"), this release marks the first time a brand new release has been given away as a covermounted CD. In the BBC article Kim Bayley, director general of the Entertainment Retailers Association, says this marks a new low.

"It devalues the music and the losers will be new artists who are trying to come through who won't have any support from recording companies because established artists are chucking out their music for free. Consumers only have so much listening time in the week and if they receive the new album from Prince then they don't need to buy new music and will spend their money on something else."

Bayley's position seems slightly bizarre to me; as though people don't budget their spending on music, but will decide that if they've acquired a free CD that they will use up their weekly budget of listening time, won't be able to listen to anything else that week, and therefore won't buy any more records. (It certainly seems odd, when you consider the perpetual "3 for 2" or "3 for £15" offers in high street record shops.) It will be interesting to see how the sales figures for Prince's other albums will change over the next week or two- will the release act as a call to action for people to go out and buy more of Prince's records?

Copyright, Copyleft and Free Software Licences

Just over a week ago, the the third revision of the GNU Public Licence was released. This is a software licence designed to protect free software, ensuring that users and developers are free to use and develop the software as they wish, while ensuring that any modifications or improvements made remain accessible to the free software community.

In an age where software development and computer technology is so governed by copyright and legal restrictions, the knock-on effects that this legal licence will have mean that it is probably a more significant release than new versions of most software applications.

Having already talked about Free software and the commons (and still with a few more things to say about it in the future), I thought it would be worth talking about exactly what "Free software" is and what it means to software users and developers.

When is a website not a website?

The words "web" and "internet" tend to be used interchangably by most people- however, they are technically two very different things.

The internet is hardware- a physical network of computers, all connected to one another and communicating using a set of open standards (including TCP and Internet Protocol.) The "web" is software- a virtual network of interlinked documents, built on a set of open standards (including the HTML, CSS and Javascript.)

Telephone support

This is a summary of my experience earlier this week with Virgin Media.

The background; I'd just bought a wireless router and wanted to connect it. Should be a simple job; however, it wouldn't connect to the internet and was asking me for a username and password- even though Virgin's website said I didn't need one.

I know my username, but having lost the little card with my password that I was given when I first signed up some years ago, I decided to phone up to ask for this simple, tiny but apparently vital piece of information to be either given to me or reset.

So...

Information Overload: Is Wikipedia the new Google?

Around the beginning of the 20th century, there was a clearly identifiable problem with information overload; although there was plenty of information available, it was practically impossible to search through it unless you already knew what you were looking for and where to find it. For example, Medelev's experiments on inherited traits were virtually ignored for decades, until being rediscovered in 1900, some forty years after they were published. This meant that although early studies in genetics were being carried out at around the same time that Darwin was working on his theory of evolution, it wasn't until nearly 60 years later that they were integrated into a common theory.

With the advent of computers and the World Wide Web, it became much easier to share, index and search huge amounts of information. In fact, most of the ideas that modern computers were built around were specifically formulated to deal with the problem of information overload.

Do you love Flickr?

Last week, Flickr.com very quietly announced that it Loves You.



It's common for software to go through a release cycle of pre-Alpha, Alpha and Beta releases, with the Beta release usually signifying that the software is complete and is usable, but is still in a period of testing.

Flickr has gone through Alpha, Beta and, unusually, Gamma phases, each one being labelled in it's logo on each page, and each release phase marked by new features being released to it's members. The "Gamma" label was apparently a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that Flickr is constantly being tested and improved, while moving away from the image of being in "perpetual beta", which carries more of an implication of being an incomplete and unfinished product.

I think it's an interesting indication of the difference between the attitudes expressed through "traditional" desktop-based software applications and web applications. Just as writing styles for the web tend to be different to writing styles for print (taking into account users tendancy to scan online text rather than properly read it) the nature of web-based applications is inherently different to desktop-based applications.

Capitalism and the Commons: Proprietary software vs. Free software

Some issues and arguments go beyond what they appear to be about on the surface. For example, the ongoing debate between creationists and evolutionists clearly isn't really about creation or evolution- it's about faith in religion and faith in science; two very different systems that shape the way that we see the world around us. If you fundamentally believe that the bible is the word of God handed down to Man, then no evidence from mere people— however scientifically rigorous their research— will convince you that we evolved from apes. (After all, maybe the fossils were put there to challenge our faith…) If you fundamentally believe that scientific enquiry is the only true path to knowledge, then no unprovable hypothesis will convince you that there is a reasonable chance that we may have been designed or created by a higher power.

In a similar way, the issue of copyright and software licences (that is, "Free" licences vs. proprietary licences) isn't really about copyright and licencing; it's about freedom. The complication is that both sides of the debate believe that they are arguing on the side of freedom.

Facebook. What happened?

In 2000, Dave Gorman set out on a mission to prove that "loads" of people had the same name as him, by finding and meeting 54 other Dave Gormans (one for every card in the deck— including jokers.)

Just this morning, I quickly found a way to get in touch with 50 Dave Gormans, and also discovered that there are 352 people who share my own name and have registered on Facebook. His mission would clearly have been a lot faster with Facebook— although I doubt it would have made a great story. (Similarly, there's no way that his Googlewhack adventure would be a success if he embarked on the same mission today.)

Having (somewhat arrogantly) dismissed MySpace as being barely (if at all) different from the "old school" of free websites like Angelfire and Geocities, and "social networking" being the domain of schoolchildren who have plenty of time on their hands and just want to compare how many friends they have, in the space of the last couple of weeks it seems like everyone I talk to is suddenly using Facebook. From registering a couple of weeks ago to see someone's photos, then someone mentioning it in conversation the next day, to having new friends added on an almost daily basis. I know it's not going to be long until I start getting worried that I haven't checked my wall recently enough or something.

Typography: the new Grammar.

Typography is the art and techniques in using type; from the design of the individual characters of a typeface to using the correct punctuation in a word processor.

In much the same way that information technology using computers has mimicked and adopted terminology from the paper based office, the art of typography has moved on from Gutenberg's movable type printing press. (For example, we still use the term "leading" to refer to the space between lines of text, even though the strips of lead used in printing no longer have anything to do with the process.)

Before the word processor, typography was the domain of professional editors and typesetters. With the introduction of the word processor, users had much more control over the layout of the text; the distinction between a typewriter and a printing press became blurred. Todays word processors are closer to desktop publishing applications than electronic typewriters, with a wide range of font faces and sizes, page layouts, and even the ability to include images. Features that are available to pretty much anyone with access to a computer, but very few people are being taught how to use them.

Free Software, Microsoft and Software patents

A recent Fortune article touched upon the ongoing cold war between Microsoft and the Open Source community. In fitting with Microsoft's tendancy to only talk about Free Software in terms of not actually being free of cost (which I've always seen as a diversionary tactic, to avoid acknowledging the actual issues of freedom and ownership that anyone involved in free software will be quick to focus on), this was addressing Microsoft's software patents that Linux potentially violates.

The Human-Machine interface: The Screen

Probably the most important part of the human-machine interface when it comes to web design (and one which is all too easy to take for granted) is the screen. Apart from sound, it's usually the only way that the computer can give information to and communicate with the user- which makes it the most important way that a website owner can communicate with their visitors. Through the screen, the computer tells us what it's doing and— just as importantly— give the user feedback about what they are doing to it. It shows us what we've typed, whether it's what we meant to type, what we're clicking on and what we're pointing the mouse at.

Will we see a "Web 3.0"?

One of the buzzwords in the web development world is "Web 2.0"; a rather nebulous term coined in 2004 used to describe the "second generation" of websites.

The first generation of websites (retrospectively dubbed "Web 1.0") were based on the idea of a fairly static website being seen by many visitors- not much different to an online version of an existing shop, magazine, newspaper etc., but existing in "cyberspace", and without the overheads that go along with the "traditional" businesses.

Exactly what "Web 2.0" means varies depending on who you talk to.

Is the Mobile Web going to be a Dodo?

Technologies are constantly evolving. Existing technologies mutate and develop as new technologies are introduced— CDs pretty much killed off vinyl records, then the Digital Compact Cassette and Minidisc fought to do the same thing to tape recorders until the iPod came along and blew them all out of the water.

Sometimes, technologies compete in markets where competition fuels progress- for example, where next-generation games consoles try to outdo one another on features. Sometimes, technologies compete; where there isn’t enough room in the marketplace for a VHS and a Betamax to live side by side, one prospers and the other dies out. All in all, it's very much like evolution.

The Numbers are The Key, the box is opened and the secret's out!

Maybe it's just that I've been spending too much time following the developments on a mysterious island, but when the story about some secret numbers being leaked out onto the internet appeared, I couldn't help but wonder what they were going to unlock...

This wasn't about 4-8-15-16-23-42 though. This time, the number sequence was 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. (They're hexadecimal numbers- instead of counting ten digits from 0 to 9, hexadecimal counts in sixteen digits, following on from 9 with A,B,C,D,E,F- so the number "F" is actually sixteen, and the number "10" is actually seventeen. Hexadecimal counting is often used in programming, because of the way computers group "bits" of information in chunks of eight.)

What these numbers unlock isn't a spiritual mystery though- it was discovered back in February that it unlocks the ability to play encrypted HD-DVD movies on a Linux computer.

Headlines and non-news

For as long as editors have had newspapers to fill, there have been news stories that aren't really news stories, and stories that get more attention than they deserve because of the editorial slant of the newspaper. Most people will have noticed a leading story in a newspaper about a nearby tragedy where one or two lives were lost which, when juxtaposed with a smaller article further back in the paper of hundreds of people being killed on the other side of the world, paints an ugly picture of the priorities of the editorial team and by extension, the readers. (The website mailwatch.co.uk collects and comments on some of the more notorious British tabloid front page headlines.)

The art of writing online headlines is slightly different to print, because you tend to be writing for a completely different audience. In print, you need to stand out more than the other newspapers in the newsagent and be the one that your target audience reaches for and buys- because that's where the money is. Online, you don't need to attract the attention of potential readers- you need to attract the attention of search engines, so that you're higher up the search list when someone's looking for a story about your subject.

"This site is best viewed in YOUR favourite web browser."

Back in the early days of the World Wide Web were the "Browser Wars." The Web was just taking off, and the vast majority of the browser market used the Netscape Navigator browser. One of Netscape's goals was to "level the playing field" among operating systems- in line with the ideals behind the World Wide Web project, to create a browser platform that was consistent across operating systems. Microsoft saw this as a threat, and released Internet Explorer as competition.I don't want to go into the details of the browser wars themselves- suffice to say that Netscape went out of business and subsequently Microsoft stopped developing Internet Explorer for about 7 years- but one consequence was that for some time, the browser market was split between Netscape and Microsoft.

The Paper Paradigm

There are aspects to the way we use computers which have become so ubiquitous that they are taken for granted. Twenty years ago or so, there was nothing unusual about using a computer without a graphical user interface. This is about how the elements of a computer desktop- including the desktop itself- have come to be the way they are.

Charles Babbage is famous for being the father of computers- he was the first to design a fully programmable computer, the Analytical Engine, which was the first programmable computer. Although it was never actually built, the Analytical Engine would have processed numbers via a system of gears, been powered by a steam engine and programmed using punch cards. It had nothing of the familiar shape of today's computer- the tv-like screen, keyboard and mouse. (Usually, there's a box of circuitry and disk drives too- whether this is sitting out of the way under a desk, out in full display, built into the screen or integrated with everything else in one portable box depends on the individual computer.) I've already talked a bit about how the keyboard and mouse came to be the typical setup- the hardware that you actually get your hands on. This is about the next "layer" of the user interface- how the computer actually deals with your keypresses and mouse movements, and communicates with the user.

The Human-Machine interface: The Keyboard and Mouse

A major factor in designing a website is the user interface; the user needs to be able to tell what they need to do to get to what they are loking for. Whether this is done by giving written instructions, graphic icons or established convention (such as underlined, blue text representing a link), the goal is to make it as intuitive as possible.

Before looking at what considerations need to be made in web design user interfaces, I want to take a step back and look at the broader picture; what we're dealing with before we even get to the website- the keyboard and the mouse, and where the vision of todays computers has come from.

The invention of the typewriter was a solution to a problem; contrary to what you might assume, the problem was that it was very difficult for blind people to write, so the first typewriter (as we know it) was patented in 1868 to give them a way to put words to paper.

Freedom of Information vs. Protection of Intellectual Property

This week, EMI announced that in May, they are to start selling their entire catalogue of music downloads without DRM copy protection, and with better audio quality. They will be available first through iTunes.

There's a quiet battle going on between proponents of freedom of information and protectors of intellectual property. I'm going to try to talk about the history and the principles of this conflict, rather than the politics surrounding it.

Why I hate IE

I hate Internet Explorer with a passion. For a number of reasons.

First of all, it's buggy. When building web pages, it's best to periodically check that they are working OK in different browsers. In theory, they should all look the same- in practice, there are slight differences between the way different browsers render pages. Usually, these differences are small, but when they are significant enough to make an immediately noticable problem with the page, it is in Internet Explorer. More often than not, in my experience, it's due to the hasLayout bug, or the broken box model of Internet Explorer- both well documented problems with the way IE renders pages that differs from the W3C specifications (and therefore, most other web browsers.)

But it's not just technical problems that annoy me. From the way MS 'acquired' Internet Explorer in the first place, through to how it was developed and marketed all feed into my hatred.

What is the World Wide Web?

Before talking about the technicalities of valid markup, Web 2.0, or the politics of freedom of information, it's probably best to start off with the basics. What is the World Wide Web? After all, it is- in my humble opinion- the most important and significant invention since Gutenberg's moveable type printing press.

Firstly, the World Wide Web is not the same thing as the internet. The internet is a network of millions of computer around the world, all connected to one another. Every computer that's connected to the internet is a part of it.

The World Wide Web is not a physical thing- it's a system of protocols which allows computers that are connected to one another (whether on the internet, or on a private intranet) to send and receive information to one another, regardless of the type of machines or what software they use.

Before the Web, if you were to connect your computer to another machine to get some information from it, you would have to know how both your computer and the one you were connecting it to worked. Thanks to the Web, not only do you not need to know how the computer you're connecting to works- you don't even need to know what sort of computer you're connected to.

First post...

Welcome to my web blog. No, that's not a spelling mistake; this is my blog about the web. About how it works, what's going on in the world of the web, and no doubt some bits and pieces about my own work and development. Longer articles will appear on my main site at Somerandomnerd.com. And this is going to stay with the default Wordpress theme until I get round to creating my own. (At least, that's the plan- I'm sure it will be interesting to see how it actually develops...)

A bit about me- I'm Scott, and I'm training myself to be a web developer. Although I do enjoy getting involved in design work, I'm mainly interested in the coding side- ie. making pages that work well is more important to me than making them look good. But my aim is to be able to do everything involved in creating a website, with the goal of running my own agency and working full time for myself.

I'm a strong believer in web standards, so I make my pages in HTML with CSS. For the behind the scenes techy stuff, I use PHP with a MySQL database. I'm still learning about Javascript, but as my main focus is on making accessible sites, particularly for use on mobile devices, it's not a priority.

At some stage, I will start using Dreamweaver for the design- however, I want to know how all the code actually works; I don't want to find myself in a position where I need a particular application to build a site. So at the moment I'm doing all my coding in either Notepad++ (which I prefer because of it's code-colour-coding style) or Bluefish. I prefer to work in Linux where possible, although I'm still finding my way, so expect some blog entries about that too.
There will be at least one update every week- probably more, more often than not.

Check back for updates!