Now:

I wonder why?

Get on the DLR at Bank towards Greenwich

Bank is on the Central or Northern line (see tube map) and is pretty easy to get to from anywhere in London. Aim to get there about 10am – any earlier during the week and you’ll hit rush hour. Get on the DLR (Docklands Light Railway) towards Lewisham. Try to sit at the front.

The DLR journey to Greenwich gets you great views of the commercial part of London, past Canary Wharf. There’s not much to get off for around there, but it’s worth seeing from the train. Get off the DLR at Cutty Sark for Maritime Greenwich – you’ll end up in central Greenwich.

Grab brunch in Greenwich

In Greenwich, have a good look around the market, and check out the views across the river. The market has a number of good stalls selling tasty food, but there’s another smaller and less glamorous market near the Ibis Hotel which sells some of the most tasty Thai noodles on London.

After brunch, wander down the road to Greenwich park. The view from the Greenwich observatory in the park is one of the finest views in London – you can see for miles across to central London, St Pauls, the Gherkin and Docklands. If you have some time and have any interest in boats, the Maritime Museum within the park grounds is worth a look.

Once you’re done in Greenwich (aim for about 4pm) get the 188 bus to North Greenwich and the The O2. The O2 is the final stop on the bus, so you don’t need to get out until it terminates – you can find the route map here.

From the O2 to Waterloo on Clipper

The O2, formerlly the Millennium Dome, is the most popular concert venue in the world. It’s got plenty of shops and restaurants inside, but there’s not too much to see there during the day. Have a quick look around, but after you’re done head towards the pier, where you can board a Thames Clipper.

The Thames Clippers are a river commuter service, and zoom down the Thames from the O2 to Chelsea Pier and back. They give you a brilliant view of all of London – on your way to Waterloo pier you’ll see the O2, Greenwich, Docklands, Gherkin, London Eye and houses of Parliament. It’s a great way to get back into central London.

From Waterloo to China Town

From Waterloo, wander up to China town. It’s about a 15/20 minute walk, and will take you up through Westminster, Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square.

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Dinner in China Town

China Town has some of the best Chinese and Japanese restaurants in London. My personal recommendations are:

• Red n Hot – really tasty and authentic Chinese hot pot (map)
• Tokyo Diner – delicious Japanese bento boxes (map)
• Misato – cheap and tasty Japanese food, including wonderful Katsu Curry (map)
• New China – more familiar British-style Chinese food, but still authentic and delicious (map)

After you’ve eaten, walk the 10 minutes to Covent Garden and check out some nightlife. There you’ll find bars, clubs and entertainers in the central arcade:

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However this only tells iTunes where your music is stored – it does not tell iTunes where to put your iTunes Music Library.xml file. This file and its associated itl files store extra information about your music library – such as your ratings, play counts etc. This information is almost as vital as the music itself, but unfortunately cannot be moved from your Windows My Music folder.

To work around this you need to move the location of your My Music folder. To do this (assuming you’re using XP), close iTunes and then go to Start -> Run and type “regedit”, then press Enter.

Navigate to the following section in the Registry Editor:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER
-> Software
   -> Microsoft
      -> Windows
         -> Current Version
            -> Explorer
               -> User Shell Folders

You’ll see in the right Window a list of folders such as “AppData”, “Cache”, “Favourites” etc. The Data column will tell you where these folders are located on your hard drive. Have a look and see if you have an entry for “My Music”. If you do, simply right click on it, select Modify and enter a new path to where you want the “My Music” folder to be.

If you do not have a My Music folder then go to Edit > New > Expandable String Value. Enter “My Music” as the name of this value, and then right click on it, select Modify and enter the path as above.

You should end up with something like this:

iTunes will now look for its XML file in [the path you've entered]\iTunes\, so its import that you copy your existing iTunes folder to the new location before starting iTunes.

I’m a Twitter user and a Twitter fan, and lets think for a minute about what it has added to our online lives:

• Its an alerts service – when news breaks, we often see it on Twitter before we see it in RSS feeds, on news sites, on other social sites or on search engines.
• Its a guage of community feeling – we don’t just get facts from Twitter, we get emotions from a large number of people, showing the general spirit of feeling around an event.
• Its about personal experiences – we get to hear the personal stories that we wouldn’t hear from the news sites.

Those three points are impressive, and something Twitter and its community can be extremely proud of. But do these make Twitter a competitor to existing services like search and traditional media, or are these benefits merely complimentary? I believe its somewhere in the middle.

The Mainstream Media

Lets look first at the mainstream media. What do they have to fear from Twitter?

• Will people stop reading news? Absolutely not. I’m not sure I know anyone who, on seeing the Michael Jackson story break on Twitter, didn’t go to their favourite news site(s) and try to verify the information. When they found it was yet unconfirmed, I think most of us still held on to a glimmer of hope that maybe it wasn’t true – it was only when the mainstream news confirmed Michael Jackson’s death that we all finally believed it. And many of us spent plenty of time today browsing obituaries or photo archives on the mainstream media sites. Twitter is an unverified source of information, and although the mainstream media makes plenty of mistakes, its still considered a more reputable source of information than @someguysomewhereelse.
• Will stop people reading news commentary? Possibly, a little. I think that as we get more information on the “general zeitgeist” from social services like Twitter we’ll have less and less need to rely on some columnists opinion to reaffirm and develop our own ideas.
• Will and should mainstream media change? Hopefully mainstream media will become less about entertainment and commentary, and much more about verifiable facts and information, which is what it was for originally. Now that we have the tools, lets leave the gossiping to the people, and turn our news organisations into something we can truly trust. In some ways, to achieve this goal I’d rather our news organisations were less worried about being first to break the news, but more about being the most accurate and trustworthy.

The Search Engines

So what about search? What do search engines have to fear from the mighty Twitter?

• Will people stop searching on search engines? Absolutely not. Unless Twitter uses its database of links to build a Google-like search engine powered by a “social pagerank”, Twitter in its current form will not have any impact on the core search terms in the search engines.
• Will people stop searching for breaking news on search engines? The key question here is, have they ever? I don’t think that people automatically go to Google to find out the latest news. So I don’t think Google will lose share there.
• Will the search engines have to change? Yes, but I think that Twitter is an opportunity for search engines, rather than a threat. Twitter provides a highly indexable, highly relevant and fairly easy-to-interpret flow of information. I can imagine a day in the near future where searches on Google for Twitter’s trending topics appear with a link at the top saying “45,534 social mentions in the last hour – view all.”. Clicking on the link will take users through to a nice search results page amalgamating social results from a whole load of social sources such as Twitter, with Adwords ads down the side. The result? Google just monetised Twitter AND people start searching Google for breaking news: win win for Google.

In Conclusion

So yes, I think that Twitter will change the way search engines and (especially) mainstream media do business, but I don’t think it will do the damage that some are expecting. We still need both of them, and they both have a role in the world, they just need to adapt to our new expectations. Search engines will do this easily and in the very near future. Mainstream media will kick and scream like the record industry has been for the past few years until they realise that its not evil people doing this to them but their own customers. Then they’ll either adapt and survive or they’ll stagnate and die, but somewhere from that chaos an “iTunes” of the media world will rise that will revolutionise their model and make it something more suitable for the 21st Century Web 2.0 world.

Today Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer would be missing from Windows 7.0 when it launches in Europe, in response to competition rules. A BBC article says that “European buyers of Windows 7 will have to download and install a web browser for themselves.”, although its not quite clear how they’ll do that without a web browser.

And that’s probably the biggest issue. These days the web browser is a vital part of any operating system. Linux has Konqueror, IceWeasel or Firefox; Mac OS has Safari; and Windows has Internet Explorer. Without it we wouldn’t have cool things like Apple’s Dashboard Web Snippets. We also wouldn’t have an easy way for the average Joe to just turn on their computer and say “I’m going to browse the web.”.

I’m not a big fan of the Microsoft monopoly, but what we’ve needed for so long are good competitors. And I think we’re getting there now, without the help of EU intervention:

• Apple are finally giving Microsoft a run for their money on the OS stakes: OS X Leopard is awesome. Linux is still quite far off, but getting there.
• Firefox and Chrome continue to steal market share from IE, and although I don’t believe they’ll ever capture the desktops of aforementioned Average Joe, I’m not sure that’s where they belong
• Google have been killing Microsoft online for years now.
• Apple and Google are making speedy in-roads into competing on smartphone market share, and have products way better than any of Microsoft’s. Palm is set to attack with the Pre. BlackBerry have already cornered the business market.
• Apple have destroyed Microsoft’s attempts at portable and desktop entertainment.
• Linux, Apache and PHP have been consistently battering Microsoft’s web server business, even since the launch of ASPX.
• Even Microsoft’s most sacred product – Microsoft Office – is under attack from Sun’s OpenOffice and Google’s online Docs

Microsoft is still a massively profitable and successful business, but it is under fire from all angles. It has been in the lead for so long partially because of dubious business practices, but mainly because it produced some of the most functional products the computer world had ever seen. And yes, they’ve often been buggy, and they’ve been bloated and they’ve been slow, but they have changed the world. And because they’re under natural stress now, these products are getting better and better much quicker than ever before.

These days at home I use a Linux laptop, a Google phone and OpenOffice. A few years ago they all would have been Microsoft products instead. Lets not make the world of computing harder for the average user just to spite the dark side – let’s fund organisations that can make a positive contribution, can compete with M$ and make things better for everyone.

I think the EU should leave Internet Explorer well alone.