Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Thanks to all of you who cast your votes in the Canadian Blog Awards.  It was a tight race, methinks, but yours truly won the coveted third prize in the Business Blog category!  I am not sure why Transit Toronto (a blog about the TTC) should win first prize for a business blog.  Clearly it must be popular among the fickle electors of Canada.  They probably all voted Liberal too…

Some of my personal favorites also won prizes:  Accordion Guy (Best blog overall), Colby Cosh (Third place, Conservative Blogs and Third place, Media Blogs), Rick Mercer (Best New Blog, and Best Humour Blog), Ghost of  Flea (Best Culture Blog), Game Certainty (Third place, Sports Blogs).  Special mention goes to Mark Evans (Fifth in Business Blogs).  Mark’s blog certainly deserves more accolades than it received.  Amongst Canadian bloggers covering business, his is a standout. 

I downloaded the Windows OneCare Live beta last week.  This is Microsoft’s new managed service for PC maintenance.  It includes backup, antivirus, firewall management, and "tune up" — at this moment, simply disk defragmentation. And, it provides it all in a simple, easy-to-understand and easy-to-use, package.

The install experience was very easy.  It beefed up some of my prior firewall settings, however, and some utilities such as my VPN no longer worked.  The VPN was easily fixed by turning on support for the GRE protocol in the firewall advanced settings dialog. 

The first virus scan I ran found a worm in my email inbox.  The worm had been marked SPAM by my SPAM filter, and never opened, but the fact is that it had gotten past my recently expired Norton Antivirus.

All in all, it seems an effective tool. Many of the things it does, like disk defragmentation and firewall, are already available in Windows.  However, it’s nice to have this simple user oriented application to manage them all.  And it’s very heartening to see Microsoft spending time on making the use of these important tools easier.

Jeff Pulver’s predictions for 2006 have been languishing in my RSS reader all week.  He paints a cautiously optimistic picture. Regulators will continue to "not get it", and the incumbents will continue to try to build walled garden business models. However new applications will appear, driven by the internet industry. 

Jeff expects that 2006 will be the year that film and television start to go direct to the net, first.  In other words, your favorite TV shows, and maybe even movies, will be available on the internet before traditional media.  Although it will happen eventually, my view is that 2006 may be a little too optimistic.  The cartel that controls media distribution (Hollywood) isn’t ready to see it be that democratic yet.

Jeff also writes that the sides in the communications war will be thrown into sharper relief — Access Providers vs Applications Providers will be the model.  Absolutely.  In the Voice 2.0 world we’re all heading toward, access, directory and applications will be the three services we pay for. 

Read Jeff’s scorecard for his 2005 Predictions too. 

Andy Abramson mentioned a phenomenon I’ve noticed many times with Skype: IM sometimes shows up much later than sent.    Specifically, if you IM someone who isn’t online, Skype somehow stores that up, and sends it later. 

At first, this looked like a great feature to me - a hybrid between IM and email.  It seemed be exactly in line with Stowe Boyd’s prediction that IM will come to dominate communications. In reality, Skype’s approach is really the worst of both worlds.  It’s not instant, and there’s no guarantee that the IM will actually arrive the next time the person logs in.  It seems to arrive only when the right alignment of the planets occurs, and the moon is in the seventh house…  

I think the approach taken by MSN makes much more sense.  MSN allows the user to register an SMS address as well, so that if offline, the IM can be directed to SMS.  And if the user is truly offline, MSN simply says you can’t send them an instant message at that time.