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(Credit:
LUS)

They argue that it’s unfair for public utilities and cities to use taxpayer money or government bonds to build competing networks. It will be interesting to see how this debate shakes out under the new Obama administration. President Obama has made it clear that he hopes to fund projects to bring broadband service to every American. And there is a chance that some of these public utilities and other non-traditional entities may end up with some of the billions of dollars in promised federal funding to build these networks.

The utility system, which built a fiber network to service its utilities business, had been offering wholesale bandwidth services to Internet service providers, and providing retail broadband services to city agencies since 2002. In 2004, the agency began looking at ways to offer broadband services to residents and businesses.

After nearly five years of planning and fighting with local cable and phone companies, the Lafayette Utilities System opened its fiber-optic broadband network for business.

But after the public voted in favor of the project and the utility fought a series lengthy legal battles that went all the way to the Louisiana Supreme Court, LUS was finally able to sell bonds to fund its project.

The maximum download speed offered by AT&T is 6Mbps for $43 a month. And it’s cheapest is a 768Kbps service for $20 a month. Cox only offers Internet download speeds up to 15Mbps. Depending on what specific services are selected, bundled pricing from AT&T and Cox is comparable. The big exception is that AT&T and Cox offer these prices as part of a promotion, whereas LUS prices are the actual standard prices and will not expire.

The new network was supposed to launch in January, but it was delayed by negotiations over television programming, The Daily Advertiser said.

The utility began offering service this week, according to the Lafayette, La. local newspaper, The Daily Advertiser. A small number of customers already have phone, TV, and Internet service. And beginning Friday, LUS will begin marketing the service to customers in the first phase of the roll out. LUS plans to roll out service gradually in three phases and expects to offer a triple play service to all residents throughout the city by 2011.

It’s easy to see why Cox Communications, the local cable operator, and AT&T, which bought local phone company BellSouth, are threatened by LUS. Pricing for the new triple play services are very competitive. Consumers can get a triple play bundle from about $85 to $200 a month. And the broadband services offer download and upload speeds between 10Mbps to 50Mbps. The standalone broadband service costs about $29 for symmetrical 10Mbps downloads and uploads; $45 for 30Mbps, and $58 for 50Mbps service. The service doesn’t require a contract and there’s no installation fee.

BellSouth and Cox Communications, the local telephone and cable companies serving Lafayette, strongly opposed the utility system’s plan. And they filed several lawsuits to stop the utility from raising the funds to build the network.

Lafayette is just one of many cities that has tried to build it own broadband network. Other cities and regions such as Provo, Utahhave attempted to do the same thing. In nearly every instance, cable and phone companies have tried to prevent these network build outs.

To be fair, there are valid reasons why carriers are so concerned about the types of applications that run on their networks. Modern wireless networks are more fragile than one might think, as demonstrated by the problems AT&T encountered when iPhone-bearing geeks descended on Austin, Texas, for SXSW 2009 and brought local AT&T data service to a crawl.

The idea that the carrier owns the billing relationship with the end user for almost all of the mobile experience is virtually sacrosanct for everyone but Apple and AT&T. But there is a concern among some in the mobile industry that carriers will extend that relationship to demand a role in creating software and services for end users marked with their own brand.

(Credit:
Maggie Reardon/CNET)

One of the big topics this week at CTIA 2009 has been mobile applications, as Research in Motion unveiled BlackBerry App World and Microsoft talked about its forthcoming Windows Marketplace for Mobile. The dam has truly broken with mobile applications; for years, most consumers seemed indifferent to third-party applications, but now they are viewed as an essential part of any smartphone, just like they are on a PC or
Mac.

The idea of mobile application stores is not new, but the faster networks and more sophisticated devices available these days have created a way for users to download applications directly to their device, bypassing the PC altogether. There are various ways that mobile companies are approaching this new reality.

Apple’s approach has been covered exhaustively. But Apple has a unique advantage compared with its competitors: its applications only have to support two devices that are essentially identical (the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G), and for the most part Apple works only with a single wireless carrier per country. Therefore, it can have a central application store and guarantee that those applications will work on any iPhone, and at the same time not have to worry as much about ensuring its carrier partners have unique ways to sell the same phone.

Some might argue that’s because they don’t have devices with the consumer cachet of the
iPhone. But it’s clear after talking to several companies on the sidelines at
CTIA that they think there’s a way to make sure they offer quality software to their customers without cutting the carrier almost completely out of the equation, as Apple has done with AT&T.

Organizations like Symbian, which controls the world’s leading smartphone operating system, believe the balanced answer is to create an “app mall” rather than an “app store,” according to David Wood, executive vice president for research at the Symbian Foundation.

For example, Symbian will do the dirty work of processing, certifying, and hosting the applications, but will give its various partners their own storefronts within that mall to sell Symbian-certified applications as they see fit. Microsoft’s approach is somewhat similar. This way, carriers can feel they still have the opportunity to sell their software and services to end users without operating system vendors having to cede control of the user experience on a modern smartphone.

“People all of the sudden were walking in and asking for core level of functionality, and that started to change the conversation from about sourcing devices to functionality,” Woodman said. “That functionality is going to be very difficult for operators to provide with significant help from others. Expertise and experience (in one area) doesn’t yield expertise and experience in another area.”

There’s little doubt that Apple’s iPhone has shaken up this market the way Apple’s Macintosh shook up the personal computing market 25 years ago. But unlike the past, several companies–not just two–are going to dictate the future of the truly personal computer.

As has been often stated, the beauty of the modern mobile computing market is that established business models and philosophies from the PC market or older cellular phone market aren’t necessarily relevant: several executives will (privately) admit they are essentially making this up as they go along.

And since different people want different things from their mobile phones, there’s room for more than one approach to selling smartphones and mobile applications. There is not, however, room for seven approaches, which means operating system vendors, handset makers, and carriers will have to be extremely vigilant about evolving customer perferences in a world where consumer tastes can change virtually overnight.

Still, the burning question is whether the carriers and handset makers will permit software companies to do what they do best, or whether they will continue to try to put their stamp on mobile application development in order to avoid their possible fates as “dumb pipes” or widget makers.

“There’s a big measure of trust there,” said Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation, which was created by a foundation of carriers and handset makers to develop software that provides a common underpinning for developers to write mobile applications. “We have to trust that the companies that build the devices and the operators that package this know what they are doing.”

RIM's BlackBerry App World is a model of how mobile OS vendors are trying to balance consumer needs and carrier needs.

Billing strategies
But while RIM, for example, is launching BlackBerry App World with the money flowing outside of the carrier’s control through an exclusive relationship with PayPal, co-CEO Jim Balsillie made it clear that he would find a way to make sure the carriers have a chance to participate in the billing for those applications. “Different carriers have different billing strategies, so it’s quite frankly a bunch of work,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

LAS VEGAS–It seems there are going to be as many ways to run a mobile application store as there are stores themselves.

Still, Aaron Woodman, a director in Microsoft’s mobile communications business, thinks carriers fundamentally understand the shift that has taken place in the mobile industry over the last several years.

Microsoft is likewise steering a middle ground, with plans to let carriers offer their own “store within a store” inside Windows Marketplace for Mobile and giving users the option to choose how they want to be billed: directly via credit card or through their monthly wireless bill.

Most of the credit for that trend has been prompted by the success of Apple’s App Store, as both Apple’s friends and enemies in the mobile world will readily admit. But few competitors are attempting to pull off Apple’s my-way-or-the-highway approach, preferring to integrate the wireless carriers in a nod to the entrenched power those companies have in the mobile world.

Verizon did nothing to assuage those fears by announcing plans to join the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) this week, essentially signaling that it plans to make sure Verizon-stamped software appears on future handsets regardless of what operating system is running underneath the layer presented to a phone’s user.

Form vs. functionality
For years, the business of selling mobile phones was about making sure you had phones that looked good and ensuring distribution ran like a clock, Woodman said. But over the last decade, business phone users started to demand features in addition to style, and that trend has exploded with the consumer demand sparked by the iPhone.

Dell’s point in the filing that the term is generic seems valid. Not only Dell, but Asus, Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Lenovo, LG Electronics, Samsung, MSI, and many others have been using Netbook as a blanket term to describe small form-factor laptops with low-power processors, usually Intel’s Atom chip, for over a year.

But Dell is taking the legal step of accusing the company of failing to defend it properly, not actually using the term for any current products–or for the last six years–and for lying about it. (See Dell’s petition to the USPTO here.)

Dell's Inspiron Mini 9 Netbook.

On Wednesday the PC maker filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel a registered trademark for the term “Netbook” by a company called Psion.

Dell has three products that fall under the Netbook category, the Inspiron Mini 9, Mini 10, and Mini 12, but it’s not entirely clear why the company has volunteered for this fight. Is it feeling charitable? Or suddenly passionate about patent and trademark reform? Note that this is the same company that tried to trademark “cloud computing.”

Here’s how you know how enamored Dell is with the Netbook concept: it’s volunteered to fight over the trademark on behalf of all other Netbook makers.

Psion is a Canadian mobile computer maker that owns the trademark and indeed has sold a product called Netbook in the past. Psion began sending some tech bloggers and Netbook makers cease-and-desist notices late last year asking them to stop using the term “Netbook.” It’s what you’re supposed to do when you own a trademark: defend it.

(Credit:
Dell)

“Users do not get a notification when they are updated…When there are security fixes, it’s crucial that we update our users as quickly as possible in order to keep them safe. Thus, it’s important for us to not require user intervention,” the company said in a statement.”There are some security fixes that we’ll keep quiet because we don’t want to disclose security vulnerabilities to attackers.”

Another reported issue in Chrome 0.2.149.27 is a buffer overrun that could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on a user’s computer and thereby take control of it, according to Bach Khoa Internet Security.

To check if an update is available, click the wrench icon in Chrome's upper-right corner, then select 'about Google Chrome.'

“All users have not received the update yet, so we cannot discuss the details of the security issues that were addressed, but we plan to disclose more information once the update has reached all of our user,” the company said in a statement Monday.

The company was willing to discuss some other details about the update, though. For one thing, the company updated a JavaScript problem that could cause problems using Facebook. For another, it fixed a problem that would crash the entire browser if a person typed “about:%” into the address bar. Google called the problem “non-exploitable, but very annoying,” reflecting the removal of the “security” label from the bug report.

The automatic update policy applies to security and bug fixes. “For major version updates, when feature changes are involved, we’ll explore options for providing users with more details about the changes,” Google said.

Google believes it’s best if Chrome applies security updates not only without a description of what’s changing, but also without an opportunity for users to decide whether to accept the patch.

(Credit:
Josh Lowensohn/CNET News)

To check if an update is available, Chrome users can click the wrench icon in Chrome’s upper-right corner, then select “about Google Chrome.” That will show both the version number and a message indicating whether an update is available.

Google has quietly begun releasing a hastily prepared update to its Chrome browser to fix some security problems.

Reported vulnerabilities
One security problem found in Chrome version 0.2.149.27 is a carpet-bombing vulnerability that could help an attacker install malicious software on a user’s computer without giving the user a chance to accept or reject the download. Google assigned the problem a top priority.

“We use this updater and the server architecture it interfaces with to update across many of our products, some of which are not open source,” Google said. “It’s not that we are trying to hide anything; rather, it’s just that this update infrastructure is not intended to be used by others who may distribute their own versions of the browser based on Chromium code.”

“Most of the changes are visible, aside from security changes, which we must keep private in order to keep users safe,” Google said of the changelog.

Google knows best
Without a manual check, Chrome will update itself automatically, Google said. “Google Chrome will automatically checks for updates approximately every five hours. If an update is available, it will be downloaded and applied at the next browser restart,” Google said.

Updated 1:44 p.m. PDT with details that Chrome automatically updates itself with no notification or choice for the user.

“149.29 is a security update and we released it as fast as we could,” said Mark Larson, Google Chrome program manager, in a mailing list posting on Sunday. “We would’ve liked more time to prepare things, but some of the vulnerabilities were made public without giving us a chance to respond, update, and protect our users first. Thanks for being patient as we work out the kinks in all of our processes.”

The new version, 0.2.149.29, replaces the 0.2.149.27 that was released when Google launched the Chrome beta version last week. Google started releasing the update Friday, initially to a small number of users, but didn’t make much of an announcement about the change.

Microsoft and Mozilla encourage users to download and apply updates automatically to Internet Explorer and
Firefox, respectively, but users can chose not to do so.

Open-source redactions
Don’t look for clues about the vulnerabilities in the Chrome source code. The open-source Chromium project has publicly available mailing lists and source code, but many recent changes to the code base are redacted to show only a blank page rather than the detailed changelog notes of other changes.

However, Google isn’t revealing details yet about what security issues it’s fixed.

Programming fans also won’t be able to glean any insights from the Chrome update plug-in, which is proprietary.

Automatic updates can cause indigestion in corporations where internal administrators often want control over what software is running or not for compatibility, security, and other reasons. But browser browser vulnerabilities loom larger as more applications move to the Web and more people rely on those services, and automatic updates can help nip attacks in the bud.

In the looks department, I’ll give the nod to the Corsair’s rugged, black-and-blue shell. Alas, I don’t see any way to keep the cap from disappearing, which is a constant problem for me and my flash drives.

On Monday, I posted an 8GB flash drive for $16.99. Sorry to do this, but Newegg has an even better deal (with one catch): it’s an 8GB Corsair Flash Voyager drive for $9.99 shipped.

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Newegg)

If you don’t mind that, this is far and away the best deal I’ve seen on an 8GB drive. And it has a 10-year warranty, twice that of Monday’s Kingston drive.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

This is the lowest price yet on an 8GB flash drive.

Still, for 10 bucks, big whoop. It wasn’t too long ago that a 4GB drive at this price point was reason for excitement. Who’s taking bets on when we’ll see a 16GB drive for under a sawbuck?

What’s the catch? You have to pay $24.99 up front, then wait on a $15 mail-in rebate (PDF).

NetworkedBlogs, a Facebook app that allows users to add blogs they love to the popular social network, currently has almost 450,000 active users and over 700,000 installs, ReadWriteWeb is reporting. According to the report, its nearest competitor has yet to reach 100,000 installs. Most importantly, the app’s users are adding 500 new blogs per day, bringing the total number of blogs on the site to 125,000. The app is free for all Facebook users.

iWidgets, a company that allows users to take their content from Hi5, Facebook, and other social networks and syndicate those across the Web, raised $4.1 million in a Series A round of funding led by Opus Capital, the company announced Wednesday. In connection with the funding, the company has also added Geoff Katz, a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Board of Governors, as vice president of business development and marketing.

Alloy Media, a company that provides youth-focused online content, announced Wednesday that it has acquired Takkle.com, an online resource and college recruitment site for high school sports. According to the company, Takkle will join the Teen.com Network, which includes a number of youth-focused sites. Takkle provides tools for high school athletes to create player and team profiles, as well as share videos and photos from games. It claims to draw a monthly audience of “1 million athletes, both male and female.” The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Slide and Katalyst Media, companies that provide social apps and original content, respectively, announced a partnership that brings KatalystHQ exclusively to Slide’s Facebook app, FunSpace. KatalystHQ is an original series that looks at the “inner workings of a Hollywood-based entertainment company.” Katalyst Media and KatalystHQ were co-founded by famed model and actor, Ashton Kutcher. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Kiva, a nonprofit microlending company, has unveiled an open-source API platform for those who want to create applications for the finance community. The company is encouraging developers to create applications for the
iPhone or a map that displays real-time global fund transfers. But its executives did say they want developers to use the API to develop apps that go beyond its few suggestions.

If the Obama team is willing to pay for some of its Web 2.0 technology, why can’t they also follow the State Department’s lead and cough up a few bucks for a streaming video service that doesn’t cross-subsidize its offerings by tracking the Web habits of users.

The White House Web site has been live for just three days, and in just the past day, Obama’s administration has given us some reason to believe that it takes Web privacy seriously. Over the next few weeks, it’ll have a chance to prove it.

Finally, if the White House lawyers are going to waive long-standing federal privacy rules for YouTube, merely mentioning the existence of that waiver is not enough. Given Obama’s much publicized commitment to transparency, I think it’s quite reasonable to ask that the team post the text of each and every waiver to the federal cookie policy to its Web site. Members of the public have a right to know the reasons that were used to justify exempting YouTube’s cookies from these otherwise strict rules. If the YouTube waiver cannot withstand the analysis of legal experts and the ridicule of tech bloggers, it probably shouldn’t have been authorized.

Just 12 hours after this blog highlighted the privacy problems associated with the White House’s use of embedded YouTube videos, the Obama team rushed to deploy a technical fix that significantly protects the privacy of many (but not all) of the site’s visitors.

Simply put, there is no good reason for Google to be able to data mine a citizen’s interaction with the president–especially when watching a video that was produced and uploaded by the White House at the taxpayers’ expense.

Unfortunately, when the new White House Web site launched, rather than fix the privacy issues that had plagued the transition team’s Web site, Obama’s legal team instead opted to provide YouTube with an exemption to those pesky federal regulations, letting it use long-term cookies to track visitors to the White House Web site. No other company was singled out and granted such a waiver.

This is clearly a step in the right direction–and it is particularly interesting to see that the White House has essentially rolled their own version of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s MyTube privacy tool.

Change.gov, the Web site for the Obama/Biden transition team, also made extensive use of YouTube videos. This practice was something that I sharply criticized back in November, citing the cookie-related privacy risks as well as the decade-old rules prohibiting the use of long-term tracking cookies on federal agency Web sites.

While this is great news (especially after just a few hours), it is by no means a comprehensive solution, but a Band-Aid. Those users who do click the “play” button will be secretly tracked as they navigate the White House Web site–and if those users have visited YouTube or any other Google-run Web site in the past, the fact that they watched an Obama video will be added to the existing massive pile of data the company has compiled on each of them.

By late Thursday evening, each embedded YouTube video had been replaced with an image of a video player, which a user must click on before the real YouTube player will be loaded. The result of this change is that YouTube is now only able to use cookies to track users who click on the “play” button on an embedded YouTube video–the majority of people who scroll through a page without clicking play will not be tracked.

The White House is already making use of Akamai’s commercial edge caching services, and the transition team made full use of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service for the download-friendly version of Obama’s weekly address. Rather than using YouTube, the State Department has for some time opted to pay for a commercial, flash-based video streaming solution provided by Brightcove for its propaganda information site America.gov.

Since its launch three days ago, President Obama’s White House Web site has included several embedded YouTube videos. While this certainly demonstrates that the 44th president is Web 2.0 savvy, the decision to embed YouTube videos has also enabled the Google-owned video-sharing site to sneakily collect data on the millions of people who visit Whitehouse.gov–even those users who never click the “play” button to actually watch one of the videos.

It seems that someone in the White House read my blog post yesterday–as within 12 hours of the story going live, Obama’s Web team rolled out a technical fix that severely limits YouTube’s ability to track most visitors to the White House Web site.

1. DLP solutions need to become more mainstream
While every company that conducts business over the Web needs DLP capabilities, software solutions require customization, sophisticated skills, and lots of dough. Microsoft’s data classification integration into Windows should help alleviate this by providing baked-in DLP basics.

Fortunately, industry players are starting to team up to lower the cost, complexity, and integration effort needed for data-centric security. Last week, EMC’s RSA and Microsoft got together to announce that the software giant will integrate RSA’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) into the Windows infrastructure in order to discover and classify data (Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and so on). Microsoft will also tightly integrate DLP with its Enterprise Rights Management (ERM) Server. Not to be outdone, security bigwig McAfee on Monday announced that it will integrate its DLP data discovery and policy management solutions with a leading ERM solution from Liquid Machines.

While no one can predict what will happen to the economy over the next 12 to 18 months, you can bet your bottom dollar that threats to confidential data will increase substantially in that time frame. Why? Malicious code threats are growing exponentially while the cyberunderground becomes ever more sophisticated.

3. Entitlement management is the next challenge
While we figured out how to centralize user authentication pretty well, we still leave entitlement management (i.e., user privileges) to each individual application. This method doesn’t scale, is full of security vulnerabilities, and is nearly impossible to audit. Liquid Machines, McAfee, Microsoft, and RSA get this as do others like Cisco Systems (through its Securent acquisition) and Rohati. Clearly, these vendors are positioning themselves for this next moneymaking opportunity.

2. DLP and ERM are complementary
DLP technology assumes you don’t know where sensitive data is so you want to find it, classify it, and keep it confidential. ERM, on the other hand, assumes you know exactly where the data lives and you want granular protection at the user and file level. These announcements demonstrate that the debate between DLP and ERM was misguided–large organizations need both solutions to safeguard known and unknown sensitive data across the network.

So what’s next? While other DLP vendors will form their own cozy relationships, my hope is that the industry comes together in a group hug and defines some meta data standards for classification, policy definition, and enforcement. I know this isn’t likely but it would sure go a long way to help us all protect our sensitive data.

Why the activity?

Unfortunately, the wedding was raided by Troll Wedding Crashers, a clan within the game that “camped out on the dance floor of the reception area.”

Online research firm eMarketer released a study Monday claiming small businesses plan to increase ad spending on social-network marketing during 2009. According to the study, 25 percent of all the small businesses surveyed claim they will increase social network ad efforts throughout the year. Twenty-two percent of companies said they plan to increase e-mail ad spending during 2009, while 13 percent of respondents claim they will increase spending on e-commerce sites. The full report can be viewed on eMarketer’s site.

An online retailer that allows users to sell goods by providing a 240-character description of the product, has decided to rename its service from Twee Bay to Tweba. According to the company’s site, which is basically a Twitter for e-commerce, “some people” asked the service to rename the site and, to no one’s surprise, it did just that. The company’s founder won’t say who asked for the name change, but you can bet they probably worked for a company that has a name that rhymes with Twee Bay.

Longtime gamers “Bello” and “Merca” were married this past December in Artix Entertainment’s massively multiplayer online role-playing game AdventureQuest Worlds, the company reported Monday. The bride and groom have been avid MMORPG gamers for three years and met each other while playing the game. The wedding was held in a private, in-game room and 11,000 avatars were on hand to witness the exchange of vows.

Low-cost pocket video camcorders have enjoyed a resurgence in sales, thanks to Web 2.0, reveals a report from research firm Futuresource. According to the findings, pocket video camcorders represented less than 5 percent of total camcorder sales in the U.S. and Western Europe in 2006, but that number could swell to 40 percent by 2010, thanks to sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, and others that make it easy for consumers to upload captured video online.

Balderton Capital, a U.K.-based venture capitalist, announced Monday that it has launched a new fund worth $430 million to invest in new technology and media start-ups. That said, the company told TechCrunch UK in an interview that it would “invest mainly in early stage” firms, but it might “also look at later stage companies.”

There are ambitious plans for Kontain, including social features (friend following, for example), privacy options, Web-based audio, image, and video editors, SEO options, and reader analytics. I don’t know if Kontain will still be as simple when it gets these features. I also don’t think there is a big untapped market for new bloggers, since it’s a safe bet that most everyone who wants to blog now is already doing so. Kontain isn’t a bad platform for teaching about blogging, but I don’t see it supplanting any current platforms.

You can't choose your display template or even colors.

There’s yet another new blogging platform out there: Kontain. It’s designed for non-technical users, and it’s easy to use and very good-looking. I don’t think I’ve seen an easier platform for beginning bloggers, in fact. Everything on the site is clear and simple. But there’s a downside.

However, pretty and simple is not enough, unless you’re Apple and have an Apple-like advertising budget. There are other super-simple, quick-to-use blog platforms, like Tumblr. And there are certainly services that already have the community angle dialed in (like Vox). And for anyone halfway serious about blogging, there’s nothing wrong with expending a few brain cycles to learn how to use free mainstream services like Blogger or Wordpress.com.

It’s the little things that make Kontain a delight. From the start, it gets out of your way. While it requires a valid e-mail address from new authors, you can start posting right away, since you have 15 days to confirm registration. If you’re writing a post and want to share it with friends, you can enter in their e-mail addresses from the posting screen.

Creating a Kontain blog is simple. Adding media to blog posts is simple. Even viewing and organizing the media files you’ve uploaded to previous posts is simple–something that’s not true in almost all other blog platforms.

The negative of Kontain is that while it’s easy to use, it’s very limited on the presentation side. You get no blog templates to choose from. While the default layout of Kontain blogs is attractive enough, the lack of customizability is surprising in a product that is so strong on the authoring side. Also, the blog pages display slowly.

All entry fields are nice and big. I would not feel uncomfortable recommending Kontain to people with poor eyesight, or those simply afraid of technology or the blogosphere. It’s really that easy.

Quite possibly the simplest blogging interface ever.