Jerry Seinfeld And The Web

Last night I typed up a massive post which I then lost when my PC crashed, about how US websites like Yahoo! when transposed and localised for non-english speaking countries are similar in some or many respects to re-dubbing episodes of Seinfeld or Frasier into those same foreign languages. The raw content is conveyed but the cultural references, humour and more subtle nuanced meanings are either lost in the translation process or just don't make sense to non US viewers.

Anyway, if I find the time and inclination I'll re-write it again - if I can remember it all. In a word processor, not in a fragile browser application that flicks you the finger whenever you hit a glitch. Here's the draft of the first part that I did manage to save, if you'd like me to re-write the rest of it then leave your votes in Comments or send me an encouraging email. Or discouraging, I'm up for both.

The bleeding edge of the Web, or to abuse another metaphor - the front of the train of the Web - is naturally in the United States for at least some of the reasons I gave last week. And so it follows that the majority of the tech market leaders and players are US based companies such as the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo!, Amazon, Google, AOL and Apple.

All of these companies have been pioneers on the Web to greater or lesser extents. Mostly greater. They have established conventions and ways of using the Web that have been adopted and accepted the world over. For example, Yahoo! is available in over thirty regional and international flavours, each in it's own language but all with that same familiar Yahoo! branding and layout, many of the same basic features and all organised in a very similar way to the main, US Yahoo.com site.

On the surface, regardless of which version of Yahoo! you're looking at, it's a boilerplate design, and who can blame Yahoo! for that since it works perfectly in the US which, to-date, just happens to be the largest and most demanding Web market in the world, so why bother fiddling with a winning brand formula? It should be said that there is, of course, more to Yahoo! Taiwan than just Yahoo.com content translated into Taiwanese, there's plenty in the way of localised content such as news, local resources and many Taiwanese websites that don't appear in Yahoo.com's indexes. But despite that, the look and feel of Yahoo! Taiwan is unquestionably based upon the main US site design.

The same for Amazon, Google, Microsoft and so on. I suspect that this has more to do with marketing departments desire to control their precious brands as much as it is to re-utilise proven design concepts.

The United States has been a test bed for those companies, it's allowed them to launch, fine-tune and evolve some of the most successful websites on the planet and they have used their domestic success to roll out their business enterprises globally with classic first mover advantage. For example, it will come as no surprise to find that the biggest online retailer of Amazon type products in the UK is Amazon.co.uk, not a domestic ground-up business.

This isn't intentional hegemony and it's not a part of some insidious plan to Americanize or assimilate the world but nonetheless, the after-effects may be somewhat similar.

Seinfeld is on record as having been biggest sit-com of it's era in the United States right up 'til it finished in 1998 and, along with countless other successful US sitcoms, has been translated into many different languages for syndication accross the world.

Bloody Windows Me flake-o-matic operating system.

The Web's Hegemonical Epicentre

The epicentre of the Web is somewhere, actually probably everywhere, in the USA. That this is the case stands to reason since the Internet more or less started there.

Last year I joked about how much it irked me that country drop down lists on web based forms always start with the United States first, then all the other countries of the world in alphabetical order after, but although it was just me voicing a trivial pet peeve, there is a deeper aspect to that particular manifestation of U.S. Web centricity.

Before I continue, this passing thought is absolutely not about, influenced by or serving to promote any form of patriotism or intolerance. In fact, I have no time for intolerance much as I have no particular leanings on the issue of ambivalence either. I digress.

What our beloved American friends have going for them that we, the rest of the world do not, is a large population serviced well by low cost national transportation and communications systems, where the currency is the same throughout, the language is the same, the foodstuffs, accounting and business practices are the same, timezones are more or less manageable, consumer brands and media networks are the same etc. etc. In other words, an ideal environment in which to break new products, ideas, concepts into a large, nurturing and receptive market. Unlike Europe, for example.

Europe is certainly improving with its medium-term federal agenda; most of Europe now has just the one currency, low cost air travel has recently become established and a tunnel even exists between the continent and dear old Blighty. Brands are reasonably harmonised but not to the extent of US brands and the economies are strong(ish). All seemingly fertile ground for nurturing the kind of creative, inspiring tech leadership we see in abundance in the land of the free. All, that is, apart from language.

The language barrier outside of the US seems to me, at least, to be one of the major reasons why we'll probably never see a Danish challenger to Microsoft's global domination, a Spanish company that gives Apple a run for its money or an Italian Oracle beater - Okay, so SAP is German. It's a major ball & chain.

That is not to say that I think, or would want for, that someone should step up to to knock the USA off it's perch of tech supremacy, I just happen to think that it would be fantastic if the rest of the world was able to complement or supplement the US tech leadership role rather than always having to follow it or to make do with it being the only show in town.

There are unquestionably pockets of brilliance all over Europe and in other regions of the world. However, it appears that those pockets or nodes are largely disconnected from each other beyond the country and language borders. And so we have a fragmented collection of dis-harmonious and distinctly domestic communities in each individual European state. All mostly incompatible with each other and certainly not harmonised with each other in the way that their equivalent communities are in the USA.

The solution? Simple. Let's all move to the USA, actually I'm waiting for France to come up on Rumsfeld's hit-list to be invaded on grounds that they posess cheeses of mass destruction and then they'll all have to speak English. Yeah, that's a great plan, hegemony in the USA! France could be just one big theme park. I'm tired, I'll shut up now.

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The Geek Gene

I?ve been wondering if being a geek is a genetic thing, you know, if there is actually a gene that makes you behave a geek. If, like me, you find that you just can?t stop yourself from doing geeky things then it?s almost certainly genetic, so stop fighting it and just succumb to the power of the geek side.

Like all genetic geeks I love to make geeky things happen and so I've been experimenting lately with geeky solutions involving my new

HP iPAQ 5450

. It's got Bluetooth wireless (and 802.11b WiFi) which allows it to connect passively with my cell phone, meaning I don't have faff about to line it up for an old-tech infra-red connection, nor do I have to manually intervene to get it to connect up to the net, it just does it automatically. Whether it?s sitting in my pocket, case, dashboard or wherever I leave it lying around, providing of course that it?s in close enough proximity to my cellphone to be in Bluetooth range, about 15-20 feet.

I've been using PDA's ever since my first 16k Psion Organiser clunk-o-matic back in 1988. But the addition of wireless communications is a major step forward in practical and usability terms. You can do much more application-wise with wireless in the mix and I think we?re at a major inflection point in my humble, but exquisitely modest, expert opinion.

Like for instance, during my working week I use a remote e-mail management suite called

Symmetry Pro

which automatically compresses and encrypts all my office based e-mails as they arrive and then dumps them on a secure server over at Symmetry Pro?s HQ. The Pocket PC?s Symmetry Pro client then periodically checks to see if there are any new emails waiting for me and, if so, it downloads them to my iPAQ?s e-mail app at a frequency of my choosing. If you don?t happen to have the often complex and costly tech infrastructure to properly support remote or handheld e-mail users in your business then this is a great workaround solution.

I set-up my iPAQ so that it has a secret Bluetooth love affair with my GPRS enabled cell phone every 30 minutes and it plays the infamous Outlook ?nee-naw? email notify sound or, if I?m in a meeting, discreetly vibrates to let me know whenever I've received any new e-mail. Very cool and infinitely useful for when I'm out of the office. To the extent, in fact, that you can no longer tell if I'm out of the office or not these days since I can always receive and reply to my e-mails all day long, whether I?m in or out.

But today I achieved geek factor 9. I connected the headphone jack of the iPAQ to a car stereo cassette adapter, a simple low-tech piece of kit that enables CD players, MP3 players or anything that has a headphone jack, to connect and play through your car stereo's cassette player. Then with my iPAQ connected to the Internet via the Bluetooth cell phone, I was able to stream live

Shoutcast internet radio

, using a PocketPC app called

GSPlayer

which enabled me listen to US based radio stations through my car stereo. Soooooo cool! [

See pictorial explanation

].

Global time-zone confusion then ensued as the US radio presenter said ??and it?s 2 minutes after 9am? when in fact it was actually 2 minutes after 2pm in the UK. I guess I need to be careful that I don?t start driving on the wrong side of the road.

But anyway, it's when technology loops back in on itself like that, when genetic geeks pathologically seek out brand new applications using all the geeky tech know-how they can muster, that?s when our geek antennae start twitching like crazy and I think that this

must

be genetic. It can't be merely a love for all things geek like some other hobby or interest in stamp collecting or trainspotting. To me it seems like a more basic, fundamental need - a disorder even - in those of us with that critical geek gene.

Look back down the years and you?ll that some of the most revered historical figures were geeks. Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Doc Brown from Back To The Future were the geeks of their day, all engaged in extreme-geeking (also known as inventing stuff) to create new geeky ?things? often which the non-geeks initially greeted with a great deal of skepticism ? after all wasn?t the invention of the telephone greeted by the then US President, I forget which, who dismissed its invention by asking why people would ever want to talk to each other if they weren?t in the same room? He obviously never had the Geek gene.

But if all this geek-ness is genetic, it leaves me wondering what Stoneage geeks or Medieval geeks got up to before their latter-day geek descendents got their hands on electricity. There's no such thing as Geek Mythology and there's little evidence of geek behaviour prior to the appearance of the electron apart from the fact, of course, that we all know that cave paintings were an early form of weblog. But beyond that, all that I can seem to imagine about geek influenced technology in the Jurassic period seems to permanently revolve around The Flintstones period with its wall mounted baby dinosaurs used as hand blenders, but I'm sure there must be other examples of ancient geekness.