... if you use Twitter as effectively as the New England Patriots.  The Patriots set up a special Twitter account for the NFL draft, and during the draft they tweeted every few minutes with information about their picks and trades.

I'm interested in the NFL draft, but I'm not that interested. What I like about the twitter feed is that it gives quite a lot of information about what the Patriots are doing in an easy-to-digest form.  For me, it's not too much, it's just right.

What impresses me on a technical level is that it gives the Patriots another channel to their fans with a very small amount of effort.   It only takes a few seconds per tweet, but it gives Patriots fans an almost instantaneous view into the Patriots draft room. 

... OR if you have as many channels as the BBC's coverage of the Indian election.  They have:

• portals in English, Hindi and Urdu;
  
• a train with a multimedia map to follow its progress, and a blog posting from the editor explaining their rationale;
• a reporter on the train with a blog, and a twitter feed;
• photos posted on the BBC World Service Flickr account (with the first set from the train).
  

I couldn't agree more with Mike Torres about the iPod.  Who needs a proprietary format that will only play on a proprietary device?  In fact, my brother generously gave me the $10 iTunes certificate that came with his iPod and I've haven't bothered to use it.  The value to me of songs encoded in a proprietary format:  zero!

Sometimes I use RealPlayer to rip CDs and sometimes I use Nero.  I'm happy to play both WMA and MP3 encoded music on my Zire 72.  My son, who has younger and better ears than me, assures me that WMA is better.  From my point of view, neither is a proprietary format, whatever the 'W' in WMA stands for.  That leaves it up to personal choice, as far as I can see.

What is Plays For Sure?  Who Knows For Sure?  The site is chock full of marketing-speak.  It seems to be a proprietary interface between PCs and music players.  All I know is, Windows Media Player won't download music to my Zire.  Who's proprietary now, Mike?

Whether my software is open source or closed, I want my data, protocols and interfaces open.  Anything else would be Unacceptable!

MSN have just opened Inside MSN, a new site for comments about MSN. The front page has a serious case of excessive cuteness, but I guess that's in the eye of the beholder (you know, one man's mead is another man's poisson).

One really good thing (which I think is new) is a page for submitting feedback on MSN.  The page design is great.  It's clear, easy to use, doesn't bother you with a lot of unnecessary questions, and it's fast.

It's very impressive that MSN is introducing new features so fast.  Personally, I'd like Spaces to be integrated into the new site, but speed is good, too.

How do I know the feedback form is beta??  Because when I clicked on submit, I got this dialog box:

Since I spend too much time whining about (beta) software that doesn't work, it seems only fair that I should speak out when I stumble across things I like ...

Many people have already pointed this out, but Google has introduced a map service.  The maps look really nice, and already it has eliminated one of my main gripes with other services:  getting a map at a reasonable scale that has every street labelled.  You can move the map around by clicking and dragging, so centering the map is easy.  And there's a simple way to find pizza or coffee shops near you.  Like other Google services, the interface just feels right.  It has just been introduced, and some parts of it are quite buggy, like printing, but it's worth a look.

I've always been uncomfortable with the idea of "advanced search" -- the idea that you have to invoke some special magic if, heaven forbid, you want to limit your search to a particular domain or find links to a particular site.  I don't know how long ago this was added, but MSN search now has a "Search Builder" which allows you to construct complex queries.  (Just click on "+Search Builder" under the text box.)  First of all, the term "Search Builder" is a lot friendlier, so already I feel better.  It's easy to use, and it works with Firefox (the browser choice of conflagrations and quadrupeds everywhere).

The last option in the builder is a simple way to tune the search for freshness, accuracy and popularity.  This looks neat, and I'm looking forward to seeing how well this works when I have a real search to do.

I mentioned in this Space that I have been trying out different photo storage and editing programs.  For the things I've tried, I've been very happy with Picasa.  Last night I had to crop an image so that it fit exactly into a frame (or rather, the matte inside the frame).  None of the free programs I've been trying will let you define an exact cropping rectangle, but Picasa has a really nice way of allowing you to repeat a crop until you get it right.  Also, Picasa did very well lightening some photos I had taken with my Zire 72.  It doesn't have a flash, so taking photos indoors in the evening can be problematic.

Normal whining will now resume ...

I love trying things out, and the Internet certainly gives you plenty of opportunities.

I've just tried two photo services:  Picasa (from Google), which organizes the photos on your own computer, and Flickr, which allows you to upload your photos to their servers, which provide web access.  They're both beta, they're both free, and they both offer paid, premium services which I didn't try.

Both services allow you to send a photo to your Blogger blog, which was what I tried first.

Picasa sends the photo from your computer to your blog.  It had a problem with a filename that contained ' (single quote).  The photo was transferred correctly to my site, but the link from the blog to the photo was incorrect, and so displayed as that sad broken image icon with an X.

Flickr doesn't send the photo anywhere, since it's already online on Flickr's site -- it just creates a blog entry with a link to Flickr's uploaded copy of your photo.  This worked fine.

Apart from this one test, the programs have different features and different strengths:  Picasa has some nice tools for editing photos, including correcting brightness, contrast and color; Flickr has tools for sharing your photos, and looking at other people's.  Flickr's signature feature is "tags", which allow you to index your photos in whatever way your like, but also to find other people's photos by their tags.

A long time ago, I worked for a company that sold equipment to telephone companies.  Reliability was important -- it was measured in MINUTES of service unavailability PER YEAR.  The telephone network itself (picking up the telephone and being able to make a call) had a reliability of better than 1 minute unavailable per year.  There are 8760 hours and 525,600 minutes in a (non-leap) year.  One minute per year is a reliability of 99.9998%

On Saturday night, Google mail was down for a significant amount of time (longer than I was willing to wait).  On Sunday night, Hotmail hiccuped briefly.  Flickr was down for scheduled maintenance.

I'm not complaining, and honestly I can't complain, since all three services are beta (and unlike the telephone network, free).  Just as long as we all realize where the bar is set.

You can now add RSS feeds to your My MSN page.  This is great, or it will be when it's stable.

It's described as beta, but it's really alpha.  I tried RSS feeds from a commercial site (The Sydney Morning Herald), a popular and presumably robust site (Boing Boing), and my brother's site (Honest Puck) and well as my own Blogger blog, which will remain nameless.

Sometimes MSN returns an error, sometimes it complains that it can't find any posts within the period I had set (the last 7 days), sometimes it gives some but not all of the relevant posts, and sometimes it gives them all.  When you set the parameters for one feed, MSN refreshes the page and can lose posts from other feeds.  Ouch!

I have a vague memory of when My Yahoo! introduced the same service, and all was not smooth sailing from day one, so I guess I should give Microsoft a few days ...

I don't know whether there is anything particularly tricky about the RSS protocol (multiple versions I guess), but anyway, software is hard!

Jeremy Zawodny announces some neat new RSS feeds from Yahoo! Finance which allow you to read news about particular stocks.  But exchange rates are still stuck in 2004:  the Australian dollar against the US dollar is still showing the data for December 16th.

I beat on Yahoo not because it sucks and I hate it -- in fact I like and appreciate both the site and the work that went into it -- but because I want more, expect more, and think they are capable of more.

I like Yahoo (or Yahoo!).  I want to like Yahoo Finance.  Not that I actually have any money riding on it, but I'd love to be able to see currency rates displayed on my My Yahoo! front page.

Instead, what I get for the exchange rate between US and Australian dollars is the data for December 16th.  If I dive in and graph the rate, I can see that the data extends into this year, so the problem isn't all the forex traders drinking their winnings over the holidays.

When will Yahoo Finance join us in 2005?  Who knows?

Not that charting exchange rates is easy or fun, either.  When you've found the chart you want, you first have to click on Linear to switch away from a logarithmic chart, and then also click on Large to get a reasonably-sized chart.

Since Yahoo knows just about everything about me, do you think they might, in the goodness of their hearts, save my charting preferences?  Like, say, Maps On Us.

Just to show I'm an equal-opportunity complainer, here's the fun I've been having with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, of which I have the developer preview:

The regular (non-server) installer booted and then during the install complained about the install DVD.  When I chose to continue anyway, the installer crashed.  I tried several times before I gave up.

The server installer responded even faster:  not having a driver for my old 400Mhz iMac, it went straight into a kernel panic.  This I did not try several times.

I'm not sure what the problem with the first DVD was.  To test the DVD drive, I'm playing one of my Coupling DVDs on the system.

Like all right-thinking (but left-leaning) canines, I prefer Firefox.  You can use Firefox to edit Spaces, but it's crippled compared to Internet Explorer:  you can't add links, indent or bold, for example.

It won't work.   If I have to, I'll spend all day in Firefox then finish draft entries in Internet Explorer.  All this does is remind me every time how poorly Microsoft software interworks with other software.  Since Spaces is beta, I guess Microsoft gets a free pass for another week or so.

Google Mail (btw, email me if you'd like an account) runs just fine in either browser, so don't blather on about browser capabilities.

I like Manchester Airport a lot.  It's convenient to Boston, and a lot less busy.  You can get in and out without a lot of hassle, and the parking is cheap.

They have big signs up advertising their wireless service, and, fool that I am, I was hoping it was free.  It wasn't -- when you start up your browser you're redirected to Boingo Boingo, and $6.95 a day is a little steep for me.

On the other hand, they allow you to access all of their site for free, including real-time airline schedules.  Neat!

A pox on beta software!

I spent all day yesterday composing a healthy flame and found when I tried to submit it that the Spaces software had timed out and all my text was lost.

So you'll just have to do without ...

Will anyone be surprised if I tell them that trackbacks from Spaces to Haloscan are still not working.  Grrrrr!

There's nothing that LagBolt likes more than a little chaos, preferably in large quantities.  It quite cheers him up, and other than a recurrent tendency to refer to himself in the third person, it's harmless.

Well, fairly harmless.  I got a Technorati account and registered my various blogs.  Technorati spiders all the blogs it has registered and reports when one blog has linked another.  Except that Microsoft has thoughtfully included an "Updated Spaces" section on *everyone's* blog that lists recently changed blogs, and Technorati counts that as a link.

This should be fun ...

Does a Microsoft monopoly have to include annoying pseudo-warnings:

Warning: You are viewing this page with an unsupported Web browser. This Web site works best with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 or later or Netscape Navigator 6.0 or later. Click here for more information on supported browsers.

Well, no, actually.  You're the one with the standards problem.  I'm viewing this page with Firefox.

Thanks, but no thanks.  I'll stumble along without a monopoly for the time being. 

Lagbolt is feeling more lag and less bolt these days.

Maybe trackbacks are a standard, but Blogger (of the Google chaebol) don't support them.  Google recommends Haloscan, but trackbacks from here to Haloscan don't work (yet -- they're working on it).

Some people don't support trackbacks at all, but use Technorati.  Perhaps this is because of some sort of trackback-mediated link warfare; I'm too honest to even speculate.  I've signed up for a Technorati account but I'm not looking forward to sneaking a fragment of Technorati HTML into the blog, on the theory that anything that is visible to a Technorati spider is also visible to a Microsoft spider.

All this seems to be a lot of not very compatible mechanism chasing a mighty small problem.  The advantage of a closed environment like this one should be that a a small-time author like self can pour a small amount of content into a simple environment and participate in conversations in the blogosphere without endless hacking of HTML, PHP and so on and so on.

Doesn't a Microsoft monopoly sound better than the present mish mash?  Standards are a good thing, even de facto standards enforced by monopoly power.  I suggest that if Google can't or won't support trackbacks, they shouldn't be in the "blog portal" business.  Figure it out, guys!

I'm even starting to like my single-login passport id.

No one knows I'm a dog ...