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Monday, May 12, 2003 |
Interfaces and habits.
It seems kind of unfair, doesn't it? First, developers have to understand and accommodate users' habits. Then we have to deliver solutions that add value while surreptitiously encouraging users to adopt better habits. Finally, we have to bring to the surface, examine, and modify our own deeply-ingrained habits. That's a painful and psychologically hard thing to do. But happy users are not the only reward. The habit of breaking habits will serve you well. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]
... [Jon's Radio]
I just hope one day we'll stop making ONE user interface for software and realize that people are different. We've started off with the premise that there should be at least THREE levels of user experience offered in any product - beginning level, average level and a "nerd's like us" approach.
 back from portofino. A three day trip to Italy left me connectionless, but I did get married again. Film at 11. [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
Congradulations to Adam and his wife. There's nothing more romantic than a second wedding - restating your vows.
Whoa, big fella.. 2,000 GB FireWire hard drive
 "Those who need a lot of storage space: a 2,000 GB FireWire external hard drive from Googie. Mainly aimed at the video editing and desktop publishing markets, and those with insanely huge MP3 collections." [via Gizmodo]
[nick gaydos > thynk]
Here's a nice toy for the nerd in all of us. A 2 terrabyte firewire hard drive. Perfect for JahShaka, Avid, Discreet or any other sort of high end multimedia production work.
They charge about $5 a gig, while I thought hard drive prices were down to about $2 a gig, but I guess that's what you pay for - for simple. elegant plug-n-pay.
I just like the idea of a 2 terrabyte hard drive. That's 2,000 gigs.
Combine that with my 2.6 Ghz P4 - with 1G of RAM, nVidia card, and 400Mhz bus - and we're talking mainframe power folks.
Finally enough elbow room to do some multimedia.
Sony puts price on Screenblast [CNET News.com]
Sony Pictures Digital said Monday that it developed a new subscription version of its Screenblast software, which lets people edit, enhance and share digital videos, photos or music files via the PC. People can sign up for a free limited membership or pay an introductory price of $49.95 annually for an enhanced service, which will be $89.95 a year regularly. With the for-fee service, people can create customized videos or photo albums and have the option to embed them into their Web site or Web log, for example. Last November, the Culver City, Calif.-based company started selling its Screenblast Movie Studio and Screenblast Music Studio in retail outlets nationwide, including Best Buy, CompUSA, Micro Center, Sony Style and Sony Gallery. The programs previously had been available only through download. [CNet]
This is a big deal in my world. I've been monitoring and trying out Screenblast over the past couple of years - watching Sony struggle. Somewhere along the line they decided that they'd buy these outdated, decrepit programs - as their video, audio and image editing software.
They apparently still think that what they've got is of some value - as they're pushing it in retail now.
The model is totally right on. The implementation sucks.
  First they got all hung up in fancy Flash interfaces which just got in the way (in that regard - Jakob Neilson is right.) Clearly nobody was going there and this huge potential was being squandered - so a couple of things happened. First they created a similar site - called ImageStation - which is the same - but for photos. Bundled with digital cameras now.
Then they simplified ScreenBlast and 'bought' the products (which they apparently were only licensing before.) They they came up with this push into retail, and now they're charging for it. If ONLY the software was on-line, multi-user based, came with built-in content, supporting open standards and their community of end-users, acted like a web service and did all the things that Jeremy Allaire and myself have been suggesting.
THEN we'd have an example of what on-line creativity will be like - in the future.
CIA hiring multimedia geek. The CIA is looking to hire a Macromedia Director developer. With Top Secret clearance. For $100K/year. Perhaps there is a burning need for animated brochureware to train new agents? Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
This reminds of my Pentagon story. I showup at an early Pentagon Mac User's group meeting (this was in 1986) to show them VideoWorks and GraphicWorks. They seemed to grok it - but it was when they saw Maze Wars - our networked videogame - that they went crazy!
"Wait - a minute you mean we can connect our Macs together and create animations that be shared across the network?" they asked. Yes - I replied.
"So we could have one Mac be the missle, one Mac be the aircraft, another Mac be the target!" They were stoked.
I slowly eased my way out of that room and never returned.
 Gatherings.
Mark Carey: Technorati as a Reputation System. He also says GlobeAlive is a conversational search engine.
[The Doc Searls Weblog]
I think that Technorati has the potential to become a great reputation system. In its current form, it reports the number of inbound links and inbound blogs. While simple, this provides a good measure of how these blogs are viewed by others. Sebastien Paquet suggested using this data as a way to filter comments in blogs. Readers would be able to set an "number of inbound blogs" threshold. So if I only value comments from bloggers with 10 inbound blogs, the comment listing would be filtered accordingly. And if I want to see all comments, I can do that to (I think that is important). In another example, today Joi Ito has created a script that displays recent inbound blogs in the sidebar of his blog -- very cool. This brings to mind the potential for many different possibilities. It becomes somewhat of a peer-to-peer reputation system, like saying "here's waht these people are saying about me...and if you don't believe me, click on the link and visit their site so you can read for yourself. And not only that, 'Joe', who thinks I am great, has 100 blogs linking to him, so he has a pretty reputation himself."
Another possibility, that I thought of, was inspired by Google's PageRank system. Right now, Technorati treats all links as equal. This works, but a more accurate picture of reputation would take into account the reputation of those who are linking to you. So, if someone with 1000 inbound links makes a link to my blog, that should contribute more to my reputation that someone with zero inbound links. I'm no mathematician, but here is a simple equation that could be used to determine your Cosmos Score: For every link you get from a blog with zero or one inbound blog, you get 1 point. If the blog linking to you has 2 inbound blogs, you get 2 points added to your score, and so on. This gives weighting to your inbound blogs that is proportional to the reputation of those linking to you. Also borrowing from the PageRank scheme, this could be taken a bit farther. If a blog has 1000 inbound blogs, in our current equation, every blog that it links to get 1000 points, whether there are 1 or 100 outbound links. But if a blog with 1000 inbound blogs decides to link to only 10 blogs, isn't that a stronger "reputation vote" that if there were 1000 outbound links.
The more outbound links, the value of these reputation votes gets diluted. To account for this, points can be divided by the number of going links. In this example, if the 1000-point blog links only to 10 blogs, each outbound blog would receive 1000 / 10 = 100 incremental points to their Cosmos score. Finally, scripts like Ito's could be used to display your score on your page, and becuase Technorati updates links so fast, your score would change as soon as links are created. The real power in this, in my opinion, would be for a similar marketplace reputation system, a strong basis for a new social marketplace. [ Web Dawn]
Mark also sees comments morphing into conversations (that's what ThreadsML is all about!) I can think of a few other Marks who share the same views. :-)
Blog Aggregator Intl. My good friend Giuseppe Granieri has opened an international version of his blog aggregator I described back in March.
It's a very experimental and totally manual aggregator (meaning that you have to visit a page to notify each post) but I must say that the Italian version has so far been very successful and useful. In some way it proves that if there is a good motivation (in this case visibility and participating to an interesting community), people do add useful metadata to their posts.
What is now totally manual will soon become automagic using ENT and a topicroll for Radio and Movable Type users. You can also subscribe to the RSS summary feed. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
The world of aggregators moves forward.
My Progress. Francois pinged me via IM tonight and asked me how I was doing and how the "big project" was coming along. Answer? Slowly. But not in that "slowly" meaning that it's being put off, just slowly in that I've been dealing with non-computer issues such as finding a place to work, and traveling, etc. Things are starting to move along.
Two weeks ago I quit my job in part to focus on the development of mobile internet services. The idea is to work on some of the ideas I've had and throw them online to see what sticks. There's really nothing I'm working on that I haven't written about here, actually, I'm a one-trick pony like that. The goal is to see what happens - if I can somehow make a business of these projects, I think that would rock. If not (and most likely not), then the stuff that's online will serve as a live example of my work in the mobile area to use to find work as a consultant, or if all else fails, as an employee at some cool mobile-tech focused company.
But I'm not just slapping stuff online (just yet - I'm getting to the frustration point of just going back to old habits). I'm trying to concentrate on the tools that will be in demand in the industry (read: XML, Cocoon, J2ME, Symbian, Jabber) and on areas where I can do something interesting and unique. I'm also constantly thinking about how to make the stuff I'm doing scalable so that 10s of millions of mobile phone users could play with it without having problems - or at the minimum, how a bunch of people could access the service with just the hardware I'm using now. :-)
Anyways, I've filled up a dozen outline documents of different ideas - gone off in a bunch of different directions before coming back and focusing on a much smaller area so as to get something up and running *soon*. Then I'll learn from that and expand as I can. It's really a learning process from every angle - technology, business, personal. And it's all just getting started. Imagine how mind blowing it's been for me for the past week or so to not having divide my mind up into "work" and "personal projects". I'm now focused 24 hours a day on the same thoughts. It took me a day or so just to organize my brain around what I was doing and how.
So anyways that's where I'm at. My blogging is definitely suffering a bit as I concentrate my efforts on other things, but I'm a "daily poster" so you'll see at least a few thoughts from me here every 24 hours or so.
And that's this one's for today. ;-)
-Russ Comment
[Russell Beattie Notebook]
Russ was one of the first names I saw in my referer log last summer when I first started blogging. It's been fascinating to watch his metamorphosis. I also encouraged him in his mobile platform ideas and am anxiously awaiting teh delivery - of anything.
Anyway - if I had the money - I'd hire him tomorrow. We should alll support and encourage Russ - 'cause what he's doing is needed.
Microsoft and Apple exchange barbs in Markoff's column in today's NY Times. "We only showed glimpses of the future of Longhorn," said a Microsoft spokesman. "Wait until the fall when we'll go into more detail at the Professional Developers Conference." [Scripting News]
This is a precursor of things to come.
Apple is leading the world of digital lifestyles - taking a pre-emptive stab at iLife.
Needless to say - this is what Longhorn is all about.
As these two dinosaurs battle it out - remember that it was the small furry creatures that survived the ice age. We need to build our own People's mesh - to have balance between these two BigCos.
Dave Winer says that the Semantic Web is overhyped. I'd say it's worse than that. The whole metadata movement is overhyped. Folks are always trying to get me to type in some metadata. Look at Microsoft Office from a few years ago. It tried to get me to enter in more information so that it'd be easier to search for documents.
Problem is, I've never used those features. Past behavior is a good predictor of future behavior, so I doubt I'll ever enter metadata for anything.
So, the semantic web is dead on delivery for me. Hell, I had a tough enough time trying to convince past employers to use meta tags. Ain't gonna happen.
Now, can someone release a pre-processor that'll add good meta data before you post? That's a more interesting idea. Imagine if Google put something on your machine that made it even easier to become part of Google's index (and made Google's index even better).
I'd love to be convinced why I'm wrong.
[The Scobleizer Weblog]
LiveTopics is a simple "pre-processor" which works for me. The thing about all this "hype" is that CERTAIN PEOPLE just don't understand that OTHER PEOPLE wanna do things THEIR way. Whether you call it the semantic web, agents, topics or smart software - this train is leaving the station.
Over the next 2 years - some real-world examples will appear which will put to rest - forever - any complaints over the 'semantic web'. I've been trolling the lists, trying to listen and understand the ideas and efforts going on. Many brilliant people say lots of things, but it takes real code - like k-collector - to get over the hype.
The W3C is on a road show, standards efforts are needed and despite lots of negative energy being thrown at them - I think these RDF folks are in it for the long haul.
Technorati API.
Technorati API 0.9. I'm proud to announce the first public release of the Technorati API, the application programming interface to Technorati's weblog index and search engine. [Sifry's Alerts]
Remember all that blogspace innovation that happened with Google's API. Double that.
[Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
Congradulations to Dave Sifry. Not only has he just given birth to an amazing piece of technology (which enhances what he's ALREADY given to the community), but he's also just launched his "day job" product (which I'm about to go purchase one for me) and his wife is about to give birth - as well.
Lots more later on this as examples start to appear. I myself am designing a blogger toolkit for Laszlo - which will enable any developer to utilize the Laszlo UI system for............. [insert here]
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