Coming over all of a twitter

Last week I talked about e-mail lists which are the Internet equivalent of mailing lists you could join to be kept up to date with any number of topics.

An arts organisation, for example, could use a mailing list to inform members about arts events but the cost and hassle of using snail mail did limit their use. Nowadays, however, anyone can communicate with an audience using e-mail with little or no trouble.

Before running out of space last time, I got as far as mentioning one of my favourite e-mail lists, Mikes List, which is a regular bulletin on quirky developments in technology. It’s free, although you can make a donation to Mike if you want to, and you can join up at mikeslist.com.

Another list which I find very useful is Windows Secrets which concerns computing in general, with a particular emphasis on the Windows operating system. It is fairly technical but I find it a valuable source of info which could end up saving my bacon one day.

Did you know, for example, that you can sometimes get a failed hard drive to work one last time by freezing it for a couple of hours? There is a free version of the Windows Secrets list available at windowssecrets.com, or you can get the premium version at a very reasonable cost.

One very useful local list published by Steffie Betts is word-of-mouth which is aimed at informing KZN residents about what’s happening in the province. It has sections on such diverse topics as health and therapies, special events, day trips and coffee breaks, employment sought and offered, requests for help, getaways, and markets, fairs and fetes.

It’s a mine of information and you can sign up at word-of-mouth.co.za. Yet another local list I’ve just discovered is published by durbs.co.za. The site is worth a visit and you can sign up for the weekly newsletter there as well.

There are some things on the web that I just don’t get and Twitter, at twitter.com, is the latest one. It is based on SMS technology and allows users to use their mobile phones to send short messages to keep their friends and the wider community informed on a minute-to-minute basis, about what they’re up to.

Messages appear on the user’s own page and can be relayed to the phones belonging to their friends. Many of these messages are also echoed briefly on the front page of the site and give new meaning to the word banal.

Some messages that I spotted included; ‘preparing for an interview (eek!)’, ‘Today I have to cook. I'm going to cook mexican food’, ‘Windows takes forever to delete files. Purging oldest items in my recycle bin’ and last, but not least, ‘70 mark exam completed in 70 mins’.

How mind-numbing is that?

Previous columns on allan-fishnet.blogspot.com.

Email lists

One of the oldest ways of publishing information electronically is by e-mail list and it predates the worldwide web by quite a long time.

The simplest form of e-mail list involves an individual communicating by sending an e-mail addressed to a number of people at the same time. The first time this happened was probably about three seconds after e-mail systems first appeared in 1965 according to Wikipedia.

Typing in lots of e-mail addresses got tiresome after a while and programs were developed which managed mailing lists and allowed the owner of a list to send out messages with little effort. These systems first appeared in 1985, Wikipedia again, on the Bitnet network, which linked US universities at the time.

Someone wanting to subscribe to (join) a list or unsubscribe, could do so simply by sending a message to an e-mail address monitored by the program running the list. The message would typically contain the word subscribe or unsubscribe in the subject line, and the system would react accordingly.

There are announcement lists, in which one person communicates with many, and discussions lists which are used by groups to chat amongst themselves on topics of interest. In the latter case, messages sent by one member of the group are sent to all other members.

There are probably millions of mailing lists out there being used to keep groups of interested people update and informed. I subscribed to a lot of lists when I first discovered them but, over the years, I found it hard to deal with the amount e-mail received.

One of the most interesting lists that I currently receive is the free Mike’s List which keeps track of quirky technological developments. The current issue has full details about electronic lederhosen, incorporating cellphone and MP3 player, a hamster-controlled robot, and solar-powered robots which move the fences in cow pastures.

The cream of the current crop of stories is a link to a Japanese shop selling a combined sellotape dispenser and 4-port USB hub. The language, surely translated by machine, on the shop’s website is absolutely priceless and puts the classic English As She Should Be Spoke, to shame.

One gem reads: “When HUB of USB and the dispenser of the scotch tape, two it arranges this, the narrow desk becomes narrower, don't you think?. HUB and the dispenser became set, if this commodity is used, also the desk spreading a little, efficiency rise!”

Another classic, describing a product called iBlue Tube, says: “The vacuum tube amplifier which can be connected with iPod, warmly it is the sound which is the straw raincoat”.

Go to http://www.mikeslist.com/ to view the current issue and sign up.

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Holy cow, blogman!

It is quite some time since I mentioned blogs and blogging so I hope you’ll excuse me if I return to the subject this week.

Before I get to the nitty gritty however, I should briefly remind you that a blog, or weblog, is a Internet-based diary which people use to record their experiences for the rest of the world to read. The technology is interactive and allows readers to reply to the original post, or have discussions with other readers.

David Sifry is the publisher of a quarterly report on the state of the blogosphere (at www.sifry.com) , which comprises all the blogs out there and the social and cultural networks around them. David is uniquely placed, as the founder and CEO of Technorati, a search engine devoted to blogs, to be able put together statistics on the blogging phenomenon.

Technorati is currently tracking 70 million blogs and reports that1,4 new ones are being created every second, which amounts to a staggering 120000 a day. Believe it or not, the growth rate of the blogosphere is slowing down and is now taking a whole 320 days to double its size.

Bloggers apparently add 1,5 million new posts to their blogs every day, which is up from 1,3 million per day in the last quarter. Japanese, at 37%, is the language of the majority of posts, with English following behind at 36%.

I get quite a lot of my news from the Internet and I see that the news sites I visit, mostly newspapers, are starting to use blogs as an important addition to the content they provide. It gives their correspondents a forum to publish information, opinions and experiences that don’t make it into print.

One of the premier sites in this regard is the Telegraph, at www.telegraph.co.uk, whose blogs page is one of my first stops, after the main news page. You never know what you’ll get, whether from the correspondents, themselves, or readers who have commented on the posts.

Another rising phenomenon are the increasing numbers of blogs which are being published in book form and which can earn their authors substantial sums of money. One example is UK journalist Judith O’Reilly, who began a blog at www.wifeinthenorth.com after moving from London to the wilds of Northumberland, and who cracked a £70000 book deal in six weeks.

Another example is the book Blood, Sweat and Tea by Tom Reynolds, which is a collation of the posts he made to his blog at randomreality.blogware.com, about his life as an ambulance medic in London. Tom’s is a fascinating blog, which more than doubled the research and writing time needed to write this column.

Anyone can get involved in blogging and it needn’t cost you anything because there are a number of excellent free blogging services available out there, including www.blogger.com.

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Calling back the past

Consumers are under continual pressure with prices rising like rockets all around and we, as South Africans, seem to be more tightly squeezed than just about anyone else.

I won’t go down that particular road this week, however, so all you middlemen can breathe a sigh of relief. I just mentioned prices because I was reminded again the other day that not all of them go up.

I was going through my bookcase and I came across the file that I use to store the invoices for equipment I’ve bought over the years. One of the invoices which caught my eye, was for the laptop I bought in 2001 before heading overseas to seek my fortune.

It was a Toshiba Satellite 1800-100 with a snail-like Celeron 800 CPU, a 15Gb hard drive, 128Mb of RAM, CD-ROM, a floppy drive, and a 56kbps modem. It was pretty much the cheapest machine available with the features I needed, but it and a decent bag still cost me R15000.

In a column at the time I reported that it was a good quality computer but that, at the price, it bloody well should have been. My notebook is now a distant memory (gone to feed a Scottish teenager’s dope habit) and you can now get vastly better ones at around a third of the price.

A quick read through the adverts in this supplement will reveal notebooks with recognisable brand names, starting at less than R5000. One, featured last week, had a Celeron 1,4Ghz processor, 512Mb of RAM, a 60Gb hard drive, modem, network card, wireless networking and a dual layer DVD writer.

Only R5000! I darn near rushed straight out and bought one but luckily remembered just in time, that I don’t have any money. My plans for a shiny new notebook were dashed so I continued to consult my file to see what else had gone up or down.

On the 19^th of July, 2000, I bought a desktop computer with a Pentium III processor, 192Mb of RAM, a 10,2Gb hard drive and a video card with an unprecedented 8Mb of its own RAM. It was quite a speed merchant and cost R6577.80, not including a screen or CD writer.

The computer’s 192Mb of RAM was quite lavish for those days and was comprised of a 128Mb chip and a 64Mb one. The 128Mb unit cost me R1379.40, or R10.78 per Mb; today the price of RAM per Mb seems to be about R1.

These days, an entry-level desktop costs about R4000 and what you get is way, way faster than the machine I bought in 2000. For about what I paid back then, you can get a very potent computer indeed.

I’m agog to see if the present trend can continue and whether computers and other electronics can carry on getting cheaper and more potent. LCD screens started out hideously expensive but, in the last year, have became pretty affordable for the average user; one of these days, I may even be able to afford a digital projector.

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