The web has come a long ways in terms of usefulness. The interfaces are much easier and nicer. It is easier to search and share information. But has it become too easy and too mainstream?

The comments there are a good example of why I don’t get much value from Digg. Too much noise and very little knowledge. Robert Scoble

Robert’s comment strikes a chord that I have felt for awhile now. When a medium is opened to the public and becomes mainstream, it starts to loose its effectiveness and perhaps its authority. Look at the history of the Internet. BBS, newsgroups, forums, live chat, social networking, and social bookmarking. When it was a limited group, it had some use. As it grew the voice of the masses’ was heard and it became more useful. It then became popular and mainstream. All of these mediums suffered similar histories. When they became popular and mainstream the noise grew to deafening volumes and blocked out the knowledge.

It is easy to comment and do a straight mind dump or stream of thought. No filtering needed. Who is going to know who you are. Better yet, look at myspace, et al., most don’t understand or care that their lives are an open book for those who know how to look. If you don’t care that other’s know your personal details, why would you care that they find out that you trashed talked about something you knew nothing about? We are or are becoming an open society that hides behind fake annonynimity of digital life. There is no accountability and when you can sign up for a yahoo or other anonymous email account, there isn’t likely to be any anytime soon.

It isn’t as much fallen from grace as it has gone the way of most mass media and popular Internet services.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, social networks, social bookmarking, Digg, MySpace, Responsibility, accountability, audience

In the first part of this series, I reviewed Microsoft’s Live Writer. Live writer is a brand new product and still in its beta form. In this article, I review an established Post2Blog 2 currently in RC2.

This window’s only editor, from ByteScout has a solid history with me. I had originally been blogging with it when I was trying out different platforms and services. It requires 11 Mb of memory to open and an average document like this, is only 17 Mb of memory to run. The full install takes 27 Mb of disk space and is quick and simple. Setting up your blog is simple if you are on one of these platforms: Blogger, Movable Type, Typepad, or Wordpress.

The editor’s interface is simple to navigate. Everything is laid in an intuitive manner, with most things visible. The drop down options under some of the buttons, I found useful but it took a little bit to get used to it. There are still some features that don’t work, like stuff under the Publish button and Microsoft Word integration. The Microsoft Word integration was a nice feature in version 1 and I hope they can get it working for the final release of version 2. The application is rounded out with a nice array of tools that are designed to help the user out.

The formatting features work mostly as expected and better than Live Writer. Lists, font styles, and block quotes all work well, but setting the font face is quirky like in Live Writer. In Post2Blog it works just the opposite of Live Writer, you can’t change the font face and size until after you have typed something. Here again though, it would be nice if there was a way to set the default font face and size for a blog.

Drag and Drop images where you want them and then right click to get their properties. If you want to resize just change the size right there by dragging the corner. Unfortunately, the rest of the image manipulation is not as powerful as in LW and lacks the special effects. The UI for the images uses drop down menus, I liked the icon buttons for alignment in LW better. Links are pleasure here. Copy the url to your clipboard, highlight the text you want to make into a link and do a ctrl + k and viola it bring up the tool with all the info filled in. Add an alt tag and select if you want it in a new window or not and you are done. Simple.

Kudos to ByteScout as well for the multiple options to save. They give you the option to save locally, publish, and publish as draft. I tend to work at multiple machines, but find the standard Wordpress editor clunky to use. Spell check works, but its not integrated with the Microsoft Word dictionary so you will have to keep two updated.

The category tool/widget is easy to navigate and use. Alphabetically sorted and check boxes make it a powerful tool. Updating the list is done nicely with a link or a ctrl+b. Maybe its the API’s that don’t support it, but neither LW nor Post2Blog support creating categories on the fly. I will have to investigate that as this series progresses.

Finally its integration with IE, Firefox, and Outlook make a nice way to keep a blog updated quickly. Though as a corporation I would be wondering about Outlook integration. As a basic editor its not bad. You get all the basic functionality and some added nice features. It being called a release candidate I think is a bit optimistic. Live Writer’s beta felt more complete than this RC. With a price tag I don’t find it a worthwhile purchase.

Part 3: My Recommendation

Technorati Tags: Blog Editors, Reviews, Wordpress, TypePad, Post2Blog, Movable Type

I will have a full review of Post2Blog shortly, but I wanted to give some initial feed back here. I like the quick snippets feature, though the first time that I typed in Post2blog and it filled in a paragraph of text it was very surprising. The formatting of text is quirky in similar way to Live Writer, in that to change the font you have to have text already there. Otherwise, it is very similar to Writer. The image functions aren’t as nice or intuitive as Write, but once you get the hang of it is not too bad. Although I do miss the extras like drop shadow in Write. Post2Blog does have some nice features that aren’t include in Writer. The table editor is a nice feature, but again doesn’t work as smoothly as I had anticipated. Quick Snippets takes some practice to get used to and the More_Text_Tag is a nice feature too. More to come later…

Technorati Tags: Blog Editors, Post2Blog, Reviews

Google has changed the world we live in numerous ways, to the point that they have to fight to maintain their company name as a trademark and not a verb. I use google every day. I subscribe to news.google.com’s home page. I use google analytics and webmaster tools. I even gave them liberty to see my search records so that I could have more power in my searches. I think google has done a lot of good and brought all of publicity to the open source movement and in turn given us more choices and better options in the long run. Which brings me to their latest foray in the world of search, “Google Code Search.”

I’ve written about being responsibility in the past. I am a believer in experimentation and curiousity, but when a company that has the resources of Google experiments, the implications have to well thought out before it can be made even a public alpha. “Code search” is such an experiment that has far reaching ramifications. On the surface, it seems harmless enough. Search open directories for source code and index them. Ok, but isn’t that what hackers did and do? Think back to code red, melissa, and any number of viruses and trojans that exploited unprotected and “open” systems. So, ok Google isn’t a hacker organization. Indexing is not a malicious activity, but what about those open systems? What about the lay person who has set up a web server and open source projects on their server? While Google isn’t directly or legally responsible for the uses that there tool is used for (or should they be, just like the RIAA/MPAA and the courts would like us to believe with P2P filesharing and oddly not the gun manufacturers yet another story.)

Reasonable and conscientious people should be able to see at least some of the flaws in this kind of searching. Now, maybe it is their intention to force people to be more careful with the security of their code and sites. But even such a noble thought, leaves me wondering about the wisdom behind it. Just look at this search on digg. Lots of reasons why the immediate wisdom of this leaves me worried. It’s like the security industry announcing to the world (of hackers) the flaw they have found in whichever operating system or application they were working on that day.

If anyone from Google reads this, please think through your actions and their implications. You have a great set of services and offer a lot, but you also wield alot of power through your brand and people will always at least try what you have.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Code Search, Privacy, Security, Open Source

Firefox RC2 is out. Its speed improvements are great and so far it works well. But like with any RC there can be issues and like other Firefox releases this one doesn’t support all of the extensions and themes yet. So if there is an extension or theme that you just can not live without, back up your profiles using FEBE. It does a nice job of backing up all of the essentials. This way if you get into a place that you can’t continue using RC2 you can uninstall it and roll back to your original profiles.

Technorati Tags: Firefox RC2, Firefox, Backup, Profiles, FEBE