Blog Currents – 2012, Mar 14

So I finally gave up on The Elder Scrolls game, I’d finished all the quests I could find and it had devolved into doing Thief Guild tasks that all seemed to be the same. Instead I started Dragon Age 1 – Origins. It is a step back in terms of game play and the quests are hard to figure out but one of the characters is played by Claudia Black. Yes I know she is married but she plays a quite delightful character. As I mentioned the game play is not all that fantastic but I read that Dragon Age 2 is quite good so I may try that after I finish this one, which should be soon.

I managed to get a look at Windows 8 recently and as long as you have a touch screen it should be fun to play with. As expected it had no Start button and some of the actions require a swipe to trigger. I suspect that if Microsoft decides to go with a PC version, then there will have to be some changes made. The primary focus however is the tablet or touch screen based devices.

It looks like a tablet app with boxes representing different applications and things to do. It starts up and shuts down quickly using an extension to the hibernate functionality of older machines and operating systems. It seemed to be fast and responsive on the inexpensive machine I was watching someone use. Not sure if it will be something that I will jump to and it remains to be seen if it will be another Windows Me or Vista.

Like most people these days I read blogs, mostly sensible ones usually dedicated to subjects I am interested in. In the February 2012 issue of International Journal of Managing Information Technology, a paper by Xuequn Wang and Yanjun Yu describes the types of people that sit in front of computers and interact, or not, with the blogs and other things they are looking at, seven types of them. They did this because others had not and for most people there are the contributors, the lurkers and the trolls.

So for your reading pleasure and because most of you are too lazy to look this up for yourselves I present the Wang and Yu classification system.

For this to work we also need to know the kinds of posts that people make, again from one to seven.

Type 1: Posts which provide new information
Type 2: Posts which ask questions
Type 3: Response posts which answer questions
Type 4: Response posts which provide feedback
Type 5: Response posts which thank for help
Type 6: Response posts which say something bad
Type N: Non-posts by those who read but don't post.

From this there are seven types of posters:

• The Contributor that provide lots of Type 1 and 3 posts and are regular visitors.
• The Partial-contributing participant that post using Types 1 to 5, but aren't regulars.
• Non-contributing Participants that will ask questions and thank fellow members for their responses but who don't contribute new information.
• Lurkers that read the content and comments but don't add anything new to the discussion.
• The Trouble makers that sometimes make Type 6 posts usually in the middle of Type 1 and 3  contributions.
• The Non-interested knowers that know about the community but don't visit.
• The Outsiders that don't know about the community and may or may not care.

I'm not convinced about those last two since they are not even part of the community and I would probably expand on this by adding a couple more.

• A variant of the partial contributor who uses Type 1, 4, and 6 who only add in things that have direct relevance to themselves.
• Also the Stirrer who deliberately makes a post to stir up comment or trouble, some make call this the Troll. Could be a nasty Troublemaker type or more benign.

The paper does add that any successful blog community will have a mix of these (with the exception of the troll perhaps) but the proportions of the community will evolve and change over time and the community goes through four stages:

1. Attraction
2. Build-up
3. Maintenance
4. Deterioration.

Like any study of this kind there are exceptions to the rule.

Industry News

Ha, ha those that invested fully in Microsoft technologies are facing two cost rises in the near future. A 20 percent rise in the cost of SQL Server 2012 up front and a possible move from server instance to the Oracle per CPU core costing model. Either way it will be more expensive to be an SQL Server based organisation in the near future, if you upgrade.

Mozilla has started working on a Windows 8 Firefox port to run under the Windows 8 classic desktop, yes of course Microsoft will have a version for the PC, and also the tablet-friendly Metro user version. This will be a single app that will work on either platform, i.e. they are not building two versions for Windows 8. Availability will be sometime in the second half of this year. This means it will be able to compete directly with IE 10.

Since Apple refuses to bring out a 3G compatible iPhone for the China market Samsung is kicking their butt there. Apple is in fifth place in China at the moment. This in the face of 15 million unofficial iPhone customer using 2G technologies. 4G in China is a long way away in technology years in this case 2-3 by which time providers like Samsung should all but have the market sewn up. Samsung recently filed against Apple in a South Korean court claiming the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 violates three of their patents. Good luck wining in Korea Apple.  

I just finished watching a video where a ‘printer’ build a tiny 385 micrometre long formula-1 racing car in about a minute. Scientists at the Vienna Institute of Technology, who had way too much time on their hands, have developed this technology for when our new tiny overlords arrive to take over the Earth. They were having way too much fun so they have been asked to now find more practical applications for the new technology.