I never believed in 3D. I always thought it was ridiculous having to wear extra glasses, watching effects that are little more than just … effects, and having to pay even more for already grossly overpriced theater tickets to see shitty movies with things flying at you. No thanks, I rather watch good movies. Flat.

The problem is that 3D television requires people to change their viewing habits. Normally, viewers watching even their favourite shows tend to be in reasonably lit rooms doing several things at once—scanning newspapers and magazines, using the phone, even browsing the web and answering e-mail. Taking 3D glasses off and on to do such things quickly becomes a chore. No surprise that even ardent early fans of 3D television have largely gone back to watching traditional fare. - The Economist “The Difference Engine: Beyond HDTV“

I am not saying 3D will never work, but so far there just have been modest improvements on a technology that is decades old. What we need is a break and something truly innovative and intuitive, not yet another multi billion dollar production like Avatar, which looked only slightly better in 3D. Here’s another rant I wrote about 3D in movies, many months ago.

Is 3D a fad? Comment below

Google launched its own social networking contender recently. While it is officially still in a closed “field test”, thousands of Google users are already on the platform, and among tech circles, Google+ is already the next big thing. That is surprising, considering Google’s relatively meager track record in  the field. It has abandoned Jaiku, which was like Twitter. It has never tried to upgrade and spread Orkut, which used to be more popular than Facebook in countries like Brazil and India, it had to abandon Wave as a social collaboration tool, and Buzz never really took off as a social sharing mechanism. While many of Google’s services have a strong social component, it has been unable to intertwine them and turn them into a unified social platform. Enter Google+, which along with a visual interface refresh across the company’s services, tries to bring together existing ones, the recently launched +1 button, as well as ideas from Orkut, Diaspora and – Skype.

The platform is clearly over-hyped, and in a way too early stage to seriously judge its qualities and potentials. It will take many months until it enters a stage where it can reach Facebook’s usability in terms of features and fine tuning. However, I am already convinced that they managed to “kill” Facebook and Skype with one strike, and possibly a few other competitors as well. Here is why….

Google has learned from its own mistakes and the mistakes of others. It enjoys the advantage of being able to launch a new product on the basis of a new kind of knowledge about social networking that has emerged in the last few years, and both have a fresh start as well as a head start because it does not have the baggage some of the competing networks have. It takes a more cautions privacy protection approach, both because it has made some own experiences and considering the massive backlash each time Facebook rips a new hole into users’ rights to information self determination. It also integrated some interesting concepts that appeared on Orkut and Diaspora, as well as tendencies that emerged from Twitter and Facebook. All that is already in Google+, even though it is not even a finished product. In a way we are where Facebook was before it launched, but with all the experience and know-how of 2011.

While Google+ is currently a very feature-slim social networking platform that most people do not have access to yet, it already accomplishes most of the essentials in a very intuitive way. There is sharing (integrated in Buzz, Google Reader, and Google-wide content sharing/posting services), categorizing contacts into “Circles” (think Diaspora’s aspects!) and the +1 button, which is a copy of Facebook’s like button, only Facebook does not have a globe-spanning search engine it can integrate it into. Yet here is the clue: Google+ already has a group chat functionality (“Huddle”), and a group video chat functionality (“Hangout”) built in and working without external programs. While Google’s chat/voice plugin for the browser is necessary, it can be said that they deliver a whole new social experience right out of the browser, with a high degree of platform-independence.

The best indication for my claim, that Facebook and Skype are under massive threat by these innovations, is the announcement by Facebook to integrate a Skype-powered videochat (currently only one-on-one). A social networking platform with Google’s reach, hype, philosophy and technical innovation is a serious threat to the Zuckerbergian view of privacy and Skype’s closed protocol and business practices. If Google+ matures, nobody will ever need Skype again (Google also offers phone calls, currently even free to the US), and most power users are sick of Facebook anyhow, not to mention consumer rights and data protection officials in such countries like Germany, which have declared Facebook a public enemy anyhow. Google’s mantra “do no evil” (despite slips such as the WiFi scanning) and its clean interface, offer much less room for criticism. Google+ does a lot of things right in terms of privacy settings and usability, which if matured will give it a huge edge over Facebook.

For quite some time now Google voice and video chat has been an attractive alternative to Skype for Linux users as well, who feel treated like second-rate human beings by Skype’s lackluster support of the Linux platform and horrible communications policies. Now it was bought by Microsoft, which for many users means nothing good can come out of Skype anymore. As much as Facebook has been a social innovator and platform for economic growth and democracy, it is a closed ecosystem despite the many APIs (which let Apps pull all the information they want, with little control by users), and in the long term – that is my opinion – closed systems do not survive. Google+ is of course not more or less open than Facebook at this point, but Google’s nature is a more open one, and the data it collects about its users it wants to monetize by delivering tailored services and ads, not by selling the information to anyone from Zynga to the CIA.

The best indicator for Google+’s success will be how well users adapt to it, and how well they instantly make use of its configuration philosophies. Circles are not for everyone, and only a fracture of web users ever reads tutorials or bothers to fine tune their privacy settings. That could back-fire. A rapid adoption rate could indicate that especially the digital avantgarde, the social activists, the web’s “upper class” will quickly migrate to G+, an observation that can in part already be made at the moment. Even if every owner of a Google email address or account starts using Google+ actively, it will not yet reach Facebook’s user base threshold, but the multiplicator effect in Google is much stronger. Consider Google Apps, too.

If Google manages to come up with a really fascinating way to allow business profiles on Google+, it will mean a quantum leap for online marketing, as those will automatically beat Facebook Pages in search rankings. If then it manages to come up with a good concept to allow Apps Accounts (all those @mydomain.com Email addresses that are powered by Google Services) onto Google+, the user base could quintuple within weeks.

Google+ is not another social network, it is a social network layer on top of an already very social array of services that are used by one of the biggest and most innovative companies on the web.  It will not have to start from zero. Users are tired of restrictions and cumbersome bloat, they will flock to Google like they flocked to it from Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft or Mapquest. I am looking forward to how the rest of the year will play out, but I am convinced that in Facebook and Skype headquarters, executives are sweating blood and taking tranquilizers.

Disclaimer: I currently work for a Google-initiated/funded project. The views above are my own, not Google’s.

Yes the age of operation systems is coming to an end, as it is more and more irrelevant which one you use. You’re storing your documents on the web, you’re using Facebook to communicate, something browser-based Google Talk for phone calls, an RSS reader to get your news and you’ve replaced your email client with a webmail account from a provider starting with M, Y or G most likely. But most people still use an operation system and for most of them it still matters, for various reasons. I use Ubuntu Linux, for various reasons which I don’t want to get into right now. What I want to write about today are 5 things I believe Ubuntu is doing right and 5 other things they are doing wrong, with the hope that someone will read this :)

5 Things Ubuntu is doing wrong

- They just can’t seem to fix hibernate on laptops. I am using the 10th or so Ubuntu now, and every 6 months I am hoping that the new update will finally allow me to properly hibernate my machine and wake it up again painless, as it’s been possible on other systems for the last 10 or so years. Suspend has always worked, and while still a little glitchy, it is mostly reliable. Why not hibernate? It is hard to believe that this is such a touch nut to crack. Ubuntu just can’t properly replace other OSs on mobile devices if power management doesn’t work as expected, and currently, it just doesn’t.

- Treating KDE like a community off-shoot certainly is not a good way to unite the community. As long as they treat Kubuntu as the unwanted step brother, resources will go wasted and potential unharnessed. Kubuntu needs an integration into the Ubuntu corporate design and strategy, and it needs to be (at least on the DVD-based installer) an installation option. The same goes for other “flavors” of Ubuntu in as far as they are mature enough. If I put an Ubuntu DVD into my computer the installation process should show me a short animated introduction about the Gnome-based and the KDE-based interface and then let me chose which one the default should be while letting me know that both will be installed and I can switch at any time.

- Ubuntu Brainstorm has been the long neglected ideation platform where Ubuntu users (the much-touted “human beings”) lament about things they miss and post ideas for what could be done better, and for the most part, all that has gone unnoticed (similar to e-participation in politics) unless these ideas have been in the pipeline anyway. This seems to be changing a bit but in general the “devs” need to orient their process more towards what users want, as Linux Mint shows, an Ubuntu-based distribution that mostly implements what the users want, not what the Ubuntu development process stipulates. It’s listening to demand that will bring success. It would save lots of resources and increase happiness and adaptation. The same goes for Ubuntu forums which mostly seem like places completely free of developers, with frustrated users mostly among themselves. Bread and games? Perhaps not, but it wouldn’t hurt if developers and users would work more closely together. Linux has been in the niche for too long, mostly because it was an OS for geeks, by geeks. That has to stop.

- Sticking to antiquated gnome-packaged software for too long will in the end hurt Ubuntu more than Gnome. I have no idea what Evolution is still doing pre-installed in Ubuntu. That application has not changed notably since it was first invented probably. It is a pain in the ass to use, offers no extensions ecosystem and just has no place in a contemporary system targeted at “human being” users. Poll after poll shows its decline, and people use web based email or Thunderbird, or innovative tools like Zimbra. Similar to that, why on earth was Pidgin replaced by Empathy? True, empathy seems to have a more open and compatible code base and framework and it has better gnome integration, but it isn’t half the messaging client pidgin is, and what stopped them from improving Pidgin’s Gnome integration? Lacking integration is precisely what stops Thunderbird from fully replacing Evolution (aside from the beta status of the calendar/tasks plugin that would put it on par with Evolution in terms of PIN functionality). And there’s a whole list of other little apps that just come with Gnome that either nobody uses or uses because there’s no real alternative. All these little panel apps (where is the plugin installation platform for that?) or the themes (80% of all the Gnome themes in the appearance dialogue have been there since 1995, at least that’s how it looks like, and why has that installation method not been modernized?).

- The gnome control panel has been around for quite a while now and been improved gradually, but it has never seen much love from Ubuntu and to date it has not replaced a redundant menu structure that people have just learned to live with. There are so many default settings/admin menu entries that nobody ever uses as a basic user, and so many other things missing, that it’s questionable why a central control panel (with zeitgeist integration so popular entries are on top for example) has not been made the cut yet. That frustrates.

5 Things Ubuntu is doing right

- They have a commercial backer who at the same time acts as the benevolent dictator giving the project leadership and the ability to make tough decisions. Mr Shuttleworth’s motives may be opaque but he’s managed to turn a Debian-based distro among many into the most-used Linux-based operating system. A vision and leadership is what it takes to steer a huge community and that has worked well for Ubuntu so far. The usability and paper cuts project is an example for really great quality assurance initiatives.

- Going along with that first point, another thing they are doing well right now is focusing on a strong brand, a corporate identity so to say, and visual polish. Ubuntu received its own font, a style manual, a color scheme, has usability guidelines for the UI and tries to have a wholesome appearance and feel. This will make it easier to identify Ubuntu as Ubuntu and not as stock Gnome, and the prettier it gets, the easier it will be to get started with it and to feel at home.

- Being open to saying goodbye. Ubuntu has started to be very daring and has gradually begun saying goodbye to established, almost never questioned, technologies. Currently it looks like the whole metacity and gnome panels will be a thing of the past very soon as Gnome 3 evolves and a more advanced user interface concept will take over. It is not entirely clear if that will be the much touted Gnome Shell or the netbook-borne Unity interface, but the next or maybe the release after that, will probably no longer offer old-fashioned panels, a concept most people are familiar with but has been with us since the invention of, I don’t know, the first OS X.

- The Software Center. Previously, Ubuntu had a menu entry to edit software sources, it had the update manager, and synaptic and the “add/remove software” dialogue. The separate entry for software sources has disappeared and the Software Center has all but replaced the rest. It is still not clear why the update manager is not integrated into the SC yet, but I am hoping this will only be a matter of time. If Ubuntu is to be for the human beings it prides itself to be for, a central place to manage software, software sources, and updates, is the way to go. And as it looks now, it will not be the terrible confusing mess that is YaST.

- Ubuntu is also, as with the user interface point I made above, trying to change the whole technical base it runs on, from changing the technologies used for booting the computer to managing graphics drivers, they are looking for which tough changes will in the long term ensure higher compatibility, sustainability and performance. They hinted at saying goodbye to the X-Server, and from what I’ve read, it’s about time to drop this dinosaur into the trash bin of history. The fact that boot (and all the nice boot splash images and animations) is still a pain in the ass for must users out there shows that there’s still lots of work to be done and I can imagine that aside from proprietary drivers what stands in the way of progress is a conservative attitude towards the technologies underlying the Linux desktop. Questioning established tools it the right thing to do I think.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading. That list is by no means exhaustive but I think I’ve outlined some things that have been bugging me personally and since I frequent the Planet and the forums quite a bit I don’t think I’m very alone with this. Ubuntu is improving every month, but there are still many things to sort out, most of all more user-driven development and more radical breaks with old established things. There are colossal failures that have become default, like the “me menu” (does anyone really use that?) and really useful things such as the different timezone clocks, but neither are seeing much improvement or change….

One of my hobbies is the Vietnam Conflict (I plan to read more about post-American phase soon), it’s origins, implications and conduct. That the conflict makes for a whole sub-genre of war movies is a different but not altogether unrelated matter. Vietnam was a huge issue for those young enough to remember student riots, Nixon and Woodstock, but for someone like myself it is a highly interesting academic study area. I have read a number of books, but want to point out one that I just finished that is particularly interesting for scholars of international relations. Gareth Porter‘s Perils of Dominance is an excellent re-examination of the road to war, that does away with some common misconceptions and credibly builds a new hypothesis for what constituted the rationale for war and the factors that influenced foreign policy decision making in the pre-Nixon administrations (the war itself is not subject of this book). It should be clear by now that what’s known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened, but what’s not so well known is how strongly all three presidents under examination resisted going to war and how over the decades their own national security bureaucracy mutated into a beast that was almost impossible to tame. That the “domino theory” was more of a PR slogan than actual policy comes out nicely from this book, and one of the more enlightening moments is when the author has the reader understand how completely different the reality in Vietnam and the perception of that conflict in Washington was. It is a depressing fact that at one point, the North Vietnamese were ready to accept all demands and hold nation wide elections and accept South Vietnam, but that information was simply suppressed, ignored and rejected. Not by a president, but by an advisor. The book is a careful argumentation and reconstruction of incidents that takes a close look at the Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese perspectives before turning to the inner workings of the presidents’ advisor circles. To cut it short, I found it to be a very informative analysis that will not change most people’s perception of the conflict but helps readjust the discourse and the history-writing. It is a very enlightening book but certainly not an introductory text, let’s call it a very advanced additional reading. Highly recommended.

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The Government 2.0 scene is in a buzz, CIO conferences and “gov camps” are proliferating, and more and more governmental entities can be found on Twitter and other “cool” social networks. That is nice and reflects a general willingness to embrace technical progress to some degree, but it falls short of the actual possibilities and promises that ICT has to offer.

One of the much heralded novelties of the “web 2.0″ age were wikis. Still today, the Wikipedia project and its offshoots are cited as the most successful forms of crowd-sourcing and user-generated content (even though the project’s governance structures are everything but democratic or bottom-up and only a tiny percentage of its users actually produce content). Still, sometimes I have the impression the only thing “2.0″ that is actually catching on in the public sector are applications that are fairly easy to implement, and not connected to too much effort. Setting up a Twitter account takes about a minute of time, content can be fed to it automatically from RSS feeds, checking it once or twice a day probably is sufficient for most agencies. Other things can be out-sourced (and often rightly so), such as the development of mobile applications, or the management of e-participation platforms. What is missing, is knowledge management, and all its promise for sustainable inter- and intra-agency empowerment and progress.

“Governments need more wikis” is not entirely what I am going for here, but it is puzzling that amid all the Government 2.0 buzz, the debate about how knowledge cane be most effectively bundled and harnessed, has largely quieted down. All the knowledge in an organization is usually hidden in a “garden salad” of proprietary documents on hard drives, hard copy folders in dusty shelves, the brains of under-used personnel or the horribly inaccessible web sites. Both internal and external wiki-based knowledge platforms would be game changers. Not only could public sector entities gradually and unrestrictedly build up easy-to-access hubs for knowledge (bringing with it a lowering of cost, freeing up of physical and digital space, empowerment of employees, etc.), with semantic technologies and the low cost of storage, much knowledge could also easily be provided to the public (creating trust through transparency) that might not be suitable for complicated integration into regular “home pages”.

The argument in favor of better knowledge management is hard to make, as its benefits are hard to measure, and especially (and that’s my point), and especially because in the end it is hard work. Such knowledge hubs need to be created. That is a slow process, and its effects might not show in months or years. Politicians don’t think long-term (that’s only one of their shortcomings), but public administrators should know better. Setting up such platforms requires little work or financial resources, so it is hard to understand why one would not be interested in taking a step toward more organizational sustainability. Hand books, tutorials, memos, transcripts, financial data, human resources data, planning documents, why lock all that away into inaccessible files and folders, when it could be at the fingertips of your employees?

I will be back with a blog entry on…. governmental blogging.

In a recent article in the European Journal of ePractice (quite a useful resource by the way), the authors examine Government 2.0 and perform a rough reality check. Unsurprisingly, their assessment is rather gloomy. Another good place to read about reality checks on a regular basis is the excellent blog by Andrea diMaio at Gartner, which I recommend. I am not writing this because I am an opponent of government 2.0 and love to quote articles proving how much nonsense it is (quite the contrary). But we are at a point, where I think two things need to be considered: one, that government 2.0 (and all that comes with it) is about to fail and die unless politics learns to deal with it rather soon (this is the urgency dimension), and two, that unless the advocates and practitioners learn to readjust their actions according to what they really want to achieve and stop following fashion trends and cool products, they will never be entirely successful (this is the conceptual dimension). Here is a short quote:

(Source) Too often, governments simply adopt social media tools, trying to replicate the existing communication and participation paradigm, rather than embracing more profound innovation – just as in government 1.0. As such, government 2.0 is destined to be little more than hype: the real impact is only enabled by institutional and cultural change. This implies the need for legal innovation, in particular in the field of Civil Service Code, Freedom of Information, Data Protection and Re-use of Public Sector Information. But most of all, government 2.0 implies a different way to manage public policies, based on openness, trust and meritocracy. Across public policy domains, governments have to learn to promote innovation and create public value not through direct intervention, but by leveraging and enabling the best capacities of citizens to be deployed and fully realised.

Government 2.0 is a term that refers to a ‘package’ of innovations in politics and public administration inspired by the new possibilities of the ‘web 2.0′ changes that have swept the world wide web. The problems with this term are, that the web is approaching the next “version number”, while government is struggling to make the transition from “1.2″ to “1.3″, and will probably not reach a state “2.0″ before the rest of the world is already at “5.3″. That is because the public sector does not embrace change as rapidly as the free market, and elites and bureaucracies are resistant to change the deprives them of power. Closely related to this problem, is the fact that government 2.0 is too much associated with certain web technologies, from social networking platforms to proprietary mobile phone applications. Already, much of what happens in this area, has nothing to do with modern social media (Open Data for example has little to do with social media, let alone web 2.0). Many popular technologies change too rapidly, are often products by certain companies that may disappear or become obsolete (does anyone remember MySpace?). They are often hype (Myspace, Twitter), fashion item  (iPhone) or market failure (Google’s dominance), but not a suitable word-replacement (like saying kleenex when you mean paper tissue) for the underlying technological innovations and possibilities that are actually responsible for what we really mean by the web 2.0, or 3.0

I think the public sector needs to react more quickly to what is currently happening world wide. Politics and administrations need to innovate fast enough to keep track with those “2.0″ developments that promise sustainable solutions and provide immediate public value. Particularly, many countries need to learn to open up and let young and skilled talents into their leadership to make this change possible in the first place, and shed off some of the old-fashioned structures and processes, which are unsuitable for the 21st century. Otherwise, we are in trouble, because the world will not stop changing just because politics is unable to keep up.

I think the advocates, mavericks and practitioners need to drop the term “government 2.0″ immediately from their vocabulary, rid their ideas of all brand names and trendy products, and remodel their approach towards the greater ends. What do I mean by that? Lets talk about Open Government as opposed to Government 2.0, just as one possible alternative, because what we really want to achieve is openness, and all the possibilities of participation and collaboration, open value chains and transparency that come with it. Tweeting ministers, half-empty message boards, fancy iPhone Apps or Tag Clouds are not really the goal we are ultimately trying to achieve. Going along with that, why waste all this energy on persuading officials to adopt Twitter if we don’t know if it will still be here next year, and who on earth came up with the idea of interfering so blatantly in competition by promoting the services of this one company? When have we started equating Apps with iPhone Apps? What happened to promoting open interfaces, standards and APIs to let the market come up with apps for any device? The open government “movement” needs to sit back, take a deep breath and take a blank sheet of paper. It needs to draw a horizontal line and write “government 1.0″ at the left end, “government 2.0″ a little to the right of that, and aaaaaall the way at the right end, but not completely at the end, it needs to write “open government or something like that”. And then, under government 2.0, we need to write 2011, because that is how long “government 2.0″ will last, in its current form, with all the inconsistencies in the terms being used, with all the overlap with modern e-government, and so on. What is too often overlooked and underemphasized is the need to first and foremost fight for changes in political culture, bureaucratic mentality, civic life and legal frameworks. In order to realize innovation, we need to ensure that there is a conducive environment for that. Without necessary legal changes to create certain freedoms in the public sector, without a different mindset within agencies, and without a culture of openness and transparency in politics, none of all the “gov 2.0″ things can produce lasting change, it will merely be a continuation of business as usual with nifty new toys to spread the same old gospel. If we do more to positively influence the institutional context and societies we live in, we may actually succeed in creating new ways of doing things, or these new ways will emerge on their own. Just as the internet, because of its openness, produced a change in the way we use it, so can the public sector. If it becomes an open platform, it will invite change, so that change does not have to break into it with clumsy brute force.

I hope I made my point and provoked a few of you to leave your comments. I hope to refine my argument continuously and incorporate feedback. Thanks for reading.

Here is a hardly discussed government 2.0 topic for you. When was the last time you took your city council / state government / federal ministry’s website for a spin? Did you find what you were looking for? Was there a quick search functionality? Did they have breadcrumbs? Was a tag cloud offered? When pasted to a text document, how many lines did the URL of any given content location encompass?

The emergence of content management systems (CMS) many years ago made it easier for institutions to manage their public information, as the web shifted away from direct file manipulation to database-powered dynamic websites. But while the web 2.0 has seen many innovations, from easy as pie blogging software to URL shorteners, content tagging and commenting, automated RSS feeds and “pretty urls” (via a so-called rewrites), many companies and institutions kept their expensive and unwieldly web 1.0 CMS. The idea behind CMS is to disconnect content from design, design from structure and structure from content. They allow publishing and modifying content from within a web browser, changing the look and feel of entire web presences with the click of a button and the modification of the whole concept without touching each of its contents and modules. In theory, CMS are a huge innovation in web publishing and in workflow management. No longer does a programmer have to come in, modify a html and picture files, and re-upload these to a web server. Now, everyone with a log-in to a designated section of the web presence could modify that on their own. But for bureaucracies this innovation meant learning yet another tool, and the painful adjustment process, along with the expensive purchase of often proprietary (or enterprise-grade open source) CMS software, made further change and progress hard to come by. As the amount of information published grew, and the areas covered by these web presences, they increasingly started to mirror the very institutions behind them. Often times two or more navigation menus lead to further sub menus, URLs started looking like this “http://nouvelles.gc.ca/web/article-fra.do?crtr.sj1D=&mthd=advSrch&crtr.mnthndVl=12&nid=502819”, where they used to look like something.gov/utilities.htm and the amount of text, PDF links (worst case: not even PDF) and side bars or information boxes experienced an inflation.

This has to change. As overlooked as the usability and content management aspect is in contemporary government 2.0 discourse, as important it is to the public. Ultimately, the bulk of government’s “customers” are not the gov 2.0 geeks who can spot the software used by taking a quick look at a home page. The average Joe & Jane are the target audience, and if they don’t find what they are looking for, if they feel overwhelmed, these web presences have failed the test. On top of that, horrible URLs, lack of semantic structures and insufficient adherence to technical standards make them virtual dead ends, with the information not shared, not found, not distributed and impossible to subscribe to or even read on devices other than discounter laptops with windows XP and Internet explorer 7. What public institutions, just like other big bureaucracies such as universities and corporations, need to learn, is how fast the web evolves and of how little use websites are to a variety of target audiences if they are badly designed, horribly implemented and built like Microsoft Word 2000′s document source code. Websites are not on-line versions of 20th century office correspondence, they are not a tree-structured pile of text and the CMS installed in 2002 does not provide adequate tools to publish content on the web by anyone’s standards.

There are encouraging examples where we see top notch design and implementation of really useful websites, that are in no way lacking behind more advanced tech community products. The principle “less is more” applies to website design just as it does to structure and content. Don’t overwhelm the reader with text and menus before he even found what he or she was looking for. Why spend thousands on expensive customized solutions if easy to use tools do the trick? The bulk of website out there realized with swiss-army-knife types of software could easily be realized with Word Press as well. Whitehouse.gov runs on Drupal. But look at utah.gov, etc….. there are positive examples and one has to wonder why so few follow suit, especially in continental Europe, where your government’s website hardly looks more inviting than the waiting rooms of their bloated bureaucracies.

This blog post is inspired by What’s in an URI? and 12 Worst Government Websites

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There are only two weeks left until I hand in my MPP thesis, which will conclude – at least for now – my career as a student. In the meantime, I have moved and already booked vacation flight tickets. When I am not puzzling together the remaining pieces of my thesis, I do seemingly procrastinative things like updating this blog and maintaining the scores of other web presences that I manage. I will write more in a few weeks.

I have now been using the latest release of the Ubuntu Linux distribution for many weeks now (yes I did start using it before it was actually released, I just couldn’t wait), and feel comfortable giving an educated statement about it. I am using the 64bit version, mainly because I think there are almost no reasons left to stick with 32bit if you have an actual 64bit system, and also because I would like to see progress made and by using it want to make a contribution to the establishment of 64bit as a standard. Ubuntu has a semi-annual release cycle, with a so-called “LTS” release every couple of releases, meaning every now and then they put an extra effort into releasing a really rock-solid version that they will give long-term commercial support for, hence “long term service (LTS)”. Version 10.04 (released month of April 2010) is such an LTS release, and that is one of the reasons it has been highly anticipated, the other is because the previous release was a major letdown by many accounts. But aside from that, it boasts a polished new interface with a new corporate design, a set of decent improvements to usability and increased support for cloud-based services, which include an online music store.

I think the release is one of the best in a long time, it offers a nicely polished interface, a decent set of applications (and a user-friendly online store to install additional applications as needed) and adequate hardware support. It shows the additional effort into usability that has been made in the last few months, even thought it looks more and more like a Mac. My main gripe? The whole boot process, which was supposed to be super fast and smooth and beautiful now with “plymouth” still looks shitty and doesn’t work well, even without proprietary graphics drivers (which don’t support so-called “kernel mode setting” required to make the boot process pretty). For most of the time you see a dark screen and when the nice boot splash finally comes up, the system has booted enough to go to the login screen, so you only get to see it for a second. The whole point was to show the splash screen instead of the black screen or not? Additionally, hibernate (a key feature for laptop users) still doesn’t work well. They dropped Gimp, the major Photoshop-replacement, which isn’t a bad thing, but they also went for Empathy as the default instant messenger, which is a ridiculously shitty and non-customizable application, and they stuck with Evolution, an Outlook-replacement which hasn’t changed since 1990 and isn’t half as innovative as Thunderbird, but more stable. All in all, I wished they had spent a few more months fixing bugs and polishing, working on the hardware support and giving third party developers more time. Some of the decisions (Empathy, etc) are clearly a step backwards and will only annoy advanced users. Also there seem to be no major under the hood improvements in terms of energy usage and performance other than the system being just overall more stable. Verdict: Best Ubuntu so far, but still a long way away from perfect

One thing that I find constantly annoying is the inability of major newspaper websites to have human-friendly URIs. The URI (unified resource identifier) is the “web address” you see in your browser’s navigation bar. It can be very simple and easy to remember, post, share and type, like “nytimes.com”, or it can be so inexplicably long and ugly like this one, linking to an article about Google’s problems in China at the German daily “FAZ”:

http://www.faz.net/s/RubDDBDABB9457A437BAA85A49C26FB23A0/Doc~E9F73DC4F0C444FE4BA1181212F925369~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html

Three things are wrong with an URI like that. 1) it is too long for no good reason 2) it makes no sense to a human and 3) it is systematically unsustainable. Let’s continue this little survey through the German newspaper landscape. The other major newspaper is the “Sueddeutsche Zeitung”.

This article about the upcoming Afghanistan conference is a step ahead of the FAZ:

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/,tt3m1/politik/790/501051/text/

It is considerably shorter, and the “/politik/” tells the reader just from the URI which section/topic he might be dealing with. But still the majority of this URI’s elements make little sense and one wonders why there is a comma in it for example, the FAZ’s URI even had a “tilde” (~), which I thought went out of fashion at the end of the 90s. Kudos to the “TAZ”, which comes close to a URI that I would not complain about, in an article on the world social forum:

http://taz.de/1/politik/amerika/artikel/1/verfechter-des-diffusen-und-bunten/

The URI makes sense to a human, is (aside from the two 1s, which I cannot explain) free of any shenanigans and is bearably short. The Financial Times Germany (“FTD”) leaves mixed feelings, in their article on Lafontaine’s latest career choice:

http://www.ftd.de/politik/deutschland/:lafontaines-rueckzug-eine-chance-fuer-links/50064665.html

I have no problem with the length, or the human-readability here, but what is the colon doing there, and why does it need the file ending and those random numbers? Let’s look at magazines or weeklies, and why not from the “Spiegel” on the same topic:

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,673667,00.html

Quite short, tells me it’s on domestic politics, but the rest are random numbers, commas and a file ending. Again: why? Spiegel’s competitor “Focus” is hardly any better:

http://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/lafontaine-rueckzug-linke-muss-sich-neu-sortieren_aid_473483.html

It has “aid” (which I assume means article ID) and a random number in it, which makes me wonder if they assume they will have the exact same identical headline some other time that might conflict, and the file ending, which the user just plainly does not need, not to mention the fact that the majority of internet users probably have not a clue what “.html” means.

Why am I writing all this? It bugs me that user-centricity seems to bear of little concern to an industry which like few others struggle so much with their very existence. Newspapers are losing readers almost every month, pushed aside by blogs and other sources of information. The newsPAPER’s future, is not on paper, yet not only do most newspaper websites look far from up-to-date, nor do they seem to care about the “average joe” surfer. For newspapers to surround their customers with an aura of comfort, visual appeal and interest, they need to rethink very simple and basic things such as the irrelevance of a file ending in an URI, the lack of prettiness of special characters and the inpracticality of very long links. You do not have to have a computer science degree to use mod_rewrite on your server, and a “pretty” URI like

http://www.newspaper.de/yyyy/mm/dd/headline-of-my-article

should really not be too much work.