When you’re bored or under-appreciated, it’s easy to think that the grass is greener. All I can say to Mr Carson is: be careful what you wish for.

Working as I do in a large e-commerce company, I am constantly bombarded with information generally intended to make my team better at what we do. Third party research, industry reports, news, internal research, customer analytics, charts, trends, observations, suggestions, the insight of senior management… the list never gets shorter. Inevitably, this means that we are perpetually skimming the surface, unable to properly manage it all. I’ve had a (so far unrealised) plan to deal with some of it, but here’s another:

Some things are self-evidently important. Well, some things are self-evidently large and complicated lumps of information that demand time and effort to digest, let alone act upon. Whether they are important is another matter. But if you think it contains good, actionable, knowledge, it deserves proper scrutiny and dissemination. Unfortunately, in just about every case I’ve ever encountered, such knowledge takes the form of a 50+ slide PowerPoint deck and at least an hour of somebody talking about it at you. The transfer of this knowledge is therefore utterly asymmetrical. The giver and the receiver(s) play well-worn roles. There might be some superficial questions from the floor, or some “next steps” formulated by the speaker, but in most cases there isn’t much of any real value. The report is “filed”, the findings “published”, and the organisation collectively skims on – possibly missing a great deal in the process. For example, I’ve just been sent a report on the results of a very (very) large and expensive experiment we conducted that, potentially at least, affects me and my work a great deal. It’s just a one line email though, with a large PowerPoint attached. Job done! Sigh.

But what would happen if you gave the PowerPoint presentation, and made it clear beforehand that those who were required to attend would be asked to give their own presentation about it? These presentations about the presentation would be scheduled over the preceding days. Presenters would be able to say as much or as little as they wanted about any aspect of the parent presentation. Perhaps several presentations would be made in one session, while others might take a whole day. Did it give them a germ of some other idea? If so, let them say that in a formal context. Did they think it was all worthless? Oh really, let’s hear it in the boardroom, not just by the water cooler. Were there some parts of it they feel they could have contributed to? Great! Let them present their own addendum.

One day, one day, I’ll try this when I have enough clout.

The first thing I’d say about Google’s design is to congratulate them on trying it, because there are obvious practical issues that might make the approach fall down. Most people tend to look at the keyboard first when typing long strings, which in turn removes much of the utility gained by each keystroke increment. They won’t see a lot of the results until they look back at the screen – by which time they’ve probably finished typing. The second issue is that the search results layout as Google currently have them are not very well arranged for incremental revelation. By having comparatively large amount of text that’s unrelated to the string being typed, they are designed for perusal after a search is triggered, not during its construction. There’s just too much to parse on the screen, changing extremely rapidly.

So I hope they will rapidly start experimenting with the layout and content of the search results when deployed incrementally. This is because I believe their approach is correct, but it would be a great shame to conclude from such an obviously flawed experiment that it was in fact the wrong one. Google’s implementation might be a very good example of how interaction design can be extremely hard to get right, and either works wonderfully or just sucks. In releasing this design, I assume that, like me, Google’s designers’ work is often blunted by the fiats of assorted suits and higher-ups who have reasons to look backwards when presented with new design ideas.

A final thought: even if the current design has flaws that limit its utility, the one thing that the likes of Google, Facebook, and others have in this is traffic and repetitive use. It would be wonderful to make incremental search the norm and to have people expect it. From the video you can see how incremental search really comes into its own by rapid iteration on the search string being used. Adopting such a practice might well produce a step-change in the efficiency with which ordinary people use free-text queries on large data sets.

As an aside, Aza’s work also makes MSIE’s “designers” look like a total bunch of muppets. There are probably hundreds of them to his one, yet they couldn’t think up anything new or interesting if they swung from trees made of fruit loops.

But this is just totally and utterly beyond the pale:

“We will not store your password.” Sure. And Clinton never inhaled either. Never mind the fact that it’s technically impossible not to store the password in this situation (if only for enough time to log in, which is enough time for anything to happen), but what does it do for the culture of data security overall? What if they decided to ask for your online banking credentials? You have the choice not to provide the data, but if you think all your friends are,* and hey – you’ve got nothing to hide – why not?

Seems to be just a matter of time before the whole idea of trust, security and ethics online just totally disappears.

* BTW It’s almost certainly untrue that the people shown have tried the Friend Finder. I’m going to ask them. Just watch Facebook ignore me when I complain.

Apple’s dominance in the field of product design and user experience is worrying. It’s worrying because they are the only ones seemingly willing or able to make design their business strategy (even if that’s not actually the case, as I shall explain later). The Apple monopoly means that people are becoming blind to any alternatives to the Apple way. Even more worrying is that the design community, for the most part, appears revoltingly willing to accept anything Apple does as being the work of untouchable genius. This community, if it is to survive as a force for good, needs to preserve a core of scepticism, self-examination and doubt. That core seems now to be dangerously weak in the face of relentlessly and quite transparent manipulation by Apple and the design of its products.

Take this example I read today. Here, somebody called Trent Walton appears to be saying that we now need to design everything for the touch screen and multi-touch interfaces. Ergo, we must all start to get used to the lack of an indicated state (what the article calls “on hover”, presumably because the web is the only thing the author knows about). He then starts wondering how to re-create an indicated state, which he correctly identifies as being rather useful.

The trouble is that multi-touch interfaces do not represent some new immutable law of interaction. Just because Apple’s cornered the market with a product doesn’t mean they have cornered it with the best product possible, or even a particularly good design. They’ve just made it look that way.

Consider that pretty much the first thing anyone who thinks about these things notices when they use a touch screen is the lack of an indicated state. This problem is responsible for most fat-finger episodes, mode errors and general user frustration. It’s the largest single problem that touch interfaces have, along with that of occlusion, and possibly gorilla arm.

As a designer, the next thought you should have is “How can I design a touch-screen device that solves the problem of a lack of an indicated state?” not “How can I make the rest of the interactive universe comply to this device’s unnecessary shortcomings?” I’m pretty tolerant of Apple fanboys in general, but there are limits!

The obvious solution to the lack of an indicated state on the iPhone and iPad is to introduce an indicator in the form of a scroll wheel. This would solve both the “on hover” problem and the occlusion problem. But Apple’s obsession with “simplicity” in this regard instead breeds complexity for the people who use their products. And here we are writing idiotic articles about how to bend over backwards to enter a world of poor usability.

Addendum:

I mentioned that it’s not actually the case that Apple have design as their business strategy. In fact, their strategy is more prosaic: to maximise profits by locking consumers into “platforms” which can then become sources of secondary revenue. To this end, they ply the cant of “just works”, “simplicity” and “beauty” in their products. This gives them a way of by-passing criticism about lock-in. Don’t like the way you can’t customise the theme on your iPad? Pah! Think different! Get with the programme! But why is it so hard to create your own ringtone for your iPhone? Apple want you to buy it from iTunes, that’s why. It’s also why you don’t have a real choice of software in the AppStore: not because that might lead to an inconsistent user experience (And whose to say it might not lead to a better one? Firefox Mobile looks damn good to me, but it won’t be allowed to compete with Safari), but because they need to keep out any competition and preserve a brand built on a certain user experience. Consumers are falling for this line, and so the cycle continues.

McCandless’s current pièce de résistance, “Colours in Cultures” – depicted on the cover of his book Information is Beautiful, typifies all that baffles me about him and the people that praise his work. It’s the Philippe Starck juicer of information graphics: it looks great, but if you actually want to know what the colour purple represents in different “cultures”, it’s damn hard work compared to the obvious alternative of a simple table. But then, that would be boring, I suppose. So is it art or science? Am I asking the wrong questions about it entirely? Perhaps I should buy his book and hit myself over the head with it until I understand.

First let me state that I probably will never buy an iPad unless I’m forced to do so. But one good thing it’s done already is apparently kill off – stone dead – the idiotic notion that ebooks will never take off because they lack a mystical property of paper that makes reading from a screen somehow against human nature.

What was previously de rigour when discussing anything that presented itself as something on which you might be expected to read large amounts of text, is now seemingly taboo. Not a single iPad review I have seen in the last couple of weeks refers to this hitherto insurmountable problem.

Of course, there is nothing magical about the iPad that makes reading from its screen any easier than a Kindle or a Sony Reader (or even a boring old laptop). It’s just that the cult of Apple is so strong that what was once a required criticism is now suddenly not an issue. Good. Bring on the final death of dead tree media, and with it the end of the last shackles of the information age. There will be plenty of problems to fix in the future, but wondering what to do about Caxton’s ghost is not now one of them.

Flattr is a system whereby people can show their appreciation of content on the web. It works by allowing you to donate a proportion of a fixed amount of money every month to whomever you want. I’m setting aside 2 euros per month (but it could be any amount). If I click a Flattr button twice this month, two people will get a Euro each. If I click ten times, ten people will get 20 cents each, and so on. If I click nothing, my 2 euros will go to charity.

If you like my thing, and have a Flattr account, you can show your appreciation too. I don’t expect the get much, if anything, but the web is a free global publishing system with Google indexing it. If I were an upcoming musician, an author or an artist, Flattr might make my situation completely different.

And even as we speak…!

“Oy people of England,
Great injustices are committed upon this land,
How long will ye permit them to carry on?
Is England becoming a Fascist state?
The answer lies at your own gate;
And in the answer lies your fate.”

So perhaps it’s not surprising that avoiding the Act’s provisions on copyright infringement turns out to be trivial. All that is required for consumers to immunise themselves from the Act is for them to declare themselves not to be “subscribers” as defined by the Act, but “communication providers” instead. Here’s one ISP explaining the situation. As a “communications provider”, you avoid being harassed by your ISP if rights holders suspect you of infringing their copyright, and the ISP gets off the hook in having to spy on you as well. Well blow me down with a feather.

What I find the most depressing thing about all this silliness is that the legislators involved in creating the Act probably don’t care about it anyway. Their work is now done: the bungs have changed hands, the lucrative “advisory positions” and board memberships have been negotiated, and the “donations” have been made. Yes, some MPs opposed the Bill, but the vast majority neither knew nor cared about it.

I hope the ballot box in two weeks time will knock them all into a smoking hole in the ground.

Frankly, I wasn’t holding out much hope for any actual customer service from the site (it’s Sunday in the UK after all), but I was pleasantly surprised to see their CEO on video explaining the situation and giving useful advice on what to do. Faced with juggling announcements from NATS and Finnair, as well as reading T&Cs to see if she’s covered, this was very refreshing.

I liked the video, and I think other people will too. It’s friendly, immediate and frank. A great example of lo-fi doing the job: get a camera, grab the CEO and get him talking. Who cares that it’s apparently in one take, that he looks a bit nervous, and it’s probably unscripted? It’s the head man talking to his customers straight up. This is what the web was supposed to deliver, and I think it’s a smart brand move for Holiday Extras too.

So naturally, I have been ruminating on this too. My thoughts were crystallised when I read Roy Greenslade’s article in the Evening Standard today (which only recently become a free paper in London – an irony there). Greenslade’s argument is essentially as follows. The paywall might work, it might not, but no matter because we must all remember that “news” is a public service:

“How can we preserve a public service that, not to be too pompous about it, is a key — arguably the key — bulwark of our democracy?”

And in conclusion, he says:

“If people also turn away from online papers that offer serious, quality editorial, the likely outcome is a damaging democratic deficit. We cannot afford to allow that to happen.”

This, I suddenly realised with great and rapid clarity, is tripe.

News media of all kinds is and has been for at least a century, 90% pointless cruft designed to get people to look at advertising. I defy anyone to prove otherwise.

If you read The Times in its entirety every day, you will hardly be more informed or enriched than if you hadn’t. Entertained, certainly, stressed and overly-opinionated on arcane matters of celebrity, party politics or sport perhaps, but on no measure I know of could you be said to be a better person for having read whether or not David Cameron’s wife is helping him win the election. What does it really do to know that an African leader has made a speech to Parliament about the importance of the Commonwealth? And obviously, anything to do with a reality TV show is almost certainly irrelevant to anyone other than the people in front of the cameras.

So charitably, Greenslade is talking about the remaining 10% of news that is somehow worthwhile. MP’s expenses fraud, EU waste and cronyism, police corruption, NHS management scandals and the like. This is of course laudable and must be investigated and reported. Perhaps this end justifies the means in publishing yet another resume of Katie Price’s latest man in exchange for some ad revenue. Or charging for it at the point of consumption, as Mr Murdoch thinks. The subtext of Greenslade’s argument is therefore that the cruft pays for the public service.

No. The point that Murdoch and his supporters miss is this. News media isn’t just in decline in the face of a free global information distribution system. “Quality” news (the 10%) is in decline because it’s always been in decline: flattened by the very platform on which it has been distributed for the last few hundred years. Information wants to be free. Music does, art does too. People can create, talk, write, communicate without money or the profit motive. What the publishing industry does is impose gatekeepers to concentrate and extract profit from those activities, and in doing so distorts and obfuscates the truth. What we have seen in print media is very similar to what we have seen in music publishing, only now being revealed to us by the Internet. The profit-driven mechanisms that controlled who said or wrote what, who read or heard what, are in decline.

But don’t get me wrong: if people really want to read about Katie Price, they will write about it. They will blog, they will twit, they will seek out distribution methods for the love of that information. But what is true of music and home movies can be equally true about investigative journalism. Why wait for a professional journalist to expose corruption in your local council when you can use the Internet to do that yourself if you care enough? The cult of the amateur it may be, but what, really, is wrong with that?

I think the future of news will be a rediscovery of an ancient history. The leitmotif of the last few centuries – the “global village” and ever larger, extended “communities” of cowed, bewildered humans managed and mined by ruthless corporate media networks will give way to the ancient patterns. Small, hyper-local communities, whether geographic or virtual, will focus on themselves and their immediate neighbours. They will not be “isolated” in the sense we understand that term today because they will control their own communications, and not the other way around. They will be liberated by the ability to organise around what they think is right, without recourse to information gatekeepers telling them what to think. It might take a while, but we’re getting there, and Murdoch is driving the train.

“We want to create a modern British design aesthetic”

And people at the Beeb wonder why they’re seen as arrogant! He he, only jokin’.

However, there are a couple of interesting IA/UX things here.

Firstly: “We’re moving away from left hand navigation to consistently placed, horizontal navigation across the site.” I can see why they think this is a good idea. They clearly want to promote the role of large, and even full-page photography to pole position,. But I wonder if it’ll give them problems like it did with Amazon (remember the “crazy tabs” era?). I predict they’ll sneak in some secondary navigation device before too long. I also wonder if they’ll succumb to the dreaded fly-out menus.

There is no direct mention of whether the rather pointless “movable tiles” approach to the content on the home page will be ditched or not, but I predict the former, if only because they want to retire the once trendy “distinctly ‘web 2.0′ design.” This observation leads me to one of my favourite pontifications: if you ditch an interaction idea on the grounds of updating a visual design, then it wasn’t a very useful idea in the first place, was it? That comment is almost certainly going to attract hate mail from somebody in the visual design community, but I call this the Glass Wall effect (8Mb PDF, sorry, but it’s a good read for some early web design nostalgia). It’s also probably me finding significance where there is none, but have they become almost obsessed with carousels (or at least things that look like them)? I often wonder what people make of these. I’ve not actually observed their use in wild very much.

Which also leads me to another observation: there’s not a single mention of user (or indeed any other kind) of research here, other than in the name Research Studios, who – bizarrely – do not use the word on their website either(!). So do they do research to support design or not? It appears not. I assume from this that the Beeb has now fully internalized the Apple Way. Perhaps that’s a good thing.  Neville Brody sure looks the part of the Genius Designer though, I’ll give him that. Then again, perhaps visual designs don’t need to be researched. Who knows.

But I’m rambling. Overall, this new style guide can’t be anything other than good news. So many people in my field regard bbc.co.uk as a reference site. It’s great they have the ability to evolve in clear progressions rather than being in hoc to the minutiae of commercial considerations and the yoke of “incremental design.”

Go Auntie, take my license fee and spend it for all you’re worth. I’m with you all the way.

I would have got more, were it not for my failure to read one of the questions properly. Q13: “True or False? The product owner must be present during at least the first half of sprint planning.” I read as “The product owner must be present during the first half of sprint planning.” So I gave that a “false” – they need to be there for the whole of it! Bugger.

I did get one wrong genuinely though, which shows my shaky grip over the definition of stories and tasks. Still, if anyone wants a scrum mastering, I’m your man. Pity I’m now not officially on any scrum teams any more. Oh well.

Widespread adoption of IPv6 is generally regarded as being part of the next stage of Internet development. The ability to assign unique address to literally anything and anyone on earth obviously opens up a large number of possibilities.

But this makes the French ruling rather worrying. If IP addresses are not personal information, this means IPv6 may well become the platform for a surveillance-based network the likes of which we have only just begun to see in our current IPv4-based world.

The article has since been updated to point out to people that they’re not on Facebook (have a look at the comments while you’re at it).

It seems these people may have been used to typing in the words “facebook” and “login” into Google, in order to start the journey to their favourite social networking website. However, the Googlebot being what it is, readwritecwb.com’s article had at some point ranked higher for those keywords than Facebook itself. Used to clicking on the first result to get to Facebook, these people then became rather confused.

This sort of behaviour (see also “What is a web browser?“) is fairly well documented. Many Internet users think the web is Google, and often don’t type in URLs at all. Interesting though that behaviour is, it’s not what I find fascinating about this incident. Instead, what’s thought-provoking is that while an apparently large number of people are being tripped up by their own mental models of how the machinery of the web works, they are clearly NOT confused with the details of the way Facebook itself works. At least, if they were, I would presume they wouldn’t sing its praises so highly here.

FB isn’t, I would suggest, an easy system to understand. It’s full of vague concepts, tricky public/private chicanery, unique and regularly changing conventions and concepts. When I consider that I sometimes have problems using FB myself, this indicates it may not follow that what I sometimes class as “naive” Internet behaviour (like using Google as some kind of bookmark repository) has anything to do with the level of sophistication in the use of UIs in general.

Who am I to say that the people on the readwriteweb.com thread might also be avid Google Wave users, or have become adept in the use of Azureus (which, incidentally, fairly makes me cry)? So the really scary thing (from a UX design perspective) is that what you observe people doing in one context may not be applicable at all in another. Put that in your persona and smoke it.

By the way, I’ve decided that OpenOffice Presentation, with which I did the mockup, is rubbish. Apologies in advance.

Hi. Sorry about this.

You need to stop using a stupid piechart on the dashboard. See the attached file for why.

On page one: a screenshot of my existing dashboard. Note the following problems:

- It encodes just two data points: the name of the category and its comparative share of the total.

- There are tiny segments that I can barely click on, or even see.

- There is one segment taking up most of the space (uselessly) on its own.

- If I had more than about 30 segments, the pie would be unreadable.

- The categories are very difficult to compare between each other.

- You cannot (easily) indicate a budget against a category.

- Because the graphics take up so much space, it’s hard to display any other information.

- No comparative data is visible. I spent a lot on home improvements last month, but nothing the month before that. Without comparative data being shown, dashboards are mostly useless, I’m afraid.

On page two: a mockup of an alternative. I’ve spent about 30 mins on it, and I’d have lots of improvements in a couple of hours I’m sure. But this should give you a general idea.

Note these improvements:

- It encodes more than twice the amount of data (5 data points) in exactly the same space as the pie. You could easily show a couple more I think (eg lowest/highest amounts over the last 12 months).

- The category labels are next to each bar. Easy to read off.

- You can see and compare very small differences between categories.

- All categories are equally easy to click on.

- You could have an infinite number of categories and be able to see them all. There are 10 here (same as the pie), but you could probably show 15 in the same space, and 150 would be just fine.

- You could show whether a category is within budget or not, and by about how much.

Good luck with the project and thanks for doing it.

Jonathan

To get a fix on the trajectory of the iPad, I think we need to look at the market it’s entering in comparison to the market that the iPod and iPhone entered. Before the advent of the iPod, if you asked the man in the street what a portable MP3 player  was for, he would have given you a straight answer. It was for listening to music. Furthermore, listening to music on your own was OK, but nothing to write home about. Sales of MP3 players clearly bore this out.

So, you would have then concluded that Apple was pretty much insane to launch an MP3 player. But they did, and they changed the game. The same was true for the iPhone: everyone know what a (smart) phone was about. Making calls, bloated and confusing user experience along the way. Then bang! (as Jobs likes to say), Apple changed all that.

However, both the iPod and iPhone had a game to change. If you ask anyone in the street what a “tablet” is, they won’t have any coherent answer. Are tablets netbooks? Are they spiffy laptops? What are they for? Work? Play? Music? Films? Something else? The iPad has no game to change.

An Apple project that had a very similar initial market condition to this was Apple TV. The “game” of downloadable movies on devices plugged into your broadband connection and then displayed on your TV was only just starting to be played. And even then it was played only by geeks. Apple TV was released to similar if not quite such ludicrous hype as the iPad. Microsoft Media Centre was out there of course, and things like Joost were starting up. But Apple TV never got the traction it needed. This may have been because Apple didn’t do the content deals, got stuck with limited video formats and the dreaded DRM. It certainly floundered while the likes of XBMC, then Boxee and Hulu  swiftly ate their lunch in their target market. But fundamentally, there was no real game to change. The Apple genie couldn’t come out of the bottle.

And so it will be with the iPad. Read this post in 18 months time and we’ll see!

Those in the UK who want to use Google Power Meter can do so using a wireless doobrie from AlertMe Energy. Nothing wrong with that, but words fail me at the staggeringly bad information visualisation on their site. I hardly know where to begin with this:

You’d think that people involved in making us aware of energy consumption would have some clue about how to actually present the data. But look at this. Just look at it. Worse than what? Compared to when? Per what? Population adjusted? Last updated? Why the map and the dial? I’m all for fun and frolics, but really, it has to have at least some underlying integrity!

Newspapers and magazines have of course from time immemorial sometimes used work without either attributing, asking or paying the creators. There are a number of reasons for this, and cock-up is certainly one of them. Were it, say, 1970 and not 2010, the rights holder would have doubtless written to the newspaper telling them that they had used his or her work and demanded payment. If the paper refused, then Small Claims court would have been the next stop. All things being equal, the paper would have then paid up because in those days copyright was boringly simple.

In 2010, however, copyright is no longer boring. It is no longer the preserve of industrial regulation, it has many shades of grey and personal opinion associated with it. So instead, this is a rather subtle tale of Internet-age righteous indignation, confusion about the law, contract, the prevailing culture of media and art, and the nature of marketing and popularity.

Here’s the course of events in a nutshell:

1. The photographer notices his picture on the Indy’s website, which he has put publicly on Flickr, and over which he has asserted all rights.
2. He contacts them by email and points out that they have not attributed him, and demands payment.
3. The Indy reply saying he’s misinterpreted Flickr’s conditions and that the paper has not infringed his copyright, nor is any payment due. They say they linked to his photo from Flickr (the implication being they didn’t host it and that anyone can link to anything on the web).
4. The photographer goes public with this correspondence: The New Righteous Indignation in full force.
5. All manner of opinions are expressed, from the plain loony to the sensible, and everything in between.

Now, I am not a lawyer, nor am I a photographer, but as an observer of this many things are notable. Firstly, that nobody seems to understand Flickr’s terms of use of its API (the mechanism by which the Indy says it displayed the work), least of all me. It seems to say that anyone can use the API, but that they don’t own the works being published, the owners do, and they might assert rights that have nothing to do with Flickr. Yet regardless of what the terms are, numerous people characterise what The Independent has done as “theft.” This implies the photographer has now in some way lost control of the photo (that much is clear: he hasn’t). Some people talk in terms of “protection” from this, and “watermarking” and so on. Copyright maximalism fairly oozes from may comments, while the photo itself is, well, not much. Have camera, will point at ubiquitous snow scene somewhere in Middle England. Not exactly Cartier Bresson. Perhaps that’s not relevant, but I couldn’t help it.

So if ever there was a demonstration of why copyright needs reforming, why we need to save ourselves from insanity in an age where most art can be copied by anyone, and when almost anyone can create such art for themselves, it’s this.  If people want to reap monetary rewards though copyright in the digital age, as well as the ability to create, build on, and distribute works in that environment at next to no cost to themselves, then they must also realise they can’t have both. Copyright isn’t some magic spell. Lock content down, it disappears from view, and you’re out of a job. Free it entirely and the same thing happens. Creative Commons is the first step, but at some point traditional copyright is going to have to change as well.

Money Saving Expert has 235 links on its forum pages

HIS Travel has 341 links on its home page

Both sites are major (if not actually leading) sites in their respective markets. Wow.

Happy new 2010 by the way, and may we all survive the cold.

Epstein (the Jewish surname not without some grim irony here) may think that ID cards are to be debated at the level of the colour of soft furnishings or who should win The X Factor, but amid all the blinkered admiration, this was for me almost the worst comment I’ve read about ID cards so far. How are liberty and freedom a matter of personal opinion? I’m not denying they can and should be debated, but there is a truth to be revealed in that debate beyond mere opinion. I think that truth is that if you collate a vast amount of personal information in one place (the National ID Card Database), that data will leak out, be abused, and generally come back to haunt those who thought it was such a good idea. And by that time it will be too late for all of us. Control needs control. The only reason for control is more control. When politicians start down the road of identity cards and use that to build up a surveillance database beyond anything that has ever existed before, the lessons of history may well be mere preludes to what could happen.

Epstein is clearly no idiot, and her article has a rather curious ring to it. These two things make me rather suspicious, and judging by some of the comments, I’m not alone.

With reportedly millions down the Swanee, Joost is now the first major casualty of the cult of DRM – an idea that cannot work, should not work, and shows every sign of not working so far. So the adage still stands: if you base your business on the principle of preventing anyone copying your content, that business is destined to fail.

But the Joost affair may be a mere skirmish compared to the coming battle waged by News Corp. That, I think, is going to be a biggie.