I tried to access it and got the following message:

"Østre Landsret har ved kendelse af 26. november 2008 stadfæstet fogedrettens kendelse af 29. januar 2008, hvorefter Sonofon A/S er blevet pålagt at hindre sine kunders adgang til www.thepiratebay.org.

På baggrund af kendelsen fra Østre Landsret har Stofa besluttet at spærre for adgangen til siden."

Google Translate to English with some manual adjustments:

"High Court order of 26 November 2008 upheld the court bailiff order of 29 January 2008, after which Sonofon A/S has been imposed to prevent its customers access to www.thepiratebay.org.

Based on evidence from the High Court Stofa has decided to block access to the site."

The TED video below made me think about the success of the iPhone. It is 24 minutes long so if you don't want to watch, I will summarize for you. Sheena Iyengar studies how we make choices and present in the video contrasts that exist with regard to how different cultures choose. She challenges three assumptions that are essentially American: 1) Make your own choices; 2) More options mean better choices; and 3) Never say no to choice. For each of these assumptions she presents examples of other cultures where these do not necessarily hold. And even more, she argues that having a choice as the Americans value does not necessarily yields the best outcomes. Here is the video:

http://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_on_the_art_of_choosing.html

In the end of her presention, she is asked whether the fact of being blind affects her work as a researcher. She answers saying that it mostly helps as it gives her new perspectives under which she can analyze the process of choosing. That is illustrated with a very provocative yet simple example: Having the need to have the help of others to choose which color of nail polish to choose, she got struck in one of these instances by the divergence two ladies had on whether Sheena should use 'ballet slippers pink' or 'adorable pink', that is, choosing between two very very close shades of pink. Being blind, Sheena couldn't decide by herself which color to choose but she decided to do a little experiment based on this situation.

In the experiment, she removed the labels of the nail polishes and asked women which one would they choose. Now, the results are very interesting. First, without labels, about 50% of the women said they were being tricked and both containers had the same color! Of the women that did spot a difference, the majority picked 'adorable pink' but when the labels were on, the majority picked 'ballet slippers'. Some women were being influenced by the name or brand.

That is precisely what happens with the iPhone. With dozens of phone brands and models to choose from, how to choose which is best becomes a challenge. It took me weeks before I made my choice last week and chose the Nokia 5230. I had to compare prices, brands, hardware specifications, operating systems capabilities, benefits from different mobile network operators, and so on. There are an infinite number of combinations and it is simply impossible to fully analyze all of them. Our rationality is bounded, that is, we have limits of time, of information available, and of cognitive capabilities, and so we have to rely on other sources that influence our decision such as our friends opinions, technical reviews, and marketing campaigns.

That is where the iPhone is most successful. Its advertisements, promotions, partnerships and even the iPhone itself are designed under the marketing strategy of simplifying the choice process for potential customers. When one choose the iPhone, he or she is not really choosing the best phone but taking the simplest choice option.  It is not necessary to think of the choice because the Apple brand has successfully advertised itself as trustworthy and from Apple you have only one phone model - the iPhone. Contrast this with HTC phones which in my opinion are the best currently available. An average iPhone buyer probably never heard of that brand and would certainly look suspicious in knowing that it comes from Taiwan. Besides, the company has 28 phone models for you to choose from. 28! How on earth would a person contrast and compare all of them without wasting the time to make a conscious, rational choice? It is not possible and so the iPhone is there to the rescue.

The same was done with the iPod before. When there were hundreds of different mp3 player brands and models to choose from, Apple introduced a simpler and easier choice. In fact, Apple successfully shifted the choosing process from "what brand and model should I choose?" to "do I need a smartphone?" or "do I need a mp3 player?" And if the customer answers 'yes', Apple's products are there for them. It is a 'no choice' strategy that works because we have too many options to choose from and we don't want to be overwhelmed by them. One consequence of this, however, like Sheena Iyengar said in the TED video, is that when you are given the choice and there are too many of them, the outcome of the decision is not necessarily (and, in fact, tend not to be) the best.

And I am not even sure what that does mean. First, I am really happy with the design and usability of my Nokia 5230. All these smart phones have almost the same shape anyway and Symbian is a very stable operating system. Second, if everybody has an iPhone, what kind of status do you get for having one? Other than that, I don’t see any other point for buying an iPhone except giving money away for no reason.

Just look at the table at this web site and compare the features between the iPhone 3GS and the Nokia 5230. Both phones have almost the same set of features. But that tells only part of the story. At first, you might argue that the iPhone has wifi or a better camera, but from a hardware perspective the Nokia 5230 has a higher screen resolution, FM radio, longer battery life, and a memory slot. As for the software, well, in the Nokia phone you get multitasking and Adobe Flash in the web browser. This site lists the top 10 reasons to buy a Nokia 5230 over an iPhone 3GS.

Now compare the prices. At Telia, a Danish telecom operator, a Flex package with the Nokia 5230 will cost you 1.416,00 kr (or aprox. USD 245). And the iPhone 3GS? “Just” 4.776,00 kr (or aprox. USD 828). This is more than 3 times the price of the Nokia phone. Or put it another way, you can buy 3 phones that do exactly the same thing as the iPhone (plus some more), just because the latter has an apple printed in its cover. How about that? A lot cheaper and a better phone.

So I tried my first long-distance ride ever. I've always cycled occasionally and since february I've been cycling around 20km every two days. It was time to try something more challenging. On the map, a ride to Hals, a village by the beach, under Aalborg municipality (north of Denmark) seemed like a nice one.

The route follows the Limfjord (a seaway) all the way from Aalborg to Hals and back. When you reach Hals, you take a small ferry to cross the Limfjord. Hals is quite agreeable this time of the year. It has a small harbor for sailing boats right in the middle of the city which makes it very charming. The food at the restaurant I tried was fine too, the best I had in Denmark so far and the first time without potatoes in it.

Besides the route itself and Hals, it is summer here and the weather forecast for last saturday seemed promising. Good temperatures, no wind. Fortunately, it was right so the ride couldn't have been better. In total, I covered 72km passing by plantations, lovely farms, small villages, windmills, and forests. I tracked the entire route on DailyMile and you can check it out here.

So there is no recent review on the web that convinced me enough to decide which platform to choose for blogging. I am a long-time user of the Wordpress platform (not Wordpress.com) and always loved it. However, the last automatic upgrade made me realize that I don't need it. Granted that It has great features for pretty much everything, you can choose from an infinite number of templates, and it is easy to use. But, of course there is a big but, you have to setup all that. And ensure that all keeps up-to-date and working together. It gets painful at times. Besides, you are responsible for everything - backups, plugins, services, storage, etc. I mean, take a look at the explanation page on how to setup the "post by e-mail" feature on Wordpress that is so seamless on Posterous. I have the knowledge to do all that but I realized I was investing more time on keeping my blog technically sound than posting. It was time to change.

So here is how I am deciding for Posterous instead of Tumblr. I am grouping my decisions into four categories in order of importance to me: Usability, built-in features, integration with social services like Twitter and Facebook, and design. Each platform gets a grade ranging from 1 to 5 in each category. In the end, the choice of a platform is resumed to what you are looking for, of course. In my opinion, it is a matter of deciding whether you prefer powerful features, usability or design. I chose Posterous great usability.

Usability
Wordpress has too many options and customizations. That is great if your blog has hundreds of services, several authors and editors, and millions of visitors everyday. Then you really need the control the platform offers you. And it certainly gives you that kind of feeling of being in control of things. 4 points.

But I am looking for simplicity and I think Posterous is clearly the winner here. The interface is easy to use and you are good to go faster than in any other service. Just send an e-mail to post@posterous.com (like I am doing now). Posterous user interface, in my opinion, is a blast. It is very well thought and very intuitive. You can see they clearly put an effort into making things just right. I give Posterous a sound 5 points.

Tumblr, on the other hand, starts by almost forcing you to setup a bunch of things. After you create your login, it doesn't even wait for you to breath. It already wants you to setup your blog - description, appearance, and a bunch of other things. Some features are also less visible than in Posterous like the Google Analytics integration. Tumblr gets 3 points for all that annoyance.

Built-in features
Wordpress is clearly a winner here. With 10,277 plugins at the moment of this writing, you can do pretty much everything you want with it. But you have to install the plugins and keep them running with your version of Wordpress. That means pain! I give Wordpress 4 points again.

Posterous and Tumblr are tied here and frankly they are very similar in their services. It is like the founders of both services are brothers or something. So both have the essential you would expect: Template customization, comment system, integration with FeedBurner and Google Analytics, integration with social services (e.g., Twitter, Facebook), and so on. But you are limited to what they offer. Want something more? You will have to wait for the service to release it. 3 points each.

Integration with social services
Wordpress looses badly here. If you want to integrate, you have to setup a plugin first. Actually, you have to find the right plugin for you first. That means you can easily loose a couple of hours just to find and setup a plugin that integrates your blog to Twitter. And what about Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, and so on? For each service you need to setup things. Again, very painful! Wordpress gets 2 points here.

Posterous is again the winner in my opinion. The "autopost" feature allows you to easily setup any service you want in very few steps. It is very intuitive too. And you can decide where to broadcast your content by e-mail too. Want to post to Posterous and announce only on Twitter, send an e-mail to twitter@posterous.com. And so on. Again, 5 points.

Tumblr has a "services" menu where it is easy to integrate to Twitter, Facebook or a RSS feed. What about other services such as Flickr or Picasa? And how about broadcasting to just one or two of these services? Can't. Or at least I couldn't find. 3 points.

Design
This is a tricky one. Design has certain characteristics that are taste-based, no matter how well you justify it technically. This way, Wordpress again is very good. With its templates, you can get very powerful and beautiful customizations. It is actually not up to Wordpress but to designers to provide a good design to your page. Or, it is up to your taste in choosing the right template and tweaking it to your needs. 4 points because depending on what you need, your hands will have to get dirty.

Both Posterous and Tumblr allow you to choose from themes and customize them using HTML and CSS if you fashion that. Both have very intuitive interfaces and it is easy to change the layout of things around. However, Tumblr has a lead here because it seems to have a lot more templates to choose from and more well-thought ones. This is not a big issue to me so I didn't really invest much time in figuring out which one is really better but Tumblr seems to be more appropriate if you care about how nice your blog looks. 3 points to Posterous and 4 to Tumblr.

The veredict
In my point of view (you are welcome to totally disagree), Posterous is the winner with 16 points, Wordpress comes second with 14 and Tumblr is last with 13 points. Again, these scores would certainly change if you are looking for something else. If you want a simple platform more focused on design, go for Tumblr. But if usability matters for you as it matters for me, go for Posterous. And of course, if you want all the power in the world and don't mind wasting some time setting things up, then Wordpress is your best bud.

In the review I liked the most, comparing just Tumblr and Posterous, the author summarizes their differences very nicely:

"Tumblr is a New York company and Posterous is a Silicon Valley company. Or, to put it another way: Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product."

It is up to you to decide.

2010/7/16