If things go flaky in the next few days, I’m in the process of moving TechWhimsy from GoDaddy to Media Temple. So if you find things missing or comments disabled, don’t panic. In theory this should be somewhat painless.

Things should be fine but you never know…

Slacktivism: n. 1. halfhearted activism.
(Wikitionary see also Slacktivism on Wikipedia)

At the recent Digital Citizens event “Social media for social good”, many worthwhile and interesting  issues were discussed that revolved around how Not For Profits (NFPs) could use social media to raise awareness of their particular issues and use that awareness to try and achieve some substantial change. However, all of the panelists on the night danced around the notion of big online campaigns that attract widespread but shallow engagement. In other words, what about the slacktivists?

While slacktivism is everywhere, it is highly visible is social media. For example, classic slacktivist slacktivities include changing your avatar on a social network (twibbons being the obvious example) or following a Facebook group that professes to support some cause or other.

The personally removed nature of online interactions make it very easy to look engage with little to no effort and indeed little to no emotional or financial cost to the individual. Even ribbons, wristbands or lapel pins (which achieve as much social change as a twibbon) at least require a financial investment that has the added benefit of raising funds for the NFP. Online slacktivism adds nothing but awareness that is fleeting if not followed by action.

You get the engagement you deserve.

People are busy. You are battling competing interests. Frankly, most people are lazy and disinterested in your campaign to begin with. It’s hardly the most supportive environment to bring attention to your cause.

It’s not enough to just drum up support. Simple gestures with low barriers to entry like twibbons, Facebook groups or online petitions are merely a gateway. If you cannot provide a clear road map of action that accommodates different levels of engagement from your supporters, you might as well not have started to begin with. Attention is precious. Don’t waste it.

Slacktivism allows someone to feel engaged while they make empty non-committal gestures that them indicate a basic level of support with having to commit to anything or make any real investment beyond a few seconds of their time.

The depth of feeling and support from your supporters is directly related to the amount of prep work you do for them and what you give of yourself to your supporters in the process. It’s basic leadership: put in the groundwork and map out a clear pathway, people will follow you to the final goal. Slacktivism fills the void that is left behind when an issue becomes stronger than the leadership in the community.

Bringing the slacktivists into the fold

If you are going to use social media to encourage individuals to participate and affect real change, you need to engage with individuals. Getting people to contribute to anything that does not provide them with an immediate benefit  is difficult. You only need to ask the same old faces that man the canteen at your children’s sporting events every week, or those who help out at the homeless shelters or the stand on street corners soliciting donations. Volunteering is often a thankless task with a shortage of people prepared to step in and do their part.

Online campaigns and social media are no different. People are still people, no matter the mode of interaction and communication. Getting people to volunteer real time and real resources is hard. Signing a petition, changing an avatar or joining a Facebook group are easy and, for the most part, very public ways of showing support without even getting out of a chair.

The only way you will really engage with these people is through baby steps. Without a clear plan of progressing such people through incremental action, they will shallowly interact and then fade away.

If you haven’t done the work, neither will they. You get the engagement you deserve.

Some of the most memorable moments of future computing in sci-fi film emphasise ease of use rather than raw power, features and hackability.

Think “enhance” in Bladerunner…

(sorry about the quality)

or the classic touch user interface in the Minority Report…

Most people don’t want fancy computers, they want things that just work without too much effort. Everyone knows what the technology is capable of doing these days, and most people despair at some point that it isn’t easier to use.

Diversion 1: Mobile phones

People hated their mobile phones. The screens were too small, the interfaces were fiddly and menu-centric, applications were limited and so was the power of the hardware they ran on. Syncing your phone with your computer to unify your contacts database involved ritual sacrifice and blood oaths, and heaven help those who wanted to sync a Windows Mobile phone with a Mac. Along came the Blackberry, and all of a sudden email on a mobile phone in an enterprise setting was easy (although I understand the syncing thing with a Mac still sucked).

Then, along came the iPhone, and it wasn’t just the hardcore geeks and executives who were expoed to the potential of mobile computing. Suddenly millions of people were able to do remarkable things with an easy to use device that sat in their pocket. A number of clones and “iPhone killers” followed, as suspiciously iPhone-like devices running a variety of operating systems cropped up in the market place like toadstools in the garden after the rain. All it took was one powerful, easy to use device, and the game changed forever.

Home networking has travelled an interesting trajectory. Setting up a home network, particularly a wireless one, is almost trivial. However, getting said network to do anything beyond sharing an internet connection and some basic file sharing still takes work, even more so if you’re trying to connect across different operating systems, despite the best efforts of OS X and Windows 7. We know from our experience in the enterprise that networks can be powerful – shared printing, networked storage, roaming profiles – but only the geekiest amongst us can set these things up at home with ease. For many, it’s just too hard.

Diversion 2: Wireless Toys

Oregon Scientific wireless weather stations measure a range of weather conditions such as temperature, rainfall, humidity and barometric pressure and transmit this information wirelessly to a portable LCD panel inside the house.

Efergy have a number of products designed to monitor household usage of electricity. One such product measures the amount of electricity being used by a household and transmits results to an LCD screen inside the house.

Smart Home Z-Series home automation devices use radio frequency spectrum and the proprietary Z-Wave wireless protocol. This collection of devices enables people to exercise a level of control over wireless security cameras, appliances and lamps using a remote control, Windows PC or the recently released Z-Server appliance. The Z-Server is accessible remotely via the internet and includes specific mobile device interfaces. Future Z-Series modules will include controllers for audio-visual equipment and ceiling lights.

The iPad Recap

For the uninitiated, the Apple iPad is a 1024×768, 9.7” touch screen controlled device, with wi-fi and optional 3G connectivity. It has between 16GB and 64GB of storage space. Although apparently a very capable device, it is not a high-powered computer and does not allow multi-tasking outside the native Apple applications (same as the iPhone and iPod Touch).It has an app store similar to the iPhone and unlike the iPhone pairs wirelessly with commodity Bluetooth keyboards. Full details of the device are available at the iPad tech specs page.

The iPad has many faces:

• e-book reader (via the iBook app)
• handheld gaming device
• email/web/office productivity on the go (a specially created Apple iWork app is available, and no doubt more will become available over time)
• media consumption device for photos, music and video

The iPad is exciting for all the reasons outlined above. It is indeed an awesome feat of technology that can seamlessly fit all those things into the one cohesive and intuitive device. If the closed ecosystem isn’t to your fancy, no doubt the market will soon be flooded with clones running operating systems such as Windows 7 or Android (or other variants of Linux for that matter). Competition will drive innovation and help develop the market. These devices are about to get fun.

At the hub of it all

Looking back at Diversion 2 for a moment, the common point is information accessible via an interface remote from the device – “dumb” LCD panels or internet-ready control devices. The difficulty with this arrangement is that each collection of technologies uses a different screen and different wireless protocols.

What happens if we combine all of these devices onto a common hardware and software platform?

• a giant storage hub with music, video and photos
• a server that can communicate wirelessly with other devices in the network using agreed protocols and methods for logging and displaying data
• a common application framework providing control interfaces to all devices
• “set and forget” home automation
• a single, touch-enabled, 10” screen to display it all.
• above all, all the power and functionality is in a device that is EASY TO USE

Some of the above is already possible in the Apple ecosystem. The Apple Remote app for iPhone and iPod Touch enables remote control of any shared iTunes libraries and AppleTVs on the network.

Attention has focused on the potential of the iPad and iPad-like devices being an easy to use computer for “Mum and Dad”, as well as the “almost notebook, super netbook” device that power users can carry around when travelling and at conferences. The iPad can display photos, run YouTube, be used for email, games, word processing – it’s all my parents would need after all, and I would love to have something like this for when I travel and don’t feel like taking my laptop just to check email and be able to do some writing when the urge strikes me.

This attitude unfairly reduces the device. The iPad can be more than just a stripped down computer – it could also be a portal. To everything.

Watch movies. Look at photos. Read a book. See how hot it is outside, and what the apparent temperature is (and what it was like at the same time yesterday, and last week, and last month). Look at what devices are currently using the most power. Remotely turn them off. As the technology advances, maybe even voice control will start to enter the picture. (“Left. Enhance.”) So much potential to be involved in everything important around the home, all built on commodity hardware that is cheap, accessible and modular – add only what you need, when you need it.

This is not to say that this is Apple’s plan for the iPad. After all, there’s a good reason that Steve Jobs is the CEO of one of the world’s most successful consumer electronics and computing companies in the world and I push paper as a day job. However, the iPad is the gateway to opening people up to this type of thinking – a lower-powered touch screen interface running self-contained modules that all play nicely with each other and work straight off the shelf without tweaking settings, all accessible with a simple swipe and a tap.

Tightly controlled or open technologies – it could go either way, or indeed both ways – but the end result should be the same: networking the pieces of the home together to make the technology easily do what know it is already capable of doing today – making all our lives just that little bit easier.

Social media allows us to make many connections but are they meaningful ones?

"Internet splat map" by jurvetson on Flickr. Creative Commons 2.0 By Attribution

From personal experience, more than ever before we can make new social connections and befriend people over a wide range of distance, culture and beliefs. I now know people in most capital cities of Australia, and in a number of regional cities, too.

The recent inaugural Digital Citizens event was chock full of social media inhabitants (enough for a swarm on Foursquare). Some were Social Media Douchebags, most were not. Given that while I was familiar with many of the attendees but only casually so, I took the opportunity to sit back and watch social networks manifest in the flesh. Maybe it’s my training as a sociologist, but I love observing people when they don’t think they’re being observed (not as creepy as it sounds – well, just a little bit creepy, but you know you love it). I was curious about how deep some of these networks really were, and the results were interesting.

I noticed that most people seem to flit from one group to the next, spending only a few minutes at a time with any one group, pressing flesh, maintaining the network and then skipping off to the next group. Rinse. Repeat. [1]

Others stayed in one spot and let the flitters come to them. They seemed to be familiar enough faces with people  that they had a steady stream of short conversations with the many network gatherers. This is possibly the same activity, only from a different angle.

Some people quickly formed into a small, comfortable group and hived themselves off from the main collective.  They seemed to be closed groups, as if to say “We’ve got all the friends we need right now. Sorry. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of other people to talk to”. I’m not suggesting anyone was deliberately rude but in a large gathering with a many loosely formed temporary alliances, the tight-knit groups stood out, no matter how hard they tried to hard in the dark corners of the venue.

Surprisingly few were like me, sitting back and watching everyone else. My suspicion is the observer personality often parks behind a camera (still or video), which provides a legitimate reason for watching without interacting too much. Frankly, I was a little jealous of their cover. I found this interesting only in that the stereotype for heavy social media users is sad, no-life losers who can’t make friends in real life and spend all their time on the computer instead. Although I know this to be a fallacy, I was still surprised at how few obvious introverts were present on the night. [2]

My point? I “knew” a lot more people on the night than I actually spoke to, and even of those I did speak to, very few conversations progressed beyond pleasantries and small talk. I observed very similar conversations happening around the bar for most of the  night (so it’s not just the fact that I’m crap at small talk and boring to talk to, so there :P ). The real conversations didn’t seem to settle in until later in the evening when the room was emptying fast.

And so, I wonder…

How strong are the social connections for people who, like me, conduct the bulk of their daily non-work related social interactions online? It has become possible to know quite personal and intimate details about other people through my online relationship with them. I know Lachlan holds Batman almost as closely and dearly as life itself, or that Barry was once good friends with my wife’s cousin, or the ongoing toilet training successes of Mel’s young lad. People have shared internal workplace policy documents with me (nothing nefarious – comparing workplace terms and conditions within the context of enterprise bargaining). My wife has sought (and gratefully received) freelancing advice from someone in another state she has never met.

Yet, with all that intimacy, I’m generally none the wiser about hopes and dreams, personal influences, or even how they are really feeling.

Admittedly, I’ve never had that many close friends to begin with. Perhaps I’m just an atypical case. But I also wonder, is the concept of “friend” changing as we move further into the 21st century?

Just thinking out loud here. No answers, just questions. If you have answers, I would love to hear them.

[1] I’m excluding the organisers of the event from this. Schmoozing is an important part of being a good host.
[2] And a thank you to those who did stop and chat for more than 5 minutes and who seemed genuinely interested in how I was doing. I don’t get out much. Your efforts were appreciated and improved my mood on the night immensely.

"Facebook stream hub" by javier.reyesgomez (cc-by-2.0)

“Lifestreaming” was all the rage several years ago. Services like Jaiku, Second|Brain and FriendFeed cropped up and allowed people to centralise notifications of their online activities.

Harnessing the technology of Application Programming Interfaces (or APIs) from various web services, it became possible to alert people when you uploaded a photo to Flickr, favourited a video on YouTube, left a comment on someone’s blog (particularly if they used a third party commenting system like Disqus), updated your own blog, shared a link via Google Reader, bookmarked a page on Delicious, or submitted a news story on Reddit or Digg.

Then Facebook entered the game. Facebook has a legacy of being a walled garden where all activity takes place inside the boundaries of the site, and data are kept securely locked down and inaccessible to outside services. The Facebook environment has purpose-built photo galleries, video players, event organisers and a marketplace. It also developed and launched the Facebook Platform, creating a thriving ecosystem of third party applications that further entice people to spend increasing amounts of time inside the Facebook garden – games, polls, quizzes, virtual gifts, causes and campaigns.

Facebook has flirted with opening up its service and for a while permitted users to export activity on their own Wall via RSS before removing that option after changes in privacy options exposed more information that Facebook or its users were comfortable with. More recently, when users receive email notifications when someone leaves a comment, they can leave a response by sending a reply email. Previously users had to log into Facebook before leaving a comment of their own.

As the hype around lifestreaming has died down, Facebook has continued to implement more changes to its system to encourage people to import more of their online activities into the Facebook garden. This is where I think it gets interesting. Facebook already makes it easy to upload photos and videos, write notes and posts, organise events and buy and sell things without ever leaving the site. It has now also made it very easy to import all this and more from external sources such as the aforementioned Flickr, Digg, Delicious, Google Reader, as well as activity streams from other services such as the music streaming services last.fm and Pandora (US only), importing RSS feeds from your own sites and US only television streaming “catch up” service Hulu.

What do you think all this information says about you? Do you think photos and videos are valuable and say a lot about you, personally and professionally? How about what events you do and don’t attend? The things you like to write notes and posts about? Items you buy and sell?

Add to this mix all the information you have filled out in your profile in the time you have been a member of Facebook – political views, religious affiliations, work history, favourite movies and books, where you went to university, where you went to high school and any other bits of information you care to share about yourself. Also add all the information from third party sources like news stories you like on Digg and music you listen to on last.fm.

Now link all that to your social circle and all the things they like and share. Facebook knows what you like and what your friends like and they know all about what their friends like and so on. This is powerful demographic information available to a site that claims a worldwide active userbase of 350 million people.

What do you think Facebook would want to do with all that information? The ill-fated Facebook Beacon should be a clue. Beacon enabled external partner websites to identify Facebook users via browser cookies and send back to Facebook purchasing and other activities. This information was sometimes published on that user’s Wall and other times stored in the Facebook back end to be used for targeted advertising.

Advertising. It is no coincidence that Facebook has its own advertising network. Beacon demonstrated Facebook’s willingness to extend outside the walled garden in order to monetise member’s personal information. This is certainly a behaviour to keep in mind, particularly in light of previous patchy history in privacy principles and understanding concerns of members.

Next time you add more information to a lifestream aggregator, consider how valuable you and your information are, and consider in whose hands you are entrusting that value.

The new Apple iPad

This is mainly just to get ideas out of my brain and onto a page somewhere for my future reference. It’s this or talk to my wife about it and at least on the internet I can pretend I can’t see your eyes glaze over 30 seconds into the conversation.

A new Apple product stirs up a lot of buzz, both g ood and bad, as usual. If you know nothing about the iPad, here are the technical specifications. Go ahead and read them. I’ll wait.

I’ve tried to steer clear of early opinion pieces by my trusted Mac news sources such as Daring Fireball. I want to sort out my own thoughts first and then compare and contrast them later.

My first impression is that this is not a laptop replacement. This is a media consumption device, and one that favours being used in portrait mode given the iPad’s 4:3 aspect ratio for the screen (old school TV compard to widescreen TV which is a 16:9 ration). I was thinking along the same lines as Adam Lisagor, but he says it much better than I ever could (Edit: Oops, I linked to the wrong post. Fixed now. The correct post is “Aspect Ratio”). This is a convergence product for the not-quite-geeky. It’s a media player with a slick multi-touch screen, it’s a loungeroom web surfer and it’s a e-book reader. However, if you already have an iPhone, laptop, desktop, home theatre PC and a Kindle, I would suggest that you are not the target market.

I sensed dissatisfcation online about the iPad (leaving aside the obvious feminie hygeine jokes about the name that stopped being funny 5 minutes after they started and about 12 hours before they finished). A common complaint was that the long-awaited Apple tablet device bore no resemblance to the classic Tablet PC ideal. My initial feel is that the Tablet PC market is too small for Apple to ever hope to make much money. All the buzz was for a lower price point, somewhere south of the current bottom-rung Macbook ($AU 1,299). I think Apple is hoping to carve out a new niche with greater potential than they stylus-wielding superuser.

Being able to dock a keyboard (and apparently any old Bluetooth keyboard will do if you don’t want to pay for the special keyboard/dock accessory Apple will sell) makes it a device more suitable for conferences, lecture halls and hotel rooms than a more fully fledged laptop – all situations where I would prefer a keyboard to a stylus. My handwriting is terrible these days and I can type faster than I can write. The iWork suite of applications will be available as individual apps. At $US 9.99, they are most likely cut down versions optimised for quick use. For short notes, emails and so on, the touch screen keyboard will be okay (as it is on the iPhone) but an external keyboard opens up more office/enterprise possibilities.

The lack of a webcam of some sort is interesting as I can see the form factor being a good fit for video conferencing and video chats. I wonder if perhaps battery life is a concern here, or perhaps heat? It will be interesting to see if the inevitable tear down of parts reveals a space for a camera to go in a later version.

An onboard mic (probably for voice control for accessibility purposes) makes this a potential VOIP machine over wi-fi, much like Skype is already available on the iPhone over wi-fi. I suspect that the iPhone mic and remote will work with the iPad, much like it does with later model iMacs and MacBooks.

The e-book reader side of things is interesting (and the iBooks application explains the change of name for the laptop range from iBook and PowerBook to MacBook and MacBook Pro). A full colour touch screen is an attractive proposition. I do wonder how an LED backlit screen compares to an e-ink screen like that on the Kindle over the course of a couple of hours of reading. The point is moot for me though as I have trouble booking in reading time longer than 30 minutes at a stretch. I want to see more about pricing and content deals with publishers that have the rights in Australia before I get too excited.

This could be the text book and tech book reading device of my dreams, provided it is possible to highlight and annotate the books in some way.

Still no multitasking allowed, just like the iPhone. This is either a battery life issue or a Steve Jobs “I don’t like it” issue. I have no idea. It doesn’t bother me on the iPhone, but I can see how it would be a hassle while working in the hotel room and you wanted a browser and an iWork app open at the same time, or you wanted to take notes and live tweet a conference. If I wanted to use the device enough, I would adjust my workflow to suit (which appears to be the Apple way of things).

The final point from me is negative press is not necessarily a harbinger of doom for the product. Exhibit A – iPod launch: “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame” Look at the iPod now. Exhibit B – iPhone v1: Lots of complaints about missing features like 3G, MMS, GPS, ability to shoot video, 2 megapixel camera with fixed focus, no microSD card support for additional storage, no cut and paste, no native applications. Look at the iPhone now.

On the other hand, look at the iPod Hi-Fi, or the PowerMac G4 Cube, or to a lesser extent the AppleTV. Time will tell.

I would love to have one around the house as an educational tool. I would finally be able to answer my son’s questions about the world (“Daddy, why does it rain?”) quickly and easily. We could learn together, sitting on the couch, exploring science and how stuff works. It would be awesome.

Do I want one? Yes. Do I need one? No. Most importantly, can I afford one? Not right now. Would I use one if I had it? Most definitely.

Right. Now it’s time to read the pundit views I have been so studiously ignoring.

I have a love/hate relationship with typography.

I love how good a well designed font looks on the page or on the screen. I love how the spaces between letters mean as much as the letters themselves. I love how simple lines, artfully connected, transform graphics to glyphs, transporting language across time and space. I love how something as basic as choosing the right font can turn a dry document to a work of art. I love how something as basic as choosing the wrong font can ruin the credibility of a document and even it’s author.

I hate that I don’t understand how and why typography works. Kerning, tracking, ascenders, descenders, whitespace – it’s all a black box to me.

I have a love/hate relationship with I Love Typography. I love that it opens my eyes to new fonts and type foundries. I love that it introduces me to innovative use of type and design. I love that it publishes typography-related articles and interviews.

I hate that I can spend hours at I Love Typography and learn next to nothing about how and why fonts work. I want to be sucked in to the deeper details. I want to read 1,500 words on the finer points of kerning or why whitespace is important. I want to understand why it is that I hate Comic Sans MS so very, very much. Teach me. I want to learn.

Alas, my search for the ulitmate Online School of Type continues. In the meantime, I Love Typography is cool, too.

   

via Merlin Mann (@hotdogsladies)

News sites. RSS feeds. Email. Microblogging. Social networks. BitTorrent. iView (or Hulu or BBC iPlayer). Time sinks, each and every one of them, providing as much or as little value to your daily existence as you are prepared to let them.

“Information overload” is a fantasy, an illusion, and deep down inside you know it, too.

Crying about living in some sort of poorly articulated temporal poverty doesn’t change the foundation of the problem – this is your life because this is how you choose to live it.

Technology is not the problem.

The internet is not the problem.

Abundant information is not the problem.

A dazzling array of choices is not the problem.

The blame game is only useful in so far as it can deflect attention away from the real problem – you.

Try this for an exercise:

• List the types of information you consume that leave you overwhelmed
• List all the things that are most important to you: future goals, things to learn, hobbies and so on. [1]
• Try and draw any relevant connections between the subject matter of  two lists

 If I was a betting man, I’d happily put a few bucks down that there is very little, if any, connection between the two subject areas.

You want to feel less overwhelmed? Start taking some responsibility and exercise some control over the inputs you choose to let in to your life. I’m not a salesman so I don’t do guarantees, but I am confident that once you match your information inputs with what you have identified as really important in your life, you will feel a lot less overwhelmed and consumed.

I’m not suggesting that you need to go cold turkey on everything that demands a portion of your time. That’s not realistic for most people. Being mindful and aware of what’s coming and going out is, on the other hand, realistic and being mindful is half of the battle.

How many times have you suddenly realised one day that a bad habit has crept into your life?  Something that started as a once off slowly became the occasional treat which quickly morphed into something semi-regular and next thing you know it’s embedded in your daily routine.

Hyper-connectivity can be like crack for information addicts but you can’t blame the connection or the information it carries. That’s like a junkie blaming the syringe. Mobile internet, high speed broadband, handheld devices – these are all just tools you can use to construct the reality that best suits you.

Don’t settle for second best. Know the life you want to lead and act accordingly. Above all, take responsibility for who and what you are. If your goals and your actions are not aligned, change one of them. Which one you change is up to you.

[1] The number of things isn’t important, it’s the process of thinking about them that counts. However, if you are the type of person who desperately needs a number, 5 is a good one to start with.

Adobe AIR for Linux beta released (labs.adobe.com)

Each of the major operating systems (assuming in this instance those are Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) have their own strengths and weaknesses. I’m not a programmer but I feel confident in saying that the Win32 API offers hooks that aren’t available in OS X on the Mac, and vice versa. Linux has its own attractions as well (although I have no idea what they might be from the perspective of a programmer). Many single-platform applications work solely on a chosen operating system because they take advantage of these platform-specific hooks. A cross-platform development environment changes that game completely.

Do common environments level the playing field or do they reduce everything to the lowest common denominator? I have a concern, which may well be unfounded, that it has the potential to remove a developer’s motivation to streamline a single-platform application to produce a program that is as lean as the hardware and software will allow (“coding to the metal” as it were). As more desktop applications move into a cloud-based arrangement with online options and storage, development platforms like AIR will become more important and more prevalent.

I’ve had reservations about AIR in the past but I have come to recognise its value in providing a desktop front-end to web-based services (for example the Twhirl client for Twitter or the eBay desktop app). My concern is that as the platform matures, some developers will see it as an opportunity to push out applications with little thought to look or feel and how they might integrate with native operating system environments. I can’t help but think of all the janky Java applications that were released in the late 90s that all used the same ugly default user interface widgets. The applications might have had the attraction of a right once/run anywhere development environment, but it often meant that they were uniformly sub-standard for everyone.

Will individuality and innovation be sacrificed for homogeneity, uniformity and cross-platform accessibility?

(Note: all prices in this post refer to Australian dollars)

(Note 2: This review has taken nearly a month from purchase to publication. Some features may have changed in the meantime that I wasn’t aware of. If that is the case please feel free to let me know in the comments)

While US residents have had access to the Amazon mp3 store for some time now, the rest of the world has been starved of access to DRM-free, high quality music downloads. Here in Australia consumers looking for DRM-free downloads have been restricted to those available via iTunes (essentially selections from the EMI back catalogue).  On 13 August 2008, all that changed as Bigpond Music launched its mp3 store.

Bigpond Music has made deals with the Big 4 of SonyBMG, EMI, Universal and Warner as well as a selection of independent Australian labels and has made available a selection of music at 256kbps or 320kbps completely DRM-free.  This compares favourably to the iTunes music store which provides 256kbps AAC/mp4 downloads DRM-free for EMI releases only.

While Bigpond Music brings with it a load of baggage courtesy of its parent company Telstra (former government owned telco monopoly and the gorilla in the room in the Australian market). On the other hand, 320kpbs mp3 downloads from a service that previously specialised in crippled WMA files of lower quality was too good a service not to at least sample.

What’s on offer?

There is only a small selection of mp3s on offer while this new service is in its infancy. I expect the number of mp3s available to ramp quickly as more content comes online. Individual tracks sell for $1.69 and albums for $16.50, which is very similar to iTunes at $1.69 and $16.99 respectively. Members of Bigpond (the parent company ISP) get a discount to $1.50 and $15. I haven’t come across any variable pricing yet and it doesn’t seem to matter if a title is one disc or two – the price sits at $16.50. The pricing model is both good and bad compared to iTunes. iTunes regular offers much cheaper titles (particularly DRM titles) but pricing also increases dramatically with multi-disc releases.

Using the service

For the purposes of this review I picked something I’ve had my eye on in iTunes but was reluctant to buy due to pricing and DRM issues – the deluxe 2CD version of “August and Everything After” by Counting Crows. Bricks and mortar stores have priced this title in the high $20s and iTunes has it at $29.99, encumbered with DRM. iTunes also offers the original release at the discount price of $11.99.

Searching

Using the search box in the top left corner, I searched for “counting crows” which brought up the results page to the left. Almost all of the results were for crippled Windows Media files. The results allow you to filter by format. Not shown here is the result of that filtering which pulled out just one title which just happened to be the one I was looking for.

Buying

When you view an album, you have an ‘Add to cart’ button. When you click that button, the status changes to “Adding…” before changing again to “In Cart”.

It provides a very obvious indicator that the status of the album has changed from viewing to one step away from owning.

Once you’ve added something to your shopping cart, the basic cart view at the top of the page changes to reflect your purchases to date. What isn’t clear in the thumbnail but is clearer if you click through to a larger version is that it keeps tabs on the number of items purchased as well as the total cost.

Clicking on the “View Cart” button brings you to a screen that enables you to review what you’ve selected to date. It also allows you to change your decision on selected file format and takes one last opportunity to upsell membership to the Bigpond ISP. Also prominent is a reminder that, similar to iTunes, you need to have a registered account and be logged in in order to use the service. Although I haven’t walked through the process here, signing up to Bigpond Music is relatively straight-forward and painless.

Downloading

Once the payment transaction has been completed, users are taken to the download page which, at the time of my purchase in mid-August, showed the legacy of Bigpond Music’s DRM Windows Media past as it refers to downloading licences and the like. Rest assured that mp33 files don’t require a licence to be played.

Clicking on the download links spawns a download pop-up window where each file can be saved individually. This is experience is much more awkward than downloading an album via iTunes as iTunes will download each file automatically to a pre-determined location. The Bigpond Music way requires each file to be saved, much like using “Save as…” in Windows. The site maintains it has special integration with Internet Explorer. However, I didn’t discover this until after I had made the purchase using Firefox. I understand that the integration is in the form of an ActiveX control, which makes me nervous. I don’t like accepting ActiveX controls on my computer for security reasons, even if the source is known to be a legitimate one.

Downloading individual tracks through a web interface has its own problems. Of the 30 tracks available for download, two of the download links timed out, leaving me without the files I had paid for.  Time outs happen. No big deal. The terms and conditions of the site clearly stated that customers have three downloads of each purchased track to cover download problems (time outs, incomplete downloads etc). So, I tried to download again.

Hmm, not so good really. It turns out that, despite the terms and conditions, you can not try and download a track more than once. Not good. I put an email through to Bigpond Music support stating my case. Unfortunately I was trialling the service on a Sunday morning and would not get an answer until the next business day. To Bigpond’s credit, I did get a timely response the next day which claimed that sometimes files are unable to be downloaded due to anti-virus and software firewall programs. The email suggested that I disable any of these programs in future before downloading from Bigpond Music. In the meantime, Bigpond reset all my download licences for the album to enable to get the two tracks I was unable to get the first time.

I’m not convinced at the logic of firewalls and anti-virus being responsible for only two tracks to fail to download and 28 tracks to work as intended. The error message (a screenshot of which I emailed to support at the time) indicated to me at least that it was a database issue. Irrespective of what the problem was, the end result was the same. Support wove some magic and I was able to get the music I paid for, albeit delayed 24 hours.

Room to improve

I found the web interface a clunky way to browse, purchase and download an entire album. The iTunes Store has a much smoother user interface that lets you buy and download an album with a single click. Bigpond Music would benefit greatly from a desktop application of some sort. I can understand that the service might wish to avoid the support nightmare of developing an app that works in Windows XP/Vista and Mac OSX at a bare minimum. I imagine a development platform like the cross-platform Adobe AIR would be perfect for this type of service. Hopefully Bigpond will give consideration to such a development in the not too distant future.

The range of mp3 music available is still not great either. It was pure luck that Bigpond had an mp3 version of an album that I had been looking at buying for a while. I skim through the catalogue from time to time and while the DRM-free side of things is growing, it doesn’t seem to be growing all that fast. Perhaps this is just a function of my taste in music and I expect that the range will continue to grow over time.

Final thoughts

Despite the stigma that is often attached to the Bigpond name (the ISP side of the business has arguably some of the worst value and highest cost broadband internet plans in Australia and the movie and music services have been strongly linked with buggy Microsoft DRM since they launched), the Bigpond Music mp3 store is not too bad. Despite my reservations regarding exclusive use of a web-based interface, it is not too hard to navigate around and if you know exactly what you want, it is quite easy to see if it is in the mp3 catalogue.

The Bigpond Music mp3 store is a welcome addition to the Australian market, providing another resource for major-label music free of DRM. I don’t see it knocking the iTunes Store off its perch anytime soon, but it will hopefully put some pressure on Apple to continue to innovate in this space. This is definitely a service to keep an eye on.