Matt Loney's Blog

The days of the monolithic upgrade are over. Five years, $6bn later and what do the ingrates do? Ask for a downgrade to Windows XP. Even Newham Council, which over the past couple of years veered from Linux pilot poster child to Vista case study as one of Microsoft's five key public sector accounts in the UK, has now delayed the upgrade of 1,500 desktops by 12 months. The council is now in the bizarre situation of facing a deployment of 1,500 CP desktops next spring, which will be over a year since Vista's launch. These desktops will then be upgraded to Vista sometime at the end of 2008.

This in itself is not unheard of - several years ago there were companies upgrading to Windows 2000, long after XP became available, usually because they were sticking to very old hardware.

The difference is that back then, companies were upgrading from the seriously unusable Windows 95 or 98, whereas now they Windows XP actually does everything you need an OS to do.

The difference is also that now we are seeing PC vendors offering downgrades - not just the option of buying the previous version of the OS but the option of taking a computer back to have the latest version removed in favour of the old version.

What we are seeing here is a real crisis of confidence.

I have a new (personal) Vista laptop arriving in the next few days and I shall be very interested to see how it performs. I am also waiting to get my hands on Ubuntu 7.10 to see how it deals with Centrino Pro and the other new bits of technology on my particular laptop that may make for some interesting driver hunts. That will go on as a boot option. And XP? Well, if Vista doesn't deliver I shall have no qualms about a downgrade.

But if I can find all the drivers I need for Ubuntu then I may well make a permanent switch asall other issues aside I do find the regular, bite-sized upgrades of Linux so much more palatable. And I suspect that increasingly businesses will warm to this taste too.

By now you should have noticed at least a couple of the changes we made recently to our community pages to help promote your posts better and make them easier to find.

In case you missed it, here's a run-down of what we've done and and some more details about why:

Community home page

This has been overhauled so that it now shows you at a glance the latest highlighted community content (by which I mean blog posts, comments to blog posts, Talkbacks to articles, Forum posts and product reviews by you), with options to view all the latest such posts, or the most discussed.

This is a big change from the previous community page which just showed the blog entries of our illustrious community editor Karen Friar. The original format was chosen because, quite frankly, we didn't know what to expect when we launched community: would we get loads of spam or flame posts in our blogs, Talkback and Forums?

As it turns out we've been pleasantly surprised by the quality of posts, and felt they deserved more of an airing. So now, if you make an interesting, pertinent, or just funny post, don't be surprised to see it being promoted as a lead item. We'll even go and find or create a graphic illustrate it.

Blogs

What was our opinions, page now provides a listing of all latest blog postings - both ours and yours. We're still running traditional news stories through our news channel of course, but using blogs for other content and for those stories that don't quite make the main news stream, whether because we don't have time to source the story ourselves, or perhaps because they're a bit offbeat.

Again, the main reason for this change is to make your blog postings more prominent. In future we'll be looking for more and better ways to promote your posts, and welcome all suggestions.

Our group blogs are still there too, of course.

Community search

The most technically challenging innovation has been community search. While you could previously search community, at the back end this was done through our internal CMs search engine; now that we are using the Ultraknowledge search that powers the rest of the site.

Now when you search you'll see community content appear in the default search results. Clicking on the community tab in search will allow you to find every member who has written on a particular subject, or find people by username (or part of their username). Try it out for yourself.

The ultimate aim of all this is to better promote your thoughts and comments, and help you better find those of your peers. We're not finished yet, and we know there's a long way to go. Of course this will only work if we make it useable, and the only people who tell us if we have it right (or wrong) are you. So please keep that feedback - good and bad - coming.

ZDNet has been shortlisted twice in the AOP 2007 awards. The organisers, the Association of Online Publishers, say they received 320 entries overall this year - some 50 percent up on last year - so it's a great achievement for the site to be recognised twice in this way.

We're the only tech website to be shortlisted for business website of the year, and one of two tech websites (alongside our sister title silicon.com, which could make for an interesting evening) nominated for editorial team of the year.

When the judges were looking at the site they would have seen our community pages and all the submissions made by you, so a big thanks to every ZDNet member who has posted a blog entry or a comment to a blog entry, a Talkback to a story, a forum post or a review and helped make this the lively site that it is.

Even if we don't win on the night, it's nice to be recognised.

We have an intriguing post from ZDNet.co.uk member kisunssi who claims to have no short-term memory. He goes on to note that he sees this as a USP, and is wondering whether someone with no short-term memory would be a good UI tester.

Well, would they?

Do you think you know software development? Would you like to share your experiences and knowledge with your peers, build your profile and get an afternoon out of the office too?

On the afternoon of Monday 18th June we shall be filming a discussion in our state-of-the-art studio on London's South Bank, on the subject of software development: how to create good quality code on time and on budget. We're giving one ZDNet member the chance to participate in this discussion, which will be shown to ZDNet.co.uk's 2.1million users.

We're looking for someone who has managed successful software development projects in a demanding business environment, and who has strong opinions on how good software should be created. If you think you might fit the bill then send me a message or email me at matt.loney@zdnet.co.uk saying why.