bookbook blog

The launch of Google Sites (the old Jotspot) today basically means that the G-drive has arrived as well. When creating a new page in Google sites one of the page templates available is File Cabinet. You can attach documents to any wiki page but by using a File Cabinet template for a page you are giving it the sole purpose of holding documents.

I’ve been using online storage for a few years now. I started using Yahoo Briefcase which is awful. I then moved over to Omnidrive which is fairly good. Then Omnidrive went down the gurgler and I reluctantly moved to Skydrive from Microsoft.

The only documents I am saving are things I’ve scanned as pdf. Typical things are copies of certificates, forms and other original documents. Anything in Excel, Word or Powerpoint goes straight to Google Docs. Photos go to Picasa.

Storing documents in a wiki is actually very practical because you can easily arrange them and add meta-data. Having said that the whole idea of a wiki is to get away from file management; the content should be on the wiki page not in the attachment. You have to be careful therefore not to just dump stuff into the wiki. It’s worth taking the minute or so to tease out the key content, put it in a wiki page and (most importantly) hyperlink it.

I love Google Docs. I use it a lot. Quite how Google Sites and Google Docs are going to interact I am not sure. There’s a good argument to be said that the two should not be distinct but I doubt that a merger of the two will happen anytime soon.

Google Sites isn’t nearly as bad as some people would have you believe. From what I’ve seen it lacks a lot of the functionality of some of it’s big competitors (Confluence, PB wiki, mediawiki, Social Text) but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Confluence which I am probably most familiar with has a huge repository of plugins which add some really great functionality to pages but there is a tendency to overcomplicate pages when you have a lot of functionality. This usually results in content being hidden in toggles and tabs when one of the beauties of wikis is that they should leave all the content “out on show”. There is a good argument therefore that a simple wiki like Google Sites may actually be a better wiki than some of its fancy competitors. The fundamental building block of any wiki is the hyperlink. It’s all you really need to make a wiki work. Any other functionality runs the risk of detracting from the hyperlink.

At some point on the road to data portability I am going to have to decide who gets my profile. At the moment my profile is replicated in various degrees of completeness across the web. The data portable world however will allow me to choose one “profile provider”. At the moment no one is specifically providing this service as far as I know. Who are the contenders though?

1. OpenID providers: the OpenID providers are obviously one of the main contenders at the moment. Dedicated OpenID providers like MyOpenID don’t allow you to enter much profile information as yet but that could change. This wordpress blog is an OpenID but even that doesn’t have much of my profile.
2. Social Networks: Facebook probably has my most complete profile right now. It has a lot of my history in terms of education and jobs. It has some of my interests and hobbies and most of my contact details. If Facebook were to sign up to the principles of data portability then it would become a major contender for my profile. Facebook’s opposition to data portability however is well documented despite any platitudes it may have delivered.
3. Google, Yahoo or MSN: I have profiles with all of the big three and none of them is very good. I use a lot of Google’s services and it always amazes me that they haven’t tried to get more personal information out of me. I suppose that’s because they already know almost everything about me.
4. The lifestreamers: the new kids on the block. Friendfeed for example has a lot of information about its users. If I want to get a rounded picture of someone’s life, after their social network page, their lifestreamer is probably the next best thing. At the moment, apart from adding my services to Friendfeed, I haven’t really give it any other kind of personal information.

A clear, complete, centralised profile page has the potential to be really useful. It would allow you to effortlessly share details about yourself with your friends and service providers. At the moment there is a gap in the market for someone to create a really good profile service.

Just spotted this news item from the BBC. It was fairly predictable I think that News Corp would be interested. The new economy is going to be all about attention as some people have pointed out. Murdoch has been focussed on attention his whole life. Going right back to the Max Stuart case in 1959, Murdoch has spent his whole life trying to capture people’s attention and then sell that attention to whoever wants it.

Like Google, News will thrive in a world where the internet is innovative, open and free.

I for one think that a Yahoo/News merger/acquisition would be great for the internet. Murdoch has always shown disdain for entrenched encumbent players. The Microsoft/Google dominance has to be challenged. Bring on the attention economy: I’m waiting to be entertained.

Also on this topic I woke up at 5am this morning and decided for the first time in a long time to listen to a podcast. I just happened to have this documentary on my mobile. It’s part four of a four part documentary series about press freedom from the BBC. It has some really interesting analysis of Rupert Murdoch’s role in the world as well as a very scary quote from former editor of the Los Angeles Times, Dean Baquet, that there are possibly only four or five US newspapers with an on-the-ground day-to-day presence in Iraq. That’s scary. 300 million people in the US and only a handful of print journalists in Iraq. I’m sure those journalists are doing a great job but there seems to me to be an unacceptable risk that the truth might not find its way through such a tiny portal.

I’m going to expound my economic theories.

One of the best things about Australia

I really enjoy reading Ross Gittins in the Sydney Morning Herald. I often don’t agree with him for reasons which I can never really put my finger on. I’ve argued with economists in the past and I’ve found that they have the annoying habit of quoting facts at you. Obviously the trick to beating someone who is quoting facts at you is to come up with better facts but unfortunately most of my opinions are based on contrarian hearsay and populist rumour so I’m quickly undone by even the weakest actual knowledge. Despite all this I’m sure that, on at least one of two occasions, I’ve been right and Ross Gittens has been wrong.

This morning however I was in complete agreement with him when I read this article about th e current predicament facing the Australian government. Politicians can be a real liability in an election year. They have a tendency to promise things wrecklessly, like tax cuts at a time when inflation is a problem. I love small government so in theory I support tax cuts but I love innovative government more and plain old more-money-in-your-pocket tax cuts are certainly not innovative.

So what do I think the government should do? Super.

• They should reduce the 15% tax on super. That 15% after all is a tax on me. Reducing it is a genuine tax cut. It’s a tax cut which will have a very significant long term impact for me.
• Extend the super co-contribution scheme. Super co-contribution has a huge impact on long term savings. I remember David Koch talking about this in the paper a while back. It’s not technically a “tax cut” but I’m sure that a good bit of spin doctery could turn it into one. I’d like to see it extended to low paid people even if they don’t make personal contributions. This is especially important when they’re young. Currently a $1,000 personal contribution when you’re 18 can make you at least $200,000 better off when you retire. It’s good to encourage people to make personal contributions but for very low paid workers I don’t think it should be a precondition of receiving the co-contribution.

Super in Australia towers over the economy and to a certain extent the society as a whole. It’s hugely influential despite having been only in place for 15 years or so. It’s a great example of a how a very simple egalitarian law which requires very little government intervention can have a huge impact on a society. People who started working in the last 15 years are going to find that they are far wealthier on retirement than workers in any other country in the world. You can play around with all the numbers as I’ve done here and what they show you is that someone who works on the minimum wage their whole life will retire with around $2,000,000 $1.2m. That’s without any personal contributions or co-contributions. Reducing the 15% super tax rate by 3% would give that same worker almost $200,000 more.

Australia is so far ahead of the rest of the world in pensions and superannuation. Not only are they already 15 years ahead of most of the rest of the world but most of the rest of the world is in no place to implement such a scheme even now. It’s such an important thing to get right. Most countries are only just grappling with the problem but Australia has already solved it. I heard recently that super savings here in Australia recently topped $1 trillion dollars.

One of the great side effects of superannuation in Australia has been that it breaks down the old social barriers between shareholders and workers. Everyone in Australia is a compulsory shareholder. Share prices are not something that rich people check in their morning papers. They affect everyone, from the dustman to the doctor. In a way it has created the ultimate egalitarian capitalist society where everyone has a stake in the economy.

Superannuation changes politics as well. Although they have traditional left-right politics here in Australia both sides are ultimately representing very wealthy supporters. It narrows the gap between rich and poor.

One of the worst things about Australia

Debt, as I’m beginning to understand, can be a good thing. It forces you to work for one. It also forces you to look for ways to increase your income. For an economy those are good things. Keeping house prices fairly high I suspect (although I am no economist) can have the effect of boosting productivity.

The problem however comes with the availability of the debt. Banks love lending. It’s how they make money. They make up some rules such as earnings multiples and asset tests to try to appear responsible but ultimately they want to lend you as much as they can without financially ruining you. If their rules won’t allow them to lend then they’ll give the money to someone else with weaker rules who will lend to you. Excessive debt makes people unhappy. It’s simple. I’d like to see stricter rules around lending to ensure that debt levels do not become excessive. It’s not enough to leave it to the individuals to decide what debt they can afford because we’ll just end with a race to leverage up as we have now. All the best housing will go to the biggest risk takers instead of the best producers.

I just read this really interesting article from the Age arguing that lending limits should be based on a multiple (20) of estimated rental income. It’s a great idea. Lenders will always find ways to lend more than they should but hopefully if you make enough rules the flood of debt will begin to dry up.

From the little I know about economics the euphoric rush to leverage up during a boom is a major factor in the severity of the ensuing bust. Slow that rush and we might see a more orderly procession in the world economy.

Update: the government must be reading my blog. Just spotted this news.

One rule about saying sorry is that you can’t put a “but” in the same sentence (unless you’re Bill Clinton).

We were right, but we’re sorry

We’re sorry, but we were right

The but completely nullifies the sorry. You might as well not say sorry at all. I got the feeling on Tuesday that a lot of Australians, rightly or wrongly, wanted to try to sneak a “but” into the sentence. In the end though I think Rudd got it just right. There’s plenty of chance for “buts” later on.

Great public apologies are fairly few and far between but I personally think that Rudd’s was a little lackluster especially when you compare it to Bill Clinton’s Tuskegee apology. I can’t find a video of it but Clinton managed to stretch the words “I am sorry” over about a minute. “I…20 second pause…am…20 second pause…sorry…20 second pause….” It was a masterful performance from what I remember. Pure Clinton.

“What was done cannot be undone, but we can end the silence … We can stop turning our heads away. We can look at you in the eye, and finally say, on behalf of the American people, what the United States government did was shameful and I am sorry.”

I just noticed for the first time on the BBC a bit of reporting done on a mobile phone. I wonder whether we are about to see a replay of the Wapping dispute except with cameramen instead of print workers.

The Wapping dispute of 1986 saw Rupert Murdoch play his part in the Thatcherite campaign against the unions. There were a number of points of contention between the print unions and News International but ultimately the dispute boiled down to technology. The powerful print unions opposed the introduction of offest litho printing which was far less labour intensive than the hot metal linotype method which was used at the time. News International which owned The Times, The Sunday Times, News of the World and The Sun clandestinely built an offset litho printing plant in Wapping and in the face of fierce union opposition transferred printing of its papers there from Fleet Street. I’m told that the best account of the dispute is in Bill Bryson’s Notes from a small island

Of course broadcasters don’t need to build new studios in Wapping. All they need to do is buy a mobile phone.

I have a feeling that I’ve written about this before but I can’t be bothered to look back through my archives so I’ll just risk repeating myself. I use a lot of Google services. I use gmail, reader, picasa, documents, bookmarks, blogger, calendar, groups, books, igoogle, finance and youtube. The social side of all these services is currently fairly limited. In fact, each one asks you to recreate your contacts list. Dataportability would allow Google to truly unite all its services by tying them into a single user ID and contact list. I suspect there are some big brains over in Mountain View currently working out how to do this as seemlessly as possible. How long before we start seeing websites wearing the dataportability logo as a badge of honour?

Sarah Boxer on blogs

I have just been trying out the feeds on libprs, one of which is the New York review of books. This morning I read an interesting article by Sarah Boxer about blogs. It’s a really well written article. It won’t contain many surprises for people who know a bit about the blogosphere but it’s a very succinct, well-written, balanced overview of the blogging world. In particular she describes the difficulty of reprinting blogs in print:

With such riches to choose from, you might think it would be a snap to put a bunch of blogs into a book and call it an anthology. And you would be wrong. The trouble? Links—those bits of highlighted text that you click on to be transported to another blog or another Web site. (Links are the Web equivalent of footnotes, except that they take you directly to the source.) It’s not only that the links are hard to transpose into print. It’s that the whole culture of linking—composing on the fly, grabbing and posting whatever you like, making weird, unexplained connections and references— doesn’t sit happily in a book.

Hyperlinking is ultimately what sets html apart from from print. It is one of the founding features of the world wide web and also one of its most enduring….

…which, for some reason, reminds of the Choose your own Adventure series of children books. Wouldn’t game books like this work really well in the hyperlinked world?

Well I’ve had my reader for almost a month now. I’ve read a few books and started a lot more. The problem which I’ve always had with books (starting them but never finishing them) has followed me into the ebook world.

Interesting things I’ve been reading:

This bit of insight into East-West relations in the 17th century from Micah Clark. Decimus Saxon recounts the story of his escape from a Turkish prison in “Stamboul” by means of converting to Islam. Here he explains what happened after he was released:

‘I set off forthwith to their chief mosque–that of St. Sophia. When the doors opened and the muezzin called, I was ever the first to hurry into devotions and the last to leave them. Did I see a Mussulman strike his head upon the pavement, I would strike mine twice. Did I see him bend and bow, I was ready to prostrate myself. In this way ere long the piety of the converted Giaour became the talk of the city, and I was provided with a hut in which to make my sacred meditations. Here I might have done well, and indeed I had well-nigh made up my mind to set up as a prophet and write an extra chapter to the Koran, when some foolish trifle made the faithful suspicious of my honesty. It was but some nonsense of a wench being found in my hut by some who came to consult me upon a point of faith, but it was enough to set their heathen tongues wagging; so I thought it wisest to give them the slip in a Levantine coaster and leave the Koran uncompleted. It is perhaps as well, for it would be a sore trial to have to give up Christian women and pork, for their garlic-breathing houris and accursed kybobs of sheep’s flesh.’

I’ve never read the Satanic verses so I’m not really sure what earns you a fatwa but I suspect Arthur Conan Doyle came dangerously close here.

Also from Micah Clark, a great euphemism for stuffing your face: playing havoc amongst the eatables. Here’s the full context:

It seemed as if he [Decimus Saxon] had cast off his manner with his raiment, for he behaved to my mother during supper with an air of demure gallantry which sat upon him better than the pert and flippant carriage which he had shown towards us in the boat. Truth to say, if he was now more reserved, there was a very good reason for it, for he played such havoc amongst the eatables that there was little time for talk.

I also just started Unbeaten Tracks in Japan by Isabella Bird. Written in 1878, it tells the story of a single woman’s journey through Japan. This is the first sentence of the book:

Having been recommended to leave home, in April 1878, in order to recruit my health by means which had proved serviceable before, I decided to visit Japan, attracted less by the reputed excellence of its climate than by the certainty that it possessed, in an especial degree, those sources of novel and sustained interest which conduce so essentially to the enjoyment and restoration of a solitary health-seeker.

That’s some sentence!

Update on RSS on the Sony Reader

I just found out about the awesome libprs500 which can convert RSS feeds into LRF files to read on the Sony Reader. I downloaded the entire BBC news site content this morning and read it while I was waiting for my paper to arrive. When the paper did arrive I didn’t even open it. I’d had enough news for the day. Today’s news feeds from the BBC created a 450 page lrf file which is probably similar to a newspaper once you’ve adjusted for the size of the page and the print. It had everything: world news, local news, business, technology, sport, nature, education, entertainment and much more. Libprs500 also allows you to set up your own RSS feeds for download.

My dataportability video

Finally here is my dataportability video with a Woody Guthrie protest ditty thrown in for good measure:

One of the big selling points of the Kindle is the ability to read blogs and newspapers. The Sony Reader doesn’t have wireless so you can’t just wake up in the morning and start reading your favourite newspaper. It does however have the ability to automatically download RSS feeds. The list of available feeds is quite limited at the moment. The big step would be if you could subscribe to any feed instead of just the ones that Sony chooses. Basically all that Sony is doing is aggregating a day’s feeds from a blog, converting them to a BBeB file and then automatically downloading it your computer. Then you can set up a sync with your Reader and hey presto you have a blog on your Reader. Of course you need to connect your Reader to a computer.

I suspect that a lot of people who work in tech know about this already but I only heard about this today. It applies to all laptops.

There is a tax break in Australia for laptops which means that employers can give laptops to their employees without an tax implications. They’re a free benefit and as far as I know the employer can still claim the GST. Now most employers aren’t just going to give you a (personal) laptop for free just because you want one but they won’t mind you buying it yourself with a salary sacrifice.

If you are about to buy a new home laptop then stop! You can save up to 51% (depending on how much you earn) by salary sacrificing the cost of the laptop (ex-GST because your employer can claim the GST) and getting your employer to buy it for you. Someone earning at least $77,000 could easily save $1,000 if they were buying a high-spec laptop or $250 if they’re buying an ASUS Eee. Here are my calculations.