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From Wired: developers are launching a beta version of QTrax, after reaching deals with the major music labels to allow free music downloads.

QTrax is an ad-supported P2P application that works within the Firefox web browser on Windows computers. Internet Explorer and Safari are not supported. Macs will be supported on 18 March, according to this article from New York’s Silicon Allwy Insider.

That article also reveals that Universal was the final of the 4 major labels to sign with QTrax.

The music files use Windows Media DRM, so they probably won’t work on iPods. A QTrax spokesmen claims iPod compatibility is high on the service’s list, and this Associated Press article says that QTrax has developed a workaround for iTunes compatibility. Apple has released patches to break previous iTunes workarounds by other companies.

QTrax has signed over most of the music revenues to the labels, so the service will earn the bulk of its margin by selling highly targeted web advertising. Of course, it is trivial to block ads in Firefox web pages by using an extension like AdBlock Plus. Whether AdBlock will work with the QTrax Songbird engine is another question. OpenDNS should block the ads, as I mentioned on 3 September 2007.

When I checked QTrax.com a few minutes ago, I saw a single image that claimed the service was overwhelmed by demand - check in tomorrow.

From one of my students comes a link to this article about Asustek, also known as ASUS. Here’s a November 2007 article from Forbes with some more details.

The company’s US$299 Eee PC laptop runs Linux on an Intel processor, and ships with OpenOffice and Firefox preinstalled. The price is less expensive than a copy of Microsoft Windows Vista, and was enough to scare Microsoft into a special deal: Eee PC buyers could add Microsoft Windows for US$40.

While the XO project and other spinoffs try to bring their low-cost laptops to the US mass market, Asustek is moving aggressively.

I’m testing a web-based research tool called Zotero. I hope this free service can replace bibliographic database products like EndNote and Citation. I’ve recommended that software to IS 6100 and professional paper students. However, both products cost over US$100 for the student versions.

Zotero is free. It’s an add-on that can be installed in the Firefox web browser. The database is saved in that computer. I’m looking for a way to overcome this limitation. Zotero will not work well or at all with Internet Explorer, Opera or Safari.

Like other software packages, Zotero can capture citation information from web pages. This is a very helpful feature, especially for users who are dealing with long reference lists. Users can import listings directly from EBSCO and ABI.

It’s also possible to add photos from Flickr and materials from the Internet Archive. Zotero keeps adding support for more sites, and web site developers can add some support on their own. Yesterday, I added Zotero support to this blog. Zotero users can click the icon in the address bar to add a billso.com article to their Zotero library.

Zotero also plays nice with Microsoft Office and its leading freeware competitor, OpenOffice. The OpenOffice software can be downloaded from its web site.

One feature I want to try is file management. Zotero can import PDFs and other documents into its search database. I usually save web pages and articles as PDFs for long-term storage.

Of course, a big reason to use any bibliography manager is auto-formatting. Any decent bibliography package, including Zotero, let users build a reference list. The software then creates a list with the user’s choice of formatting, such as APA style.

Please note that I will not require my IS 6100 and IS 7010 students to use Zotero or Firefox, of course.

The New York Times ran an interesting story today about ad blocking software for web browsers.

I’ve used variations of ad blocking over the last few years, in an effort to speed up my Internet browsing. After all, every ad on a web page takes time to download. Some ads use Flash or Java to provide animation, and those ads can take additional time for a browser to download, process and present.

AdBlock Plus, which is discussed in the Times, is one of the easier tools to use, but it only works in Firefox, my favorite web browser.

Updated 8 September 2007: AdBlock Plus supports several third-party lists of domain names – see this page for details. Subscribing to a list such as EasyList or EasyElement is a quick way to set up a comprehensive ad blocking system in Firefox.

There are other tools available for Internet Explorer, but I won’t discuss them here.

In the past, I’ve used a more comprehensive approach that blocks ads from appearing on a computer or a network. This method uses a hosts file, as described in this Lifehacker post and in this page, to block well-known ad servers, based on their domain names. This isn’t a good idea unless you own your computer and you understand what you’re doing. I wouldn’t do this on a corporate or public computer.

Updated 8 September 2007: Yoyo.org has a page with detailed information about ad blocking at the router and computer level.

It’s also possible to do this with an OpenDNS account. Just add the domains that the router or your computer should block. I mentioned OpenDNS on July 13.

Ad blocking is easy to do

For both the hosts and DNS methods, the strategy is simple. I’m trying to stop my router or computer from looking up the ad servers, thus blocking the ads themselves. Usually I’ll see a blank space or a 404 (file not found) message in place of the ad. In the example below, OpenDNS has blocked an ad server before my browser could open the ad.

Some of my readers may have noticed that I do include Google Ads on this web site. The Google Ads are located at the bottom of each page, and Google tries to select appropriate ads based on my site’s content.

Last week, I also added some dynamic ads from Amazon.com that show prices for my courses’ textbooks. Here’s an example.

I’m hosting these ads to see how the systems work before I include ads on some of my customers’ web sites. I do receive a small amount of cash if anyone clicks on the ads, somewhere between 5¢ and US$1, so this really isn’t a revenue stream for me.

Updated 8 September 2007: To my chagrin, I noticed that the default settings in AdBlock Plus will block my Amazon ads. It’s easy to fix this by deactivating or removing the entry for rcm.amazon.com.

But ad blocking can affect the revenue streams of some web sites, especially if a significant number of users are blocking ads. A few small web sites are throwing the baby out with the bathwater by blocking Firefox users, usually redirecting them to whyfirefoxisblocked.com, based on the ridiculous assumption that every Firefox user has also installed and is using AdBlock.

This kind of filtering by a web server isn’t an invasion of privacy. It’s trivial work for a web server to determine the kind of browser that a user is running, because the browser itself includes that information whenever it requests a file from a web server.

Blocking Firefox is not an option for larger web sites

While Internet Explorer still holds the most market share, a significant number of users, including myself, usually use Firefox for their web browsing. No sane advertiser wants to block users who are smart enough to install and run an alternative browser, as smart users might have more disposable income or more influence on their company spending.

There are some ways to circumvent ad blocking. Most ads come from third-party web servers. Webmasters can choose to server the ads themselves. Anyone who wants to see the site will have to see the ads, because these users won’t want to block the web site itself.

As the Times mentions, Microsoft itself is caught in the middle of this problem. Microsoft doesn’t include ad blocking software in Internet Explorer, but the company hasn’t prevented users from loading that software, either. But Microsoft also has a significant revenue stream from ads that its MSN sells.

The New York Times ran an article today about adaptive aids for the baby boomers. Because I was born before 1964, technically I am a boomer, even though I don’t feel like one.

The Lucida font is one example cited by Times journalist Katie Hafner. The font was co-designed for Apple by Charles Bigelow to provide a highly readable font for low resolution printers and monitors. Lucida is the default menu font for Mac OS X and the Safari web browser, and has been included in Microsoft Windows since 1995. Wikipedia has a page full of examples.

Tiny fonts in web browsers? There’s hope.

Hafner mentions that Internet Explorer and the Mac have features to enlarge fonts on the screen. These are handy, especially when using a laptop computer. I’ve noticed that Internet Explorer sometimes compresses or mangles the page layout when displaying enlarged or zoomed fonts. In my favorite web browser, Firefox, fonts can be enlarged with the Ctrl+ keystroke on a Windows computer, or Command+ on a Mac. this method doesn’t always work, especially on sites that use Flash.

There are a few screen magnifying utilities for Windows users. I’ve used Magnifixer, a freeware product that is easy to install. Windows also has its own accessibility utilities, available in the Start, Accessories folder.

Mac users can find a Zoom feature in the Universal Access preferences panel. There is a built-in feature to enlarge the mouse cursor, but the results look awful. I use Pinpoint, a US$10 app, to display a very large mouse cursor on my MacBook Pro.

It’s much harder to enlarge the fonts on a mobile phone or PDA. A few models provide adaptive features, but most don’t. The Sidekick 3 provides no way to enlarge a font on the screen, and that’s been a sore point for a few of my colleagues. Larger screens can help, like the display of an iPhone. But a larger screen almost always increases the device’s size and reduces battery life.

Oticon’s Delta hearing aid was profiled in the New York Times on September 24. This model looks more like a fashion accessory, and is marketed towards users in the 40-60 age group.

Hearing aids that look like Bluetooth headsets

A blog that covers technology for older users, 50+Digital, posted an article last week about the Audeo. This hearing aid is marketed as a “personal communications assistant”. It looks like a large Bluetooth headset, but it is similar in many ways to the Delta.

Devices like the Audeo and Delta will become more popular, according to Don Aucoin of the Boston Globe, as boomers hunt for fashionable alternatives to traditional hearing aids and reading glasses.

I expect more younger users to adopt hearing aids, partly because they’ve blown out their hearing with their iPods. I’m always careful to keep my iPod’s volume at a level that will let me hear traffic noise.