In a recent article in the “Times Higher Education Supplement”:http://www.thes.co.uk/ (subscription only), “Alan Ryan”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ajryan/ mentioned in passing that UK funding of universities is ‘not much above half the proportion of GDP per capita spent in the US’. Does anyone know the correct figures? (And does anyone know how Canada compares?) It’s a pretty appalling state of affairs if true – particularly since I intend to become a career academic!

If you are in London tomorrow, have a half day free and have £150 (£120 concessions) I encourage you to attend a “half-day workshop”:http://nmk.prismix.com/courses/course.cfm?ItemID=4926 I am running on Internet research methods. It’s not too late to “book”:http://nmk.prismix.com/courses/register.cfm?CourseDateID=120! Assuming all goes well, I hope to do it again – possibly for a full day. Meanwhile take a look at my “search engine category”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_search_engines.html for some of the latest news and my thoughts on the subject.

I fear I have somewhat misrepresented Ian’s position on “‘bonsai’ (128Kbps) broadband” It’s not that he thinks it is going to disappoint everyone – speed, phone line blocking and always-on remain the main drivers to broadband adoption according to Jupiter. But he believes that, ‘once consumers switch to such a ‘bonsai broadband’ product they will then become disillusioned that they can’t do the activities that they will have been led to believe possible on broadband (even though these may not have been their main motivations they may be ‘nice to haves’ and which they expected to have).’

This is a very fair point. In an attempt to make broadband sexy, broadband providers promise things like “Movies and TV on demand”:http://www.bt.com/broadband/ which they just can’t deliver. But I would contend it isn’t just the ‘bonsai broadband’ companies that can’t offer this – you can’t get streaming TV or movies via most other broadband providers either – “HomeChoice”:http://www.homechoice.co.uk/ is the obvious UK exception. 512Kbps or even 1Mbps isn’t fast enough for adequate streaming video across the Internet (except for Flash animation or short films where the small size and occaisional jerkiness aren’t so much of a problem). Even if the speed were good enough, there just isn’t a wide range of on-demand high quality video available online yet (see my “Broadband Content category”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_broadband_content.html for more on this point).

So if people do want VOD, the broadband available to consumers today generally won’t give it to them, so those people would be disappointed with any broadband, not just ‘bonsai broadband’. I contend, however that a customer that has always-on Internet without blocking their phone line (two out of three of Ian’s key broadband drivers) will likely be happy and that someone like that would be almost as happy with ‘bonsai broadband’ as they would be with today’s commercial broadband.

The next step forward will happen when/if 2-4Mbps broadband to the home becomes cheap enough for the consumer and broadband providers strike VOD deals and a large BBC “Creative Archive” comes online.

An old colleague of mine, “Ian Fogg”:http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/fogg/ (a Jupiter analyst), commented in an “earlier posting”:https://blog.org/archives/000896.html that he didn’t think ‘cheap broadband’ at 150kbps would would ‘really offer the full broadband experience that customers expect’. The reasons he gave were interesting, and reveal I think a kind of ‘supplier led’ thinking that is holding back broadband takeup.

* ‘150kbs is not sufficient for good quality [streamed] mp3 music’
How many people want to listen to streamed music? How many subscribers have services like Real One managed to sign up? If you are at work in a sympathetic company you might use it instead of bringing a radio in to work, but if you are at home you already have a radio! People who really want broadband for music are (I’m guessing) relying on broadband to download tracks either legally or (more probably) illegally.

* ‘To build community around online games, it’s important to enable access to add-on levels, and enable players to host, or run, their own games’ – well, I could see there would be a problem if a broadband games player frequently found they were being asked to download a map from within a game and they then found the ‘game cycles to the next level and the player has missed playing’. But if you found that to be a problem as a player you could also just go off and download the necessary files from one of many fan sites. As for hosting, I have played many, many online games and I have only hosted one or two. As long as one of your friends has ‘proper’ broadband this is not a problem.

* ‘it’s still good value if you care about price and mainly email and web browsing’ [but]… it doesn’t exactly encourage third parties to deliver rich video/audio content and applications … and subscribers that expect broadband to enable a richer online experience will be disappointed.’

Aha! But we’re not talking here about what subscribers *should* want from their broadband in order to support a healthy industry – we’re talking about what they *actually want*. And all the evidence I have seen is that what subscribers value most from broadband is always on/instant on connection, better web browsing and no arguments about who is on the line. A smaller segment may value download of large files but if you no longer need to worry about the ‘clock ticking’ on your connection does it really matter if that game demo comes down in the background in four hours or two?

My personal view is that the only commercial service that would cause a substantial increase in the desire for ‘true broadband’ would be something like iTunes but for TV and movie content. (And yes I know you can already download movies but so far this is very much a minority sport because of bandwidth problems).

My guess about the best way to boost broadband takeup is to a) offer it at £15 a month with speed limits (but no publicised download caps) and b) offer free three month trials – I imagine enough of the people who get it would keep it that this would pay for the installation costs for the few who tried and rejected it.

Of course I may be wrong – I am basing this largely on my own experience, friends, gut instinct and (to a lesser extent) on the ‘iSociety’s broadband research’:http://www.theworkfoundation.com/pdf/broadband.pdf

If there is, however, evidence that the consumer wants what the broadband content industry wants them to want then please bring it on!

intro is an application for conference-goers designed to help them meet others who share their interests and attitudes (I apologize in advance for the over-Flash-y website – what do you expect from a Macromedia-led project?). I have dreamed for years of something like this, but it won’t realise its true power until you can essentially download it into your location-aware PDA/smartphone.

Microsoft’s new “Information Rights Management”:http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/editions/technologies/irm.asp software in Office 2003 will only let approved users open Outlook email messages which are ‘IRMed’ and allow users to set an expiry date after which their messages will die. Rather handy for business use, but if you “read the fine print”:http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/itcommunity/chats/trans/office/OFF0327.asp you find out that:
1) This is a subscription-based service, so if you use it you will be locked into paying Microsoft for ever after.
2) The only email software that will be able to read ‘IRMed’ messaged so far will be Outlook 2003 – and there are not even plans to make rights management work on the Mac.

I worry profoundly about what might happen if this proves popular. It might result in a situation where it’s a lot of hassle for non-Outlook email users to receive Outlook email and/or where people using Outlook end up having to remember who in their address book has Outlook and who doesn’t.

It also might actually make corporate email security worse – no technology fix is perfect and this might make people think they have solved the problem when in fact the only solution is eternal vigilance…

A barking mad alternative medicine practitioner “‘The Barefoot Doctor'”:http://www.barefootdoctorworld.co.uk/mainpage.htm published (for some reason) in a regular column in The Observer went online recently for a “live chat”. What resulted was a hugely entertaining hour-long session of abuse where several indignant and sarcastic people ask questions like, “To the best of my recollection, you have said in various columns that massaging your kidneys with your fists 44 times a day can help relieve:
* baldness
* bad breath
* bad dreams
* indigestion
* migraine
and many other conditions beside. I was just wondering what therapy you would recommend for someone who has problems with their kidneys?”

(If you want to see an example of one of his columns, “here”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1061077,00.html is a recent one).

Thanks to “NTK”:http://www.ntk.net/ for the link.

Ever wanted to get several people coordinated across the world using a calendar? Microsoft Exchange lets you do this easily across the web (and has other useful features like the ability to automatically schedule events) but of course it costs money and using Outlook does make you more vulnerable to viruses. There are a couple of free solutions available, each with benefits and drawbacks. Of these the best two I have found are Localendar which looks slick and (if you are in the US) includes an interesting “see public events near you” feature. You can also add features like import/export to Palm or Outlook or a message board if you pay.

“Calendars.net”:http://www.calendars.net/ would be my choice. It looks very powerful – it lets you edit calendars offline (and sync with Palm or Outlook) using a separate Windows application – “iCal”:http://www.brownbearsw.com/ical/newical.htm – then upload them, and allows multiple security levels (so you can set certain groups with the ability to view, others who can post new events etc). It also supports email notification for events and works in different languages. The drawback is that it looks as if it might be somewhat complicated to get to grips with as a calendar administrator.

The only thing none of these calendars seem to do is allow you to automatically enter pre-set locations (meeting rooms etc) and schedule them or auto-schedule people if you know what their schedules look like. If anyone knows any free web-based software that does this I would be interested to hear about it!

I wanted a USB data storage device, but it seemed a shame to get one that just did data storage. So I ended up with the Archos Ondio which has 128Mb of storage (but is expandable through MultimediaCards – yet another new storage format to deal with). But that’s not all…
* it’s also an MP3 player
* And has an FM radio…
* But (unlike most other similar players) you can record from the built in radio.
* And it is a voice recorder…
* But (unlike most other similar players) it also has a line-in jack so you can record streamed audio (or any other audio source like tape) directly into the device for later playback.
* And if you send it plain text files you can even read them on the built-in 112×64 pixel screen!
I am also happy that it works on AAA batteries instead of requiring a special charger.

Truly this is a Swiss army knife among USB storage devices!

Minor drawbacks I have come across so far
* I had some teething troubles getting the USB to connect to my home Win2k PC (but it worked trouble-free when connected to two other win2k computers, and the tech support guy I reached was pretty good)
* It did once cause a fatal system crash for no discernable reason when re-attached to a Win98 laptop.
* I can copy MP3 files over to it directly without trouble but the Musicmatch Jukebox software playlist copying doesn’t seem to function – I’ll be nagging tech support about that tomorrow.
* The radio doesn’t pull in the signal terribly well (it’s probably the last analogue radio I’ll buy!)
* The UI is a little clunky (perhaps not surprising since it is so small and has just 5 buttons to work with)
* It’s the size of a (small) mobile phone instead of being thumb-sized, but I’ve got reasonably big pockets.
* To connect it to USB you need to carry around a USB cable – it won’t plug in directly.

I’ve only had it for an afternoon so I may become more disillusioned later.

FWIW I bought it in the UK from Datamind for £120 inc VAT – the cheapest price I was able to find. I’m not amused to note it is $150 direct from Archos, but I thought having a UK supplier was worth a few quid.

P.S. Before you ask, I did consider buying a hard disk-type device instead but
1) The prices are still too high (around double?)
2) They are significantly larger/heavier and not solid state like this is.
3) I don’t think I really need that much portable storage at present and when I decide I do I can buy a storage card for it (and other things like cameras) once prices for those drop further.
4) The iPod doesn’t record or include a radio – what’s up with that?

Like many other Moveable Type weblog owners I have been suffering from a recent onslaught of automated, offensive ads for porn posted as comments to messages. Jay Allen has just produced a “spam blocking tool for Moveable Type”:http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/ which should help some – I fear this is not a final solution to the problem but merely the start of a depressing “arms race” between spammers and weblog users which may substantially reduce the usefulness of weblogs for everyone. In a way I am surprised this took this long to happen, people being what they are.

P.S. I apologise in advance if you accidentally stumble across any offensive links in comments – it will take me a while to get around to deleting all of them because at least for the moment there is no easy way for me to bulk-delete comments.