I'm on the train. HELLO, HELLO...

As a regular commuter into London on the train, I have become increasingly sensitive to the decibel-fueled Dom Joly school of mobile phone conversations. Part of the problem has been the unfortunate demise of a Christmas 'Ministry of Sound' MP3 player which, true to brand, finds it impossible to function in daylight.

With all of the hype surrounding Macworld this week, from the launch of the Mac Mini to the iPod Shuffle, I recall with great fondness the first Walkman that I bought some fifteen years ago. By some strange combination of consumer abuse and state-of-the-Ark engineering, one of the side effects of its increasingly erratic performance, is that it blocks out mobile phone signals within a short radius. All I need to do is to find some old stock, bury it in the garden for 11 months and it will be Christmas 2005's top commuter gadget.

The blogger is back in town

Niall Cook's New Year resolution to unsubscribe from every email newsletter to switch to RSS feeds is laudable. At this time of year, information overload is at its worst, as you return from the New Year excesses to a mass of emails as impenetrable as the weather outside. The convenience of RSS feeds, such as Bloglines, helps to manage information overload by having access to your news sources in one place and allows you to keep bang up-to-date with new articles published.

The pressures of the New Year have made it difficult to keep up with the blog, so I can only admire the prolific output of fellow blogger Johnnie Moore, who has managed not just one, but four posts today. Whether he can maintain this output over the rest of the year or in facts works to a different calendar to the rest of us Brits, only time will tell.

Review of 2004

The year is drawing in and all through the land(s) bloggers are typing misty-eyed reviews of 2004. Despite the temptation to Google everyone else's thoughts and get stuck into the mince pies early, I will add my take on the significant developments of the year when many former winks in the milkman's eye really hit the public consciousness:

- Google's flotation: the big headline behind the story that new media is back from the dot com crash. It also saw Google the verb (see usage above) being used in the mainstream, along with its many other variations: 'Googling', 'Googlewhack' and 'just popping down the pub for a Google, dear'.

- Me, me, me media: when you saw your Luddite friends getting to grips with 3G, Sky Plus, IPod, Tivo, Blackberry's, Desktop Search, RSS, and the rest. What you want, when you want it and on what device you want it.

- Mass media broadband: when broadband in the UK finally became affordable.

- Email wars: Gmail hit the headlines with its 1G storage, sparking an almighty dust up for customers among the big players, with Lycos, Hotmail, AOL all indulged in a free-for-all.

- Blog, blog, blog: when colleagues started writing them, clients starting asking about them and people actually started reading them

- Blood boiling: yes, the year that my boiler decided to pack in on Christmas Eve. Do you know how difficult it is to get a plumber out at this time of year?

Given that it is the season both of giving and receiving, in true 2004 style I invite you to Google your predictions for 2005.

Return to haunt sender

This week saw an old email emerge as the final straw that broke the proverbial camel's back for UK Home Secretary, David Blunkett, revealing his curious phrase "No favours, but slightly quicker" in the nanny-visa-gate affair.

For all the talk of the anonymity of the Internet, the reality is that with the ability to record each website visited, file downloaded, comment published, email sent and to search 8 billion webpages on Google (and the rest), the potential for your Internet history to return to haunt you is all too real.

This blog featured the sorry tale of former air hostess Queen of the Sky who was reportedly brought back to earth for featuring inappropriate pictures of herself in her employers' uniform on her blog.

Blogging and email have empowered people to transmit their thoughts in seconds, but this carries with it all the dangers in terms of lack of reflection and hot-headedness. Add to that the potential for cultural misunderstandings inherent in a global audience and you'll wish you'd taken daddy's advice and signed up to law school after all.

No wonder then that so many companies' email signatures feature the obligatory 'don't blame us' legal warning - a particularly well written one I received this week featured the immortal line: "These are the views of the sender unless you like them a lot - then they are the Company's!"

Perhaps I should add a postscript: This blog contains the views of my virtual alter ego, unless you like them a lot - then they are mine!

Sorry, you were saying?

Apologies to those communicative souls that placed comments on the site up until today (apart from that weirdo forum that kept spamming the site. Yes, you). It seems you can't make an omelette without breaking any eggs and all of those wonderful posts have been consigned to cyber-history.

The culprit is progress. Blogger doesn't yet have 'Trackback' as a function, but it is possible to enable this functionality through Haloscan. Unfortunately, when you enable their handy auto-installer, it deletes all of the previous Blogger-powered comments.

Hopefully, the change will be worthwhile as, true to the blogging principle that 'no blog should be an island', Trackback is a great way of viewing debates in the blogosphere.

"Your designers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

Whether or not you appreciate the Jurassic Park reference, the web is awash with sites that "didn't stop to think if they should." I'm not talking here about the sites that suffer through lack of design or programming skills. Ignorance or incompetence are an excuse in this rant.

No, instead I'm talking about site designers that do have these skills in abundance. It's just that through a desire to showcase their skills (usually in prime offender, Flash) they commit creative hari-kari and render their sites totally unusable. The web is still a relatively new medium, yet there are still basic conventions that you should follow that don't have to compromise your creativity.

I'm talking about sites that try to reinvent the navigation wheel with floating menus, one-off scrolling bars, unintentionally-hidden links and, of course, those overly complicated intro movies.

The worst offenders are often web design agencies themselves who may or may not do great work for clients, but can't resist one creative flourish too many when it comes to their own sites. Take for example, these guys - I defy you to navigate their website without throwing something at the screen.

Any candidates you'd like to see savaged by a virtual T-Rex? Let's hear about them in the comments section.

Please tell me this is a spoof

I'm hoping this website design awards site is trying to be ironic...

Google toolbar PageRank bar, where are you?

The Google toolbar features a handy PageRank bar which lets you know the PageRank of any page that you are viewing. There has been some debate recently about just how accurate the figures are with claims that the total shown is often months out-of-date or just plain wrong.

My own experience of using the calculator is that the figures it shows are reasonably accurate and are logical. Thus, Google-owned Blogger.com's homepage has a PageRank of 10, new pages show 0 and those in-between generally conform to my understanding of how influential a site is. I find it a helpful tool when reviewing longer term (note: longer) progress on sites that I have been working on.

However, today the PageRank bar vanished from my Google toolbar without explanation. This may be a temporary blip while it gets it's annual springclean. A quick search of the SEO forums show that some have it, some don't, and some see a universal grey or 0 Page Rank for every site they visit, so it looks more like a blip than the end for one of my favourite pieces of internet trivia.

Let me know if you've experienced this in the comment section.

Updated: It was just a springclean (if you're in the southern hemisphere of course) with regards to my PC. After a well deserved break, the toolbar decided to reset itself to US Google and switch off its PageRank bar option.

Chance to end your online identity crisis

Those in the UK that joined the internet revolution later than others (or those with particularly common names) have had to suffer the indignity of a split identity online. The thousands of john2365's out there are getting another opportunity to be referred to by their real name (provided they still remember it) with news that Hotmail.co.uk is being launched.

Whether the benefit of having a decent email address will outweigh the pain of telling all your contacts that you have changed email address is another question. No doubt the common names will be snapped up by those enterprising souls hoping to sell them straight back on Ebay, small print permitting or ignored (Hotmail are themselves auctioning off the most common for charity).

Those readers with an eye on future trends may well wonder whether they should even be bothering with email given news from tech-obsessed South Korea that email is for old people. In a survey, over two thirds of students rarely or never use email, prefering the more informal texting or instant messaging as the way to communicate. No doubt this is the same old story of when your Dad has something, it's just not cool anymore...

Where there's a will, there's a way (to advertise)

Those loyal readers that subscribe to this blog via an RSS feed or equivalent have been missing out. The longer term subscribers probably won't even know that the mother site now has a neat row of grey text ads decorating the top of the site.

The RSS-tinted world (explanation of RSS here, if you're interested) is reminiscent of the ad-free early internet, with just fresh content picked up by the feeds.

Just as you can't escape death and taxes, it was only a matter of time before the loophole got plugged. This week saw news that Overture is working with Feedburner to place its contextual ads into their feeds. This move will surely be widely copied as both publishers and the software providers fight for their share of the valuable advertising pie that pays at least some of the bills.

You've got spam

Spare a thought for Microsoft supremo, Bill Gates, who is the most spammed person on earth, according to his colleague Steve Ballmer. He receives an inbox-busting four million emails daily, the vast majority of which are spam.

Given Gates' bank balance, it looks like those 'make money online' emails really do work after all.

(Can you beat Bill's total? Leave your details below.)