Tip - email etiquette/netiquette, and using computer resources wisely

This material has been consolidated from sound policy advice provided by major computer companies.

A general rule of life is that, if left undisturbed, people will tend to follow the path of least resistance and fall into bad habits.

This rule can also be applied to the way people use email. In the early days of email, in the late 1970s or early 1980s when companies first installed email systems, email was mainly for the use of company employees and relatively few people received mailboxes - it was almost a mark of respect to have an email address. Email was rather in the private domain. Few companies supported external access to mailboxes, and fewer still allowed employees to connect from home. Today, email is in the public domain, is ubiquitous, and each of us is able to access free email on many different systems and can connect to email using a variety of devices and different network links, ranging from notebook PCs across VPNs to RIM Blackberries across public wireless networks.

In the early days, there was a form of email etiquette - necessitated as much by the need to conserve what were previously scare storage and network bandwidth resources as to be courteous of peoples' time. However, people newly starting to use email may be ignorant of that past, and though some of that etiquette could now be regarded as archaic, much of it could still apply in today's hectic world. We could still reduce demands on and conserve finite storage and network resources, and maybe make all of our lives a little simpler, if we followed some basic rules in email conversations. Listed below are some basic rules of email etiquette that may help to make email easier for us all to deal with. Apart from reducing stress levels, email etiquette can generate lower loads on servers and networks and reduce the size of email stores, in turn reducing workload for administrators who have to backup and maintain the data.

The world is not perfect and we cannot expect email systems to function perfectly either. Email users are human beings, and human beings make mistakes, do things inefficiently, and take short cuts whenever possible. By following the major points of email etiquette outlined below, email users can minimise network traffic and reduce the amount of duplicate data held on email servers. There are bad and good habits, but perhaps there is a pressing question as to why people fall into bad habits. The answer could be:
(a) because of a lack of training or a failure of organisations to train users and communicate expectations regarding the proper use of email, or
(b) because people are relatively ignorant as to how email systems work, and have never had to think about how to use email more efficiently and effectively, and have succumbed to the trap of relying on user-friendly software.

Major Bad Habits
Any email user could fall easily into five major bad email habits. These are:

1. Copying too many people – the "reply all" syndrome;
   
2. Not compressing large attachments;
   
3. Including graphics in auto signatures;
4. Including unnecessary text from previous replies in current conversations; and
5. Unwittingly spamming addressees with unwanted email.
   

Minor Bad Habits
Some of the major bad habits may have only arisen in the last decade, or they may have existed since the commissioning of the very first email system. There are many other smaller points of email etiquette that cause people grief. These include:

• BCC replies to ALL: Replying with a message to ALL, for an email that you received as a BCC recipient, when the author really would have preferred you not to disclose the BCC by replying that way.
• Unauthorised forwarding: Forwarding a message to a new set of recipients without permission of the original author - this is especially grievous if you (say) send a company-confidential the message to external recipients, thus risking disclosing corporate information that should stay inside the company.
• Corporate policy breach: Along the same lines, it is not good etiquette and it may even be against a company’s policies or rules of business conduct to add an external recipient to an email discussion. The golden rule here is never to include an external recipient on any correspondence that might contain company confidential information.
• Inadequate auto reply messages: Using an auto reply (e.g., "Out of office") message where you do not give useful information to the recipient. It may be nice to know that you are enjoying yourself on holiday, but even better to know where to go to (preferably with a telephone number and email address) in your absence.
• Other minor/thoughtless breaches of etiquette: These can usually cause frustration only and do not absorb additional resources. However, the frustration level can be intense especially if you inadvertently tell someone about something that they should learn in another manner. For example, telling someone that you have heard that they are about to be promoted when you are not their boss is possibly acceptable; telling them that they are going to move to another job is not.

Good Habits
There are some good habits that you can get into. For example:

• Summarise key points up front: Because many people use SmartPhones, PDAs such as the Blackberry, and Pocket PCs to read their email, it is best to write short messages or at least place the key points up front so that readers can understand right up front what it is that you want to say, without their having to go through multiple screens to find out. It is also a good idea not to have important points or questions at the bottom of messages because readers may never see them.
• Minimise the number of messages: Do not respond immediately to a request if you do not have all the necessary information. Instead, wait until you have the information and then send a complete answer. In this case, it is always appropriate to send a short acknowledgement to indicate that you are working on the issue.
• Be clear about your subject (topic) and change it if necessary: The volume of email continues to rise, so it is helpful to use clear subjects so that recipients can pick the most important messages out of their inboxes. Spammers pay a lot of attention to creating compelling message subjects and maybe this is something we can learn from them. If the topic being discussed changes during a message thread, then alter the message subject to reflect the new discussion.
• Keep your email in native form: Never use a word processor(e.g., Microsoft Word) to compose a message and then send it as an attached document. Instead, use the advanced features of the email editor to format your text. Sending unnecessary attachments occupies valuable network bandwidth, ties up disk space, and makes the message hard for SmartPhone and Blackberry users to view.
• Sleep on it: This last good habit may save your job, or save you from a libel case, or at least stop you from angering someone. It may feel enormously gratifying to compose a most cutting and sarcastic response to someone's inept ideas expressed in a message that you receive, but it might be more prudent to save your response as a draft and come back to it a few hours later (or next day) when some matured reflection may convince you that maybe it is a bad idea to send the text as written. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to send a message written in haste or when drunk, and then consider the consequences at leisure.
• Avoid mistaken/premature sending: Some email packages include a message recall function, but these are limited in effectiveness - the speed and efficiency with which email systems can deliver messages, plus the vast array of devices (SmartPhones, Blackberries, etc.) that someone can use to receive messages on, means that the recall function may have little chance of being able to retrieve the message before it is read. It may be prudent to at least pause and save the message, leave it for an hour or so, and then review it before sending. Do not leave the message open, waiting to be sent, because it is easy to make a mistake and send the message inadvertently. If you do leave the message open, include an undeliverable address (such as “XXX”) in the TO: or CC: line so that the email service displays an “invalid or non-existant email address” warning when you try to send it.

The "Reply all" syndrome
When you receive a message, you have two basic reply options: either send a response back to the author, or, share your opinion with everyone who received the original message. Sadly, many users rush to reply to everyone without thinking things through. The worst examples are where someone sends a note to a large distribution list to announce that a new product or service is available, initiating a flood of "Please send me details" messages results, where each is faithfully copied to everyone on the address list. This sort of thing could result in some few members of the list deciding that they want to leave, so they send a reply back to the list to say "Please remove me," which provokes some more responses, and so on. It is depressing when people in these situations cannot correctly make a simple decision about the appropriate option to take, thus potentially wasting many peoples' time.

The best practice is to generate a selective response to any message by minimizing the recipients. If you only need to communicate with one person, then do not include everyone else. In addition, if you really must reply to everyone, consider moving all the addressees in the TO: line of an original message to the CC: line when you reply. This is because etiquette dictates that the presence of someone on the TO: line means that they may be expected to take action on the information in the message, whilst those copied on the CC: line are there solely for information. Many users now employ email filtering rules to prioritise incoming messages where their name is in the TO: line, as opposed to the CC: line.

The issue of sending and handling large attachments
Statistically, he average size (in bytes) of messages seems to have grown steadily over the last decade. Ten years ago, most corporate email accounts were on "green screen email" systems and the average message contained less than a page of text. Thus, fetching a message from the server generated no more than 4-6KB traffic and we were able to happily use 9.6kbps modems.

If you track statistics from email servers over a period, you will invariably find an increase in the average message size, to well over 100KB in many companies. Whilst messages with large multi-megabyte attachments are the chief culprit in raising the average, amongst the reasons why today's email systems handle much larger messages are:

• The drag-and-drop paradigm implemented in software - such as Windows Explorer and Outlook, for example - which makes it so easy to add an attachment to a message that people add attachments almost without thinking;
• People use graphics more extensively to convey ideas, so documents, presentations, and spreadsheets are full of diagrams, charts, and pictures (which have relatively larger data volumes than just text);
• A wider range of software is used and few packages compress data;
• In some countries (and especially in the US), network bandwidth has become so plentiful and cheap that people take it much for granted (like water out of a tap) and do not need to consider minimising bandwidth (resource) absorption;
• Users increasingly have more sophisticated message editors (e.g., Microsoft Word), so they can more easily cause graphics to be embedded/included in their message content;
• Storage costs are far cheaper, so the ever-growing size of files does not have such a huge cost impact as it may have once done, and users can have larger mailbox quotas so they do not see the need to change the way they handle attachments.
  

Nevertheless, storage and bandwidth are finite resources. We could all endeavour to become more efficient in the use of these resources, by, for example, using and educating other users to use compression utilities like WinZIP, to compress large attachments before adding them to messages. Some files - e.g., text and Microsoft Word files - compress well, sometimes to a small fraction of their uncompressed size. However, compression utilities are less successful in significantly reducing the size of other file types (e.g., image files, PowerPoint files). Where compression utilities are available, users often do not know how to, or forget to compress attachments, or the additional step makes the email system feel less friendly to the user, so they may avoid it. Where compression utilities are not available, then system administrators need to distribute copies of the chosen utility to all desktops.

For some years now, ZIP compression has been built into the Windows XP operating system, but not every user is necessarily aware of this. However current major email systems or email clients do not automatically compresses and decompresses large messages as they transit the email system, So, if you want to trade CPU cycles (to process the messages) against bandwidth and storage, you have to install additional products. For example, C2C’s MaX Compression product automatically compresses and decompresses attachments as users send and receive them through Outlook. Modules of the same product are available for Outlook Web Access working within both Exchange 5.5 and later Exchange 2000/2003 and later servers.

This combination of current versions of Outlook and Exchange helps with the compression issue, because Exchange automatically compresses and decompresses message bodies and attachments if you connect to it with Outlook clients. The need for separate compression utilities almost goes away, but only if you upgrade your complete environment to current Windows, Exchange and Outlook versions, and you may still need to deal with other clients such as OWA, Outlook Express, and so on. (e.g., refer Microsoft KB0487 for information about how Exchange 2003 and Outlook 2003 compress message content.)

The issue of auto signatures
People who work across low-bandwidth network links will often find that bloated auto signature files are the bane of their messaging life. The difference in connect times across 28.8kbps connections that result because people send messages that contain 2KB of useful data but end up at 50KB to accommodate a spinning, 3D, or other form of graphic intense logo is annoying when you have just one message. The degree of annoyance could becomes infuriating when 20% or more of your inbox items are similarly bloated. Apart from absorbing valuable bandwidth and slowing user ability to process email, graphics soak up storage and create pressure on mailbox quotas. It would be interesting to survey many Exchange mailbox stores to discover just how much work administrators have to do on a daily basis, to take backups of graphics and other useless data, not to mention the expense required to provide and manage the storage that they occupy.

For example, if you include (say) a 50KB graphic in your signature, then, after you have sent 100 messages, your own mailbox contains 5MB of redundant, duplicated graphics. Would you or any other user accept a voluntary reduction of 5MB in their mailbox quota? Yet many users cheerfully accept this overhead by default, without thinking. Moreover, if you scale this up for 1,000 users on a server, you end up with 5GB of useless data.

Auto signature files originated in the UNIX world as a convenient way to transmit some personal contact information along with your messages so that recipients could follow up with you by phone, fax, or whatever medium was appropriate. The original auto signature files are text only and consist of a couple of lines. For example:
    Regards,
              Joe Bloggs
              Telephone: +1 606 5439 21870

Signatures can create litter. You can clearly see the intention behind auto signature files in RFC1855, which covers netiquette:

"If you include a signature keep it short. The rule of thumb is no longer than 4 lines. Remember that many people pay for connectivity by the minute, and the longer your message is, the more they pay. "

RFC1855 appeared in 1995 and focused on a world where dial-up connects were the de facto standard and people worried about paying telephone companies by the minute, a feature of life outside of the United States. The authors would have been unable to foresee a time when users could cheerfully include a spinning multi-coloured 3D logo in their email signature.

Apart from logos, trademarks, and other public information like a URL to the company's web site, it is unwise to include corporate information in an auto signature file. Titles and the name of your group are acceptable, as long as they make sense to the recipient, but if you send this information outside the company, you always have to be aware that recruiters or other people who want to learn about the company's organisation for their own purposes may wish to use the information in ways you had not imagined.

If you really must include a logo in your auto signature file, then use a low-resolution GIF file to keep the data size to a minimum. This is much better for all concerned than the other variations of corporate logos that are usually designed to be used in advertising or other graphically rich situations. If you wish to include a corporate logo in your auto signature, then take care to follow any prevailing corporate guidelines on the use of such logos in auto signatures. You could also consider pointing to an ecard in your autosignature instead.

It is possible that some corporate email gateways would negate the desired effect of a logo, on external correspondents' email systems, if they strip out graphics in message bodies (not attachments) as messages pass through the gateways. Companies are always concerned about viruses, and it is possible to hide a virus behind a graphic or embed instructions to launch a virus inside the data for a graphic, so it is also possible that anti-virus scanners will remove the logos too. Therefore, the result could be that the only people you can share the logos with are internal recipients - who would already know what your company's logo looks like in any event.

Another consideration is the impact on, and courtesy to recipients. Whilst it may be acceptable for you to let everyone else inside the company know about what the current corporate logo looks like, it may be a different matter when you send excessive data to other companies - because you are now consuming

• their network bandwidth,
• their  time, and
• their  storage to hold whatever you care to transmit.

People already complain about SPAM, because these messages absorb IT resources and human time, which all have a cost. Might they consider your superb graphically intense messages in the same light?

Redundant data, and repetition/duplication in email
Email can be notoriously inefficient. If you analyse a typical mailbox store, then you will likely find that along with the graphics, uncompressed files, and "me too" messages, many database pages are occupied with redundant data generated by users automatically including the text ("thread") of previous email messages into their reply. Sometimes they do not make a conscious decision to include this text thread, because it is the email package's default behaviour as set by the user or system administrator.

Maintaining the context of a discussion is the major advantage of including the text in a reply to a message. This is certainly a valuable feature, but only if people use it wisely and not when it becomes the way that they generate every reply.

As an example, let us consider what happens in a typical email exchange.

1. User A sends a message to seek opinions from 10 colleagues. The original message is 5KB.
2. User B uses "Reply All" and includes User A's original text. This message is 10KB.
3. User C now responds with "Reply All" and includes the text from User B's message along with his comments. The message has grown to 20KB.
4. The cycle continues until everyone has contributed and the final message that holds the complete thread might now be 100KB. At this point, everyone involved probably has 10 messages occupying 200KB or more in their mailbox. While tidy users will clean up and only keep the last message in a thread, many user do not do this, and the result could be a lot of redundant information that is stored until someone - the user or a tool like a "mailbox manager" - comes along to clean the litter up.

Best practice is only to include the text from previous messages when needed, not as default behaviour.

Knowledge Management versus generating internal SPAM
Within any large company, it can often be difficult to discover where you should look to find a piece of information or some knowledge on a particular point. The goal of Knowledge Management is to create an environment where people know how to collaborate and how to use repositories that hold useful information. If a company deploys good Knowledge Management systems and if people understand how to use and exploit those systems, then you should not see frantic appeals in email sent to ALL (or large distribution lists), asking for help about various problems. Yet these appeals happen even in companies that have invested heavily in Knowledge Management. The question is why.

One reason is that people simply do not know about all of the tools at their disposal. They may be new entrants, whom  no-one has yet told about where to look or how to find things. Another reason is that the immediacy of email lures people into seeking knowledge by sending messages to distribution lists of people who they think might be able to help. This can be "hit-and-miss" - sometimes the technique is successful, and a member of the list is able to send back a fast response, sometimes not. However, in all cases, even when the originator receives a helpful answer, everyone on the list has had to deal with the original message and any replies.

Another example of internal spam occurs when someone decides that it is time for them to leave the list and they send a message to the complete list to request that their name be removed from the list. This is simply laziness on the part of the sender, as they have not attempted to discover who the list maintainer is to ask them the question. In most cases, if the list is an Exchange distribution group, then you can view the properties of the list through the GAL to discover who takes care of the list and then send them a request to be removed - instead of needlessly filling hundreds of mailboxes with spam.

Large international companies usually maintain several internal group mail distribution lists (also listservers), some of which could have hundreds or thousands of members. Thus, any message sent to these lists would potentially generate thousands of messages that have to be transported across a worldwide network and delivered to hundreds of mailboxes on hundreds of servers. Whilst email routing systems may be very efficient and only generate additional copies of messages when necessary, the sheer number of members of these lists could mean that a huge message volume is created, representing a large processing burden to the routing systems. Even though such systems may support single-instance storage in their databases, the delivery of these messages to many different servers will result in a lot of duplicated data. Lists are an invaluable business tool because they allow people to share important information that they need, to do their work.
Best practice is to use email sparingly, and take the time to look for existing knowledge more carefully before resorting to internal SPAM.

Tip - dispatching the CapsLock gremlin with Microsoft's remapkey.exe

This single tip has probably saved me from hundreds of hours of recovery work and annoyance, over the years - avoidable work and annoyance that I still see a lot of people labouring under today. The tip is about changing the function of the CapsLock key. I used to do that with a Zif-Davis program called KEYMAP ZD v1.0 (which worked in Windows 98 but not in Windows post that). For Windows XP I use Microsoft remapkey.exe.
I mention it now because, today, I was perusing one of my favourite sites - Donation Coder.com - and reviewing the subsite:
1-hour software by Skrommel - (IMHO well worth a read).
Of the mountain of free and useful software there, there were these two:

• CAPshift v1.7 - "Ever hit caps lock by accident and not found out until half a page later? CAPshift extends the Caps Lock key by slowing it down, and shows a menu to change the selected text to lowercase, UPPERCASE, TitleCase, iNVERTEDcASE, RaNDoMCaSE or to Replace user defined characters." 
• ShiftOff v1.2 - "Turns off CapsLock when Shift is pressed together with A-Z or other user defined keys."

Whilst these could both be really useful software, they (and lots of other ways of remapping keys) are made largely redundant, because of remapkey.exe - arguably the best and simplest way to remap the CapsLock key (or almost any other key). It is a free utility from Microsoft, available as a tool within the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools. That is a file of dozens of useful uber-geek tools, and they work with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista.
If you are not a geek, and/or just want the remapping tool rather than the whole toolset, then you can get it here: remapkey.exe (click on link to download). When you have downloaded this file, double click it, and you will be presented with two keyboard maps (see image of my keyboard map below) of the  101-key keyboard.

Use these to change CapsLock to Shift. Drag and drop the Shift key from the upper keyboard, onto the CapsLock key on the lower keyboard - notice that it now shows as a red Shift key. You can can remap other keys too, if they are configured on the 101-key keyboard. Once you have remapped the keys, save it and forget it - it makes a registry fix. There is no need to run remapkey.exe again, unless you want to remap some other keys.
If you need a more detailed step-by-step guide for using this utility, then you can find a good one at TechRepublic, here.

Tip - use a decent web browser - Firefox

Firefox 3 has landed. On its release date of June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 happy surfers downloaded this latest version of Firefox. These folk are now able to enjoy an even safer, smarter and better Web. This download statistic set a new Guinness World Record for the highest recorded number of software downloads in 24 hours.
If your web browser is not Firefox, then you will be using a proprietary browser which will be relatively limited, by comparison.
The more you surf the Web, the more you need a browser that makes your surfing as secure, efficient and effective as possible. Experience indicates that the public domain browser Firefox, and the add-ons that you can install to it, already made it arguably the best browser on the planet (for "best", read "secure, non-proprietary, highly functional and customisable, and not fat, bloated software"), and it just got even better. However, don't take my word for it - install it yourself and try it out today. To find out more, or to try it out now, press this button:

Tip - "Social networking" sites and online chat media

I had been trying to track down one of my best friends from grammar school in Llanrwst, North Wales, and had made contact in Facebook with a school alumnus who recalled him. This alumnus asked me if I had tried FriendsReunited.
This was my reply (I thought it could be generally useful):

No, I have not joined FriendReunited - and I shall try to avoid doing so. Being relatively computer-literate (I have depended on and developed my IT skills and knowledge to make a living for years), I am acutely conscious of the risks of so-called "social networking" sites. The risks include:

• Risk of loss of ID (from "identity theft") - so I am thus wary of most of the these sites.
• Risk of unwittingly contributing to spamming sites, or sites that sell your email address to spammers.
• Risk of invasion of privacy.
• Risk of the sites starting to make one feel compelled to provide increasinly large slices of one's cognitive surplus and time.
• Risk of being bombarded with unsolicited advertising.

Notwithstanding, I have for several years been a member of RealContacts and later LinkedIn, for professional association. Against my better judgement - after avoiding them like the plague - more recently I joined the social networking site Facebook and very recently Plaxo- because several of my friends encouraged me to join.

There have since been some gaffs, issues and concerns relating to the potential for loss of ID/privacy on Facebook - these seem to have been mostly addressed for the moment - but I feel that Plaxo is still pretty dubious (based on the dodgy-looking manner in which it was originally started up), so I have put very few details into my profile on that. I am becoming somewhat desensitised to these social networking sites clamouring for my profile details. Why do they want those details so badly? It's all about advertising revenue, and there is often no clear benefit to me as a user.

It is similar to the evolution of "chat" media - e.g., ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, irc, etc. Initially, users were obliged to have a separate proprietary application running for each chat medium being used. I was an early (about 1997) adopter of ICQ, and started to use the other media because my friends used them. However, I then started to use Trillian instead, which caters for all five media, and I was thus not able to be held captive by the chat media providers and thus could not be subjected to their otherwise compulsory manipulation and advertising.

When Trillian was establishing itself, it was a case study in the exercise of corporate control and fascism - amazing to see how the big four of these media providers (ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!) kept changing their proprietary program code or data formats on an almost daily basis to frustrate Trillian from interoperating with them. This, of course, seriously pissed off the Trillian users who (like me) wanted to use Trillian instead of the separate proprietary chat media applications. The Trillian user forum made interesting reading on these points, at the time. Eventually, perhaps after seeing how pissed off their users were getting and what asses they must have been making of themselves by trying to overtly manipulate and control their users, the big four seemed to get a grip on themselves and arrive at some form of agreement whereby Trillian has now become an accepted (or at least tolerated) fact of life.

Tip - test the recoverability of your backup media/data

This may be another one of the most important and valuable tips that you ever read.
An old friend who was one of my teachers in high school had seemed to go quiet in our email exchanges recently, until I received an email from him indicating that:
(a) he had had a hard disk crash, and was currently unable to recover data from the damaged disk;
(b) his backup software had not been "properly programmed" and had not necessarily backed up (onto his external backup drive) what he thought it was backing up.

The 2nd post I had made on this blog was: Tip - backup your work data

I made the post because backing up your digital life:

• could be very important in the event of a data loss/corruption;
• could be very important if your living might in some way be dependent on your having access to that data;
• could make something which might be regarded as an extreme inconvenience/disaster (loss of data) just a minor inconvenience.

However, what I did not stress in the post was that testing the recovery of the backup media/data is also important, because, after all - and, for example, as my friend seems to have discovered - backup is not of much use if you cannot actually recover it.

So, how do you ensure that you can test it, and how do you test it?
Well, ideally:

• You should have read Tip - backup your work data., and be using a portable or semi-portable external hard drive (or two if you are paranoid - the more the merrier) for backup.
  
• You should not have to be dependent on the software that performed the backup to make the recovery.
• The backup should be in a non-proprietary, uncoded, uncompressed format - so that you can look at the backup media and recover the backed up data, using normal file management tools from any computer, just as if it was any old hard drive with your data on.
• You should then be able to use standard/conventional file management tools (e.g., Windows Explorer, or - my favourite - xplorer²) to copy the data and test it for relevance and usability with the appropriate applications that used/created the data. By "relevance", I mean, it is a copy of vital work data, as opposed to some obscure system files (e.g., desktop.ini) which would not usually be essential to be able to continue working.
  

Tip - Use Adblock Plus, and save your time and traffic

The words quoted below are taken from the site for AdBlock Plus. I have used this add-on in Firefox for some time now, and it is brilliant. It blocks adverts in websites - e.g., Facebook - and saves your bandwidth from being gobbled up by the nowadays all-too-prevalent, annoying advertising junk. If this sounds appealing to you, then check it out.

Ever been annoyed by all those ads and banners on the internet that often take longer to download than everything else on the page? Install Adblock Plus now and get rid of them. Right-click on a banner and choose “Adblock” from the context menu — the banner won’t be downloaded again. Maybe even replace parts of the banner address with star symbols to block similar banners as well. Or choose a filter subscription, then even this simple task will usually be unnecessary: the filter subscription will block most advertisements fully automatically.

Tip - Use free Google Mail and other free Google services

I used a free Google product called Picasa as an entry to the free Google blogging system that hosts this blog. Picasa really seems to be a remarkably good piece of free software from Google, and it integrates really well with blogger.com and the blog site blogspot.com.

How did I get started on this? It all started in 2005 when I was invited by my son to open a Gmail account. I held the view that Google was becoming far too ubiquitous on the Net, and perhaps even predatory in the way it inveigled itself into search bars in browsers - especially in my favourite browser, Firefox. I don't like the way large companies start to become ubiquitous and predatory in the IT world - for example, that well-known company Microsoft. Why? Because it potentially limits the freedom of choice that we consumers have, and I have long disliked the way large corporations try to dictate to the market exactly what they will consume. That's why I am a strong supporter of consumer rights, consumer protection laws, consumer associations, and things like privacy - for example, I used to use JunkBuster (and later it's sister product Guidescope) to help to keep the ad-men and their annoying noise from my Net experience. On Guidescope's recommendation, I have dropped Junkbuster and Guidescope in favour of a plugin to my Firefox browser - the plugin is called Adblock Plus.

Anyway, I opened up a Gmail account, and was grudgingly impressed. Having initially been suspicious, I became assured that:

(a) my much-valued privacy was not going to be lost or exposed to the advertising spammer world, and

(b) I was not going to be inundated with advertising junk, either on screen or in my mailbox.

Then I started to check out the increasing number of utilities that Google offer, and I installed the Google desktop utility, and then Picasa2 onto my laptop. I recommend readers of this blog try out these and other free Google products. You might be as amazed as I was at how brilliantly these products work, what timesavers they can be, and how they open your world up to doing things in new ways and possibly changing your paradigms.

Internet BBC Radio tuner

If you like to listen to the BBC World Service, or other BBC Radio stations (and I do), then you may well be interested in this Google Desktop "gadget". I am a happy user of this gadget.

Introducing ClustrMaps from clustrmaps.com

I have just installed a nifty free graphics tool on this site called "ClustrMaps" from clustrmaps.com. It shows a small map of the world and indicates - by means of clusters of red dots - where "hits" on the blog site are emanating from around the world.

I came across it being used on another blog and was so impressed that I put it into all the blogs that I maintain.

Introducing Snap Shots from Snap.com

I have just installed an incredibly useful and free little tool on this site called "Snap Shots" from snap.com. It makes for a more informative blog, and it makes reading the blog more efficient for the reader. I came across it being used on another blog and was very impressed. I initially tried it out on one blog, and have since put it into the other blogs that I maintain. What it does is this:

• When you hover your mouse over a link in the blog (see the little icon to the right of the link?), it gives you more information about the link - maybe even a miniature display of it. i.e., it enhances some links by providing visual previews.
• The further information allows the reader to choose whether they want to follow that particular link to find out more. This would seem to be a better alternative to following the link and only then finding that actually it is not very interesting/useful to you.

Sometimes Snap Shots bring you the information you need, without your having to leave the site, while at other times it lets you "look ahead," before deciding if you want to follow a link or not.

Should you decide this is not for you, just click the Options icon in the upper right corner of the Snap Shot and opt-out.

There's a good discussion about Snap Shots on the blog here. It's all about "drilling" links.

Tip - backup your work data

This may be one of the most important and valuable tips that you ever read.

If you had ever worked in IT on mainframe computer systems, then you would have had several professional best practice rules and lessons drummed into your head, often based on the hard-won lessons of other peoples' experiences. One of them was sure to have been: carry out data backups of your work data on a regular basis. The only time that you will realise exactly how valuable and important this rule is will be when you have a disk crash or similar, by which time it will be too late to help yourself if you have not carried out any backups.

Because the majority of laptop/PC users are not professional IT workers, they may not know any better. Those that are professional IT workers often:

• have not been trained as professionals
• may be rather slack in their work practices in any event
• may have been meaning to get a round tuit
  

- so, this rule is often forgotten nowadays and regular data backups may have been ignored/omitted.

Data backup is actually quite a simple process, though rigorous double-checking and spring-cleaning the work data and its backups can be tedious and could consume quite a bit of time. Fortunately, such spring-cleaning, though useful in conserving storage space, is not mandatory. You need 2 things to make backups possible:

1. A portable backup device.
2. A system (software) to carry out the backups in an automated manner.

Backup device:

• Forget tapes of any sort - not only are they expensive and not portable, but they are also unreliable in the recovery.
• Avoid using CD-ROMs, unless your backup data really is minimal - they are too slow and not easily/safely portable.
• Insist on using USB or Firewire (for faster data transfer) plug'n play portable or semi-portable hard drives. From experience - having tried CD-ROMS, ZIP drives, etc. - I recommend the use of 2.5 inch profile laptop drives in a pocket-sized (i.e., portable) metal case. These devices are robust, cheap, reliable and fast, and can hold large volumes of data - e.g., typically 120+GB, which are likely to serve most users' needs.

Backup system/software:

• Go for something that is flexible and that enables you to automate and schedule backups on a regular basis. I would recommend that you try one of the many freeware and shareware products in the market. I personally have used Handy Backup since 1999, since reading reviews of it in computer magazines and on web sites. It is a brilliant and relatively inexpensive product.
• Is it worth it? For cost-justification, the expense of doing backups needs to be compared to the expense, inconvenience, and loss of business/time in attempting to recover from a data loss if you have not done backups.

Tip - selecting a laptop

If you have already bought a laptop, then you are likely to be committed to making the most of it. If you have not yet bought it and are wondering what to buy, then take this tip born of 30 years' experience of working in IT and 17 years' experience of using laptops as my main/only productivity tool:

• Insist on a Toshiba laptop.
  

Now I know that people could object to such a bald statement - so, why Toshiba? Well, it is because, after trying out or using Toshiba, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, NEC, ASUS, IBM, etc., I have been forced to acknowledge that Toshiba corporation are consistent. Their three most important consistencies are:

• They consistently conform to relatively high production quality standards.
  
• They have consistently been shown to be leaders in laptop technology (along with NEC) - i.e., always being farsighted in implementing features that other manufacturers only belatedly follow.
• They have consistently implemented good ergonomics in their laptop design - including especially: large/full-size keys designed to assist touch-typing; keyboards with good feel and bio-feedback; good and consistent keyboard layout (the Del, Alt and pagination keys are usually in the same/similar locations on all models); good ergonomics in the screen design; solid construction (so they can put up with everyday knocks).
  

These are the most important simply because, if:
(a) you are likely to be spending a lot of time with your laptop and
(b) if it does not enable you to achieve optimal efficiency, effectiveness and productivity when it is being used as a working tool,
- then you will probably inevitably find that it is forcing you to waste time.