What’s also interesting is the cost of getting that speed. Here’s another graph:

According to this, all that speed is incredibly cheap, under a dollar per month per megabit in US Dollars, according to the article. By this calculation, I’d expect that for a person in Tokyo to get roughly the same speed I do, they’d pay around $20 per month. Here in Vancouver, my Internet cost is coming in at about $47 for that 19 Megabits, so that works out to roughly $2.5 (Canadian) per megabit, which would convert to almost exactly $2 US per month per megabit. That’s better than the graph says (although it’s hard to tell, I’d read it at closer to $5 per month).

Although I’ve been making some comparisons here, I’m wondering how life would change for me if Internet was half the cost it was, and 3 times faster, but I’m also wondering if this high level of service at relatively low cost will cause a flurry of Internet activity and development in Japan. I note that their limitations have more to do with screen size (many Japanese access the Internet exclusively through via cell phone screen, if  I’m not mistaken).

So, what’s it like? How has cheap, fast Broadband Internet made things different, and do you think it will change things in the coming decade? My friends in Japan, your input here is welcome!

I’ve been a little better about my personal blog, Loud Murmurs, but now that my contract at IBM is over, I have a little spare time. That means not only redesigning this web site (yes, look for exciting new changes in the coming days and weeks) but also starting to write in this blog once again. I will make another effort at getting my presentation of roughly a year ago up online (and fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, it’s still just as valid today as it was then).

What you can’t see is that I have a new admin interface which I really, really like. It’s the Fluency Admin by Dean J, Robinson.Tell you what, I’ll put in a screenshot of the screen I’m writing this on:

So, I find myself in the unfortunate situation of essentially having to recreate the slides from scratch in Dreamweaver, and re-compress all of the movies (along with trying to figure out how to do so without them becoming unreadable thanks to multiple transformations from one codec to another). All of this is not a problem if one has the time. So, I’m going to give it a couple of more hours today and hopefully will get closer to a solution that I can post here. In the meantime, sorry for the delay.

A great example of good information design, if there ever was one. I’m thinking that it might be easy to read, once you get used to it. And pretty, too. Will make a nice screen saver.

And now they have a new video that explains the concept of Wikis and why you would use one:

They are well done, and charming the way that they employ old fashioned stop-motion technique to create a sort of animated white board. My only negative comment is that I wouldn’t mind them using a different voice without the twang (just a personal thing I have with accents). On the other hand, some would probably say that using an amateur voice helps to suggest a non-professional feel for the presentation, which makes the subject less threatening.

It’s only a matter of time before some advertising exec sees one of these and rips off the technique for a ‘hip’ spot about a car or razor. In the meantime, I’m pleased to be able to point people to these videos when they need a quick (and are done at breakneck speed) tutorial on a few new concepts and technologies that are very popular these days. If you don’t quite get the concept of each the first time through, try once more through. It won’t take long.

A visitor to this blog noted the lack of contact information (such as my email address) in plain view. My answer to him was that this is partly on purpose. As many people know, when you leave your email address on a web page, software that is designed to harvest email addresses can easily grab that address and put it in SPAM databases. I learned from my Kendall Group web site that doing this resulted in a nearly unusable email address (ddrucker@ that address is constantly inundated with hundreds of SPAM a day, and only after I completely removed it and put up a ‘closed for business’ page up has this begun to let up , but not entirely).

There are some solutions for this problem, but I’m not sure which to adopt. Here are the ones I know of:

1. List my address as ‘name “at” domain name’ , rather than an address that is actually written out. This is inconvenient, and relies on the ability of people to figure it out (and machines to be unable to – I’m not sure if they have improved the SPAMbots so that they can get around this). It’s a relatively simple but user unfriendly solution, that is potentially useless if the software has been made more ‘intelligent’ to get around this subterfuge.
2. Create a ‘Contact Me’ form for the initial email, much like a comment, but on it’s own page and with a simple mailto form script. While it’s not particularly elegant (and mailto scripts have their own security problems), it might do the trick. Again, there’s no guarantee that SPAMers might find a way around this one.
3. Include the text “To contact me, please use a comment.” somewhere on the home page. This is easiest, and would have a pretty good chance of getting by the SPAMbots. It is, however, less ‘friendly’, since initial communications would be public and not everyone likes having their opening communication visible to all (even though I can actually choose to not publish the comment and still respond via email).
4. Years ago I’d heard of services where email sent to an address for the first time required the sender to validate themselves (essentially respond to a link in an automatic responder email). I’ve forgotten what it was called, but it sounds good in this case, but I’m not sure what kind of reaction it might cause (since it puts most of the responsibility upon the person who is initially trying to get in touch to verify that they are not a SPAMer)

So, there is my quandary: How to make myself more ‘contactable’ without opening up the door to the inevitable flood of SPAM. I already receive about 2-300 SPAMs a day from my old address, so this is no small issue. I know that there are probably some other solutions, but I do not want to run extra SPAM software on my Mac, and do not want to have to buy a PC to run SPAM software either. I want to stop or discourage these emails before they are sent, not have something sift through my mail to remove them afterward. I sometimes access my email from the road via webmail, so extra SPAM-filtering software doesn’t help there.

Any ideas?