If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or you can register for email updates. Thanks for visiting!

• Everything you ever wanted to know about "Rickrolling"… - The man who sang "Never gonna give you up," the classic Stock-Aitken-Waterman pop song, makes an unexpected come back. (What's wrong with Debbie Gibson by the way?!)
• Lies and Statistics - Most people in Britain believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Or do they…?
• Our Bad. Wired Had Some Tips For Apple — We Were Wrong. - Fascinating to see how much things have changed in the last ten years.

• The Best of Technology Writing 2007 - I just finished reading this book myself yesterday. I was considering writing a review but Ars got there first and said it better than I would have done!
• Protests in Tibet erupt into violence - Violence is never a good thing, but the Olympics is undoubtedly a good time to try to raise the profile of the plight of the Tibetan people.
• Open Rights Group questions Phorm - Good to see TalkTalk, BT and Virgin Media's abuse of their own customers getting more press.

This is the second of a two-part article about YoPhoto’s photo book printing service. Previously I wrote about the authoring software and the ordering experience. Here I will go into more detail about the finished product.

I placed the order on Saturday 8th March. The dispatch notice arrived at lunchtime on Tuesday 11th and the book arrived on the next day. After waiting two weeks for some of the previous photo books it is refreshing to have this one in my hands less than three working days after placing the order.

Of course getting the book quickly is no good if it is of poor quality. So what is it like?

It arrives in a brown card sleeve, with glue so strong that you practically have to destroy it to get in. Or maybe I’m just clumsy. Either way everything inside was in perfect condition.

Immediately inside the sleeve is the book carefully wrapped in tissue paper. First impressions are good. The linen binding feels good and the “black bean” colour is deep and attractive. The only external indication of what is inside is the small, silver “yophoto” branding on the back.

Opening it up you find white paper, vellum and then the book proper. The photographs generally look good and most of the comments that I have made on the other books appy here too. The images are very good, but at a lower resolution than normal photographic prints. The colour — which has varied considerably more than most other variables — is muted but accurate. As with any hard copy, the images sometimes show the imperfections of the original in ways that you can’t really see on-screen. Of course this is hardly a criticism of the printing process.

Speaking of on-screen representations, it turns out that their editing application did a great job of rendering the finished product. The book arrived with no surprises which, is just as I like it.

My sense is that all the vendors must be using very similar technologies as it’s very difficult to distinguish between them simply in the quality of the pictures. And the good news here is that they’re all very good; most people would be happy the final results from any of the companies that I have tried.

Then there are the little extras. I like the vellum sheet that YoPhoto (and MyPublisher) places before the first page; I appreciate the tidy folding of the tissue paper — it shows a commendable attention to detail; and I prefer the way that they include the delivery charge in their prices; but none of these things are likely to push you towards one supplier above another.

Given that the finished books are very similar, the two things that I think matter are the ordering process and the delivery times. YoPhoto do well on both counts. Their delivery was the quickest of all those that I have tested — a full ten days ahead of the slowest — and the ordering process was helped by a powerful yet fairly simple to use application.

My only hesitation in using them again is the fact that they do not offer a Mac version of their application. But the vast majority of people who are stuck in the Microsoft world should certainly consider them next time they want a photo book printing.

• Dear ISP, I am not a target market - "Some things should just not be for sale, no matter what assurances are on offer or who they come from. Regardless of how the data is acquired and processed, and despite the powerful ISP friends Phorm has made since the PeopleOnPage days, spyware is spywa
• Happy now, bitches? - A fair and balanced analysis of yesterdays announcement of the iPhone software developer kit and "enterprise" functionality.
• Polls say 88% want EU referendum - About a year ago the Daily Mail (I think) published a poll saying pretty much the same thing. But they also asked "Do you understand the Libson treaty?" and about the same percentage of people said "No." (Can anyone find a link?) Is democracy best served

One thing I noted when I first reviewed photo books back in 2006 was that most vendors were based overseas, resulting in quick printing times but a protracted and expensive delivery process. This was true of Apple (both times), MyPublisher and Printing-1. The one company that I tried that were UK based, PhotoBox, was let down by its browser-based interface that was less flexible that the native applications of the other vendors.

I was therefore quite intrigued when YoPhoto asked me to take a look at their brand of photo book as they seemed to offer the best of both worlds.

This review will take a similar form as the previous ones. Today’s piece will concentrate on the ordering process, and the next will be all about the finished results. The order was placed on 8th March 2008.

So let’s get started. As regular readers will know I tend to use a Macintosh, so I was pleased to see that YoPhoto acknowledged that it’s not an entirely Microsoft-centric world. Unfortunately they seem to expect their Apple-using customers to be professional photographers and the like since they assume that they have £1000 worth of software.

Given the wording of that last sentence you can safely assume that I do not.

Of course there are likely to be cheaper ways to generate multi-page PDFs with at least 2mm of bleed and crop marks, but given that there is a £20 set-up fee for submitting a book in this format (for a book that costs £30) I didn’t feel terribly inclined to experiment.

I switched to a Windows XP based laptop and continued.

In the Microsoft world they provide some of their own software for the task. It’s a 22Mb download and the process of getting it installed on your computer is entirely uneventful — a good thing!

The installer finishes by starting the application. Up pops a splash screen asking whether you want to create a new product or open an existing one. I select ‘new product.’

The next screen wonders what product you want. They offer mainly books, of varying sizes and finishes, but there are also a couple of calendars. The interface makes it clear how much each option costs which is a nice touch. I decide on the medium size linen book. There seems to be no option to choose the colour of the cover of the book which is odd as they do mention this on their website.

The next step is to enter a name for your new creation and decide whether to manually populate your book or use their “autofill” feature. It is looking for exactly 78 pictures. I have way more than that, and I’m not exactly sure which ones I’ll use at this stage. Also I figure I’ll probably need more than the standard number of pages but cannot see a way of adding any. I go for the manual process.

It quickly zips through my folder and generates thumbnails for all the pictures. Before I’ve had the chance to look at the main window properly, it notes that this is the first time that I’ve used the software and asks whether I’d like some help. It shows me a nice step-by-step guide, in pictures, of what I should be looking to do next.

Maybe it’s my experience with making the other photo books but the guide didn’t add much to an already fairly intuitive process. It’s mainly drag-and-drop. On the right side of the screen you can select the format of each page. You select the number of images on the page from a drop-down list. Beneath that a number of pre-defined templates appear and you can drag these onto the page. The templates tend to make pretty good use of the available space. Some have text widgets which can be removed if you don’t need them.

Next you move to the left side of the screen where there is a list of available pictures. You can also drag-and-drop these onto the page. The templates seem to only act as a guide, meaning that if you “miss” any of the template slots you end up with another picture on that page. Of the easy to use solutions that I’ve come across, this is by far the most powerful.

The slots in the templates are the wrong aspect ratio for the images coming straight out of my SLR, but, luckily, there are fairly extensive editing facilities built-in. Sure, it’s not going to have Adobe worried but it’s on a par with iPhoto, and includes red-eye correction, exposure compensation and some effects, some more useful that others, including sepia, grey-scale and water-colour. I stuck to Photoshop for my (minor) effects.

I spend quite some time playing around with the book, adding and removing pictures, changing the order, editing the number of pictures on each page and fine-tuning the whole thing. Throughout of the whole process I didn’t experience any glitches, hangs or crashes.

Once everything looks about right I click the “Order” button on the tool bar at the top of the screen. It immediately objects, telling me that I have not entered a valid email address yet. But continuing the thoughtful nature of the interface it allows me to enter one immediately without having to back out and play around with the options screen.

I’m surprised that it only asks me for my name and email address. I was expecting to have to enter the billing and delivery address.

The next few screens pass by quickly. The first asks me to check the product, making sure it is exactly as desired — no doubt the result of complaints from previous customers who didn’t get exactly what they were expecting! An unusual option in this age of almost ubiquitous broadband is the ability to send the order in on CD. I stick with my cable internet connection and select upload.

The next few stages require a cup of tea while they execute: first preparing the book, followed by compressing and finally uploading. The “while” is not unreasonable or unexpected, just a consequence of the size of a typical photo book.

The final stage of the process is entering the delivery address and, finally, the colour of the cover of the book. I check the various details and complete the process. An email arrives shortly afterwards suggesting that they plan to dispatch the finished product in three working days.

I’m impressed so far. The process has been quick and intuitive. Their program works as described and has a surprising level of sophistication. Let’s hope that the book lives up to these standards. Part two will follow when the book arrives.

One of the big technology debates in the US goes by the thrilling title of “Net Neutrality.” In the UK we seem to have skipped this part of the debate and moved on to the next, all without many consumers even knowing that anything has changed. As we’ll see, this does not work out well for many end-users and exposes hypocrisy and dishonesty on the part of the Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

The first question you might be asking is, What is Net Neutrality?

To cut a long story short, this is all about ISPs wanting to prioritise some types of Internet traffic to the detriment of others. At first glance this makes some sense. The ISPs have a finite amount of capacity with which to connect all their users to to the wider Internet. By design, all traffic on the Internet is traditionally considered to be equal. That’s to say that my movie download from iTunes gets the same priority as your video chat and my neighbours web surfing.

Is that fair? You’ll get delays and jitters in your webchat if the performance of your Internet connection isn’t good enough. My neighbour doesn’t have quite the same requirements as you. She doesn’t want to be waiting too long for that page to download, but the odd outlier isn’t going to cause any significant issue. And me, well, my movie is going to take a while to download anyway and I’m not planning on watching it immediately.

Right, so it makes sense for you to get full speed and my connection should be throttled back?

Let’s not be too hasty.

As I understand it, there are two main arguments given against traffic shaping (as it’s called), one technical, the other political. The technical reason is fairly simple: the Internet was designed with the assumption that all traffic was equal and we don’t really know what effect large scale traffic shaping would have. It could be the butterfly flapping its wings in Japan that causes a tornado in Florida.

The political reason is probably why the ISPs really want an end to Net Neutrality: they are not entirely impartial when it comes to deciding which traffic gets priority. These same companies want to sell music and movies and voice over Internet services, so what’s to say that they wouldn’t give their own voice traffic priority over Vonage or Skype?¹

This debate never really happened here in the UK. While the big print in the adverts usually says “Unlimited Downloads!”² the small print typically hints at traffic shaping. I suspect this already affects many people without them knowing about it; they just blame their PC or Bill Gates without realising that the problem is actually further downstream.

But as I hinted back in the first paragraph, in the UK three of the major ISPs are taking one further step: they are planning on selling our surfing habits to a third-party so that they can send us context-sensitive adverts.

It can’t be just me that thinks that this is creepy.

Advertisers love the idea as they can see exactly the sites that everyone³ is visiting and not just those that, for instance, have DoubleClick or Google banners.

In return, consumers get some nebulous “security” protection, details of all their web surfing sent to a third party without their consent and even more adverts⁴.

Where does the hypocrisy come in? Well, recently the UK government suggested that ISPs should police the Internet for copyright infringement. Three offences and your connection is shut-down. These offences, incidentally, seem not to require any legal process or evidence — it’s pretty much the suspicion that seals your fate.

In response to this, the ISPs say:

“ISPs cannot ‘monitor or record’ the nature of the data flowing over their network, argues [the ISPA]. UK data protection laws make deep packet inspection illegal … and even if it wasn’t, complete monitoring is impossible. ‘ISPs are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope,’ says the ISPA.”

Hang on!

When they can make money selling those records it’s just fine. And when this transaction hinders their own users experience by flashing up adverts without their permission, that’s also dandy. But when it comes to scanning the traffic for law enforcement purposes then it’s both illegal and impossible?

Being an Internet Service Provider has gone from being an almost glamorous, high margin business in the mid-nineties to one barely above commodity level today. It is, perhaps, no wonder that they are trying every last trick to eke out every last penny, but is selling out their own customers really the best strategy?

1. My parents ISP chose to throttle all P2P software, which may not be a bad choice per se. Unfortunately they also included Skype in this category. I’m not sure whether this was purely an accident or because they are mainly a phone company who are providing “free” broadband and are trying to push people away from VoIP.↩
2. Are people really so gullible as to believe that they can reasonably get unlimited anything? ISPs clearly think so as I am only aware of a few that have bandwidth quotas.↩
3. They are three of the biggest ISPs in the UK. So while this isn’t actually everyone, they cover around two-thirds of British broadband subscribers.↩
4. One of the most creepy parts is that if you opt-out then there is still the possibility that you’re still going to be tracked anyway.↩