Thinkcorps

I see so many companies fretting about new initiatives like Facebook apps, mobile, video and more. Yet their sites suffer from many obvious blunders, inefficiencies, bad usability, and detritus from failed experiments.

Your Web site is your digital home. Just like a regular house, you need to clean it regularly.

I guess most people just don’t like housework, but it’s actually the nature of the Web. There are frontiers and trails to be blazed online, but in most cases, innovation happens close to home, where new strategies and methods are improving the basics of how we build Web pages and interact with readers.

It’s these basics that your entire online business is built upon—get them wrong, and it won’t matter how cute your Facebook app is. Everyone gets distracted by shiny objects some times, but great companies keep their focus on core values and work very hard to continually improve and refine them.

First, I love print media, though I work primarily in online. I also have tremendous respect for those people who are trying to figure out what the future holds for their businesses and careers. That said, to all the journalists and editors who’s only response to these looming changes is to grouse about how blogs suck and the olden days were awesome: please, shut the hell up.

The latest I’ve seen is an interview with Kerry Eggers, Portland Tribune sportswriter.

What gets me is the tremendous arrogance of the “journalist” when it comes to their readers’ intelligence. In Eggers view, readers of sports journalism don’t know anything about sports and are easily hoodwinked by “unaccountable” bloggers. How silly does that sound?

If the job of the journalist is to inform, then wouldn’t it follow that the reader might learn something about the subject matter? Wouldn’t you become smarter and more discerning about what you’re reading?

Maybe—just maybe—sports readers are smart enough to take care of themselves when they venture off the path to read those scurrilous blogs.

The reason people read sports blogs in the first place is because they love sports. They can’t get enough of it, the nuances, the details, the sidelines chatter, the armchair managing. In fact, while Eggers decries some jounalist/bloggers for writing about peripheral things like “troubles with their rental cars” on their blogs, isn’t that exactly what fills up the pages of sports books (books that Eggers himself writes)?

Maybe if these old-school “journalists” got up off their asses and paid for regular, crappy seats at games, or god-forbid, watched the games on TV like the majority of us unwashed masses, they might rekindle the love of sports that first got them into the business.

Maybe then, they’ll remember what it was like to be fan, and stop treating us all like idiots.

I just finished up a super-simple view of the New York Times that answers a simple question: What’s new?

SimplerTimes, What’s New at The New York Times
http://simplertimes.smithmag.net

The Backstory

All I wanted was a simple page where I could see what’s new at the NYT. I’m a bit of a news/blogs junkie, and I check my feeds throughout the day. However, in the case of the Times, I check a few regular sections in the morning, but then only return to the homepage. There’s so much I knew I was missing, but I didn’t feel like digging through the site or subscribing to a whole mess of RSS feeds.

Separately, it’s been bugging me that newspapers are still hanging on to the idea of “editions” on their Web site (an always-on medium, if there ever was one). The editors program the day’s news, package it up into an updated homepage, and voila! Success! Eureka! Brilliant! Their job is done! Their paychecks justified.

Unless I visit their site more than once a day.

At which point, I’ve already seen all those homepage stories, and I’m looking for something new. Which I can’t find anywhere, because it’s all buried in a mess of sections and categories. So here I am: a voracious reader, at your site, ready to engage with whatever you’ve got — and you give me nothing.

So i decided to take a stab at fixing it. SimplerTimes is my little experiment to create a reader’s view of the news. It’s what I expected from MyTimes, but didn’t get.

The site is very simple. You simply click on the “Categories” link to customize the sections you want to see. Click “Update” and your preferences are saved in a cookie. The page now lists recent articles from the sections you’re interested in.

Articles with a red flag are brand new within the past 2 hours, articles with a yellow flag have been published today. Just a few simple visual cues to help you navigate your way down the page, until you decide you’re done and there’s nothing more to see.

I’ve also included “Top Stories” articles on the first page. These come from the NYTimes Home Page feed. This way, I still get a taste of what the NYTimes feels is important today. So now we’ve flipped the balance of power, the main content is personalized, and the sidebar is editor-driven. I think I like it better this way.

The concept is very simple and can be extended in any number of ways.

• The categories are all feeds from the NYTimes (pulled from their OPML file, though, inexplicably, not ALL their feeds are in that file). The feeds could come from any number of sources.


• The displayed content is very limited, with better data in the feed, you’d have more options for how to display it


• I wanted to use Thickbox to display the article in an iframe on the page, but NYT uses an iframe breakout script. Bah, no fun at all.

There’s nothing particularly revolutionary here. You can certainly add each feed to your newsreader and get the same effect (without the css elements of course). But there’s something compelling to me about reconstituting all this RSS data back into a Web page that’s been customized just for me.

Our book finally goes on sale today. The site is humming with new signups and the book ranking has jumped up above #600 at Amazon. Yes, Amazon computes its rankings hourly, but so what? It’s still cool.

If you are so inclined, It makes a great gift.

Friday night, I screwed up a project’s subversion repository (note: I don’t think subversion really works on your local client, too tempting to overwrite files via the OS, which I’ve done countless times. D’oh.). In the process of trying to recover those files, I noticed my backup hadn’t run in two weeks. Yikes. I reset the backup scheduler, fixed my project, and decided to quit for the day.

Later that night, a bit after 10pm, I went to check something on my computer, and it froze up. I restarted and got a blank screen. I fiddled a bit, got it booted off the install CD, and tried Disk Utility. It said I had a b-tree error, but it couldn’t fix it. The next morning, I couldn’t find the drive at all. It was 100% and totally dead.

Did I mention that I have a book coming out and will be traveling next week?

So, I was freaking out, even though the Macbook is still under warranty (4 months old). But I got a lot calmer after realizing that my backup had successfully run Friday night, before the hard drive went belly up.

The funny thing is, most backup solutions are built around the limitations inherent in copying a lot of files. But that’s exactly the wrong approach. What people care about is the “restore.” Nobody cares about a backup until something goes wrong, at which point that backup should be as easy to use as possible. No weird archive formats, no software to install. Just my files please.

Thanks to a tip from my friend Ted, I invested in a $28 copy of SuperDuper and a 500 GB external firewire drive ($200). I partitioned the external into two drives, one which was the same size as my Macbook’s hard drive. Then I scheduled SuperDuper to run every night during the week.

What that meant, is that when my hard drive died, I had a perfect clone that I could boot from (because of the firewire). So, I could do everything normally, just by holding down the option key on startup, and selecting the firewire drive as the startup disk.

After Apple installed my new hard drive, I came home, restared off the clone disk, and ran SuperDuper to backup the clone to my new drive. With SuperDuper, backing up IS restoring. Pretty sweet. One click, same process, no muss, no fuss.

It took a while to finish copying all those gigs, and I was a little drained emotionally, but SuperDuper saved my bacon. Thank you.

Two of my current interests include homes design and green trends. So, when I see this Treehugger story, “Home Design Trends: Smaller, Closer, More Urban“, I click. Turns out, it’s based on a WaPo article on a published summary of an AIA survey of member architects. I love Treehugger, but regurgitations of excerpts of summaries just doesn’t do anyone any good.

First off, there’s no raw data to be had anywhere here, just abstraction on top of abstraction. So, I don’t really see how anyone (even the AIA, who sponsored the survey) can expect to draw any real conclusions. You should always expect surveys to be biased and try to get behind the numbers and compare your conclusions to the survey-makers’.

I love dataviz, but numbers are easily skewed and fudged, and people with no statistical background are churning out Excel charts like there’s no tomorrow. And yet, we buy into it every day. Someone makes a pretty chart and we’re all like, “Wow, that’s awesome!” All down the media chain, it’s assumed that someone else has done the homework.

Well, today I’m calling bullshit! It happens again and again, and no one calls anyone on it. So, no offense to any of the parties involved, but I’ve got a ask a few questions:

(images copied from the AIA summary article)

1. What’s with the weird data format? Percent reporting sector “improving” minus percent reporting “weakening”? What does that even mean? I’d guess it’s an easy way to exaggerate the numbers. Example: 100 people, 50 answer improving and 25 answer weakening, (25 answer something else we’ll never know). So, is the answer 50% minus 25% = 25% positive. Or 33% positive as (50%-25%)/(50%+25% total respondents)? I guess we’ll never know.
   
2. Given that this is Q3 data only,  I have to take this as “housing market is awful; people are spending what money they have on remodeling vs. buying.” No exactly earth-shattering news.
   
3. 
   As far as this expressing an interest in “new urbanism,” well, maybe. Mixed-use projects are not built by architects for families. They’re built for developers. And in almost any market, building in a denser (read: urban) environment and adding retail reduces risk in your investment. It’s not a trend because of ideals, it’s a trend because the current market  bears it out. I don’t see how this says anything about people not wanting to commute.
   
4. When I go through the list of “neighborhood features,” it has me wondering where these trends are coming from. Someone had to tell the architects they wanted these things, right? And we know it wasn’t families. Here’s a few of my personal guesses (no guarantees implied).
   
   • Does “traditional neighborhood design” = Adapting to lowest-common denominator buyers in the market to eliminate developer risk?
   • Does “dedicated open space” = Conforming to city ordinances?
   • Does higher-density development = Maximize our return on investment?
   • What’s “access to commercial”? (See previous guess)
   • Does “affordable housing” at 0% = Times are tough, screw the working class?
5. 
   I’m also very confused about the home style trends. Is new urbanism all about bringing the suburbs back into the city? Because that’s what this survey seems to say. Architects are seeing demand for features that echo the suburban single-family home. And how do you reconcile the trend of “single-story homes”? I mean, is there anything less urban, less green than that?
   

Tags: aia, housingtrends, surveys, statistics, dataviz

I’m going to take a stab at this Yahoo/Adobe announcement, since Yahoo didn’t apparently take the time to think this through. According to the Paidcontent article, which quotes WSJ and AP sources, publishers can now include contextual ads in their PDFs. Here’s why this is dumb:

1. Selling ads isn’t hard if you’re doing it right. If your product is good, and your sales people are competent, you can make money. If it becomes hard, then perhaps the deals are too small, in which case, the prospect of splitting revenues with Adobe and Yahoo isn’t going to be any help.
2. Laying ads out on the page isn’t hard, thanks to a recent revolution in desktop publishing (Oy! Heard of InDesign, Quark Xpress??). They sometimes look better than auto-generated text ads, too.
3. Assuming #1and 2 are difficult, then you’re going to have to make up the difference in volume, which means you’d better go learn HTML fast, since PDFs aren’t going to get you the audience you need (It’s pretty incontrovertible that your Web audience is going to be larger than that reading PDFs).
4. Finally, somehow Yahoo and Adobe are going to have to convince advertisers that having their ads disappear when the PDF is printed out is a good idea. I mean, isn’t emulating the print ad/edit relationship the whole point of PDF advertising?
   

Yahoo and Adobe need to sit down and think about how they can actually make publishers “new” money, not just insert themselves into an already functional business process. They may make it “easier” for some publishers, but it’s extremely doubtful that this program will deliver solid ROI for any of the parties involved. I don’t think the math is works out on this one.

Tags: yahoo, pdf, ads, adobe

I spent about 4 hours on Flickr this weekend, searching for photos to illustrate a presentation for SMITH’s new six-word memoir book. If anyone you know doubts the future of participatory media, have them dig around for 10 minutes. Yes, most amateur photos are probably crap, but so many are incredible. Couple that with Creative Commons licensing, and Flickr suddenly becomes “important” to the mediascape in a whole new way.

That being said, Flickr, you have a major design flaw that needs immediate (and super easy) correction. On search results pages, the cursor is focused into the search input. This is a no-no. Automatically focusing the cursor assumes you know what I want to do. But how can you know on a page with several possible activities?

In fact, the primary purpose of a search results page is to browse lots of results. By focusing the cursor, you’ve broken my keyboard control (arguably the more important of my two input devices) and I cannot page up or down. I have to click (sometimes double-click) the mouse to unfocus and get my pageup/pagedown working.

In fact, on a typical web page, with all the options it presents: why assume anything when the page just finished loading?

Like I said, I was on the site for 4+ hours this weekend and I was about to ring someone’s neck over this.

It’s long overdue that I write something up on A.D.: After the Deluge, the webcomic we’ve been producing on SMITH since early this year. I’m tremendously proud of how this story is coming together, and it’s great to be a part of something this good.

A.D. is the story of 6 Hurricane Katrina survivors, written and illustrated by Josh Neufeld, a tremendous artist, and produced by Larry and myself for our webzine, SMITH. It combines an original webcomic, presented in monthly installments, with in-chapter hyperlinks, along with audio & video shot by us with the characters from the story.

If I’ve piqued your interest by now, then by all means, go—read the story! Otherwise, I figured I could go into some of the behind-the-scenes action detailing how we’ve put all this together.
Read the rest of this entry »

Despite our grumpiness, or perhaps because of it, I received a happy text message this morning—we got Stephen Colbert’s six-word memoir for our upcoming book.

All is right with the world. (This book is gonna rock, btw.)

Our story begins with a photo essay on our ezine SMITH, Iraqi Graffiti: The Photos of Todd Bowers.

Our pals at the NYPost picked it up for the Page Six article “Thigh Anxiety”:

July 29, 2007—WHICH genius thought the war-torn women of Iraq would be in need of the ThighMaster? U.S. Marine reservist Todd Bowers told Smithmag.net, “We were getting humanitarian aid sent and we got in a bunch of ThighMasters – official, made-in-Taiwan, Suzanne Somers ThighMasters.” Page Six learned the exercise gadgets came from the Defense Department, not Somers, in a bulk aid shipment. The Web site also shows GIs goofing with the dubious “aid.”

And then, a few days later on August 2, here comes Senor Colbert! I’m gonna pretend I’m too psyched to mention the lack of credit to either us or Todd! Seriously, TV people! Come on now! Pretend for once you actually understand how journalism works! Ah, forget it.

Things that are great about living in Portland: getting up on a Saturday, walking into a quiet Apple store, waiting for 2 minutes at the back of the store before purchasing one of the plentiful iPhones, and walking out within probably 5 minutes. Oh yeah, and no sales tax.

Things you need to understand:

It’s so not a logical decision. I don’t care how much I paid, in fact, the number doesn’t even register in my brain somehow. I refuse to sink to those depths, at least for a week or so. :)

I’m not a fan-boy. I usually wait a year before jumping in, so this is new territory for me. However, I have faith in Apple, given it’s track-record with the iPod, OS X, etc. All mature product lines that clearly influenced the iPhone design. I feel pretty comfortable.

Removable battery? Whatever, dude.

I don’t like ATT/Cingular, in fact, I was on the verge of throwing $150 at them simply to give them the finger. I hated my Sony Ericsson phone. It was complete crap and I’m pissed Cingular even carried it and sold it to me.

Because I already had a plan, it was a $20/month proposition for me. Not too bad, given the all-you-can-eat simplicity of Apple’s approach. I have been waiting for someone to straight-talk me. It’s not the ultimate cost, but the attitude that matters most to me. The cell carriers’ nickle-and-dime approach may finally be over.

Signup was easy (I knew to download ITunes 7.3—it showed up when I ran Software Update). Syncing all that music took a while, like it always does.

The camera is OK, the interface is amazing, the keyboard was better than I thought.

Youtube was a score. Once they convert more video into Apple’s format, it will be even more awesome. One more reason Youtube kicks any video search engine’s ass. Youtube is the new network. ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox—you have been warned. Maybe Google is now a media company in the way Yahoo always wished it was?

Integration with all the iLife apps is great. I’m now ditching all other options for Mail and iCal.

Google maps is great. Search for a business, save it as a new contact, click to call, click address for map. Maybe i’m a n00b, but wow.

Mail can be checked every 15 minutes, which seems like a decent compromise to me. This idea that you “need” push email (Blackberry) just makes you more annoying to everyone around you, believe me.

What may change the most is the general idea that a shiny flat piece of glass isn’t supposed to have fingerprints on it. Mine is a mess, and it’s all the more awesome for it.

[I tend to have these thoughts on Sunday mornings over coffee and reading NYTimes, blogs, etc. They come in no particular order—it’s not like I’m a paid analyst or anything. That’s a simple disclaimer for those of you thinking, yeah, so I read this 6 months ago. Anyway, it’s my blog, I’ll write what I want.]

I’m reading this NYT article about Google’s competitors in search, in which the writer completely mischaracterizes how Google makes its money (text ads on search, not search alone). After reading about Mahalo, I finally go check it out. the human-edited pages are interesting, though I wonder how easily it scales up and over time (updating already-created pages)—the iPhone page will have to be updated when v2 comes out; Paris Hilton’s page could need refreshing every week. I already pointed out this problem with Shopwiki.

I must note, it appears that Shopwiki is now a price-comparison search engine (with google ads down the side). The wiki section is only accessible via a link in the header. So much for the revolution.

So, anyway, YouTube. Mahalo’s human-edited pages group interesting results under topics (news, reviews, humor, video, etc.). And it occurs to me that the video search engine never really took off. Probably because while video is difficult to find (masked within flash players as it usually is), when you’re executing a new search, you have no idea what’s out there. It’s not obvious beforehand that any interesting video exists, and that you should be using a video search tool.

YouTube = Video Search

What YouTube did was essentially offer video search to the world (Google Video tried). But instead of some fancy algorithm, YouTube brute forced the issue, turning video uploading into a fun game you could play with friends. Now, instead of searching the Web for video, you could simply search YouTube—it was all there.

By involving users, YouTube helped change our mental model of search and the Web. Soon, we started thinking: “Hey, I wonder if that clip made it onto YouTube.” And of course, it usually had.

Google video failed because while technically spot-on, it wasn’t fun. It didn’t help users help themselves, in changing their expectations about online video.

iTunes is now the number 3 music seller because Apple built an end-to-end experience that people could get into and enjoy. We didn’t need to be able to buy songs and albums online, but Apple showed us it was fun and cool and better.

For YouTube, fancy algorithms went out the window. Why try searching for a needle in a massive, growing haystack? Because YouTube made video fun and sharable, users uploaded it by the truckload. Most of it is crap, sure, but lots isn’t. And who cares anyway? It’s 100% video content! All Youtube is burdened with is data storage, which is probably the cheapest of all the Web app-related burdens to bear.

I suppose that some time soon, search algorithms and/or our CMSs will get smart enough to parse out video from regular web pages, though with the proliferation of video playing widgets out there, I’m not entirely sure.

What I do know is that an algorithm can never change a person’s mind.

Read Rafat’s interview with Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore this morning. I tried to leave a comment, but something’s not working—I was not authorized to do that action. Weird. Anyway, here’s my 2 cents.

There may not yet be a replacement for the banner and CPM, but you can bet Ann Moore isn’t going to be out there innovating to find it. Perhaps it’s not her job; perhaps her business is merely to suck money out of her advertisers’ wallets as quickly as possible.

How many times did she use the phrase “firehose”?

CNNMoney.com is going to be a brand disaster for the print magazines under it. Business2.0’s editorial blogging experiment can be viewed as an attempt to maneuver around this multi-headed beast to engage their readership in an intimate and much more honest manner.

I seriously question both her and her team’s statistics (and sanity) if she’s really trotting out 71 pageviews/visit on people.com. If you’re looking for click-fraud, I think people.com may be a good place to start.

Also, if people.com is getting 392 million pageviews/month, how is 500 million pageviews last year for SI’s swimsuit issue a success? That’s one flimsy “firehose.”

Lastly, her comments about margins online are naive and misleading, at best. She paints a picture where online is all rosy because print is shouldering all the heavy costs (employees). That’s a convenient arrangement of the balance sheet, but you can only cut costs on the print side so far before you have to start making up for those losses on the online side.

It seems like she’s playing a dangerous game right now; I doubt it will last.

Ann Moore has built an organization that still believes it controls distribution (the hoses): her company can’t make magazines under 1 million circulation (her admission), and now she’s translated that strategy to the Web.

With the entire Internet moving in an opposite direction—towards niche, topical sites that more directly engage their audiences—I have a really hard time believing her strategy is going to work.

So Conde Nast has finally launched its new business magazine, Portfolio, which you can see at www.portfoliomag.com—oops, I mean www.portfolio.com.

The mag’s introduced with the tagline, “We see the big picture.”

I am not making any statements about viability, since CN has deep pockets and a powerful ad sales dept. But I do wonder how relevant Portfolio thinks it can be in today’s world.

It’s well-known that for any real insider-y information, you need to hit up B2B titles or, better yet, join an association or pick up a telephone. This is even more true today, with cellphone messaging and online forums. The information that really drives business never makes it to a business magazine, at least not before it’s completely stale.

A natural corollary is that “business” magazines aren’t actually targeted at “business” people—at least not the people on the front lines. The biz mag audience is the hundreds of thousands of middle managers, who are now finding themselves increasingly disintermediated as their companies struggle to compete on a faster global playing field.

Now that I think of it, Portfolio could be a stroke of utter genius.

The magazine (quietly, desperately) tries to evoke that 1980s high of noblesse oblige, though tempered by 20 years of pop-ified reality. I’m weirdly reminded of Charlie Sheen’s Wall Street, as if some shadowy half-demon from the Buffyverse were trying to conjure him out of the imaginary past and into the world of flesh and blood.

Save us Charlie! Save our jobs, our corner offices, our condos, our cars ... and maybe that last twinge of self-worth, if you get around to it.

I am a bit slow and just noticed the NYTimes pop-up contextual search. When you double-click on an item in the text, a pop-up search window appears.

Problem is, we already have a well-defined context for selecting text using double and triple clicks, which this feature breaks rather dramatically with the sudden appearance of a pop-up window.

My other problem is that it seems dubiously useful to be able to search on only one word—and that’s all a double click can possibly get you. I suppose there’s some other hidden methods that also activate this feature, but I’m not going to stumble around blindly for them.

When you’re the paper of record, don’t you think the breadth and depth of your coverage might necessitate readers using something more advanced than single word search queries?

Does Khoi Vinh know about this, has he mentioned it already I wonder?

Here’s a simple sketch. Without knowing anything about what type of site it that you’re running (imagine you’re a newly installed CEO, for example, they’re usually pretty oblivious) and given the limited information detailed below, which user would you rather have?

User A: spends 6 minutes on your site and generates 3 pageviews
User B: spends 30 minutes on your site and generates 24 pageviews

Second question: which user probably has a deeper relationship with your site?

In my admittedly simplistic sketch, User A has gone to a online magazine to read an article about a health condition. User B went to an active online health forum and had an interesting discussion with several other members about the same health condition.

After this one session, User A probably knows a little more about the condition, but User B has collected lots of advice, several new article and Web site recommendations, and some new online friends. Similarly, User A won’t engage the online magazine until an editor posts a new article (of interest), while User B is welcome to come back and chat about whatever’s on their mind at any time.

The definition of “media” hinges upon the word “communications”. User B clearly communicated more, gathered more information and forged a deeper relationship than User A. In addition, User B is free to return and deepen that relationship at any time, 24/7. User A has to wait for new articles to be published.

Admittedly, there are times when you want to be passive like User A, but more and more I think, we are becoming like User B—active consumers, armed with online tools that make being active almost as easy, and far more satisfying, as being passive.

This is why I’m having a hard time embracing traditional media business models.

What a whirlwind! SXSW was excellent, met some new folk, reconnected with some friends (and family), and generally got psyched to get working on new projects. But oh, the ups and downs! Several work issues blew up just before I left on Thursday, I tweaked my back while gathering up gear to leave (thanks to my physical therapist, I recovered nicely, despite 5+ hours of flying), and I ended up losing my moleskine (75% full, btw). But of course, that creates the opportunity for me to have one of those cool, “I lost my moleskine and this really great person returned it to me” story. Oh, and my checked suitcase didn’t make it back to Portland with me (should be here this afternoon, though).

But SXSW has a way of energizing your mind, and I feel focused and ready to kick some ass. I’m picking up new glasses today, and while that might seem meaningless, I’m really hoping that the new prescription helps with my astigmatism and eases up the eye strain—that means more hours designing and coding. :)

Huge props go out to to Ted and Molly for their gracious invitation to the gospel brunch at Stubbs on Sunday. I can’t even tell you how much that lifted my spirits (I was really obsessing about work issues at that point). I’m not particularly spiritual in an organized religion kind of way, but it’s truly amazing what a good bass line can do. Plus, migas, catfish and barbecued brisket!

I’ve been trying to dig up links to downloadable SXSW presentations, and while I haven’t found any good compiled sources, a good bet seems to be a google search for “sxswi 2007 notes”.

Quote from Pete Levisohn, president of FIM, on the announcement that the company bought SDC, an ad tech firm—“the internal example being tossed around was if someone’s in Wisconsin in the middle of winter you don’t want to send them ads for surfboards.”

That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. Why would you assume that someone freezing their ass off (I grew up in Wisconsin) wouldn’t be interested in surfboards? I mean, wouldn’t that perhaps be the perfect time to sell someone on the possibilities of enjoying the sand and surf of, say, Hawaii?

How much talk has there been about the potential of online ad targeting? And this is where we’re at?

I’d just like to ask one question (of you, big media exec): why do you continue to maintain traditional expectations of revenue when you’ve given up responsibility for creating or maintaining the content?

In other words, I create it, I maintain it, while you paste ads all over the place and take all the money. Yeah, that sounds like a plan that will work out great.

(free-ridin’ a-holes)

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 85% Iron Man 65% Green Lantern 55% Hulk 55% Robin 55% Superman 50% The Flash 50% Supergirl 45% Wonder Woman 35% Batman 20% Catwoman 15%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

As I was walking in to work this morning, I was thinking about what my resolution for 2007 should be. I don’t usually care to make resolutions, let alone follow them, but what the hell.

Now, I’m learning Ruby on Rails at the moment, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t harbor hopes for launching a (beta) product in the next 12 months. :) I’m also excited about the prospects for SMITH, the personal media/stories webzine I started with long-time friend and colleague Larry Smith in January of ‘06. I’d also like to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.

But I think I’m going to go with “take more pictures”.

Taking more pictures would mean getting better at photography, sure, but it would also mean spending more time thinking about and creating art. And of course, it would mean being away from the computer screen, likely outdoors or in some new and interesting place.

These are all very good things, so I think I’ll focus on that.

Oh, and I’m going to try and split time between my digital camera and my old Nikon FM2n (which I love). Digital revolution be damned.

Some notes on the recently launched askville. I just signed up (by asking a question).

I’ve been fascinated lately with wikis, and search apps that attempt to condense and organize information in a knowledge management sense—the management of information collected over time, or “expertise” i suppose you could call it. This, I think tails with an interest in data visualization, which is also generally concerned with timeframes.

In any case, it’s interesting how seeing Askville and comparing it to Yahoo Answers helped me understand more about how these services work.

A few thoughts:

My sample question is first answered within a few minutes (I get an email notification). A lot of answers I see (including mine) are copied from other sources—a copyright violation that’s easy to track. I can’t see publishers being psyched about this.

Amazon uses mechanical turk for questions that aren’t getting answers (other people do the search for you). Though I imagine this is a temporary measure until the community grows large enough.

What occurs to me (and maybe it’s the inclusion of mechanical turk that made this obvious to me) is that what drives an answer community (besides entertainment) is not that people are smarter than you, it’s that they can perform a particular topical search better than you.

If people are really using this for answers and not just for fun (unclear at this early stage—yahoo seems very ‘fun’ oriented to me), then this implies that Google returns too many search results. So is QA is a viable alternative/competitor to search? It’s Mechanical Turk turned into a game for getting the easy answers (the assumption being that many things are “easy” with a large enough audience.)

On the other hand, I’ve often wondered what a service like Rollyo could do if it were to use its data to help focus search. With Rollyo’s data prioritizing which sites people thought were good for particular search topics, a search engine could effectively harness that “human power” and get some of its mojo back from the QA communities.

What concerns me about services like Askville, is that by prioritizing the “game” aspect of the community, they hinder the ability to build a detailed knowledge base. The game is completely focused on the “now”: users have to be able to earn points for answering new questions, even if that question has already been answered several times over. And the winning answer in a current questions’ iteration may not be as good as the winning answer of a previous iteration.

Yes, you can search old questions, but historical search is clearly separated from the primary QA process. At no point does Amazon suggest that, “hey, i think we answered that a while ago.” And that’s a problem, in my opinion.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, stresses completeness, where users are focused on filling in the gaps in knowledge and improving accuracy. Of course, Wikipedia also has much higher barriers to entry.

When you make expertise a game, I wonder how you maintain a standard above status quo “popular wisdom”. There’s really no way to gauge authority and no respect of past contributions, pushing knowledge ever further.

Users may accumulate “expertise” points, but those are clearly doled out in a haphazard fashion. I mean, if you don’t know the answer, how do you judge the best one?

It may turn out that QA is 95% entertainment / 5% useful, and I’d guess that Wikipedia would end up the inverse.

I never really had much to add to the whole Web 2.0 debate. In fact, I was just happy we were having it and that so much of 2.0 hinged on individuals (both creators and users) driving next-generation Web apps. But there’s a limit to how far all this can go, which I think becomes clear when you look at where Web 2.0 isn’t. Mind you, I don’t really care. I’m just happy that despite all of it, things will continue to move on. :)

I think my key point here revolves around the social aspects of these new Web apps. Generally, what’s made them great is that they’re made by and for people. Individuals come first, not companies. That’s why so many of these apps are so interesting, and also why so many will fail as they try and build traditional organizations with commensurate revenue streams. Niche is niche for a reason.

There’s a huge difference between an individual and a company. We don’t make the same types of decisions, and we never will. But there are analogs: as individuals, we have friends who we love and value. A company has partners, vendors and advertisers (among others). The truth is, a company values them just as much as you would your friends.

So when you start your Web 2.0 company, you want to help or impress your circle of friends. And you make decisions independent of anything outside of what will help that circle. They’re your market, after all.

But as a company, you now have to contend with both sets of friends: your users and your partners. And that’s a delicate balance to maintain. The needs of each are very different and they’re often going to clash.

I’m tasked right now with building out a new Web presence for my company, and I can already see potential conflicts on ideas that seem great for users, but would drive companies mad.

I’m pretty user-centric myself, but I don’t need the headaches, I can tell you. If you piss off a user, you might get an angry email. If you piss off a partner, you get chewed out by the head of the company.

Now, you can say you’re going to stand firm and uphold your values, but you won’t. Because that person chewing you out controls your paycheck, and you like your paycheck. No matter how right you think you are, you are going to bend.

Look at YouTube. They’re already bending like a willow tree in a soft breeze. Same thing’s going to happen to MySpace. They aren’t communities anymore. They are corporate entities. And they cannot help but act like what they truly are.

So, it’s a battle between these two aspects of your company: the needs of users and the needs of partners. I’m not saying you can’t strike a balance. Thousands of businesses do it every day. But it’s hard work and shouldn’t be underestimated.

But you have to start somewhere, and it’s pretty clear that users have to come first.

Great ideas develop within a real market. That’s why beta is so important. Real users help you develop a real product. And these early users don’t just help find bugs, they help find features! They define you in so many ways.

But when the buzz is high and the scent of money is in the air, people begin launching companies based on the “idea of people.” There’s no time to develop organically, so the user base is extrapolated from a Powerpoint slide and a marketing budget.

When you start like this, I think you’re doomed. That was the true hallmark of the first bubble: all those projected market share slides.

I’m not sure you can really learn to love your users without spending a good deal of time solely focused on them, completely outside of the concerns of business and money.

In fact, I’d argue that what made the companies acquired by Google/Yahoo so attractive was their lack of an exit strategy. They were honestly focused on building a great product. And greatness, you can’t fake.

My day job currently consists of figuring out how to build a next-generation city/regional magazine site that respects the core values of both the Web as well as the company’s business model. My hobby (for now), consists of figuring out how to build a next-generation consumer magazine (call it “People 2.0“). I’m not going to pretend I’ve got all the answers, but I do have a handful of core operating principles, and I figured I’d better start writing ‘em down.

(This blog is designed primarily as a scratch pad for my thoughts, so be warned.)

Most of what passes for “media 2.0” discussion today is focused on newspapers. That’s because the “future of newspapers” has pretty easy answers. Printing on paper clearly has no future, electronic publishing is the ONLY option. Blogs equals a dead-simple publishing and community platform, so obviously newspapers should integrate those lessons.

In general (if the success of political & celebrity blogs are any indication), it’s the simple, obvious arguments that draw the most attention. You could probably create some kind of Internet rule that stipulated once a theme reached a certain pitch, you should simply ignore it because the answers have clearly been decided already, and all that’s left are the sounds of an ever-expanding online echo chamber.

Web 2.0 bubble? It’s a fact. Newspapers need to go digital? It’s a fact. Celebrity nipple slips are pre-planned (at least probability-wise)? It’s just gotta be a fact.

The story for magazines is much more difficult. Newspapers are tooled for the kind of daily content the Web loves, magazines are not.

Blogging is great, but …

Many magazines have adopted blogging as some kind of solution (or merely an experiment, I hope) to their digital woes. I’d be extremely nervous of all company-mandated blogging programs, like the one Business 2.0 just started. And clearly Business 2.0 (SEED, too) is better positioned than just about anyone else to take on this challenge. But determining success is another story.

First, blogging takes passion—the same as journalism does. I don’t think the question is, “Can we create a blog?”, it’s “Can we create a GREAT blog?” Most great blogs are targeted on a small niche a typical company would be uncomfortable squeezing into. And a company is always going to want to increase a blog’s appeal to a wider audience, thus watering down its niche appeal and effectiveness. So keeping focus is a big problem.

The second problem is one of opportunity costs. You’ve reached your position in the mediasphere by creating a certain flavor of print editorial. Forcing your editorial staff to blog is going to diminish your ability to create that great print content. You don’t fight a war on two fronts, especially when one front is as insatiable as the Web. Editors will quickly find themselves spending hours creating one blog post. Ask yourself, what does that cost your print product?

User-Generated Content

There’s a lot of fuss about leveraging user-generated content these days, like it’s some kind of panacea to the entire media industry’s problems. It’s not, trust me. UGC, as people have shortened it, is terribly misunderstood and has it’s own set of limitations.

The first is, of course, the 1:10:89 rule, which stipulates that 1% of users will create content, 10% will interact with it (participants who comment, rat, & re-appropriate), and 89% of users will passively consume. This rule has massive implications for any Web site. Without a certain critical mass of audience, certain features and programs simply won’t work.

I’d add that this rule emerged from several Web 2.0 pure-plays, meaning that there may be an additional “passive-to-active user conversion” percentage to add to the front of this rule if your site has an audience more used to passively consuming content than creating and interacting with it. The actual rule for print media Web sites may be 10/1/10/89, where 10 equals the percentage of your audience that you can convince to start using/playing with your new interactive tools (meaning 90 percent may not even look at your new comments/ratings tools). I’d guess that 10 percent is a pretty aggressive number right now. Regardless, it’s a positive number, which makes participation more difficult.

Wait, I’m not done. It gets worse. If you’ve noticed, UGC varies in quality. Most of it, unsurprisingly, kind of sucks. Meaning that if you really want your site to take off, you have to make sure that the 5% of really good user-creators (of the 1% total user-creators) is a large enough pool of content to give your 10% of user-participators something to work with. It’s not much fun rating comments or videos when there’s only 3 decent items to choose from.

In short, community is hard, always has been, and it’s easier than ever to over-extend yourself into an area you can’t support.

“Monetization”

You know we’re in trouble when people start throwing this “monetization” word around. Seriously, never trust anyone who uses this word. They will lead you down the path to ruin.

There’s a rule in e-commerce that states that every step in a transaction costs you 99% of customers. This is to be expected, since clicking costs you nothing. Most clicks are exploratory. This rule is most useful is helping you weed out those get rich quick schemes, usually appearing in the form of affiliate deals.

Now, if you’re a one-person company with a strong niche media product, affiliate deals might actually work for you. However, if you’re a typical media company, run, don’t walk, away from any talk of affiliate programs. You will never make these profitable. Never.

They sound sexy, but walk through the buying process and apply your 1% rule to every click you make. Then do the math.

Do yourself a favor, sell ads and subscriptions to your magazine and nothing else. Stick to what you’re good at.

Post GoogTube deal, I think it’s pretty obvious that “bubble” is on everyone’s minds, but hey, the more voices in the anti-chorus, the more likely a couple of these booster idiots might hop off the bandwagon leading things back to the crapper, right?

This New York Times article today, It’s Not the People You Know. It’s Where You Are, is about as stupid a piece of Bubble 1.0 journalism I’ve seen in a long while. Randall Stross, baby, I’m calling you out.

Stross strongly implies that you better move your ass to the Valley if you really want your startup to succeed. That’s exactly what happened last time around, and there’s a legion of Bay Area middle class (teachers, blue collar workers, etc.) that would like to talk to you, Mr. Stross, and they don’t look happy.

Interestingly, I seem to remember that what defined Web 2.0 in it’s infancy was how the ideas were coming from everywhere but the Valley. But I guess that story’s been done to death by now.

Stross, how many startups do you think actually get funded by VCs? How many of those funded companies actually make it to the big payout? The odds are slim, my friend, and despite this boundless optimism you discovered under every rock (only anecdotally, I might add—let’s see a law firm go on the record that, “yeah, we’ll happily defer $20K in fees for some equity), eventually your creditors do come calling. And that’s when everything starts falling apart.

[I say all that having lived through the first bubble and having to leave San Francisco in 2004 because of it. No, I’m not happy about it at all.]

Sure, the investor money is flooding back, but given the typical 1 out of 10 success rate (probably lower these days with competition), do you really expect to see lots of payouts given that Google, Yahoo and a handful of media conglomerates are the only buyers? Without IPO as a standard exit strategy, there’s just not enough liquidity events to go around.

Google and Yahoo are maturing businesses whose missions conflict on the most basic of levels: solve users’s problems faster, but slow things down enough to extract more revenue. Eventually, both companies are going to reach an equilibrium with this contradiction, and that will open the door to the next wave of services. If you think about the massive size and depth of the Internet today, Google is really not in an unassailable position. And in fact, their size in a world of niches is an undeniable, exploitable weakness.

That means that very soon, Google and Yahoo will turn inward as they spend more and more time keeping their own huge houses in order. Media conglomerates, as public companies led by Net-naive executives, are going to be in precarious positions for the next 10 years. There will be spurts of buying, but long droughts as well. Private equity firms are faddish buyers and the market’s going to have IPO drymouth for a long long time.

So where’s a bright-eyed, money-grubbing startups to go? It’s not like they have business models—AdSense is a joke, a way to stave off the inevitable, but eventually even the inevitable comes to pass.

Divide average funding amounts by average burn rate and you’ve probably got a good bead on when this house of cards is going to start crumbling down.

It’s probably safe to say that this bubble will be more contained (for the very reasons Stross lays out). Meaning that if you’re actually serious about your startup, you might want to incorporate “bubble risk” in your business model and avoid the Valley entirely. If your idea is good, the money will come. If not, well … get a better idea.

The viability of your company, and hell, your future, might depend on it.

I’ve been meaning to post here for several weeks now, but haven’t had the time or energy. That’s what happens, I suppose, when life kicks into a different gear. Plus, I tend toward runs of blog-writing separated by long silences, anyway.

First off, I’m now gainfully employed. That’s right, I’m back in the game. I’m now the Online General Manager for Portland Monthly, Inc. and responsible for the online presences of its magazines Portland Monthly, Seattle Metropolitan, and Portland Bride & Groom, as well as any other publications it decides to launch. It’s a solid position at a young, successful company that gets the Web. Plus, I’m building everything from scratch. That means no legacy code, no outdated business models. Just the opportunity to build something fresh based on all the knowledge we’ve accumulated to this point in the Net’s evolution.

As a side note, I recently attended Webvisions06 in Portland, and let’s just say I’m excited to explore some of the ideas I heard there.

On a sobering note, just last Sunday, my friend Bill Goggins died near the end of the SF marathon. I got the chance to work with Bill at Wired. He started less than a year after me. I think he was editing copy about the time I transitioned out of copy edit to an editor position. Regardless, we did hunker down over copy on many occasions. Bill was an amazing guy. He was a challenging editor, very knowledgeable, thoughtful and kind—even while he was subtling bending me to his will. :) I was younger and more naive then; oftentimes overconfident (nay cocky?)—I think they nicknamed me “old man,” for my grumpiness. Bill took me in stride. He was pretty much unflappable. Despite our different styles, the guy was definitely growing on me.

My opinion of Bill radically changed after a night spent bar-hopping around SF with some co-workers. I think it’s true that you only see a certain side of people at work—generally, it’s the side best suited to the job. At work, Bill was thoughtful, precise and tough. He tempered this style (really necessary for a copy editor) with humor. The combination could get grating at times, since you knew 99 times out of a 100 you were going to lose to a guy whose smile never left his face. I don’t think Bill brought much to my attention that he hadn’t thoroughly worked over in his head. He was always prepared, that’s for sure.

Anyway, I have a terrible memory, so a night out drinking is already a total haze for me, and it’s amazing I can remember anything about it at all. But Bill’s sense of humor really shone outside of the confines of his job. Once you get to know Bill, the whole Bill, you start to wonder how the guy could jam such a sprawling, ebullient personality into such a tight job description as “copy editor.”

He was nicer, funnier, more geniune and honest than I’d thought a person possible. He sprung up into 3 dimensions for me that night. And I’m happy to hold onto whatever slippery shadows remain of that night in my head, for as long as I can.

It’s a wonder to me that Bill was able to maintain that personality through the years. Beyond whatever tough times he might have had, the ticking of the years wears all of us down, and I often wondered about how Bill would weather time. Beneath that shield of intellect, he seemed so delicate, with a personality like a bright-eyed child or flower. He was someone you wanted to protect, if only so you had an example of someone to look up to. I don’t think anyone will ever understand why Bill fell that day. Maybe his flame did burn twice as bright, maybe a flower’s bloom is only meant to last through Spring.

But I got a chance, albeit brief, to know him, and I’m so much the better for it. Thanks Bill.

Briefly following up on my previous notion of “unionizing” your user communities, Michael at TechCrunch posts about an issue between Flickr and a new competitor, Zooomr, regarding giving API access to a competing service. It’s a portability issue, really, about whether you should offer users an easy path to export/transfer their data.

Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield initially responded in their forums:

We’ve been extremely open and we have no problem with people building tools to export their data from Flickr (there are several already). There is no lock in.

With respect to granting a commercial API license to a direct competitor: we might not. ... And I don’t see that as malicious on our part: why should we burn bandwidth and CPU cycles sending stuff directly to their servers?

But this issue evidently sparked some internal debate, and Stewart soon modified his stance:

... this is something that we’ve never had any set policy on and this thread has sparked a lot of internal debate on the team: some people felt that it was unreasonable, some people felt like it didn’t matter since Flickr should win on the basis of being the best thing out there.

I actually had a change of heart and was convinced by Eric’s position that we definitely should approve requests from direct competitors as long as they do the same. That means (a) that they need to have a full and complete API and (b) be willing to give us access.

The reasoning here is partly just that “fair’s fair’ and more subtly, like a GPL license, it enforces user freedom down the chain. I think we’ll take this approach (still discussing it internally).

First, I think this is a fantastic example of how a company should react to community dischord . Even after being acquired by Yahoo, it’s pretty clear that the Flickr team has maintained its razor-like focus on its users (as evidenced by other examples Stewart mentions in that same thread). It also shows that often the “business of community” is about protecting your users over whatever internal concerns you might have.

Stewart’s “fair is fair” reciprocal API access may seem at first like a hedge, but in essence it’s about extending portability and benefiting all users. And that’s Flickr influencing the market in all of our interests (something cellphone carriers couldn’t do on their own). If Flickr does give Zooomr a commercial license, then that implies that both Flickr and Zooomr users now enjoy portability. Everybody wins.

Hmm, architecture is politics. :>

Just a few things I wanted to jot down today.

Does the Web Need Unions?
With the growth of online video, everyone’s looking for new ways to exploit its popularity. I think its current appeal is its focus on user-gen video—individual participation. Levelling the playing field is also fun—The Dixie Chicks have to compete for attention along with everyone’s funny little video clips. It’s a meritocracy the audience controls—and which the studios are negotiating an escape from even now.

Since studios have money, they believe they should get special treatment from the MySpaces and Youtube’s of the world, and will blur the lines between advertising and content to get it. I imagine that by the end of this year, we’re going to see a lot of “new features” and content deals from Web companies looking to capitalize on or “monetize” their popularity. But it will likely come at the expense of their users and the meritocracy.

Promoting studio content above others because they paid is like forcing regular users to use the servant’s door, and once the screen real estate tips past a certain ratio of paid to user-gen content, the community will begin to fall apart.

It’s a delicate balance, and I believe the Web companies would be best served by adopting a variation on the editorial guidelines for magazines set up by ASME. Users need to be protected, especially now that they’re your suppliers. You might even consider hiring someone as a “user representative”, like a union boss, to protect their interests.

Citizen Journalism: Misses not Hits
Mark Cuban’s invested in citizen journalism site sharesleuth.com (nothing live yet). This site sounds interesting. They will focus on stock fraud and executive malfeasance. I can definitely see a demand for this, or rather an obsession. But I wonder, given this example, whether the goals of citizen journalism might be very different than traditional journalism.

Journalism is a specialized job designed to create “news” for a (general or niche) public. I see citizen journalism being more of a community fueled by the stories that don’t quite make it into the papers: the inside pages, local incidents, people, city government, etc. Issues are driven (like online video above) by users, not by advertiser-driven business concerns. I’d bet that “citizen journalism” will be co-opted by newspaper companies within 2 to 3 years, it’s the perfect way to get their readership back.

Myspace: Here Today …
Michael at TechCrunch writes about some staggering MySpace stats (created by Paul Kedrosky). The thing that gets me about these figures is that I’m completely convinced that MySpace is a flash-in-the-pan, and that they will not be what they are now in 5 years.

What these numbers say to me is that: Kids are very comfortable living online; an Internet “hit” will soon dwarf a TV “hit” in terms of raw numbers; and that old media companies will continue to salivate over these properties, paying top dollar while failing to monetize them over their ever-shorter lifecycles.

So the clock is ticking for Fox, which had better bust a hump making some cash off MySpace, because the writing is already on the wall. I don’t think the site is still as popular with young kids as they think; it’s also being overrun with small businesses and spammers looking for customers on the cheap. A victim of its own success.

To me, MySpace represents the amazing fluidity of the Internet. It is not easy to create an audience that large, the medium has to be almost frictionless to support that. Of course, being frictionless means that your audience never truly stops. You may slow them down for a while, get them in orbit around your service, but eventually, they will escape your gravity and move on.

There are two truths that MySpace cannot contravert: New and Cool. The march of time erodes both, and soon all the kids will move on and create something even bigger and more spectacular.

Update: Fox announces that it’s outsourcing its ad biz to the highest bidder. Fox may have its own ambitions in the ad space, but I think this announcement makes it clear that they realize there is a (currently open) window to capitalize on MySpace’s popularity.

Cory at BoingBoing posts about how restrictive the music industry has been in limiting the evolution of legal music services, denying features like searching by artist. As the RIAA and its cohorts continue to stand their ground: kicking, punching and wrapping everything in sight with new flavors of DRM —like some bizarro-land Christmas presents you can’t actually open unless first stripping down to your skivvies, getting down on all fours in a dim, empty and windowless room, and peering through the one loosened corner with only your right eye—I wonder what impact this will have on the music culture at large, the listeners not the labels.

I suppose you can fall back on hubris and assume that no matter what happens, there will always be music consumers to sell to, but I don’t know. This is the digital world, and there’s always something new and disruptive coming down the pipe. Adaptation is the name of the game. Remember Netscape? Lycos? A thousand dot-coms? They were huge and now they’re not.

Just because you guys own music today, doesn’t mean you’ll own it tomorrow. Worse, I’m not sure you realize that your product is changing.

The kids are online, and they’re chatting, creating, sharing with each other, building their own digital personalities, ecologies. They are building homepages with their favorite bands integrated into a player on the page. They are blogging and posting cool mp3s to share. They are remixing and podcasting. They are downloading, ripping, and burning.

The consumer is evolving the market and you aren’t there.

First, I think it’s clear that this is a market. It’s just not one defined by profit motives; it is instead about individual obsessions and passions. The only real difference between markets and communities is that communities aren’t limited to trading in dollars. And that makes communities much more powerful, doesn’t it?

If I were a music executive today (or a shareholder), I’d be very worried whether the music market was even going to exist in 10 years. Will the music consumer still want what you’re trying to sell? Ownership and possession are very late-century American concepts in my opinion. Ubiquitous connectivity and cheap technology are slowly breaking down those ideas with consumers, even if they don’t completely realize it.

For example, combine two current trends, participatory remix culture and the celestial jukebox (i.e., the Net), and you’ve got a very powerful combination that doesn’t rely on the record industry we know today.

Be afraid.

I found this great free 3D figure modeling program the other day. It’s called Daz |Studio (http://www.daz3d.com/) and so far, I’m loving it.

I just wanted something to use as a digital mannequin to help me model figures for some drawings that I’m doing. I tried Poser, but I couldn’t figure it out. Why is it that so many 3D programs have to create some original “artistic” user interface? I honestly don’t care what your program looks like, I just care if it’s easy to use and produces good results.

Maybe I got lucky, but I found Daz pretty intuitive. The interface is more like a typical PC/Linux style program (I’ve used Lightwave in the distant past, and it kinda reminded me of that).  I was pretty easy to just knock about, clicking things and stumbling upon their functionality. In maybe an hour over the course of a few sessions playing around, I think I have the basics figured out, and have already created a useable rendering.

I am part of SMITH, an online magazine of personal stories, and we’ve been working on a serialized graphic novel based on reporter Anthony Lappé’s experiences in Iraq called Shooting War. Well, we had the good fortune to have BoingBoing link to us late today. Thank you Mark and the BoingBoingers!

Anyway, the server started having a fit almost immediately. I logged in and top had the server load at around 25 (highest I saw was 78), which is bad. I had already turned on the Wordpress Staticize caching plugin. (Oh Mommy.)

I quickly worked to resize the comic’s images, compressing them about 50% further. Then I realized I should offload all images entirely. So I signed up with Photobucket (thank you Web 2.0), and uploaded all the images to them, and rewrote the chapter pages, with the new image urls. Luckily, I already wrote a script to create the code for each chapter, so I only had to make a few tweaks, and then paste up the new code.

This seemed to placate the universe, as the load went down to about 15. The problem seemed to be MySQL (I’m guessing). Since Wordpress relies on MySQL for storage, I needed to see if there was a way to export a static html version of your site. I guess I was trying to get back to how Movable Type used to publish out html. I went looking for a plugin and damned if I didn’t find a better solution.

Elliot Beck wrote a plugin called Digg Defender. It rewrites requests that come with a referrer from the big sites (Slashdot, BoingBoing, Digg), and redirects them to the Coral Cache. What’s the Coral Cache? Yeah, I didn’t know either.
I tweaked the plugin to rewrite everything, since the BoingBoing link only went to the homepage, and everyone was clicking through 15-page chapters. (One things calm down, I’ll change it back to only rewrite certain referrers.)

So, within about two hours, and with almost no idea of what I would do, I’ve now got our site completely cached through free services on the Net. I love the Internet.

[Note: Each comic chapter was set up as a number of ‘pages’, using the ‘nextpage’ tag in Wordpress. I wonder if that adversely affected caching performance? I’m not sure, but may investigate later.]

UPDATE: I thought for a moment this morning that I’d spoken too soon. But I did what I had to do. Coral Cache is not perfect and we had an update to the site (a new chapter) to publish this morning, which took a few hours to show up properly. And there was a separate problem that required a MySQL restart.

After freaking out, and having friends calm me down (thank you Ted and Alex), I realized that I’d done the most important thing, keep the server up. There’s really nothing else to do when you get Boing’d or /.-ed, except wait it out.

Moving to a dedicated server would have taken a week at which point the Boing effect would be gone, and our server’s already pretty good and almost dedicated. Publishing a new chapter wasn’t a mistake really, but trying to do that while a cache is in effect is going to be messy.

Extra Tips for Digg Defender: Make sure you add lines in the digg-defender-phase-1.php file (to the if statement) so that you’re not rewriting any admin pages, or the login page, or maybe the comments-post page. Mine looks like this now:

if(
!strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],'wp-comments-post.php') &&
!strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],'/wp-login.php') &&
!strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],'/wp-admin/') &&
strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'Coral') === false ) {
$url = digg_defender_coralify('http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
header("Location: $url");
die();
}

Lately, I’ve begun digging into research and academic theory on craft as well as communities of practice for a possible project. The discussions and papers I’ve discovered so far have been very illuminating, and point to the tremendous value of thinking outside of the context of business and the marketplace.

I’d even go so far as to argue that because of the Web (blogs, search, etc.), businesses (of all sizes) have more of an opportunity to engage academia than ever before, and that the value and importance of academic research has grown as magazines and newspapers hone their focus on “sexy” articles (designed to attract readers to advertisers, which is after all, the business of their business).

It’s increasingly rare to find well-researched articles with depth in traditional media, and I’m not sure that situation will change in the future. For “street level” views, you can easily find online communities, blogs, etc. where real people are willing to dish the straight dope. For the 30,000 ft. view, we have better access to high-level academic papers and discussion.

There is still a broad gap between these two worlds, and it’s a bit of a shock coming to grips with the differences in vocabulary. But I believe you’re far better off blending the two extremes. Your perspective will certainly be better informed, and your discourse (and by extension your thinking) will be more accurate. I think sometimes we forget that words can be very precise, powerful tools—not just clay we mold to our individual social contexts.

The problem lies in the availability of tools to increase our capability to understand foreign vocabulary and the concepts built from it. That’s where the Wikipedia comes in. I don’t believe it had occurred to me in the past how well Wikipedia serves as that bridge, and it really stands as testament to the power of the product they’ve put together.

The press and many others, typically see Wikipedia as a reference product, a repository of knowledge, and it is that, of course—but is its value really tied up in some vague notion of “final authority”? Or has the concept of value in knowledge shifted to weigh participation and access more heavily, as more achievable and more useful than authority?

What’s critical to the Wikipedia experience, as I see it, is how easily I can slide among strange concepts and foreign words, very quickly accumulating a rudimentary understanding that serves as a gateway to new knowledge. Without the online component, the hyperlinking, I wouldn’t be able to overcome obstacles like learning new vocabulary. Without the human, participatory component, these ideas would not be fleshed out as completely and as currently as they are, and there would only be limited linking to different viewpoints and positions.

It’s like a Stargate to the universe of human ideas. There’s a million places it can take you, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll always be safe. Sometimes, you’ll run into danger, sometimes, you’ll screw up. So what? That’s what exploration and learning are all about.

I guess I’m suggesting that the Wikipedia’s “authority” is less of a problem that the media would have us believe. When you’re researching, you’ve already put yourself in a skeptical mindset as you work to accumulate information. It’s not authority that you’re after really, it’s completeness and currency. You’d like to pull together as much relevant, up-to-date information as you can—on which to formulate your own conclusions. You’re acting as your own authority.
In addition, this is casual, informal learning at a much higher level than we’ve seen before. It will be very interesting to see how this affects our ability to learn, as well as our definition of what learning means. In one sense, much of our early schooling is about “learning how to learn,” training our brains to navigate new concepts (At least, it used to be before Bush overhauled education, for the worse, IMO). Wikipedia helps make learning a life-long process.
For example, I don’t remember phone numbers anymore, since they’re all stored in my phone’s memory. What happens when I can quickly bone up on any topic (via cell phone, probably) within a few minutes? Helicopters, Carrie-Anne Moss and The Matrix, anyone?

I just finished reading a NYTimes article today about a wiki-powered shopping site, Shopwiki, brought to you by two guys from Doubleclick and Amazon. I think I see that bubble, people. ;)

I really doubt this will ever get off the ground. The whole wiki phenomena is very young, even Wikipedia, the granddaddy, is still growing into itself. The idea that people are going to write, write, write so these guys can make money is typical 1.0 thinking. There’s very little unique value to be had here.

Part of what characterizes the 2nd gen sites is the “lazyweb” effect, people writing up cool hacks, mashups and apps that make things easier and more fun. Shopwiki doesn’t do either of those things. It simply assumes that X spent marketing dollars = Y driven traffic = Z generated content. That’s usually a slippery slope calcuation, since there’s also N new apps competing for visitor attention, which increases X, which bankrupts company A.

You may feel like disputing that, but you’re gonna have a harder time dealing with problem #2: the product cycle. With a typical manufacturer product cycle of 12-18 months, probably less, Shopwiki will have to refresh ALL of its content on a regular basis in order to stay relevant. The site will only be as good as its last 12 months of contributions.

Amazon is apparently blind to this problem, since their database is overflowing with old products they don’t even carry. This is the most annoying aspect of Amazon, IMO, and it shows a willingness to put sellers (retail, auctions, etc.) ahead of the needs of shoppers.

Shopwiki is going to be mainly populated with stub entries that are never fully fleshed out before they’re abandoned, colored entries by manufacturers and retailers (SEO will drive this), and their editorial product guides, which they pay for and don’t scale. Even mature, there’s nothing here but some pageviews to put Adsense ads on.

I suspect the founders know this. I will bet their whole “consumer-friendly” business model falls off in tatters within six months, and the company reorgs as a SEO company.

My favorite quote in the article: “All of us have our own little thing we’re into,” he said. “Mine is Ping-Pong. I don’t need 1,000 people coming to the Ping-Pong area of the site to make it work. If there are three people in the country who read it and comment on it, we’re in good shape.”

Dude, if you were really “into” Ping-Pong, as you say, you’d call it table tennis.

Scott Rafer asked me to create some graphics for a campaign he’s launching against Google (and apparently AOL, too now) pre-emptively stripping out (“simplifying”) web pages for mobile phones through their mobile search. Of course, Google’s not the first company to have ever heard of the mobile web (surprise!) and Rafer among thousands of others, already have mobile versions of their sites—with advertising—that Google is running roughshod over.

Way not cool. I guess it’s hard to “do no evil” when you’re stomping around the cybersphere in size 32,000 shoes.

I did this as a favor to Scott, since although I’ve never met him, we have mutual friends in common, and I’m a big believer in karma (in lieu of actual social networking :).

The following three graphics are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

I’ve been noodling kottke’s nod to Caterina’s lament that: “It’s a bad time to start a company”. It hasn’t been sitting right with me—but then, I have the luxury of not being in the Bay Area, so a boomlet won’t affect me much. Plus, it’s not fair for me to color her argument on the basis that she sold Flickr to Yahoo!

So, I decided this morning that I agree with her, but for very different reasons. It’s a bad time to start a [VC-funded] [Internet] company.

Despite everything you read, definitions have changed. The words “company” and “start” don’t mean what they used to.

An Internet company, especially a Web company, should be a group of friends/colleagues who complement each other. A team that shares some enthusiasm for a particular subject, a goal, and has fun building toward it. Anything and anyone else is dead weight at this point. You can’t make money until you have a great product.

If you’re going to tack on a corporate structure, make it as light as possible, cause it’s not really the point, and won’t be for a while. (You can always change it later. That’s what lawyers are for, after all.)

Taking VC funding is about the same as going public: it’s a big fricking deal and will radically change your little company’s focus. It’s not something to be taken lightly, and if you really need it, you’re in bigger trouble than you probably think.

Putting “VC” in the equation pretty much kills whatever shot you had at building something great. It makes you focus on creating returns for investors, and not on creating a great product.

On the Internet, No One Knows You’re A Dog
My good friend Ted started Dogster by himself. The idea of web pages for dogs is hilarious, and a 100% stupid idea for a business. It doesn’t make any sense, and no sane business person would even consider it.

But he built it anyway, played with it, tweaked it, and steadily attracted users. Soon, he had a community on his hands. He started asking it questions, he learned about it, and he realized that he might actually have a business here.

There’s a lot of advertising in Dogster’s business model right now, but there’s also a lot of other interesting opportunities that the Dogster team is beginning to discover with the help of its community.

What this all means to me is that I think it’s a great time to start an Internet “project”, if you’ve got the skills to pull it off between you and your friends. It doesn’t have to be industrial strength, just get it up and running. You will learn a lot along the way. If you lack skills, get to learning.

Screw the VCs, screw the corporate structures. Screw getting rich. If you can’t get obsessively excited about your product, then what chance do you really have of creating something worthwhile?

Derek posted a measured reaction to a SXSW panel that devolved into an MPAA hate-fest, arguably deservedly so. His take: the movie industry (and others) have evolved a protective, mucus-like litigative layer designed to stem the onslaught of change.

Movies are buried in this goop, preventing any real innovation, while music was blind-sided early on, preventing its “lock down” and allowing consumers to determine their own definition of “fair use,” which arguably fertilized the nascent portable music player market, which led to the iPod, which led to the iTunes store and a billion dollar market for digital tunes.

We hear this “consumers” are in control refrain every day, but music may be the perfect example of how it happens and how much consumers really need to be in control for innovation and new markets to emerge.

Hello, my name is Tim, and I am a pirate

The one point that I disagree with in Derek’s post is that consumers aren’t “pirates” or a “real threat”. I think we are. We’re the biggest threat these industries have ever seen. We’re pirates and we’re going to ransack their towns and villages. We will not stop, we will give no quarter, and we are going to win.

What I mean is that the MPAA can whine all they want about us “pirates” now, but in a few years they will be out and we will be in, and everyone will be talking about those “pioneers” in digital content and the fantastic battles of the late 90s and early 00s.

The reason I’m a pirate is simple: I determine what my time is worth; I determine who I let in and why. Sometimes, I spend valuable time with my favorite bands. Sometimes, I put on an album by an unfamiliar artist in the background while I work. Sometimes I pay, sometimes I don’t.

The industry used to decide this for me: intimate time was a $9.99 LP, casual time was free radio or a special promotion. They liked deciding for me; it fits easily on a spreadsheet. They could make charts and projections; they could make a lot of money.

But now, I’m writing the rules of their economic model, and they are deservedly freaked out. They believe that we should understand and accept their spreadsheet. They maintain that they have a standard of living that they’ve become accustomed to, and we should respect that.

We give no quarter

I am not going to abdicate responsibility here: I am the pirate (today). I didn’t used to be, but I watched and I learned. The capitalism that media execs espouse gave me skills, same as them.

I began to understand the value of promotion. I saw that CDs could be given away in the mail (thanks, AOL). I got a taste of the auction market (thanks, eBay). I could download files fast and furious, and immediately cater to a whim (thanks, Web & P2P).

Eventually, and without even realizing it, I became aware that I could create my own market for music. A market of one, defined and controlled by me.

What do think the Web is anyway? It’s a few hundred million unique user markets. The vast majority of Web sites are free simply because it’s so difficult to determine pricing based on individual markets. Text advertising is a billion dollar business because it addresses the market of one (the click-through).

The reason we’re battling today is not because of changing definitions of fair use or copyright. We are battling for control of the economic model: who gets to decide what a song or a movie is worth. Industry fights copyright and fair use battles because they feel like they can’t give ground. Why they feel compelled to bother with traditional warfare strategies is beyond me.

We are pirates. We’re not going to play by their rules. We’re not even going to fight. We are simply going to open our wallets, or we’re not. That’s it.

One final question

If you were a media exec, you’d probably be willing to let consumers give you feedback, you might even let them in on the development process, guiding you towards popular products. But would you let them set pricing on your new baby?

Until you’re ready to say yes, you’re living on borrow time. We’re pirates, and we’re coming for you.

If you’re interested, check out my new magazine, Helloindie. It’s essentially an indie handmade shopping magazine. It’s going to be chock full of the most unique, amazing products from small, independent designers from around the country (maybe even the world). The first issue is shaping up nicely, and we’re about to start putting the word out far and wide.

This is an independent magazine, with an independent spirit. Not your typical soulless big corporate publishing mag. This mag’s about real people, making uniquely great things. And we’re making it West-Coast style, from our HQ in crafty mecca Portland, OR.

I hope you’ll check us out.

Better than watching the refs spoil a decent game. Better than the Stones who honestly looked a little bewildered and lost at time. Better than John Madden. Yes, thank the stars for Puppy Bowl II.

I like shopping, exploring bookstores. I like looking for interesting books—interesting specimens of printed matter. See, now that I can easily get just about any book in the world shipped to me, I find that the quality of the physical object matters more to me.

But even though I have one of the nation’s great bookstores at my disposal, Powell’s, there’s something lacking the experience. Now, I’m just postulating here, but it seems there’s a balance that any retail store needs to strike between the inventory it stocks and experience it offers. With books, you have to warehouse (stock) many books on a wide variety of topics in order to satisfy your customers. At the same time, you need to find some room to create a shopping experience through which you can promote those books to customers.

Big chains like Barnes & Noble simply optimize their stock on sales data, leaving plenty of room to promote the “experience”. Since they’re large, this data allows them to hone their stock to only the titles they know will really sell. Smaller stores don’t have access to a large set of sales data, and they usually recoil at the prospect of optimizing toward lowest common denominator best sellers and the like.

This is of course a self-fulfilling prophecy in the retail space: you can’t sell what you don’t stock. So retailers can’t accurately explore their “long tail” without dedicating the majority of their space to warehousing titles. And since new titles are continually appearing, I imagine it’s very difficult to get any sense of a tail at all – you just can’t afford to waste time or space promoting older niche titles.

So I was wondering, what if Amazon, who probably has the largest and deepest book-related data set in the world, sold that data as a service to bookstores looking to optimize their inventories on a vector other than sales?

How a book sells is not necessarily the best indicator to how well it belongs in your inventory. How authoritative is it? How well does it do as it ages in your back catalog? How does it relate to the other titles you stock, your speciality, clientele, etc.?

I imagine that you could build a pretty amazing tool using this data, data that we couldn’t have collected before the advent of the Internet and Amazon, and which led to the decline of retail bookstores in the first place. So maybe, this is just a natural stage in the evolution of the bookstore, after all, and in a few years, we’ll all be marvelling at how wonderful our local bookshops (admittedly, the ones that are left) have become.
Silver lining, anyone?