The Art Of Stone Skimming

By | November 24, 2011
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For those of you not sure what resolution to commit to this year, here’s a suggestion: Improve your stone skimming. To help you out, this month’s Nature (subscription required for full text) carries a scientific analysis by three French academics of the optimum angle at which the stone should hit the water:

Following earlier attempts to analyse the physics of this ancestral human activity, we focus here on the crucial moment in stone skipping: when the stone bounces on the water’s surface. By monitoring the collision of a spinning disc with water, we have discovered that an angle of about 20° between the stone and the water’s surface is optimal with respect to the throwing conditions and yields the maximum possible number of bounces.

So now you know. Apparently the record is 38 bounces, set by one J. Coleman-McGhee in 1992. Good luck, and have a happy 2004.

A Way Forward For RSS Content

By | November 24, 2011
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RSS is one of those technologies that’s hard to explain to casual users of the Internet. When you tell them they can have their news and site updates in the form of a feed, direct to their desktop, they usually ask

a) can’t I do that already? I thought I could do that already.
b) you mean like email? I don’t want more programs on my computer. Or
c) OK, sounds good but what kind of things can I get?

Don’t get me wrong. RSS, or something like it, is the future. But it’s a hard sell to folk who haven’t downloaded a program in their life (more people than you’re care to imagine; I wonder what the stats on that look like), or to folk who are so worn out by spam they don’t want to sift through more bits and pieces arriving on the computer. But even if people do like the sound of it, RSS still doesn’t lend itself to grabbing information. It’s great for folks looking to read what other people are writing, or even keeping up to speed on general news, but it doesn’t quite have the customisation necessary to lure ordinary folk. Not everyone considers reading blogs in another format to be their idea of fun.

This may be changing (not the idea of fun, the customisation of RSS.) Klips, an RSS-type desktop feed from Serence, have introduced modules that include feeds of more specific, user-defined data, allowing you to track selected currencies, UPS and FedEx packages and stocks. (While I love the design and simplicity of Klips, I don’t think they work for large bodies of information, such as blogs and news, so expect to see Klips move more and more in the direction of small clumps of changing data, such as traffic reports, flight departure and arrival times, or hot deals, scattered around your desktop.)

RSS could do a lot of this too, but so far hasn’t. You can harvest a lot of information via RSS but most of it is passive: You can’t tailor it too much. Either take the feed or don’t. This will change, and already is beginning to, thanks in part to a guy called Mikel Maron from the University of Sussex. He’s come up with a way to deliver some of the personalized data from your My Yahoo! account to an RSS feed, a neat trick that arose from his university studies. (If you’re interested in the technical aspects, here they are in PDF form.) So far his feed — which is not related to Yahoo! in any way — can handle market quotes, weather and movie listing, depending on how you’ve configured your Yahoo! account. But of course his approach offers great potential for funnelling all sorts of personalized data straight to your RSS browser. Let’s hope Yahoo! support, or even buy, Mikel’s efforts.

(Thanks to Chris Pirillo’s LockerGnome RSS Resource for pointing out Mikel’s site.)

Goodbye To The Browser?

By | November 24, 2011
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Here’s some more interesting end-of-year stuff from Nielsen//NetRatings: a report issued today (PDF file) says that three out of every four home and work Internet users access the Internet using a non-browser based Internet application, particularly media players, instant messengers and file sharing applications. “With 76 percent of Web surfers using Internet applications, functionality has grown beyond the browser to become a fundamental piece of the overall desktop,” said Abha Bhagat, senior analyst Nielsen//NetRatings. “It’s become harder to distinguish when you’re on the Internet, blurring the lines between what’s sitting on the desktop and what’s coming from the World Wide Web.”

According to the report, the top five applications are Windows Media Player, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger Service and Real Player. Of these top five applications, Windows Media has the largest active user reach at 34 percent. AOL Instant Messenger was next at 20 percent, followed by Real Player also at 20 percent, MSN Messenger Service at 19 percent and Yahoo! Messenger Service, which reaches 12 percent of the active user base.

Interesting. But what does it actually tell us? First off, we shouldn’t get confused by the data. This doesn’t mean that folks are eschewing the browser, just that a lot of other programs are also connecting to the Internet (where is e-mail in all this?). Second, if Real Networks and MSN Messenger are anything to go by, a lot of these programs access the Internet without the user doing anything (or even knowing about it) so does this actually count? Lastly, there’s been plenty written already about how Microsoft is moving past the browser to incorporate similar functionality into its Office and other products — say Microsoft Word 2003’s Research Pane, for example — so it’s clear the big boys would have us move to more proprietary, locked-in environments, which all of the top five applications have in common. We’re not so much witnessing a demographic change as a deliberate shove by the main players.

My wish list? I’d like to see all of these players stop hoodwinking the end-user by loading their programs into the start-up queue automatically (you know who you are). It’s deliberately misleading (read: sleazy), it hogs resources and it skews data like Nielsen’s. I’d also like to see AOL, MSN and Yahoo all agree to share their instant messaging lists so folk like me don’t have to use great alternatives like Trillian to pull together our disparate buddy networks (Trillian will lump all your different Instant Messaging accounts into one easy to view window, minus all the ads and annoying pop-ups).

I see no danger in the browser gradually being phased out for plenty of web-related tasks. But, if the Internet has really become ‘part of the desktop’ let’s try to make it a place where ordinary folk can hang out without too much hassle.

Branded Blogging – The Next Big Thing?

By | November 24, 2011
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I spotted this a bit late, but thought it was worth throwing out there.

As you know, I’m a big fan of blogging, and while it’s not always easy to convince those higher up the food chain of their merits, blogs and RSS feeds are part of the future and the sooner we embrace it the better it will be for everyone. For an example of how mainstream they are becoming: I read on the blog of one of Jupiter Research’s analysts, Joe Wilcox (most Jupiter analysts have their own blogs, it seems, and they are quite prolific, in itself an interesting reflection of how blogging is seen in some industries as part of your work, not an adjunct) of the official Spider-Man 2 website of how blogging is becoming a promotional tool.

Not only do the production assistants have their own weblog (admittedly, not updated since May 2003) but they have a ‘how to blog’ page and, most importantly, a page of templates for bloggers. These templates, of course, all contain strong Spider-Man themes (templates are the layouts and backgrounds used on webpages, much like a template in a Word document.) The idea: set up a blog, promote Spider-Man along the way.

Good marketing tactic, of course, but also a sign of how, as Jupiter’s Joe Wilcox points out, mainstream blogging has become. If the big studios are starting to spot this niche, can the other big boys be far behind? Expect to see branding creeping into blogging, and creativity pushed a little to the sidelines. Not something I’m crazy about, but then what happens if content on a ‘branded blog’ displeases the brand owner? If I launch a Spider-Man templated blog saying how awful Spider-Man is, or using offensive content, how long is it before Sony Pictures start knocking on my door, or back off the whole branded blogging thing?

Online Holiday Spending Throws Up Some Kinks

By | November 24, 2011
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I think we might have said this last year (and the year before) but this holiday appears to have been the Big One for spending online. According to a report by Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive and Nielsen//NetRatings (‘the eSpending Report’) the total amount spent online was $15.8 billion, up a whopping 37% from 2002. (They don’t say this was in the U.S., but I’m assuming it is.)

There’s some interesting ticklers in the details too: While every category went up, a lot more was spent on practically everything except music this year. While folk seemed to spent a lot on clothes ($3.1 billion spent, up 40% over 2002), the biggest increase was in DVD and video ($1.4 billion, up 58%), a jump that could be explained largely by the rising popularity in DVD players, one of the biggest selling consumer items this year.

But it’s the meagre 20% rise in online music spending that gets me. They splashed out only $790 million this year — a bit more than half of what they spent on books or video. Now while some of this discrepancy may be blamed on the rise of the DVD — they weren’t available in such numbers last year, they’re usually sold in the same store as music CDs — it doesn’t really hold water when you compare it to the books category, which has been available for years online (at least 1996, if not earlier) and yet also showed an impressive 39% growth, with folk spending $1.4 billion on tomes this year. Could this either be a sign of the lingering appeal of online file sharing, suspicion about the spread of ‘hobbling technologies’ that restrict usage of CDs, or a growing lack of interest in what is on offer at current prices?

I’ve asked Nielsen for more data, so perhaps there’s another explanation for this.