WSJ.com: Digits

But there’s still a huge reluctance on the part of many communities to allow some of the infrastructure to helps deliver the mobile web — the towers. It can take years to approve new towers or even add more equipment to existing towers. In November the FCC passed rules that require towns to make decisions within 90 days for adding equipment to existing towers and 150 days to decide whether to allow new ones. This helps, but it’s still hard to manage multiple municipalities and zoning regulations.

In most cases the delays are a combination of irritated city officials and reluctant neighbors who don’t want to deal with perceived health issues or unsightly towers.  Just this weekend I found a local example that had me almost pitying AT&T. The network, which already has pretty poor service in the hilly West Lake area of Austin, unfortunately, may not have the opportunity to improve its service thanks to local opposition to a tower. From the Lake Travis-West Lake Hills Edition of Austin’s Community Impact Newsletter:

AT&T Wireless applied for a special-use permit and height variance at the July 11 meeting Board of Adjustments meeting. AT&T desired to replace the 80-foot tower located behind City Hall with a tower standing 120 feet. Several residents opposed the new tower, citing a possible risk to their health, as well as their safety were the tower to fall; two former council members spoke in favor of the taller tower. The seated board members agreed that the expected improvement in reception was not enough to approve the application.

Poor AT&T. West Lake Hills wants the company to put the tower on a nearby City of Austin water treatment plant, but AT&T apparently has been told it can’t because of homeland security reasons. My cell phone provider is Verizon, and even it can’t keep a reliable signal when I’m traveling through West Lake — which in addition to neighbors concerned about their health and the dangers of a falling cell phone tower (!) also is full of hills and near water — two enemies for wireless reception.

So as the carriers race to expand 4G networks, cell towers are as much of piece of the mobile broadband equation as backhaul and spectrum  – and one  that ordinary citizens actually have some influence over. If you’re upset your iPhone doesn’t work in your neighborhood, perhaps a trip to city hall might help.

Related GigaOM Pro Content (sub req’d): How AT&T Will Deal with iPad Traffic

GigaOM

If the AppleTV announcement didn’t satiate your need for a Google TV set-top box battle royal, then new details about Amino’s Freedom box might do the trick. Yes it still packs the same hardware announced back in 2009 such as an Intel CE4100m Atom Processor, 500 GB of internal storage, SD card support, Bluetooth, WiFi 802.11n and 1 GB of RAM. We’ve now discovered however that it’ll also run its own Amino branded version of Nokia’s MeeGo OS, adding apps and gaming support to its list of capabilities that already included 1080p playback, VOD streaming, and DVR recording. In other words there’s going to be a new Google TV competitor on the block sometime before the end of this year looking for a fight. Whether it’ll provide a Lincoln Hawk-worthy performance though is something we’ll let the bookies squabble over until we can go hands on with both.

[Thanks, Hary]

Amino launches Freedom over-the-top video set-top box, challenges Google TV to arm wrestle originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Sep 2010 07:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Engadget

Author Nicholas Carr wrote a controversial post recently about the use of hyperlinks in online content, in which he argued that links were a distraction for readers, and were likely to lead to less comprehension rather than more. This idea was an offshoot of Carr’s latest book, The Shallows, which makes the claim that the Internet — and digital media in general — are making society dumber rather than smarter. Now Scott Rosenberg, one of the founders of the online magazine Salon and of a new media-accuracy startup called MediaBugs, has written an admirable series of posts defending the link as the heart and soul of the web. In his original post, Carr described links as “conveniences,” but said they also functioned as a distraction for readers:

Sometimes, they’re big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we’ve forgotten what we’d started out to do or to read,” he wrote. “Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head.

The author said that research he looked at for his book showed this created a “cognitive load” for readers, and those who read hypertext “comprehend and learn less… than those who read the same material in printed form.” Some prominent writers and media figures agreed with Carr’s take, including — ironically — Laura Miller, a writer and book reviewer with Salon, who argued that links shouldn’t be necessary if writers did their job of synthesizing the topic properly, and said that most people don’t click on links anyway. Carr also got some support from Jason Fry, writing at the Neiman Journalism Lab, and Ryan Chittum in a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review (in the spirit of full disclosure, I wrote about Carr’s argument on my personal blog).

As Rosenberg describes in his first post in response to Carr, much of the research that the author relies on for his attack on hyperlinks and comprehension don’t really fit with his broad thesis. For example, the kinds of links that were studied in the research Carr uses in “The Shallows” had nothing to do with adding context to the text that they were embedded in; in other words, they weren’t the kind of hyperlinks that everyone is used to in blog posts and other Internet content. As Rosenberg notes:

All this study proved was something we already knew: that badly executed hypertext can indeed ruin the process of reading. So, of course, can badly executed narrative structure, or grammar, or punctuation.

Instead of impeding understanding, as Carr and his supporters argue, Rosenberg says he believes that they deepen it, quoting author Steven Johnson as saying that links are a tool for synthesis, “a way of drawing connections between things,” to bring coherence to the vast universe of information online. “The Web’s links don’t make it a vast wasteland or a murky shallows,” Rosenberg says, “they organize and enrich it.” I’m firmly on the Salon founder’s side in this one — without links, what point is there in having hypertext at all? The whole idea behind Tim Berners-Lee’s invention was to enable sites to point to each other and create a “web” of context. Do they impose a cognitive load of some kind on users? Possibly, but in my view, the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages.

In his second post on links, Rosenberg first takes on what he calls “corporate linking,” which is the practice of clogging up text with links “because they provide some tangible business value to the linker: they cookie a user for an affiliate program, or boost a target page’s Google rank, or aim to increase a site’s “stickiness” by getting the reader to click through to another page.” Rosenberg also argues that much of this is Google’s responsibility, because of the value attached to page rank and links:

Google is a great tool because it draws meaning from links. And it is a profitable company because it has placed a tiny but real financial value on many links. But by making links a business, Google also made it harder for editors and writers to defend responsible linking.

In the third post in his series, Rosenberg says that even if Carr is right and links do slow down reading and get in the way of understanding the content they appear in, he would still prefer to have links, because they are “additive and creative.” Links pull together different pieces of a topic and connect them into a whole, he says, and at their best, they also “show a writer’s work” and are “badges of honesty, inviting readers to check that work.” Rosenberg adds that the use of links has multiple benefits, including:

• Saying hello. “A link to another site can serve as a way of telling that site, ‘I just said something about you.’ This kind of link remains a valid and valuable social gesture.”
• Showing your work. “Some people are happier with this stuff collected at the end, as we did for centuries in print. But linking in situ gives the reader the information right where it’s needed.”
• Fairness. “Does a writer present the perspectives of those he disagrees with in a way that they feel is fair? Linking to those perspectives is a way for a writer to say: Go ahead — see if I got you right.”
• Adding context. “A fragment that gets connected is no longer a fragment. It becomes a working part, a piece of a mosaic, a strand in a web.”

As Rosenberg puts it in the conclusion to his series, writing online without linking “is like making a movie without cutting. Sure, it can be done; there might even be a few situations where it makes sense. But most of the time, it’s just head-scratchingly self-limiting. To choose not to link is to abandon the medium’s most powerful tool — the thing that makes the Web a web.” Hear, hear.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users papalars and Robert Brook

GigaOM

One of the most talked about websites to come out of beta in 2010 in Silicon Valley has been question and answer site Quora. Quora does a number of things correctly aimed at getting its users to both ask and answer questions, however, the still very new service still has some features and issues that we would like to see addressed to make it even better.

Faster interface

Quite often, we notice that the site hangs up on requests, and we’d like to see that addressed. This isn’t a major flaw, and one that can certainly be addressed with more resources, but Quora is noticeably slower than we’d like to see it. Perhaps it is fast enough for most – maybe we should ask a question about it…

Date stamps on questions

While there are date stamps on answers, it is a little frustrating to not see a date stamp on questions. We understand that Quora wants the question to stand the test of time or something (like Wikipedia in a way) but knowing how fresh the question is would probably entice more people to answer them.

RSS feeds

Especially as Quora already has a (rather detailed) email notification system set up for following people, topics and questions, it’s a bit surprising that the service hasn’t added the ability to follow an RSS feed of any of those activity streams. Of course, an even better way to do that would be with an…

API

Quora will really be an extremely interesting platform to build on when and if the service releases one or more APIs. To get extremely meta on this request, you can check out the Quora question “Is Quora planning an API?” that has an answer by co-founder Charlie Cheever. We know that our own Boris would probably love a Quora API. With the absence of developer APIs, however, the final request is even more pressing…

Mobile apps

Quora does have a mobile version of its website (which isn’t half bad frankly), but still, if the service isn’t going to offer third-party developers the opportunity to build stand-alone mobile apps or integrate the Q&A stream into existing services/apps, then we’d really like to see Quora itself come out with apps on the major mobile platforms. However, as Quora really does seem focused on enhancing its website for the foreseeable future (not to surprising really, considering the founders came from Facebook), we might have to wait quite some time before this happens, if at all.

So those are our top 5 requests, how about you? Please let us/Quora know in the comments!

Original title and link for this post: Question: What are 5 things we’d like to see Quora offer?

The Next Web

The new-look version of the BBC’s iPlayer TV and radio on demand service is set to go live early next week following a three-month beta period.

The new look site is a significant upgrade on the previous site, offering a sleek new design, personalisation features and integration with Facebook and Twitter to make sharing programmes easier.

In a blog post, the BBC’s James Hewines says that he hopes the new design is a step towards TV’s inevitable social future: “While social networks are now a well established phenomenon, socially enhanced TV and radio aren’t. It’s early days yet, but we’re pretty sure that this is going to be an important facility in the near future. Together, we hope these features represent a crucial evolutionary step in the enjoyment of online TV and radio.”

The BBC says that 75% of users of the beta iPlayer preferred it to the previous version and usage of the beta has recently been as high as 10% of the total iPlayer audience. Meanwhile 18,000 beta users linked up their Twitter and Facebook accounts to the servie while 70,000 users utilised another new feature to mak programmes as ‘favourites’. The most frequestly chosen favourite shows were Eastenders, Doctor Who, Top Gear, Mock the Week and Sherlock.

While the BBC appears to be cautious about setting a precise day for launch, in an email to The Next Web a BBC publicist said that Monday was the planned day. The new version is still available in beta here.

Original title and link for this post: New look BBC iPlayer set to launch within days

The Next Web

Early last week, TNW’s very own Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten posted an article titled “Job 2.0 – The End of Profession.” The general idea: having a job isn’t the be all end all these days. People don’t have jobs anymore, or, if they do, they have a lot of other occupations alongside it and they consider them all their “job”. A plumber isn’t just someone who fits pipes, he or she is also a marketeer. A dentist can also be a photographer. We don’t stick to being one thing nowadays. It makes being at a party and trying to explain what you ‘do’, a complicated matter. Well, I think it’s nonsense.

First, let’s take a look at how we have supposedly got to this point. The article states that there are two reasons for this ‘multi-talentization’: “The first is the internet and the second is our increased proficiency in everything”. Many online tools give us an opportunity to do the things we used to go to school for, in some cases for quite some time as well. But today, anyone can make a film or a graphic design. Anyone can compose a song. Piece of cake. “The learning curve for a lot of skills has decreased immensely over the past years.”

But is this really work? Just a hobby? Just some activity?

Just because there are many applications which make it easy to do or create things, that doesn’t mean they are done well. Or that the results will be anything more than mediocre. And it doesn’t mean you can do it without learning anything. That’s not ‘increased proficiency’, but ‘increased availability’. The difference between a good photographer and an average photographer has nothing to do with a state-of-the-art camera, but is about having a good eye.

Let’s be honest, not everything can and has to be of top quality. But there’s still a difference between learning real skills, training and practice them on the one hand and doing things you like to do on the other hand. As a hobby. Let everyone do his or her job and by all means do other hobbies but they’re not your job. It gives me the creeps to think about my dentist, being distracted by a nice little bird on the window sill, just because he’s also an ornithologist. And heaven help me if I end up with a plastic surgeon who’s learned the trade by watching video’s on Youtube.

Original title and link for this post: Job 2.0? Whatever…

The Next Web