Review: Legislation, Death and Music in the Blogs

This time its all about graphics, legislation, life, death, and music. For the second stage of my journey into the world of blogs I decided to start using a 'news reader'. For the uninitiated amongst you, a news reader is not a program which reads out blogs, but is a program which aggregates a number of news feeds (blogs in this case) and presents them to you in one coherent interface. Such programs can then tell you which blogs have new entries, and can even download all new items for you to read on your PDA whilst you are on the train.

Of course, in aggregation you are bound to lose something, and with news readers you lose the aesthetics of the original blog - all the items are placed in textual lists which you navigate. As a light blog user this seems quite a shame - I quite like looking at the layout and images that people have gone to trouble to design which gives you a real sense of their personality. Maybe something more graphical would help.

Matt Jones (13 April, 2004), that perennial purveyor of all things a little bit odd on the Web, caught my eye with the newsmap. This neat interface provides a flash treemap visualisation of Google's news service, reminiscent of various stock market visualisations that have been knocking about. I can't help feeling that such a pleasing visualisation would make news readers more engaging for casual users. Talking of Google, their announcement of a personal email service and social networking applications has Headshift, the on-line community consultants, thinking of a future beyond locked-in webmail services such as yahoo (1 April, 2004).

But, as they point out, this will have some serious privacy issues given current rather draconian terms-of-use contracts. And legal issues are certainly something to be considered from every angle. Take, for example, the online music store and exchange, mp3.com, which suffered no end of legal troubles. Wired reported that the last dotcom goodies from mp3.com's offices were being sold off after the company was closed (9 March, 2004).

One of the aims of mp3.com in its early days was to allow small music producers and individual bands to get an audience without having to be signed to a label. Jeffrey Veen (5 April, 2004) sparked a discussion about the merits of file sharing, burning CDs, and the music industry in general on his blog which is typically about much more urbane user experience issues including the rather marvellous IA Jargon Watch.

Most of the participants seemed to be positive about file sharing, with just a few dissenting voices such as 'You guys are dreamers living in an alternate universe'.

Legislation isn't just about stopping us doing things though. E-government@large hosts a regular blog on issues related to e-government from the sharp end. They to report on conferences, articles, and so on, from a government perspective. For example, they critiqued the recent DRC report on the accessibility of websites (14 April, 2004. They also provided summaries of website availability statistics (9 May, 2004) in which they highlighted that local councils had the lowest availability of websites surveyed.

For the more macabre aspects of legislation consider the legal issues of an audio clone of deceased people as highlighted by the usually sober IA Slash (13 April, 2004), who mostly comment on topics such as visualisation techniques. Still, 'Imagine being able to leave an A.A.I. archive of yourself in the event of your death; imagine being able to converse with a deceased loved-one;'. Indeed.

Well, on that note, I’m off to look for a graphical overview of blogs which also plays the music that the blogger is listening to, and adheres to accessibility and privacy legislation. 'Til next time.

Nick Bryan-Kinns
Queen Mary's London

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