I have a love/hate relationship with typography.

I love how good a well designed font looks on the page or on the screen. I love how the spaces between letters mean as much as the letters themselves. I love how simple lines, artfully connected, transform graphics to glyphs, transporting language across time and space. I love how something as basic as choosing the right font can turn a dry document to a work of art. I love how something as basic as choosing the wrong font can ruin the credibility of a document and even it’s author.

I hate that I don’t understand how and why typography works. Kerning, tracking, ascenders, descenders, whitespace – it’s all a black box to me.

I have a love/hate relationship with I Love Typography. I love that it opens my eyes to new fonts and type foundries. I love that it introduces me to innovative use of type and design. I love that it publishes typography-related articles and interviews.

I hate that I can spend hours at I Love Typography and learn next to nothing about how and why fonts work. I want to be sucked in to the deeper details. I want to read 1,500 words on the finer points of kerning or why whitespace is important. I want to understand why it is that I hate Comic Sans MS so very, very much. Teach me. I want to learn.

Alas, my search for the ulitmate Online School of Type continues. In the meantime, I Love Typography is cool, too.

via Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies)

News sites. RSS feeds. Email. Microblogging. Social networks. BitTorrent. iView (or Hulu or BBC iPlayer). Time sinks, each and every one of them, providing as much or as little value to your daily existence as you are prepared to let them.

“Information overload” is a fantasy, an illusion, and deep down inside you know it, too.

Crying about living in some sort of poorly articulated temporal poverty doesn’t change the foundation of the problem – this is your life because this is how you choose to live it.

Technology is not the problem.

The internet is not the problem.

Abundant information is not the problem.

A dazzling array of choices is not the problem.

The blame game is only useful in so far as it can deflect attention away from the real problem – you.

Try this for an exercise:

• List the types of information you consume that leave you overwhelmed
• List all the things that are most important to you: future goals, things to learn, hobbies and so on. [1]
• Try and draw any relevant connections between the subject matter of  two lists

 If I was a betting man, I’d happily put a few bucks down that there is very little, if any, connection between the two subject areas.

You want to feel less overwhelmed? Start taking some responsibility and exercise some control over the inputs you choose to let in to your life. I’m not a salesman so I don’t do guarantees, but I am confident that once you match your information inputs with what you have identified as really important in your life, you will feel a lot less overwhelmed and consumed.

I’m not suggesting that you need to go cold turkey on everything that demands a portion of your time. That’s not realistic for most people. Being mindful and aware of what’s coming and going out is, on the other hand, realistic and being mindful is half of the battle.

How many times have you suddenly realised one day that a bad habit has crept into your life?  Something that started as a once off slowly became the occasional treat which quickly morphed into something semi-regular and next thing you know it’s embedded in your daily routine.

Hyper-connectivity can be like crack for information addicts but you can’t blame the connection or the information it carries. That’s like a junkie blaming the syringe. Mobile internet, high speed broadband, handheld devices – these are all just tools you can use to construct the reality that best suits you.

Don’t settle for second best. Know the life you want to lead and act accordingly. Above all, take responsibility for who and what you are. If your goals and your actions are not aligned, change one of them. Which one you change is up to you.

[1] The number of things isn’t important, it’s the process of thinking about them that counts. However, if you are the type of person who desperately needs a number, 5 is a good one to start with.

Adobe AIR for Linux beta released (labs.adobe.com)

Each of the major operating systems (assuming in this instance those are Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) have their own strengths and weaknesses. I’m not a programmer but I feel confident in saying that the Win32 API offers hooks that aren’t available in OS X on the Mac, and vice versa. Linux has its own attractions as well (although I have no idea what they might be from the perspective of a programmer). Many single-platform applications work solely on a chosen operating system because they take advantage of these platform-specific hooks. A cross-platform development environment changes that game completely.

Do common environments level the playing field or do they reduce everything to the lowest common denominator? I have a concern, which may well be unfounded, that it has the potential to remove a developer’s motivation to streamline a single-platform application to produce a program that is as lean as the hardware and software will allow (”coding to the metal” as it were). As more desktop applications move into a cloud-based arrangement with online options and storage, development platforms like AIR will become more important and more prevalent.

I’ve had reservations about AIR in the past but I have come to recognise its value in providing a desktop front-end to web-based services (for example the Twhirl client for Twitter or the eBay desktop app). My concern is that as the platform matures, some developers will see it as an opportunity to push out applications with little thought to look or feel and how they might integrate with native operating system environments. I can’t help but think of all the janky Java applications that were released in the late 90s that all used the same ugly default user interface widgets. The applications might have had the attraction of a right once/run anywhere development environment, but it often meant that they were uniformly sub-standard for everyone.

Will individuality and innovation be sacrificed for homogeneity, uniformity and cross-platform accessibility?

(Note 2: This review has taken nearly a month from purchase to publication. Some features may have changed in the meantime that I wasn’t aware of. If that is the case please feel free to let me know in the comments)

While US residents have had access to the Amazon mp3 store for some time now, the rest of the world has been starved of access to DRM-free, high quality music downloads. Here in Australia consumers looking for DRM-free downloads have been restricted to those available via iTunes (essentially selections from the EMI back catalogue).  On 13 August 2008, all that changed as Bigpond Music launched its mp3 store.

Bigpond Music has made deals with the Big 4 of SonyBMG, EMI, Universal and Warner as well as a selection of independent Australian labels and has made available a selection of music at 256kbps or 320kbps completely DRM-free.  This compares favourably to the iTunes music store which provides 256kbps AAC/mp4 downloads DRM-free for EMI releases only.

While Bigpond Music brings with it a load of baggage courtesy of its parent company Telstra (former government owned telco monopoly and the gorilla in the room in the Australian market). On the other hand, 320kpbs mp3 downloads from a service that previously specialised in crippled WMA files of lower quality was too good a service not to at least sample.

What’s on offer?

There is only a small selection of mp3s on offer while this new service is in its infancy. I expect the number of mp3s available to ramp quickly as more content comes online. Individual tracks sell for $1.69 and albums for $16.50, which is very similar to iTunes at $1.69 and $16.99 respectively. Members of Bigpond (the parent company ISP) get a discount to $1.50 and $15. I haven’t come across any variable pricing yet and it doesn’t seem to matter if a title is one disc or two – the price sits at $16.50. The pricing model is both good and bad compared to iTunes. iTunes regular offers much cheaper titles (particularly DRM titles) but pricing also increases dramatically with multi-disc releases.

Using the service

For the purposes of this review I picked something I’ve had my eye on in iTunes but was reluctant to buy due to pricing and DRM issues – the deluxe 2CD version of “August and Everything After” by Counting Crows. Bricks and mortar stores have priced this title in the high $20s and iTunes has it at $29.99, encumbered with DRM. iTunes also offers the original release at the discount price of $11.99.

Searching

Using the search box in the top left corner, I searched for “counting crows” which brought up the results page to the left. Almost all of the results were for crippled Windows Media files. The results allow you to filter by format. Not shown here is the result of that filtering which pulled out just one title which just happened to be the one I was looking for.

Buying

When you view an album, you have an ‘Add to cart’ button. When you click that button, the status changes to “Adding…” before changing again to “In Cart”.

It provides a very obvious indicator that the status of the album has changed from viewing to one step away from owning.

Once you’ve added something to your shopping cart, the basic cart view at the top of the page changes to reflect your purchases to date. What isn’t clear in the thumbnail but is clearer if you click through to a larger version is that it keeps tabs on the number of items purchased as well as the total cost.

Clicking on the “View Cart” button brings you to a screen that enables you to review what you’ve selected to date. It also allows you to change your decision on selected file format and takes one last opportunity to upsell membership to the Bigpond ISP. Also prominent is a reminder that, similar to iTunes, you need to have a registered account and be logged in in order to use the service. Although I haven’t walked through the process here, signing up to Bigpond Music is relatively straight-forward and painless.

Downloading

Once the payment transaction has been completed, users are taken to the download page which, at the time of my purchase in mid-August, showed the legacy of Bigpond Music’s DRM Windows Media past as it refers to downloading licences and the like. Rest assured that mp33 files don’t require a licence to be played.

Clicking on the download links spawns a download pop-up window where each file can be saved individually. This is experience is much more awkward than downloading an album via iTunes as iTunes will download each file automatically to a pre-determined location. The Bigpond Music way requires each file to be saved, much like using “Save as…” in Windows. The site maintains it has special integration with Internet Explorer. However, I didn’t discover this until after I had made the purchase using Firefox. I understand that the integration is in the form of an ActiveX control, which makes me nervous. I don’t like accepting ActiveX controls on my computer for security reasons, even if the source is known to be a legitimate one.

Downloading individual tracks through a web interface has its own problems. Of the 30 tracks available for download, two of the download links timed out, leaving me without the files I had paid for.  Time outs happen. No big deal. The terms and conditions of the site clearly stated that customers have three downloads of each purchased track to cover download problems (time outs, incomplete downloads etc). So, I tried to download again.

Hmm, not so good really. It turns out that, despite the terms and conditions, you can not try and download a track more than once. Not good. I put an email through to Bigpond Music support stating my case. Unfortunately I was trialling the service on a Sunday morning and would not get an answer until the next business day. To Bigpond’s credit, I did get a timely response the next day which claimed that sometimes files are unable to be downloaded due to anti-virus and software firewall programs. The email suggested that I disable any of these programs in future before downloading from Bigpond Music. In the meantime, Bigpond reset all my download licences for the album to enable to get the two tracks I was unable to get the first time.

I’m not convinced at the logic of firewalls and anti-virus being responsible for only two tracks to fail to download and 28 tracks to work as intended. The error message (a screenshot of which I emailed to support at the time) indicated to me at least that it was a database issue. Irrespective of what the problem was, the end result was the same. Support wove some magic and I was able to get the music I paid for, albeit delayed 24 hours.

Room to improve

I found the web interface a clunky way to browse, purchase and download an entire album. The iTunes Store has a much smoother user interface that lets you buy and download an album with a single click. Bigpond Music would benefit greatly from a desktop application of some sort. I can understand that the service might wish to avoid the support nightmare of developing an app that works in Windows XP/Vista and Mac OSX at a bare minimum. I imagine a development platform like the cross-platform Adobe AIR would be perfect for this type of service. Hopefully Bigpond will give consideration to such a development in the not too distant future.

The range of mp3 music available is still not great either. It was pure luck that Bigpond had an mp3 version of an album that I had been looking at buying for a while. I skim through the catalogue from time to time and while the DRM-free side of things is growing, it doesn’t seem to be growing all that fast. Perhaps this is just a function of my taste in music and I expect that the range will continue to grow over time.

Final thoughts

Despite the stigma that is often attached to the Bigpond name (the ISP side of the business has arguably some of the worst value and highest cost broadband internet plans in Australia and the movie and music services have been strongly linked with buggy Microsoft DRM since they launched), the Bigpond Music mp3 store is not too bad. Despite my reservations regarding exclusive use of a web-based interface, it is not too hard to navigate around and if you know exactly what you want, it is quite easy to see if it is in the mp3 catalogue.

The Bigpond Music mp3 store is a welcome addition to the Australian market, providing another resource for major-label music free of DRM. I don’t see it knocking the iTunes Store off its perch anytime soon, but it will hopefully put some pressure on Apple to continue to innovate in this space. This is definitely a service to keep an eye on.

(Update at the bottom of the post)

The analogue TV signal in Australia will be switched off by 2013. This means that everyone without a digital tuner will suddenly find themselves free of broadcast television.  The date for the switch over has been shifted several times as politicians remained convinced that the digital TV (DTV) adoption rates were so low that it would be a disaster if the signal was turned off as scheduled. I remember when the switch over was going to be sometime in 2005, then 2008, and now it will begin by 2011 and be completed by 2013.

I’ve always been confused about what the fuss is with adoption rates. People won’t rush out and upgrade their TV or buy a tuner until they have to. Just pick a date far in advance, prominently and consistently publicise the date and when the switch date looms, people will upgrade.  Tuners are easy to come by, whether they be in a set-top box, built-in tuner in the TV, via pay TV like Foxtel or even a USB tuner for a computer. They’re also quite cheap. A standard definition set-top box can be bought for well under $50 at any large consumer electronics chain and high definition ones (the signal of choice for the Australian market) have started to drop well under $100 for the more dodgy, 90 day warranty, indeterminate country of origin brands.

DTV has many benefits – superior quality transmission and reception of picture and sound, multiple channels, different camera angles, ‘back channel’ possibilities such as e-commerce in the spectrum and so on. Yet, adoption rates remain low. Legislation that restricts ‘narrowcasting’ (the option of tailoring different channels to different market segments) and places strong limits on what broadcasters who are not one of the current free-to-air channels can display has reduced the type of content currently on offer. It seems to me that the market is trying to sell the product purely on the grounds that it will look better.

No wonder adoption rates are so low. Where is the incentive to the consumer, especially the consumer who wants more variety that what is currently offered on the five free-to-air channels but don’t want to be encumbered with a costly monthly subscription for a large number of channels they don’t want?

Following is a final example of the problems with DTV programming in Australia. Channel 7 (and its regional partner, Prime) have the rights to broadcast the 2008 Olympics in Australia. Ch7 has five digital TV channels available to it, covering both standard and high definition spectrum. The Olympics is a perfect showcase for DTV. There are many different sports with different niche markets playing at the same time. Different camera angles would enhance a number of these sports (especially team sports like football and hockey). There is also a healthy portion of the market that couldn’t care less about the Olympics and would like a channel with alternative programming. Obviously the latter could also just watch another station but they are still a market that can be catered to by Ch7.

Have a look at the slideshow below that displays a screenshot of each of the five Ch7 DTV channels over the course of approximately two minutes. Count how many of the different options that DTV technology makes available have been utilised by Ch7.

Five different channels. One picture stream. Where’s the incentive to upgrade?

UPDATE: Mark Pesce reminded me on Twitter that I’d forgotten to mention something in my post, namely that the commercial channels are at the moment prevented from multicasting on their extra DTV channels by legislation. I meant to say this but accidentally removed that paragraph during editing (that’ll teach me to edit my posts). However, I see this situation as just as absurd. If the commercial channels are restriced from innovating in this space, the incentives for consumers to upgrade still are not there. Whether it’s commercial imperative or legislation, the result is still the same – 5 whole channels all showing the exact same thing.

See also:

Interesting article on digital TV in Australia – The Present and Future of Digital TV in Australia [PDF] Dead TV

Photo credit: daedalicious Dead TV

Untethered technology gives us the freedom to do nearly anything, anytime, anywhere. It can also enslave us – we feel compelled to use it where ever it is. Technology is neutral. How, when and where we use it is up to us

- Linda Stone, “Is it time to retire the never ending list?” (Huffington Post)

What is attention management?

There are two different concepts that are often referred to as “attention management” – one I’m not going to write about (mainly because I’m still researching what it means and its implications for my daily existence) and one I am going to write about.

What I am not referring to (just to get it out of the way) is the excellent work being done behind and around the Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML) standard, which provides a way to collect and rank the types of things you look at and store it in a portable XML format.  However, the application of APML could form a part of the bigger picture down the track.

What does interest me is attention management within the context of what Linda Stone refers to as continuous partial attention (CPA) – paying partial attention to everything around you continuously.  CPA is scanning everything constantly (possibly due to a fear of missing something).  This should not be confused with good old fashioned multi-tasking, which is often a case of combining a few simple tasks (eg talking on the phone while sorting some papers).

CPA can obviously be a good thing if you are trying to quickly absorb a lot of information on a broad topic. However, anecdotally it appears to lead to stress and fatigue if adopted as a broader lifestyle choice.  There are almost limitless sources of information, media and nodes of interaction.  It is easy to switch to an always on, 24/7 lifestyle where the current morsel of datum is snacked upon before being quickly discarded for the next morsel, with 5 more morsels queuing up for every morsel that is skimmed and disposed of.  Each morsel has its own way of alerting you to its existence and stealing away your attention, whether it be a “bing”, an on-screen pop up, a little envelope in the status tray or an ever rising number of unread items every time you look its was.

This is where attention management gets interesting.

How is my attention “managed”?

I am sure there are as many different ways to manage attention as there are attentions begging to be managed.  APML-aware applications like Particls (currently a closed beta so I haven’t actually had a chance to use it) and Engagd from Australia’s Faraday Media are one way.  From what I can see, these services use the data in your information profile to algorithmically filter incoming information so that only the stuff you are most interested in reaches you (please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong).

It could be argued that the entire lifehacking movement is another way attacking the problem. While lifehacking ostensibly seems to be about being more efficient and managing time more effectively, a lot of the techniques shared between and adopted by knowledge workers are as much about managing interruptions as they are about being more efficient with the time available.  A brief perusal of leading lifehack sites Lifehacker, 43 Folders, Stepcase Lifehack and even Ask Metafilter shows that this is a shared experience, often built upon the systems popularised by David Allen and his Getting Things Done philosophy (usually shortened to GTD).

What’s in it for me?

The theory of attention management is attractive.  Successfully applied, my life should be more tightly controlled with better targeted information, less time spent on irrelevant tasks as I work more focused with less distractions, closing mental loop after mental loop, leaving me with a mind like water.  Herein lies my difficulty. I like being somewhat distracted.  I enjoy my slightly chaotic existence.  I revel (and sometimes ROFL) in the serendipity of some of my daily distractions.

In the end, when I need to manage my attention and focus on something important, I use the easiest method of all.

Just turn it all off, people.  The world will still be there when you get back.

Original photo credit – markhillary

Further reading

Attention Profiles
APML – The open standard for attention metadata – APML.org
Explaining APML: What it is and why you want it – Elias Bizannes (liako.biz)
Attention Profiling: APML Beginner’s Guide – Robin Good (MasterNewMedia)
Paying attention – personal blog of Chris Saad, co-founder of Faraday Media, DataPortability Project and the APML Workgroup

Continuous Partial Attention
continuouspartialattention – Linda Stone
Is it time to retire the never ending list? – Linda Stone (Huffington Post)
Dealing with partial attention issues – Marc Orchant (Platform Agnostic)
“Zerstreutheit” and the Attention Management Cure – Merlin Mann (43 Folders)
Continuous partial attention: software and solutions – Alex Iskold (ReadWriteWeb)
Nokia and continuous partial attention – Jack Schulze and Matt Webb (Schulze & Webb)

Lifehacking (historical)
Meet the Lifehackers – Clive Thompson (New York Times) 2005 (printer friendly, all on one page version)

Who is suffering here?

The question to my mind is, just who is actually suffering here?  Too much information sounds like your classic First World problem – a bunch of hyper-connected individuals who have found that ‘Life 2.0′ has left their brains crammed with more information than they can process, leaving them anxious, jaded, or worn out (or all of the above).  I understand their pain and share some of it, too.  I do not have too much sympathy however.  So much of it seems to be a self-generated problem.

What is the real problem?

Where does the problem lie?  Consuming large amounts of media is actually pretty easy.  You can see a video from 2007 by 4 hour work week guru Tim Ferriss of Robert Scoble outlining how he reads 600+ news feeds every day as just one example of how to do it (although I don’t know if Scoble still consumes media in quite this way).  The difficulty is in absorbing the information, filtering it and synthesising and sharing it.  Normal people don’t have this problem. I’m sure that most people who consume massive amounts of data do it for fun and personal interest and don’t have the inner need to process it to a level that writers and other web professionals do.

The people experiencing the most difficulty are the amateurs writing, digging, twittering, friending, stumbling and otherwise staying connected for the fun of it.  These are people who have a full time job and often families of their own where reading and processing information is done in their spare time, time that could be spent de-compressing, socialising, unwinding and experiencing.  Be aware that I’m not passing judgement on how people choose to spend their spare time (I’m one of these people described above after all), but it explains to me why this malaise seems to have become the echo-meme du jour.

Strategies for dealing with the data flood

If there is one geeks aren’t short of, it’s solutions.

(jeff)isageek writes on LouisGray.com “Trimming the fat on RSS Feeds” that a combination of shared items (whether through Google Reader shared items or services like Readburner and RSSmeme), Friendfeed aggregation and Twitter is the way to go.  This does run the risk of feeding into the echo chamber and, as Duncan Riley shared in the comments of that post, “if we all followed it, there would be no shared items to follow :)”.  Other commenters noted that if you have interests outside of tech (apparently some people do, but I’m not convinced) than the narrow field of early adopters aren’t likely to sate these needs.

Matt Wood shared on 43 Folders back in November 2007 that it is all in how you group your information (in this case, also RSS feeds) and it is okay to not have read every single feed that comes into your reader.

And then there is Marshall Kirkpatrick, one time lead writer on TechCrunch and now lead writer at ReadWriteWeb (as well as being a market intelligence, product usability and promotions consultant).  If you want a way to consume a lot of media, look no further than “How I use RSS to track thousands of news sources easily“.

The answer?

Obviously there is no one answer.  Everyone needs to find their own solution.  Duh, I guess.

If anyone has been wondering where I have been the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to find my own solution.  I’m not there yet, but at least I know where I’m heading.

Photo credits: Information overload: layout debugging by corra24 and Thinking on the wall: last spots left by Alex Osterwalder

There have been many pretenders to the social bookmarking throne – Furl and Ma.gnolia are just two – but del.icio.us remained the place to go to see what other people felt was worth bookmarking.  Even Google had a stab at it with the horribly named and feature free Google Shared Stuff.  Nothing has been able to gain the traction that del.icio.us has managed.

However, with the digerati clamouring for the long-awaited release of Delicious 2.0, something of a vacuum has appeared in the social sharing space.  Are Google Reader shared items filling this void?

Shared items have arrived at an interesting time and in something of a perfect storm.  RSS is increasing in popularity and verges on mainstream acceptance.  Lifestreaming services are popping up all over the place (see 35 ways to stream your life on ReadWriteWeb for example) and many of these services allow RSS feeds to be imported.  Every Google Reader shared items page has an RSS feed.  The recent addition of notes functionality allows individuals to add a note to items as they share them from within Google Reader.  Add to this the Google Reader Notes bookmarklet that allows you to share any web page, and all bases seems to be covered.

I see more and more “link blogs” that are the blog author’s re-purposed shared items feed. Services like FriendFeed are full of other people’s shared items.  Other services like Readburner absolutely depend on other people’s shared items feeds.

Yahoo! had better watch out.  If Google Reader shared items aren’t the new del.icio.us yet, it’s only a matter of time before they are.

Will shared items replace del.icio.us for social bookmarking ?  Let me know what you think in the comments.

However, content owners, you need to understand that if you deny people a way to legally access your product simply on the basis of geographic location, they will get it anyway without you.  Once people realise they can get the same content more easily and at a better quality than anything you provide, they may never return to you as a paying customer ever again.

There is a market out there absolutely begging to be serviced. Unclench the fist or it will squeeze out through your fingers and be gone forever.

The WB

Hulu

Adobe Media Player

The Office Season 4 on The Pirate Bay

The Colbert Report on The Pirate Bay

(click picture to embiggen)

Apparently, no one is safe from the Google spam filter.