What Josh Does at Youthworks

I’m employed by an organ­i­sa­tion (the one I referred to in my first post about this project, wherein I didn’t bother explain­ing exactly what was going on, but hoped it would be clear to those who already knew) that exists to — amongst other things — resource youth ministry.

One thing we’ve noticed (“we” is myself and a hand­ful of oth­ers with an inter­est in the web) over the past twelve months is an uptake in web usage by youth min­istries — for obvi­ous rea­sons: that’s where kids are spend­ing their time, and it’s a great com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool, and every­one else is doing it.

When I say every­one else is doing it, I actu­ally mean every­one else is try­ing to do it. Every­one has, for the last six to twelve months, been writ­ing the same appli­ca­tions, inte­grat­ing the same soft­ware, pay­ing for the same soft­ware, attempt­ing to train the same peo­ple, and gen­er­ally doing a lot of the same stuff, sep­a­rately. With no point of inter­sec­tion or shar­ing or intel­li­gent resource management.

This is under­stand­able: after­all, the web presents a rel­a­tively new front for churches in gen­eral, and whilst kids have been wast­ing time online for years, only with the rel­a­tively recent advent of social net­work­ing web­sites (I refer to it as ‘Soc­Net’ in these parts — no-one else seems to, but I like it, so what­ever) have the less computer-inclined began spend­ing sig­nif­i­cant amounts of time in front of a keyboard.

There’s also a bit of a catch-22 when it comes to build­ing these things. Peo­ple ask, what are the ben­e­fits? We’ve never had some­one come along to youth group because of our website! — well, no, you’re right. But you also don’t have a web­site, so that’s hardly fair, is it? Nine times out of ten peo­ple will not come along to church (gener­i­cally) because they’ve searched for a church in a par­tic­u­lar sub­urb in Google (though, speak­ing of that, I’ve got to do a bit of SEO work on the Matthias site — it’s not on the first page for a “Church in Padding­ton” query. Changed the title, it’ll be a while til that kicks in. We’ll see.)

They’ll come because a friend asked if they wanted to, or they were walk­ing past and heard peo­ple inside, saw them going in, and won­dered what it was all about.

But this is hardly exclu­sive to hav­ing a web­site. If they have those points of con­tact, a web­site is a great way to invis­i­bly inves­ti­gate fur­ther with­out need­ing to make them­selves uncom­fort­able. It’s easy to find these sorts of web­sites through search engines — you walked past a church and noted its name, you remem­ber the name of your friend’s church, etc.

The same goes for youth groups, obviously.

Peo­ple have just been start­ing to realise this, or at least think of it at all and decide “yeah, we could do that”. So, there’s the ratio­nale for it all. Most peo­ple with decent web­sites already may not have con­sid­ered ratio­nale in any great depth — they’ve got a good web­site because they know some­one who makes them, and vol­un­teered their time (maybe they’re a leader), throw­ing some­thing together with Xoops in an after­noon. It’s quick and dirty, but effective.

We’re try­ing to spend a small but not insignif­i­cant amount of money to equip peo­ple to do these sorts of thing, so it’s only sen­si­ble that some more time is spent con­sid­er­ing what on earth we’re try­ing to achieve. Hence the lengthy pre­lude to what it actu­ally does.

Now, the fea­tures. We have too many tar­get audi­ences for it to be an alto­gether com­fort­able project, but that’s half the fun of it. The prod­uct is being mar­keted to churches (who pay for it) through lead­ers (who want to use it) and for youth (who actu­ally aren’t the cen­tre of the uni­verse on this one, but we need to give them UX that says they are). Out­side of these three, there are also the friends of the youth already in the appli­ca­tion who are just check­ing out the youth group page.

Of course, it’s not quite that sim­ple. We’re also mar­ket­ing this to camps, high school scrip­ture groups/lunchtime bible groups, and maybe bands/events. Which is great and tech­ni­cally only a small step, but it does pretty hor­ri­ble things when you try and explain who’s pay­ing for what in a con­cise business-like fash­ion. If you’ve read this far, chances are you’re well aware that concise-ness has never been my strong point.

So, with these tar­gets in mind, we are (firstly) going to equip them with web­sites. Big woop. WordPress.com and Blog­ger eat your heart out. Cue yawns.

No, seri­ously. We’re going to give them (‘them’ being the var­i­ous enti­ties described above, not indi­vid­u­als so much — there’s no way I’m posi­tion­ing this against other Soc­Net sites because I reckon it’s too frag­mented to last… Face­book or Myspace or Bebo or.… yes.) web pages. Wel­come to 1999.

They’re going to have web pages with cal­en­dars they can chock full of the sched­ule for the term, though. So that’s exciting.

And everyone’s going to have their own user­name, so they can leave com­ments on the inevitable blog­ging ele­ment with iden­tity — this is won­der­ful for com­ment– and generic form-spam. Inci­den­tally, I read a few blogs that Wild St peo­ple are writ­ing and was really excited to see they’re actu­ally enthu­si­as­tic about doing it. There’s quite the bunch of them on Blog­ger these days, and it’s all com­pletely autonomous — so far as I know, no-one has pushed them to start doing it. I was so proud of their keen­ness and inno­va­tion for build­ing up com­mu­nity and spread­ing the gospel! Another aside, my copy hasn’t arrived yet but I believe there’s some­thing about blog­ging in The Brief­ing for Decem­ber (it’s not on their web­site yet, either). My copy arrived today, and I dis­cov­ered the cur­rent issue is in their web­store, just not on the main site. It’s The Brief­ing #339, if you’d care to read it.

Any­way. Blogs will fea­ture. Cal­en­dars will fea­ture. All the stuff you’d rea­son­ably expect to be able to do with a CMS tool these days will fea­ture. Blogs, cal­en­dars, gal­leries, con­tact forms, sta­tic pages. Yay. So that’s the bor­ing stuff that we’ve just got to do the grunt-work for at some point (I’m sure it can be fun, but, just between you and me, I’m not really look­ing for­ward to the cou­ple of weeks we have to spend on that bit).

Now, for inter­est­ing and inno­v­a­tive fea­tures — because, let’s face it, the above is hardly enough to con­vince any­one to switch their exist­ing web­site (if indeed they have one) across to a hosted plat­form for a nom­i­nal (to be deter­mined, but prob­a­bly only payable by church groups, and not for camps/events on account of these being once-off) monthly fee.

Con­tact tools. Yummy. We’re going to give them mail­ers that make it easy to send a mes­sage to, say, all the kids in year 10. Or just guys. Or girls in year 8. Or only to your co-leaders (we’ll have a resource area where they can share files — Word doc­u­ments, PDFs, slide shows — on the site, too: that’s some of the fun CMS stuff). But email’s been done before. Everyone’s used email. Admit­tedly, some­times you just wish there’s a bet­ter way to store and man­age lists of peo­ple, and this tool will cer­tainly do that, but it’s a lit­tle bor­ing still.

So we decided it’d be a good idea to throw SMS into the mix. It’s not just a gim­mick: again, this is in response to what peo­ple are already doing. The only dif­fer­ence is it’s paid on a shared account (used by the lead­ers — the youth kids won’t have access to these tools, for fairly obvi­ous rea­sons) and inte­grates the same con­tact man­age­ment fea­tures as the mailer app. We’re hop­ing con­ve­nience will draw peo­ple across to this tool. Use sce­nar­ios are basi­cally just that you’d use this tool to inform peo­ple of what’s going on this week at youth group, or remind­ing them that the group is on bring­ing sup­per this month, etcetera. The orig­i­nat­ing num­ber will be that of a sin­gle leader, or it could even be that of that person’s own leader.

For exam­ple, one mes­sage is sent to all kids by the group co-ordinator, but that mes­sage is altered depend­ing on who the indi­vid­ual recipient’s bible study leader is, so that it appears to orig­i­nate from them. Obvi­ously com­mon sense would say that you wouldn’t do that with­out con­sul­ta­tion, so we’d prob­a­bly have a check box in the leader’s “my account” page that would say “Allow mes­sages from other senders to orig­i­nate from my mobile num­ber”, or some­thing to that affect.

Beyond con­tact tools, we want to take advan­tage of the fact that this is a service-based prod­uct and entirely a hosted solu­tion. Part of the rea­son we’re strongly pur­su­ing that is it gives an oppor­tu­nity to equip and direct in a way that decen­tralised sites can’t be. So, a few things we’re think­ing of doing are cen­tralised offer­ings like weekly newslet­ters (sent to lead­ers two days in advance so they’ve got an oppor­tu­nity to see it first) and global blog prop­er­ties that give reviews, cur­rent affairs com­men­tary, etc.

That’s the end of the uni­ver­sal fea­tures that are great for kids and lead­ers alike, but there’s lots more for lead­ers. As I’ve already said, we want this to be self-funding. Part of this is sell­ing elec­tronic ver­sions of dead-tree prod­ucts, as DRM’d PDFs, or as unen­cum­bered PDFs with watermarks/obviously time-sensitive adver­tis­ing (so vio­la­tion of copy­right is glar­ingly obvi­ous). The other part is (for me at least) far more excit­ing, and that’s reselling user generated/contributed con­tent (UGC) under an iStockPhoto-esque model (Basi­cally, profit sharing).

This isn’t just about words on a page — I want to get plenty of video stuff hap­pen­ing, too, because (espe­cially in reformed evan­gel­i­cal Anglican/Baptist/Presbyterian, etc. churches) that doesn’t get nearly enough of a work out as is. It’s a really effec­tive tool for sup­port­ing preaching/bible stud­ies, and it’s been largely over­looked until prob­a­bly early this year (I had my first con­ver­sa­tion with some­one about video resources for small group bible stud­ies as late as July or August this year, I think! They had used a Matthias Media resource which I haven’t encoun­tered, and thought it really helpful).

Pric­ing mod­els for all that are still a lit­tle up in the air, but, from a consumer’s point of view, it’s def­i­nitely going to be afford­able. The project will ulti­mately sit on a server main­tained gratis and depend largely on vol­un­teer labour to admin­is­ter con­tent. The only “costs” are those to the estab­lished Youth­works pub­lish­ing divi­sion, but hope­fully we can tran­si­tion the way they do their high-school level con­tent effec­tively, so they’re com­mis­sion­ing con­tent for the web and sell­ing it there. Some­thing that’s really excit­ing is the pos­si­bil­ity that, instead of com­mis­sion­ing con­tent, it’s pos­si­ble to pur­chase it directly and already cre­ated from a pool of resources on the website.

There’s def­i­nitely a work­able model here, somewhere.

Prayer is greatly wel­comed for:

  • wis­dom try­ing to fig­ure that model out
  • energy and resources to make it hap­pen (in what­ever form)
  • adop­tion and enthu­si­asm from youth lead­ers and kids
  • effec­tive­ness in web strat­egy as we attempt to use it as an evan­ge­lis­tic out­reach tool, and a tool for the growth of exist­ing ministry
  • and, hand-in-hand with that last point, that God’s will be done and if He wills it, that growth would be given!
# by Josh on November 30th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| 1 Comment »

FEVA not-marketing, motivation, and red wine

FEVA’s “Pro­mot­ing the Word through Image and Text” con­fer­ence (they will break my link fairly quickly, methinks, but it’s good whilst it lasts) was today, and it rocked.

Ses­sions about archi­tec­ture to cre­ative strate­gies to the the­ol­ogy of “pro­mo­tion” (which we don’t call mar­ket­ing for fear of stir­ring the con­tro­versy pot) to a rather help­ful copy­right ses­sion (albeit one rais­ing more ques­tions than it answered), as well as great food, a com­fort­able venue, and gen­er­ally excel­lent organ­i­sa­tion, etc.

Go along next year.

And, now that pos­i­tive rec­om­men­da­tion is cemented firmly with­out men­tion of the web…

I did, how­ever, take great excep­tion to the web strat­egy speaker, who I am tempted to pour out all man­ner of vit­ri­olic utter­ances against but will attempt to refrain. He essen­tially said that footer keyword-stuffing was fine, as was spam­ming meta tags (though, thank­fully, he acknowl­edged search engines pay “less atten­tion” to them these days — I would put that closer to “insignif­i­cant atten­tion and not worth the markup bloat they so often are”). Every­thing he had to say about con­tent for the web could be sur­mised in the key­word, “key­words”, pay­ing no atten­tion to the dif­fer­ent copy-writing demands of web media and the flow-on effects of organic key­word enhance­ment. Fur­ther, he man­aged to sug­gest online games for youth and prize com­pe­ti­tions as legit­i­mate mar­ket­ing tac­tics, which, to me, seems brain-dead — per­haps I should just say “an unpro­duc­tive use of time”. The entire pre­sen­ta­tion appeared to have been repur­posed from a very basic web 1001 pre­sen­ta­tion to small busi­nesses, with­out much (or any) regard for audi­ence feedback.

For exam­ple, he asked ques­tions at the begin­ning to get an indi­ca­tion of where the audi­ence was at in terms of web pres­ence (I would say well over 90% had a web­site, with prob­a­bly half of that being main­tained in some capac­ity — yes, our web­site is get­ting touched up soon… heh, in all my free time) and then pro­ceeded to com­pletely ignore that (although he did act very sur­prised at the num­ber of hands that went up) and tell every­one about how to get online in the first place. Com­plete with the worst in Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion technique.

Def­i­nitely not a high­light of the day!

Any­way, that aside, I went home feel­ing pretty moti­vated to Get­Stuff­Done™ and started on the three gazil­lion changes pend­ing for the Matthias site… then gave up when Budd called say­ing Borat was on. I’ve gen­er­ally had a great evening, though — a few hours with a glass of red wine and a sense of accom­plish­ment as con­tent takes shape, then a con­ver­sa­tion about using Google Maps to plot some 2,100 retail out­lets effec­tively (no con­sen­sus as to how to achieve this yet, because that’s 2,100 points to be ren­dered client-side as an over­lay, which would prob­a­bly crash some browsers, if not make them run hideously slowly — but the brain is churn­ing over), then watch­ing that crazy movie. Yeah, you’ve got to laugh at it, but… gosh. Really hope they went back and explained it was satire to some of those peo­ple, if not apol­o­gis­ing out­right. Hav­ing said that, I think he’s reached the lim­its of the per­sona; it really got a bit repet­i­tive and pre­dictable (but still evok­ing laugh­ter for shock value) in parts. I still laughed loudly.

Any­way. More to come soon.

# by Josh on November 25th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
| 3 Comments »

People versus search engines

It seems that search engines are an immutable fact of early-twenty-first cen­tury exis­tence. We can’t escape them in any imme­di­ate sense, and can­not believe they could ever dis­ap­pear (I recall one instance on Whirlpool forums where a user thought his/her ISP’s inter­a­tional link must be down because he couldn’t access Google. This was one of the very few times Google had actu­ally dropped off the face of the planet for about twenty min­utes. It was sim­ply out­side the realm of possibility.)

Yet, increas­ingly, our surf­ing habits are defined by this bizarre social con­cept that seems to be shap­ing cer­tainly acqui­si­tions and web-two-point-oh-bubblism, wherein web­sites serve users by con­nect­ing them with one another, not on the basis of them know­ing what they wanted, but rather in a bizarre a pri­ori man­ner whereby degrees-of-separation (MySpace) or user-supplied-already-knowns (Live­Jour­nal, Xanga, etc.) define con­nect­ed­ness and dis­played content.

Search is no longer the macro-inter killer app, but an intra-site facil­ity applied to micro­cosm — often based on “trans­par­ent” tech­nol­ogy that has, on the basis of known knowns (in the words of a cer­tain Rums­feld), already done some of the hard work for users (I should say peo­ple, but don’t out of habit: it is an indus­try haz­ard) with­out actu­ally ask­ing them any­thing. This is where loca­tion– and organisation-based match­ing (cf. MySpace, Face­book, etc.) come in.

But none of this data is intel­li­gently search­able by generic engines.

None of this data (in the case of Myspace espe­cially, hor­ri­bly marked-up doing-everything-wrong-with-the-web tech­ni­cally entity that it is) is avail­able for index­ing by search engines because it’s not abid­ing by any defined seman­tics. There is not, for exam­ple, any over­whelm­ing use of micro­for­mats — hCard, etc. — for defin­ing con­tact details in any com­mon sense. Yet these things are search­able within a given website.

And, what’s more, these things are search­able with great pre­ci­sion within (social net­work­ing) sites. This is because of a very well defined inter­nal seman­tic (not the “seman­tic web”, but inter­nal data struc­tures) and an enforced obe­di­ence to these struc­tures that was never a part of pre-SocNet sites.

Soc­Net plat­forms are rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent from web 1.0 sys­tems in that they are (iron­i­cally) vastly more con­strict­ing. As “web 1.0″ I would cite Geoc­i­ties and free web host­ing ser­vices, por­tals, and all-things-to-all-people con­tent net­works. Now, we’ve got blogs (pre­cisely defined web­sites), MySpace (chiefly Soc­Net pro­files with bits on the fringes com­mon to the users, and now with enough impe­tus to appear unstop­pable), Flickr (free — and fee-for-service that peo­ple actu­ally pay for — web host­ing, pre­cisely defined as photo host­ing), and, strangely, a por­tal (Yahoo!) still on top of Alexa 500 rank­ings. A por­tal that owns both Flickr and Geoc­i­ties, but has changed the model of the lat­ter to place greater empha­sis on fee-for-service host­ing. But I digress into strat­egy — the point is not that, but rather in the way social data is stored.

Flickr is meta-data rich. It uses a well defined sys­tem based on EXIF, intrin­sic seman­tics (title, descrip­tion, tags — tags that get used prop­erly, unlike Face­book which doesn’t bother to make such things clear — I want Face­book to flop, by the way, because it annoys me, so don’t expect nice things to be said about it. It’s a poor closed-system imi­ta­tor, albeit with a stu­pidly effec­tive adver­tis­ing model every­one else should be wish­ing they came up with first but haven’t seen in order to copy… because it’s a closed sys­tem (or used to be) exclu­sive in scope. Which makes it very effec­tive SocNet/Web 2.0, by my own def­i­n­i­tion, so I don’t really have a basis for com­plaint.) and extrin­sic seman­tics (groups, pools, etc.).

Pro­files, unlike ‘pure’ Soc­Net (Myspace, Face­book), per­mit anonymity, but allow dis­clo­sure of as much as is desired: at any rate, that is not the pur­pose of the site. Myspace/Facebook’s rai­son d’etre is pro­files. (Well, and that and cash-cow-marketing-tool of the *R**IA’s of the world) Accord­ingly, its pro­files have very def­i­nite seman­tics even whilst the rest of the site may not (I speak of Myspace more, here). Myspace gives core “Details” pro­file info indi­vid­ual fields, whilst allow­ing a diverse “Inter­ests & Per­son­al­ity” infor­ma­tion in freeform textar­eas that are designed to entice users into par­tic­i­pa­tion (and, pos­si­bly, aid­ing more fuzzy searches — but mostly I think it’s just com­pelling con­tent, as there is no imme­di­ately obvi­ous way to search that data).

“Inter­ests & Per­son­al­ity”, along with blog con­tent, seems to be the only freeform con­tributed mate­r­ial avail­able on the site. Want music or a video with your pro­file? You’ve got to browse to the band’s site, load the player (no go in Opera with Flash at the minute, it seems), and then select “Add” on the track. They (yeah, it’s kinda big-brotherish) know exactly what song you chose, what band it’s from, what genre, etc. — that is to say, unam­bigu­ously and cer­tainly beyond a probably-common song title. This isn’t an upload-yourself-and-we’ll-manage-rights kind of thing. The offi­cial­ity gives that inter­nal data struc­ture that much more depth: but, again, the point is that the data is inter­nal and not open.

This, it seems, is the defin­ing qual­ity of Soc­Net. That’s what makes the ideas of open fed­er­a­tion advo­cated by Google Talk ear­lier this year so bizarre for the rest of us. We don’t par­tic­u­larly care, because closed sys­tems mean inno­va­tion (because we can define new data for our­selves to work with) and/or exten­si­bil­ity that isn’t pos­si­ble in an open plat­form (if, for exam­ple, not all fed­er­ated part­ners agree to a spec exten­sion — take, for exam­ple, Google Talk’s own Jab­ber base and pro­pri­etary VoIP on top of that). Open­ness is in Google’s inter­ests, because it’s so depen­dent on things being open for its core busi­ness (search). But real peo­ple want ser­vices that work, not ser­vices that push them to another site. I’ve never trusted sites that bounce me off to Google for their site’s search, even if it’s one of those crappy co-branded things. It doesn’t make sense. Why would you make some­one inspect your web­site from an infe­rior per­spec­tive when all the infor­ma­tion is stored in a data­base, with the pos­si­bil­ity of more seman­ti­cally mean­ing­ful search open inter­nally only?

Google won’t deal with your inter­nal search needs. It’s not designed to. It does a great job of deal­ing with pub­licly indexed mate­ri­als com­pletely aside from Soc­Net ser­vices. Soc­Net sites thrive on and are empow­ered by strong intrin­sic seman­tics that make clever profile-based (or UGC–based) search pos­si­ble, which builds loy­alty etcetera in a way for­eign to infor­ma­tional web­sites. Soc­Net is expe­ri­en­tial and (sur­prise sur­prise) social — it doesn’t have to be about anything.

Con­tent was deposed as king some­time in the mid­dle of the first decade of the twenty first cen­tury, and with that regime change his deputy, Search, was also shuf­fled to a some­what less promi­nent posi­tion. Some­where out of sight, Search’s iden­ti­cal twin, Query, is the real power behind the throne: it uses unin­dexed data and makes clever links to bring peo­ple closer together in a way that tra­di­tional search engines had never even envisaged.

# by Josh on October 26th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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On the follies of Copyright expectations

I’ve been occu­pied the last few days try­ing to get an effec­tive fileserving/sharing/roaming pro­file (domains) envi­ron­ment work­ing with Samba, and was think­ing this evening about the impli­ca­tions of a network-wide media share. At present, it’s ille­gal, though not par­tic­u­larly morally rep­re­hen­si­ble in view of the fact that all con­tent on it would be ‘licensed’ (just not for dupli­ca­tion in a dig­i­tal form, under present copy­right law — sched­uled to be over­turned).

It is a truth uni­ver­sally acknowl­edged… that the absence of a fair-use pro­vi­sion in Aus­tralian copy­right law is sim­ply an over­sight on the part of leg­is­la­tors. (Apolo­gies to Austen fans :P)

What if it’s not?

There is, now, what Paul Shee­han termed “lit­tle squares of light”, sig­ni­fy­ing con­nec­tiv­ity in an “advanced, ironic, post-ethnic poly­glot societ[y]”. Before that? The “Dark Age” (also Shee­han). It did exist. There was a time before com­put­ers and mul­ti­me­dia were intrin­si­cally con­nected (depend­ing on your def­i­n­i­tion of mul­ti­me­dia – mul­ti­modal media is per­haps more apt). There was, indeed, a time before mul­ti­me­dia existed — though we can, per­haps, trace its ori­gins to Wagner’s 1849 essay, “The Art­work of the Future” and the notion of Gesamtkunst­werk — which, in turn, traces back to Greek drama, but no matter!

Yet irre­spec­tive of when this arose, leg­is­la­tors are meant to have acknowl­edged the immi­nent rise of the copyright-violating, citizen-empowering, content-producer-collaboration–dic­tat at the hands of the web. We’re expect­ing the wrong thing. Media has pro­gressed, the law hasn’t. Yet.

But what if it doesn’t? Does this mat­ter? Speak­ing to an influ­en­tial podcast-media per­son­al­ity yes­ter­day after­noon, it became clear that there had emerged between cit­i­zen media and con­ven­tional mech­a­nisms a fis­sure that cer­tain peo­ple were very reluc­tant to bridge. Sus­pi­cion exists between the two ‘indus­tries’ (though it was sug­gested that an ‘indus­try’ can­not exist until some­one is mak­ing money: per­haps not the case with cit­i­zen media, overblown acqui­si­tions aside) where ‘cit­i­zen media’ is con­cerned that any part­ner­ships with ‘con­ven­tional media’ will sti­fle inno­va­tion. Clearly, this is wrong, and ignores the ‘cit­i­zen’ part of ‘cit­i­zen media’: any part­ner­ship can­not exist with­out the ‘cit­i­zen’ remain­ing, thus chang­ing con­ven­tional media. And if the ‘cit­i­zen’ com­po­nent is dis­solved, it becomes a mean­ing­less acqui­si­tion as ‘media’ already exists, and ‘cit­i­zen media’ with­out the ‘cit­i­zen’ has no impe­tus whatsoever.

How­ever, that aside, this (per­haps mutual) hos­til­ity raises inter­est­ing notions.

If we con­sider the two to exist in entirely dis­tinct and dis­parate spheres, then new pos­si­bil­i­ties arise. We accept that cit­ing and re-using ‘mass media’ mate­r­ial in new cre­ations is, for a time, impos­si­ble. We accept that a ‘nor­mal­i­sa­tion’ is tak­ing place, to cite the much-lauded ‘vil­lage square’ con­cept of com­mu­nal media: that we are return­ing to a ‘nor­mal’ state, and that broad­cast top-down media was a tem­po­rary hic­cup in the state of human being. The dif­fer­ence, then, is that we now exist in a glob­alised state where those with whom we com­mu­ni­cate (or, share media/experience) is not lim­ited by geog­ra­phy… but remains lim­ited in scope (sen­sual expe­ri­ence, for exam­ple, is rather inhib­ited by the tyranny of distance).

In two hun­dred years, assum­ing mass media assim­i­lated back into ‘nor­mal­ity’ today, all copy­right would have expired and all work could be cited, quoted, re-used and abused as peo­ple willed it. There is clearly no great pos­si­bil­ity of this hap­pen­ing: acknowl­edged even by the mass-media-hostile per­son­al­ity inter­viewed. Should we care? Maybe. If there is mate­r­ial worth repro­duc­ing, that is.

The web is a tem­po­ral media, still. Never before have such vast vol­umes of infor­ma­tion been so volatile, in part because such vast vol­umes of infor­ma­tion have never been so acces­si­ble (in an entirely un-web-standards-related sense). Hence, it is pos­si­ble that the alle­vi­a­tion of this access will hurt more than it would had we not known what was pos­si­ble. The nature of this detach­ment from the web isn’t some­thing to be dis­cussed here — suf­fice to say, global energy cri­sis, war, cen­sor­ship (because the web remains rel­a­tively depen­dent on a small num­ber of servers — DNS root servers par­tic­u­larly) and a vari­ety of other fac­tors could all play a part. But what would this mean?

Ear­lier, I alluded to the ‘glob­alised vil­lage’ con­cept, and how that, in some senses (no pun intended), fails. What we are now see­ing is a series of online ‘com­mu­ni­ties’ exist­ing in par­al­lel, with very occa­sional (but also very com­plex) per­pen­dic­u­lar rela­tion­ships. There is no global vil­lage. There are a series of global com­mu­ni­ties, with which peo­ple can choose to par­tic­i­pate and engage to what­ever extent they deem desir­able. A series of fac­tors aside from the web and MSM have also led to the decline of the phys­i­cal ‘vil­lage’ envi­ron­ment — urban sprawl, glob­al­i­sa­tion in a phys­i­cal sense (highly mobile pop­u­la­tions, etcetera) and the like are exam­ples of such — but there is some­thing wrong with an entirely directed, spe­cific, no-overlap envi­ron­ment. Ben remarked a day or two ago that it’s intrigu­ing his three best friends all have an affin­ity for Eng­lish (and two of those teach­ing it), whilst he is indif­fer­ent about the lan­guage, as about teach­ing (though remarked it is ‘fun’ where maths is con­cerned!).

Rarely, in Internet-based com­mu­ni­ties, have I seen some­one engage with peo­ple out­side of their own area of prin­ci­ple inter­est. Web sites work like that. They are sites with a pur­pose: and, if they do not have a pur­pose, the traf­fic they attract is often spo­radic and undi­rected. Even this blog has a pur­pose — it must, to have attracted (and retained) the atten­tion of an Amer­i­can with an inter­est in web pub­lish­ing. Once atten­tion is engaged on one front, it is pos­si­ble to explore oth­ers — it’s pos­si­ble that peo­ple with an inter­est in web pub­lish­ing and acces­si­bil­ity will read this post sim­ply because it popped up in their feed reader and looked vaguely inter­est­ing (though length is doubt­less a deter­rent!). Back to the term ‘site’ — clearly, this word’s ety­mol­ogy ensures it can­not be divorced from its real-world meaning.

Peo­ple do not sim­ply enter a build­ing for no rea­son. This par­al­lel fails to some extent as the power of search-engines come into the equa­tion — but, remem­ber, search engines must also dis­cover a ‘site’ at some point (impos­si­ble with­out incom­ing links). Which brings us back to the parallel-with-occasional-perpendicular-bridges image (note, par­al­lel can­not mean lin­ear because of the nature of hyper­links. Per­haps I speak of par­al­lel Möbius strips?)

Irre­spec­tive of the mech­a­nisms for web-based explo­ration, web media and main­stream media both fail to serve an encom­pass­ing pur­pose of human inter­ac­tion. Copy­right makes no dif­fer­ence to this. Observe how dis­tracted this post is. Observe how I return to the topic of copy­right harshly, how it does not link to the impor­tant defin­ing qual­i­ties of human inter­ac­tion (which, it must be said, the web in part facil­i­tates). This was both inten­tional and unavoid­able: there is no bet­ter link. Copy­right doesn’t mat­ter, and pre­vi­ously cre­ated con­tent under copy­right does not mat­ter. Even­tu­ally, copy­right will dis­solve, and a har­mon­i­sa­tion between for­mally detached pub­lish­ing mech­a­nisms (I have decided that is all the dif­fer­ence is) will come about. Peo­ple will con­tinue to express them­selves, draw­ing on the con­tent of their time — ideas are aside from copy­right — whilst, per­haps, drift­ing apart from this new media and back into the village…

# by Josh on January 29th, 2006 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
| 1 Comment »

Name change

I’d been keep­ing the name “Street­Com­put­ing” around because… it fit like an old shoe. I now think it’s kind of ugly, and it’s been hinted I should do away with it a hand­ful of times, but I’d kept putting it off. Brand recog­ni­tion and all that, at least with the folks at school, many of whom remem­bered it from Year 10 (when, it must be said, the audi­ence from that part of the world was many times greater than what it has been ever since. Mostly as a result of the pro­lif­er­a­tion of videos in which stu­pid things were done, and, I would haz­ard, the fact that I wrote as though I were com­pletely illit­er­ate). But those days are done. And, fur­ther away from the Real World, your site could be called “The Hip­popota­mus Tsar; or, The Adven­tures of One Irrel­e­vant Title to a Land Not So Far Away” and do per­fectly well by the search engines, assum­ing you had the con­tent to match it.

Rebrand­ing in a com­mer­cial con­text is risky. But I just made this site look like a white­washed wall, and have sig­nalled my gen­eral lack of inter­est in com­plex aes­thet­ics here at this par­tic­u­lar point in time. Fur­ther away, per­haps, but that’s some­thing entirely sep­a­rate. I’ve got three designs in the works at the minute, one of which is this site, another of which is less aus­tere but cer­tainly not what would read­ily be described as “busy”, and another I envis­age [hav­ing not yet com­menced its design out­side of my head] will be a fair dis­tance from #fff (white, for those non-geeks in the audi­ence) and hope­fully more visu­ally com­plex than the other two. I say this so every­one is aware I’m not a lost cause to this whole sparse design thing. I just wanted change, but change is iso­lated site-by-site.

So whilst I’m rip­ping down the estab­lish­ment in that sense, I may as well do the same thing with the name! I strug­gle to define a pur­pose for this site, which is an over­whelm­ingly good thing (I think) at this par­tic­u­lar point in time. It means I am not con­fined by the tyranny of Pur­pose and its twin, Ratio­nale. Nepo­tism runs rife.

And, see­ing as I have this domain here, it does make quite a lot of sense to make the blog name match the domain name, for as long as the blog remains the key com­po­nent of the domain. Street­Com­put­ing would have been a con­ve­nient iden­ti­fier had my blog related to com­put­ers and been of approx­i­mately equal or slightly less than equal (either way) impor­tance within this domain space, but it doesn’t relate to com­put­ers for the most part, and I’m not keen on split­ting up blogs into sep­a­rate nerdery (lan­guage), geek­ery (pure IT), tech-ery (unsure about the appro­pri­ate­ness of that suf­fix there, but per­tain­ing to A/V) and web-ery (CSS/markup/occasional server-side) blogs.

Though I am tempted. I could call one of them “Cas­cad­ing Style Street” ;-)

Any­way. This is now called Joahua.com. And that was a really lengthy explanation.

My con­cern now is chiefly for Georgia’s cap­i­tal J, on which the lower serif (there’s prob­a­bly a more pre­cise typo­graph­i­cal term) seems dis­pro­por­tion­ally large:

Joahua.com set in Georgia

That aside, this whole change thing is fun. Can you tell it’s [nearly] the end of my HSC? ;-)

# by Josh on November 4th, 2005 Tags: , , , ,
| 9 Comments »

Selling an audience short?

Or, What Josh Said About Ansearch That Was Irrel­e­vant to Most Users.

Dean Jones responded to my Ansearch Answers post with the following:

All in all I feel [the post is] a fair rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the so called facts, but I stand by my recent email… namely that sim­ply review­ing us on tech­ni­cal issues that most peo­ple either

  1. wouldn’t have dis­cov­ered, or;
  2. would not likely care about,

is sell­ing your audi­ence short.

I’m inclined to dis­agree, and just wanted to quickly post to say that. I like to think I under­stand the ‘audi­ence’ here fairly well. They’re either peo­ple with (web-)geek ten­den­cies, and are hence inter­ested in any analy­sis and crit­i­cism I can deliver on the tech­ni­cal aspects of prod­ucts, etc., or (and this cat­e­gory is com­pletely unre­lated to the for­mer) stu­dents and humanities-focussed peo­ple read­ing var­i­ous con­tent I’ve pub­lished here — rang­ing from stage plots to a short story to an essay on the nature and effects of the dig­i­tal divide.

Most guests in the lat­ter cat­e­gory are just that: guests. They gen­er­ally dis­cover this con­tent via a search engine, read what they want, and leave. Over 80% of my vis­i­tors stick around for one minute or less, pre­sum­ably because they find what they need quickly, or dis­cover that the con­tent isn’t what they were look­ing for.

The “reg­u­lar” audience/participants, how­ever, are not that. I don’t think you’re all geeks, but this blog leans towards that style of con­tent, and you match that accord­ingly. You don’t come here look­ing for prod­uct rec­om­men­da­tions (the one excep­tion to that being some­one who viewed my post on Asterisk/VoIP, and asked me what my expe­ri­ences with it had been some time later: to which I replied, we haven’t both­ered, as we moved into a house with a Com­man­der sys­tem pre­in­stalled!). You come here, I think, for the qual­ity of writ­ing, for rants, for occa­sion­ally insight­ful (I hope) com­ment on var­i­ous facets of things I deem interesting.

This is a blog. This is not a news­pa­per, though it is pos­si­ble that search engines, iron­i­cally, are chang­ing the clout of this medium to some­thing sim­i­lar. The dis­tinc­tion between news­pa­per and blog becomes blurred with posts like the one that inspired this, because of the form it was writ­ten in. It is impor­tant, how­ever, to remem­ber the audience.

Peo­ple don’t come here to shop for search engines. We might be inter­ested in how they work, what they do, what the poten­tial ben­e­fits and fail­ings of each one is, but ulti­mately it doesn’t affect anyone’s choice in the real world. Sim­i­larly, investors are unlikely to come here, scop­ing out Ansearch’s offer­ing before buy­ing into par­ent com­pany Optum. And, if they did, my con­clud­ing remarks were pos­i­tive — I gen­uinely believe the story bal­anced out in their favour more than any­thing else. If I over­played the sig­nif­i­cance of a small flaw that could poten­tially be abused, my apolo­gies. I don’t, how­ever, regret includ­ing it in there at all, because I think it’s some­thing my audi­ence is inter­ested in.

As you stated in an ear­lier email… “I’m not 100% sure as to how one should go about review­ing a search engine.” Here’s a tip. like Google, Yahoo, MSN… we are a busi­ness. For us to stay in busi­ness we need to gen­er­ate revenue.

To do this we need to get more peo­ple to our SE, to get them to come back more often, and to, through their usage (CPM, CPC etc…) gen­er­ate revenue.

To achieve this we need to pro­vide a search ser­vice that the user finds use­ful. Given our rapid growth over the past months in UV’s and rev­enue, I would say we are doing OK.

Unfor­tu­nately for Ansearch and any­one else who wants to use this as an adver­tis­ing space, we don’t par­tic­u­larly care if you’re mak­ing money. It’s good to hear they’ve grown: if their evolv­ing prod­uct is any­thing to go by, they deserve it. But met­rics such as rev­enue and Unique Vis­i­tors mean lit­tle to this audi­ence, even if it’s what investors want to find out all about.

I think this is a fair assess­ment of this site’s ‘audi­ence’ (the impor­tant ‘audi­ence’, for me, being the minor­ity that don’t come through search engines, sub­scribe by RSS, and come back regularly) — though, as always, your role is not restricted to that. You are par­tic­i­pants. In light of this, I’d invite com­ment and dis­cus­sion on this post as to your role as you under­stand it. It’s pos­si­ble I’ve got this all wrong… but I doubt it.

# by Josh on September 14th, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
| 2 Comments »

Ansearch answers

All had been quiet on the Ansearch front as I awaited a response from Ansearch CEO Dean Jones, promised a hair under two weeks ago when I alluded to an ear­lier analysis/criticism I’d writ­ten when talk­ing about the state of play with Aus­tralian search engines, specif­i­cally refer­ring to the then-newcomer Ansearch.

Dean picked up my post via Tech­no­rati, a blog search engine that uses RPC update ser­vices to track what peo­ple are talk­ing about in real-time. I was suit­ably impressed by this dili­gence and appar­ent desire to hear what the mar­ket has to say about their prod­uct: could this be the same com­pany whose birth was so marred by a spat of cyber-squatting, in what Dean Jones was reported to have described as a fit of “youth­ful exu­ber­ance”?

Appar­ently so. Ansearch’s begin­nings, though marred by dubi­ous prac­tices1, received praise from var­i­ous quar­ters of the main­stream press — or, at least, those quar­ters not con­trolled by News Corp, whose domains had come under threat. How­ever, the Inter­net com­mu­nity responded qui­etly, and those voices that were heard were mostly of dis­dain at Ansearch’s domain practices.

Strangely enough, my orig­i­nal post wasn’t about any of that. I hadn’t heard of Ansearch until I read an arti­cle on them in the SMH — an arti­cle which reads a lit­tle too much like a rehashed press release for my lik­ing: the tell­tale sign is in the clos­ing sen­tence “Ansearch is the search engine divi­sion of Optum Ltd.” — if it were filed in the Busi­ness sec­tion of their paper, I’d under­stand, but it wasn’t.

I wan­dered over to their site, played around for a bit, and decided their offer­ing was mediocre. In hind­sight, it prob­a­bly didn’t help that I wasn’t shop­ping for any­thing in par­tic­u­lar — accord­ing to a ZDNet arti­cle, “In the short term [Ansearch] is focus­ing very heav­ily on the com­mer­cial end of the market.” — but at that point in time, I also don’t think they’d tuned their list­ings par­tic­u­larly well, as a search for Dash­Lite turned up my Word­Press hack over com­mer­cial list­ings for the actual Dash­lite brand I inad­ver­tantly used.

I say “at that point in time”, because it appears to have sub­stan­tially improved since, as per Jones’ claim: “Much has changed since your first arti­cle on us some 6 months ago.”

Much improved, it seems, on sev­eral fronts. Their core offer­ing has shaped up nicely, and some facets of my ini­tial com­plaints regard­ing acces­si­bil­ity have been met. Their ancil­lary prod­uct offer­ings seem to have devel­oped nicely: Ansearch CEO Jones claims “Each of [our prop­er­ties] goes through up to 7 stages rang­ing from an ini­tial, sim­ple SERP/Directory style page through to a more involved ser­vice, mini por­tal, search tool, etcetera.” He went on to say that these ancil­lary prop­er­ties (such as http://www.picsearch.com.au/, http://www.videosearch.com.au/, http://www.thefreedictionary.com.au/ and http://www.messengers.com.au/ amongst sev­eral oth­ers) are cur­rently being actively sep­a­rated from the core Ansearch site (he described it as “quar­an­ti­ning”), and the exact direc­tion of a num­ber of these projects would become clear over the com­ing months, with the appoint­ment of a full time man­ager of these online properties.

I’m a tad con­cerned about his descrip­tion of their strat­egy with regard to these — he said this would become clear over the months to come, and I’m hang­ing off two words here: dis­trib­uted por­tal. Whilst I can see this as being of value to users (espe­cially for generic, non-brand-specific/legally dubi­ous domains such as jokes.com.au and the ones listed above), it doesn’t seem to fit Ansearch’s core strength as I per­ceive it: as a com­mer­cial por­tal, and not as another Google. “We are not aim­ing to be another Google… we don’t have their bud­get and, to be frank, there are enough peo­ple try­ing to clone them: why build another?”

In fact, Jones sug­gested that Ansearch’s strengths lie in that it is not the ubiq­ui­tous search behe­moth, and that its index is “some­thing unique… some­thing faster… [and] against the so called “arms race” of search (my SE has more links than yours etc…)”. I’d agree this is indeed a strength, and also a rea­son for them not to try and be a por­tal. Aus­tralia already has Yahoo! and NineMSN for domes­tic por­tals, and I’m strug­gling to see what Ansearch will do to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves in this: but I’m happy to be surprised!

Ansearch appar­ently holds an index of only 500,000 web­sites con­sid­ered by its met­rics to be “most pop­u­lar”. I argued that this was poten­tially a bad thing as rel­e­vant con­tent might lie out­side this realm: for exam­ple, this web­site per­forms well when peo­ple search for reviews of the HP 2610 or infor­ma­tion about Apache on Ubuntu linux or ACT files from MP3 play­ers that record audio, but isn’t included in Ansearch’s core index.

Which is per­fectly valid, for a commercially-focussed site, I just think they could be miss­ing out a lit­tle bit. They can lever­age on my con­tent for their adver­tis­ing impres­sions and poten­tial click­throughs, because they have more valu­able con­tent show­ing up in their list­ing along­side adver­tised prod­ucts. If some­one reads my HP 2610 review after hav­ing found it in Ansearch, and decides they’d like to buy it and remem­bers hav­ing seen a “Buy HP print­ers!” ad on Ansearch, they’ll most likely click “back”. It’s abstract, behav­ioural stuff, but valu­able nonetheless.

Whether it’s valu­able enough for them to bother is another mat­ter. “We spi­der our own con­tent… some­thing that over time will be done daily,” says Jones. “Hav­ing only 500,000 web­sites will allow us to index sites more often, and as is the case with the ‘site info’ pages, pro­vide far more info on these pages.” Which is a value-add, and worth pre­serv­ing. If that’s all resources per­mit, I think they’re doing the right thing as is. Jones openly admits Ansearch’s index of pop­u­lar­ity “has a com­mer­cial flavour to it” — and rightly so. Given their much-touted gen­der and age demo­graphic based search fea­ture, this makes sense.

Their index of pop­u­lar­ity seems to be fairly slow-moving. “Monthly we add around 20,000 sites… and take out 20,000.” I’d guess this would be the low­est 20,000 that gets shuf­fled, and this seems to make sense. One has to won­der whether all the higher-ranking pages can have sub­stan­tially fresh con­tent month after month, but pre­sum­ably they do — it’s one of the things the SEO experts have always cried from rooftops.

It was inter­est­ing to hear Jones speak­ing about these peo­ple, too: amus­ing, even! Web devel­op­ers the world over often join in spec­u­la­tion as to what exactly makes search engines tick, such that we can boost our clients (or employ­ers) website’s per­for­mance. It seems the reverse is also true: search engines all over the world sim­i­larly spec­u­late as to what those hor­ri­ble devel­op­ers are doing to screw with their indexes day in and day out!

I don’t say this in jest, and I believe they’re right to com­plain: “The larger SE’s are hav­ing a very tough time com­ing up with clever ways to index con­tent to counter SEO… only to have SEO’rs quickly find ways around it. Cat and mouse…” I think “counter SEO” was a poor choice of words, given that rel­e­vant con­tent should hope­fully still be rewarded, but his point stands.

Just as inter­est­ing is Ansearch’s strat­egy to avoid falling prey to dodgy SEO tactics:

By only index­ing the root page, we remove almost all SEO trick­ery. This works in 2 ways. Firstly, peo­ple rarely put spam on their home page — that is, door­way pages, link farms, etc. usu­ally reside away from the main index… and, sec­ondly, it deletes mul­ti­ple results from the same web­site. It also stops the site owner/webmaster from say­ing they are rel­e­vant to 100 or 1000 key­words or phrases.

Kids, we just found a new argu­ment against clients who love their splash pages!

Con­tent rich front pages aren’t, how­ever, an absolute solu­tion (at least, not in Ansearch’s index). Accord­ing to Jones, Ansearch’s pol­icy of “rank­ing sites in true usage pop­u­lar­ity, both on and off­site” is “SEO proof… or at the very least, extremely resis­tant.” I’d agree it’s a pow­er­ful met­ric, but my reser­va­tions above still stand.

One caveat of Ansearch’s algo­rithm that appears poten­tially exploitable is its fail­ure to exclude con­tent in the from indexing. I don't just speak of standard meta author/keywords data, but of something else.

A screenshot highlighting the inclusion of information between style tags in Ansearch's index

As high­lighted in the screen­shot above (click for orig­i­nal page, link may expire), Ansearch’s list­ing is includ­ing con­tent between <style> tags. This presents poten­tial for SEO abuse2, as most browsers hap­pily over­look errors in CSS — and <style> tags can be placed towards the top of a doc­u­ment: if we are to believe the SEO myths, increas­ing their rel­e­vance in engines. Of course, it’s entirely pos­si­ble the con­tent bears no weight at all — but the ques­tion of why it is stored in their index at all remains unanswered.

This is another rea­son to reward web­sites that use seman­tic markup prop­erly, though at this stage that would exclude dis­pro­por­tion­ate amounts of the web, so I under­stand engines’ hes­i­tance to embark on any­thing like this. It’s not some­thing a lot of sites use”, says Jones, before con­tin­u­ing “but it will be used more and more in the future.” Well, so much of the web com­mu­nity hopes.

This formed part of Ansearch’s defense for not hav­ing embraced seman­tic markup from the out­set. Accord­ing to Jones, it’s built on a tech­nol­ogy devel­oped for a pre-April 2000 (dot com crash) search engine — so that par­tially excuses the markup at launch time. Jones’ first com­ment on their fail­ure to use seman­tic markup was sim­ply that “The majors [Google and Yahoo!] don’t use it” — something I’d dis­pute the valid­ity of, as Ansearch isn’t a “major” player, and, as has been estab­lished, is chas­ing a fairly dif­fer­ent mar­ket sec­tor. Their core busi­ness is search, but it’s a dif­fer­ent breed of search con­ducted in a dif­fer­ent way: and seman­tic markup and acces­si­bil­ity is a dif­fer­ent way. Encour­ag­ingly, Jones sees the poten­tial for embrac­ing seman­tic markup in the future on both tech­ni­cal and com­mer­cial grounds: “It makes sense to use it and as it does open us to a wider audi­ence with var­i­ous devices used to browse our site.”

He didn’t cite the “reduced band­width expen­di­ture as a result of light­weight code” rea­son, pre­sum­ably because their host, OzHosting/Destra charges only for the link, not for trans­fers over this, on their ded­i­cated server range.

Irre­spec­tive of their rea­sons, the future of Ansearch in terms of markup is promising:

Our long term goal is to have Ansearch web­site designed with­out any tables and heav­ily styled using the CSS, which even­tu­ally will gives us more con­trol on how we present our site to dif­fer­ent media types.

Ansearch has gone through sev­eral minor enhance­ments over the past 6 months with the releases of ver­sions 1 to 1.3. We are cur­rently plan­ning a major update for ver­sion 2.0 and the issues [of seman­tic markup and sep­a­ra­tion of pre­sen­ta­tion and con­tent] will be addressed.

But as we know, markup isn’t every­thing: con­tent is what ranks well in search engines erm… con­tent is what draws an audi­ence. Ansearch’s explo­ration into the devel­op­ment of por­tal envi­ron­ments is some­thing to be watched with inter­est over the com­ing months, as well as its other busi­ness aspects, includ­ing an adver­tis­ing net­work known as Soush that remains slightly enig­matic, and the mys­te­ri­ously named “Fac­tory” division.

An announce­ment is expected to be filed with the ASX later this week out­lin­ing some­thing of Ansearch’s future direc­tion: At this stage, I’m inclined to believe that the future is a pos­i­tive one, as Ansearch dis­tances itself from its much-criticised prac­tices at launch, to a diverse range of prod­uct offer­ings that uniquely ful­fil the needs of Aus­tralian Inter­net users.

Update: A fol­lowup to this has been posted, in response to a crit­i­cism that this review was overly tech­ni­cal in nature. Read on!

Notes

1 Jus­ti­fied with the catch-cry “MSN do it, so we can, too!” — to which the only sen­si­ble reply is, “yes, but MSN do it with Inter­net Explorer, and as soon as you go and write your own web browser, feel free to hijack as many unused pages as you want.“
2 I noti­fied Ansearch of this shortly prior to pub­li­ca­tion in the hope that, if this is indeed an issue, it will be resolved before this post is noticed and widely acted upon. One hopes this poten­tial prob­lem dis­ap­pears quickly.

# by Josh on September 13th, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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