China vaults past USA in Internet users - now 220 million users in China

China has surpassed the USA as the No. 1 nation in Internet users.

The number of Chinese on the Internet hit more than 220 million as of February.
http://mobileanalytics.com/forum/index.php?topic=28.0

I wonder how Americans are going to handle this little turn of events.

What is really interesting in the rest of the article it discusses how the percentage of penetration for china is 17% of it's 1.3 Billion population versus 71% penetration of the USA's population of 304 million people.

So with China expected to increase another 13 million users in March to 233 million users how long before there are more people using the internet in China than the entire population of the USA (I'm guessing about 7 months so about the end of this year).

Cheers,

Dean
P.S. In case you are wondering Australia has a piddling little 15m users but this is against a pop of only 20.5m so the penetration is actually higher than the USA.

Google Chart API now generates QR Codes.

Simply choose the size in pixels of your barcode and the url you wish to encode. Inserting these in the required url format gives:
http://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=300x300&chl=http://www.cognation.net

Which when you paste it into your browser address bar produces this:


It's been out for a few weeks now, only I wish it was configured to encode more than just url’s - I kept waiting for them to provide documentation or extend the capability.

Until then it’s really just a neat trick.

http://code.google.com/apis/chart/


I keep wondering what google is really up when it comes to qr codes? If they wanted to make this happen they could roll out really effective tools with less than a few hundred developer hours (so in other words less than a weeks time for a small google team).

…..what are you really delaying for google?




Cheers,
Dean

Odiogo "Listen Now" enabling articles

Just came across a really interesting feature on the www.RedHerring.com site

www.odiogo.com has a voice reader that reads out the article or you can do 'one click' to your ipod/mp3 player or you can just download straight to mp3 file.
http://www.odiogo.com/demo.php

Not sure what their revenue model is, I'm assuming free to content publishers and once volume is up they will be doing voice advertising insertions (will be interesting to see if they have to pay content providers a revenue split on the incoming ad revenue).

Not a bad solution, you can still tell it is computer generated voice but it’s comfortable enough to listen to if not a little stilted. Feel free to click on this link to the article I listed to. http://www.redherring.com/Home/24193


Cheers,
Dean

Live Mesh

I was going to post a longer blog post about Microsoft Live Mesh at a later date once all the details were known but commented on the Newtech-1 list this morning and thought it was worth posting here as well.

If you haven't heard of Mesh check out this site http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1355 which has pretty good coverage.


then read the inbound email and my reply below.

On Behalf Of Matt: Thursday, 1 May 2008 1:48 AM
To: newtech-1@
Subject: Re: [newtech-1] Live Mesh

Joel Spolsky's take on Mesh is here:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html



On Behalf Of Dean: Thursday, 1 May 2008 7:48 AM
To: newtech-1@
Subject: Re: [newtech-1] Live Mesh

Well that’s a little harsh – if file synchronization is such a snap why isn’t it more prevalent?

Show me an application that is syncing video from my living room dvr to my cell phone.

Too consumer orientate you think?

Ok then tell me why when I install Outlook (or firefox if you are anti MS) that I have to re-configure it exactly the way I like it, why doesn’t it sync to the ‘syncoverse’ and pull down my configuration files etc?

(btw just checked both the .com and .net domain names are available for the term ‘Syncoverse’ :) - cut me in for 10% if you think there is a business model)

I think Mesh has some interesting potential……..lets just choose to agree that whether or not the potential will ever be fulfilled is what we are really discussing.

Regards,
Dean Collins

Google 'messy interface'

Google are renown for clean lines in all of their applications particularly their start page; So can any one explain this new strategy to me?

Are peoples short term memories so short that we jumped away from the Yahoo's of the world to seek purity in the all knowing all clean algorithm of the mighty Google?

(btw if you are going to pick a home page design - definitely go for the Mark Ecko design).


Cheers,
Dean

CBS Viral Video show

So someone from the www.cakke.com team left a comment on my www.collins.net.pr/blog site about how they should be voted for an oscar because of their clip about viral videos here "Cakke".

That’s not that big a deal…..what is a big deal is this story about how they recently sold the rights of that song for $750,000 to CBS. Wow does that make their editing time worthwhile or what!!!
http://cakke.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/internet-stars-are-viral-goes-primetime


Cheers,
Dean

Boxbe

Yes so everyone reading this blog that is my address book would have received an email from 'Boxbe' this weekend.

No it's not a virus. No it's not spam. No it's not another social network.

It's an 'alpha stage' product that while has really interesting potential seems to be still working out the kinks.

Basically Boxbe is a SF based startup that through an outlook plugin (or yahoo and soon to be gmail etc etc) adds a toolbar that will enable you to separate out spam from your inbox.

It works in the theory using sender address verification, so if you send me an email and you aren't in my outlook address book or in my 'approved guest list' it sends you an automated reply email asking you to fill out a robot detector captcha test.

If you don't do this then I still see the email but it's placed into a 'holding folder' that I can check and manually approve any time but without me seeing this in my inbox helps weed out spam.

So whats bad about it?

Well I sent an invitation to Alec Saunders and he blogged about it as good as I could so check out his blog here http://saunderslog.com/2008/04/22/boxbes-spam-a-fatal-mistake-for-them-and-me/

Basically they send an email to everyone in your 'approved list' and whilst that's ok, it's confusing that this is going to happen and also confusing wording in the email people receive - they should just read then delete the email but it makes it sound like you have to sign up to the service otherwise your emails to me wont get through.....

That's bad enough but they then send a second email 2 days later for people who didn't sign up......

I’ve been getting emails from people who received the ‘2nd day’ invite with requests to please get me off this list from my 1300 or so Outlook contacts.

I think people are used to ignoring a ‘first email’ (though a few people did query me about ‘whats Boxbe’ when i first sent them out the initial invite) but getting one 2 days later makes them think that they are on some continual spamming list.

I also have to comment that whilst Boxbe support has been fairly responsive to my initial comments when I asked how do people delete accounts…….that there has been no response.

Not that I’m ready to cancel my Boxbe account, for the moment after about 3-4 days it seems to be doing a really nice job of separating all but self sent domain spam (eg someone purporting to be sending you an email from your own domain). Everything is is being nicely separated out and although I’m reviewing the ‘boxbe isolation folder’ about 4 times a day I feel this will settle down to once a day soon.

Far better than the spam protection that comes with outlook/exchange.

So I’m thinking I might keep it…..though the jury’s still out, Will post more on www.collins.net.pr/blog once I make my final decision - just hopefully someone at Boxbe works out they need to be a little less 'aggressive' with the 'viral' nature of their emails.

If you have a good product that solves the worlds spam problems, trust me they will come.


Cheers,
Dean

Clay Shirky

A couple of weeks ago at the Newtech meetup here in NY I was introduced the first time to someone who radically lifted my personal expectations of what I should be doing with my IT knowledge.

Clay Shirky apparently was really well known by the 500 or so people in the room but I hadn't heard of him before. After listening to him for less than 10 mins I realised why he was so warmly received.

Someone recently posted an audio file of the discussion so feel free to click below to have a listen for yourself and let me know what 'you personally hear'.


Click To Play
(unfortunately the audio isn't great as it was captured by someone in the audience on their cell phone or something like that - it's one of those spontaneous events where you wish for years later you had a proper recording of the event but as far as i know this is the only recording - and they missed the Q&A at the end that had the majority of the good points raised around what 'we' should be doing about this).

I was very inspired and heard there is an expectation (not a burden but more of a tax), that I as a literate, educated, well trained IT person should, if not must, give back to the world something that utilises my personal skillsets to the best of my ability something in IT that radically changes the world as we know it.

It was for me personally a very inspiring session.

If you enjoyed his point of view you might want to check out his book on Amazon, i purchased it online that very night and this blog post was going to be a review of his book but after 3 re-writes of what I was going to post originally I just couldn't cover it in a way to do it justice (which is why i sought out the audio file).

You should click below and check it out.
Clay Shirky - Here Comes Everybody

Cheers,
Dean

P.S. someone sent me this video http://youtube.com/watch?v=A_0FgRKsqqU its a much longer version of the same topic he presented on but it was much more powerful at Meetup because of the Q&A (and was shorter - I also think Clay may have been more nevous giving the talk in front of the Berkman community).

HD80606b

Well what do you know, you learn something new every day.

So you know the scene in "The Chronicles Of Riddick" where the sunrise of the planet is bringing a fierce firestorm sweeping surface of the planet that they are trying to outrun....

Yeh you know the one, so I always thought whilst an exciting scene, was absolute BS.


Anyway so I'm watching a documentary on planets that have highly elliptical orbits (an orbit where the planet does not orbit in a near circle like earth but one where planets circle swinging close into their sun then far out in an egg shaped movement) there is a planet called HD80606b that has a highly elliptical orbit of 111 days and as it swings in close to it's sun, a firestorm of several thousand miles an hour sweeps in both directions from the 'sunny' side to the dark side.

After a period of about 12 hours this dissipates into an entire planet engulfing storm before cooling down again while it swings out the long lobe of it's 111 day orbit.

I guess that would mean you'd need to stay indoors that day or up the SPF factor on your sunscreen several thousand percent.


Cheers,
Dean

23 degrees

23 degrees thats the number of degrees the earth tilts in order to change New York from Winter to Summer and back again (I'm not sure if thats just at the poles or equal everywhere - my geometry is a little rusty but you get the point).


So I'm out taking Lou Lou for a walk today, the sun is shining, the grass is green (and growing rampantly - the baseball diamond across the road is being mowed every week now), the flowers are blooming and it's hard to realise that less than two months ago if you were outside without a jacket you would be freezing.

It makes you realise how big a fluke it is that earth is as inhabitable as it is. And should something happen, meteor, earthquake, tidal wave or otherwise that it would be easy for things to be very very different.

If you've never seen the documentary "Guns, germs and steel" you should - really compelling insight as to why somethings are the way they are.

Also makes me wonder why we are wasting billions of dollars in petty squabbles when we should be racing for other inhabitable worlds.....but thats a post for another time.

Just wanted to say spring time in New York how sweet it is.


Cheers,
Dean