Hamarana

Just as I start waxing lyrical about the wonderful things that Google has to offer, I find a post on another blog which throws me into complete chaos. Its a thoughtful post with a bunch of interesting comments about the issues surrounding just how much information Google has about the individual who uses the services they offer, and what, ultimately, that information might be used for.

Food for thought right here

Windows users who have been using Picasa, and who also use gmail, now have access to online photo storage in the form of Picasaweb. Mac users can also access Picasaweb via an iPhoto plugin, or in the same download, a freestanding uploader somewhat similar to the Flickr Uploader.

However, where Flickr costs $$ to customise to any great extent, as usual, Google’s offering is free.

I’ve created a couple of online albums to demonstrate the offering. You can make albums public or private and at this stage theres not a whole heap else you can do. No commenting, for example.

Nonetheless, its a good deal. Go take a look!

Well, its almost upon us, just brinking on release.

Screenshots here and here. Its much prettier than Windows used to be… but they have, apparently, in their wisdom, left so much out of the basic system that we are used to, you have to go looking for things that were just right there, or at the end of a right mouse click…

And the pricing is going to be hideous… there are five variants: Basic, Business, Premium, Ultimate and of course Server. According to my friend John, the top of the range (Ultimate I guess) will be around $400US. He also tells me the minimum hardware configuration of 800Mhz, 512Mb and DirectX9 will only get you a really feature reduced version, with most of the GUI goodies falling by the wayside.

You need a minimum 800Mhz, 512MB and a DirectX 9 capable video card… but a heck of a lot of stuff gets disabled at lower speeds, like no translucent titlebars, etc… they have a special ‘crippled’ UI for low end systems. To have the standard “Premium” UI you need 1Ghz, 1GB, 128MB Video, and 15GB of drive space.

I guess there isnt anyone I know who will like this new Windows… it will look too Mac-like for them

Why would anyone want to blog? I’ve been asked this a few times and can only explain it thus: Its easier than having a static site that you have to design and redesign over and over. Static sites are useful for static information. That is, information which never ever changes. Most of us who have a blog change the information quite frequently, and logging in and just typing without having to consider html, xml, css, etc etc is just wonderful. Whats happened, of course, is that anyone can have a blog now. You don’t need your own domain, you can sign up for any of a dozen places which will give you a free blog and away you go. I’m not sure if this is a good or a bad thing, but there are some absolute gems out there. Check out Laughing Knees for example… aways thoughtful, always interesting. Then there are examples like Rants and Brain Damage…

Value Judgements aside, there are lots of alternatives if you want a blog but don’t want to have to fuss with paying for hosting, design, installation of scripts and so forth.

The most recently discovered is the very new Vox, from Sixapart, who designed Moveabletype and Typepad, as well as buying Livejournal which I do believe was the original free blog tool (Yes, I do believe it was there before Blogger). Vox is what you might call “social” blogging because there seems to be a community effect much more integrated than Blogger’s. Its similar to Livejournal I guess in that sense and its existence now makes me wonder if LJ will eventually become a Vox clone as well. I have an account there and have not yet really felt inclined to do much with it. It is really easy to work with, its practically idiot-proof and it is free… worth considering if you just want somewhere to post your photographs, music and so on, and blog for the pleasure of yourself and your friends. At the risk of sounding “precious” I don’t regard it as being a “serious” blogging tool, MT and Typepad do the job much more efficiently (for a price) and even Blogger (free) is better. However, for such ease of use, it will be hard to beat.

So what else is there? I seem to have covered most of the existing tools just in one paragraph…

As a WordPress fan, my top choice for a free online blog would have to be WordPress itself, at wordpress.com. If you don’t want to have the flexibility of designing your own, or installing one of the hundreds of templates available, a free WordPress blog is hard to beat. Its easy to use, and there is NO advertising. There’s a choice of more than a dozen templates with more being added all the time. Comment spam won’t be much of a problem (if indeed it is a problem at all) because Akismet is installed to every WordPress.com blog. You’ll be on the bleeding edge of what they are doing with WordPress, as well, because amongst other things, most of the new features are incorporated at wordpress.com before being released into the script for the rest of us.

Blogger is very decent. There is a plethora of existing templates to use, and if you are a dab hand with code you can have your own template with no fuss at all. With your own hosting or webspace you can also have the blogger system ftp the files to that space, wherever it is. I like blogger much more than I used to, especially the blogspot hosting now that they have gone with a narrow ad bar across the top of the screen, instead of that HUGE 480×60 advertising banner of the old days.

Xanga is pretty hideous. Its restrictive, has a huge advertising space at the top of every page and theres really not much to recommend it at all. I tried it for a while, just to test it out, and did not like it one bit. Very limiting.

Diaryland seems to be okay for basic blogging needs. There’s a bottom frame for Diaryland stuff but when you are reading a diaryland blog, you can remove the frame, so not too bad. I didn’t see any advertising… I created a site just for the purpose of checking it out and found it sadly lacking by comparison with the others, although (as I said in the blog itself) it does allow some flexibility. Here’s a default site and I really don’t think they have made much effort to improve it over the years.

Then, of course, theres Windows Live Spaced (controlled and contrived, IMO… but ideal for those who think Microsoft invented the Internet), Yahoo has weighed in with yahoo360, very similar to the M$ offering and just as contrived… and there are many more than these, most being advertising supported.

So… how to choose a free site? Try to get one without advertising, or else with minimal advertising, and also try to get one with an established reputation.

My recommendations for serious opinionated bloggers are:
1. WordPress
2. Blogger

and for family, friends and social blogging
1. Vox
2. Livejournal

Thanks to Ron at Bibliobillabong, I have now discovered Library Thing. Its an online catalogue of your books. A free account allows entry of 200 books and after that its either $10 a year or $25 for a lifetime (thats lifetime of the site, remember). Many people have their own catalogue on their personal computer, but this seems like a nice way to share your reading and collection…its also a way for people to get to know who you are. I do believe you can understand a lot of a person by seeing what it is they read

Starting with a free account allows you to see whether you will use it to any great extent, and if you get to the 200 and are still hankering for more space, its probably worth spending the $25. You can also insert some code into your blog to display a random selection, and you can reference any entry any time you like. To make the book entries, you enter the term you wish to search on, and Library Thing does its Thing and searches Amazon, the Library of Congress and 60 other world libraries, then presents you with a list to choose from.

Its a great service for the bibliophiles amongst us! Take the tour at Library Thing

This website is worth
What is your website worth?

Michael’s post reminded me of this tool, which I had all but forgotten. I do believe its value has declined by 2/3 since I last looked, but I can’t remember, and as Michael points out, its all a bit of a nothing, anyway, given that its based on incoming links. Most of mine are from a WordPress theme I designed what seems like a hundred years ago… hardly anyone links to me for content and reading… I think maybe I have four people who do.

Still… mildly entertaining for a moment.

I seem to have lost my old Imation 256mb drive, which is a bloody pest because it has on it everything I was working on for my job, and that cannot be replaced, I will have to start over…

I had already decided to u/g anyway, as the 256mb was no longer adequate to hold my stuff, and had decided on a 2G drive, as it was a nice balance between cost and capacity.

The Sandisk Cruzer Micro 2G caught my eye for one reason alone and that was its size (its tiny, though not as tiny as the Imation). The other feature I liked was that it has no cap, its retractable instead. I did not know that it has this thing called U3 which is Windows only and is like a little apps area of the drive, complete with its own launchbar. I was impressed with the notion of having an on-board virus scanner… its all very well having virus scanners on host machines, but you don’t know if they are updated often enough and if you can have some control over it, well and good for the protection of your own files. I paid $99 for it at Officeworks yesterday. I believe RRP is around $179.

Further exploration of the notion of apps on a flashdrive revealed PortableApps.com and of course the U3.com site. These apps require absolutely no installation of anything on the host machine and there is a veritable truckload of them (relatively speaking). The apps listed at portableapps don’t seem to require U3 which is an app in itself… its a fascinating concept… I suppose its not long before we have Operating Systems (mac OS7 is already available) as portables and we will be able to run whatever we want on whichever host machine we are working at.

Tech moves fast. When I think of how when I was a kid, I did not even have TV, let alone the stuff we have today… I keep getting blown away…