Perspectives, opinions, comments and rants.
Free speech in action.No theme is excluded here, although most of the posts will be about technology, music, travelling, and politics. BTW, did you notice that the word "politics" is really an accurate description: "poli" is Greek and means "many" and "tics" are "ugly blood-sucking creatures". So there.
Current location:
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I have repeatedly written about unsolicited emails, briefing requests (here and here) and other spam-like stuff flooding my inbox. While my Outlook filters work fine by dumping all offenders' emails into the trash folder, maybe I should let the senders know, too, by telling them"Thanks. No." Kudos to Amanda Congdon's Rocketboom episode for bringing this to our attention. I like it... simple and to the point. Thanks. No.
What a brilliant story. Apparently, BBC anchor Karen Bowerman is supposed to interview Guy Kewney about the Apple vs Beatles lawsuit. Trouble is, Guy is at home, but some other fella named Goma is mistakenly sent to the TV studio and he does his best to answer the questions. First, he looks genuinely stunned, but then responds without flinching once. Any seasoned analyst couldn't have done better. Still ROTFL. The Mail on Sunday has the full story.
The interview
Karen Bowerman: Guy Kewney is editor of the technology website Newswireless.
Face of horror
KB: Hello, good morning to you.
Mr Goma: Good morning.
KB: Were you surprised by this verdict today.
Mr Goma: I am very surprised to see... this verdict to come on me because I was not expecting that. When I came they told me somehting else and I am coming. So a big surprise anyway.
KB: A big surprise, yeah, yes.
Mr Goma: Exactly.
KB: With regards to the costs involved do you think now more people will be downloading online?
Mr Goma: Actually If you can walk everywhere you are gonna see a lot of people downloading the internet and the website and everything they want. But I think eh It is much better for development and eh to inform people what they want and to get the easy way and so faster if they are looking for.
KB: It does really seem the way the music industry's progressing now that people want to go onto the website and download music.
Mr Goma: Exactly. You can go everywhere on the cyber cafe and you can take, you can go easy. It is going to be an easy way for everyone to get something to the internet
KB: Thank you. Thanks very much indeed.
Google came out with another interesting toy: Google Trends. By entering popular search terms into the entry field, Google plots a statistic about the historical search relevance of the term. Particularly interesting is the ability to compare search items over the same time period. For example, let's see how Formula 1 drivers Fernando Alonso, Michael Schumacher, and Kimi Räikkönen were searched since 2004. It's not surprising that Alonso dominated the search in 2005 with the peak being the D flag, when he became world champion. The other interesting fact is that Schumacher lead the News Reference Volume in 2004, before Alonso took over in mid-2005. With McLaren-Mercedes not constructing competitive cars and not winning any races, their search volume is on the bottom.
Where are the majority of searches come from? Well, with Alonso being Spanish, you can't be surprised that the top 10 cities are all in Spain: Oviedo, Santiago De Compostela, Malaga, Las Palmas De Gran Canaria, Leon, Valladolid, La Coruna, Zaragoza, Madrid, Bilbao. 
Looks like Hyperion leads the pack by quite a margin in terms of people entering their name into Google, while both Microstrategy and SAS have a low dial tone. An interesting pattern is shown on the news volume chart: it seems that around the end of each quarter there are peaks, most likely originating from an earnings call. The real surprising data (to me) is coming from the chart depicting the origin of the search. If anybody still things India is not a force, check this out: 
Sure looks as if Business Objects and Cognos are the most relevant vendors in India, and the Vancouver data can be interpreted as a lot of ex-Crystal folks researching themselves. I wonder whether the vendors use that kind of data to decide how to distribute marketing dollars.
Looks like this and other blogs are for the enjoyment or the entertainment of the author and the respective readers more than anything else. Because according to this study by GlobeScan, done for the BBC-Reuters-Media Center “We Media” Forum, people don't trust the information gathered on blogs. That hurts. Or does it?
I guess, as a blog reader, for me it depends whether I actually know the blogger, often personally, because his/her name are visible. However, anonymous bloggers rank rather low on my trust level. Particularly, when discussing controversial subjects, talking to a phantom does regularly make my BS alarm go off. That would make those blogger be categorized as quadrant 1. Seems like quadrants can be used in all sorts of ways, and this one from Paul English appears to magically work as well.
It may not really be a representative sample when looking at the browser ratio that visits this blog, but it appears that the browser war isn't quite over yet and there are more browser types out there than we are made believe. While Netscape seems to have lost pretty much all of its users (I mean, they were the browser, back in the mid 90s) to Internet Explorer, which holds the lion share at the moment, Firefox is apparently turning the tables right now. Heck, I've been using the Mozilla browser since it started, and now with the possibility to plug in an IE rendering engine into Firefox for those sites that the Gecko engine doesn't quite like, I've been IE-free for quite some time. Since Firefox version 1.5, the annoying memory leaks have also disappeared, at least for now. Nice work, guys.
