Steve Nichols' TechNotes

Beating the hackers

2009-06-19T12:24:00.000Z

This is a warning for the freelancers and small business owners out there. While you are sleeping there are an army of hackers out there, hell bent on destroying your web site or using it to distribute spam e-mails, viruses or other malware. And what is worse, there may be very little you can do to stop it.

Once you have a web site you are fair game for every hacker in the world. And they even share your information with each other. They are looking for websites using bulletin board and forum software that has not been kept up to date, and content management systems or operating systems that have known flaws and unlocked back doors.

They are even silently attacking your web host, trying to get hold of your personal log-in details, which makes their life a lot easier.

Don’t believe me? In December 2007 hundreds of websites had to be closed down temporarily after hackers managed to get hold of the personal log-in details from UK web company Fasthosts. The company claimed that it had no option other than to perform an emergency shutdown after it discovered that the hackers had tried to use information gleaned from its servers. New passwords had to be sent out by post rather than e-mail to avoid the information being compromised again.?

And it isn’t just small companies that get their sites hacked. A quick search using Google uncovered a whole host of companies that have had similar problems, including job site Monster.com, US anti-virus specialists Kaspersky and even ex-Beetle Paul McCartney's website.

Hacking can take many forms. The simplest and least damaging is defacing a website. When this occurs your normal home page is replaced by an image with the words “hacked by the Turkish dot squad” or something similar.

This is annoying, but not too damaging. A simple reinstall will get you going again, although you may never know how they got in. After you have reinstalled the site reset your FTP password to something very unusual, preferably consisting or a mixture of letters and numbers. You should also ensure that any software you are using is up to date.

Slightly worse is a hack whereby code is injected into your site to advertise Viagra or something similar. Bulletin boards and forums are classic areas where this can occur. I have also seen an online registration form targeted, whereby a poor unsuspecting conference organiser was inundated with e-mails advertising porn sites. This was happening at a rate of about two per minute until I was able to add a Captcha module, whereby visitors have to key in a four-digit code that is shown to them by way of an image. This won’t stop manual hackers, but it goes some way to defeating computer-automated hacks.

The worst hack involves the distribution of malware, whereby anyone visiting your site gets a PC virus infection or key logger. Again, the only solution is a complete reinstall. If you don’t clean up an infected web site you run the risk of it being blocked by Google, although you can apply for the ban to be lifted once the site is clean again.

So what else can you do to prevent hackers? Firstly, make sure you are using an up to date virus checker on your PC or Mac. Secondly, visit your site on a regular basis and make sure it looks OK and checks out with your antivirus. Lastly, make sure you have a complete back-up of your site so that you can reinstate it should the worst happen.

Then just sit back and cross your fingers. It isn’t a matter of “if” your site will get hacked, but “when”.

The 3M MPro110 pocket projector

2009-05-29T07:02:00.002Z

Presentations have come a long way since the days of 35mm slides and a Kodak Carousel (remember them?).

Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple’s Keynote have made sure of that. Oh, and while I think of it when you are putting your presentation together think about how you use images. Many people just throw in full-size JPEG images which means that you end up with very bloated PowerPoint files. These can end up too big to e-mail.

It is much better to size your images in Photoshop before you import them. It is quite easy to work out how big to make them. An average digital projector has a horizontal resolution of about 1024-1280 pixels, but images straight out of a digital camera are likely to be around 3000-4000 pixels wide. Place these straight into PowerPoint and you’ll end up with enormous PPT files.

If you are going to use an image full screen your imported image needs to be about the same size as the projector’s resolution – about 1024 pixels wide. Any bigger and you are not gaining quality, but just bloating your files. If you are using an image at half screen size then about 600 pixels wide is fine.

Anyway, back to the main story. Once you have your PowerPoint presentation you still need to have a digital projector to connect to your laptop – and that is where the trouble starts. Firstly, they are still quite expensive with replacement bulbs costing the earth. A quick tip – after using your projector switch it off and let it cool down completely before moving it. The bulb is less likely to blow in future.

Projectors are also bulky and not the sort of thing you want to carry around. By the time you have taken your laptop, your briefcase and your projector you start to look like a packhorse.

But 3M has come up with a product that it hopes will change all that. It says its MPro110 pocket projector is ideal for travellers who deliver a lot of presentations but do not want to carry bulky desktop projectors around with them.

Measuring just 115x50x22 mm (4.5"x1.97"x0.88") the projector is more like a large mobile phone. It weighs just 152 grams (0.33 lbs) and has a built-in lithium ion battery that can provide enough power for about 40-60 minutes.

If that isn’t enough it also has a power supply/charger.

The secret of the projector is that it uses high-powered LEDs and not incandescent bulbs. The LEDs have an estimated life of more than 20,000 hours so should see you through to the end of your career! It is also silent in operation as it doesn’t need a cooling fan.

There are only two controls – an on/off button and a focus ring, although this was quite loose and it was easy to lose focus if you moved the unit around.

3M says the projector is particularly useful for giving impromptu sales pitches to customers while on the road or in a last-minute meeting.

I tested it with both an Apple and Windows PC and it worked well, projecting in its native 640x480 pixel VGA mode. This is quite small, but it will also support 800 x 600 SVGA, 1024 x 768 XGA and 1280 x 768 WXGA modes.

The projector is no match for a full-size projector though and I found that in subdued lighting (but not a dark room) it could only really project up to about 24-30 inches across (60-75 cm). You really need a screen too to make the most of the projected image - something else to carry.

Its own literature says that in a normally-lit room it can manage up to 5 inches (127mm) wide, which is miniscule, but in a darkened room it can project up to 50 inches (127cm) wide.

I can see that as LED technology develops these units could get brighter and brighter. After all, a projector like this was unthinkable just a couple of years ago.

It also needs a small tripod really as laying it on a desk meant that you lost the lower portion of the image. In fact, the company’s own PR photographs show it being used with a mini tripod so I don’t know why they don’t supply one in the box.

So in all, the projector does what it says on the tin, but I’m left wondering if you really need one at all. Given that most venues that you visit are unlikely to have full blackout conditions the usefulness of the projector is going to be limited.

And if you are in a completely dark venue the chances are that you would be using a “proper” projector anyway. If you just presenting to a handful of people then it might be better to use a large-screen laptop, such as a 17- or 20-inch model.

So the 3M Mpro110 is an odd beast. For small presentations you could just use a laptop and for bigger ones you need a proper projector. If you do happen to present to five or six people, in a room with subdued lighting, then I can see that it could be valuable.

At a street price of around £235- £285 it might just be worth having one as a spare for your normal projector. But don’t buy one expecting it to do everything you want. As one review said “it is more of a geek’s toy really”.

The Asus Eee netbook

2009-04-08T15:34:00.002Z

It's a funny old world. A few years ago manufacturers were hell bent on making laptops bigger and bigger. Seventeen-inch screens were de rigueur and there was even one with a 22-inch screen. But that's all changing.

They have finally twigged that for portable use some people want smaller, lighter machines. And so the netbook was born.

A netbook is a tiny portable PC, usually weighing less than 1kg and with a 7 to 9-inch screen. If you only want to do basic world processing and web browsing such a machine has a lot to offer, being small enough to fit in the corner of a briefcase or handbag, but powerful enough to handle two-three hour's work on a single charge.

Netbooks are available from Dell (Mini 9), Acer (Aspire One), MSI (Wind) and Asus (Eee PC) among others and this seemed like a good time to test drive one.

For the test I chose one of the cheapest on the market - the Asus Eee PC 701, running Windows XP with 512Mb of RAM and a sold-state 8Gb drive. At £135+VAT from Carphone Warehouse they don't come much cheaper.

Measuring just under nine inches (23cm) wide by six and half inches (17cm) deep and less than an inch (3cm) thick the PC701 may be small but it packs a punch, with built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, three USB sockets and even a VGA port for connecting to an external monitor. It has also a built-in webcam, bundled Skype, audio in and out and a slot for an SD memory card.

The seven-inch screen works at a resolution of 800x600 pixels and automatically pans as you move the cursor towards the edges. It is also quite sharp.

Some netbooks come with a version of the Linux operating system, which shouldn't put you off. Coupled with the bundled open source OpenOffice.org software and the Firefox web browser they are more than up to the job.

This model came with full-blown Windows XP and Microsoft Works - not quite as capable as Microsoft Office but able to open and save .doc or .docx format, as well as Excel's .xls. It comes with a PowerPoint viewer, but you can't actually create PowerPoint slides with it. With Windows XP and the associated software installed the computer's 8Gb of memory still had 5.21Gb left. Not big enough for your digital photograph collection, but more than adequate for documents and the odd additional program or two.

The biggest problem facing any computer only nine inches wide has got to be the keyboard. I have fingers like sausages, but managed to make a fair fist of using it and after a while became quite adept at keying text in without making too many errors. But I think it would drive you nuts if you had to use it as your main machine. Don't forget that you can always plug in an external keyboard and mouse (and screen) if need be.

Microsoft Works is OK, but if you intend sharing documents with other people try to avoid saving them as .wps (Works document) files. These are not very compatible, but it is the default format for Works and you have to physically force the machine to save as .doc each time.

The Eee PC 701 also includes Internet Explorer and this worked fine, although with most web sites you have to pan to see the right hand side as few are now only 800 pixels wide. E-mail is taken care of with either Windows Live Mail or Outlook Express - it does seem strange that both are bundled. It only took a couple of minutes to configure Live Mail with my Gmail IMAP account and all my mail and folders were there.

In case you hadn't gathered already, this feature was written on the Asus, and it did a pretty good job. Anyone familiar with a PC and MS Office will feel quite at home. If you are a Mac user who can't bear to even touch Windows then you can always go for the Linux version. In fact, one or two hackers have actually managed to get Mac OS X running on the Asus and Dell netbooks, although it isn't easy to do and is technically illegal.

At this point in the feature I thought I would try and get a little more adventurous. Could I add a better Office package, like OpenOffice.org or perhaps even use it with my 3G data dongle?

The answer to that second question was very easy as Carphone Warehouse actually bundles some of its netbooks with dongles. The dongle worked fine, although it did put an additional load on the battery, witnessed by increased cooling fan speed.

OpenOffice.org 3.1 is a free open-source office package that mirrors the applications in MS Office very well. I have used it (and its close cousin NeoOffice) on Macs and it is a good substitute.

After installation I still had more than 4Gb left and OpenOffice.org offers a user interface that is more like MS Word's. You can also set up .doc as your default format - much better.

At the two-hour mark the Asus still had 30% of its charge remaining and it was a further 45 minutes before I really had to think about reaching for the power cord.

For around £150 I think this netbook is a bargain. If you fancy a bigger screen and keyboard the Dell Mini 9 is also very nice at £242 + VAT. Just one questions remains - who wants one?

STOP PRESS - I have now bought an Acer Aspire One, which is currently running Windows XP and Mac OSX, but that's another story!

Getting linked up to LinkedIn

2009-04-08T15:30:00.001Z

Social media was one of the internet buzz phrases of 2008, and 2009 doesn't look being much different.

Previously we have looked at Facebook, which is great fun but a little lacking in professional usefulness. People seem very keen on updating their status, trying to get you to join daft groups like the "Baked Beans on Toast Appreciation Society" and generally throwing cream pies at each other.

If you are looking for a "Facebook with A levels" then LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) might be a better bet.

LinkedIn, which is free to join, describes itself as "an interconnected network of experienced professionals from around the world, representing 170 industries and 200 countries".

The object of the network is to find, be introduced to, and collaborate with other professionals.

When you join, you create a profile that summarises your professional expertise and accomplishments. You then search for and add other contacts to join you, so creating a network.
Your network then consists of your connections, your connections' connections, and the people they know.

But why would you bother? LinkedIn says that the system will help you find and be introduced to potential clients, service providers, and subject experts.

You can also "create and collaborate on projects, gather data, share files and solve problems".

But does the reality match up to the promise?

I have been a LinkedIn member for about six months, but haven't really taken it that seriously. My "network" consists of 14 people, which is very low. In my group one person has more than 500 contacts and the average is about 30.

I belong to the "intranet professionals" and "internal communication" groups, both of which have a forum, but they are not used very much.

What I do get however, are endless requests from people I have never heard of asking me to "join their network". And according to some e-mails I have received after asking for CiB member's thoughts on LinkedIn I am not alone.

But I do think that you get out of LinkedIn would you put in. CiB member Lorraine Donald said: "I've definitely found it very useful. It helps break the ice with new contacts if you've LinkedIn beforehand, or do it straight after meeting up.

"Potential new clients can check you out in an instant, and see your recommendations, your work history and background - it's like a living CV and credentials document.

"You could discover that you worked in the same company, or went to the same college as a new client, which has happened to me! You find out you know people in common, and that helps build trust and relationships.

"I like the idea of using Facebook for personal and social use, and LinkedIn for business/work related contact," she said.

But Adrian Holliday said that he was also pestered by people he didn't know. "A colleague of mine thinks it's great and is linked in to 200-plus others. I've probably missed the point of it," he said.

Jackie Mitchell had had a similar experience, but Helen Osman, sister-in-law of CiB member Rick Osman, said: "Working for a small consultancy, I am finding it is a good way to stay in touch with people I used to work with and also another way of building relationships with existing clients and increasingly clients who are being made redundant - sadly two in the last couple of weeks.

"I am putting them in touch with people who are in a similar position or are in the same industry and in the longer term these people should get new jobs and could become future clients - over and above that they are nice people. It is also useful for tracking down past clients, whose contact details I no longer have.

"Whilst it is a case that some people are merely collecting contacts - an ego trip (I've got more friends than you) I suspect that there are a lot of passive users. For example, last week I sent out invites to half a dozen people, but only one has come back. This could be because people don't want to be my contact, but I suspect (hopefully!) that this is because a lot of members are not logging on regularly."

But the final word rests with freelancer Carole Seawert who has found the system useful. "I am currently waiting to hear if I have landed a contract to write the copy for a new website," she said. "The contact came via LinkedIn."

So if you do choose to sign up with LinkedIn, the secret may be to a) make sure your profile is as comprehensive as it can be b) that you grow your network of contacts as quickly and widely as possible and c) use LinkedIn as an adjunct to your other network activities and not a replacement.

Ten steps to getting your message across

2008-12-05T12:29:00.001Z

While the intranet is a fantastic tool, you really have to fight to get your message through the information overkill that seems to pervade organisations nowadays.

You know the problem. You need to get an important message across to employees and you have the corporate intranet at your disposal. But the trouble is, employees have so many demands on their time and attention. They have a group home page, their regional home page, a departmental home page, a divisional microsite, newsfeeds galore - and their real job to get on with too. So ....

1. Get to the point
Read any newspaper and you will find that a good news story gets to the point quickly and succinctly. If you haven't told the story in the first sentence of the first paragraph and preferably in about 20-25 words, you have failed.

If in doubt think of what you would say if someone asked you what the main point of your story was. You can virtually guarantee that the first sentence you utter would make a better opening paragraph than the usual waffle that companies seem to want to publish.

2. Keep it simple
Long-winded prose has no place on an intranet. Get to the point, tell people what they need to know and stop there. Back this up with a hyperlink to a longer more detailed story if need be or use Q&As which are much easier to read.

3. Use your headline
Many people give little thought to the use of headlines and summaries in online stories. In fact, these are more likely to be read than any story that has to clicked on to be read. For example, the headline "Important News" and the summary "Click here for important news" are utterly meaningless. The user has learned nothing and you have not given them enough information to decide whether to click further. Make sure your headline tells your reader something.

4. Use your headline and summary together
People often write these as an afterthought. But work the two together and you can impart a lot more information. The trick is to ensure that you don't just repeat the headline information in the summary, but use the extra space to add something. For example, "Manchester Branch to close" as a headline is good, but if the summary then says "Universal Widget's Manchester Branch is to close" you have just wasted space. Better to say "Cost-cutting exercise will see Leeds being the main branch in the North" has added more detail.

5. Get your timing right.
Find out the best time to publish information onto the intranet. If your news is important there is no point burying it in the middle of three lesser stories. Why not leave it an hour and then publish your main story. That way it will stand out. Core times for maximum readership are likely to be in 09:30-11.00 period, but not on Mondays or Fridays or just before/after a public holiday.

6. Use Questions and Answers
Sometimes a long, rambling story that contains the information people need is just too much to wade through. If you can, break down the story into meaningful questions and answers – the ubiquitous Q&As. The important thing is to ensure that the questions are ones that people would really ask.

7. Use Summaries
At the head of the article, use five or so bulleted points that sums up the content below. That way, the reader can get the gist of the feature without having to read the whole thing. If they then wish to dig deeper they can.

8. Prioritise your articles
It is human nature to read the top story first. So make sure that if you need to publish three or so stories that the most important one is placed at the top of the pile. Make sure it stays there for a good five hours or so for maximum effect. Depending on how your intranet is laid out, make sure it doesn’t go disappear further down the list and so needs the user to scroll – the modern day equivalent of being “below the fold”.

9. Use reminders or pointers
Send an e-mail out once a week that summarises the main news that has appeared. You just need to show the headline and the URL. Better still have a clickable web link. You can order the stories to suit your particular needs and the weight you place behind each story.

10. Highlight important stories with blobs or colour
Nothing makes important stories stand out more than having a red blob or some other image attached to them. You can make up an “Urgent” image and include that if you like. Don’t overdo it though or people will switch off.

How to make money with blogs

2008-11-26T13:27:00.003Z

Yes, you have read the headline correctly – it is now possible to make money with blogs.

Until recently, a blog was something that was perhaps a little self-indulgent, but definitely not a money-spinner.

Now you can link a Google AdSense account to your blog. Adsense will then pay you every time someone clicks on one of the display ads at the top of your latest post.

This is incredibly easy to integrate with a blogging service like Blogspot, but there are a few hints and tips. The first is to make sure that your blog is worth reading in the first place. Blogs that are entertaining work well, as do blogs that educate or inform.

You can also make sure that the blog is available as an RSS feed. Again, this can be set up automatically with some blogging systems like Blogspot.

So once you have visitors how do you convert that to cash? Google Adsense pays you money in exchange for being allowed to publish paid-for ads on your blog. The clever thing is that the ads are related to what you write about. If used correctly they can both enhance your site and make you money.

So how does it work? Google automatically provides you with its AdSense code. Then, Google automatically “reads” your blog and decides on the best ads to display.

It uses a sophisticated algorithm that includes such factors as keyword analysis, word frequency, font size, and the overall link structure of the blog.

If a visitor clicks on one of the ads they get taken to the advertiser’s web page and you get paid cash – easy!

Well, not quite. First you must have a site with plenty of visitors, otherwise it isn’t worth the effort. Secondly, your page must be set up in such a way that Google stands a chance of working out what you are trying to promote or sell. In essence, you need to look at your article title and initial copy to make sure that Google matches the right ads to your blog.

For example, on my blog, I wrote about digital photography. I made sure that the article title included the term – in this case “Improve your digital photography in five seconds”. Then I made sure that the words “digital camera” appeared in the first sentence and voila, Google threw up ads for digital cameras.

Don’t expect to earn a fortune though. Google is a bit cagey about its ad rates, but you typically earn a few cents per click.

On the downside, the very nature of Google Adsense means that users navigate away from your site, which may not be in your best interests, but Adsense is worth trying.

If you are interested in finding out more about how to monetize blogs I can recommend an e-book called "Blogging to the Bank 3.0"

Back-up - or else

2008-10-31T18:52:00.002Z

Back-ups are the things you do after your computer crashes. No, seriously. It is only when you have suffered a catastrophic failure of your hard drive that you realise how important it is to back up your system on a regular basis.

Recordable DVDs have made it easier, but even the 4.7Gb of a DVD disk isn’t big enough nowadays. Backing up to an external hard drive is better, and programs like Apple’s Time Machine have made it an easy, but slow, operation.

But what if your external hard drive fails? Or what if a fire destroys your computer, the external hard drive and your DVD back-ups?

Large companies have planned for this for years and have always maintained off-site back-ups for when the unexpected happens. Well, now you can too.

Companies are starting to offer online back-up facilities that allow you to back your precious data up to their servers. The benefit is that you then take advantage of their own high-end back-up systems and you can access your data from anywhere in the world that has an internet connection. The cost is tumbling too.

For example, Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service - see aws.amazon.com/s3) lets you pay for just the data you store and costs 18 Cents per Gigabyte per month, plus 10 Cents for every Gigabyte you transfer. That’s dirt cheap and means that an average laptop-full of data (50Gb) would cost about £2.50 to transfer across and £4.50 per month to store. Amazon takes your data very seriously, ensuring it is safe from fire, computer crashes, and viruses.

It hardly seems worth buying an external hard drive (although I recommend that you do - see later).

To use the Amazon S3 service you need to set up an account and also buy some software.

I tested JungleDisk (www.jungledisk.com), which came recommended and costs just $20.

The reason I plumped for JungleDisk was simple. It is available for both Mac and PC, is very simple to use and works very well.

Once installed you can opt for a new drive on your desktop that you drag and drop your files onto. Or you can ask it to keep track of complete drives, folders or files. Either way, JungleDisk then makes a copy of your selected files and backs them up to Amazon S3.

You can automate this process or opt to back-up manually as you wish. The automated option is quite clever as JungleDisk tracks what you have changed and only backs up the changed files when it next connects.

This is where reality lags the promises, as backing up over an average ADSL connection has a distinct disadvantage - speed, or lack of it.

I opted to back-up my entire “Documents” folder, which amounted to about 8GB. Once running it soon became obvious that this wasn’t going to be a five-minute job. In fact, it took a total of three days to complete the single back-up. Hmm!

My upload speed averaged around 250kbps - that’s about 25k per second or 90Mb per hour. To be fair, subsequent back-ups have been much faster as the system is only handling new and changed files.

Be aware that your service provider might put a monthly limit on how much data you can transfer too.

So is online back-up the way to go? Yes, probably, but be aware of just how long it will take. Buying a £120 external hard drive is probably easier, but only if you store it away from your office. Best bet is to have both remote and local back-ups.

When (if?) we all get fibre-optic internet connections with Gigabit speeds online storage might be useable. For now, I would back up the most vital documents online and continue to use DVDs/external drives for everything else. A 500Gb external drive will cost you about £120-£150 and won’t tie up your internet connection for the next three days. The simple fact is that any back-up is better than none. Just make sure you take it seriously.

Seeing the light with the Nikon D3

2008-10-14T10:25:00.003Z

Digital cameras have come on leaps and bounds. So much so that film is effectively dead in our profession. I remember the first digital camera I reviewed for CiB. The 800,000 (0.8 megapixel) images were fuzzy, purple and noisy, but despite this I could see the potential.

Most of the first generation of digital cameras did not like low light. You could use flash and have noisy images, or you could use available light and have noisier images – your choice. But the latest high-end offering from Nikon has taken the concept of light sensitivity to new levels.

Before we go into detail, a quick lesson on photographic light sensitivity. Back in the dark ages we bought our film according to its ASA or ISO rating. ASA was the old American standard while ISO is the new international standard. They are in fact, identical.

If we were shooting in bright sunlight in the middle of June we bought 50 or 100 ISO material. If we were shooting action we bought 400 ISO.

Then 3M and Kodak moved the goalposts and introduced (deep breath) 1000 ISO and 1600 ISO film. Yikes!

This stuff had grain like golf balls and muted colours, bit if you needed to snap black cats in coal cellars it was just the job.

Even as digital cameras were being developed, those high-end ISO numbers were still achievable, but the quality was terrible with flecky red, green and blue noise where true blacks should have been.

But Nikon have now changed all that. Not so much moving the goalposts, but reviewing the entire game and doing way with them completely.

The 12 mega pixel Nikon D3 features a chip capable of shooting at 6400 ISO – and the quality at that level is absolutely superb. In fact, you can push it to 25600 ISO, although at those ridiculous speeds the quality does degrade.

So what does 6400 ISO actually mean? What can you do with it?

CiB member Stewart Foley of Caters Photographic and I worked together at the Berlin Airshow, producing the Flight Daily News publication.

Stewart lent me his D3 as I had to take a photograph of a Mars Rover in what was effectively a dark, moodily-lit exhibition hall. The light levels were about the same as a cinema with the lights out. With my own Nikon D80 I was getting an indicated shutter speed of about 1/4 of a second – serious tripod territory.

But with the D3 it was 1/90th of a second - more than fast enough to handhold. What was even better was that the images were noiseless with great colour rendition.

Stewart tells me that he is now routinely able to shoot indoors without flash, getting a shutter speed of at least 1/125th of a second with standard room lightning. This is revolutionising the way Stewart works and means that the lighting is now softer and his presence less off putting to the subject being snapped.

This means you can shoot at night without flash or tripod, shoot action whatever the weather and basically shot what you want, where you want without having to worry about camera shake.

While I don’t recommend that you go out and buy a Nikon D3 – at nearly £3,000 (body only) and 1.24kg (2.7lb.) before you put a lens on it the camera is a seriously expensive and weighty beast, but it does show where the industry is going. The brand new Nikon D700 also has the same sensor and costs less than £2,000 so we are getting there.

I imagine that we will start to see sensors routinely capable of 6400 ISO appearing on much cheaper cameras within the next two years and this is going to revolutionise the way we take photographs. I can’t wait.

The deal on dongles

2008-10-14T10:20:00.002Z

Mobile broadband finally grew up this year with the proliferation of 3G USB Dongles.

If that just sounded like a random collection of techie terms, let me help. A dongle is a small modem that connects to your laptop via the USB port. The 3G bit means that it can then connect your laptop to the internet using the third generation of mobile phone standards, which means near-broadband speeds.

I say “near”, but the actual speed will vary depending on your network and location. Either way, the speed is likely to be miles better than using dial-up or connecting via your mobile phone and GPRS.

Having spent a small fortune on Wi-Fi internet connections at a number of different hotels recently I thought this was a good opportunity to try out one of the latest mobile broadband packages to see how good or bad they actually are.

Broadband dongles are available from all the major providers, including Vodafone, O2, T-Mobile, Orange and 3. While there are some differences in the download speeds available, the biggest difference is in how you are charged.

There is a whole host of different packages out there, but they all boil down to two things – a) how long do you want to sign up for a contract and b) how much data do you wish to download per month.

In general, the longer the contract, the cheaper the deal. The 3 network also does a “Pay As You Go” (PAYG) dongle where you pay £10 in advance for a gigabyte of data. The catch is that you have to use the gigabyte up within 30 days, which rather defeats the object of PAYG.

If you struggling to get your head around the various offers go to http://seekbroadband.com/ which outlines all the packages on one page.

I chose a 3Gb package from 3 with a free dongle, costing £15 inc VAT per month.

To give you some idea, a single Gigabyte might equate to surfing the web 12 hours a day for a month, uploading a total of 20,000 MS Word documents, or uploading 300 hi-res photographic JPEGs.

In other words, if you are just using the mobile broadband connection when out and about for casual surfing, e-mailing and the occasional file upload/download you aren’t going to get anywhere near the 3Gb a month limit.

The dongle itself looks just a large USB memory stick. The only difference is that you have to insert a supplied SIM card into the dongle. This is fiddly rather than difficult.

Once that’s done you just plug it into a spare USB port, with the supplied extension lead if you need to, and away you go. Well, almost.

While most dongles will work with both Mac and PCs you will need to install some software. This only takes a minute or so and the software is usually preloaded onto the dongle.

Once you have done that you merely click on “connect” and away you go.
Mine worked very well indeed and while I wouldn’t say that the speed was as fast as my office broadband connection it was still very usable.

I never failed to get a connection in any major town or city, but if you are thinking about sitting in a cottage in the Outer Hebrides for a month I would talk to your supplier about coverage in that neck of the woods before you commit your cash.

But do you really need mobile broadband? If you own a Blackberry and are happy just reading your e-mails on it, probably not.

If you are a photographer, definitely. And if you regularly use a laptop away from the office, need to update websites or intranets and transfer copy, images, presentations, audio or other files around I would say most definitely.

OpenOffice: a free alternative to Microsoft

2008-06-13T17:08:00.004Z

Steve Nichols takes a look at a free alternative to Microsoft Word for the Apple Macintosh and comes away very impressed. If you have been hearing bad things about Office 2008 for Mac, this could be a good alternative.

I am a big fan of open source software. That is, software that can be freely distributed.

OpenOffice.org is Sun Microsystem's open source alternative to Microsoft Office. The program was released with the aim of reducing the dominant market share of Microsoft Office by providing a free, open and high-quality alternative.

It includes modules called Writer, Calc, Impress, Base, Draw and Math. The first four of these equate to Microsoft's Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access, while the other two are a drawing and mathematics package.

OpenOffice.org is available for number of platforms, including PC, but the Mac version has always been a bit clunky. Without getting technical it had to run on Mac OS X with something called XII. What interested me was the upcoming OpenOffice.org v3.0 “Aqua” release that runs natively on OS X.

As a beta tester I thought it would be a good idea to give the Writer module a thorough test. I was due to write for Flight Daily News at the Berlin Air Show, which involves producing around 2,000 words a day, so what a great opportunity to see if a program handles.

So, with OpenOffice.org loaded onto my Apple MacBook (a svelte 168Mb download by the way) first impressions are that if you can use Microsoft Word you will feel fairly at home with OpenOffice.org. The menus are very similar and intuitive. It also loads within a few seconds – far quicker than the rather bloated MS Office 2008 for Mac.

As journalists we have a unique set of requirements from a word processor. Firstly, I want it to be easy to use, with good on-screen display (it ticks those boxes) and I want easy access to a word count facility (yep, Tools>Word Count does it for me). Beyond that I want instant, reliable, on-screen spell checking in UK English (another tick).

OpenOffice.org gives you a large number of configurable options, some more suitable than others. I liked the auto-correct facility, which you can add commonly miss-spelled and miss-typed words to. This works brilliantly with words like “foreign” - my particular Achilles' heel. If you do misspell a word, right click (or ctrl+left) click gives you options.

I found auto complete a bit of a pain, as the computer tries to guess what it is you are typing – I switched that off. I also configured it to only allow one space after a full stop – a particular nightmare of subs the world over.

Other highlights? A dedicated “paste special” command lets you cut and paste “text” material from a press release without bringing in the formatting – very useful.

Inserting foreign characters is also a very easy operation too, thanks to the one-stop “Special Characters” menu option.

Above all, OpenOffice.org can be configured to save in whatever format you like. I made it default to Microsoft Word 97/2000XP. It can also open MS Word 2007 docx files, but can't yet save in that format. I don't recommend “docx” format anyway – if you want to know why docx is such a problem search the CiB website for “docx” or download a PDF of the May 2007 edition of communicator magazine.

A solution is to look at NeoOffice, which a Mac-only cousin of OpenOffice.org which can save in docx – see http://www.neooffice.org/.

All in all then, OpenOffice.org Writer works very well. It didn't crash in four day's intensive use and didn't frustrate me so much that I went back to MS Word.

As it is free I thoroughly recommend it. Plus you get Excel and Powerpoint look-a-like modules thrown in. OpenOffice.org advises that you don't use the OS X Aqua beta version for “live” work, but hopefully by the time you read this the full release will be available.

With MS Office 2008 for Mac only getting a two-star user rating on Amazon it is worth giving OpenOffice.org a try. It is also available for PCs too.

To download go to http://www.OpenOffice.org/, but make sure you get the Mac Aqua version. Take a look at NeoOffice too – this is an offshoot of OpenOffice.org and is virtually identical.

Steve Nichols runs InfoTech Communications . InfoTech specialises in online communications and Steve has acted as consultant and trainer for many blue-chip companies including Aviva, AWG, Shell, BT, Standard Life, HBOS, BNFL, Accenture and Australia New Zealand Bank.

Taking control of your e-mail

2008-05-04T09:16:00.002Z

How did we live before we had e-mail? As a communicator it is the ideal medium for swapping copy, pictures, page proofs, PDFs and just about everything else.

But what do you do when that vital e-mail you want is on another machine, 2,000 miles away? Or what if you use multiple machines?

Web-based e-mail accounts are one answer, but I prefer to keep all my e-mail offline on my own machine.

Most of us who have been using e-mail for a few years might be familiar with so-called POP (Post Office Protocol) e-mail. It is simple to set up and means that when you connect to your mail server you download the mail to your computer and automatically delete it from the server.

You also have the option of leaving your mail on the server, but that gets messy – the server just fills up month by month with all kinds of electronic detritus.

Luckily, there is a solution to the problem and it’s called IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol.

IMAP is better alternative to POP and allows the mail on your web-based e-mail account to mirror the mail on your laptops or desktops.

When you connect to your mail server the two talk to each other – deleting mail from the server if you have deleted it from your laptop, moving it from folder to folder just like you did on your desktop and keeping a copy of every e-mail you have sent. Magic!

And it gets better than that. If you buy a new machine or have multiple computers, as soon as you connect to the net the systems will automatically synchronise themselves, downloading and moving mail as they need.

I have found this to be a real boon. I use a number of different machines, both Mac and PC, and used to struggle to move mail around so that they were all the same. Not any more.

Before I leave my office I fire up the Apple or Windows laptop I want to take and five minutes later the e-mail is synchronised.

So what is the downside? First, you need to have an IMAP-compatible e-mail account. Even if your supplier doesn’t support IMAP it is not the end of the world. Sign up for an IMAP account from another supplier – Google Mail is one – and use that to collect the mail from your other accounts. Then set up your machine to talk to Google Mail – it is quite easy.

A bonus is that you also now have access to your e-mail via any computer in the world using the Google Mail web access facility.

Another problem is that you could end up with your laptop only holding the headers for your mail – it might only download the main bulk of the message when you click on the message.

If you are away from a net connection this could be very frustrating, so be careful. You can set up Outlook Express, for example, to fully synchronise some folders and not others - make sure you set this up correctly.

IMAP also works best on a broadband connection. If you are using a mobile phone or dial-up I would leave well alone.

If you only ever use one machine stick to POP e-mail – it works fine. But if you have multiple machines and struggle to keep them all synchronised IMAP might be for you.

Thanks for the memory stick

2008-05-04T09:15:00.000Z

USB memory sticks (flash drives) are becoming a very common corporate give away. Perhaps you have a spare one tucked away in a drawer. If you have, get it out now.

They have come on leaps and bounds over the past year or two and are now available in larger sizes, including 1 and 2 Gb capacity. This makes them far more useful than the older, smaller 128Mb sticks.

But have you ever wished you could do something useful with them? Now you can. It is possible to run portable applications straight off the stick instead of installing them on a PC.

A portable application is a computer program that you can carry around with you. When your USB flash drive or other portable device is plugged in you have access to your software and personal data just as you would on your own PC. And when you unplug the device, none of your personal data is left behind. And if you haven’t got a memory stick how about using your iPod instead?

For example, if you visit a client’s office you can carry your own word processing software with you. Out and about? Find an internet café and use your memory stick to call up your own web browser or bookmarks. Need to edit some photographs while on holiday? No problem, just use your own image editing program. This makes memory sticks a very useful emergency back-up.

If you are a PC user hop over to www.portableapps.com and download a full (free) suite.

To give you a flavour of what you can run off a memory stick how about:

AbiWord Portable
This program will create, open, edit or save documents in Microsoft Word format. It will also handle Word Perfect, Open Document, RTF, HTML, Palm and other formats. AbiWord includes both grammar and spelling checkers as well as an array of other handy features.

OpenOffice Portable
OpenOffice.org Portable is a full-featured office suite that's compatible with Microsoft Office, Word Perfect, Lotus and other office applications. So now you can handle Excel files while on the move too.

GimpPortable
The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a photo retouching, image composition and image authoring program as well as an image format converter.

Nvu Portable or KompoZer
These are both HTML editing programs in case you need to edit any web pages while off site.

If you are a Mac user I wouldn’t want you to feel left out. If you go to http://www.freesmug.org/portableapps/ you’ll find a similar list of downloadable portable applications written for OSX.

Many of these, including OpenOffice and AbiWord are copies of the PC versions and are very usable.

You can also download web browsers and e-mail programs like FireFox, Safari, Thunderbird and Mail for both Mac and PC.

So how far can you push a memory stick? As an exercise I installed a full Apache web server on one, along with a Mambo content management system (CMS).

With this running it was possible to add content to a “web site” in real time and develop the CMS and site design even though the computer wasn’t connected to the net.

Memory sticks have a lot of potential. For the sake of a few minutes work a memory stick with some portable apps could be a Godsend.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard spotted

2008-02-18T22:10:00.002Z

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, to give it its full name, has now been available for a couple of months, long enough for users to decide if it is a hit or a miss.

But it seems that Apple has done a good job with Leopard and, apart from a few minor niggles mainly surrounding the transparency of the menu bar, the new reflective dock and some compatibility issues, it seems like a popular upgrade. To be honest, Microsoft should take a leaf out of Apple’s OS book when it comes to new products as Windows Vista has turned out to be a major pain for the company.

Leopard has more than 300 new features and as there isn’t enough space to go into them all in this feature, I thought I would concentrate on a few that I think might be of the most use to readers.

The first “feature” is a hike in computer performance over OS X 10.4 Tiger. It definitely feels snappier thanks to the revised code. To be honest, when I bought my MacBook running OS X 10.4 I thought it was a tad sluggish compared with an equivalent XP-powered PC.

A memory upgrade made little difference and I got used to seeing the little spinning beach ball on occasions when the machine thought about what I had just asked it to do.

Installing Leopard has made a big difference and it now feels much faster.

The second feature I like is called Spaces. This allows you to create multiple virtual “monitors”, so that you can have different applications running in different windows.

When I first read about this I couldn’t quite see the point. After all, you have always had applications effectively running in their own window. But after using Spaces for a while it makes sense. I can now have Microsoft Windows running in one space, Photoshop running in another, my WP software running in a third and Firefox running in a fourth. The desktop is no longer cluttered and a quick keystroke lets me move between the different spaces at lightning speed.

If you are using a laptop or have a small monitor it really makes sense.

The next enhancement is Time Machine. A similar feature has been available on Windows for a while, but now Macs have the ability to wind back time to a point where you had files that you have subsequently deleted or when your machine worked properly. If you have just corrupted your font library, for example, you can wind the machine back to a time when it was OK.

Time Machine also allows for sophisticated back-ups to be made while you work, although they have to be written to an external USB/Firewire drive. These cost around £80-£120, depending on the hard disk size you want. You can also tweak Time Machine so that it only backs up what you want to save space.

My final favourite features are Quick Look, which enables you to instantly view the contents of any file from the finder without opening up its application, and Spotlight, which is snappier and now works as a dictionary and calculator too.

Add in built-in Boot Camp as standard (for running other operating systems like Windows without having to buy Parallels or Fusion) and Screen Sharing (which allows you to connect to and control another machine remotely or give a presentation) and the Leopard upgrade looks like good value for money at £85.

If you are buying a new machine in the next six months I would probably advise you to hang fire. But for anyone else, I think it is a worthwhile investment. And yes, it does run on PowerPC Macs like the G4 and G5 as well as newer Intel machines. My upgrade took about an hour and a half to complete - your upgrade may take longer so don’t rush it.

Internet access on the move

2007-12-09T10:56:00.002Z

It has been four years since I first wrote about accessing the internet on the move. Interest in the subject is still running high, although from conversations I have I know that a lot of people still find the subject a bit of a black art.

I thought an update might be a good idea.

If you have wi-fi capability in your laptop or PDA being out of the office no longer means being out of touch. Wi-fi (Wireless Fidelity) “hotspots” – places where you can use your laptop or PDA to connect to the internet at broadband speeds, without a hard-wired connection - are now commonplace.

When out and about you can search for a hot spot in your vicinity. Just make sure your wi-fi is switched on and then start your internet browser – it should lock-on to the strongest signal.

You then log on using a password and surf away. But the costs can vary. BT Openzone was one of the first providers and I have been using them or the past four years with few problems.

One quick tip, if you sign up for BT’s Total Broadband package they bundle in 250 minutes of BT Openzone use a month completely free. Alternatively, you can pay for your access pay by the minute, the hour, the day or take out a monthly subscription for around £25.

But BT isn’t the only provider and many hotels and airports offer alternatives – Cloud wi-fi being one of the most prevalent – see http://www.thecloud.net/.

Some cities even have free public wi-fi – I’m proud to say that Norwich was one of the first. It is sometimes flaky, but I have used it a lot. Bristol has it too.

You can search for other hotspots in the UK at http://www.hotspot-locations.com/.

In theory you can also connect to other private wi-fi networks that are not secure. That is, that haven’t been set up with a security WEP/WPA password. I would advise that you don’t. Two people in Redditch were recently cautioned for using someone’s wi-fi broadband internet connections without their permission. This is a legal minefield.

But what if you don’t have access to a wi-fi hotspot? For many years I have been using my mobile phone to connect to the net using what is known as a GPRS connection. With GPRS speeds are slower than wi-fi and you pay for the amount of data you transfer, typically around £1.50-£2.50 per Megabyte.

First, you need a phone with a Bluetooth facility to connect to the laptop. Then you need to make the phone connect to the net. The way you do this will vary from network to network. For example, on Vodafone you make the laptop dial *99#.

GPRS is fine for the odd e-mail, but pretty useless for transferring large files. You may also need to check with your operator that GPRS has been enabled. For more details see http://www.filesaveas.com/gprs.html

The next step up involves using a 3G phone or plug-in card, such as the T-Mobile “Web ‘n’ Walk range. The benefits are a much faster data transfer rate. Typical costs for the T-Mobile Flext 20 (which gives you the equivalent of £34 worth of phone calls per month) with web 'n' walk, which offers unlimited web surfing and e-mails, is £27.50 per month.

A Vodafone 3G card for your laptop, either Mac or PC, offers you faster speeds than GPRS, but will fall back to GPRS if the 3G network is not available. Typical costs are £25 per month including 250Mb of data, but I suggest you shop around. Orange and O2 have similar schemes.

Alternatively, you buy one of the latest 3G phones such as the Nokia N95. These have built-in browsers and e-mail, plus the ability to connect to wi-fi networks. But they are not cheap – you are looking at about £200+ for the phone on a new contract. My favourite is the SPV-700 from Orange which is a full-blown Windows PDA and phone for about £50 on a new contract. I have used my PDA to update websites and upload features from the wilds of Cornwall and Yorkshire and my laptop and wi-fi to do the same from the Norwegian lakes. Sad, I know!

I hope this update helps. I find the ability to access the internet on the move invaluable. I think you will too.

A sound investment

2007-12-09T10:55:00.002Z

Dictaphones or pocket cassette recorders can be a real boon to professional communicators. You can use them for taking audio notes, tape interviews or even record telephone calls with a suitable adaptor.

Taping interviews is no substitute for decent notes or shorthand, but can be a useful back-up.

But in the old days it meant keeping an eye on the tape to make sure it didn’t run out, you could never find the recording you wanted and well, they were sooooo last century. But not any more.

The latest recorders are now, you guessed it, digital. Instead of tape you have a memory chip. And instead of being able to record only 45 minutes you can record hours and hours worth. But the good news doesn’t stop there. The latest generation of digital recorders can be plugged into your PC and Mac and the sound files transferred across to your hard drive.

This means that you can take your precious recordings with you or back them up to CD or DVD.

As an example of what you can do I recently tested an Olympus WS-200S digital voice recorder. This has an integrated stereo microphone for high quality recording, four recording modes - SHQ and HQ mode for superior quality and SP and LP for extended recording

Its recording time is 4 hr. 20 mins in Stereo High Quality (SHQ) mode and up to 54 hr. 50 min. in LP mode. But the remarkable thing is its size, or lack of it. Measuring about the size of a small chocolate bar (94 x 40 x 15.1 mm) and weighing 54 g it really is pocketable.

Powered by a single AAA battery, that lasts for about 13 hours, I can’t think of an easier way to take notes. You can even plug an external microphone in too, which does give noticeable better quality.

You can change the speed by pressing the PLAY button while the recorder is playing back. If you press the button once it will play 25% faster if you press it again it will play 50% faster. But this isn’t like the old days. It doesn’t sound like Mickey Mouse, the person you recorded just seems to talk a lot faster.

You can also vary the microphone sensitivity – the highest position works well for lectures and presentations while the lower setting is better suited to one-on-one interviews.

But the great thing is that once you have finished recording you just pull off the end cover and plug it into your computer’s USB port. This mounts it like a memory stick and you can now drag and drop all your sound files across to your hard drive.

You don’t need any other software or cables, which is great when you are on the move.

The files are stored in Window .wma format that plays with no problems using Windows Media Player. If your machine can’t handle .wma files there are plenty of utilities that can convert them to other file formats.

I used a PC program called WinFF to convert them to wav files, although it could quite as easily convert to MP3.

But this got me thinking – in HQ stereo mode just how good are the sound files? Could this little recorder be used to produce quality recordings for podcasts?

My normal recorder for these is a Sony MiniDisk, which offers Hi-Fi/CD quality, but you then need to stream them back to the PC in real time to digitise them. You can get solid-state recorders now, such as those made by Edirol, but they start at about £300.

Tests shows that with an external microphone and the highest quality settings the sound files were in fact pretty good with only the slightest signs of compression/clipping. In other words, as long as you accept the slight decrease in audio quality the Olympus WS200S can be used to record audio interviews for podcasts.

If you want to hear for yourself listen to the podcast I recorded at the 2007 CiB Conference on the CiB website at www.cib.uk.com.

At just £75 that makes it a bargain, but even if you don’t want to stretch to podcasting it still makes an excellent little recorder.

Video killed the in-house newspaper

2007-12-09T10:54:00.000Z

If you are not using online video as part of your internal communications mix then you are probably missing out. It has become so much easier to stream video on corporate intranets and it needn’t cost the earth to produce either.

But start to look at streaming video and the myriad of different formats and jargon can bamboozle you. So what do they all mean and what should you choose? And do your end users have the right Codec?

Codec stands for coder/decoder and is the software that enables your media player to understand the various formats used for streaming video.

If you try to view a video and don’t have the required Codec the video will either not play or you will be prompted to download it. This is why it is important to run compatibility tests with your IT department before releasing your streaming video masterpiece on the world – only to find that no one can view it.

Let’s start by taking a look at the most popular formats available and their pros and cons.

Windows Media
This is probably the most common format for people using PCs. You can virtually guarantee that most PC users will have a copy of the requisite Windows Media Player installed on their machine. But unfortunately it isn’t that easy. There are various versions of Windows Media files (.WMV) and they are not all compatible.

Corporate intranets are notorious for not keeping their software up to date so the chances of your employees having the latest version are slim. If you are counting by the way the latest version is nine. WM9 gives an approximately 20 to 50 per cent improvement in quality compared with Windows Media Video 8.

QuickTime
Generally found on Apple Macintosh machines QuickTime is a good format, but the QuickTime player isn’t usually found by default on PCs. This makes it a difficult choice for corporate environments. But don’t despair, the Macintosh and OS X are an excellent environment for creating and editing videos, thanks to the bundled iMovie in the iLife suite of software. Upgrade your copy of QuickTime to QuickTime Pro (it only costs £20 to upgrade) and you can convert your QuickTime videos to many other formats including MP 4 and Windows Media.

MP4/MPEG- 4
You may be familiar with the ubiquitous MP3, as used for compressed music files, but MP4 or MPEG 4 is fast becoming one of the video standards that you can’t afford to ignore. Technically, MP4 is a “container”. That is, it is a standard format that can contain videos that have been encoded in a number of different ways using different Codecs such as H.264, XviD, Div X and others.

I like MP4 and not without good reason. The quality is superb and the file sizes are quite small. H.264 offers fantastic quality with none of the awful squiggly artefacts you used to get with low bit-rate Windows Media files.

Now this is where it gets confusing. H.264 is a video format, but it can be contained within an MP4 file. QuickTime also uses the H.264 standard, so when you talk about wanting your videos in the H.264 standard you also have to say what format you want it in – Quicktime, MP4 or Flash. Which leads me to….

Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash has come a long way since it was first introduced by Macromedia. It certainly offers a great way to view video as you can build the Flash player right into the web page, complete with fast forward, rewind and stop buttons. You can also include a volume control.

But once again it can get sticky. The latest version of Flash is version 9 and if you encode your videos to the Flash 9 standard people using Flash 8 or earlier won’t be able to view them properly. This means it is important to find out what version of the Flash plug-in people actually have.

Flash is rather like MP4 in that it is a “container” – you can embed videos encoded to the H.264, MPEG 4 or Windows media or other formats.

Flash is probably the most end-user friendly of all the formats and is the one you see most often on the net. You can always tell if a video is Flash-based – when it is playing just right-click over the image and it will tell you if it is a Flash file.

Conclusion
There are other video formats out there, including Real Media as beloved by the BBC, but for corporate use I think Windows Media and Flash are the way to go. As always, talk to your corporate techies before deciding on anything.

If the Facebook fits

2007-12-09T10:53:00.000Z

There is a new social networking phenomenon taking the internet by storm. If you haven’t heard about it yet, you soon will. It’s called Facebook and you have to see it in action for yourself to see what all the fuss is about.

Facebook (www.facebook.co.uk) was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 and was initially restricted to students of Harvard College in the USA. It was subsequently expanded to other Boston area schools, but since September 2006 it has been available to anyone.

As of July 2007, the website had 34 million active members worldwide with networks set up for geographical regions, interests and much more.

But what exactly is Facebook and how does it work?

Once you have registered you have your own page, listing as much or as little about you as possible.

Now the fun starts. You can then search for friends and acquaintances, join special interest groups, post photographs and generally have fun. You may have read last month that CG Business Communications was the first CiB member company to have its own corporate cartoon character on Facebook. Called “Chandler Gooding”, he lists his interests as: “Coming up with great ideas, bike riding, watching Star Wars, social networking and computing the molecular mass of various minerals and metal oxides.”

Nick Andrews of CG says: “Internal communicators have traditionally been seen as controlling the information that employees receive, but the advent of social networking sites has changed things - and we have to recognise and embrace the concept.

“Harnessed correctly, social networking media can mark a sea change in business communication. We can learn from sites like Facebook in terms of the way we share best practice and encourage thought leadership.

“On a different level, CG recognises the marketing potential of Facebook, and also, its actually fun to communicate!”

A quick search around Facebook revealed a whole lot more CiB members use the system too, including Paul Brasington, Alan Peaford, Geoff Thomas and Amelia Clark.

Each of them lists their interests and who their “friends” are. And this is where the real point of social networking starts to come into play.

Within five minutes of playing with Facebook I had rediscovered people I had lost contact with years ago. They were listed as “friends” of people I know and a few quick clicks and there they were, with all their contact details on the screen.

This may sound trivial, but Facebook will let you find people that you hadn’t even realised you had missed!

So what else can it do? You can post videos and photographs, have virtual foodfights, play poker, nominate bumper stickers for people, dare people to do things and generally play silly devils all day long.

According to some users they are now using Facebook to e-mail their contacts rather than use conventional e-mail software. One user even reports that his company’s competitors are using the system to try and poach staff – it’s a brave new world out there.

And it gets worse. According to the BBC, workers who spend time on such sites could be costing firms over £130m a day. According to employment law firm Peninsula, 233 million hours are lost every month as a result of employees "wasting time" on social networking.

The study - based on a survey of 3,500 UK companies - concluded that businesses need to take firm action on the use of social networks at work. One, Kent County Council (KCC), has banned its employees from using the site.

Paul Brasington thinks: “I can see that in its original incarnation as a way for students to mess around in an online gang it could be fun, posting pictures and comments. But that has limited appeal at our age I think.

“Having said all that, thinking about it in the light of CiB, I see you can create administrator-controlled groups and I think that would be a much more potent way of operating because people could share pictures, and functionality like the Facebook “Walls” gives more flexibility than posting emails.”

So is Facebook and social networking a communications boon or a recipe for lost productivity? The answer is I don’t really know – and neither will you until you try it.

An alternative look at alt tags

2007-07-18T12:20:00.001Z

Alt tags are perhaps one of the simplest elements of a web page to understand – and perhaps one of the most misused as well.

In simple terms, an alt tag is used with any image on a web page as “alternative text”. They were originally set up for people who switched off their “display images” facility in their browser to download the page more quickly. The alt tag meant that you could see what you were missing.

But things have moved on. With the advent of broadband and fast corporate networks nobody switches off their images nowadays. But that doesn't mean that alt tags are not important - modern browsers have made sure of that.

If you don't believe me call up any web page – news.bbc.co.uk is a good example - and move your mouse over an image. You'll see that a small pop-up appears with what looks like a caption. This is the alt tag.

Now, I know what you are thinking – great; we don't need to caption our images any more. We just need to put the caption in the alt tag.

Well, from a usability point of view that would be a disaster. The problem is that you have to mouse over the image to read the alt tag. If you don't you will never know it is there. So I suggest you keep the captions too.

I can hear someone else now suggesting that you could use the alt tag to give more information about the photograph. Not a bad idea – give a basic caption and then put more information, perhaps just putting the copyright details in the alt tag.

While that sounds like a good idea you probably just fell foul of the Disability Discrimination Act, which is where alt tags come into their own. Imagine you are sight-impaired and can't see the image. A screen reading program will “read” the page for you and a speech synthesiser will “speak” to tell you what it says. When it comes to the images all it can do is read the alt tag.

A CiB awards judge will probably not be impressed by an online publication that has no alt tags. It will lose you marks - you have been warned!

So, as a first step, having your caption embedded in the alt tag is very important. This can be accomplished in a number of ways. If you use a content management system (CMS) that asks you to input a caption it can be programmed to copy the text into the alt tag – this is what I do with the CiB website. It is quick, easy and seamless, but not really optimum, as I will show later.

If you have a CMS that converts MS Word documents to HTML you can usually “double click” on the image in Word, go to “web” and add the alt tag.

If you are doing it all by hand then most HTML editing programs have the ability to add alt tags. Beware though as some versions of MS FrontPage set the alt tag as the image filename by default– that's as good as useless!

There is no need to preface the alt tag with "Image:" as the reader will already know that it is an image.

But if you have got this far, can tick all the boxes mentioned above and are feeling smug I'm afraid I'm about to shake you up.

The Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) says: "All images need alt text that is clear and conveys the equivalent information as the image."

That is, if you had to describe your image to a sight-impaired person does the caption actually do the job? I would argue that in many cases it doesn't.

Sometimes, the caption we use supports the image, but does not describe it. In this case our alt tag should be different to the caption. For example, on the BBC News website was an image with the caption "Expectations have been building ahead of the talks" but the alt tag is "Japanese chief negotiator Kenichiro Sasae, Beijing 8/2/07".

If the image is contextual we must fully describe the context. For example "Man reading an insurance policy and looking confused" is better than "Man reading insurance policy".

If the caption describes the image properly, including the names of everyone in the image, you could argue that there is no need to name them in the alt tag. However, from an accessibility point of view I believe that it is better to duplicate the information, as the caption is actually divorced from the image. We only know it is a caption as we can see that it is physically underneath the image - a screen reader may not be so accommodating!

In a nutshell, your alt tag should always describe what you physically see as a bare minimum. If in doubt, more rather than less information is better.

Images of text should have alt text that is the same as the text on the image. If it is a logo with a strapline line then "Motorola logo – Hello Moto" is better than just "Motorola logo".

If you have a system that will only let you input the caption as the alt tag then there is little you can do about it. But if you do have the ability to put a more descriptive alt tag you will be helping sight-impaired visitors a lot.

For more information see www.rnib.org

Handling MS Word 2007 files

2007-07-18T12:18:00.001Z

As the French Resistance lady used to say in “Allo Allo”: “Leesen very carefully, I vill say zis only vonce.”

If you have to handle copy submitted by other people the information in this feature could save you a lot of grief. And if you don't think it applies to you, just wait!

This month's column looks at the recent changes to Microsoft Word; in particular to the format now used to save documents. From now on Word documents saved in Word 2007 and later have a “docx” extension. If you haven't yet had to deal with one of these you soon will as Word 2007 starts to find itself on desktop machines around the world.

So why is this a problem? Simple - earlier versions of MS Word can't open them!

Docx is a new format that saves your word-processed material in what is known as an XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) format. As Microsoft says: “This enables improved integration with external data sources and systems.”

This is all well and good, but for the time being Docx could prove to be a major headache for anyone receiving Word documents for editing.

If you receive such a file the .Docx extension is the first giveaway. The second is that clicking on it will result in your machine failing to find a program that can open it. At this stage you have a number of choices.

The first is to buy a copy of Word 2007 or Office 2007, although I would hold fire at the moment – there are cheaper alternatives.

The second is to go back to the originating author and get them to save the file in an earlier “.doc” format that you can handle. As a short-term solution this isn't a bad idea, but this pre-supposes that the original author can a) be found and b) be bothered.

The third solution involves getting your hands dirty, and if you can't handle this find someone to help you who can.

If you are using a Windows PC and have an earlier version of Word visit the Microsoft website at http://www.microsoft.com/ and search for the “ Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack”.

This is a hefty 26Mb download, but should allow you to open Microsoft Office Word 2007 .docx or .docm files with Microsoft Office Word 2003, Word 2002, or Word 2000.

As Microsoft says: “By using the Compatibility Pack for the 2007 Office system, you can open, edit some items, and save Office Word 2007 documents in previous versions of Word.” Take note of the word “some”. My own tests showed that my copy of Word 2000 would indeed now open docx Word documents, but it lost all the formatting, tables and designated fonts. Not a huge problem if you are only dealing with raw text, but do beware.

If you are a Mac user you could also buy a copy of Word 2007, or you could be a bit canny. I have it on good authority that the next versions of the free NeoOffice and OpenOffice packages for both Mac and PC will support docx too.

After a bit of playing around I discovered that docx is actually a zip archive – remember those? If you change the file extension from docx to .zip you can now “unzip” the file into its component parts.

You'll find that there are now a whole host of separate files that go to make up the original docx document. Navigate to the unzipped “word” folder and you will find a document called “document.xml”.

If you use Safari to open this file you will be presented with the original text. You can now copy and paste this into your older copy of Word. Unfortunately, you will have lost all the carriage returns, but hey, it’s free!

Technically, you can open this XML file in a PC browser too, but chances are that you will see all the tags that make up the file too – Safari strips these out for you.

Alternatively, search on Google for “Docx Convertor” and you will find a Mac Widget that you can install. This is a free drag-and-drop utility that is linked to a website at http://docx-converter.com/. It didn't work for me, but could be worth a try.

I am sure that there will be other solutions popping up over the coming months, but these should get you going. As I said at the beginning, sooner or later this will become a problem, so file this feature away carefully – “eet will be published only vonce”.

The Apple Macintosh MacBook

2006-11-29T09:31:00.000Z

It seems funny to think that my first Apple Macintosh laptop (a PowerBook 100 if you are interested) had no CD drive, no wireless connectivity, no Bluetooth, no software, no colour screen and yet cost £300 more than the new base model MacBook on review here. And that was 15 years ago.

Wow how things have moved on. But the new MacBook has a lot in common with that original machine. It’s small, very light and very, very usable. In fact, it makes you wonder why anyone would want a desktop machine.

The all-white polycarbonate MacBook is only 12.78 inches (32.5 cm) wide by 8.92 inches (22.7 cm) deep, and is paperback thin at only 1.08 inches (2.75 cm). Weighing in at 5.2 pounds (2.36 kg) it really is a carry anywhere machine. Yes, I know that all laptops are meant to be, but my other Toshiba PC laptop feels positively lardy in comparison.

Don’t underestimate the benefits of a lightweight laptop. By the time you add a case, mouse, power adaptor, assorted CDs, diary and the other detritus we need for work a heavy laptop soon becomes a pain in the neck, and back, and shoulder.

But lightweight doesn’t mean lacking in functionality. Open up the magnetic latch on the lid and the MacBook shows you its 13.3-inch (diagonal) glossy widescreen TFT display. This supports a native resolution of 1280 by 800 pixels and millions of colours, giving you a widescreen cinema effect in a handy package.

If you want to use the Mac as a desktop you can also plug in an external keyboard, mouse and monitor, although you will need a Mini DVI to VGA adaptor (£15). Don’t let the London Apple Store palm you off with the wrong one like they did me - grrr!

Here is another revelation. Plug in a PC mouse and you instantly get right-hand button pop-ups and scrolling windows, just like a PC – nice one Apple.

A PC keyboard was also plugged in, recognised instantly and worked well – although you have to do some head scratching to find out how you access the Apple key. It is the Window's key by the way. The MacBook even has a tiny built-in iSight camera for video conferencing.

The Macbook’s Wi-Fi turned out to be very effective, allowing me to connect and download data from networks that my PC could barely detect. Back in my office and it refused to connect to my Belkin wireless router. Switch the encryption off and it was fine, put it back on and no go. After a lot of surfing to find a solution it seems that this is a known problem. All you have to do is add a “$” sign to the beginning of the WEP code – easy when you know how. From then on it worked fine.

The MacBook’s Bluetooth functionality was also very good, allowing me to set up a GPRS connection via my Nokia mobile phone in about two minutes. I don’t think a PC would have been that easy.

Battery life was excellent – the battery gauge suggested that you could get up to 4 hours on a full charge. I very much doubt that, but 2-3 should easily be possible.

Other excellent features include a Magsafe magnetic power supply plug. This pulls way if you accidentally yank the cable, so saving your laptop from instant death as it hits the floor. I have never actually found anyone who has destroyed his or her laptop in this way, but it is the thought that counts.

The keyboard, while looking like it has migrated from a child’s toy, is actually surprisingly good, even if the keys look like they belong on an office calculator.

There seems little point in singing the praises of Mac OSX and all its toys, other than to say that you get iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, iWeb and the others as standard. What was annoying was that the updater program advised me to download the latest versions as soon as I hooked up to the net – all 400Mb of them. Still, Windows XP is little better.

As for other programs that is entirely up to you, although the MacBook will happily run all Intel-native software. You can also run MS Windows using Bootcamp or Parallels although I haven’t felt the need so far.

A free 120Mb download of NeoOffice gave me all I needed to open a PC version of most of the documents I have, including those produced in MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint - this feature was written in NeoOffice and saved as MS Word.

In all then, if you are already a Mac fan you will love the MacBook. Even if you are a PC user there is a lot to be said for a machine that is this cute. I won’t be throwing my PC away yet, but I think this one could soon be accompanying me on any trip that involves lugging a computer around for any length of time.

The base model with a 1.83MHz Intel Core Duo processor and 512Mb of Ram will set you back £749. This gets you a CD rewriter/DVD player combo drive. Increase your budget and you can get a faster processor, DVD rewriter and more memory.

See www.apple.com/uk for more details.

What the heck is Web 2.0?

2006-11-29T09:29:00.000Z

If you haven’t yet come across the buzz phrase “Web 2.0” you soon will. It’s on the lips of communications types up and down the country. But what on earth is it and why should you be bothered?

Web 2.0 sounds a bit like a computer program – the second generation if you like, and more advanced than Web 1.0. In fact, that’s pretty much what it is.

The phrase was first used by O'Reilly Media and MediaLive International for a conference they hosted. Dale Dougherty mentioned it during a brainstorming session, suggesting that the web was in a renaissance, with changing rules and evolving business models.

The dot.com crash of 2001 made a lot of people feel that the web was an over-hyped phenomenon that had no real place in our lives. Others looked at which web companies were succeeding and tried to work out why.

The term Web 2.0 as we use it now refers to a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and share information online.

Another definition of Web 2.0 is that it provides an "architecture of participation" or “social networking”.

Also, if Web1.0 was comprised of flat pages that just offered up information, Web 2.0 also gives users an experience closer to desktop applications. They often allow for mass publishing and collaboration and the concept includes blogs, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and wikis.

So Web 2.0 really describes the best of the web as we see it now. It isn’t written in stone and isn’t a set of rigid guidelines. Still confused? What we can say is that the following are probably all examples of Web 2.0:

· Wikipedia – if you haven’t come across Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/) yet then you are missing out. It is an online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit. This means that it is far reaching and can be viewed as the collective knowledge of all internet users. Ok, there may be something that is incorrect, but someone else will come along and correct it – at least that’s the theory.
· Amazon – not only can you buy goods off Amazon, but you can also rate them too – letting other people know what you think of them. Ebay is similar in that you can leave feedback on the person selling the goods.
· Digg.com – Everything on this site is submitted by the digg user community. After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see.
· Google Adsense – this serves up advertisements that are targeted at your interests depending upon what you are searching for. The premise being that the targeted ads are more likely to make you want to click them.

The common thread of all the above is user interaction – if you are to bring these concepts to your own intranet or internet then your readers must be able to respond to your news stories as well as read them. Scary stuff for the average corporate communicator.

A simple solution is a “Tell us what you think” button at the bottom of every story, although true Web 2.0 would have an automatic response box and publish the comments in real time.

Another aspect of Web 2.0 is the use of online applications, such as spreadsheets, word processing, to-do lists, reminder services, and personal start pages.

A good example of this is Think Free at www.thinkfree.com. Now you can run your own version of MS Office wherever you are in the world and all online. Think Free offers Microsoft Office-compatible word-processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software that operates online, right in the browser. It also allows you to upload, edit, save, and download documents in their native Office formats.

This would have been unheard of in the days before broadband. In fact, the first online version of Think Free was released in 2000, but didn’t catch on due to the slow download times.

So if this is Web 2.0, what will Web 3.0 look like? The answer is that it is likely to know who you are, wherever you are, serving up just the content you want and collaborating with other systems at all times. Imagine a web that knows it is time for you to visit the dentist, can check your online calendar and book an appointment without you doing anything. Oh, and you could be served up content on how to look after your teeth better too.

Find out more at www.infotechcoms.co.uk

Being canny about spam

2006-07-17T18:25:00.000Z

Spam, or unwanted e-mail, has become a real pain in the backside. Run a mail account without some form of spam filter and you could end up with 30-40 e-mails a day trying to sell you the latest alternative to Viagra, a cheap mortgage or, ahem, help your body grow in stature – if you know what I mean!

According to the BBC, UK spammers account for less than 2% of all junk e-mails. The vast majority comes from the US. Industry expert Spamhaus estimates that by the summer of 2006 spam will account for 95% of all e-mails sent.

But just as spam has become a pain to receive it is also wreaking havoc on legitimate e-mailers who are trying to tell the world about their wares.

If you involved in sending any multiply-addressed e-mails, ezines or other electronic newsletters to the outside world it is getting harder and harder to get your message through.

But there are a number of ways that you can help yourself.

Use a dedicated mass mailing company
If you are involved in sending out ezines or electronic newsletters the first step is to make sure that you are using a dedicated mass mailing service. Pasting in 300 addresses into Outlook Express and hitting the send button could result in your mail going nowhere.

The reason is that mail servers will detect the fact you are sending out 300 e-mails at once, deduce that this is spam and can it.

A dedicated service, like www.mymailout.com (which we use for the CiB ezine) sends its e-mails out in small batches and is also registered with many mail servers as a legitimate mass mailer. That way, your mail is more likely to get through.

Avoid key word “triggers”
If there is one thing guaranteed to stop your mail getting through it’s using words like “special offer”, “free”, “once in a lifetime opportunity” and the like. Load your ezine or mail with marketese and it will hit the floor. Even the most innocuous e-mails can be stopped, as Scunthorpe City Council discovered - think about it! I have even seen a corporate “profanity filter” reject an e-mail that I was sending, even though there was apparently nothing that should have triggered it. Even the phrase “lap top” has been known to cause mail to go in the spam can – even if you don’t dance with it.

Use a spam checker
Although not infallible, you can use either an online or PC-based spam tester to check your content before you send it out. This will check for the above trigger words. Take a look at http://spamcheck.sitesell.com/ or http://www.lyris.com/resources/contentchecker/index.html

Include the name of your ezine in the subject line
Even if your mail does get through the spam filter the recipient could delete it on sight. Make it very obvious what it is by including the title in the subject line and the end user is less likely to hit the delete button.

Choose your timing
Think about it. If you come in on a Monday morning and find you have received 100 e-mails over the weekend what are you going to do? Delete the non-essential ones. I prefer to do my mass mailings on a Wednesday, as people are less likely to be taking a day off or have a mountainous in box. I also mail out about 10.30 or 2.30 – away from the “first thing” peak or just after lunch when people might be more accepting of mail.

Check to see if your mail includes other e-mail or web addresses that belong to known spammers
This can trip you up – go to http://www.dnsstuff.com/ and use the spam database look-up tool to see if any of the domains contained in your e-mail are listed as potential or known spammers.

Keep the bulk of content on a web site, not in the e-mail
Think about it. Your e-mail is less likely to trigger a spam filter if it only has a few, well-chosen lines. Use your email to provide a short summary of what you wish to say and put the bulk on a website that you then hyperlink to.

While these rules are not infallible they will go some way to help stop your ezines and newsletters hitting the mesh before they reach the intended recipient. You can also read more about spam at http://www.spamhaus.org/.

The GIMP - an alternative to Photoshop?

2006-04-28T14:05:00.001Z

Until the launch of Apple’s Aperture software Photoshop didn’t really have any serious competitors.

Photoshop Elements at £60.00 (Mac and PC) is great if you don’t want to prepare images for print – it can’t handle RGB to CMYK conversions There is also Paint Shop Pro (£50 PC only), but it’s amateur persona means you’re unlikely to find it in a professional designer’s office, although corporates have been known to install it

With Adobe Photoshop CS2 costing more than £400 (Mac or PC) and Aperture at nearly £300 (Mac only) a free image editing like The GIMP sounds too good to be true.

The Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free download from http://www.gimp.org/. It is available in Window, Mac OSX and Linux versions, although the Mac variant isn’t too straightforward as it requires Apple's X11.app. If this is all sounding too complex go and buy Photoshop Elements – you won’t be disappointed.

If you using Windows you will also have to download and install the (free) GTK+ 2 Runtime Environment. This is a one-click install and the installation process for The GIMP is then quite straightforward.

Once you run the program the interface may look a little strange if you have been brought up on Adobe products. But it is quite straightforward and I soon had a 55mb TIFF file open on the PC desktop.

The GIMP uses multiple Windows – one to hold the image, another to hold the tools and a third for layers, brushes, channels and paths. This can be confusing as it possible to “lose” windows behind the main image. This third window, and its uses, gives you some idea of the capabilities of the program. It is up there with Photoshop and Aperture.

Without reading any instructions I was quickly able to pull up a Levels Palette (Tools>> Colour Tools) and adjust the tonal range of the image – a typical task if you use a digital camera.

A Saturation boost was equally easy (Colour Tools >> Hue – Saturation). Cloning to get rid of marks was also straightforward, as was “Undo-ing” my ham-fisted mistakes.

Previews to show what the effect will be for a particular action are not quite updated in real-time, although the large image size didn’t help. It certainly isn’t too slow.

The program comes full of what it calls Script-Fu menu items. These turned out to be scripting extensions and at this point I came unstuck. Applying a Spyrogimp effect (whatever that is) caused the whole thing to lock up and the need to restart the program (Mac users can start laughing now). This is actually a fairly rare occurrence on a PC nowadays.

Once back up and running I reduced the image to 300 pixels width, applied some unsharp masking and bingo – a ready to use JPEG file for web was prepared in less than a minute. The JPEG save button gives you the option of adjusting the quality to reduce the file size, just like Photoshop or Image Ready. Incidentally, The GIMP can also save in a wide range of other file formats.

But what about RGB >>> CMYK conversions? Well, The GIMP falls down as it can’t handle them out of the box. But luckily, others have stepped in to help out, although the plug-in I downloaded from http://www.blackfiveservices.co.uk/ didn’t work and crashed.

At this point I have to say that if the world of ICC device profiles, colour management and monitor calibration is blank canvas to you, perhaps it is better to leave the final RGB >> CMYK conversion to the printer. That way, if there is a cock-up it is down to them.

In summary then, for the grand sum of absolutely nothing, the GIMP turns out to a be a pretty useful image editing tool that can quite easily tweak your digital images for intranet or internet sites. It also allows you to edit full-blown 300dpi images, but the jury is out on saving press-ready CMYK TIFF files. As a free alternative to Adobe Photoshop Elements and for home use it has a lot to commend it. Try it - you’ve nothing to lose.

A free alternative to MS Office

2006-04-05T16:16:00.001Z

Owning a new PC or Macintosh is only half the story.

You also need software - and lots of it! If you were to buy Microsoft Word (£199), Quark Xpress, (£899) Adobe Photoshop (£549) and Macromedia's Dreamweaver (£399) together you could easily spend more than the cost of the hardware.

But there are alternatives to commercial software packages and some are even free.

Such as NeoOffice (http://www.planamesa.com), which is described as a fully-featured set of office applications, including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing programs, for Mac OS X. NeoOffice is the Mac version of OpenOffice, a PC program I reviewed a few years ago. Available as a 124Mb download, you had better allow half an hour or so to install it, even with broadband.

NeoOffice takes a good 30 seconds to boot up, but is impressive from the start with the menu structure very similar to Word.

Spell checking is done in real time and it has a UK English dictionary so it knows the difference between color and colour. I couldn't find a word count tool, but the help option soon showed me that File>>Properties>>Statistics was the place to go, although you can only word count a whole document and not sections. The program also has a think ahead feature that tries to guess what you are trying to type. Just like predictive text on mobile phones, I couldn't get used to it and switched it off.

If you are beginning to think that I liked NeoOffice you are right. In the two hours or so that I played with it I was impressed. It feels like a viable alternative to MS Office and it even opened up both Excel and Powerpoint files created on a PC, the latter only needing a little tweak to the fonts to make sure they fitted the screen perfectly. It will also save files in MS Word .doc format, so clients need never know you are a cheapskate.

Measuring your readability

2006-03-09T18:20:00.000Z

How readable is your work? No, it isn’t a trick question. Readability is fast becoming a vital part of written communications and one that you may be tested on when pitching for work.

In the USA, many organisations are required to ensure that documents aimed at the public are readable. But how can this be measured?

Readers may recall the Fog index – where Fog stood for “Frequency of Gobbledygook”. This was devised by the American Robert Gunning, and indicates the effort it takes to read and make sense of any written text.

The Fog Index (FI) is calculated by taking the total number of words and dividing it by the total number of sentences. To this you then add the number of “hard words” divided by the total number of words, divided by 0.4. Hard words are those composed of three syllables or more.

This is where the FI is tricky as you ignore words with three or more syllables if they are proper nouns, compounds like thirty-two or words in which the third syllable is the sound caused by '-es', '-ing' or ' -ed'.

If you still reading this far you have probably noticed the major flaw with the Fog Index – it’s too complicated.

Enter the Flesch Reading Ease Index, which is fast becoming a standard for readability. This is defined as being equal to 206.8 - (s + 0.85w), where s equals the average number of words per sentence and w equals the number of syllables per 100 words.

The object is to get as high a Flesch score as possible with 90-100 being regarding as “Very Easy”, 80-90 “Easy”, 70-80 “Fairly Easy” and 60-70 “Standard”.

Anything between 50-60 is defined as “Fairly Difficult”. You shouldn’t really score less than this.

Attempts have also been made to equate the Flesch score with reading age, with 70 – 80 equating to about 12 Years. Don’t laugh –the average reading age for the whole of the UK is supposed to be about nine according to Bath University. Such a reading age requires a Flesch index of more than 100, while the average reading age of internet users is about 14 (Flesch 60-70).

The great thing about the Flesch Index is that MS Word can work it out for you. Go to Tools>> Spelling and Grammar>> Options and ensure “Show readability statistics” is checked.

Then, when you do a complete spelling and grammar check the Flesch reading will be displayed. Oh, and this feature scored 60.7 if you are counting.

You can get too hung up on Flesch Indices. But if you are writing for the general public it is a good guide as to how effective your prose really is.