First of all, I dislike the idea of having more than one account. It’s very easy to use the wrong account to post, we already see this with people who handle company accounts in addition to their personal one. Secondly it means you have to distribute two account names to other people, which also seems unnecessarily tedious.

I see two solutions for twitter. One is to allow tweeps to handle several accounts from one panel, but there are already clients that support this. Although easier, it’ll still leave the potential of posting from the wrong account and you still have to distribute several account names. This can however be solved if the accounts are linked and when you follow such linked accounts, you’re asked which of them you want to follow.

The second solution is to allow tweets to be tagged with a language, preferably without stealing any of your precious 140 characters. This will eliminate the problem of distributing several account names. Simply select which languages you want to tweet in your twitter settings, and a simple dropdown will allow you to specify which of the languages you want to use when you post a new tweet. When tweeps are following you, they’ll be given an option to filter which languages they want to see from your account.

Today the record labels war on illegal downloads of music took a new low. The norwegian student Even (18) shared his frustration with his Twitter followers about iTunes not letting him download the newest album from Dave Matthews Band saying something like:

I’m pissed! iTunes is only allowing downloads of the new Dave Matthews Band album if you live in the US! And they complain about pirating.

Not many minutes after Even’s tweet, Terje Pedersen from Warner Music Norway replied with something like:

Then I suggest you steal it and write about the process in your stupid brat blog. We don’t want you to get upset.

This shows the record companies lack of understanding for social media and the lack of respect for the costumers.

The norwegian twitter community has already spread the word wide and are using the hashtag #warnerfail.

Screenshot of Even’s tweet:

Screenshot of Terje’s tweet:

Help spreading the word with digging this article.

This post was originally written by Thomas Moen, but after his site was dugg and hit the frontpage, it went down. This is therefore a mirror of his original article.

The interesting question is, does it have any effect? Pål Nedregotten, Channel Manager at API, which has 50 news papers with IE6 warning under their wings, posted some stats which he keeps updating with numbers for hour by hour and per hostname. The graphs show IE6 usage Friday 13th compared to Friday 20th of February.

From the updates we can see that there actually is a decrease in IE6 usage. (Red numbers are good) At the same time we know that there are winter holidays in Norway this week, and thus we will not know for sure before 1-2 weeks have passed.

It’s also important to remember that the impact of the campaign is not not likely to be visible from day one. As has been mentioned numerous places, the biggest job isn’t to make average Joe update his machine, but getting the big companies’ IT departments to update their machines. We can clearly see this with numbers from Budstikka.no, where I work. On a typical work day we see 23-25% with IE6, while on Saturdays and Sundays we see a drop down to 10% IE6 usage.

Big companies are of course reluctant to upgrade their machines. They have everything working right now, both intranet and internet. They have also applied all possible patches to IE6 to make it more secure, so security isn’t that much of an issue. Why would they want to upgrade?

The hope of this campaign is to make direct and indirect pressure on the IT departments to update their machine parks. By putting this banner out on all possible sites, users and IT departments will be constantly reminded that using an eight-year old browser is unacceptable, especially when you think about how much www has evolved.

Hopefully this will be the push most companies need, and that they will start planning to upgrade. This however requires testing and patching before it can be rolled out. I only hope that before the summer, the IE6 numbers will be so low that we can ignore IE6 completely.

I can also reveal that on budstikka I’ve been given green light for ignoring IE6 in our new design. The reason we can do this is that we will have the old design, which supports IE6, running too, and we can just forward IE6 users there automatically by doing some user agent sniffing.

Being on a Mac, I have no easy way to actually see these warnings. I thought it would be cool to see, so I started asking around for screen shots. The result can be seen here.

Apparently this campaign also spread to Sweden and Australia, so now I’ve created this post to try to keep track of international pages working for the same campaign: To push IE6 percentages so low that you don’t have to take it into consideration when you create web sites anymore.

axbom.se is a Swedish site about web strategies and web trends:

travelfish.org is an Indonesian travel intelligence site

mappic.org is a site where users can add pictures from places around the globe

travelfusion.com is a search engine related to travel information

aftonbloadet.se is one of the biggest news sites in Sweden

travellerspoint.com is a site to share and plan travels

flashmagazine.com is a site striving to give the best information about flash and related productions. Offices in Norway

whoa.nu is the biggest hip hop site in Sweden

easyimagesoftware.com is a site for a product site for easy image software

Willhaben.at is a big online market place is Austria, eqiuvalent of Norwegian finn.no

tv2.dk is the danish TV2 channel

hogyan.org is an Hungarian how-to site

Anyone missing? Please send me a message on twitter with a screen shot. (Having a hard time doing them myself, as I don’t have access to IE6 on my mac)

Being on a Mac, I have no easy way to actually see these warnings. I thought it would be cool to see, so I started asking around for screen shots. In this blog post I’ve collected as many images as I can to show how the differnet sites are “edutcating” the Norwegian masses.

For international sites, you can look here.

finn.no is the biggest online buy and sell market in Norway. Their blogpost. They were the first to suggest doing the campaign, on Twitter

tu.no were first to publish a post about it

gamer.no is the biggest gaming site in Norway, and have a whole 47% of their users on Firefox. Still they want to help out

nettby.no is the biggest norwegian community online. Owned by vg.no

nextgentel.no is one of the bigger ISPs in Norway, they also run broadpark.no which has the same message

pwned.no is the biggest online game tournament site in Norway:

rb.no is a local news paper owned by the umbrella corporation A-pressen interaktiv. API has about 50 online papers, all with the same warning

sesam.no is a norwegian search engine and portal, who also have their own mapping service. They are a part of finn.no

start.no is an online entertainment arena for youth in Norway

studentersamfundet.no is the Norwegian student society

vg.no is the biggest news site in Norway. They don’t like IE6 either

db.no is the second biggest news site in Norway. Although late, they are now participating in the campaign. They also have an article

sol.no is a large news portal forwarding clients to articles on other sites

dn.no is a big site about business news

foreldreportalen.no is a parent portal

lavkarbo.no is a portal for taklking about different diets

nwo.no plans to take over the world and have one global unitarian government. They have a slightly different approach, where they actually thank people for using IE6 as the insecure browser it is, making it easier for nwo to accomplish their goal

gulesider.no Yellow pages

telefonkatelogen.no online phone book. Owned by gulesider.no

keyteq.no does online marketing

mac1.no is a mac portal

linux1.no is a linux portal

ipod1.no is an ipod portal

kreativ1.no is a portal for creative work and people. They also have an article about the IE6 campaign

aftenposten.no is the third biggest news site in Norway

morgenbladet.no is a news paper with emphasis on culture, art, literature and politics

sysedata.no is one of Norway’s biggest hosting providers and ISP

I think this is a great initiative, and a very special one too. It’s not often you see all the media corporations in Norway agree on something, but this time they did.

I’ve marked Feb. 18th 2009 on my calendar, and I’ll keep checking the statistics to see if we see a significant drop or not.

I’ve also started to track pages who show a IE6-warning:
Norwegian sites here: http://blog.peterhaza.no/current-web-sites-in-norway-warning-against-internet-explorer-6/
International sites: http://blog.peterhaza.no/current-international-web-sites-warning-against-internet-explorer-6/

CalConnect (The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium) will host a one-day Timezone Workshop on Tuesday, February 3, 2009, at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. This workshop is intended for and open by invitation to parties with an interest in Timezones, how they are currently implemented and managed, and what to do about them in the future. We particularly want to attract representatives of other industry and technology areas to gain a broad perspective on the problems with Timezones as implemented today, and the relevance of our proposed direction. You do not need to be a CalConnect member to attend the workshop. Please see http://www.calconnect.org/timezoneworkshop.shtml for more information, and to request an invitation to the event.

The error that occured, in a console window, was:

Error : Could not open WIN file D:\05006XSP.swm!
ERROR : RecoWMAInfo.exe did not run poperly!

Long story short, I ended up installing the windows 7 beta. We had some experience with Vista since I own a copy, and we figured we might aswell try something that worked well, and wasn’t old(XP).

It worked amazingly well with the laptop. The only driver I had to get was the one for the built-in camera. Since Win7 uses the same driver model as Vista, the Vista driver from the Toshbiba support page worked very well.

Unfortunately for us mere mortals, it may still be half a year’s wait for the public beta, but I don’t think that matters as much. As soon as TextMate is released to more people than Allan and Ciaran, and even if the only thing they can confirm is that they got a copy of TM2, I think that is proof enough for the waiting masses that TM2 is coming along, that it’s not vaporware, and the Macromates is a company you shouldn’t write off just yet.

Allan will probably have people signing a NDA to avoid competition copying and publishing features before TM2 is out, but the most important thing is that TM2 is in a state where it can be used for text editing and is still under heavy development.

Hopefully this will also stop the negative comments around TM2 being vaporware, when it’s clearly not.

You can read my previous speculation of what to come in TextMate 2 here and here.

Transcript from IRC:

allan: joachimm: Avian is coming along nicely though
alexross: allan: nicely?
allan: as in, I think I could give previews to really trusted people in a month maybe
alexross: oh, that does sound nice
ciaran:
allan: yeah, still lacks lots of stuff, but at least it will be as good at editing text as 1.x
…
allan: there can easily be 6 months from preview to trusted people to actual beta

I must say that installation was a breeze. You just install the plugin Intense Debate provides, sign up and tweak your configuration, and you’re ready to go. No need to mess with any tags, or any code at all, and as far as I can tell, it just works.

The plugin mirrors very many of the configuration options from the Intense Debate site into its wordpress settings page, and it also allows you to switch to the old commenting system with a flick of a switch if you want to, even letting mobile devices use the old system as many of them don’t support javascript.

The best part is probably that importing and exporting is also a breeze, meaning that you’re not losing any data. The plugin also imported all my wordpress comments automagically, which was also a very good feature.

For now I haven’t had any comments in the new system yet, so no review of usage so far, but installation is absolutely a simple task who everyone who managed to install Wordpress and any other plugin will be able to carry out.

When I’ve had a few comments I’ll make a small review of the usage from the administration side, so feel free to comment away and test ahead. Since this post is about testing a commenting system, I think it’s fair to use it for testing. So if you don’t have anything to say but just would ike to test it writing garbage, feel free, I will neither mark it as spam nor delete it unless it’s offensive.

Check out http://www.intensedebate.com/ for more information.