Status-Q

In the UK, every vehicle has to display a tax disc which generally needs to be renewed once a year.

This year, for the first time, I could pay for the replacement online, and it was posted to me. Very convenient. The details are also printed rather than handwritten, and are rather more legible than last year’s one!

But in the past you had to go to the post office taking both evidence of your insurance and your vehicle’s MOT (road-worthiness) certificate, which would be checked by the cashier before you could get the disc. In theory, then, the police or the traffic wardens could look at a car and tell that it had appropriate insurance and mechanical condition.

With the online process, you just have to tick boxes affirming that you have these. No other human is involved. Somehow this doesn’t make me think that our roads will become safer…

Actually, if I remember correctly, the MOT test database is checked as part of the process, so that bit is covered. But what about the insurance companies? Is there a central service that can be checked for that too? I think uninsured drivers are more of a problem than unreliable cars…

I’ve never used Microsoft’s Mappoint mapping service in the past, but it has a rather neat option when requesting directions, called LineDrive™ – this attempts to produce more useful directions, such as you might sketch for someone on the back on an envelope.

This is the route from my house in Cambridge to my brother’s in Southampton, 130 miles away:

I think this is rather nice, and an efficient use of screen space; ideal for mobile devices. Just as long as you don’t ever stray off the route…

Thanks to Christine Herron for the link.

Regular readers will know that I helped start a Seattle-based company called Exbiblio, which is based on some quite interesting technology and business concepts.

What’s also interesting is that Exbiblio have decided to blog about as much of their life as possible. Some of the blogs are for internal use only, and those are proving to be quite an effective communications mechanism. But there’s also a public blog which is written both by people on the inside and an outside observer, Hugh Fraser (no relation!), who has been brought in specifically to document the building of this somewhat unusual company.

Exbiblio, the company, is about changing the way we interact with paper documents. But it may also be about changing the way startups do business.

If you think you’re confused about the Net Neutrality issue, you should read what Senator Ted Stevens had to say.

Or you can listen to him. No need to listen to the whole thing. I’m sure you can gain enlightenment by scrolling around and listening to a few snippets…

Here’s a web service I’ve always valued: TinyURL.com.

Have you ever wanted to send a web link to somebody and discovered that it has a long and unwieldy URL like this one?

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=trinity+college+cambridge
&ie=UTF8&ll=52.204329,0.115727&spn=0.003925,0.007972&t=k&om=1

It really messes up your email formatting, some email programs fragment it so it isn’t clickable, and it’s impossible to dictate to somebody over the phone or to send in a text message.

If you hop over to TinyURL.com, though, you can just paste it in and get back something like this:

http://tinyurl.com/nmcsk

which does the same thing and is much easier to hand around.

There are other services like this, but TinyURL has been around for a long time and seems to do a good, efficient and quick job.

A few days ago, I had the great pleasure to be at John Naughton’s inaugural lecture as a Professor at the Open University.

For those who are confused about the timing, I should point out that while John is loved and celebrated for many things in this world, promptness is not always one of them, and his inaugural lecture came just four years after he was awarded the chair. 🙂

In stark contrast, however, he has been very efficient in getting a transcript of his lecture online, and The Social Life of Networks comes strongly recommended. The webcast will be even better.

(For international readers unfamiliar with the British academic system, a ‘Professor’ here is an honorary post granted to very few. John has been a lecturer at the OU for over 30 years and is also a fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.)

There’s been much debate here in the UK about whether the BBC is giving too much coverage to the football (soccer) World Cup. On their web site, they’ve come up with a neat solution: you can choose whether or not to put the site into ‘World Cup mode’.

It probably won’t be long before we’re able to do such things with our TVs and radios as well. The concept of discrete channels is so 20th century; soon your channels will be hierarchical. (‘Tonight I’m going to watch cnn.sports.hockey’). Or maybe you’ll simply tune your TV to a set of your favourite keywords…

Tim Berners-Lee warns of the dangers of a two-tier internet.

The telecoms companies don’t really have a leg to stand on here, I don’t think. I’ve heard them complain that companies like Google and Skype are making lots of money from customers on their networks, and they’re not getting a share of it. But they are, of course. The whole reason people want to buy their broadband services is that there are companies like Google and Skype out there.

And that’s not counting the fact that those companies are already paying for their bandwidth at the other end. A recent estimate put YouTube‘s connection costs at $1M/month. So if service provider X is concerned, for example, that they failed to win YouTube’s contract, but they’re handling lots of traffic to and from YouTube’s site, they should sort it out with the other service providers concerned, not simply try and aim at the people for whom they feel the most jealousy.

For those of you who, like me, find yourselves running out of disk space too quickly, here’s a statistic to help keep your problems in perspective:

Yahoo Mail’s storage requirements are measured in terabytes per hour.

from Jeff Bonforte’s talk at e-Tel, when he was talking about the ‘SMTP fiasco’ – the spam problem