I just got in a ticket control on the local public transport. No problem, since I have a general abonnement. What I wonder about these controls is why you can always recognize the guys doing the control instantly when you enter the bus? They are clothed in civil, talk casually and generally behave inconspicuously. So what is it? My guess is, that they just don't look like people who would normally take a bus. This is weird, I can't describe the typical bus rider but it seems like these guys don't match.
I hear that the Zurich public transport is more sophisticated, a friend reporting that she was once surprised one evening by two twenty-something girls perfectly dressed for a party suddenly turning around and asking for the tickets. Well, maybe this was only a clever trick to earn some extra cash :-)
Imagine a charger pad: Just put your notebook, phone, PDA, MP3 player, etc. on your table and - no plugging required - it recharges! This is exactly what MobileWise promises. They claim, that there is no radiation and the system manages where the power is sent. I wonder how much energy is lost in the process.
Although the main problem with recharging is that you have to carry around the adaptor if you plan to work for more than a few hours until you are back. The pad is too big, too (although depending on the number of devices one universal charger would still be step forward). What you'd really want are these pads everywhere. At least at home and at your workplace, but also in hotels, conferences, trains, airplanes, etc.
Just found:
"I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my
telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my
telephone." - Bjarne Stroustrup
Via Squawks of the Parrot. Bjarne Stroustrup is the inventor of C++...
We had an interesting business case on the bild.li moblogging platform: The cellar of an Aroma Café burned, causing damage which had to be handled by several insurance companies.
Several pictures were taken to assess the damage and bild.li was used to communicate: From store manager to company head, to the owner of the house and his insurance company and to the business insurance of the café. As a bonus some café's employees started commenting the pictures, which was a nice way to keep in touch in the week the café was closed.
The primary advantage was the easy communication between the parties. Just point to a URL instead of determining receipients and then trying to get several MB of pictures through various mail servers.
Jon Udell writes about E-mail's special power and points out, that a lot of the usefulness of email comes from its utter simpleness. A particular strong area is instant, low overhead group formation, which often renders email the preferred tool over more powerful but also more complicated tools like web forums, KM tools, etc.
Clay Shirky then points to an important missing feature in this instant group forming: The possibility to easily get unsubscribed from a discussion. In e-mail the sender determines the group, and the receiver has no easy means of leaving the group.
On the other hand I often find myself reading a partial thread, because some people answer in private or take me off the list, while other's add me back. In these cases I'd prefer a few superfluous mails to having to reconstruct a discussion by combing quoted parts from different mails.
Ross Mayfield adds, that they allow CC to wikis as a means to complement the group forming use of email.
We use the roundup issue tracker, which has a very interesting feature called nosy lists. You can discuss an open issue in email by CC-ing roundup (which tracks the issue with the subject line) and all users that are CC-ed are automatically subscribed to information about this issue. The important point is that issues are generally short-lived, so that landing on such a list doesn't mean too much irrelevant mail in turn for being sure not to miss important information. Another use I like about it is the automatic archiving of the discussion.
The interface could be improved further: First, tracking with the subject line is brittle. The first mail (which opens the issue) doesn't even have to correct line and any Reply-All answers to this mail opens new issues. This could be solved by relying on the "Reference" headers in the mails instead. Secondly, unsubscribing is too much work, it'd be nice to add a link to outgoing emails that points to the unsubscribing page for this instant-list (keep in mind however, that a mail could come directly from a sender who uses reply-all and thus, the link cannot incorporate the user information; just the list information).
This would be a nice standalone application or a nice addition to a wiki software, too: Some archiving address in the organization that manages short-lived mailing lists and publishes all mails it receives on the web, threaded and searchable.
Oh boy, as reported by Slashdot and others, Verisign, who is trusted to administrate the contents of the .com, .net and .org DNS root servers added a wild-card entry to an IP of theirs, which catches all mistyped domain names. Currently they redirect to a search engine supported by paid listings (as Microsoft has been doing in IE), but I'm sure that they will offer you to register this domain very soon, too.
Aside from the unfair advantage their position creates, many technical problems with this approach have been pointed out. E.g. this will break anti-spam filters that check for valid sender domains.
Developers of spiders will now have to treat this as a special case for dead links. Otherwise all mistyped or expired links will point to Verisign now. Imagine if Google wouldn't fix this: They would accumulate a mind-boggling amount of pagerank due to this trick!
So Veri$ign's greed causes troubles and confusion for users mistyping domains, forces many software authors to fix parts of their software (and that every time they change something significant in their system, like pointing to another catch-all domain), which in turns causes users to unnecessarily update their software.
Boycott Versign, Network Solutions and Thawte (all the same company)!
Quite amazing: Recall allows you to search 11 billion web pages in the internet archive. Of couse, you can restrict by date, but it also plots graphs on when your search terms appeared on the web.
Even more so, it automatically (and amazingly effectively) categorizes results and plots graphs on the time-dependence of your terms in conjunction with these categories. Cool.
Ranking is done purely on content, there doesn't seem to be any link analysis. The author claims, that there is additional content analysis being done to increase relevance, although it is not really clear what. Also read her powerpoint presentation of the technology. It includes some technical details on the hardware and the performance of the (all POSIX C) code.
The presentation mentions a personalization feature, but I wasn't able to reproduce it. Apparently the results from previous queries should influence later queries. I wonder wether I could seed the personalization with the contents of my blog.
I wasn't able to find any connection to nutch, which is also hosted at the internet archive.
Give it a try!
Broadband access is steadily growing in Switzerland. According to swisscom and swisscable we had about 640'000 broadband subscribers (half/half cable and ADSL) at the end of june.
Yesterday, WEMF published the results of their MA Comis 2003 study. This is a poll of about 2000 users in the german part of Switzerland, studying not only the reach (by recall) of various websites but also quite a lot of behavioral and attitudinal data.
This allows an interesting view on how broadband always on access is changing the behavior of users: E.g. it says, that 74% of users who download movies use a broadband access (which means, that the other 26% do this over dial-up?!). More interesting in my opinion is that increased usage of communities and tools like the TV schedule. Obviously in the days of dial-up the extra step of connecting to the internet was enough to keep the newspaper the primary source for this kind of information. But with the feeling of always on combined with the easy of use and depth of information the web is gaining ground for these kind of of everyday services. I personally switched to online schedules (TV, movies, parties) a long time ago.
More to come as soon as I get my hands on the MA Comis CD-ROM.