He’s a very nice man.
Due to the unfortunate habit his opponents, and people who link him to atrocities like the Moscow apartment bombings have, of dying nasty deaths, you won’t find me saying anything bad about Vladimir Putin.
Monthly Archive for November, 2006
Alexa is a site that ranks websites’ popularlity by analysing sites visited by people who download their toolbar. However, its stats have long been thought to be dubious at best.
This morning I see Jason Calacanis is running a little experiment to see how easy it is to game Alexa’s results.
The only thing that confuses me is that he is asking for people’s help in this experiment. Surely the more people who help him, the less it shows that Alexa can be easily gamed - or am I missing something?
Keychain is a fabulous application which comes as standard on every Mac. It is the program which stores all your passwords for you.
For me, it has proven to be a lifesaver time and time again. I have more passwords for more sites than I have hairs on my head (not that that’d be very difficult!). I have systems in place to try to help me remember passwords but I frequently find myself staring at the login screen of a website with no idea what password (or username) I chose for the site.
This is where Keychain comes into its own. Launch it from Applications -> Utilities, search for the website, click the Show Password tick box. You are prompted to enter your login ID for your Mac, on doing so successfully, your password appears - brilliant!
I bought a new Western Digital My Book Pro Edition II last week to beef up my storage. It cost me €522. Unfortunately it was a dud. Didn’t work, out of the box. I wrote a quick post about the fact that it didn’t work last Monday.
A Google search for the term “My Book Pro Edition II” (without the quotes) shows my post complaining about the drive at search position number 2!
Any company worth its salt should be monitoring RSS Searches for its product names (and its company name, and its competitor names, and its competitor’s product names, and…) - here look, I’ll make it easy for you WD, here’s a link to a Google blog search for My Book Pro Edition II.
Keep an eye on that search through an RSS Reader. If someone complains about one of your products, respond to the complainant. There is no surer way of generating loyal customers.
By ignoring the complaints, there is no surer way of annoying your (soon-to-be former) customers. You won’t find me buying or recommending a Western Digital product anytime soon again.
Via Liz Lawley and Scoble comes probably the funniest video I have yet seen on YouTube.
I defy anyone not to laugh when watching this:
Joel Spolsky has written an interesting critique of Windows Vista where he points out that there are up to 15 ways to turn a Windows Vista computer off (I can think of a 16th - don’t license it and Windows will automatically disable your computer!).
He goes on to suggest ways to trim the number of choices down and effectively bring the number of options down to one or two.
However, Joel uses an out of date reference in his article. He says:
The more choices you give people, the harder it is for them to choose, and the unhappier they’ll feel. See, for example, Barry Schwartz’s book, The Paradox of Choice.
What Joel presumably doesn’t realise is that the Paradox of Choice’s findings have since been discredited by the authors of the paper on which Schwartz himself based his book. In their follow-up paper Knowing What You Like versus Discovering What You Want: The Influence of Choice Making Goals on Decision Satisfaction, the authors realised that when choice was ordered in ways which helped the consumer, more choice is better. Hence the success of Amazon, YouTube, Netflix, etc.
However, in the case of Vista, as Joel points out, who knows the difference between Hibernate and Sleep or Lock/Log Off/Switch User? In this case, it does seem Microsoft haven’t gone far enough to explain the differences and therefore only succeed in confusing their users.
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