curnow.org » My Web Life

Give Us Our Daily Blog

Jon — Sun, 03 Nov 2002 07:00:00 +0000

In common with any page of links, many of the pages noted below have long since moved, closed or cease to be updated in any regular kind of way. Facebook and Twitter have meant some of those who I used to read have moved on to the next way to communicate their thoughts. I keep this here as a nice remineder of the early days of blogging!

As I started redeveloping this site, it became apparent that I wanted to link to my collection of daily blog reads and this became the place to keep them.

The first, almost daily, read is Jase Wells. I guess I have been something of an invisible online stalker to this site for years. I have watched it move, change and develop since sometime in 1994 when I first came across it. It still remains one of the best personal homepages on the web – and I am very pleased to see that he has turned it into a blog.

Next on the list is Tom Coates’ plasticbag.org – which must be one of the best around and, if I am honest, I miss it if he doesn’t post. You will find notsosoft linked from there which, I think, contains some of the best writing on the web.

trabaca, posterboy, eric and contrasts.net provide additional regular reading from the US, while Adam’s photoblog provides stunning pictures on a regular basis. overyourhead is a UK take, while prolific is based in Amsterdam. Haddock blogs is a collection of well-known UK internet names.

Of course, blogsphere is represented well by Metafilter which I try and check out most days.

Other’s of note include Nick Denton and Brendan O’neill for opinions; Scott Andrew, Ben Hammersley and Jason Kottke for web-related stuff and Stuart Towns for his travelogue.

Finally, if you’re not interested in reading the ramblings of people you may never have heard of, then click along to Wil Wheaton’s blog which is a fascinating take on the world of celebrity.

Key

Jon — Thu, 21 Jun 2001 03:53:52 +0000

Security on the Internet is a big concern for many people. Keeping information that identifies you personally from falling into the wrong hands is important. Check for secure sites when submitting credit card information, be careful about who you give your email to and read privacy policies. This is all worthy advice.

If you are concerned about sending information (or you want to verify information came from where it says it came from) I would recommend you investigate Pretty Good Privacy. A useful piece of freeware to digitally sign and/or encrypt files (including emails).

PGP uses a system known as public key encryption. As a PGP user you would generate a “key pair” which is made up of both a public and private key. The private key should only be accessible by its owner but in order to share files etc. you need to share your public key (and you would need a copy of another user’s to send files). For mote information see PGP or PGP International.

Occasionally, I use PGP to sign emails or encrypt files. If you wish to email me using PGP my public key is given here.

other resources

Visit PGP and read this message (at PGPI) from Phil Zimmermann who invented PGP.

My Web

Jon — Sat, 21 Apr 2001 23:52:46 +0000

Much of the information below is now well out of date and many of the site are no longer around. Independent Radio News’ site no longer has any of the original code behind it and Satellite Media Services went out of business a long time ago. See ex-sms.com a little bit more about that company. I’m leaving this page up, however, because it remains a valid history of some of the early websites I worked on.

Since I have been online I have been involved in the development of a number of web sites. Nowadays, I do not work for a web development company so many of the sites listed here are not the versions that I was involved in. Some of them have developed well and some seems somewhat stuck and, dare I say, even basic.

In 1994 I was working for Satellite Media Services. During the next two or three years we developed various versions of their web presence, including the online versions of IRN’s news service at The Radio Magazine. Now they have a new web address and much better design but don’t seem to develop sites for others any more.

The Radio Magazine has a new web site that has absolutely nothing to do with me but it still makes good reading about the UK radio industry.

Independent Radio News has also gone through several revamps. I can still see some of the code we developed behind this version of the site, and I suspect, the original audio scripts are still in place. IRON was one of the first sites in the UK to broadcast up-to-date news in RealAudio format.

At the time, Satellite Media Services was partially owned by Capital Radio plc and were responsible for the original prototype of Capital Online. Capital’s web services have moved on dramatically yet remain some of the best entertainment web sites around.

My original personal sites were based on the SMS servers and there remains no trace of them anymore. They were moved to various free space until I placed them here. The original UK Radio Information Pages were also based at SMS. They then moved to Onair before I removed them. James Cridland and the Media UK team do I much better job than I was doing.

SMS, back then, was a satellite audio distribution company. Back in 1994 I used to produce a site featuring a range of photographs of SMS’ satellite dishes which became a something of a cult site for a while (I know, the whole thing was very strange). Media UK also became the host of those pictures but, somewhat wisely, they seem to have removed them.

The next few web sites I was involved in are no longer in existence. Events Online, one of the UK’s first events listings services has long since vanished. It was an idea ahead of its time. For something similar, try Scene One (link now obsolete).

A number of other sites were developed around that time. Fruit Machine is still an idea and I did some of the scripting work behind the original Alternative Holidays site (working with Kevin from Incline Media – one of the best web productions houses around).

The last commercial web development I was involved in was at IPC Magazines (now IPC Media). Yachting and Boating World still has massive amounts of content behind it and, if you have an interest in sailing, why not pay it a visit?

I had great fun working on the development of all these sites. One day, I think I would like to work with content again (rather than software) but for now I am happy to be away from the struggles of generating commercial content.

Is Email Bad?

Jon — Mon, 01 Nov 1999 19:55:49 +0000

The internet is the most wonderful tool of recent history. It’s fun, factual, interesting and full of fascinating creatures. It’s strange and freakish: at the same time useful and useless. I am thankful that it filled my night shifts and unhappy it takes over my time. Thank goodness for the internet.

Of all the components that make up the ‘net (Archie, anyone?), email is – probably – the greatest invention. Fast and functional, it has revolutionised my working life. Back in ’93 when I got my first real-world-connected email address, apart from those people in the same office, I knew one other person. Friends of mine couldn’t see the point. However, once I was able to communicate with my Dad in Thailand at a reasonable hour without staying awake to call him – other people saw there may be uses. Then, they connected and suddenly they sent me emails telling me how great it was to be part of this connected-universe.

Now, after six years, I think I may be turning into one of the none-believers. That’s not wholly true but – nevertheless – I’ve decided email is not as great as it could be. Sure the power to communicate is still fantastic and the informal nature is wonderful. The ability to time-shift conversations is useful but it gets in the way of my working day and I haven’t the strength to do anything about it.

If you can’t put a finger on why email doesn’t always work, ask yourself these questions:

How much unrelated junk do you sift through daily?
How many times have you stopped working to answer the “ping” of the email to read some nonsense.
How many times has your concentration been broken by the “You Have Mail” screen?
When did you last get copied in on an email that was only of peripheral interest to your work because somebody felt the need to “share” or “justify”?
How many times have you felt the need to copy people on an email who, if you’d conducted the communication by ‘phone, wouldn’t have been included?
How many times have you been mis-understood because you typed in a hurried, informal manner to somebody who doesn’t see email as less formal?
When you last answered the ‘phone did the caller say, “have you got my mail” and they’d only just sent it?
When you last met a colleague in the corridor did they ask you what you’d thought of their email. When you said you hadn’t got round to reading it, did they look like they’d been snubbed? Did you feel bad for not having read it?

I could go on but my day is like this. I have to get discipline and stop interrupting myself. But I can’t. Ping, here comes another one.

Note: This article is dated 1 November – although the exact date of writing can’t be determined. It was retrieved from the archive and posted in March 2003. See the entry from March 2003 that links.

Elsewhere: Acting Like Rank Amateurs

Jon — Thu, 28 Oct 1999 19:43:32 +0000

On Monday, over on the uk-netmarketing mailing list, Stefan asked, “Why do people seem to think it’s acceptable to act like rank amateurs just because it’s online?” It’s a question that increasingly comes up as we’re looking to develop service models for a digital businesses. I’ve been recently asking similar questions both of our ability to serve our customers and of those that service my little piece of business. Technology on its own can not create great customer service; those of us involved in designing and managing that technology have to start with a customer centric view. Nonetheless, technology should be able to help us deliver better service. I posted a response yesterday:

I’m not sure I’d use the phrase “rank amateurs” but poor service still common in many parts of our industry despite the fact most pitches tell the client how an online presence can help with customer service.

And it’s not just customer service. It’s the service levels we give each other.

You buy a service – be that hosting, mailing list management, stats crunching, ad delivery, product fulfillment, whatever – and in a high number of cases you get plenty of promises and in reality a 9-5 service. Something goes wrong outside those hours and there’s an excuse. And I suspect many of us are guilty.

I used to work in another media environment where 24 hour operation was also the norm. And if something went wrong at 2 in the morning somebody was available – or at least on call – to fix it. In the 3 years I was there we never had a 100% service failure for more than about 2 minutes. Sure, sometimes small elements failed but tried and tested monitoring procedures provided backup so that the customer got 70% of the service.

I find this is not the case with online media. Servers go down at 2 on a Sunday afternoon and it isn’t easy to get somebody in to fix them. Pipe to ISP fails. Sorry they’re in a meeting? Somebody messed up the DNS records last night? Can it wait until Monday? (All 3 responses happened to me in the last 2 weeks) Where’s the backup & redundancy that’s in the initial sales pitch? I find the concept of a Service Level Agreement pretty hard to swallow – I accept things go wrong and I’m not in the game of trying to get compensation for every second over the agreed levels that the service isn’t delivered. However I’m slowly turning that way as it appears to me the only solution to some basic failures where I believe there should be redundant systems etc.

Now it isn’t everybody and as there are more and more online only or online centric businesses then it will get better but there seems to me a great reluctance to accept we need the professional service levels other media already have.

Am I alone with this view/experience?

jon

I genuinely believe we are in a place to change customer service using the web technologies for our customers but we must not forget the service we provide each other. The novelty, if I can use that word, of web-based service delivery should not be excuse for forgetting the lessons learnt elsewhere. If you service sucks your customers will, eventually, go to somebody else.

Update August 2009: Almost ten years since I wrote this and I’ve found it archived online by the good folks at Chinwag.

Elsewhere: Wayback When

Jon — Sat, 01 May 1999 21:57:02 +0000

Two years ago today I left my colleagues at Satellite Media Services in Lawford Heath, Warwickshire and moved on to IPC where I can be found looking after advertising systems for ybw.com. I left copies of my original web presence on SMS’ servers but sadly they no longer exist. For a side project, I have been trying to determine when I first started building web sites. The Wayback Machine only appears to have an archived version of the SMS site from 1997 but, unfortunately, I don’t appear to have the earlier versions. Wayback does have a copy of the original Independent Radio News site we launched in 1997 but not of the original news audio we were serving for several years before that. If I am not mistaken it was the first real-time news audio service in the UK. Thanks to Deja News (now Google Groups) I can find references to the UK Radio Mailing List that we at SMS took over running in 1996 and one reference to a 1995 request for information about an indirect access service called 1602. It’s a shame those original sites are not archived somewhere. I guess this is a lesson in the transient nature of the web. We need to remember how easily digital history can be erased.

Update September 2002: Deja News links updated to Google

Update August 2003: Links updated

Update June 2009: ex-sms.com link added