News: The Next Big Thing: Mobs

By | November 24, 2011
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 Wired reports on the arrival of flash mobs — “performance art projects involving large groups of people. Mobilized by e-mail, a mob suddenly materializes in a public place, acts out according to some loose instructions, and then melts away as quickly as it formed”.
 
 
Last Wednesday a mob turned up at the Grand Hyatt in New York, “walked quietly upstairs to the hotel’s mezzanine and gathered shoulder-to-shoulder around the balcony,” according to Wired. It then burst into thunderous, screaming applause for 15 seconds and dispersed, just as the police turned up in force.
 
Hmm. Sounds a great idea, depending on what the mobs actually do once they gather, although I would have thought SMS might be a better way to spread the word. Where I come from a mob gathers at the drop of a hat — or cry of ‘thief’ — and usually doesn’t disperse until summary justice has been dispensed. E-mail doesn’t have anything to do with it. Nor does art, come to think of it.
 

News: mobile phones and the decline of society

By | November 24, 2011
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Mobile phones make you rude
 
 
 From the excellent Techdirt website, a collection of stories about how rude we are getting with our mobile phones: “Yet another study about mobile phone rudeness (going along with the one we posted earlier this week has determined that a stunning 71% of people are now consistently late for social events because they can reschedule at the last minute with their mobile phones. 70% say they’ve completely canceled meetings at the very last minute using their mobile phone, and 78% say they’ve gotten out of “awkward situations” by sending a text message rather than calling. From the sound of this, it appears to be focused on the UK, where text messaging is a lot more popular than the US. Also, the study found that 89% of people think others need to have better etiquette when using a mobile phone. Yet another example of the way mobile phones are changing the way people go about their day (not always for the better).”
 
Couldn’t agree more.

Note: ToolButton responds on privacy

By | November 24, 2011
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 Further to my note on the interesting news toolbar ToolButton.  I’ve heard back from ToolButton Inc’s Deb Alloway on the issue of privacy, and here’s her answer:
 
“While a user has the ToolButton toolbar installed we collect stats on the activity of their ToolButton toolbar.  For example, we will know which buttons they have installed, the menu items they use, the number of times they do a search, etc. We do not track any activity done outside of the functions of the ToolButton toolbar. Another example would be if you did a search for “cats”.  We would know you searched for “cats” but that is all.  We can’t tell which web site you visited from there or any other activity.”
 
The only problem I can see with this is that over time, that information would reveal quite a lot about the individual user. Say you’d searched for medical terms, or cars, or brands of diapers, quite a thorough picture of your family would be available to ToolButton for marketing purposes. Given that each ToolButton would have to have a unique user ID that information would end up being quite specific.
 
Lastly, a general thought: it’s quite sad that most folk nowadays, burned by spam and other sleazy marketing devices, don’t trust products like this anymore. I suppose in some ways the companies concerned have only themselves to blame, but abusing Internet users’ trust in the heady early days. My survey of about 100 friends and contacts for Plaxo revealed that nearly all of them considered it a marketing scam. Thoughts, anyone?

News: Another way to get your fix

By | November 24, 2011
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Another way of getting news
 
 
 I’ve talked ad nauseam about RSS feeds — a method of getting you snippets of news and whatnot but not clogging your inbox, or exposing you to more spam — but if you find it all a bit fiddly, you might want to try this option. ToolButton Inc. this week released version 1.2 of ToolButton, an Internet Explorer browser enhancement “that provides users with a delivery channel to obtain content from their favorite websites without the worry and bother of spam.”
 
Basically, the ToolButton is a toolbar that appears in your browser, offering buttons to dynamic — i.e. it changes when new news comes in — and static content — it doesn’t (change, that is) from websites you choose. A website?s ToolButton can include news content, dynamic feeds, blogs, RSS content and menus of important URLs.
 
I’ve installed it and like it. What I haven’t checked out is whether it’s monitoring your browsing activities. More on that once I find out, and hear back from the ToolButton folk.

News: “Champagne or ink, sir?”

By | November 24, 2011
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The chips are down
 
  Unsurprisingly, computer printer cartridges are more expensive than vintage champagne. An investigation by British consumer group Which? published yesterday found that “Epson inkjet cartridges stopped printing even though in some cases there was enough ink to print over a third more pages”.
 
 
Here’s the full press release:
 
“Many of the printers tested gave premature warnings to change ink and toner cartridges, but most gave users the option of continuing printing. However, embedded into Epson’s ink cartridges are chips that stop the cartridge working before the ink runs out. A Which? researcher managed to override this system and print up to 38 per cent more good quality pages, even though the chips stated that the cartridge was empty.
 
“Epson cartridges are pricey – a T026201 cartridge costs about £21 and holds approximately 12ml of ink. This works out at around £1.75 per millilitre for ink, which makes it over seven times more expensive than vintage champagne (a bottle of 1985 Dom Perignon works out at about 23p per millilitre).
 
“Epson said that customers are free to reset these chips to get more ink out, but it will continue to use them ‘to protect the customer from accidentally damaging their printer or producing sub-standard print quality, by unknowingly draining the ink cartridge and damaging the print head.’
 
“Which? experts think that damaging the print head is unlikely if consumers stop printing as soon as they see a drop in quality.”
 
I’ve harped on before about the sleazy price of cartridges. I hadn’t thought of comparing it to bubbly, though. Good one.