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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
The other day I received an ezine recommending the back-up service Carbonite. The information given made it seem a pretty good option - basically it backs up anything that's changed as soon as the computer is idle. The price wasn't so hot - $55US, which translates into some $100NZ - but that wasn't the biggest deal.
It was when I started to look around and see what other people said about it that I began to have qualms about its value. Now I have to say that the worst reviews of it I've seen have been from 2007/8, which should have given Carbonite time to pick up any problems.
The reviews on Amazon are basically pretty negative - the system works well when you're uploading, but woe to you when you want:
(1) help
(2) to restore your data.
Carbonite doesn't come across well in either of these areas. On the FreshThinking blog there's even the ironical sight of a blogger complaining about the lack of customer service for three whole weeks after a complaint was sent which suddenly gets replied to just after the blog post appears. Nothing like a bit of negative blogging to bring the customer service people out of the woodwork. When you treat your customers like mugs ('custom mugs', we might call them!) don't expect your customer to suddenly kowtow to your arrival on the scene.
In this blog there's also some good discussion amongst the comments of another online backup service: Mozy. Mozy comes off better than Carbonite in these comments, but you'll note that instead of annual fee, there's a monthly one, which, of course, quickly adds up the cost. Apparently if you pay the year in advance you get one month free, so it's compatible with Carbonite's cost.
Simply Offsite is another option mentioned, but their site is minimal in information, to say the least. Which is odd, considering they're supposed to be more expensive. They're obviously not using the profit to upgrade their site!
Crashplan looks more promising. It certainly explains a lot more, and seems to be pretty well priced. It would be one I'd consider if I was making decisions. Certainly the reviews in general seem to be more positive than not. Here's one example.
Since I last wrote here, I've collected a variety of items relating to the Web and its joys and woes.
First up is a horror story about poor service at PayPal. Now I don't have any beefs with PayPal. For me it's always worked well, and I hope that it will continue to do so. But some people haven't been so lucky. It doesn't appear as though it's been their fault in the slightest; they've just tried to do something that PayPal's Big Brother team hasn't liked and things have fallen apart rapidly.
This wouldn't be so bad if you could get someone at PayPal to respond as a customer servant - you know, related to customer service. But this is where PayPal has fallen down badly. Customer service doesn't seem to be their high priority. Not at least as far as those in the story are concerned. We all hate call center services a lot of the time, but we hate them even more when they're obtuse, obstructive and downright bullies.
On a more pleasant note comes an update from that most peculiarly-named search site, Wolfram Alpha. In an end of the year update on their blog you'll find an extraordinary list of things that have been upgraded on their site, or added to, or improved or whatever.
My first impression of this search engine back in May, was that if didn't serve any great purpose that wasn't already served by Google - and I wasn't alone. However, they're obviously setting out - if this blog post is anything to go by - to prove that they're aiming to do something Google doesn't do well at this point.
Whether you want the information they're making available is another question - of course, you could ask the same thing about 99.99999% of the information on Google. But WA is making available lists (the FBI stats on crime for 20 years or details of winners, also-rans and a host more in the Olympics since they began) or data about things we'd like to understand better, such as the complexity of the solar system or details of how your teeth grow.
It's possible such information could be found on Google, but it may take a number of searches (and with a modem that keeps flicking off just when you're in the middle of something, that can be frustrating). AW is aiming to bring information together and then make it more easily found. And it seems to be achieving this.
The photo is of Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the machine.
There's a longish piece on the Idea Logical blog talking about my old friends Baker and Taylor. Who are they? When I ran the bookstore they were amongst my biggest suppliers (we always seemed to owe them heaps of money). In the later days of my time in the bookshop B&T had become so techno-refined that I could order books direct online with them and they'd be in my store less than a week later - pretty good from the US to New Zealand.
In fact I used to rely on them as being able to get books to me faster than many of the NZ suppliers...
However, they're in the news for a rather different reason - which I might have already known about if I was still a bookseller. They're introducing a platform called Blio which is another competitor in the e-book race. Think Kindle, think Barnes and Noble's e-book system - this supposedly will outdo both of these, and many others.
Seemingly what will happen is this (roughly!): Publishers deliver PDFs, which B&T converts for free to the new format. The publishers get the ebook back with a tool kit that enables totally intuitive functionality that will change styles and layouts, embed links or video or audio and set up the TTV capabilities. If there is a recorded audio of the same text, the toolkit will synch it to the ebook automatically. And users can take notes, or mark up text with yellow (or other color) highlighting.
B&T has 180,000 titles already committed to Blio, at least 50,000 of which will be available at launch.
An article on Publishers' Weekly says that B&T will offer the software to consumers for free. Take that, Mr Kindle.
Another feature of this will be that there will be a vastly improved test to speech function. The inventor, Ray Kurzweil, claims that eventually it will be the format.
Kurzweil explained that the e-reader software will run on laptops and desktop computers (PCs and Macs) as well as netbooks and mobile phones or ipods—Windows mobile and the iPhone right away with other mobile phone operating sytems added as quickly as possible. The software can read any format from straight text to PDF and ePub.
I don't see the old handheld book going away just yet, (I strolled through a plaza today where there were several people reading) but these are certainly exciting times for books!.
Well, I'm giving Jimdo a go - doesn't look like you need any online master degrees. Everything is pretty standard, in fact, and if you've used any other regular site on the Net you'll feel at home.
I uploaded a photo with ease, and it's willing to accept long or short captions by the look of things. Here's the address of the site, by the way. It's very much a work in progress, and I'll probably get round to adding a lot of the stuff that was on geocities before its demise
[ Click here to read more ]
Back in the earlier days of the Internet I joined up with geocities.com, and had a website there - along with thousands of others. For some time it was the only website I had, and anything I put on the Net tended to go there via ftp and other such now fairly outmoded devices.
Somehow I missed the fact that Yahoo (who took over geocities quite some time ago) had decided to close down geocities. I'd seen the fact that they were getting rid of the briefcase, (if that's what it was called), a place where you could store files as a backup, but while no doubt they told me they what they were doing with the websites, I missed it
[ Click here to read more ]
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