I hope this will not come as too much of a disappointment to anyone, but despite the title, this post has nothing to do with the ocean. Here “Surf” refers to the newly established Sydney R user group. While the acronym may be a little forced (it actually stands for “Sydney Users of R Forum”), as a long-time user of the R programming language for statistics and a resident of Sydney, I have signed up and will be doing my best to make it to the first meeting. Any other Sydney-siders who read the post on graphing in R and would like to learn more about R may be interested in coming along too as the group is aimed as much at beginners as old-timers like the Mule. I might even see you there.
If I do make it along to the meeting, I will report back here on what it was like.
Last year I bought a Kindle e-book reader and wrote about its strengths and weaknesses. With the release of Apple’s iPad last month, people keep asking me whether I wish I had waited for that instead. The short answer is, no, but now a fellow gadget-aficionado, Tony (aka @thewordpressguy) has drawn my attention to another new device, the TEGA tablet, and has asked me for an opinion*. I am yet to get my hands on either device, but I won’t let that stop me expressing a view!
The history of tablet computers is showing every sign of repeating the pattern of mp3 players. The first mp3 player pre-dated the iPod by about 5 years, but it was not until Apple entered the market that they really began to take off. Two key factors behind Apple’s success were design and the iTunes store. Having owned a Creative Nomad Jukebox and an iRiver H340 before getting an iPod, I experienced first-hand how much better the user-interface of the iPod was than everything that came before (even if it lagged at times in its technical specifications). The iTunes store was even more important. While early-adopting enthusiasts like me may have had the motivation and patience to convert all of my CDs to mp3 format, this would not be true of most people. The iTunes store provided a simple and reasonably-priced way for people to get content onto their iPods. The rest is history.
Just like iPods, tablets have been around for some time before Apple entered the fray. The term was popularised by Microsoft in 2001, but tablets were around in one form or another well before that (you could even include Apple’s less than successful Newton). Just like the iPod, the iPad is no doubt a superbly-designed piece of hardware, with an intelligent user-interface (I am extrapolating from my experience with the iPhone as well as taking into account the plethora of articles I have read about the iPad). Combine that with the App store, which is to the iPad and iPhone what the iTunes store was to the iPod, and the success of the iPad looks assured.
While the iPod came to dominate the mp3 player market, the iPad may stimulate the emergence of a broader range of alternative tablets, much as the Google Android phone is showing signs of being a serious alternative to the iPhone. Based on Tony’s assessment of the TEGA, it could well be an early example of this phenomenon. While it does not offer Apple design, it does have a few other things instead, such as USB, card-reader ports (rather than having to rely on external adapters as the iPad does) and a built in 3G modem which allows you to pop in your own sim card (so no more 3G dongles). What may hold even greater appeal for some is that it is operating-system agnostic: while most people would buy it with Windows 7 installed, it will also ship with Linux.
The release of the TEGA is an interesting development and I am sure there will be more iPad alternatives to come, but that brings me back to the original question. Do I have Kindle-regret? Would an iPad, a TEGA or something else be better?
I do not. The Kindle certainly has its shortcomings, some of which I discussed in my original review, but here’s what it gives me that the alternatives do not:
electronic-ink display – while the page-turning flicker may be annoying to some, I continue to find it a very easy medium to read, particularly in bright light
battery life – with 3G turned off (except for when I am making a purchase), I get two weeks or more between charges. The iPad offers an impressive 10 hours, so the gap is closing, but the Kindle retains the lead for now. Clocking in at only 2.5 hours, the TEGA remains a laggard on this score and it cannot be a serious contender until this improves.
price – compared to prices of portable computers only a few years ago, with prices starting at US$499 the iPad looks cheap. But at US$259, the Kindle is a lot cheaper. Of course, it cannot do what the iPad can do, but if you are after an e-book reader (as I was) that may not matter. The TEGA is closer to US$1,000 (A$1,187.98) and at that price looks expensive.
continuous partial attention – on a computer I cannot help flicking from email to twitter to following links, so perhaps I suffer from a touch of CPA. What this means is that a single-purpose device like the Kindle is ideal for me and offers a better, less-interrupted reading experience. It may seem absurd to some to want to impose restrictions on a device, but in this case it is an advantage for me.
As a bit of a gadget-obsessive, I may well succumb to the lure of an iPad one day (perhaps 2.0), or indeed a descendant of the TEGA or something similar. For now though, I will happily continue reading on the Kindle.
* In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that if enough fellow-bloggers post on the topic of the TEGA, Tony will have the option of purchasing a heavily-discounted unit.
This week Fairfax reported on Australia’s broadband pricing “war” in an article appearing in both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age. The publisher thoughtfully spared online readers the egregious chart that it foisted on readers of the paper editions. Judging from this junk (to use the official adjective for low-quality charts), these newspapers should stick to journalism and steer clear of graphics.
The chart in question was brought to my attention by Mule Stable regular @zebra, who also kindly scanned it (and devised the headline of this post), allowing me to reproduce it here. It shows the pricing of a number of broadband internet plans offered by the four largest internet service providers (ISPs) in Australia.
Chart from print edition of The Age (29 April 2010)
It is a busy chart, made difficult to read by a number of ill-advised design decisions:
the horizontal axis reads from right to left rather than the conventional left to right
although labeled “Price vs Download”, price is on the horizontal axis, again violating convention*
repeating the ISP label for every point adds unnecessarily to the busy-ness of the chart and it also makes the legend redundant
labeling each point with the download limit (although not the price), adds more unnecessary ink
These conventions are arbitrary: we could just as well have developed a tradition in the West of reading from right to left, for example. But once a convention is in place, you have to have a very good reason to break with it. Otherwise, you end up making your chart harder for readers to interpret for no good reason.
But perhaps the biggest weakness in the chart is the labeling of the ISPs. Each has its own colour, but this is not enough for the eye to naturally group them together, which makes it hard to track the pricing trend provider by provider. This is easily addressed by connecting the points for each ISP with lines. Once this is done and the other short-comings are also addressed, a couple of anomalies in the data leap out immediately. Compared to their other plans, the Optus 100GB plan and the TPG 150GB appear dramatically over-priced, costing more than other plans that offer more data.
Improved version: Price vs Download limit
Of course, this phenomenon was there in the original chart, but it was hidden. So much so, that the journalist does not appear to have noticed at all as it went unremarked in the article. This is a good example of the power of good charting technique.
There are a number of possible explanations for the anomalous data points. They could simply be errors, although it is certainly not impossible (or perhaps even unlikely) that ISPs have illogical pricing policies. A more likely explanation is that the data includes apples and oranges: the higher-priced plans may be bundles offering additional services such as VOIP that are not included in the other more basic plans. Perhaps if Fairfax had done a better job on the chart in the first place, the journalist may have been prompted to answer this question for us.
* Typically “dependent variables” (the y of “y versus x”) appear on the vertical axis and “independent variables” on the horizontal axis.
We think microblogging is too big for any one site or company.
Evan also talked about an exciting new development known as OStatus. This is an umbrella term for a suite of technologies which will help make the open microblogging vision a reality: separate communities like the Mule Stable, which can nevertheless communicate between one another. This is in contrast to Facebook or Twitter which operate as “walled gardens”. Google Buzz, WordPress, LiveJournal and Tumblr already implement OStatus to varying degrees and, of course, so does StatusNet and hence the Mule Stable.
But back to the Mule Stable. Following on from the introductory video about getting started on the Stable, here is another video which aims to make sense of the symbol soup of microblogs. If you have been put off by seeing pages full of @, # and !, this video should help make things a little clearer. It lasts around four minutes and this time, for the benefit of speed readers and the visually impaired, I have included a transcript as well. If the video below is a bit hard to see, here is a larger format version.
Demo Video Transcript
Welcome to another Mule Stable demo video, this time it’s all about tagging.
The first time you visit the Mule Stable it can look a bit like a symbol soup, full of # symbols, @ symbols and exclamation marks. But these symbols are in fact a short-hand that can turn posting simple text messages into something a lot more powerful.
In this demo, I’ll run through all the different types of tag symbols you can use on the Mule Stable.
Even though it’s not really a tag, I’ll start with the @ symbol. Sticking an @ in front of another user’s name is a way to direct your post to that user’s attention. As a shortcut, if I click on the “reply” button next to any post, it will automatically start my post with an @, like this…
Now if I go to my Home page and click on my “replies” tab I’ll see all the posts that anyone has sent to me, in my case anything with @mule in it.
The last thing to notice about the @ replies is that they turn the username into a link. Clicking on the link takes you to that user’s profile.
Now on to hashtags. You can highlight the topic of a post by using a hash symbol, for example #music. Just as with @ replies, doing this will automatically turn your tag into a link. Clicking on the link will show you any other posts which used the same tag. Hashtags are a handy way to group discussions on a particular theme.
To get a sense of the tags other people are using, you can click on the Public timeline and the select the “Recent tags” tab. The bigger the tag, the more often it has been used.
Up next are “bang tags”, which allow you to send your post to a particular group. You can see all the Mule Stable groups by clicking the “Groups” tab on the public timeline. Now if you put an exclamation mark in front of the group’s name, it will send a post to all of the members of that group. Like hashtags, bang tags automatically create links, only this time the link takes you to the relevant group.
There is one important difference between bang tags and hashtags to be aware of. Anyone can use a hashtag at any time, but bang tags only work if you have already joined the group. If you are not a member of the group and try to use a bang tag, you’ll just have an odd-looking word, with no link and no posting to the group.
The last type of tag is a friend tag, and this one really starts looking messy! If you look at the people you subscribe to by clicking “Subscriptions” on your home page, you will see you can assign tags to other users as a way of grouping them into, say, friends, family and music buffs. Keep in mind that others will be able to see the tags you choose! Once you’ve tagged a few people you can send a message to all of them with a @ reply hashtag combo (@#). Again, this creates a link and will send the post into their “Replies” timeline.
So that’s it as far as tags are concerned….stay tuned for the next Mule Stable demo video!
Earlier this week, Amazon began shipping the international version of the “Kindle” electronic book reader for US$279. The first generation of the Kindle was released almost two years ago in the US, so it has been a long time coming. But, with the announcement this week of the competing Barnes & Noble “Nook“, it looks as though the era of the e-book reader is well and truly upon us.
The Kindle has a monochrome “electronic paper” screen rather than the pervasive LCD screens found on laptops, iPhones and BlackBerries. Also known as e-paper or e-ink, the electronic paper screen comes a lot closer to replicating the appearance of traditional printed paper. There is no back-light and in fact displaying a page draws no power, it is only changing the display that will draw on the battery. As a result, the battery life of electronic paper devices is much longer than other devices. Amazon claims that, with the wireless connection turned off, you can read on the Kindle for up to two weeks before draining the battery. This also means that the Kindle can display an image on the screen when it is powered off, which is somewhat disconcerting at first. Although the contrast is not quite as high as print (the background is not quite white and the text is a little grey), reading on the Kindle is very comfortable. Better still, the quality does not degrade in strong sunlight as is often the case for LCD screens (although they are getting better all the time). So reading the Kindle outside is just as easy as it is in bed (although you will still need a bedside light).
A few months ago, a new site arrived on the increasingly crowded web 2.0 scene. Posterous offers a medium that fits somewhere between a blog and a microblog (the canonical example of the microblog being, of course, the juggernaut that is Twitter). Maybe it should be called a “miniblog”.
Posterous is not the only site to target the miniblog niche. Tumblr has been been around for a few years and has been reasonably successful in building a base of users who like the ability it provides to easily share photos, links and assorted random scribblings. As an obsessive early-adopter of most things web 2.0, I have a tumblr account (the “Raw Prawn” identity pre-dates the “Stubborn Mule”), but I have not been very active there of late.
Although Posterous launched only about six months ago, it has already seen healthy growth in traffic since then and has already reached the traffic rank that tumblr had six months ago.
Posterous.com Traffic Rank (September 2009)
Part of the reason for its success is that it is extraordinarily easy to use. There is no need to sign up or create an account, as you would on twitter, tumblr or any other web 2.0 site. Instead, simply send an email to post@posterous.com. Give it a try! Send a snippet of text or, better still, a photo, music file or a link to a youtube video and Posterous will work its magic to send back to you a link to a web page with your content that you can easily share with anyone and everyone. Here is one I prepared earlier. If you live in the US, you can also send posts via SMS from your phone.
Posterous has a raft of other features that put it on a level above tumblr. For a start, it tracks the number of times that a post has been viewed (the power user can even track traffic using Google Analytics). Also, like any good web 2.0 application, it supports tags which can easily be added, edited or deleted after creating your post. There is also an iPhone application that allows you to take a photo and immediately send it to Posterous (to be fair, tumblr has an iPhone application too).
To take full advantage of Posterous, you should “claim” your email address (ok, so at this point you are effectively signing up for the service, but you don’t have to take this step). One of the features this will allow you to access is the ability to “auto-post” to an increasing range of other sites, including Twitter, Identica, Facebook, Flickr and Delicious. Turning on these services is straightforward once you have claimed your address signed up.
What exactly auto-posting does varies with each service. In the case of Twitter, Posterous will send the title of each post with a shortened link to the post. If you auto-post to Flickr, any photos you sent to Posterous will be added to your Flickr account. If you have a blog, the chances are you can repost the entire content of your Posterous post.
Posterous also shares with tumblr and any good web 2.0 a social networking feature that allows you to subscribe to other people’s Posterous accounts. You can see posts you have subscribed to through the “My Subscriptions” link on Posterous as well as receiving regular email updates. Posterous also allows the creation of multiple miniblogs (up to three) within the one account.
Unlike Twitter, Posterous even has a business model in mind, with plans to offer premium services for a fee at some point in the future. This “freemium” service approach has already been adopted by the likes of Flickr, Dropbox and a number of other web 2.0 services. Even for users who never take up these premium services, any means of revenue generation should help the site to stick around for longer than some of the more fleeting web 2.0 sites.
I have only been experimenting with Posterous for the last couple of weeks, but with the combination of extreme ease of use, smooth handling of multiple media types and the auto-posting feature I expect that it has a bright future ahead. In the meantime, keep an eye on the Mule’s Posterous account for posts that do not quite warrant appearing here on the blog.
Posterous Tips
Add tags to your posts using this short-hand in your email subject line: ((tag: food, photos)) – of course, you don’t have to use “food” or “photos”.
Email to twitter@posterous.com if you only want to auto-post to Twitter. Similar email addresses work for other services.
I feel I am due for a break from the GFC* and so will instead return to the subject of Web 2.0.
Whenever I come across a new Web 2.0 site/application/service I cannot help but sign up. A quick search for the phrase “welcome to” in my gmail archives throws up about 100 messages, representing only some of the debris of this obsession: sites I have signed up for, explored briefly and mostly never visited again.
Among these, however, is a recent discovery that has quickly become an indispensable tool. Alongside gmail and google calendar, Dropbox is now one of my favourite examples of “cloud computing”. In a nutshell, it provides synchronised offsite storage in an extraordinarily seamless way. For a new service, still only in beta, it is very impressive.
In a recent post on his Sprechblase (“Speech Bubble”) blog, Cem Basman examines a number of different forms of communication that have evolved on the web: chat, forums, wikis, blogs and microblogs. Although the boundaries can be blurred, Cem’s summary of the key features of each of these forms is a useful one.
The original post is in German and, with the help of Google translate and my own rusty German, I have adapted it to produce an English version. I am publishing it here with Cem’s blessing. Cem couches his discussion in terms of his notion of “die Sphäre” (the “Sphere”), by which he means the totality of communication in all its forms on the web. Continue reading →
Google and others have had great success with online advertising, while the provision of the mere “pipes” of the internet has become an increasingly competitive, commoditised business. So, it is no surprise that some ISPs have felt they have missed out on the real success of the internet and are keen to join the party.
The holy grail of advertising is to be able to precisely tailor ads to a behavioural profile of their intended target. ISPs have one enormous advantage when it comes to profiling web-surfing habits: the one node of the internet that users cannot bypass is their way in, their ISP. Companies such as Phorm, NebuAd and FrontPorch have developed technologies to exploit this advantage and have tempted a number of ISPs to install their systems with the promise of a slice of the advertising action.
