Earth: Mostly Harmless

Phone lust

I am very happy with my current mobile phone (the Nokia E61, a.k.a. the BlackBerry killer). It does everying, and very well. It does all my email; I can blog from it; it’s a great calendar/to-do system; it has a GameBoy emulator; it has WiFi; it runs Google Maps Mobile; it has an SSH client; it’s built very sturdily; and apparently it’ll even make phone calls.

The one thing that I would improve about it is that it doesn’t have any kind of camera. I suppose the rationale for this is that it’s aimed at business/government, where trade secrets and suchlike may be an issue. And omitting a camera allows the phone to be a bit slimmer.

Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks that the E61 suffers from this oversight. I hear that there’s an E61i in the works, the main difference being a camera. Tempting, so tempting…

Nokia E65 and E61i details:

Nokia have added a number of user agent profile files to their website including ones for the as yet unannounced Nokia E61i and Nokia E65 models. Careful reading of the user agent profiles reveals that both devices run on S60 3rd Edition on Symbian OS 9.1. The E61i appears to be a tweaked version of the E61. Changes from the E61 include the addition of a camera and a change to the MicroSD memory card format. Read on for more.

(Via All About Symbian - News).

What’s wrong with today’s web media

Have a look at this article at InformIT. Useful, well-written content - but it’s laid out so badly that you’re put off reading the whole thing by the ad-ridden multi-page badness that is their site design.

On the linked article’s page, you have to look past a network banner; a full-size ad banner; a header/login bar; a set of navigation ‘tabs’; a bread-crumb trail; a title; a set of descriptive metadata to do with the article; a toolbar (save/discuss/print/email); and a table of contents box before you get to the actual content. That’s 750 vertical pixels of page to look past - in other words, an entire screenful on a 1024×768 screen. I have a 1680×1050 screen on my iMac, and I can still only see the first six lines of the story in my RSS reader.

The article is spread over ten pages. Why? It’s only two thousand words long. This is something I see a lot on technology sites, Tom’s Hardware being the worst offender (example). To make matters worse, the table of content box (pictured left) is right where the actual content should be. It’s got a stupid AJAX collapsable header - the need for which just exposes the fact that it gets in the way. Personally, unless the story was extremely important to me I wouldn’t tend to read more than a couple of ‘pages’ from an article like this - clicking through just gets tiresome.

[Note: I'm about to put in a 'more' tag, which means you'll have to click through to read the rest of this story. This may seem hypocritical, but remember that you'll only have to click-through if you're on the home page of this blog, where it exists for brevity of the blog entry list. On the permalink page, which corresponds to something like InformIT's article page, the entire blog entry is displayed.]

Continue reading What’s wrong with today’s web media…

The Google Skynet awakens

I picked up an interesting tidbit about one of the new features Google has added to Google Documents:

How can I use spreadsheets to answer some of my many questions about the world?

The GoogleLookup function attempts to answer your question using the web, with information about people, places and things, like the population of Japan, the mass of Jupiter, or the place of birth of Abraham Lincoln.

Keep in mind that, while the GoogleLookup function knows quite a bit, it doesn’t know everything. Not all of the formulas that you might try will work, but we encourage you to experiment with the function and see what does work.

So far, so Ask on steroids. But the syntax is particularly interesting:

Syntax: =GoogleLookup("entity", "attribute")

where "entity" represents the name of the entity that you want to access, like Kuala Lumpur, Audrey Hepburn, or oxygen, and "attribute" is the type of information that you want to retrieve.

It would seem that Google are making some pretty nice clustering and natural language query technology available to the public, at least within the constraints of the spreadsheet system. It would be really nice if everyone could use this as a web service.

Publishers Thank Google for Book Sales

The latest chapter in Google’s continuing world-domination book-scanning operations, this is a defence of the programme - a rare publisher’s voice speaking out in favour of it, at a time when the nebulous and highly-successful company is being sued by authors’ associations for copyright infringement over the service. And as for the scheme’s greatest benefit for less well known books - further confirmation of the Long Tail thesis?

I, for one, welcome our digitising, organising, aggregating, comparison shopping, advertising, Mountain View overlords.

Publishers Thank Google for Book Sales:

eldavojohn writes “A few book publishers are actually thanking Google for an apparent rise in sales due to Google’s scan plan. Google is busy defending itself against authors and publishers that have brought lawsuits for ignoring copyrights. The director of the Oxford University Press said, ‘Google Book Search has helped us turn searchers into consumers.’ It seems to work in favor of the smaller publishers: ‘Walter de Gruyter/Mouton-De Gruyter, a German publisher, said its encyclopedia of fairy tales has been viewed 471 times since appearing in the program, with 44 percent of them clicking on the ‘buy this book’ Google link.’ Do you think that Google’s ’sneak peak’ search access increases sales or violates copyrights on intellectual property?”

(Via Slashdot).

Everyone has their obsessions…

More genius from Randall Munroe…

Search History:

(Via xkcd.com).