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I started a post last week about the future of web content, and the problems of content distribution in web 2.0, and why we should all adopt open standards to structure everything we write on the Internet. The piece got much too long, so I split it into three parts. Here’s part 1.

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Remember how the experts told us that computers were supposed to eliminate paper — and then for twenty years we wallowed in ream after ream of wasted paper? It was a running joke for a generation.

Now we see that computer technology really does eliminate the need for paper. My laser printer mostly sits idle these days. I primarily use it for two things: (1) printing out copies of MultiReal for editing and publishing purposes, and (2) printing out driving directions, because syncing them to my Treo is such a goddamn pain in the ass. The rest of the paper in my house is going away too. I can’t remember the last time I sent someone an actual letter. I gather most of my news through websites and RSS feeds instead of newspapers, and 90% of the mail is either advertising I don’t want or paper bills I should be receiving electronically.

So why did it take twenty years for paper to go away? Why was there such a huge boom in paper use after computers became ubiquitous?

A lot of it had to do with simple economics. Computer usage needed to hit a certain critical mass. Computer screens needed to be large enough, cheap enough, bright enough, and portable enough to serve as a comfortable substitute for the printed page. Adobe needed to see the business case for creating a technology like PDF.

But in addition to all that, people just didn’t see the potential of digital media. Some people still fail to see it. There’s a large segment of the population that sees the Internet as simply a convenient distribution system for paper. Attorneys are notorious for this, and doctors are the same way, but plenty of other businesses have this misconception too. Suffice to say any company whose website relies mostly on downloadable, printable PDFs to convey their product information just doesn’t get it.

The battle against paper is largely over. I’m bringing all this up because there’s another equally important battle looming, and that’s the battle against unstructured content. Turning all those stacks of paper into gigabytes of 1’s and 0’s was only the very, very first step. Just like there were many people twenty years ago who didn’t understand the benefits of email over paper mail, there are many people today who don’t understand the benefits of smart, structured content over unstructured content. Just like we understand now that the Internet isn’t just a distribution system for paper, we need to understand that it’s not just a distribution system for big globs of text.

The kicker is that the stakes are much higher this time around. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that plain, unstructured content is not only inconvenient in the long run, it’s dangerous. We need to develop open standards to structure all the electronic content we create, and we need to start insisting that everyone use them. If we don’t, we’re quickly going to find ourselves facing a monopoly that’s much more pernicious and dangerous than Microsoft’s ever was, and that’s a Google monopoly on information.

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It’s phenomenal how much free software is out there on the web for the taking. I, for one, definitely take it for granted. Back in the days of taping LP records onto 90-minute cassette tapes, I used to pine for a computerized music library. Now I’ve got a computerized music library that I built for free, and my CDs are largely gathering dust in the basement. Do I marvel at the whole thing on a daily basis? Do I spontaneously jump up and click my heels throughout the day in jubilation because I live in an age of cheap technological miracles? Er, no.

Here’s a random list of some free software tools that I do feel like jumping up and down about. In no particular order:

Windows Live Writer is a desktop client for interfacing with all your blogs in one convenient place. It’s got a very clean Windows Vista-ish look to it (see screenshot to the right), and works rather like WordPad or MS Word. Of course, Microsoft wants you to compose things and publish them on their Windows Live Spaces. No thanks. But they’ve opened up the API so you can easily create, edit, and publish entries on WordPress, TypePad, and LiveJournal, among others. There’s no big mystery here or “gee whiz” factor; Windows Live Writer is just a nice, simple blog post editor that includes a lot of the basic features the WordPress interface leaves out. For example: automatic image uploading, quick image editing, headline tags, and quick table creation. (This post, in fact, was composed entirely in Windows Live Writer.)

TweakVI is a nice GUI customization tool for Windows Vista. Similar to the popular (but unsupported) Microsoft TweakUI tool that’s available for Windows XP. In addition to all the standard GUI tweaks (Start menu customization, Explorer tweaks, etc.), TweakVI will do some behind-the-scenes performance tweaking as well. I’m too lazy to actually run benchmark software to see how effective it is, but something I did in TweakVI was enough to give my wireless networking a big performance boost. (Be warned that although TweakVI is free, they do pester you to upgrade to the paid subscription service quite a bit.)

Copernic Desktop Search is the coolest desktop search program I’ve found yet. It’s just as thorough as Google, twenty times faster than Windows’ built-in search (even Vista’s), and it has a slick user interface. Copernic’s search-as-you-type feature just rawks. (Be warned that I did have stability problems with an earlier version; but Copernic seems to have fixed those bugs since then.)

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I haven’t always been kind to open-source software (read exhibits A and B), but sometimes you’ve got to give credit where credit is due. WordPress — whose version 2.2.2 powers this blog, as of this writing — is a remarkably polished CMS with an extended community that rivals that of Mozilla Firefox. Me likey WordPress.

But WordPress has some irksome shortcomings that need to be overcome if it’s going to reach that Firefox level of ubiquity and respectability. I can’t pretend to be savvy enough to give any kind of real assessment of the shortcomings under the hood. But as a user and a web developer, here are some of the improvements I’d like to see to WordPress.

1. Simple plugin updates. Since it’s so easy to create a WordPress plugin, thousands of people have thrown together plugins of varying quality and durability. I’ve got about a dozen plugins running on my WordPress installation, but the only way to check for updates is to browse to the developers’ websites one at a time. Sometimes I’ll go for months without bothering to check. There needs to be an easier way to update plugins — or at the very least an easier way to notify WordPress users that plugin updates are available. (I see from this entry on the official WordPress blog that this is a feature slated for version 2.3. Hurrah!)
2. Better word processing window. For an application that revolves around words, WordPress has a pretty lousy word processor. That’s not entirely WordPress’s fault, since it uses the TinyMCE JavaScript Content Editor, itself an impressive open source project. Still, the TinyMCE editor has a number of irritating quirks. Formatting often breaks in mid-composition, and once this happens the only thing you can do is save and reload the page. The editor will often do some very bizarre things with spacing that aren’t apparent until you publish. But the worst sins are the sins of omission. There are no buttons for simple tags like headlines and horizontal lines, and you can’t add id’s or classes to your HTML elements without switching to “Code” view. I’m aware that there are plugins out there to extend and customize TinyMCE. But honestly, headline tags should be available out of the box.
3. Page sections. WordPress takes a very limited view of what type of content you can have on your page. All the default installation allows is one big text blob surrounded by preconfigured dynamic sidebars. But what if you want to include a callout box in your article? What if you want to subdivide your article into multiple sections with different formatting rules for each? Currently the only way to accomplish this is by digging through the HTML and CSS code and rolling your own sections by hand.

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When I wrote my not-so-complimentary piece on OpenOffice the other week, I expected to receive at least a few slams from fans and believers in the open source movement. And I did receive an interesting comment from a fellow who signed his name MnMKY, which I excerpt here:

The accomplishments of a worldwide effort, unifying multiple cultures and countries, is what OpenOffice.org represents. It is not a company sole bent on making money but on helping…

Microsoft has showed little innovation since the beginning days, no wait they took the concept of a graphic interface from someone else to. Microsoft was a great marketing agency; their best client, themselves. Bill Gates is the ultimate master…

OpenOffice.org deserves your talents unless you would rather sit on the bench and criticize and follow the the rest of the groupies. Innovation does not come from working in a bubble (MS OS, MS Products, MS Backend, MS tools) and neither does efficiency. Innovation comes from competition and not buying it.

This has brought up something that really sticks in my craw that I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time. So now I’m going to ramble about it for a while for your edification and entertainment. You have been warned.

For some reason, all semblance of rationality goes out the door when techies talk about Microsoft. There are people out there who simply hate Microsoft. I’m not talking about people who just dislike Microsoft products; I’m talking about people who believe Bill Gates and Company are actually evil. Microsoft is throttling the open source movement! Microsoft is practicing mental slavery! Microsoft is an evil capitalist enterprise that seeks to dominate, control, and destroy!

(A lot of people have had the same kind of irrational delusions about our last two presidents. These are the ones who don’t think it’s enough that George W. Bush is incompetent and has made really dangerous decisions for really bad reasons during his two terms in the White House. No, George Bush actually plotted to overthrow democracy by rigging the tragedies of 9/11! He’s sending your children to Iraq to die because he hates Muslims and wants to claim all their oil for his Texas cronies! On the right, these are the folks who believe that Bill and Hillary Clinton routinely murder their enemies, and then lob a few cruise missiles at random aspirin factories to distract us.)

I think part of the problem with the hardcore Microsoft haters is that many of them simply don’t understand business, or capitalism for that matter. It’s not for nothing that I compared the open source movement to socialism in a previous blog piece.

Here’s the thing: Microsoft is a business whose primary goal is not to help people, but to make a buck. And there’s nothing wrong with that. America is all about making a buck. The main reason this country was founded in the first place was not because the Americans had philosophical differences with the British monarchy, or because they wanted the right to freedom of speech and assembly. It’s because said monarchy was taxing the colonists to death and not giving them anything back for it.

(A side note: Paul Johnson in his often brilliant History of the American People traces the character of this country back to two primary groups. There were the Jamestown folks who settled in Virginia primarily to make money; and there were the Plymouth Rock folks who settled in Massachusetts largely for evangelical reasons. It’s a brilliant thesis. Money and religion: if you think about it, those words really do sum up the two sides of the American culture pretty well.) (Update 8/15/07: I should add the caveat that Mr. Johnson gets a wee bit cranky and reactionary when talking about the late 20th century. He believes JFK was just a playboy blowhard and Nixon should not have been impeached for Watergate.)

Not only is there nothing wrong with Microsoft being out to make a buck, but that’s what a corporation is for. And yet one of the nifty benefits of a business making a ton of money is that it does tend to help people. There are thousands of ordinary people who made millions of dollars by investing in Microsoft stock back in the ’80s when Bill Gates was just the richest dork in the world. Tens of thousands of people have built long, prosperous, stable careers from Microsoft paychecks. And Gates’ private foundation is already one of the most generous and successful non-profits in history; some people estimate that Bill and Melinda Gates’ efforts to make malaria drugs more affordable in third world countries have saved millions of lives. Millions of lives. That’s not trivial.

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You want to know why people use Microsoft products? I present to you Exhibit A.

The new Sony laptop I’ve been bragging about came without a licensed version of Microsoft Word. Sony included a trial version of Office 2007 Student and Home and a copy of Microsoft Works. So I figured I’d give OpenOffice another try after having a few bad experiences with version 1.

And as far as functionality goes, I like OpenOffice 2.1. It’s got a nice, clean, consistent interface across programs. Writer includes just about all of the features I’m likely to want or need from MS Word, and a few conveniences that Word lacks. (How nice it is to choose which custom dictionary you want to add unrecognized words to straight from the right-click menu.) It reads and writes Word documents pretty seamlessly, and although it crashes a little too often for my tastes, it always seemed to recover gracefully so I could pick up right where I left off.

Until Monday.

On Monday, OpenOffice Writer corrupted Chapter 38 of MultiReal. Corrupted it good. The file won’t open any longer. No file recovery option. When I look at it in Windows Explorer, it’s mysteriously shrunken in size by about 25K. When I open the file in Notepad or use one of the gazillion corrupted file recovery utilities out there on the Internet, I can still see amidst all the gobbledygook about 7 pages out of the original 12. For whatever reason, it seems like Writer truncated the file at that point.

Between the recoverable text from Notepad and old versions of the document, I was able to cobble together most of Chapter 38 again. And considering that I had just (re)written that missing page a few hours earlier, I think I’ve been able to reconstruct most of what I’ve lost. I suppose I could have downloaded a hex editor that would let me scour the raw data on the hard drive for those missing paragraphs, which are probably still floating on the hard disk somewhere.

But my confidence in OpenOffice has now been shaken, possibly for good. How do I know that Writer didn’t corrupt other documents that I wasn’t just working on? How do I know it’s not going to mess up the next chapter I open? I can’t afford that kind of uncertainty. I can’t afford to lose another three hours trying to recover the next mess.

Is Microsoft Word perfect? Hell, no. It’s bloated, it’s a resource hog, it’s got usability problems, and I’m not sure how I feel about the whole Ribbon concept MS has adopted in its 2007 version. Plus it’s a big fat target for every malicious hacker on the planet. But I can’t remember the last time Microsoft Word corrupted a file to the point that it was unrecoverable. Perhaps sometime two versions back when I was using Office XP. Yet it’s happened after only a month using OpenOffice.

I’m not ruling out the possibility that my Diskeeper or McAfee Security Suite caused this. Perhaps the laptop got nudged while it was writing to the hard drive, or maybe something funky happened when I closed the lid and put it into Sleep mode. But what are the chances that these things would only corrupt the last file I was working on, out of all the hundreds of thousands of files on the system? I can’t rule out that I might just have been unlucky, and I know this kind of thing happens in Microsoft Office too every once in a blue moon.

This whole episode has brought home to me the fact that the most important factor for any piece of software is the Hippocratic factor: first, do no harm. I don’t care how smooth and pimped-out a ride your car is; if it routinely leaves you stranded in the middle of nowhere, it’s useless. (Incidentally, I also got stranded in the middle of nowhere by my Honda this past weekend, but that’s a different story.) (Okay, so Chevy Chase, MD isn’t exactly the middle of nowhere. But I lost another few hours of writing time regardless.)

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