Ah, Citizen Smith; Robert Lindsay's finest hours. I wonder if they've stood the test of time?

Folks who know me, know that I regard sell-by dates as a suggestion. M&S were horrified when my mum once congratulated them on selling a yoghurt that was still good two years after the sell-by date (glad you enjoyed it, but please don't do that!). The man who opened the tins in his wedding hamper on his gold wedding anniversary? Why not - canning is a preservation method. Lea and Perrins being told to put a six month date on the bottles when they have a bottle dating from the opening of the factory that's still going strong? A bureaucrat who doesn't understand salt as a preservative.

Sugar works quite well too. My mum used to buy jam at village fêtes and sometimes pass them on a year or so later. I eat jam in batches, as it were; I'll want jam every day for a week or every week for a month and then not again for six months. I don't keep jam in the fridge once opened (definition of preserve, anyone - although modern homes don't have proper larders at the proper temperature so I sometimes compromise). That means there are a few elderly unopened jars in the cupboard; they crystallise at the top but are usually perfectly fine under the top crunchy inch. I opened one for my PBJ and I can report that while it is indeed preserved, after 15 years gooseberry jam is really more like candied gooseberries in jelly. A little crunchy, but rather nice...

One of the reasons why I resigned from AOL to go freelance was the trend away from producing and commissioning our own editorial content and towards placing ads around partner content; it became a bizdev and production job rather than an editorial one, and that's not what I really do. AOL UK had an editorial director at the time, Andy Bull, whose management style I found a little abrasive. He left abruptly after giving an interview to the Media Guardian in which he said rather too frankly that he wasn't a fan of Harry Potter; as this was just before the first movie came out, in which Time Warner had invested $BIGNUM, that might have been the reason. I don't think it was because of the comment I personally disliked, that "advertising is content too"*.

The holy grail of online advertising is contextual ads that speak to your needs as an individual, at the time you're most ready to buy. Getting an offer for cut-price flights when I'm ready to book my ticket home from Orlando should be a win for both of us. But the baby steps along that road tend to be annoying (Gmail gets like Clippy: "I see you're breaking up with your girlfriend - would you like help with relationship counselling?"). And AOL had no contextual information about the user; they put wedding-related ads in the Wedding area and PC ads in the technology channel - it was just themed advertising.
 
Google can probably do a little better because it can mine your searches and your history and your email and all that information you publish about yourself in those memes you do. And you should get used to advertising 24x7 everywhere you look online courtesy of Google, and be thankful. Because Eric Schmidt is reminding me of that content comment. As he said to an interviewer from CNBC at the Milken Conference: "Google believes that advertising itself has value. The ads literally are valuable to consumers. Not just to the advertisers, but the consumers."

He goes on to admit that yes, they've already made the classic AOL blunder about monetising social networks. AOL made very little money from the most popular areas of the service: chat. You see, when you're talking to your friends, you don't interrupt the conversation to take a sales cold call, you don't click through to an advert. Social networks are the same; you care that your friend has a new car; you don't necessarily want to go look at the slick video of how a professional driver made it look good on TV, still less see a deal to buy one yourself. Who's buying all those ads on Facebook applications? Other Facebook application developers.

Other Schmidt nuggets
On not buying back stock: We love watching that cash sit in a well-managed bank and not get lost.
The new consumerism: Everybody wants the same thing. They want fashion, they want information, they want products, they want e-commerce, they want it now.
On discovering that running a big company means having a Microsoft-style formal process rather than spontaneous startup energy, even when you're a small fraction of Microsoft's size: [the biggest challenge today is] the ability to manage the creative process, deal with the complexity in what is a relatively large company, in terms of people, who's doing what. We have 50 development centers all around the world, people in different time zones, `Are you doing that? Are you doing that? Do I work with you? How do I check in my code?'...The systems in the company, literally who's doing what, what are they doing, seemed to lag our ability to hire these great people.


I did wonder if even after all this time it would be unprofessional to mention why I left AOL or to discuss the public record of someone I worked with; on consideration I thought it would only be unprofessional to snark about it*. I think ethics in journalism matter. That's why I thought this comment in the CNBC interview at a conference last week was pretty low.
CNBC's Maria Bartiromo: Yeah, you can bet, I guess, who tipped off the DOJ about the phone call that was made, Steve Ballmer or somebody from that side."
Not only it is a very soft-pedal interview, that refrains from asking any difficult questions (like if the Google tenet is do no evil, are they doing the right thing in China, if the Google tenet is don't trap user data, why are they complaining about being told 18 months is too long to keep it for?), but an unsubstantiated presumption about Microsoft behaving badly shouldn't go out at all, let alone be given authority because it's said by a journalist.


*I don't think I'm snarking by saying that Bull's departure from AOL was also three years before his prosecution as part of Operation Ore so probably not connected to the actions that led to his conviction and jail sentence (and for clarity, he's not the Guardian sports writer Andy Bull), which you can read his take on; that doesn't mention his time at AOL, which was during those four years, and it doesn't say whether he was paid for writing that article. I'm processing my own reaction to finding out that he was one of the few people caught by Ore who hadn't had their credit cards stolen but was looking at dubious content. I find it a little disquieting, but I'm far more offended by his suggestion that ISPs and search engines share his guilt by not have censored the sites or otherwise taken over the responsibility for his actions he should have taken himself. 

Simon and I are having fun researching a feature on enterprise technology in 2015 and we're getting some interesting predictions. But I'm also getting a number of PR folk who I'd have to characterise as either lazy, chancing it or in need of a visit to the optician sending through predictions for 2008.

Predictions for next year are common at this time of year and dailies and online titles will find them useful (print titles wrapped those prediction pieces up some weeks ago; dead tree media needs time to kill its trees). Sending them as a flavour of the areas your client can address or to see if there's a trend we'd like to ask you to extrapolate, with a note saying you're looking into the 5-10 year span we asked about is fair enough. Sending them to go into the 2015 piece because it's easier than doing the work involved in actually answering the query and being surprised when we come back and say they're not suitable isn't.

And if you're going to ask 'why 2015?' I'll be more impressed if you ask whether we're picking that year because of the AMD targets, the Cisco predictions, the Millennium targets, the Crossrail completion date, the climate predictions or simply because it's a round number in the 5-10 year period - because having thought about any of that before you ask makes me feel you're more likely to have useful predictions for the piece rather than just an attempt to get your client a mention, which gets the answer in the title...


BTW, for the benefit of my most-welcome PR readers who may be wondering what happened to 'the sweet Mary Branscombe' as characterised by TWL: this isn't a swipe at anyone in particular but at something of a trend in my mail in the last 24 hours.

Last week I caught up with Jon Callas of PGP and we had a nice time agreeing violently about the HMRC data loss; it's the system that's broken, outsourced IT is a problem if it makes it more expensive to do it right than to do it wrong and why aren't we nailing up the courier company instead? You can read the conversation over at IT Pro.

But one of Jon's examples is how Amazon ships everything to you using tracked services. Yes, but, as he'd say. One of our Amazon orders - quite an urgent one as it's Zorb for dealing with Horrid Beasts - was sent by Royal Mail without any tracking. So it may or may not be the item they tried to deliver on Saturday morning - when we were in - and wouldn't give us at the sorting office this morning (they were fresh out of explanations as well; the Royal Mail complaint line, for future reference, is on 08456 112471). Could the police keep an eye out for my parcel while they hunt for the CDs?

I set up a new PC quite frequently with all the reviewing I do; for Vista I have this down to under two hours for all my apps and customisations, for a review machine I'll be using for only a few days it's far less. It depends where the PC comes from as to how many tweaks it needs. The very gorgeous HP 2710p I'm using today has a US keyboard and as I've just realized, US date formats. I've already set the keyboard to UK, and the timezone, and the location. How about if when I changed any of those apart from the timezone Windows said to me 'there are these x other settings that relate to location and nationality; tick the ones you'd like to set to UK as well'. There's a nice hierarchical arrangement when I want to go digging through the control panel (well, better than earlier versions of Windows, some settings I still look in three places for first) but why not have a logical connection and pull out the relevant options in a dynamic view?

Sumner Redstone, the 80something-year-old chairman of Viacom and CBS, is the man that Steve Case borrowed 'Content is King' from; he decided early on that as far as the money is concerned, it's the 'distribution, stupid' and his keynote speech at Dow Jones and Nielsen's Media and Money conference shows he still gets it.
"If content is king, copyright is its castle. Copyright compels creativity, it furnishes the incentive to innovate. If you limit the protection of copyright, you stifle the expression of self."
"Think about it: You cannot pay the rent posting videos on YouTube... And most aspiring novelists do not aspire to self-publish. You cannot make it as a musician, you can't make it as a filmmaker or a writer without ... effective and enforced copyright legislation."
"The time and effort spent creating and the months spent producing, marketing and distributing content is an investment; it is not intended to be a donation."
On the Internet as on TV "advertising will pay the way".
"We are now in a fragmented search economy, which means we need to extend our content beyond our own destination sites so consumers can reach it more easily ... The content mountain has officially relocated." (Does that mean Viacom and YouTube will kiss dollar bills and make up?)

Leaving aside the YouTube spats and the DCMA rights grabbing and the whole Melancholy Elephants side of things, I found myself wondering what his take on the WGA writers' strike is: they're the first level of the food chain in content production. The studios are saying on the one hand that the Internet has to be an income stream not a fan fest - and on the other that they don't have to pay the writers any residuals because everything on the Internet is promotional. That makes less sense than an episode of Lost.

I skim a lot of press releases, looking for keywords, product names or something that makes them interesting enough to read or follow up on them. Many are irrelevant, cover something tedious or don't tell the story well. Some start with a summary in bullet points of the bullet points that make up the majority of the release; with these I skim the summary. I ignore superlatives - best, fastest, first, biggest, largest, latest - and anything invoking temperature - hot, cool - and indeed the word 'new' as if there's a release about it that might go without saying.

I find mysef pitying the intern over at Rainier who had to read (or hopefully search with a macro) 150 press releases posted on Sourcewire to see how many such words I'm ignoring. "Out of 150 press releases posted on Sourcewire in June, “best” appeared 68, times followed by “latest” recurring 29 times and “largest” 24 times. Descriptive words such as “biggest”, “fastest” and “hottest” weren’t far behind." Andy Smith points out that you can blame the client and the PR both; and lots of comments abuse journalists for everything from cutting and pasting to refusing to work the way PRs want to needing superlatives to take an interest.

That's a six gun's worth of messenger shooting. Current press releases are almost uniformly trash even without superlatives. I often can't work out what a Microsoft press release is talking about because the language is so rounded and diffuse and marketed (like the email quotes santised by a marketing department to take out all interest, that I'll never use and regret wasting time on asking for when they arrive). But to me a press release is nothing more than a lead or a trigger, like a blog post; the real story I'll go find rather than waiting for it to arrive in a spoon. And I wonder. How many journalists do need to be 'woken up' by bombast and adjectives? How many do swallow the best/first/further, faster, furrier claims? Surely not many?

And are we to blame for being polite when we see terrible press releases? I cover the excesses of press releases when I do media training and I don't normally tell PRs their job without being asked to do so. But should we start saying 'this is meaningless - I had to look on the client Web site to work out what it was talking about' or 'that's plain wrong - it's not the first such but it is interesting because of x' or 'don't tell me what's hot/cool/significant - it's my job to decide that for myself'? It could take up a lot of my time - and I don't want to sound as if I'm insulting people who work hard and deal with deamnding clients. But if we don't say anything, are we implicitly condoning releases that make our journalistic lives harder?

I don't shut down my PC; I hibernate it. I already opened my applications and documents and files and logged in to email and IM and Websites and the rest; why would I want to do it again every day? I don't put away everything on my desk every night and get it all out again. I do reboot for installs and updates - just when I choose to.

First I'm going to rant and then I'm going to give you the Group Policy instructions. Scroll down now to skip the rant ;-)

Vista is much better than XP for this. If I forget to turn off automatic reboots that happen in the daylight, I get a popup that lets me postpone for as long as I want, not just ten minutes at a time - and I can't accidentally type something in another window that triggers the reboot. And so far, updates haven't reset the setting - though downloads like the Office 2007 search gizmo still reset the setting.

If you've had unexpected overnight reboots that killed a flickr upload or an MSDN download or just closed your open apps when you thought you'd told XP not to install updates without asking, check the Automatic Update settings (even if you already changed them) because some downloads from the Microsoft site change the settings for you. Let me say this to Microsoft one more time: this is a stupid idea. It changes the state of my machine without my knowledge or permission and could lose data. I don't care how much you think an automatic 3am reboot is good policy; while you give me the option to choose something else, you have to respect that and not use downloads to reset things so updates are installed automatically and get to reboot me. BAD MICROSOFT! NO BISCUIT!

The good news: you can use Group Policy to stop downloads making the change. I know this works for XP and I expect it to work for Vista as well; I'll be testing that out by rebooting tonight after installing the UNC search add-on (and let me say to the Microsoft search person who thought searching network shares shouldn't be built into Windows Desktop Search: you are way behind your users and the Home Server team. Never mind all those business users and block your ears to the SharePoint team saying network shares are a thing of the past; they're a wrong as the Exchange folk trying to kill public folders. A third of your Windows Server SBS sales are to HOME USERS. WiFi is huge. SyncToy is enormously popular. People have files on DIFFERENT MACHINES. Wake up! And yeah, NO BISCUIT!). Right, back to Group Policy.

If you don't already use this, GPEDIT.MSC is your friend. If you have XP Home, you have to do this in the registry, by hand. If you have a system admin at work you should talk to them instead; I'm describing local GPO editing which is a horse of a different colour from AD GPO. Obligatory warning; messing with policies and the registries can stuff your machine. Take a backup of the registry and if you don't know how to do that or how to find/change/create keys you probably shouldn't try this. This process isn't difficult, but you need to do it right.

1 Open the Group Policy Editor (GPEDIT.MSC), expand Computer Configuration, right-click Administrative Templates and choose Add/Remove Templates. If you don't see Wuau.adm, click Add and find the file in the WINDOWS\INF folder (in Vista I found you don't need this step; Vista users go to #2).

2 Look in Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update. Configure Automatic Updates is the important policy; select it, view the properties, choose Enable and you see the same settings as in the Automatic Update tab of System Properties (the Windows Update > Change Settings control panel in Vista). Pick the one you want; option 3, downloading updates automatically but getting the option of when to install them is what I recommend.

3 Vista users are done because the default are what you want; I wouldn't change anything else. For XP users there are several other useful policies here. To get rid of the restart prompt if the updates setting is changed again enable No auto-restart; change how long you get before the first prompt and between subsequent reminders by enabling Delay Restart and Re-prompt for restart. You can also stop Install Updates and Shut Down being made the default when you want to hibernate or restart instead.


3 XP Home users have to fire up the registry editor. Microsoft has a master list of the registry keys corresponding to Group Policy objects at http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/a/3/aa32239c-3a23-46ef-ba8b-da786e167e5e/PolicySettings.xls
The Configure Automatic Updates policy is equivalent to the registry key HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU\AUOptions - if it's not there create AUOptions as a DWORD and set it to 3.

The other keys listed in the spreadsheet are left as an exercise for the reader...

The new iPod Shuffle could be the smallest media player we've seen - it's the size of a book of matches - especially when you remember that nearly half of it is the clip for attaching it to your pocket, T-shirt or anything else on your person. Small and light is great, but is the Shuffle too small? There's no screen, and no direct USB connection, so if you want to see what you're playing and plug directly into a PC, the Samsung YP-U2 might suit you better. This looks like a chunky flash thumb drive - it's bigger than the original iPod Shuffle - but sometimes size isn't everything. Want to know why I actually dislike the Shuffle intensely? Read on at Gear Digest...

Dear PR person
If you are setting up a phone interview for me with a US spokesperson, please take a look at the calendar and check what UK time corresponds to the US time you've booked and bear in mind that the US switched to daylight saving time last Sunday (I know because I was there and because I haven't had my head in a bucket for the last month: your IT team/calendar software/OS updater might have told you too, especially if you work in tech PR/have a client in the US/read the news). That way I won't get the call an hour before I'm expecting it, or phone in an hour late when the spokesexpert is packing up to leave.
Ditto if you're telling me about the conference call that's the only chance I'll have to speak to the high level representatives of the company about your new aquisition. You may think you're giving me nearly an hour's notice but actually you're telling me five minutes after the call starts (and no, listening to the recording isn't quite as useful).

I know March is a weird time to put the clocks forward. I know we're not actually in the US. I do always try to double-check times myself because I find timezones very confusing (that's why I nagged the Office team until Outlook 2007 now does timezones properly, why I've bookmarked http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ and http://www.worldtimeserver.com/ and why I appreciate being able to have two extra timezones on my clock in Vista). But this is one more thing in the rich tapestry of PR life that you need to get right, because it's part of the 99% perspiration that makes for good PR...

Where should the burden of blocking spam rest? On the ISP mail server? At your server? In your client? With the person sending you mail? Making the person who sends you unsolicited mail respond to a mail message that asks them to click a link to go to a Web site and type in a captcha to get the mail through might sound like a good idea - although how you distinguish your legitimate spam filtering site from my phishing site is another question and aren't we telling users not to click links in email these days? It's certainly a burden to the sender and if I was a spammer I'd have a bot to do it for me - if the spam was really high value I'd extract the captcha and pay peanuts to college students to do it. These systems usually end up penalising the legitimate user...

But how about if the person sending you that unsolicited mail is responding to a mail you've sent them, perhaps through a directory site, asking them to get in touch if they're interested in a project? Making a potential business partenr jump through hoops to keep spam out of your inbox - does that send a message that you're professional or not?

Rumours of a ZunePhone are talking up the OFDM in the FCC filing as meaning Microsoft is going to do a WiMax device; while it would be nice, I'm not sure the chipsets, power consumption or the netowrks are there to make that a reality this year. Talking to Siemens, they expect the mobile WiMax services to hit the UK around 2008 and I;m not sure Sprint/Nextel will be much faster than that in the US.

And OFDM is a technique, not a standard. It's used in DSL, in some WiFi implementations - and in UWB. A wireless mesh - like the one Sonos ZonePlayers use to distribute music around your house - or a UWB connection between Zunes; those make more sense to me for social music.

Want to share tunes faster? Siemens has a class 1, 100 foot Bluetooth interface for pushing music over A2DP to five headsets at once...

Y'know what bugs me about blogs as sources? Blog A says they got it from site B, which says they got it from blog C, which might credit blog D. Blog E credits blog F - often not mentioning any of A-D. None of them have a link to the primary source - the FCC. I don't blame them - I can't find the application on the FCC site with both hands and a shovel. But this 'I'll mention what's cool that I saw' round robin makes it very hard to find out more. I linked to the blog where sbisson first saw this, which claims to have made (gasp) phone calls and checked stuff out; if they had an FCC link I'd really rate them...

I'd like an extra 24 hours please, Bob... I'm trying to fit 12 hours worth of appointments into every 8 hour day at 3GSM, I'm cursing that if the Microsoft invite hadn't been in HTML images with no plain text accompaniment I would have seen that it was on Monday at 3 in time to ask for a plane ticket that didn't get me to Barcelona Monday at 4 (and the email about the ticket was the message immediately after the Microsoft email so if I'd been able to read both on my Windows Mobile phone I wouldn't be missing the press conference...) and I keep typing that I still have some time free on Thuesday or Thurtsday.

I'm also still at a loose end the Wednesday evening - hint, hint...

We have plenty of data to work with and systems that can process enormous data sets. But some of the biggest successes - say, Google - are doing the processing based on pre-computing algorithms and work done with pen, paper and thinking cap. The Rev. Bayes reaches a very wide congregation today. As the Harvard Business Review puts it, "done in the absence of high-speed, low-cost computational capacity, that work put a premium on imaginative quantitative thinking". It's not just vintage idea though; Tesco is using simulated annealing, Nokia is using genetic algorithms - I learned both of those in the 1980s when they were only a decade old, if that.

But I found myself worrying; with all the pressure on academe to work well with business and have more immediate goals, will we have enough blue sky research going on to give us well-thought out algorithms to implement in the next generation of even higher performance computing? Any excuse to slow down and think more has to be good!

There's another 19 thought-provoking points in the HBR List of breakthrough ideas for 2007

This is a job description from a press release, with names removed to protect the unintelligible; the job is Technical Fellow in Platforms and Strategy, in the Office of the CTO...
"Understanding the trends, architecting and piloting the implications for existing and new products and evangelizing [the] vision are the key aspects of [his] job."

understanding the trends - kind of goes without saying
evangelizing the vision - yes, that's what strategy does
piloting the implications - ok, you lost me there.

I can guess at what this means; Microsoft has hired IBM's WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli and Web services guru and he's going to look at tech trends and make sure people understand what changes need making in products because of those trends and maybe hit them over the head to make things happen. But it's more a vague, it feels like it ought to be this, amorphous inference than actual, y'know, understanding the words.

Hiring a new tech guru - $X thousand
Hiring a new tech guru *before the competition gets him* - $2X thousand
Writing the job description: priceless

If you want to try out most Apple kit, you can do it in the Apple Store. Unless it's an iPod Shuffle when you can press the buttons but not hear what it sounds like as none of the units have headphones. If you go to the wrong Apple store - in the local mall, say - you'll be told that you don;t need to listen to it because 'it sounds like an iPod'. If you go to the right Apple Store - Palo Alto say - an employee will scratch their head and suggest that you unplug the Bose headphones from the iPod next to the Shuffle display and plug that instead, and if you find the one Shuffle in four that actually has any charge, you can hear what a $79 player sounds like with $200 headphones. If you want to hear it with the headphones that come in the box, you can find a Shuffle and a Nano that are close enough together that you can pull the headphone half out of the security tag so that they reach the Shuffle. At this point I had to fold forward from the waist, lean on the display case of iPod Nano boxes and lay my head on the table in order to get the headphones to fit in my ears. Or I could have bought one, taken it out of the shop and come back in five minutes later saying 'actually, no, I don't think it does sound like any other iPod'. Could be they've left on the auto-convert down to 128kbps setting in iTunes; I haven't yet found if you can actually turn that off - further investigation on the review unit. Until then, I'll be bending over the counter...

This fuss over the shutdown options in Vista (people who know what they need see the different options as excessive because surely everybody will want the same one as them, Joel Spolsky complaining that the default options are exactly the same as the ones he finally decides he'd want to see and an ex-Softy complaining that because many teams influence the code in Vista the shutdown options were dependant on many other people) just got a a bit funnier. Business Week picked up on the story, mailed Lettvin for comment and got a response that screams 'wait - did I just say that out loud?'. "In an e-mail to BusinessWeek.com, Lettvin stressed that he didn't intend for his post to receive such a wide audience..."

This from a man who now works for Google. The Internet, by definition, is a wide audience; few wider. Remember, never say anything on your blog you wouldn't want to defend to your boss, your mother, your significant other, your doctor, your vet and a jury of your peers...

Booking flights on the BA site turns the air blue in the office. First, booking with miles, every time you make a change to the initial selection it loses everything else, so if you change booking for two in December from London to Gatwick it changes it to booking for one in November. Second, when you discover it's only £30 more to pay for the flights because tax is £40+ and anyway there's only one miles seat the day you want to travel and change the booking to two people, it puts the price up from £70 to £84. And then you go to pay and it wants to charge £6 to use a credit card (and when you put in the debit card number it doesn't want the card number labelled card number, it wants the one that's a fakeup of your sort code and account number). It's all such a faff I forgot we could change the date when we pay for the ticket and we stuck with the dates from the miles tickets. #~*(%$%^&&^%&**&*(

There is a standard list of things that annoy journalists. One whole section is people asking for information that's tedious for us to compile and of dubious value if we do compile it. Did we receive your press release? If you sent it to the right address, we did.Will we be using it? If we are, we'll have contacted you already because we don't re-use press releases intact with no extra research (insert catty comment about automated news writing here - Ed). Can we send you a features list? No.

Magazines and newspapers produce features lists so the ad department knows what to try to sell ads for. PRs use them in place of building a good relationship with the journalist so that they're sure that if a relevant feature comes up, the journalist will ask if their client can contribute. A few freelancers do their own features lists and if it's the way you work, more power to you. I write for so many titles in so many markets on such specific features at often such short notice that my list is unlikely to have more than one entry that's relevant to any one agency and very few tht you could pitch on. Phrasing it right, keeping it up to date and distributing it would take a lot of time. I usually know exactly who I want to talk to before I sell the story. If I want comment for a specific feature I'll put that feature on a service like ResponseSource that publishes it to all the PRs who sign up. And if you tell me ResponseSource is too expensive, I'll ask you to explain why I should do more work to save your company money.

My features list for the next few things would read:
reader questions on Windows XP - sourced
Microsoft consumer-related people to interview, mostly from the US offices - I already have the relevant contacts
Battery and power issues for the FT - on the FT features list and I've had maybe 50 pitches already
ditto three other pieces for the FT
Camera reviews - sourced
MP3 reviews - this one I do need more contacts for
Failures in identity systems and what developers need to know - if I want to talk to your client I've been houunding them by email for a month
Motorola, Google and the mobile enterprise - sourced

A PR who knows me already knows this. A new junior account exec won't know this.But they'll have been hired by someone who ought to know it. Particularly if they work on the account for BigSoftwareCorp#5 who I have been writing about for years. If you ask me a daft question, I wonder how well you've been briefed. I won't blame you; I'll blame the person who must have asked you to do it. And if it's the third request I've had this month I'll wonder if we need to do a little... re-education.

I've just been shopping for a recording gadget to record conversations; it's a combines earpiece and microphone that you put in the ear that you hold the phone to, so it will work on mobile calls. I'm not sure how well it works but it's worth a try for £16. Except that the first site I try charges £8.50 postage, so I abandon my cart and look elsewhere. This is annoying as I've already had to register for an account, typing in my name, address, company name, phone number, business type yadda yadda yadda... My time, their processor cycles; both valuable.

The next site only charges £5 for postage, so I sign up for another account, find my credit card and fill in the details. But wait; this site didn't tell me in advance that they don't show the VAT in the price, so it's no saving after all. I abandon the cart halfway through the credit card validation; their card processor might or might not charge for that. Third site, another account. Postage is £5, there's no hidden VAT. I type in my credit card details again. They're not accepted, because the default is Visa Electron, not Visa and it was pre-selected, making it easy for me to forget to change it. They got the sale, but they burned more cycles on it than necessary; they may have done the initial card type/number algorithm check locally but they still had to serve another page. Do that to a thousand people a day and your CPU and hard drive and network and aircon are all working more than they'd have to if you designed things properly in the first place. And your customers are less satisfied and less likely to come back.

Not showing the postage cost before checkout is the number one reason for people abandoning a shopping cart online (in the real world I think it's because it's too much effort to push it back to the shop unless it has one of your shiny pound coins in). If you don't show me exactly how much you're going to charge, I'm not committed to buying; until I see the final price, I'm still browsing and your site is wasting my time.

A lot of people abandon sites that collect too much information up front. Why do you need an account for me; I might never come back and now you have my personal data clogging up your hard drive, imposing a duty of care on you to back it up and protect it from hackers. You can't spam me or sell me to an address list; you didn't ask for permission or I said no. Offer me the chance to save my details after you've delighted me with a friction-free shopping experience. Or if you insist on my address up front, use it to work out the shipping charges and show them to me.

Ludicrous postage and packing charges. I paid £8.50 postage on an eBay item, special delivery. The stamps on the parcel didn't come to £2.50 let alone £8.50. I've been charges $20 shipping on an $1 eBay auction. £8.50 for something that weighs 100g? Please. For that price I could get a travelcard to Tottenham Court Road, shop with one of your competitors, buy a latte and still have change. How much will I pay for convenience? Amazon has doubled the number of people who are willing to pay $79 a year not to pay any postage at all.

Is it in the basket? Is it really in the basket? Is it still in the basket? I had to go answer the phone. Your shopping cart isn't showing me what products I put in and I forgot. Give me a hand, show me what I'm doing.

Ecommerce; it's not rocket science but if you get it wrong, your sale goes bang.

I completely agree with Passionate Users today (http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/07/we_cant_leave_i.html) that you can't leave it up to users to know what they need or ask for it. Finding out what they want is hard enough and it's not a user's job to know what system would improve their life and work properly for the business.

It goes for little things; I didn't know I wanted a running word count in the status bar until it showed up in Word 2007. I thought I wanted word count on demand, but actually ambient word count is more useful. Of course there are things we users know we want; I've been telling people at Microsoft in detail what I wanted for timezones in Outlook and lo, Outlook 2007 has a Timezons button for appointments. It goes for big things; I might say I want a macro to export an Excel table to ICS format so I can import it into Outlook's calendar, but what I'm really asking for is an integrated accounting and time management system.

But I'm going to take Passionate to task for saying "The world never needed the iPod until Apple created it". One; I needed it. Two; Apple may have created the iPod but it was neither the first MP3 player (Eiger Labs branding of Saehan) nor the first hard-drive based MP3 player. That was the 5GB Hango Personal Jukebox (PJB-100), designed by Compaq, abandoned to a Korean company without the distribution or marketing to get it out there. Back in 1998 you might have seen me testing the anti-skip on the hard drive by hurling it across the table at lproven in The Lamb, or being dragged back onto the pavement just before I got run over by a taxi I didn't hear because I had headphones on. I was copying MP3s from my PC, making playlists, browsing my library with an easy to use menu system and generally making like I had an iPod. (The PJB site has become a shop but CNET remembers and so do I http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6450_7-5622055-1.html)

What Apple did was take an existing product, design it beautifully, make it with the cheapest possible components engineered to an inch past their predicted life and market it superbly. That's what Apple does. Their innovation is all in the implementation; it's all in the delivery. That's OK - that's often what the user needs to realise that this is something they really do need. A geek will have hunted out the first version (and probably written a macro to get around the problems that Apple will smooth over in the design). Just don't tell them they didn't know they needed it till someone prettied it up.

Your mySpace posts may embarrass you at job interviews. Your usenet posts will last for as long as Google. And the phrases 'under NDA untily July 10' and 'get a sneak preview at URL' do not belong in the same sentence.

PDF is one of those formats that I like in principle (fixed presentation), loathe in practice (try signing a PDF document and adding the date to it without printing the whole thing out and scanning it in; way too hard) and just can't avoid. I updated my test laptop with the 2007 Office technical refresh and as I needed to get dates and purchase order numbers out of files attached to seven different emails I thought the attachment preview would save me a lot of time. It would if the files were anything but PDF. All I get is the error message saying there's no previewer installed for PDF. Nor for ZIP. That means the previewer can't pick up IE plugins and use those to preview files, nor does the native XP ZIP support work; developers are going to have to code up more plugins for 2007 Outlook. Attachment preview is a lovely idea; I can't wait till it gets out of beta.

Marc Smith (not to plug my FT piece two days in a row, but hey) says software is autistic because it has no concept of human relationships. I think of it as toddler-tantrum software. Software will ask you repeatedly for information that you've given before if it's not getting exactly the answer it wants ('Are we there yet?'). That's irritating enough to us humans. But if there's a problem with the software we can close down the program, look for a fix or switch to other software. If those repeated requests are inside a closed system like a router talking to an NTP server ('what's the time NOW?') then the problem doesn't show up until it looks like a DDoS (or until you see the bandwidth bill).

A few years ago NETGEAR put the time server at the University of Wisconsin as the only NTP server some of their routers looked at. Once every second. There's a firmware update that changes the behaviour but how many people upgrade the firmware of their home network? SMC did the same thing to the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization's National Measurement Laboratory. And now an enthusiast who runs a Danish NTP server to provide very precise time measurements to Danish ISPs says D-LINK is flooding it (D-LINK tells Kamp it disagrees and is waiting on legal advice). There's an update to NTP, rather charmingly called Kiss-o'-Death packets, that let a server tell a client to go away. Of course not all NTP implementations respect these...

This is the tragedy of the commons; the common resources contributed to the Internet only work if people are polite and use them when they're appropriate. If developers can't get these things right without laywers spanking them, there will be a good excuse for a two-tier Internet with paid-for prioritised packets and telcos increasing their control.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTP_vandalism includes both information about the floods and an arguemnt about whether vandalism is a loaded term
http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2006/04/07/when-firmware-attacks-ddos-by-d-link/ - Richard Clayton on the detective work
http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/ - Poul-Henning Kamp on the Danish time server

I like innocent smoothies, for the flavour and for the jokes on the bottle (over the years they've claimed as ingredients everything from a small church to half a ham sandwich, TM usually stands for Tasty Mangos and the new carton promises '12 more strawberries'). But the faux-friend marketing bandwagon is rumbling along; the pomegranate apple juice I got yesterday said it was yummy, promised to fight back against heart muggers, claimed to have 'teh pwoer' and asked me to tell Jeremy what I think of it. And the chicken sandwiches from M&S proclaim that not only do their ingredients come from suppliers and farms with high standards of animal welfare, they come from suppliers and farms with "really high" standards. It's warm, it's cuddly and it smacks of naive start-ups hoping to change the world one smoothie at a time. Fuzzy is the new sleek. It says 'we're human, just like you, we're not a faceless company; trust us'. But at least for