Contact merger

I don't know when it happened but at long last, there finally exists a means of simply merging the many different contact listings for the same person (as people rotate email addresses and whatnot). It's a killer feature that I've always desired but have never seen in any contact manager I've used. I've posted to group boards on this topic before. This problem came to the forefront when using webmail accounts like Yahoo and Google that typically added contacts based on incoming or outgoing emails. Hence multiple contacts for the same person were created. Finally Google's contact manager has a way of merging the many versions into a single contact. The lack of that feature (and the fact that there were just so many contacts, most of which I don't need to have synced) caused me to manually create a small set of contacts using a different application. I now have some incentive to keep clean up my contact list in Google and perhaps even use their new Google Sync.

Readme

I'd been a Bloglines user for some time now, but the only things I used it for were for the smaller things like friend's blogs and things that didn't have a huge update frequency on the scale of, say, Digg or even Slashdot or Boingboing. For the bigger stuff that I checked daily, I went to the actual pages in sequence and at most kept a recent articles listing on my personalized Google page. I tested out readers and aggregators that ran locally on my machine but determined pretty quickly that it didn't serve my purposes because there wasn't a convenient way to sync between my home machine(s) and workstation. So Bloglines sufficed but the interface was just clumsy enough that I only used it for a "here's what's updated" list.

Then a week or so ago I found that Google Reader aggregator was updated and I started using it. I'm a huge fan of Gmail, one of the few, if not only, web apps that I prefer to use online rather than with a local program. I gave it a go and, true to form, I like the interface. I've moved just about everything I monitor to it and even deleted the overlapped items on my personal Google page. The main usage difference (other than the interface) I noticed between this and Bloglines is that with Bloglines, I would just see what was updated and click over to the actual site to read the articles. Something about the look and the missing images just made me not like to read within it. On the Goolge Reader, I am just as happy to read the full text (when available) within the reader and only click over to the site when I want to look at the whole article or when I care about the comments. It's not perfect of course, but very well done and I have now changed my viewing habits.

Of course now that everything's in more or less a single stream, I'm starting to feel my own version of the Digg effect. Up to hundreds and hundreds of new and unread items waiting for me to click through them. I'm sure I'll find a system to not get too overloaded, the layout and interface seems to allow for it a lot better than other aggregators I've tried.

One aggregator to rule them all.

Labels at last

So it looks like I may keep using Blogger afterall. I kept telling myself, "come on, they're not that stupid, what's the holdup?". At long last, Google has finally stepped up to the plate and updated Blogger (now Beta.Blogger of course) and one such valuable upgrade is the addition of labels. For the longest time, I'd been confounded by the lack of any significant features added to Blogger, most notably, the lack of categories or tags. The lack of that feature really makes a blog inaccessable. I mean, if you stumble upon someone's blog and happen to dig an article and want to learn more on what they have to say on the subject via categories, then manyally sifting through the archives is a miserable option. Even site search is a poor substitute. Categories give topics an identity in a way that keyword search cannot (at least currently). Further, a listing of categories gives the entire blog a kind of identity and at the very least hints as to whether other articles on the site would be of interest.

It's not that I think anyone would be interested in this blog, but even for personal use, down the road, it would be nice to at least peruse the different things I had to write about a given interest at the time. There are still tons of cool features that area available to the likes of Wordpress and Typepad and others but for now, the simple category listing is a what I was looking for. I don't necessarily think they display or handle their "labels" elegantly at the moment but I'm happy it's there.

The synchronicity here is that I'd only last week started playing around with my own web servers and webdev stuff on my home Linux box. Some work projects had me playing around with web-works and through that I became more interested in the whole web-development thing. I finally got around to playing with Ruby on Rails and subsequently Typo after reading about them for the past year or so. So far, I think they're fantastic. I'd been imagining setting up something more focused and porting it to a hosted site and such, I have a few ideas in mind, but for now I'm content with the minor dribblings that I have here on Blogger. Perhaps someday after (or if) I develop more webdev chops I'll make a more serious attempt.

Search defense

A while back Google was taken to court over its scanning books for the purposes of search and indexing. They raised a lot of quasi-interesting but mostly bad arguments regarding copyright and control and such. From a social standpoint I think it would be a tremendous boon to have all works collectively indexed and searchable. I think there's a "public-good" argument similar to "immanent domain" that one could make. I recently read an article on Slate that contains one of the best analogies I've come across:

The idea that there is no tradeoff between authorial control and exposure is attractive. But it is also wrong. Individually, more control may always seem appealing—who wouldn't want more control? But collectively, it can be a disaster. Consider what it would mean, by analogy, if map-makers needed the permission of landowners to create maps. As a property owner, your point would be clear: How can you put my property on your map without my permission? Map-makers, we might say, are clearly exploiting property owners, for profit, when they publish an atlas. And as an individual property owner, you might want more control over how your property appears on a map, and whether it appears at all, as well as the right to demand payment.

But the law would be stupid to give property owners that right. Imagine how terrible maps would be if you had to negotiate with every landowner in the United States to publish the Rand McNally Road Atlas. Maps might still exist, but they'd be expensive and incomplete. Property owners might think they'd individually benefit, but collectively they would lose out—a classic collective action problem. There just wouldn't really be maps in the sense we think of today.

The critical point is this: Just as maps do not compete with or replace property, neither do book searches replace books. Both are just tools for finding what is otherwise hard to find. And if we really want to have true, comprehensive book searches, we cannot require that every author's permission be individually sought out. The book search engines that emerge would be a shadow of the real thing, just as a negotiated map would be a lousy one. Studies suggest that millions of out-of-print books are of unclear copyright status, and Google estimates that relying solely on books provided by publishers and authors will yield only 20% of the books in existence. Not only might it be difficult to get permission. (At least with real property we know who the owners are.) But there are just too many books with owners who are hard or impossible to find"orphan works."

Each of those is a hole in the "map," and a shame.

But again, for every decision there's a good reason, and a real reason. Others have pointed out what I also think is the real reason: Dispite the high minded claims regarding author rights, copyrights, control, and intellectual property, publishers really just want a cut of the potential Ad-Sense revenue that Google will probably make. If it really comes down to a bare-knuckle legal-fight though, and if Google really wants to support the altruistic image that it purports, perhaps they can at some point come to an agreement not to connect advertisement to its book search, or perhaps to branch it off to a non-profit arm and promise to donate revenue above and beyond the project costs to libraries; I think the project is important enough to make happen dispite any greed factors.

Context ads

I remember reading an article of how Amazon's context recommendations were proposing things like "Planet of the Apes" as "you might also be interested in" stuff for people looking up things related to Martin Luther King or Black History Month or something like that; creating a bit of a furor.

It occurs to me that stuff like this has to be happening all the time and I would be there's a site out there somewhere collecting it. I was just reading a Google groups post where a guy was suggesting using suspenders in place of belts for people with big bellies. The Google context ads on the side all concerned pregnancy. I'd post a link but the ads of course rotate in and out. On second read one had to do with pregnancy, one about babies, and one other regarding beanbags.

I wonder how many of these misapropos that can be deemed as offensive will pop up, how many will create a stir large enough for action to be taken, and how to handle it in freeform.

Fortunately, Google ads are (when used properly) unobtrusive and easily ignored, especially since they're all text and take up fairly little real estate. Boggles my mind how some people think it's not enough. I've seen pages where no less than 4 areas of the screen devoted to these ads, including between posts. Does this really help earn revenue that much?

Delete this

I can only guess that the reason Google did not make a delete button (you had to go to the dropdown menu) was that they didn't really want you to delete anything. Now... why wouldn't they want you to delete anything? I have no freaking clue and I have no intention of digging through their literature in an effort to understand such an inane idea. There are just emails that are not worth saving. Maybe they figured so long as it was archived and out of the way then it wouldn't matter if it was there or not. That's kind of how I (used to) treat all of the accumulated items I have at home. File it and forget about it. The only advantage Gmail has is that the search is very good, whereas with my files, it is not. Still... clutter is clutter. The lack of a delete button was a big complaint by nearly every Gmail user I imagine and for such a simple thing to fix I'm astounded at their lack of response to it. But now it's there thankfully.

In slightly related news, I've finally started getting spam on my Gmail account. It took more than half a year for the spam to start and for that I'm both thankful and impressed. Well there was some spam there already but that was my fault due to some web purchases and signups but those were sensible, controlable, identifiable, and filterable. Now the typical maddening garbage is starting to trickle in. There's no escape.

Yahoo, I just left but I may be back

I remember the days when Yahoo! was basically a public bookmark list by some clever fellows at Stanford. They'd come a long way quickly, even when portals were en vogue and everyone's least favorite uncle was creating their own portals, I still managed to stay fairly faithful to Yahoo. That of course changed in recent years, most recently with the rise of Google and the plethora of social networking sites. I'll be honest and say that in my opinion Yahoo remained kind of bloated and stagnant from a user experience point of view most of that time; though during a lot of that time they were still on top in my book, but more in the "lesser amongst the evils" kind of way. They've been on the prowl this year. Acquiring Flickr and now del.icio.us almost seems like an act of desparation. Something like "we need to be cool fast, let's buy the cool stuff and claim it as our own." I guess that's common and fortunately they're nowhere near as atrocious about it as... some other big monopolistic companies.

My take is that it took some serious ingenuity and competition to get them off their arses. That's a good thing. Whereas before they were not happy with their place but still didn't truly experiment and encourage imagination, now they see that that is the key: making stuff that's cool and works good. So I finally move my email over to their new beta email client and I have to say I'm impressed. It looks and works pretty much like what most email clients (e.g. Thunderbird) have evolved into, except through a web interface. I like it. Good for them. I hated having to page through my emails 26 at a time, and with abysmal threading and search features. They even upped their storage quota to 2Gig (direct response to Gmail) which was something I used to have to pay for. Actually I'm still annoyed that I still have to pay for POP3 access, spam filtering, etc... something that's free on at least one other free amazingly popular email service. If this had come along, oh, about half a year or a year ago, I would have been even more pleased. Sadly, it's just a liiiiiittle bit too late. I really dig the Googlemail interface. Yes it has bugs and all the features I want aren't there but I consider the basic label+conversation+search paradigm the wave of the future and the way I want to handle my email from now on. Sadly, their interface is also just a web interface and not the way my normal machine clients work so I'm kind of stuck doing things the old way with my work email and such. Ah well, maybe someday.

I'm glad to see Yahoo getting aggressive. Although I may not fully embrace their new direction, especially in the presense of some serious competition, it's still good for Joe Consumer.