A guest blogger on Tom Raftery’s site posted about Firefox’s marketshare in Europe and his site’s statistics. Here is mine for comparison. Internet Explorer on Windows is the dominant browser and operating system but overall Internet Explorer is just 3% more than Firefox across all operating systems.
Anyone else think it is weird, daft and scary that News Corp. could soon own the Dow Jones? This is the same company that owns My Space, GQ, The Sun tabloid and many other completely vacuous media companies. Rupert Murdoch with a say on the Dow Jones, charming.
I am such a nerd. Posting a photo of my hand with an iPhone in it. But, kids, this thing rocks.
Now if I could only make calls with it here in Ireland…. 
A new version of Flock is out, 0.9, inching towards 1.0, and I have to say they have made it even more confusing and bloated. There is now a proliferation of tiny icons, a new “My World” screen which exhausted its usefulness in 10 seconds and an updated skin which took a decent skin (I’ve long wanted a Flock skin for Firefox, just the skin, not any of the Flock functionality) and added curves and doohickies, rendering it inelegant.
I’ve tried to like and understand Flock because some very good programmers are involved in it. But the concept, stuff built-in media and social features into Firefox, never seemed right to me (how about an extension or set of extensions rather? Or just use the web) and its performance is still frustrating. Firefox is dog slow to load but Flock is worse.
It is good to read Nielsen are realising page-views are not an accurate measure of a website. Sadly they have chosen “time-spent” as their new measure.
As a pure value it is a good one to measure but “time-spent” is not a measure of the value or importance of a website. Google Search will suffer on a time-spent metric but Google Search will still be one of the most important websites. Come to think of it all the sites I cannot do without are very good at minimising the amount of time I spend on them. They are tools which let me get in and out as fast as possible. They get the job done. Lingering around, or “stickiness”, is an old way of thinking about the value of a website and Nielsen seem to be catching up with 1999.
Nielsen seem to think sites with the best time-spent metric will help advertisers. I disagree as an effective advertisement has a static amount of time to grab me. An advert becomes less appealing the longer I see it, not more. And the websites that I spend time on, not the gateway tools like Google Search, are the ones I am least likely to click-through on adverts because I am already at my destination. It is the gateway sites where adverts are more effective, the sites I spend the least time on. An advert click-through is a snap-decision.
I’m not sure what should replace page-views but time-spent isn’t it.
I had a few minutes to play with an iPhone my boss brought back from New York. It is heavier than expected and feels solid, not like the plastic-fantastic feel of a Nokia N95. It is also smaller than I thought, the thin body and the rounded edges feel good in the palm of my hand. The screen, which feels just like the glass it is made from, was smudged but you don’t notice the smudges once it is turned on. That bright, gorgeous screen shines right through. I didn’t have time to do much with it but I dialled in a few numbers with the on-screen keypad and it feels fine to me. I tried it one-handed, typing with my thumb and that worked too. The slide mechanism to unlock the screen is really slick.
Only bit I didn’t like is when it goes into standby you have to hold down the button on the top and then unlock with a slide.
Initial impressions are good, it feels like a quality Apple product. Hopefully I’ll get some more time with it over the week and try out its browser, WiFi and, oh yes, the phone bit.
Maybe I am thick but the waste management system here in co. Waterford is a tad confusing. Or at least the information online is confusing to me.
Outside our house we have two bins; a brown bin for organic waste and a grey bin for refuse. There is no green bin for recycling.
The information online is confusing because you can get tags for a year to stick on your bins (but I don’t see any mention of tags for green bins) or you can get labels which vary in use. We’d rather go with the tag, pay one big fee per year and leave it at that.
The application forms online though seem to be for people who don’t have bins or only have a grey bin. Not for people who have two of the three bins but no tags.
So how do I get the tags for the grey and brown bins and how do I get a green bin and do I need a tag for it?
After a bit of hunting around, quite a lot of “Aglish? Is that still in Ireland? No, we don’t cover you” we finally got a broadband connection from home. Thanks to Azotel-Ocean who had to put up a reflector dish and threw in a WiFi router to cover our home. Speed is good so far and this is on a windy, wet night.
CNN.com may not be the best site for news but their redesign is well done.
Daily bits...