MediaSavvy

I’ve ranted here a few times that I don’t want HTML in my email. Today I did something about it. Virtually all of the HTML mail I get is spam. I was sick and tired of my mail client parsing the HTML and going to the Net and every time I clicked on one of those messages. And spammers could use those accesses to track whether I read their message.

I set my email client (CTM’s PowerMail) to flag all HTML email as spam, mark it as read, and put it somewhere that I can review it at my leisure. Newsletters and commercial email are filtered out before they hit the HTML filter.

This has eliminated about three-quarters of the spam that Razor missed. I was especially pleased to see all that Chinese-language spam was being tagged.

I know that this may not be a good long-term technique, because more and more email clients are defaulting to HTML, and it does offer some advantages over plain text. But, for now, friends don’t send friends HTML email.

I’ve been looking for a while for a phone to replace my ancient and reliable Startac. I finally found one (Sony Ericsson T616) that meets my criteria:

• Addressbook and calendar that are Mac friendly: I can use iSync to synchronize by addressbook and calendar via Bluetooth. It was pretty easy to set up and now it’s very easy to use. This pretty much eliminates any need I had for a PDA.
• Small and light: It’s not some huge PDA, like the TMobile Sidekick or Palm Tungsten or Handspring Whatever. It’s just a phone and it fits in my pocket. And it’s really light.
• Good service: I wanted to switch to AT&T or Verizon, because they’re the best of a bad lot. I was done with Sprint PCS, and the thought of TMobile or Cingular just made me weary.
• Simplicity: The hardware is simple and has a look I would describe as “Scandinavian”. It avoids all the design excesses of most new feature-rich phones. It has a number keypad, four navigation keys and joystick. The keypad is arranged like a traditional telephone keypad and you can find the buttons by touch. The software interface isn’t great, but it’s acceptable.
• Email access: I haven’t set this up yet, so I’ll report on this later, but I’m looking forward to accessing my email from this gadget.
• Fun factor: It has a lot of fun features I don’t necessarily need, but which are fun: a camera, games, voice control.

It’s hardly perfect. Many of the problems are tied to the mobile industry’s desire to keep us in a walled garden, because it serves their needs, not ours:

• Nonstandard connectors: Not only is it incompatible with standard accessories — such as power adapters and headsets — the T616’s connectors are more Baroque than any I have yet seen.
• Garish interface: It’s not an iPod, that’s for sure. Its overuse of color reminds me of Windows XP. The background patterns that come with it are awful. However, I was able to use Apple’s Bluetooth utility to upload my own background. There’s still a lot of unnecessary and over-decorated junk on the screen.
• Weak menu system: There are too many menus and they’re too long. There’s no reason for a phone that is able to easily display six lines to have menus that scroll off the screen.
• Too much space dedicated to extra-price services: There are dedicated icons, menu items and a button for AT&T’s mMode service, which costs extra. I’ll be talking more about this later.
• Deadly ringtones: They must want to sell me ringtones, because the ones that come with the phone are just plain awful. It can’t play MP3 files, so my ability to customize the ringtones is limited.
• WAP: The tortured, broken zombie protocol continues to live as a crude but effective walled garden. After all, who but a cell company would produce or serve pages for WAP? The T616 does not do HTML.
• Display: Some reviews have said the display isn’t readable in bright sunlight. Here on the foggy SF coastside, I haven’t had that problem yet.

I’m really happy with my new phone and I’m looking forward to using it. It’s the most complicated consumer electronics device I’ve ever owned and it’s going to take me a while to understand how to use it and make it my own. My guess is that a year from now, there will still be features I don’t know how to use.

Newspapers are giving away half their archive revenue to database vendors, according to Peter Krasilovsky at Borrell Associates.

I can see why this serves the need of the vendors, but I don’t see how this serves either the reader or the publisher.

The disservice to the reader is obvious. It means that they can’t count on your content being available to them over the long run. It also means that they can’t count on links to your site from blogs and other sites to remain active.

The disservice to the publisher is less obvious, since they are getting what looks like free money. What are the costs and what do they lose?

• It’s generally not free to get the information into these databases, nor to keep it there. How much overhead (both hard and soft) is associated with this activity?
• Stories in archives are not indexed by Google. No one can find them unless they come to your site to do it. Are you sure they’ll be able to find you?
• As blogs and other personal recommendations become more important, you’re losing all the traffic they represent.
• You also lose something less intangible–the credibility (expressed in terms of Google PageRank) that comes from lots of links.
• You’re losing potential advertising revenue. Even if you’re not selling out your ad space yet, this will be an issue in the near future.

Google is a better way to search your site than your proprietary search engine (which are designed for fielded data and searches by professional librarians). Over time, blogs and other web sites will build up an infrastructure of links, references, and context that will improve the quality and access to information on your site. Links and the context that surrounds them are superior to any metadata that you or your database vendor can add to your information.

Google is able to search a billion pages in virtually no time at all. How fast is your database, and does it really do a better job of delivering relevant stories?

Print publishers should consider that online-only publishers have not succumbed to the temptation of paid archives. What do they know about online archives that you don’t?

Lockergnome has a great article on why RSS is a superior to email publishing. [Thanks, PaidContent.org!] What’s great (and unusual) about the article is that it is written from the perspective of the user: here are ten reasons why your readers will demand that you make your newsletter available via RSS.

These advantages are indisputable. But RSS is not the best medium for communicating all messages. It’s great for headlines, but not for essays.

I don’t think this essay addresses the forces (e.g. inertia, the mental overhead of new software platforms, single interface for all communications) that will keep email vital for years to come.

The preferred strategy should be to give your customers a choice.

It’s apparently time for everyone to think about wikis.

I was inspired by Matt Haughey’s “CSS wiki zen garden” to try setting up a wiki for one of my sites. I had no idea how difficult and confusing this would be.

I entered this mission with clearly-defined goals:

• I wanted a site where my readers could easily create and update pages. Sounds like a wiki!
• The software needed to be (really) easy for a Unix doofus like me to install. UseModWiki took me about 15 minutes to install and configure, but it was downhill from there.
• The site’s design needed to be consistent with the rest of my site. that means I need to use CSS and to include a navigation bar. Navigation turns out to be a special challenge.
• I didn’t care whether the software was based on Perl, PHP, or Python, since I don’t understand any of those languages well enough to modify the software. But that also means the package can’t require me to modify its code to get something done.
• The pages need to based on templates that can be modified by someone who knows HTML and CSS.
• It would be cool if the software supported search, an index page, and RSS.
• I’m not sure if I should care whether the software stores pages in MySQL, a built-in database, or a big pile of text files in a directory. But, as far as I can tell, there is no way to move pages from one wiki package to another. I suppose the markup is so simple that one can manually move wikis with even hundreds of pages.

Like most simple plans, mine ran into some harsh reality.

I’m not sure anyone knows how many wiki programs there are and I haven’t been able to find a comprehensive list. Wikis manifest some of the worst aspects of open source software. Everyone has their own package because everyone thinks they can do it better, their preferred language is superior, or that they should be in charge. And because wikis are so simple, it appears that anybody can write a wiki package.

Wiki authors should talk to Ben and Mena Trott about how to create templates. The wiki templates I have seen are programs that contain HTML markup, and not HTML pages that call program macros.

Because wikis date back to the earliest days of the Web and because they are based on a doctrine of extreme simplicity, and probably because there are so damn many of them, they have largely ignored everything we’ve learned about building Web sites in the last near-decade. Their accomodation of CSS is weak. They typically don’t support tables, even for tabular data. Their notion of content management is all over the map. And they don’t support any navigation other than inline or generic navigation links [Home, Edit, Recent Changes].

Try finding information about wikis using Google. One problem is that, unlike weblogs or web sites, most wikis have the word “wiki” in their name, so it’s difficult to separe pages about wikis from the wikis themselves. It’s like searching Google for “home page”.

Navigation is at the heart of my problem . Unfortunately, most information about wikis is stored on wikis, and most of it consists of links to the same pages, most of which are waiting for wiki users to update them with useful information in lieu of placeholders. Even when I can find a site with useful information, like Choosing A Wiki, once I begin following links, I soon become lost in a way that I don’t on most modern Web sites. . Even the vaunted Wikipedia is a hopeless maze of twisty passages.

Can anybody point me to enough information to find a wiki package that meets my modest criteria?

Online publishers are wondering whether RSS is going to replace email as a means of distributing headlines.

This is understandable, as email newsletters are increasingly being thrown out with the spammy bathwater and publishers are casting about for a way to replace the audience they’re losing.

I don’t understand why anyone is talking about RSS as a replacement for newsletters, instead of as a supplement. Granted, everyone makes the obligatory note that email isn’t going away any time soon and that RSS is still in its infancy. But the normally reliable Dan Gillmor and Steve Outing both jump to the conclusion that this is a solution to the email problem, instead of an opportunity in itself.

We’re still confusing the Web with the Internet.

Until we understand that the Internet can and should support multiple file formats and protocols, we’re going to continue to think that Javascript menus and Flash belong on Web pages, that Web pages belong in mailboxes, and that RSS is going to “replace” email as a publishing medium.

RSS should replace email as a way to deliver headlines and links, with no real useful content, to your readers. RSS makes it possible for smart, busy people to browse dozens of news sites in the time it would have taken them to review a couple.

Newsletters should be readable and useful in themselves. If they aren’t, you’re not using them effectively. And, if your web site is nothing more than a newsletter, why not send the whole thing to the reader, instead of making them come to you?

It’s easy to forget that less than five percent of Internet users are reading blogs and those are the current RSS audience. The good news is that there is indeed a network effect driving the adoption of RSS by publisher and readers. Within a couple of years, most serious online news readers will be using RSS.

Thinking about RSS as a replacement for email newsletters doesn’t begin to address its potential. It’s what “push” could have been, without the overhead of Internet bubble business models and publishers’ attempts to control what their readers saw.

I challenge online publishers to come up with more innovative and useful applications of RSS than delivering headlines or replacing existing newsletters.

One of the strongest arguments in favor of deregulating industries is the promotion of innovation. Industries that are gearing their strategies to the regulatory and antitrust environment, the argument goes, are unable to focus on serving their customers.

However, too-powerful corporations can stifle innovation in plenty of ways. The motion picture trust tried to keep independents from producing unauthorized movies. The independents moved to Los Angeles and became the establishment. If AT&T hadn’t been broken up, it’s unlikely that we would have the consumer Internet as we know it today. Currently, the access monopolies are trying to keep us from accessing standard network protocols (SMTP, FTP, etc.) in order to keep consumers in a walled garden.

Freedom to innovate is a constant theme of Microsoft’s lobbying against antitrust enforcement. Freedom for whom? Freedom for Microsoft, surely. But what about the millions of consumers and independent developers who want to modify their computers in ways that contradict Microsoft’s strategy? Who’s fighting for their freedom to innovate? Microsoft isn’t.

Intellectual property law is becoming a threat, rather than a spur, to innovation. SCO’s lawsuits agains the Linux community doesn’t promote innovation, nor does the RIAA’s desperate rear-guard action against file-sharing, or the proliferation of software patents, or the DMCA’s regulations agains reverse-engineering and information sharing. What’s ironic is that IP is government-created fiction that has nothing to do with liberty. It makes private property of ideas and enforces its rights with government force.

I don’t oppose the idea of intellectual property, but I do oppose the hypocrisy of demanding “freedom to innovate” while using government guns to limit your competitors’ freedom to innnovate.