Live from Austin!

I reminded one of our content editors that we needed a text version of a diagram on an alternate page, to meet accessibility requirements and support screen readers.

So he created one, by laying the information out in a pretty table.

I’m an iPhone skeptic. While I appreciate good UI design considerably more than the average person, a good UI alone is not enough to make me accept a crippled and overpriced product.

At WWDC today, Steve Jobs has announced that the third party SDK for the iPhone is…make all your applications web applications, and access them from the Safari browser. Which means the user has to pay network bandwidth charges to run the application, and can’t make or receive any calls while it’s running. And of course, no service means your applications all stop working.

So basically, the iPhone is a closed platform, a very pretty but underpowered cellphone. It’s not a smartphone. It lacks even the capabilities of many low-end handsets offered by GSM networks, but it’s going to be sold at a premium price.

Let’s see how it compares with my current 2-year-old phone, for example:

To me, that’s a hell of a tough sell.

You may point out that my tiny phone’s screen isn’t great for browsing the web, but that’s just tradeoff I made because I like a phone that’s truly pocketable. If you prefer a big screen, you can get a Blackberry or Treo for $150 or less. Right now, Cingular has refurb 8525 devices for $99.

I prefer the hybrid solution: pair a small phone with my Nokia N800, and browse the web at triple the resolution of the iPhone. You can get an N800 plus a small Bluetooth phone and you’ve still saved $200 over buying an iPhone.

In addition, most of today’s phones take SD cards for memory expansion. I can dump movies onto a 4GB SD card and stick it in the Nokia. If I need more space, I’ve got a couple of extra 1GB cards floating around. What happens when you use up all the memory in your iPhone? You’re stuck, there’s no expansion option.

If the iPhone was $99, or even $199 at the most, I might be interested. At $599, it ought to sell like the similarly-priced PlayStation 3. It’s the most overpriced Apple product since the Mac Cube. (Which I loved the design of, but didn’t buy because it was overpriced.) It’s the most overhyped since the first Newton.

Oh, I’m sure Apple will sell some. I mean, the Motorola RAZR sucked, but plenty of people had to have it because it looked so cool. But then, the RAZR wasn’t $600…

Once upon a time, back in the ancient history of the Internet–before the 1990s–domain names were carefully controlled and regulated. A single organization controlled each top level domain. If you wanted a domain name, you had to meet their requirements.

Often the policies enforced were quite picky. If you wanted a .uk domain name, you were required to actually be in the UK, for example. If you wanted a .org domain, you were required to be a non-profit organization. To be in .net, you were expected to be a network access provider or ISP.

A lot of people disliked the bureaucracy involved in domain registration, and objected to the fees charged. And so it was decided that the domain name system would be opened up. There would be many domain registrars for each major top level domain, all competing to give the best price and service. Anyone would be able to register a domain, with minimal bureaucracy. Domains would be bought, sold and transferred in a perfect Free Market.

At first, things looked good. The cost of registering a domain dropped rapidly. Rather than having to fax paperwork around and get signed documents from company directors, you could just register online with a credit card for whatever domain you wanted.

However, it quickly became clear that domains could have value. A small proportion of Internet users (around 5-10%) don’t seem to understand search engines or bookmarks. They find things by guessing domain names and typing them in. As a result, people found that domain names an idiot would guess first ended up with traffic, purely by existing. Suddenly instead of having to advertise your web site, you could buy a domain name that people would randomly visit anyway, and get instant traffic with no work required.

Domains like “sex.com”, “computers.com” and “cars.com” suddenly became very valuable, changing hands for large amounts of money. Some people weren’t very happy about it, but still, there was nothing wrong with it really.

Unfortunately, there were headline stories of domain names changing hands for millions of dollars. And suddenly, there was a gold rush. Everyone with a modem hurriedly registered every domain name they could think about.

This was a major pain. If you wanted to set up a web site, it became almost impossible to find a simple domain name that hadn’t been registered already. Almost all of them were unused, just a whois entry and nothing more, but if you approached the owner their eyes would light up with dollar signs and they’d demand extortionate rates for their “valuable property”.

Still, the situation was somewhat self-correcting. It did still cost $50 or so to hold a domain for a year, so eventually when nobody turned up to offer $100,000 for it, the holder would let the registration lapse and you’d be able to pick it up for $50.

Then someone invented banner ads. Suddenly, those unused domains could be used to make money. Domain registrations were still dropping in price, and there were ad companies who would pay you $0.01 each time you served up an ad to someone. $10 a year for a domain, and all you needed to do was show ads to at least 1,000 idiots who typed your domain in at random, and you’d break even.

And so suddenly, the Internet filled with junk web pages filled with ads and nothing else. There are now multi-million-dollar companies whose primary business is hoarding domains and filling them with content-free crap. Domain spam is now so mainstream that companies like Google actively encourage it.

The next step was obvious. Sure, you could think of a domain name that other people would be likely to guess at random, but most of those were already registered. So the domain spammers began watching the lists of domains that people failed to renew. So now, if a widely used open source project fails to renew its domain name, the page will suddenly be replaced with a spam site full of affiliate ads.

Not everyone appreciates ending up on a domain spam page, however. Plus, if your page doesn’t look like total spam, you might get search engine traffic, and boost your profits further. Hence, the new trend is automatic content generation.

Some domain speculators take the unsubtle approach, and simply rip off content wholesale. If you have a web site with significant readership (as measured by, say, technorati), someone will likely set up a spam site which copies the text of each post you make, covers it with ads, and re-posts it to one of their hoarded domains. Sure, it’s copyright violation, but the chances of getting caught are slim, and so long as you pick on personal web sites the chances of anyone going after you with a lawsuit are slim too.

(I don’t think it has happened to me yet, but if I include a made-up word that doesn’t appear on the web, like spozquak, I should be able to do a Google search in a month or two and see if anyone’s copied it.)

However, again thanks to the free market, there’s now a market for software that can generate moderately convincing looking content. You’ve seen it in spam e-mails, and now it’s being used to fill the web too. The first generation used random text generation, but now more sophisticated “auto content generator” software uses web feeds to pull in text, chops the text into individual sentences, and then recombines them based on keywords.

(So I guess I should clarify that spozquak is a great alternative to viagra, cures mesothelioma from asbestosis, and helps you make money at home.)

While the web was filling with crap, the domain name registrars kept competing in their free market. As the supply of new unregistered .com domains dried up, they had to think of new ways to pull in customers. The solution: trial periods. You can now register a domain name for a 5 day trial, see if it pulls in any suckers, and if not you don’t have to pay for it.

You can probably guess what happened next. Someone wrote software to repeatedly register domains for trial periods, automatically.

And so we arrive at today’s web, the ultimate result of applying unconstrained free market economics to the problem of naming web sites. It’s a world where every name you can think of is already registered and filled with spam, often by someone who isn’t even paying for the domain. A world where if you’re away on holiday when your domain name expires, it’s immediately filled with spam. A world where web searches return hundreds of pages filled with spam designed to look like content, ripped off from other people’s web sites.

Of course, there are a couple of things we could do that might help ameliorate the problem. They’re just utterly unacceptable to the free market faithful who make up the Internet’s core audience.

The first is this: Do not allow domain transfers between third parties.

You bought a domain? Great. You want to sell it? Can’t. I mean, you can’t sell your home address, your postal code or your telephone number, so why should you be able to sell a domain name?  Your friend wants the domain? Fine, you cancel it, he registers it for the standard price.

If you could sell telephone numbers, you’d see rampant speculation there as well. If you moved to Austin and wanted a 512 phone number so friends could call you without paying long distance fees, you’d probably have to buy one at auction for a few hundred dollars. Or if you were in Massachusetts and wanted one of the old 617 numbers so you’d look like a long-established business, you could end up paying thousands of dollars. But the phone company doesn’t allow reselling of phone numbers, so the problem doesn’t occur.

(It’s worth noting that you can sell toll-free numbers. And sure enough, you get rampant speculation in that chunk of the phone number namespace, with most of the good ones already taken.)

The second way to help reduce the damage caused by the free market in domains is to resurrect an idea from the 80s: that your domain registration is voided if you don’t actively use the domain. And by “use”, I mean more than simply putting up a blank page of ads.

I can tell that people are already sharpening their pitchforks and lighting their torches, but which is worse: a domain name system that doesn’t support your religious belief that a free market is the best solution to everything, or a free market domain name system where you can’t actually buy any domains you want and everything is full of spam?

I find to my surprise that I’ve not posted here before about EBD. So, here goes…

Over the years I’ve noticed that people who are exposed to Emacs for an extended period of time become unable to use other software. I don’t just mean that they refuse to use other text editors; I mean that they cannot tolerate any non-Emacs interface for any task.

They read news in Emacs. They read their e-mail in Emacs. They can’t use a simple pager to page through their manual pages; they use Emacs, and insist on rewriting man pages as info documents. They use Emacs to assemble and play MP3 playlists. They can’t even use a web browser; they read the web using Emacs w3-mode.

Try to get them to use another piece of software, any piece of software, and you’ll be treated to a lecture on how it isn’t like Emacs, and Emacs is much better.

I call this curious affliction Emacs Brain Damage. It’s a stiffening of the brain cells, an inflexibility of thought caused by excessive Emacs use.

Users of other text editors don’t seem to have the same problem. You don’t see vi users complaining that they can’t possibly read e-mail using mutt or pine. You don’t get BBEdit users refusing to touch iTunes. Eclipse developers don’t use it to read Slashdot.

EBD sufferers will often try to explain away their condition by claiming that the Emacs interface is simply the optimum way to interact with a computer, for all possible tasks. It’s not that they can’t use other software because they are inflexible; it’s because Emacs is simply a better interface than all other software.

I emphatically reject this rationalization for a very simple reason: when I first started using Unix, I used Emacs. I only switched to vi years later.

It’s also worth noting that the RSI sufferers I’ve encountered have almost all been heavy Emacs users. Famous Emacs hackers like jwz and RMS have suffered from RSI. Some Emacs users have written extensive notes on the technology they’ve had to use to enable them to continue to use Emacs. I think that demolishes the “Emacs is simply superior” argument quite nicely.

How to make cookies work the way they should work:

1. If you’re using Internet Explorer, upgrade to Firefox.
2. Install the CookieSafe extension. (For Firefox 3, you want CS Lite.)
3. Restart Firefox.
4. Open Edit→Preferences→Privacy. In the Cookies section, uncheck "Accept cookies from sites".
5. If you’ve been accepting cookies from all kinds of sites, clear your cookies with the Private Data "Clear Now" button.

That’s it. Now, Firefox will block all cookies by default. If you navigate to a site that has a legitimate reason to use cookies—for example, a site you log in to—you just need to click the cookie icon bottom right of the Firefox window and a menu will pop up. From the menu, you can choose to allow cookies for that site, and that site alone, with a single click.

No more being spammed with dialog boxes from sites that try to send you a dozen third-party ad-tracking cookies. No more painful editing of lists of domains allowed to set cookies.

Frankly, this is how they should make cookies work in Firefox 2.0.

NoScript

Add the NoScript plugin and JavaScript works the same way.

Awesome! I’ve entered a Firefox enhancement request asking that this be the UI for cookie and script security in future versions of the browser. If you agree, please vote for it.

Google quietly overhauled Google Reader recently. It’s now worth checking out, it has a more Gmail-like interface and can be used to chew through a few hundred web feeds.

If you’re still using an archaic feed reader (e.g. the TrollJournal “friends” page) you should definitely check it out and see what you’re missing.

I like that it has a phone-optimized interface available, so I have the option of checking my favorite web feeds from anywhere.

If writing gives us satisfaction, we are likely to end up writing for definite periods each day even when we have little to say. The hanging on to an empty form is almost natural since it is the form only that we can control and stage. There is, of course, also the unconscious assumption that once you stage the form, the content will come to nest in it of itself. All ritual is perhaps based on this assumption: you stage the gesture and words that go with fervor and faith and you assume that the latter will somehow materialize.

—Eric Hoffer, 1952.

Tom Tomorrow has his panties in a bunch over the outrageous behavior of Internet users. He was shocked this week to discover that some people were reading his published web log using special purpose web log browsing software (aka “news aggregators”), rather than the software he wants them to use (a web browser). Worse still, the miscreants were skipping the ads! Quel horreur!

It rather reminds me of the CEO of Turner Broadcasting, who declared that skipping TV ads using fast forward was “stealing the programming”.

Here’s the deal: if you publish or broadcast something, you don’t get to control how people choose to read or watch it.

If I want to watch Cartoon Network on an HDTV and chop the logo off the bottom of the screen, I can. If I choose to read AOL Time Warner’s web sites using a non-AOL web browser, I can. If I want to block your ads or change the layout of your web site using a local style sheet, tough luck, you can’t stop me.

I think the argument that it’s rude for me to skip TV or web ads is ridiculous. However, you may disagree, in which case here are some rules which may soon appear in the Tom Tomorrow Guide to Etiquette.

• When viewing television, politely sit and watch every TV ad. Do not go to the bathroom or fetch a snack. If you must use a VCR to time-shift, do not fast forward through the ads. What, you expect the TV companies to let you watch that programming as you wish?

• Make sure you are careful to read every ad on every page of the newspaper. If you must throw away a section of the paper, be sure to read every advertisement first. Otherwise, you are automatically skipping a big chunk of ads which helped pay for the newspaper you enjoyed, and that would be quite literally stealing content from the newspaper, wouldn’t it?

• Make sure you open and read every single piece of junk postal mail you receive. The postal service you use is heavily subsidized by the money it makes from bulk advertising mail. To toss junk mail in the trash automatically without opening and examining the ads would be taking advantage of something without paying for it. That would be stealing, wouldn’t it?

• When you’re listening to the car radio, never change the station during an ad break. The ads pay for the radio transmitter and the electricity used to broadcast the music. If they couldn’t advertise to you, why, the radio station would go away entirely. So if you skip the ads by pushing a button, you’re obviously human scum.

• You know those advertising inserts in magazines? They’re there because the publisher wants you to have to look at them and move them aside to read the whole article. If you rip them out so you can just read the entire article without seeing the ad, well, you’re stealing. What, you want the content handed to you on a silver platter?

Meanwhile in the real world…

People skip ads all the time. Sometimes manually, sometimes automatically, but mostly without thinking or even registering the presence of the ad. Our daily environment is so ad-infested at this point that even the advertisers are admitting that it is becoming harder and harder to ‘reach’ people (where by ‘reach’ they often mean ‘interrupt’, ’distract’ or ‘annoy’).

If people’s desires and behavior make advertising ineffective, that’s just tough luck for advertising. If technology makes it easy for people to skip ads and people want to skip ads, then people will skip ads. You can rant all you like, but the world was not designed for the express purpose of advertising, and there’s no guarantee it will stay amenable to your marketing messages.

In fact, the Internet was never designed to be friendly to advertising. The fact that you can advertise on the web at all is accident. The Internet existed before web advertising, and will probably still exist in some form when capitalism has collapsed on itself and mass marketing is something kids are asked to read about in history textbooks. If my skipping ads breaks your business model, you need to find a new business model.

And now it’s disclosure time. I’m one of those evil RSS-readin’ web-aggregatin’ freeloading varmints. Except that I have bought a bunch of Tom Tomorrow books, and I wear a baseball cap with Sparky the Wonder Penguin embroidered on the front, purchased from you-know-who’s web site. (As an aside: I wish Ted Rall was still selling embroidered caps in custom sizes, I could totally go for an El Busho cap too, but One Size Does Not Fit All.)

I think I’ve demonstrated that I’m responsible and adult enough to make my own moral choices, so I don’t particularly appreciate being told that I’m “human scum” because I choose not to look at ads every day, and only go browse them when I feel like getting a new T-shirt or some bumper stickers.

Back in the 90s, the folks at WIRED decided that the web was so fundamentally new and important that it needed to have a capital W, even though nobody capitalizes things like radio and television and boring old books. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations who should know how to recognize bullshit nevertheless adopted WIRED’s style diktats wholesale into their own style guide. Hence in journalism, it’s not uncommon to see capital Ws all over the place in articles about the online world.

Some people attempt to rationalize capitalizing web by saying that it’s because it’s short for World Wide Web; but unfortunately for them, radio is short for Radio Telegraph or RT, and was even written that way when it was invented, yet we still don’t write about “listening to a Radio show” or “talk Radio”.

Some come up with the rationalization that web is a proper noun because there’s only one web. If you want to take that approach, which is at least somewhat justifiable, then you would refer to something being “on the Web”, but you’d still write “web browser” and “web site” with lower case ‘w’. Personally, though, I don’t buy the ‘proper noun’ argument either; the web is not a place. It’s very like the telephone network; there’s only one phone network, but nobody writes about talking to their mother “on the Phone” or considers the Telephone Network to be a proper noun that needs capital letters.

Finally, if you look at actual common usage, practically nobody writes web with a capital W except journalists who are slavishly following style guides.

So basically, capitalizing ‘web’ is not consistent with how other media and networks are treated; it just comes across as pretentious and “WIRED told us this was cool and we don’t know any better”.

What drives me even more nuts is people at work who write web with a capital W, but don’t manage to write Web Services capitalized. They write “Web services”, which is wrong no matter how you look at it.

(Copied and expanded from a post elsewhere.)

((And Tim Murtaugh agrees.))

If you search Google for “Welcome to Adobe GoLive”, you’ll get a ton of matches for web sites which were set up by people too incompetent to change the default text in the GoLive web site template.

Ironically, the current #1 match is a web site containing cracked serial numbers for Adobe products.