Co.Lab

Using Ning Social Network for Clubs

We've been using Ning for a local breakfast club Avon Business Club and found it very useful.  I've recently been contracted to configure another Ning site for Rotary Club of Bristol Aztec, the styling is based on the that from the main GB and Ireland Rotary site and the local club is paying to remove the adverts from their site.

In addition to the general information about a club or social organisation, Ning is useful for posting details of upcoming events and letting club members indicate attendance. It can also be used to post photos or videos from past events, allowing existing members to remenisce and give prospective members a flavour of what goes on. Individual groups can be setup for the organising committees, to facilitate communication about plans, these groups can be made visible only to committee members and even linked to from the main menu.

Setup and configuration on Ning is very straightforward. I would recommend it to anyone wanting a website for their club.

Create a video with Animoto

I created this video for Tonsho, check it out.  You just give Animoto some images and text, select the music and it does the rest, including all the effects!

Top 4 Unsolved Computing Problems

My father-in-law recently asked me what I think the big outstanding computing opportunities are.  I think these are some of the top problems.

1. SPAM (Email and Web comment) - Of course there are solutions here.  But I think there is still opportunity for someone to do for spam what google did for search around 1998.
2. Image Serach - Some approaches are getting off the ground. Gazopa is interesting, the example images work beatifully, but uploading your own images the results aren't as good.
3. Video Search - Lets stick with image search for now...
4. Naturual Language Interface - The holly grail of computing. Would in theory make computers usuable by anyone who can talk.

What do you think are the main unsolved problems?  Leave a comment and let me know.

Safari and Firefox open with IE

Recently one of our machines started behaving strangly.  Under Windows XP the Safari and Firefox browsers would open as a page in IE.  This appeared to happen after installing an IE update.  We tracked it down to the following registry setting:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options

 

In that path there are sub-directories for different files.... so the ones we removed are

 

chrome.exe

safari.exe

 

inside those paths there is the following key:

Name                    Type            Value

Debugger                REG_SZ     C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe

Corporate Non-Speak Looses Customers

Compare these two descriptions:

"Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers..." Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

"At Sun, we envision a world of many clouds, both public and private, that are open and compatible. We offer an extensive portfolio of products and services and are fostering open communities and partner ecosystems to make this vision a reality. It all starts with the delivery of the Sun Cloud, a public compute and storage infrastructure service, which is due out later this year." Sun Cloud Computing

I've rarely seen such a stark example of the difference between the clearly written text from Amazon which communicates the intent and the absolute nonsense from Sun.  The most painful part is that the very sentence in which Sun uses the word "vision", is the very worst kind of non-speak.  How many people will choose to use Sun's yet-to-be-released cloud because they "offer an extensive portfolio of products and services"? Perhaps people will be attracted because Sun are fostering "partner ecosystems"? No and No. However, people might well use Amazon because its "designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers".

Come on Sun, get your act together!

Simple but useful summary of some navigation trends.  Stressing the importance of what the user expects and how this affects usability: Horizontal Navigation Menus

$2.6Billion but not for the whole company?

In this cnet news article about Ebay's plans for Skype it would seem that ebay will not easily be able to spin out Skype with an IPO, because the original Skype owers are claiming ownership over some of the technology.  How do you pay $2.6 Billion for a tiny company like Skype and not even manage to aquire the technology? This is incredible.

Expect Regulation, Policing and Taxes on The Net

Increased levels of regulation, policing and taxes are inevitable on The Internet. Whilst The Internet was used by cutting edge technophiles, it was like the wild-west, a new area to be explored free from the encumbrances of regulation.  But once everyone gets on board then we get two groups joining in:
1. criminals
2. children and vulnerable citizens

If we have criminals then we need policing, identification and the authority to shut them down.  Email spamming, identity theft and fraud can't be allowed to go unchallenged. All the designs from one of our sites were recently copied.  The copyright infringer was based in America and we had to personally chase them down, using several agencies. There was no standard process to apply to have their server disconnected by their ISP.  Clearly any such process would need to be carefully monitored and controlled, but it should exist.

With vulnerable people using The Internet this changes the game too.  Whilst as a savvy user you may say "I will recognize a scam or phishing attempt; don't erode my freedom of speech with regulations, controls and identity tracking", can you be sure your parents and grandparents would be safe?  Whilst a mature user may say, "I'll choose what pornography to view", do you want your children to have the same choice?

And finally, as more commercial transactions go through the web, governments will be attracted to levy VAT taxes. Why should online transactions not be taxed whilst off-line ones are?

It will all have to happen; tax, regulation and policing.  Better to be involved with a debate about how to do it, than arguing against it.  The same rules and regulations we need to run a civil offline society, will also be needed online to protect everyone from criminals and safeguard the vulnerable and young.

How many estate agents per village?

How many estate agents would be appropriate for a village with a few hundred inhabitants? When searching for houses I saw villages with 2 or 3 and I saw town high streets sporting 3 or 4!

Apparently estate agents in the UK are closing at a rate of 150 per week in 2009.

The village of Chew Magna near our office recently lost one of its two estate agents. The shop has now started to be fitted out as a men's Barbers.  I think this is a better balance of services and look forward to having a barbers available near the office.

Photo Gallery for New Personal Account

The next two Tonsho releases are planned.  Coming up on 16th June is a release which introduces a new Personal Account as a lower cost premium account. All paid accounts will include photo galleries and the ability to create a zip archive in addition to the individual files for convenient downloading.

We're also working on the marketing materials for the Photographer account with Photo Checkout.

I've now linked this blog to my new twitter account EdRoss_Tonsho.