There were many excellent talks of both a technical and general nature – leaning heavily towards the technical, but that more or less suited the participants (I won’t say ‘audience’ because at an unconference there is no real seperation between organizers, presenters and audience!)

At some point we all gathered ourselves together to show solidarity with the 120 people in Wellington hashing out the PublicACTA declaration that day, via twitter. It was unfortunate that we’d already announced the date for the barcamp by the time PublicACTA was announced, as there were certainly several people who would have liked to have gone to both events (including moi!).

#bcchch showing their support for #PublicACTA

As one of the nominal unorganizers of this particular unconference, I’d particularly like to thank CII for hosting the event, my co-unorganizer Pete for doing much of the publicity, getting the ball rolling, and buying the beer, Stephen for organizing the Pizza and doing much of the MC work once things got going, and everyone who showed up, got into the spirit of things, and shared a great day of talks with us, despite it being nice and sunny outside!

A few highlights of the barcamp for me included:

Rus Werner from CrowdFusion gave us a quick demo of how to put together a website using the CrowdFusion framework, which looks to be a highly advanced content management system targeted at large group blogs, but capable of supporting all sorts of content management scenarios. Rus is the only NZ based developer, the rest of the team were in LA that day to put their latest client live – TMZ – which is one heck of a big site.

We were very pleased to have CJ down from Wellington and she joined her fellow Hitlab member Rob Ramsay to talk about a really fascinating idea they’ve had for combining augmented reality and the DigitalNZ APIs into a new kind of mobile-web game. Actually it appears to have got a long way past just being an ‘idea’ and we’re eagerly looking forward to seeing this come to life later this year.

Later on in the day Pete wowed us with his demonstration of what’s possible with HTML5 and Webkit, culminating with a live demo of the Quake engine running at 30fps *in the browser* – I had already heard about this awesome demo (done by some Google guys to show off what’s possible with HTML5 these days), but it’s another thing to actually see it running.

It was great to hear that we have a Camino developer in Christchurch, and Chris gave us an update on the Camino project, entitled ‘Not dead yet!’ or something along those lines. I asked about what it might take to get extensions into Camino, and he seemed open to the concept. My feeling is that it will be best be done using the new Mozilla Jetpack framework, as that does not use any XUL, which Camino avoids in favour of native Mac ‘Cocoa‘ componentry.

My old friend Neil from Screaming Duck software talked about his new lightweight browser plugin (plugin as in something like Flash, rather than an extension like Interclue) ‘thefbi‘ that allows for a subset of native x86 code to run inside a sandbox in the browser. I think there may well be a niche there despite the fact that HTML5 may make most plugins irrelevant in the long run (and many of us would be very happy about that).

Andrew from Morningstar Security gave an overview of the huge scan of NZ based ‘websites’ he originally presented at the last Kiwicon. Apparently lots of really crazy stuff has public facing content on Port 80 these days – Printers, Voip-phones, drilling equipment, you name it. Much of this stuff should only be available behind a firewall or at least a login, but as you would expect, this is not always the case.

Personally I did a presentation about “Personal Idea Management” and although it was ok, I put it together in a bit of a rush and didn’t really get in all the “ideas about ideas” that I wanted to. I got some good feedback afterwards and I look forward to reworking the presentation and giving it another go sometime in the future. Maybe as a Pecha Kucha talk, or at another unconference. At the very least I’ll make a blog post on the subject at some stage! For this talk I was mainly talking about the special class of ideas that could form the core of new tech projects (or even new startups), which is a type I am particularly prone to. This is a pretty tiny subset of the general field of “ideas”, and although in an ideal world one might have software custom designed to help out with it, it’s probably going to be handled mainly within the standard note-taking / brainstorming apps such as Mindmappers, Hierarchical Outliners, and Personal Wikis. I have tried a bunch of these and have never quite settled on one I’m totally happy with, or a system that was in any way ideal, but working on this presentation and the feedback I got afterwards has definitely given me some ideas and I look forward to trying them out. Since the presentation I’ve had two new ideas for iPad apps, and they will join the backlog of 50+ things we could be building if we had any spare capacity right now. Certainly I look forward to the day when some of that backlog hits the front burner!

Many of the folks at the barcamp said we should have another one soon – which hopefully means “within the next year”! I may or may not still be living in Christchurch at the time, but I will try to be there regardless! Remember there’s nothing stopping anyone from getting another barcamp ball rolling at any time, anywhere. Come up with the nugget of a plan, make a post to barcamp.org about it, tell your friends, and you’re on your way! I may make another “lessons learned” post with a few hints about what went right for us and what went wrong this time around, but really all the info you need is at barcamp.org, and if I do make that post I’ll try to find a place for those thoughts there as well.

Anyone who missed Barcamp but would like to present a tech talk in an informal setting, I encourage you to come along to a Spacecraft gathering, and let people know in advance what you’ll be talking about. There are also the monthly TVIC tech dinners – the last one was very good with possibly as many as 20 geeks in attendance.

Following up on my previous post about the Christchurch Digital NZ hackfest, I did find the bug in my search plugin script, it was just one of those minor typos that takes ages to find because the error message you got when you tried to use it was completely uninformative. Sigh. However, since I spent most of my time on this during “Mozilla Service Week” I chalked up a few hours there to add to their total. Kudos to Mozilla for organising that and I’ll be sure to take part in a more serious way should they do it again.

Digital NZ has created a Custom Search Builder, and it seems to me that they could add Search Plugin generation to this reasonably easily. All they need to do is take a copy of my sample and use it to create a template the swaps out the content of the ShortName and Description tag, and also the template attribute in the <url> tag – everything else can stay the same. Then they need to add a javascript install link to the search result pages similar to the one here.

Heres what my sample search plugin file looks like (NB: First bit of code I can recall posting in this blog. I promise not to make it a habit.)


<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Digital NZ</ShortName>
<Description>Digital NZ Archive Search</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16" type="image/x-icon">data:image/x-icon;base64,[data string goes here]</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="get" template="http://search.digitalnz.org/en/search">
<Param name="search_text" value="{searchTerms}"/>
</Url>
</OpenSearchDescription>


The Webserver has to serve up that XML file with a MIME type of application/opensearchdescription+xml

eg using apache, in a directory where .xml isn’t reserved for anything else, one could put this in a .htaccess file:

AddType application/opensearchdescription+xml .xml

It’s also relatively trivial to add something to the headers of a webpage to enable autodiscovery of one or more search plugins. I’ve done that on my example page. Once you’ve done so it’ll appear in the search plugin manager for the browser, like this:

For more details, and how to do other cool things like enabling search completion, see:

OpenSearch Specification
Mozilla article on creating OpenSearch Plugins for Firefox

Among the various hacks there was an iPhone app and a Drupal module, and I got most of the way through building a Search Plugin for Firefox and IE, which is a relatively trivial hack in theory but I’d never built one before so it was a useful learning experience.

Unlike fully blown browser extensions such as Interclue or Lazarus, search plugins are just an xml file that when loaded using a special javascript method (only available in certain browsers, such as Firefox 2+ and IE7+) will cause your browser to create another search provider for the search box, which by default in Firefox only has a few general purpose search engines such as Google and Yahoo available, and a few site specific ones such as Wikipedia. But anyone can create a new search plugin for the search on their website, and getting users to install it can mean that they come back to your website more often.

I found a few little niggles, such as that the xml file had to be served up with the right MIME type by the webserver, and that the best way to provide the icon was using a “Data URI” – essentially a way of encoding an image using text. Fortunately Hixie has a kitchen for that.

My attempt is here, and in theory it should install fine in IE7+ and Firefox2+ by clicking the link on this page, but so far, it doesn’t, and I’m not quite sure why. I’ll update this post once I’ve fixed it! [update: fixed]

DigitalNZ has a “roll your own search engine” system set up for their growing collection of Digital Kiwiana, and it should be simple enough to extend that system to build a search plugin for each derived engine, since they will share the same pattern apart from the target URLs. There are also standards for search completion (guessing what you want to search for) and autodiscovery. I’ll make another post in a couple of days once I’ve had a chance to figure it out properly.

[updated because I forgot their mission was only to index the metadata, the digitizing and putting online bit is up to the contributors and partner organizations]

Some good news. Lazarus Form Recovery, our little side project, has risen through the ranks and joined Interclue on the AMO “recommended list” – probably the highest accolade available in the world of browser add-ons, apart from perhaps a glowing review in the Mossberg column, as our colleagues at Surf Canyon recently achieved.

The AMO directory (addons.mozilla.org) is linked directly from the Firefox Tools|Add-ons menu, and add-ons from the recommended list are even featured within the browser itself, so the 30-40 add-ons on that list do get a lot of exposure, and having two in there at once really is a great honor, given how many they have to choose from.

I’ve been asked a few times how we managed it. The short version is in both cases I wrote to Mozilla and explained how our addon met their criteria for recommendation, which you can read at the bottom of this page, and not long after that they were recommended. So it’s really about having the right sort of add-on and the right sort of reviews, rather than doing much in the way of lobbying or cajoling.

Most of the credit goes to Karl, who put a lot of effort into making Lazarus almost flawless. My only significant contributions were the original concept, a few innovative implementation ideas (eg asymmetric encryption to get around having to enter a password), and letting him avoid our Interclue todo list for a month or three. It took a while longer to get Lazarus right than we expected, there are a bunch of edge cases where form recovery is hard, but we felt it was worth chasing them all down so we could honestly say “Never lose anything you type into a web form again”.

Part of the Interclue Manifesto says “We will never stop looking for more ways to increase the value of the time people spend online.”, and certainly being able to recover hours of typing that otherwise would have been lost has increased the value of my time online, and from the ecstatic reactions we’ve gotten from Lazarus users, I’d say we haven’t strayed too far from our core mission.

Here are some snippets from Lazarus reviews on AMO:

I guess that means they like it :-)

It’s also gotten good feedback from tech bloggers who picked up on it. Not a lot of mainstream attention so far, probably because I haven’t contacted any of them, but hopefully that will come with time. Hey Walt, about that column of yours….

The 3 big reasons I gave were (1) It’s way faster than IE (with IE8 that depends on how you measure it – but Firefox is certainly much faster for highly dynamic sites) (2) It’s the safest browser available, and (3) there are over 5000 free addons available to help you “pimp it” to the max. I also talked about Firefox being an open project and the fact that you could, in theory, fix any bugs you find yourself (I could have spent another 6:40 explaining why this almost never happens in practice, starting with the fact that unless you’re an expert, you’ll never be able to tell what is a bug in the browser vs a bug in the page markup, webserver, or network services).

My next 11 slides were mostly dedicated to the various types of Firefox add-on that are out there, and on the last one I promised to post links to all the examples I used, so here they are:

Foxtab: See all your open tabs in a coverflow like visualization.
Personas: Radically pimp the look of your browser without even needing a restart.
Foxclocks: A world-time clock in your status bar.
ReminderFox: Tasklist with alarms etc.
Trashmail: An addon that lets you use a different (disposable) email address for every website you visit (we recently redeveloped this for Ferraro Ltd in Germany)
Flagfox: Information about the web server for this webpage, starting with a country flag icon in your status bar.
Interclue: Our flagship; tells you everything you want to know about a link before you click (ok, maybe not everything, but we’re working on that).
Lazarus: Our first major side project; securely & privately auto-saves content as you type, so you’ll never lose anything you enter into a webform again.
SimSidekick: Fun animated Sim-companions for your surfing, who do whacky things when you visit various “cool” sites on the net. We redeveloped the addon version of this for Freestyle Interactive, who built the no-addon-required version for their client EA, as part of what (I suspect) is the largest game marketing campaign of all time (for the Sims 3, of course).
Firebug, every web-developer’s must-have addon.
Zotero, the academic’s add-on of choice
Adblock Plus, the addon installed by over 50 million Firefox users, strips the ads from your webpages before they even get a chance to load.

My thanks to Vanessa Coxhead from Pecha Kucha Christchurch for the invitation to present, and for helping me sort out my slides at the last minute. If you’re in Christchurch and have something you want to talk about with 20 slides for 20 seconds each, I’m sure she’d love to hear from you. If you’re somewhere else, just google “pecha kucha YourCityName” and there might be one closer to home!

Many of you will know her as the founding editor of the uber-famous (well, in tech circles) Lifehacker, a phenomenally successful blog covering tips, tricks, software and sites that offer a multitude of ways to improve your workflow and lifestyle. Sadly, the sheer number of suggestions forced me to stop reading Lifehacker a while ago – chasing up all those potential speed improvements wasn’t helping me get anything done in the short term! I’m looking forward to achieving a somewhat more measured pace of life improvement from reading Gina’s new blog; Smarterware.

The fact that so many of these posts were of good value, and the fact that Gina was churning out a dozen or more every day, day after day after day, is certainly a Heroic feat in my opinion. I don’t think I’ve managed a dozen blog posts inside a single month, let alone in a single day.

While researching Gina’s life (a remarkably easy task, given how much she has written or had written about her in the last decade), I discovered an article that mentioned the genesis of Lifehacker – it turns out she was already working for Nick Denton as a coder when he bought the domain name, and her enthusiasm for the what could be done with it made him offer her the editor job on the spot. Many will realize this was probably one of the best HR decisions Nick made in his life, and it has to be said he’s made some good ones in his time.

“The one blogger I wished we had landed at Weblogs, Inc. was Gina Trapani from LifeHacker. I tried every two months for a year I think… no offer was good enough. Very, very frustrating.” – Jason Calacanis

To go from being a full time professional coder (with a pretty impressive resume) to being a full time professional writer is no small feat. Both involve using a keyboard and your brain – after that the similarities start to die off pretty fast. So that’s another reason Gina is a Tech Heroine.

I was actually aware of Gina well before she started Lifehacker, in that she was one of the few girl geeks who was seriously blogging, and there was a time (pre-2004) when just running your own blog qualified you as being moderately cool. I looked in the WayBackMachine and discovered she’s been blogging since late 2001 – which makes her a serious early adopter. Here’s her first post.

Another reason she’s among my Tech Heroines is that she’s the author of quite a few Firefox Addons, and I would say she’s contributed just as much to the success of Firefox through constantly blogging about Firefox and Firefox add-ons on Lifehacker, and providing early examples of add-ons for people to learn from, as almost anyone who actually works for the Mozilla Foundation. They should give her a medal or something. One of the earliest “Top X Firefox Add-ons” lists features her app “About this site”.

For reasons that may not be immediately apparent, the success of Mozilla ranks up there with the success of Google, Wikipedia, and the W3C as reasons why the web is so damned useful today, as opposed to mired in a morass of crappy over-commercialized portal sites and walled gardens, so Gina’s contributions to the success of Firefox are no small thing in the world of Tech Heroism.

Gina has said that her book is one of the things she’s most proud of, so I really must get around to buying it sometime soon. [2] Her book is called “Lifehacker – 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Life”.

If you can’t wait to get the book, or don’t feel like perusing thousands of lifehacker articles for your dose of wisdom from Gina, the interviews she gave to Tim Ferris and The New York Times should at least whet your appetite.

It’s not for nothing that in 2007 she was ranked 7th by Forbes in a list of 25 Web Celebrities, one above Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook.

Herein endith my tribute to Gina Trapani. To read about more Tech Heroines on Ada Lovelace Day, check out this huge list of posts, which is also available referenced by subject, and the locations of the bloggers writing about them!

[1] “Today” being a somewhat amophorus concept for me. Lets just stay I started this post on the 24th, NZ time, and will finish on the 24th, American time.

[2] My book reading has slowed to a crawl now the internet feeds me pretty much everything I need, but I make exceptions. It doesn’t help that book prices in New Zealand are at least twice what they are in the USA, if we’re lucky. This is another reason the internet is a great leveller – eliminating the edge once enjoyed by readers in large markets with better enconomies of scale. Imagine what it would be like if everything on the internet was priced differentially by where you lived, or you weren’t allowed to watch clips from an upcoming movie because it wasn’t available in your country….ok, bad example. Eventually the creative industries will realise how batshit crazy they are to do this to their international fans.

I ended being MC by default, which is a pretty unfamiliar sort of role for me, but Ben was busy liveblogging and Stephen was running the laptop finding interesting content to go along with the talks, so I ended up being the one doing the talking between talks. The job was to watch the clock and figure out when and how to call time on each speaker, and since we had a lot of interesting people there and lots of good questions being asked, it was tricky. Didn’t completely fluff it. Everyone seemed to have a good time anyway.

A few notes on some of the presentations:

Ben didn’t quite manage the Steve Jobs effect since we couldn’t make the air-pointer driver work with Powerpoint 2007, but it was an excellent presentation on SaaS nonetheless, probably the best of the day from my perspective. And he thought he wouldn’t be geeky enough!

The lads from SLI definitely had the best schwag. Actually I think they had the only schwag. They also brought their projector which came in handy. It’s good to know there are some well financed web companies in Christchurch – hopefully Interclue will join them in that regard sometime soon. They’re hiring, by the way.

Marek showed off his new OpenID provider. OpenID was very much on the menu at BarCampWellington as well. There was some good debate about the pros and cons at both. I think it’s definitely an important standard, but it may take a while to catch on with the users. I hear that they have taken it off the menu for Firefox 3 which is a shame.

We chatting about hardware gadgets in an open session, with Phil telling us about Arduino and Eric Woods mentioning his recent investigations into the world of smartphones, and his conclusion that the best value to be had right now was importing a new Treo 650 from the states, for about NZ$300. I have a Treo 650 and I can confidently say it’s excellent value at that price, but the two things that really irritate me are the lack of 3G data – GPRS ping times are awful – and the camera being a poxy 640×480 that doesn’t work well indoors. The photo I’ve used here is an example of that. The sound recording for video is also pretty poor. Also if you want to use it as an alarm clock you’ll need to install an app, and most of the cost money. Google Maps works moderately well on it tho, and doesn’t cost money.

Near the end we remembered we hadn’t done the 3 word intro’s! A week later, the same thing happened at BarCampWellington! You’d think if anyone would have remembered to point it out at the time it would have been me, but my memory is reasonably atrocious at times. At Barcamp Christchurch we mixed 3 word intro’s with short talks by the people not wanting a half hour slot. Eg
Isaac from Wowza gave us a bit of a chat about user-centric data modelling that he expanded on here.

As a Finale, Roger Bays gave us a demonstration of his phenomenal augmented reality artwork, Semaphore. He was able to demonstrate using a monitor rather than using a headset like he did when he one the People’s Choice award at a recent exhibtion featuring 50+ artists (I think). I’m really looking forward to the day when they get this sort of thing working with descrete, affordable, non-bulky, wifi enabled dataglasses.

All in all, although I think in retrospect we should have given ourselves a few more weeks to prepare, and done it over a weekend, it was a really good day for the Chch tech scene and I hope it inspires more gatherings of it’s like as soon as we can organise them. Don’t forget to sign up to the TVIC mailing list to find out more about geek gatherings in Christchurch.

It’s pretty impressive how you can drag the nodes around and actually do one or two things you can’t do with Freemind, but there are definitely a few kinks to be worked out, eg I had problems when one node was on top of another, and kept selecting the one underneath. Printing also wasn’t too flash.

It’s way too big to use as an embed really, but I can’t resist playing around, so here it is. You can zoom from the bottom left and click through to the larger version from the bottom right.

[update: removed it - slowing down the page a bit much, I should probably get in touch with them with performance tips for embedded javascript widgets... Here's a link to it tho - and if you haven't seen Mindmeister in action, seriously check it out. Most impressive Ajax I've seen in ages]

Actually I’ve thought of another thing I could say when people ask what Web 3.0 means….Wittgenstein says “Meaning is Use” (roughly speaking) and therefore Web 3.0’s meaning is bound to whatever use people put that phrase to. In general, I think they use it to mean “Some funky web stuff that supposedly wasn’t part of Web 2.0″

Unfortunately the meaning of Web 2.0 is vastly more complicated, because people use the phrase for all sorts of purposes.

I was particularly pleased that a few folks there told me that they’d been been using Interclue and enjoying it. Thanks very much to Dave Tinkler of Holliday Corporation for inviting me to speak and helping to steer me in the right direction as I began to run out of time!

It was good to have an excuse to talk about the 2.0 Big Picture for once. Normally I lose people in the first few sentences…for a more gentle introduction, I’ve got some great videos on my 2.0 page linked in my menu above.

Of course lots of folks wanted to know what I thought Web 2.0 really is, and I put forward my opinion that “Web 2.0 is what Tim O’Reilly says it is“. I’m at least half serious about that. Tim and his company have been the thought leaders of this revolution, almost as much as they’ve just been “Watching the alphageeks” as Tim calls it. Of course they wanted specifics, so I gave them Tim’s compact definition, which is:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

If I’d tried to give them the long version I would have been there all night…

Of course, I live in a slightly different universe to most folks, so I was somewhat thrown by the followup question “So, who is Tim O’Reilly anyway?”. This is why I love the web. We can explain these things with hyperlinks, and not slow down the information flow for the people who already know. Interclue makes it even better because you can view the main body content at the end of the hyperlinks in the context of the current page, without all the cruft around the outside of the page that could distract you off into the distance.

I wasn’t quite sure which bits of 2.0 the audience was going to be interested in, but I had faith in my ability to wing it, so I prepared a little mindmap of the various things 2.0ish that have caught my attention over the past couple of years (distracting me and slowing down the progress of Interclue quite considerably as a result). Unfortunately it’s a bit large. Click the image for a version large enough to actually read!

Also please note that this certainly isn’t a map of all things 2.0 – just the people, projects, platforms and protocols that I think I know a little bit about. And it’s not a complete map of those either.

I wish I’d had time to highlight the bits I find particularly interesting/important, hyperlink relevant articles, and add some more detail, but I’ll regard this as a starting point and post an update later. If anyone sees something they want to have a chat about, feel free to get in touch, or just leave a comment about something they’d like me to blog about in the future.

There are essentially two reasons I suggested that email as we know it, ie as based on SMTP/POP3/IMAP, will be gradually replaced with something better and browser/HTTP based. The first reason is that email is a significant source of pain for users and even worse for systems administrators. The second reason is that the existing plethora of clients, servers and gateway applications that deal with email means that it’s more or less impossible to make any significant upgrades across the ecosystem.

Ok, just looking at the pains for users, here are some things that are wrong with email at the moment. The list of pains for the poor benighted sysadmins is just as long, but I just don’t have time right now (and may not have time for weeks, already wasted too much time on this really, Interclue really needs 150% of my attention at the moment)

Security – it’s too much hassle, and most people just can’t be bothered. Microsoft, for some unknown reason, doesn’t want Outlook to have PGP, most PGP/GPG solutions for Windows are either flaky or a pain to set up, and they’re not all compatible with eachother. Alternative mail security solutions exist but aren’t as common and are probably just as hard to set up.

File Attachments - The brokeness of email attachments has led to about a bazillion online services that try to make this bit easier.

Confirmations – you can ask for a confirmation that someone’s read a bit of mail, but they don’t have to send it. Frankly I’d just like a confirmation that they *got* the mail and it didn’t end up in a spam/virus filter somewhere.

Lock-ins – using your ISP’s provided email address locks you into that ISP, because they don’t want to risk losing emails from long lost friends. ISPs love this. Ditto hotmail/gmail/etc. Switching mail clients can be just as much of a pain due to the problems of getting all your mail archives in one place so you can search them.

Mobile email – a pain, and remarkably inconsistent. Email from a friend of mine in the UK will usually end up in my spam filter because it has some unusual stuff in the headers or whatever.

“Rich” email – if you use HTML in mail it can trigger spam filters, and you are less able to rely on it getting to the other end. To make matters worse (well, actually there are pros and cons) Outlook 2007 changed the layout engine it uses for rendering HTML mail, to something more secure but it increases the difficulty of getting something in the right format.

Viruses – Existing email protocols make it to easy for them to spread – for instance by allowing them to fake the sender header so that you have no idea who sent you the virus.

Spam – The problems regarding spam, well, you could write a book on them. Sure, if you want people to be able to contact people who aren’t already on their list of contacts, or you want the ability to contact people anonymously, then there will always be spam, but existing email protocols and practices just make it way too easy.

Antispam – Almost as irritating as spam is all the problems that can result from the security measures taken by various users and systems to stop spam from getting in, which often get in the way of legitimate email as well.

Depending on the situation you’re in, you might also have trouble with Search, Archiving, Backups, Filtering, File corruption, Software Updates, Virus Checkers…there are a lot of things that can go wrong or were designed wrong with desktop email clients. Some webmail clients are just as bad. I’ll save them for another post.

I have a pile of MoCo bloggers in my feed reader, and I’ve noticed that most of the chatter around the call to action that inspired my post seems to be about what they’re going to do with Thunderbird and why. Only Myk appears to have picked up the thread of building “something better”. But I suspect the seed has been planted and we shall see more of this particular meme.