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I logged into my Yahoo! Mail account the other day and was presented with the option to test their new interface. Overall, Yahoo! Mail Beta is pleasant to use and feels like a regular desktop client such as Outlook or Thunderbird. You can read RSS feeds alongside your mail and have the option of forwarding stories to your friends. You can also drag and drop email messages between folders without refreshing the page, thanks to a lot of AJAXy goodness. You have the option of using a preview pane for messages or a handy tabbed interface.

However, the big disappointment would have to be speed. There are noticable delays when you attempt to load a folder and sometimes even when you select a message. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer stall when I attempt these basic tasks. However, it’s still faster than the old method of refreshing the page.

Almost two years ago, Yahoo! acquired Oddpost, which is now powering Yahoo! Mail Beta. Integrating two existing pieces of software can take much longer that it would first appear. Even after a lot of effort, the results can still be less than ideal. When time is limited, it is essential to decide early on exactly how far you want to take software integration. Otherwise, you could just get stuck waiting for your mail to load.

Back at my Midwestern high school, state law mandated that students could not graduate without having taken a course called consumer seminar. Though a wholly informative course, after college and graduate school, I can’t really remember much about the course or what we learned. I know that I took it during summer school after my junior year of high school and that we spent our last day in class watching this (awesome) movie called “Breaking Away” as a reward for making it through the course. I know that the teacher’s daughter worked in advertising and had written a famous sports jingle, but that’s about all I remember about that class.

Not too long after high school, you find yourself making actual decisions without the benefit of all the information. You sign things because you are either too busy or too visually impaired or too impatient to make out the mouseprint. Sometimes you simply don’t know how to advocate for yourself. You meekly pay your bills, buy your groceries and submit to what companies describe as external pricing pressures. Once in a while you pop open the newspaper to find that a desperate and strung-out consumer has written to a columnist about how her phone company or credit card misbilled her and could the reporter please advise her on what to do? Sometimes the reporter does oblige, and after the whole sordid tale is in print, the PR people usually start looking into this. Things tend to get resolved when bad publicity is at stake. (more…)

I just downloaded the beta version of Microsoft’s new version of Internet Explorer. Here are a couple of quick thoughts on it:

(1) This is a very RSS friendly browser, and will go a long way towards getting non-geeks to use the technology. IE 7 has a little RSS icon (shown on left) that is highlighted when you are browsing a site that has an RSS feed associated with it. After you select a feed type (such as RSS 2.0), you are taken to a page that shows the feeds’ contents and prompts you to subscribe. Once you subscribe, you can view the feed in a built in RSS feed reader. Below is a screen shot of the subscribe page:

I’m a broken record here, but I really believe you need to include an RSS feed on any new website you develop.
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So, it looks like we have example #1,211 of a politician (or more aptly, their staff) abusing Wikipedia for political gain. This time Morton Brilliant, the campaign manager for Georgia gubernatorial candidate Cathy Cox, edited the entry of opponent Mark Taylor to include a reference to Taylor’s son’s DUI arrest. The campaign manager has resigned, and the typical media feeding frenzy is gearing up now.  You can view a version of the entry with the DUI information here. 

To play on an old saying: Don’t make any edits to Wikipedia that you wouldn’t want printed on the front page of the New York Times.

You can read more on Wikipedia here.

In a post a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that organizations post their videos to viral sites like YouTube as a way of reaching a larger audience. Well, the advocacy group Public Knowledge has done just that, posting a video on the net neutrality issue currently before Congress.

It seems to have worked, too. So far the video has been viewed 43,000 times and ranks 39th on this week’s list of YouTube’s most watched videos. Just as importantly, the video has created a pretty good conversation on YouTube about net neutrality, with thirty four comments so far.

Here’s the video, for those interested:

Like a lot of people, I have a camera phone. And like a lot of people, I don’t use it. When I first got it, I went through the motions of playing with the camera. I took a bunch of pictures and emailed the better/funnier ones to friends. Cool. Now what? I got bored with it quickly, and I am now pretty focused on using my phone for phone calls (and text messaging) and my digital camera for taking pictures.

Having said that, I’m intrigued by the concept of moblogs. A moblog (mobile weblog) is a type of blog that focuses on content posted from mobile devices like phones and PDAs. Services like Text America and Moblog UK allow you to quickly and easily publish photos from your camera phone to the web via email or MMS. You can also post mobile video clips, assuming your camera phone has that capability. Lots of moblog communities have popped up, with anyone with a camera phone able to contribute. Moblogs are a great way for people to share/report on events in real time as well as an interesting way for marketers/PR folks to hype products and events. (more…)

Some of my colleagues and friends have called me ‘paranoid,’ ‘crazy,’ and ‘apocalyptic,’ but I continue to stick to my guns on the issue of America’s intellectual decay. Our economic and cultural dominance has always stemmed from our ability to attract and retain the best-of-the-best intellectuals from around the globe, and our ability to nurture and grow our own base of talent. Our military dominance is also clearly predicated on our economic and intellectual superiority. In short, we can out spend and out gun all others because during the Twentieth Century we built the world’s greatest base of knowledge and talent.

Quite some time ago our ability to cultivate our own internal talent began to fade (witness the poor state of our primary and secondary educational systems), and over time (especially since 9/11) we have failed to garner the rest of the world’s best, largely due to immigration regulations. We are just starting to see the effects that this will have on our competitive advantage in the global marketplace. If nothing changes, we will see a rapid and painful descent into economic mediocrity and a marked decrease in the average standard of living. (more…)

As yesterday was deemed Fake Writer Day by Gawker, it seemed appropriate for the Denton-ites to start the day off with a blurb involving a Harvard student whose literary dreams were coming true, only to be squashed by her school paper’s revelation that she might actually be a plagiarist. Metafilter and The New York Times, as well as a number of British, Australian and Indian publications, quickly picked up the Crimson story. Kaavya Viswanathan’s teen college admissions drama very recently made The New York Times bestseller list and has also been optioned by DreamWorks. All of that came to a standstill over the weekend when The Harvard Crimson determined that language and certain passages in Viswanathan’s book had been directly lifted from another book.

The Harvard Crimson broke the news on its website on Sunday and by now, there are more than 400 hits on Google search alone. The New York Times carried two stories about the news yesterday alone: the first being the Crimson story and the second being the apology/explanation Viswanathan issued through her publishing house later in the evening. After Viswanathan apologized, the news circuits (if there were such a thing) began lighting up again. By 8 p.m. ET yesterday, a number of major publications, including The New York Times and Washington Post had published the story.
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