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At a speech in New Orleans on Monday I said we were just five percent of the way into the Internet -- that of all the things that could simplify our lives and save us time, only five percent of them are here so far. New companies such as Pandora are pressing the envelope to do great things but unfortunately many existing companies have not kept pace with expectations.

This morning I checked on the status of a medical prescription at Express Scripts, my "online" pharmacy. The web site had an order number but did not show the name of the medication. Clicking on "check status" gave a line that said "In pharmacy" -- since May 6. No information available. Sending an email to them is hopeless -- I have done it before -- they respond to the email by telling you to call if you need information. I called and was told they had received the prescription on May 3 and it then takes them three days to enter it into the system. Four days later they determined that it needs "prior authorization" and so they faxed a form to the doctor requesting that he fax a form to the insurance company who would then need to fax a form to customer service who would then notify the pharmacy it is ok to ship the medication. The pharmacy and customer service are the same company. There is no feedback to the customer at any point. Meanwhile everyone is calling everyone and the doctor's office is so overloaded with calls about prescriptions that you can't get through to them. This is the status of online pharmacy. Five percent would be an overstatement.

Then I made a reservation at Marriott.com. At the end of the form was a "comments" box and I entered some things that I thought would be helpful. Upon hitting the submit button I got an error message saying "Comments too long". The form only accepts 45 characters -- a ridiculous limitation in these days of inexpensive storage. Well designed online forms that limit the text input tell you how many characters you have remaining. Not this one -- there is no indication given of how many characters have actually been entered and the text box actually has four lines of 64 characters each. You just keep shortening and entering submit until it is satisfied. What could they be thinking? The confirming email arrived quickly but because they had embedded some javascript in the email to make it look pretty, it could not be printed. Travel sites generally are getting better but they still do a lot of dumb things.

The point that top management of these and many other companies are missing is that the perception of their company and their brand is no longer based on their past history or even the reputation of their products and services. The way we see them is the way we see their web sites. Unfortunately, a lot of things we see are not pretty. Increasingly our loyalties will shift to the companies who make our lives simpler and save us time instead of frustrating us. Many are trying hard but they have a long way to go.

Jason over at Digital Media Thoughts sent me an email about his new article on The Powers and Perils of a Platform.  Jason talks about the trouble he had when a Media Center 'plugin' went bad and couldn't be uninstalled.  It's not clear if it was an HTML application or a managed code add-in, but based on the description I'm assuming it's the latter.  He ran into problems when trying to manually uninstall the application so I thought I should post something on what to do when an add-in goes bad...

In Media Center 2005 add-ins can do pretty much what they want to do without restriction, if one starts to misbehave the best thing you can do is to disable it:

1. Start Media Center
2. Click on Settings
3. Click on General
4. Click More Programs Options
5. Click Edit More Programs
6. Deslect the app to disable and click Save

This will disable the app from starting and hide anything entrypoint it's registered throughout Media Center.  It won't uninstall the app, but it will prevent it from running.

Like so many, I'll never forget where I was.  Brushing my teeth, getting readyfor work, I turned on the Today show just after the first plane hit.  Imagesof the plane hit on the Empire State Building a generation before were conjured up.This must have been a freak accident. Then I saw the second plane hit. I yelled,called my wife into the room.  She gasped  when she realized what had happened. Cultural innocence had been shattered in an instance.

I'm not going to write a long diatribe on how this event gave rise to blogginglike some others are.  In my opinion that would be to lose sight of what todayis really about and personally I think it does a disservice. There are otherdays in which to discuss it.  Remembering the innocent lives lost and theheroes who worked so valiantly to save them is what today is about.

Picture: I took this in December 1999 from Newark Airport.

In yesterday's announcement of the new Zune media player and Zune Marketplace, Microsoft (and many press reports) glossed over a remarkable misfeature that should demonstrate once and for all how DRM and the DMCA harm legitimate customers.

Microsoft's Zune will not play protected Windows Media Audio and Video purchased or 'rented' from Napster 2.0, Rhapsody, Yahoo! Unlimited, Movielink, Cinemanow, or any other online media service. That's right -- the media that Microsoft promised would Play For Sure doesn't even play on Microsoft's own device. Buried in footnote 4 of its press release, Microsoft clearly states that 'Zune software can import audio files in unprotected WMA, MP3, AAC; photos in JPEG; and videos in WMV, MPEG-4, H.264' -- protected WMA and WMV (not to mention iTunes DRMed AAC) are conspicuously absent.

This is a stark example of DRM under the DMCA giving customers a raw deal. Buying DRMed media means you're locked into the limited array of devices that vendors say you can use. You have to rebuy your preexisting DRMed media collection if you want to use it on the Zune. And you'll have to do that over and over again whenever a new, incompatible device with innovative features blows existing players out of the water. Access to MP3s and non-DRMed formats creates the only bridge between these isolated islands of limited devices.

The real culprit here is the DMCA -- but for that bad law, customers could legally convert DRMed files into whatever format they want, and tech creators would be free to reverse engineer the DRM to create compatible devices. Even though those acts have traditionally been and still are non-infringing, the DMCA makes them illegal and stifles fair use, innovation, and competition.

May this be a lesson to those who mistakenly laud certain DRM as 'open' and offering customers 'freedom of choice' simply because it is widely-licensed. With DRM under the DMCA, nothing truly plays for sure, regardless of whether you're purchasing from Apple, Microsoft, or anyone else.

Take action now to support DMCA reform and to stop the government from mandating more DRM.

[Postscript: In an interview with Engadget, Microsoft Zune architect J Allard pointed out that Zune has sufficient video format support, in part because there's 'Lots of DVD ripping software out there that encodes to those formats, so the most popular formats out there, whether it's MPEG-4 or H.264, we'll support those.' Gee, he isn't suggesting that his business model benefits from customers using tools like DeCSS or Handbrake to evade the DRM on DVDs, right? Especially since Microsoft is furiously trying to squash the FairUse4WM tool, that would seem rather hypocritical.]

(Cross-posted at DeepLinks)

Like many other Mac users I do most of my coding in TextMate. It has tons of really nice features, one of which is its extensibility – if you need support for a coding language that isn't included with TextMate, you can add it yourself.

Well, I've been using Robert Nyman's DOMAssistant JavaScript library quite a bit lately, and TextMate doesn't support DOMAssistant's methods and syntax. I was getting a bit annoyed at knowing that I was doing a lot of unnecessary typing because of this, so I decided to create a TextMate bundle for DOMAssistant.

Armed with my copy of TextMate, James Edward Gray II's excellent TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac, and the DOMAssistant documentation, I started hacking away. This was the first time I took a closer look at adding support for a language in TextMate, but it turned out that it really isn't that difficult.

After a few hours of work, the result is a DOMAssistant TextMate bundle with tab triggered snippets for all methods, a code completion dictionary, and documentation links for all DOMAssistant keywords.

• Google Code project: textmate-domassistant
• Direct download link: DOMAssistant-tmbundle-1.0.zip

If you use TextMate and DOMAssistant I think this will save you a few keystrokes :-).

Suggestions for improvement are welcome. Remember that this is my first TextMate bundle, so please be gentle.

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Posted in Coding, JavaScript, Mac, Productivity.

Being a little lazy at times, I tend to skip typing 'www.' before the domain name when I enter a URL in my web browser. No, it doesn't save me a whole lot of typing, but bear with me here. Most of the time it works fine and I end up on the site I expect.

But it really surprises me how often typing in a domain name without 'www.' in front results in one of the following:

• My browser displays an error message such as 'Safari can't open the page 'http://example.com/' because it can't find the server 'example.com'.'
• My browser finds a server but nothing happens because there is no website configured.
• I am redirected to a parked domain.
• I get a 'Directory listing denied' message.

This happens with all sorts of organisations, from the tiniest single-page websites to huge online presences of multi-national corporations.

You can add 'www.' in front of the domain name and all is fine. But should you really have to do that? What I think should happen is that the web server either responds on the address I entered or redirects me to the www host. Unlike the no-www and yes-www folks I'm 'www-agnostic' in that I don't really care if the preferred host is the bare domain name or 'www.' + domain name. Just make both work and redirect all traffic to one of them, I don't care which. I do however think that it makes a really bad impression when any of the above happens when you try to access an organisation's website without typing 'www.'.

I'm no DNS or web hosting expert, so there may well be technical reasons that I am unaware of that make it hard or impossible to configure all web servers to work with or without the 'www.'. But when this sort of thing has happened to clients, it usually turns out that whoever is hosting the site has simply forgotten about it.

Considering how many use their bare domain name in advertising, and looking at colleagues and relatives, I know I'm far from the only one who skips 'www.' when manually typing in a URL. And do you really want to risk your clients losing visitors due to a misconfigured web server? I thought not, so remember to check this with the persons or companies responsible for the servers your clients' sites are hosted on.

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Posted in Usability.

The journalism industry, in all its worry over its place in the digital age, seems too willing to “commit suicide out of a fear of dying” and seemingly latches onto anything it thinks might increase user engagement and/or page views.

At the recent Online News Association conference, the entire place was filled with “MSM”-types buzzing about “UGC.”

Those implementing it were eagerly doling out advice; “It’s wonderful,” they seemed to preach. “It’s revolutionary!” (Ironically, there was also a session explaining how to keep the annoying people from participating).

Job postings for Site UGC Editors abounded.

The sense was as though the industry thought it finally has this “Web” thing figured out.

But, as the IHT’s Mike Oreskes said in his keynote to the conference, journalists need to help audiences with information overload and not just become conveyor belts.

The online news industry needs to realize mainstream media has always about aggregation. The New York Times prides itself by claiming that it only publishes the “news that’s fit to print.” Online news needs to confidently embrace this role by filtering out, again as Oreskes said, the wheat from the chaff.

If a news site can present its readers, alongside the pure news, a distillation of the best of the rest of the Web by properly using the tools of the new Web surprising things could happen: news outlets might once again been viewed with the kind of authority they once had.

But first the industry needs to remember, technology won’t save the day.

During his presentation at the recent conference, Adrian Holovaty was asked repeatedly about what tools a news organization can use to collect and refine data for features like “Faces of the Fallen.” His answer?

“Hire a reporter.”