chris-on-the-web

Welcome new hook_module_implements_alter

2012-01-01T12:24:00.000-08:00

Introduction

Whilst trying to debug something in Drupal 7, I came across a nice new hook a while back. hook_module_implements_alter allows you to hook into any calls to module_implements. You get to find out which hook is being called, and as a bonus to you get to see which modules are returning implementations for the hook and block them if you so wish.

Why is this useful?

I have to admit that this doesn't appear immediately useful, however Jamie has already described very well how you can use this hook. In very quick summary if a module is doing something in a hook that you don't want it to do, you can intervene, you can step in block it and if necessary provide your own implementation, the post I have linked to provides a good explanation of this.

There are other ways in which this hook may be useful, brutally simple to start with is just to quickly find out which hooks are being called for a page request and which modules are returning implementations for them.



function {mymodule}_module_implements_alter(&$implementations, $hook) {  
  drupal_set_message("<pre>" . print_r($hook,true) . "</pre>");
  drupal_set_message("<pre>" . print_r($implementations,true) . "</pre>");
}

This will naturally print a long list, which can be useful in emergencies, this hook could be used for more sophisticated debugging.

Drupal taxonomy manager module

2011-12-27T03:03:00.000-08:00

Introduction

I am going to start using this blog to record more technical stuff and ideas, particularly Drupal related, sometimes just random thoughts or comments sometimes, more heavyweight. Hopefully if I tag well and re-organise the blog it should be possible to keep track of various disparate threads and ideas.

Drupal admin is still somewhat awkward in areas, especially in areas like menus and taxonomy where an incredible amount of functionality and a strong api is hampered by administration difficulties in some cases. Managing taxonomies in the administration interface is prime example.

The Taxonomy manager module is a terrific administration module that brings the regular administration of taxonomies forwards in leaps and bounds.

The module

The module has worked well for me in two different scenarios so far, firstly in populating and administrating taxonomies it is far far easier to use than the default Drupal administration. In a few cases I have been able to use this module where I would normally consider populating a taxonomy programmatically. Secondly in the case of a programmatically populated taxonomy that had a huge number of entries normal Drupal admin crashed on display in my web-browser. The taxonomy manager module gracefully handled the display with paging.

Programmer working hours (is 9-5 enough?)

2011-10-30T11:46:00.000-07:00

This is an old post pulled from another blog for preservation

Introduction

A while ago I heard the phrase "if they want to work 9-5 then why not just work in a shop?" applied to programmers, the implication being that programming is not a 9-5 kind of job. I have been thinking about this on and off and discussing with people when I get the opportunity, apart from the fact that many people in shops work very long hours there are a number of problems with what was being suggested here.

My thoughts

Computer programming is undoubtedly one of those professions where people are often expected to work long hours, usually without extra reward. A major problem is that we often don't know for sure how long something is going to take (more on why this is in a later post). Another problem is that there are many times where there is a shortage of staff. So many times programmers are expected to work long hours to address these two problems, and many programmers are prepared to put the time in. Sometimes however this doesn't work out, sometimes the programmer who is happily prepared to pull the occasional all-nighters in company X leaves company Y because of long working hours, what is the difference?
Here is one observation or possible reason: programmers like to feel they have some autonomy over what they are producing, they like to understand the reason they doing something and feel that it makes sense. Programmers don't like repeating their work for no good reason, spending long hours working on something that experience tells them will never be used or repeatedly patching and fixing something that they know full well (and will happily tell anyone who will listen) needs to be re-factored and repaired properly. Programmers may be resilient to a lot of the aforementioned woe if it occurs within normal working hours (somebody else is effectively footing the bill, and obeying orders is the path of least resistance), but if the wasted work that they cannot avoid means they also have to work extra hours then those hours hurt, that lost weekend bites deep.

My conclusion

I actually think that programming is a job that is hard to achieve with a 9-5 mentality, but that the hours outside the 9-5 are what people put in themselves, the things that programmers do for a hobby or to keep up to date with technology changes. Given the space many programmers will do things themselves and extend their own skills and knowledge in a way that ultimately benefits the companies they are working for. Sometimes programmers given appropriate autonomy will even extend part of what they do at work into this extra space.
Many programmers work in a challenging environment of constant change, it is hard to manage this kind of career on a 9-5 basis. You would assume that a language interpretor who gets paid 9-5 doesn't switch off and never use the foreign language outside of work (if he did it would be hard to maintain the level of skill required), I believe that programming is a similar profession.

MySql Definer problems

2011-10-30T06:29:00.000-07:00

This is an old post pulled from another blog for preservation

Recently whilst moving a legacy application, I had to make it more secure. In trying to make the database more secure I ran into one particular error in some of our Java code java.sql.BatchUpdateException: The user specified as a definer ('root'@'%') does not exist

The definer ('root'@'%') is the root of my problem (pardon the pun). Our application was accessing MySql as root user (so a compromised application could take control of all the databases on the server), even worse having root@% as a user in the database means that root access is not just restricted to local access.

Having given the application it's own user and remove root access from anywhere everything was running fine until we hit a page activated a trigger. Definers appear in a number of places in MySql including triggers, stored procedures and views (not sure what if any problems occur with a view if the defined no longer exists but will make a point to find out). My problem was an easy fix there was just one trigger that needed altering.

Although I have not had to yet, next time I run into this problem I would be looking to take an approach more similar to this one somewhere in that post or the comments there should be a working solution there to remove the definers from a MySql dump. I assume (would check) that the default definer if set by MySql would be the user credentials used to load the database again.

Fortunately the problem was spotted on a test server first.

Turning Chinese, no such thing as a standard search?

2011-08-21T05:28:00.000-07:00

Short but sweet, this one. I have already noticed the filtering bubble on one or two sites that I use, particularly I increasingly get the "Chinese influence". Because of my interest in Chinese language, language learning related things and particularly Chinese related things and people I get increasingly connected to Chinese things and Chinese people. This is actually starting to become a hindrance, from the point of view of some services the granularity of what I may be interested in Chinesewise is pretty low. For example I can usually work out why Linkedin is suggesting I want to link with most of its suggestions, however on more than one occasion now it throws in a random Chinese person, who I have not worked with, isn't interested in the same things as me (technology or otherwise) and isn't even geographically that close (although to be fair UK rather than China is somewhat closer than it could be).

How many ways, are decisions about what I see being influenced by what is on my profile? On one site in particular I seem to get a suspiciously high number of adverts regarding hair restoring products and eye-care/laser treatment/optician related links. I don't search for these things, but it wouldn't take much processing to target me based on my follically challenged, bespectacled profile picture.

Once we wrote content for people to read, then wrote content for machines to read, now write content for people that machines may decide they want to read.

The thing I find really interesting however is that, if you are considering search engine optimisation you also increasingly need to consider the profile of the person who is doing the searching, because all search results are not equal. Perhaps even more worryingly increasingly more of our lives are being determined by computer algorithms, we are moving closer to time when algorithms control the world.

Getting around DNS

2011-08-14T01:24:00.000-07:00

This is an old post pulled from another site (for preservation)

Jotting this down really, because it is the type of related problem that crops up every now and again and sometimes if my brain is not firing on all cylinders I get stumped for a while.

The problem

Really wanted to check out an open-source project NOW yet svn checkout couldn't resolve the host for the repository. My PC can't find the DNS, other PCs on our network can't find it, it was there yesterday (or rather it was there for me at home).

The solution

First checked that the site was available for some people by checking on http://downforeveryoneorjustme.org/ apparently it is just me (and a few others I guess). Next I need an IP address so searched in Google for sites that give IP address if you know the DNS (because I can't do this for myself right now), first one couldn't find it (down for them also it seems), the second one gave me an IP address(phew)Next problem is that the IP address just takes me to the server for their hosting company, so I need to add an entry in my own hosts file (/etc/hosts) on my Linux system and another entry for the svn. address I was originally trying to use there.Bingo now my PC knows how to find their server and make the request in a way that takes me to the pages and data I want (using the expected host).In the past have also resorted to trying different DNS servers (opendns or googledns)Additional later note: and of course I could always get a command-line on a remote server somewhere (we have a client server in Hong Kong for example) and use that location to do my investigation from.

JavaScript

2011-08-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

This is an old post pulled from another site (for preservation)

JavaScript has always been an important programming language for me, I use the term programming language rather than scripting language deliberately. Now I am taking the time to rationalise the technologies that I use and develop in (develop my skills in), I have to say that JavaScript is part of the core. JavaScript has often been associated with the web-browser and treated there as something to add a little bit of visual whiz-bang or tie together a few things that you might want to do in the browser that are not covered in standard HTML. bandwidth, performance, the danger of JavaScript being turned off, the single execution thread ("a script on this page appears to be busy") and other factors have contributed to a general feeling of "not wanting to do too much in JavaScript".These days performance appears to be much less of a problem, Linux on a PC emulator running in your browser for example. The single execution thread blocking problem is solved with HTML5 web workers. Various libraries from JQuery to Extjs allow you to create an interface entirely in JavaScript. You can build sophisticated mobile applications using Phonegap and Titanium.I feel that as more people develop for HTML5 factors like the scriptable video and SVG and going to drive a lot more development in JavaScript and of-course applications like node.js are continue to raise the profile of JavaScript in other areas. Something that has me really excited though and something I will definitely want to play with when I get a nice stretch of time is Quake2 in JavaScript. This project is based on Jake2 which was a Java port of the open sourced Quake2 code that did leave me with mixed feelings (the code very much looked like a conversion from C to Java mostly via implementing a bunch of static classes), however a long time ago I had some fun writing a mod and experimenting with the original Quake source code. The project looks like it needs a bit of effort to build but I am looking forward to enjoying that at some point.

Moving some posts in here

2011-08-13T03:19:00.001-07:00

I recently started posting some random thoughts, comments etc, mostly about techie stuff else where. i think they are better posted here so I will drag those four articles into this blog shortly

Again the purpose of this blog is mainly just to collect together things I might want to come back to, being online it is accessible anywhere, and although nobody else reads it, it helps me to focus by knowing that in theory they can.

Dropbox, more cross appliance goodness

2011-06-25T10:36:00.000-07:00

Another short but sweet, after my last post about the Kindle I reaslized I had forgot to mention dropbox. Definitely worthy of a mention in the same thought as again I have had a wonderful experience from the service. Not only does drop box keep files synced and available for me across a number of devices it also provides extra functionality on my Ipod Touch, I can choose to save files there of various different types, actually open them etc. etc.

Now I am starting to sound like an advert for Kindle and Dropbox, have to think of something a bit gloomier and more negative for my next post.

Whispersync and Kindle

2011-06-12T13:46:00.000-07:00

Short but but sweet post this one, a while ago I bought a Kindle for my wife, she loves reading and loves books and always said she wasn't interested in Ebook readers. Well she grudgingly decided to try her new present and now a few months later there is no going back. The Kindle2 was a big big hit.

I don't have a Kindle of my own but have played with one a bit (when I am allowed ;)) and it is an excellent device in my opinion. Something else has impressed me even more though and that is the Whispersync technology. Our Kindle is attached to our Amazon account and I bought a few books for myself and installed the kindle application on my Ipod touch and Android Phone.
I haven't worked out exactly what the syncing does, I don't need to it just works. Very occasionally I pop-up just confirms that I want to jump to the last place I was in a book on another device but that is usually reference books where I am jumping around a lot. Basically it just works, nice one Amazon.

I am not suggesting that reading a book on a phone or Ipod is as good as reading it on the Kindle but it is very nice to be able to pick up reading where you left off if you miss or bus or for some other reason you suddenly have some unexpected free time on your hands and not many options.

Be interesting to see whether Apples new cloud thing works as smoothly, even if it does though Amazon where there first in my humble opinion.

Fractured Identities

2011-05-30T06:19:00.000-07:00

I am back again, I think this blog is going to be updated much more frequently, I have a building pressure of thoughts to offload in this private (mostly) space. I re-read some of the material I posted a long time again and it is a very useful review process, so time to start dumping more half-baked thoughts and seeing what happens in my head.

Something that has bothered me for a long time and something I am going to think about in more detail for a while is on-line presence of the individual. A couple of weeks ago I went back to the place where I went to school and met up again with some guys I originally knew from over two decades ago. We meet up approximately once a year or so and have one or two shared interests in common even though we have all lead very different lives. Careers, interests, lifestyles, philosophy, outlook, are all very different. Every time we meet up we have a great time, but between times we communicate very little and know very little about each other. I am sure that the person we present to each other is relevant to the situation and that this is in part what makes it such a pleasure to meet again. We have little connection on-line (apart from the occasional email to make arrangements). The people we are when we meet are in many ways shaped by and relevant to the situation and the history we share.

I have multiple twitter accounts including twitter like accounts in Chinese etc. I struggle with Facebook, the concept that there is a single me that can be represented, distilled and relevant to all the real people I know. How can the various circles in which I move, the various persona's and interests, the professional links converge on one spot in a meaningful way? If I am interested in someone on a language learning basis, I want to read a blog or follow a twitter feed that is mostly relevant to this aspect, not filter through the chuff that is the rest of their lives or get asked if I want to connect with friends of theirs that they go diving with. Perhaps I will meet them and connect more fully (and then be interested in more aspect) but perhaps they will lose interest (even if only online) in languages and the feed will dry up (effectively vanishing from my radar).

I don't want to connect with my teenage sons on Facebook, I should be connecting with them in real life, I am pretty sure that connecting with them on Facebook would dilute the experience on both sides.

Ex-coworkers have largely nothing to do with people I meet to learn foreign languages, my messages to them, links for them, information I share with them (hey I might want to work with them again some time) should not mix. In fact it would seem that in a lot of cases the only reason to mix is to say to one group "hey look how well rounded I am" by exposing them to the edited highlights of the rest of my life. Regardless of tagging etc. I don't have many good ways to separate the life-streams without spending too much time organising (organising something that works better if spontaneous) or expecting people following me to somehow organise theirs. So we are polluting each others lives with spam. No better than inviting someone around in the 1970's to watch the 4 hour sideshow of your holiday (unless there is special interest after the first 10 mins they don't really care).

If I follow the public, social feed of some guy who is known for developing a cool programming platform, anything not related to that platform is spam to me, time wasting spam, we are not related, we are not friends, I don't have a reason to be interested.

Maybe this seems a little harsh, maybe a little extreme, and there are some focused feeds out there, and people who are not afraid to set-up multiple focused on-line presences. Perhaps I could be accused of not being interested in people? Nothing is further from the truth, I enjoy finding out about people, I just find that face to face, with all the feedback mechanisms we have evolved to gauge interest the experience is order of magnitude better.

Facebook of course is a harder place to fracture, or even linkedin (which is admittedly more focused on fabricating an image for yourself that may make you more employable). Maybe I am over reacting, a lot of the information requires some action to pull it out, but it seems to me that there is still too much I have to actively ignore or too many distractions.

Why Blog?

2010-12-18T09:10:00.000-08:00

Introduction

It has been quite some time since I posted here, I am coming back and I expect that over the next year or so I will post a lot more here and then maybe tail off again. This does beg the question why blog? There isn't a single answer to that question there are many reasons for blogging. I have consistently blogged over a number of subjects and accounts for more than four years now, there are a variety of reasons for each one and some fall by the wayside (some get picked up again) but why do I do it?

Not for profit

I don't blog for profit (yet, maybe one day). Quite some time ago I experimented with Google ads and found that with little effort I could make maybe £20 per month. I work in internet technologies sometimes helping drive traffic to sites. With some effort there was potential there I guess and a bit more thought should come up with better ways to make money off of the back of blog posts. Just thinking about these things changed the nature of what I posted, made me start thinking about sensational blog titles that may drive traffic, reciprocal links with other sites (just for the sake of links). Two things made me tear the ads down, one was that I didn't want to write just to drive traffic, the other simply that making significant amounts of money would be hard work doing things that I didn't want to do in my spare time. I also have a problem in that I am not driven by money, I am rubbish at making money, once I have enough to get by (+ for anybody dependant on me, I find it hard to care too much about money).

Not for the sake of literature

I have said it before and I will doubtless write it again, most of my blog-posts in any area are wrote fast, spare time is precious, I speed type, I think something and at some point I may write it. Spelling and grammar, checking, I leave for other areas where I have to put finger to keyboard. I understand the motivation for more literary blogs but that is not what I am about so far. Each post is reference to a thought to come back to, some where I have a little traffic is an invite to discuss.

Not for the sake of fame

Whilst there is often an element of "look at me" in many things that people do publicly that is not a strong driver for me. I wrote many posts on this blog even after finding out that virtually nobody but me ever reads them. There are useful to me though, putting the thoughts down sometimes crystallizes them. Some rough posts become the basis of more formal writing for work etc.

For conversation

Sometimes (with my language learning blogs for example) I just want to attract a few comments, start a small conversation.

For reflection

Writing things down helps the thought process, making them public acts as a bit of a focus.

Summary

So I guess that there is some reflection, some "look at me" and sometimes need for conversation. Up until now that is why I blog.

Against the Spam Argument

2009-02-05T07:44:00.001-08:00

I have been thinking about Intranets and Web2.0 a lot over the last few months. One thing that really bugs me is that I can do some much learning, networking and collaborating over the Internet, the benefits are so apparent and so obvious, why can I not do the same at work? I will soon be moving to small company where these problems are not likely to apply, but how is it that so many medium to large companies completely resist new ways to use technology amongst their employees? The larger the company, the more likely there is to be someone who can help me, unfortunately without the right technology the less like I will be able to find them.

I will be posting a series of thoughts tagged with "why_not_at_work" for a while to vent my frustration and suggest ways in which social technologies could help.

One common argument against things like micro blogging/social networking etc. at work is that when managers (of the traditional Corporate nature) are introduced to it they quickly come to the conclusion that it is largely spam and irrelevance, not serious enough for real work etc. this is usually after only gaining a trivial understanding of what is going on.

Of course this is the case but this does not invalidate the new method of communication because maybe every communication medium has been the same, it is the nature of communication between people. Who would argue against the importance of snail mail in its time, yet consider the junk mail problem, consider the huge resource spent to deliver greeting cards with pointless messages, holiday postcards that don't really say anything etc. Spoken language itself is largely phatic communication that doesn't really mean anything of significance. Telephone lines are saturated with meaningless twaddle ......

Don't blame the communication medium for human nature that makes us blather away, we need that, it maintains and creates connections, we will still need it right up to the point that we can make direct data connections between the lumps of jelly that sit in our skulls. Think instead that a traditional letter that had worth would have to be sent to a newspaper (or other medium) deliberately and published to be made available to to a wide audience, yet a single tweet can be plucked from the maelstrom and instantly made available on a Newspaper website. A single undirected micro-blog post about a piece of software can elicit an immediate response from the author of the software. a carefully selected RSS search in my feed reader can alert me when two people I don't know comment on something I said in a presentation months ago. How easy would it be for me stop listening to a source of traditional snail mail? It is the searching, categorization, scalability, and personal control that give the Web2.0 technologies their power.

If all you see is spam and a trivial waste of time then maybe you just don't know how to look yet.

Gaming and the Web

2008-12-30T10:25:00.000-08:00

Been very busy recently but finally getting around to re-thinking about dconstruct 2008, yes that is some lag but I fully expect to have completed writing up my thoughts by September of 2009 ;). Actually lots of people complain about information over-load etc. etc. my favorite way of coping with that is simply to put aside quite long periods of time for just reviewing and going over things I have squirreled away. Making connections between old and new is also hugely useful.

The first talk at dconstruct2008 that came to mind is actually the second, it was presented by Aleks Krotoski, at the time it was probably the talk that made the least impact on me although looking back I find it much more interesting. Reviewing material from Dconstruct is easy now since eventually both podcasts and transcripts have appeared for all the presentations.

The main gist of the presentation was that web developers and game developers do not mix although they have a lot to learn from each other, maybe the web has borrowed some ideas from the games industry but the flow of information in the other direction has not been so great. The thing that sparked my mind into reviewing this presentation was simply watching my children playing (and starting to play myself) Little Big Planet for the PS3. I was struck by the community aspects of the game and by the very web like use (and very useful implementation imho) of tagging and commenting for content developed by other players.Once I found out that there was a huge amount of community content out there I immediately got my sons to show me how you could search (and re-find) that from within the game interface, as soon as I saw the tagging it made perfect sense that it should be there.

Actually I find it hard to pull out juicy points from the presentation although there was much I agree with and that sparked more thinging, Joshua March gives a good summary and Aleks wrote about it herself. A minor highlight for me after the fact is simply that Little Big Planet made me think of the talk and that when I got around to reading the transcript Little Big planet was raised in the brief question and answer session, it is certainly a game that was worth mentioning in this context so well done to man1.

Watching the development of games and community aspects on a games console via the PS3 is certainly an elightening and highly useful experiance.

Why I wouldn't like to design an Asian Website

2008-09-16T10:37:00.000-07:00

Actually I wouldn't like to design any kind of website, that is not where my strengths lie. I would be particularly careful of making any design decisions on a website that was aimed at a culture I didn't fully appreciate though.

Taking Chinese as an example, a number of times I have directed Chinese users to an Internet site I like and then been surprised when they are completely underwhelmed by it. One reason has been that they feel there is not enough content. This screen shot above is from web-page of the Chinese television station CCTV, it is typical of many I have seen and to my eyes appears very text dense with lots and lots (too many links). It wasn't until a Chinese web friend told me that many Chinese Internet users had yet to get used to using search functionality that the penny dropped, navigating through and discovering new content via links felt most natural to them.

Also consider that a Chinese designer can typically choose a lot of two character words for links (or three / four character words/phrases) this makes it an awful lot easier to layout blocks of links that can be scanned much better than if they were written in English.

I am not advocating the CCTV site as a good example of any kind of web design, simply attempting to highlight the kind of issues that may need to be taken into account when looking at websites from different cultures. It has to be said that in my experience many Asian websites do a better job of catering for Western users (with language options and search support) than their Western counterparts.

Naturally nothing is that clear, many young Chinese will be familiar and used to Western style websites, many of them have gone through the language/culture mind-hack.

This post will be a small part of the background to my Bathcamp presentation Bathcamp presentation Twine(in progress).

Is Learning Chinese a Mind-Hack?

2008-09-11T10:50:00.000-07:00

Mind Hack image from psd.

It has been said that learning a language is a type of mind hack, it is good for the brain and gives you a different perspective on many things. Written Chinese however has a peculiar feature compared to English and that is simply that it takes rather less characters to write something. Many Chinese words are just one or two characters and there is no space between words. Some of the space gain is lost because each Chinese character takes the same space and English fonts can take advantage of proportional spacing but on the whole a block of Chinese text takes up less space. On Twitter and other micro-blogging sites you are typically given 140 characters, a fairly short message in English but a Chinese writer can potentially pack in a lot more information. As a couple of examples (美女) and (帅哥) map to (beautiful women) and (handsome guy). I also believe from my own early experience and observation that the Chinese reader can read noticeably faster than English readers (could be useful if you have a lot of information to scan).

Sometimes it is unfortunate that so much emphasis is given to ease of use and quick learning/understanding, often the thing that is initially easiest to learn, understand and use falls short in the long run when compared to something that initially takes more effort. Douglas Engelbert is credited with developing the computer mouse which was widely adopted, he also developed a special one hand keypad that in conjunction with the mouse was proven to significantly improve typing speed. This keypad was not adopted though simply because the learning curve was considered too high (taking into account all the typing I do though it makes me wonder).

I feel that an often overlooked mind expanding element of language learning occurs when you are prepared to open your mind to a new culture however. It is possible and sometimes illuminating to see something from two points of view simultaneously. A recent Newscientist article How to keep your head in scary situations (unfortunately you have to be a subscriber to view full text) stated "find a knowledgeable person who shares your general cultural but who disagrees with you. You are likely to give this person's arguments a sympathetic hearing, which will help offset the natural disposition we all have to dismiss as unreliable and biased the arguments of persons whose basic outlooks are different from our own." The cultural element is important because you are not likely to believe or entertain an argument coming from a culture that differs from your own. I found that being prepared to start adsorbing another culture suddenly hugely expands the number of people that you can learn from. As Steve Kaufmann puts it History is a good example. Students should be obliged to read history books from different countries, in order to see how different these perspectives can be.

A final thought, many people who have learned English as an additional language (and or adsorbed Western culture) have undergone a mind-hack of some sort, doesn't this leave many mono-lingual English speakers at a disadvantage?

This post will be a small part of the background to my Bathcamp presentation Bathcamp presentation Twine(in progress).

Learning Via a Muse

2008-09-11T09:27:00.000-07:00

This is what learning Mandarin means to me in respect to learning about the Internet, no Wait! let me explain ;)

Like the artist's muse my language learning gives me a focus, a filter, a point of reference and a reason to learn more about Web(n.0) and to judge whether a new technology is really helping me. Perhaps because I often spend more time working on the back-end of websites I used to find it difficult to learn about using web-technologies via learning about web-technologies. I often felt I was in a kind of "echo chamber". Although this work that sold for so much money probably doesn't fully represent a muse.

At Dconstruct08 Aleks Krotoski explains how Web developers can learn from game developers, this is her own summary on at the Guardian. I think learners can learn from game players also, make it fun, get passionate and the learning happens before your realize.

What is your muse, or if you don't have one, how do you avoid the echo chamber?

This post will be a small part of the background to my Bathcamp presentation Bathcamp presentation Twine(in progress).

Learning Potential of the Internet

2008-09-11T06:54:00.000-07:00

The Rue Sophie Germain named for the French mathematician (1776 - 1831).

I believe that the Internet has boosted learning potential in a way that most of us have not caught up with yet. The full impact has yet to be realized but I think many subjects, or the foundation of many subjects can be easily acquired and practiced by an individual with no need for teachers, classes, university etc.

Of course to learn successfully requires dedication and interest but this is almost always the case, no matter what the method. The internet gives us unprecedented access to information, unprecedented access to fellow learners and experts and supports more media and approaches than most traditional methods.

A big hint lies in the IT sector, of there are many that are formally educated, but due to the ever changing nature of IT and due to fact that the barrier to playing with and building real things with real technology is so low, many people in successful IT careers have no formal qualifications at all, many have learned everything that supports their career via the very same devices and infrastructure they use in their daily work.

Take the mathematician who inspired the French street name above, she taught herself mathematics from books in her fathers library despite all the efforts of her family to stop her (not the done thing for a middle class girl at the time), she had to pretend to be a man initially to correspond with famous mathematicians of the time and develop her theories. Think how much lower is the barrier to entry for a modern day Sophie Germain, the vital inputs and opportunities to communicate are so much more now. The interesting questions is will the availability of information create many more autodidacts like Sophie?

In language learning we have access to media, learning resources, foreign speakers, fellow learners, free tools (Audacity for audio for example, your own personal language lab), I firmly believe that any reasonably motivated learner can learn a language to a significantly better level than most university students in less time as a hobby (it really seems that farcical).

I hear people moaning about informational overload but this is a personal problem we just have to learn to adjust the way we view learning and knowledge, nowadays the possession of information is less important than the understanding of it and the ability to do things with it. The memory tricks of savants like Kim Peek seem much less impressive today, although Kim has show an increasing ability to work with his facts and develop his social skills due to his fame allowing him to practice and use what he knows. Many of us today can retrieve information as reliably Kim does and almost as fast, it is up to us to understand and use it.

I understand that some areas will always need professional qualifications, and some will need access to special equipment (particle physics springs to mind at the moment). But the basis of knowledge acquisition in these areas can still be acquired outside of special institutions.

How many times have I heard someone say "I really want to learn XXXX, I haven't started yet though I am waiting to see if there is going to be a course at the college next year...." how much do you want to learn???

This post will be a small part of the background to my Bathcamp presentation Bathcamp presentation Twine(in progress).

Social Network Portability

2008-09-07T01:04:00.001-07:00

Attended the Dconstruct conference last week and as last time I'll try to process the information I got from it over the next few weeks. As I am also attending BathCamp next week I will start with the talks that have any kind of potential connection with my BathCamp presentation.

Tantek Çelik gave an interesting talk on Social Network Portability a brief summary of which is provided by Tom Hume.

The point Tom makes that there may be instances where we don't want to share aspects of ourselves between different social sites is one that immediately came to my mind also. In my case an excellent example is when using some social sites for language learning. I don't see this a significant barrier though, unless I am mistaken in the application side of things, a profile page that you create on a social site is not going to be able to make those connections or allow others to make them unless you provide the initial link into your social network, it will still be easy to create completly separate identities. Also the connection to your identities on other social sites will be limited to public information.

The basic aims that Tantek initially expressed certainly need to be addressed, my own AHA moment recently came whilst using the microblogging service at identi.ca, thanks to the openmicroblogging specification I was able to follow a user on http://openmicroblogger.com/ simply by adding the url of his profile page. The exchange of avatar icons and who is following, being followed by who happened automatically (try doing that on Twitter).

I guess at that moment the microblogging AHA moment sums up my interest in this area (although I have not looked under the hood I don't thing it uses the same technology Tantek was discussing), unless I am doing something at work that is impacted by Social Network Portability then I will leave the implementation and specifications to others and wait to see how it affects me. I have installed the Operator Firefox extension for microformats and so far it doesn't appear that much if anything I am using online is using them (or if it is, then it doesn't impact what I am doing).

Information on the technologies that Tantek discussed can be found here on the microformat wiki.

BathCamp Presentation

2008-09-01T13:12:00.000-07:00

For the last two and a half years I have been learning Chinese, for the last two and a half years I have also been learning about learning especially how the learning landscape is changing thanks to the web technologies.

Learning Chinese has become my muse for learning about new web technologies. My job has involved me in many different aspects of developing web applications (possibly too many) and a while ago I had totally lost touch with the front end and more importantly how to "use" the emergent technologies. Because I don't feel you can really understand something until you can use it and because I was interested in learning a language I decided to learn a language as much as possible via the internet.

I like to write down my thoughts sometimes especially to refine ideas, when I came to think about a presentation for Bathcamp the obvious thing to do was to write down anything I feel I have learned so far and then pull out the more interesting points(in my opinion) for a short spoken presentation. Whatever happens the writings will be useful to me in the future, I have found it very useful to review what I wrote about Dconstruct last year.

I tend to write in more than one place and may have some other resources to add so I am going to try to pull all the background material to the presentation in a twine. By the time I make the short spoken presentation (or at least shortly afterwards); hopefully everything underpinning it will be available on the twine.

Dconstruct and Bathcamp

2008-08-31T09:22:00.000-07:00

Interesting couple of weeks ahead, this week I am attending the Dconstruct conference in Brighton and the following weekend I will be attending Bathcamp. Attendance of Dconstruct last year provoked lots of thought and posts about Internet related matters but I suspect that this year Bathcamp will generate or refine even more.

I strongly suspect that Bathcamp will generate more this year, primarily because being an unconference I will be making my own small presentation, this requires a lot of thought....

This post will be a small part of the background to my upcoming Bathcamp presentation.

BathCamp

2008-07-25T04:29:00.000-07:00

Short post this, but there will be more. I am signed up to attend Bathcamp later in the summer and looking forward to it, it will be my first attendance of a barcamp style un-conference. I am not entirely sure what to expect, but I am sure it will be interesting and well worth the time.

Twine has started opening little bits to the public now, I quite like a few elements of Twine but there are some things that don't seem to work very well still, building a Twine of language learning resources is going OK, I am building a Bathcamp Twine but already it seems more work than it should be (I am going to have to make a logo for it, add lots of links and text by hand etc. etc.).

Now I wondering how to make a presentation for Bathcamp, I guess as much of my internet interaction that is not work related has been to do with learning Chinese via the internet this will be the theme, there are a lot of web technology goodies in there I just have to shake them out and dust them off. Trouble is I always leave these things to the last minute. Emergency plan is to juggle whilst harmonic throat singing (Tuvan style), I hope it doesn't come to that...

More on the Demise of Email

2008-07-13T10:31:00.000-07:00

A while ago I posted on my feelings about email, it was a brief post provoked by frustration at the time, I was intending to come back to the topic but this post at ReadWriteWeb entitled Is Email In Danger says it all really for now.

I think the frustration that I am feeling is not so much to do with email still being used but more to do with the fact that other tools that fit communication needs are not being used in so many organisations.

What flavor of Stone Soup is Twine

2008-06-15T12:08:00.000-07:00

I have been playing with Twine for a little while now. Some aspects I really like but there are one or two things that puzzle me, and one or two that I am not sure about. I think the twines themselves have potential, I have slowly started building up one that I hope will be a good way to share some resources, particularly when Twine goes public. I am sure that some will think that the aspects that bother me are simply down to not knowing enough about how Twine works, or more likely because I am not using Twine enough yet. This "not using Twine enough" is the thing that bothers me most, the mantra used to answer criticisms of Twine is that "the more you use it, the more you get out of it". Well that seems reasonable but I also think that a cutting edge semantic web app. should do some things almost from the get go.

There is the story of the stone soup, it doesn't really matter if you don't know it and don't wish to read the Wikipedia entry, hopefully my point will still make sense. Is it that the flavor of the Twine soup is mainly derived from all the ingredients that are added to it by the users. A cunning but relatively simple starting framework could attract a critical mass of interaction and this mass then be used to develop a semantic application. Of course you need content to be added and categorized at some level, but once you have content why does it seemingly require a lot of activity to guess what kind of new content a user may be interested in.

My best example so far is a story on Mandarin immersion learning , here are the things that Twine could know.

I have created one twine so far, it is tagged with mandarin

I have posted a high percentage of items tagged with mandarin

I have read a number of other items tagged with mandarin and shared one or two to other twines

I have conducted a search for mandarin

I have pulled an RSS feed against the mandarin tag search

The mandarin tag is relatively rarely used on twine

Yet when a new item is bookmarked on Twine and has a mandarin tag, I am not alerted. Given all the information above and not withstanding any smart programming that may be monitoring my activity across twines or connections I cannot imagine not picking up on at least enough of the low hanging fruit above to alert me somehow on the item. In fact if I had been involved with the programming I would have a red face at this point because Twine is touted to be smart etc. There is a remote possibility that I missed something I suppose but there doesn't seem to be any mechanism to discover or tell me of the important fact, also the twine where the article appeared wouldn't normally hold my interest enough to make it worthwhile subscribing to it, so the standard Twinerian approach of subscribing to a huge number of twines wouldn't have helped either

There are a number of other things I am looking into that worry me. There is a "bug" where if you post a bookmark that is already in Twine you get duplicated items, even if you post to the same Twine. Putting on my programmers hat this is more than a bug, unless I am mistaken it seems that the url of a bookmark is its unique identifier, this should be enforced at the back-end and unit-tested, not allowed to bubble through to the user interface. Other opportunities to cut down on information clutter have been missed for example my Twine digest email informs me of items I have posted myself.

What I have at the moment to discover things I may be interested in a marvelous hack-up of RSS feeds, pumped and tweaked and combined through Google Reader, Netvibes and now increasing Yahoo pipes. This chaotic system has the amazing ability to (assuming I apply a little regular maintenance and tweaking) to supply me with a pretty good overall picture of things I may be interested in. Now I am increasingly adding Yahoo pipes to the mix I can see another big step-up in the ability of my ad-hoc distributed tangle to serve this purpose. In fact if you didn't know how it worked you could even be mistaken for thinking the system I am using has some kind of intelligence (Yahoo pipes probably being the major potential contributor here).

Twine is a useful social repository to drop information into, they have convinced me of that, also it is supposed to automatically tag things (well sometimes), why haven't the simple quick wins to link people with interesting information been picked up on, especially when I can get so much mileage from tweaking and manipulating RSS feeds from disparate sources all over the Internet? The recommendations that are supposed to kick in once Twine has learned enough about me haven't show me anything yet. My experiment is going to be to see if I can get more interesting and relevant content to read from Twine simply by the manipulation of its many RSS feeds (and become a Yahoo pipes power-user at the same time ;)). At the moment I am betting on my system to win, to be fair I am interacting with Twine in a manner that should help their recommendation system, but not as fast as some (anyway a system that only works for power-users is not a mainstream system at all).

As it happens a helpful Twine user called Twain (thank you twain) told me about the Mandarin post in a reply to a comment on an unrelated thread, which was nice, even though I was already aware of it. This however does not count as Twine informing me of it.

Ultimately the stone soup story can be interpreted in a number of different ways, with both a positive and negative slant, lets hope the Twine story has a happy ending.

BBC go full fat RSS

2008-06-15T04:34:00.000-07:00

Just a quick YAAAYY. Due to pressure from some of their users, more BBC RSS is full feed. As I have said before I much, much prefer full feeds.

It is supposed to be a conversation (part1)

2008-06-08T10:21:00.000-07:00

A chain of thoughts that started a little while ago and ended up in me resolving some personal thoughts about what a semantic web actually means (to me at least). Bear with me because in part 1 the semantic bit is not really obvious.

It all started when I came across a forum that had a "correct this grammar" link next to each post. I am not sure if this is the stupidest thing I have ever seen or just a very, very clever way to divert the time and energy of pedants whilst quietly direct all their corrective output to /dev/null/ (a place where the sun don't shine). If it was a diversion it was very authentic looking as it even had instructions telling you to retain the original meaning, your corrections were supposed to be approved by a moderator.

I came across this whilst I still had the "well intentioned??" efforts of some grammar/spelling actionists fresh in my mind. They hadn't been directed at me but they easily could have been and we had crossed swords. Often the grammar pedant will start with something like "I hate to be a pedant but it irks me when..." so we have to assume that in this case irk > hate.

There are places where writing as correctly as possible is important, however consider that people do not speak grammatically, when having conversations they do not use correct grammar (amazingly some people haven't even realized this). I view comments, some types of blog posts etc. etc. as conversations and the word conversation is often used to describe many interactions on the web. We are pulling in more and more information, and engaging in more and more online conversations, usually testing/refining ideas, for many people now this is not a place to worry too much about the technicalities of language so long as the meanings and concepts are exercised. I consider many of these conversations are supposed to be quick and snappy, and people adapt to this environment. We don't have same pressure to use l8r for later as we would when texting but there is a pressure there

English is often not the first language of the conversationalists but is the default language of many places where they have to interact (not so smart or sensitive to pick holes in what they have written). This was the case when I lost my rag a little and had to intervene (it irked me to intervene but I hated what was going on).

By all means strive for correct grammar and spelling in a CV or presentation or highbrow blog etc. but apart from that I think those that are upset by non-perfect English should deal with the irksomeness out of the public eye.

How do I think this relates to the semantic web, well that is coming soon.

Languages are made by ordinary human beings not by God or the pundits who stand in for him.
Anthony Burgess loved language and was a linguist. He enjoyed the play of words and the technicalities of grammar and pronounciation. However in his books on language he was consistent in objecting against those that were overly sensitive to its usage, ending on one occasion with
When we think we are making such a judgment we are often merely making a statement about our prejudices.

Facebook not for the Intranet

2008-05-26T02:53:00.000-07:00

At one point there was a lot of hype, regarding the possible use of Facebook for all or part of an intranet. From my point of view that quickly became a very bad idea. Maybe a new, small internet company, with internet savy executives could pull it off (maybe) but I wouldn't dream of trying to implement that approach where I work.

Aside from the questions of who owns your data? what happens if Facebook is down or slow? there is the considerable problem of bleed between work and personal life and bleed between the few useful things you can do on Facebook and the vast array of useless trash. The following youtube sums up my feelings exactly. I would suspect that most employees would not welcome this bleed either.

Not that Facebook is a complete waste of time, there are one or two people I can communicate most reliably with via a Facebook message, I have played a couple of very entertaining chess games via Facebook, but I have also ignored far too many hot potatoes and their like.

More on fullness of RSS

2008-04-22T07:23:00.001-07:00

A while ago I posted in a very general way about some advantages of full RSS feeds. Since that time I have continued to use RSS extensively and thought about it a little more, there are of course various degrees of fullness.

One of the most useless feeds I have comes from a Chinese site, translated into English the title of the page the feed comes from is "Everyday English". Each time a new article is published it appears in my feed-readers with the title "Everyday English" and the text "Everyday English" that links through to the article. I have no way of knowing whether it is worth my while going to the article, each RSS item in my reader is identical.

At the other end of the spectrum would be the blog feeds where I can read the entire article in a feed-reader, inclusive of any included media files, the only reason to actually go to the site in question would be to read or leave comments.

In between there is a sliding scale, descriptive titles, snippets or abstracts included etc. etc. The bottom line seems to be I don't care how it works so long as I minimize time spent wasted going via links and finding I am not interested in what is at the other end. If I don't find my-self wasting time this way it is surprising how much information I can sift through and select from, every time I have to follow a duff lead though feels like a huge drag (probably way out of proportion to the time wasted but that is human nature). A feed that commits the double crime of not having a high enough density of compelling content and wasting too much time gets deleted.

Sometimes the outcome can be surprising, I had a number of feeds that produced very little of interest but sometimes the odd gem. Usually there was enough information in the title or link to spot something of interest. I decided that they were not worth close monitoring but occasionally I have time I might look to see what is floating on top there. A bunch of these types of feeds can be seen on my Netvibes potluck page.

Sometimes I use Google Reader on my phone via the Opera mini browser, it is very efficient so long as I don't waste time following links to destinations that have nothing of interest.

I guess content providers often want me on their sites but, what kind of mood do they want me to be in when I get there. The challenge would seem to be in giving me other compelling reasons to visit.

My final observation is that the usefulness of an RSS feed depends on the type of content and how I interact with/use it, I can only determine this over time and by having some interest in the content. So I suppose if you produce RSS it would be a good idea to get feed-back from people that meet these same criteria.

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Using Google to buffer and/or archive RSS

2008-03-30T10:27:00.001-07:00

I have ended up using both Google Reader and Netvibes to monitor RSS feeds. Google Reader is great for long-term stuff whereas Netvibes is great for monitoring what has changed recently. Netvibes also offers other functionality that I find more useful than iGoogle for generating an online desktop.

Whilst learning Chinese I have found a number of things I can monitor by RSS that yield a high number of results, many of which are of no interest but there are the occasional gems. I tend to call these type of feeds "potluck" If I have time I can always trawl through them quickly and see if there is anything that interests me. One type of feed that can yield the occasional gem via online link tagging services, just monitoring the del.icio.us tag for "chinese" for example can sometimes give me useful new resources. Recently I started experimenting with the public universes offered by Netvibes. I also thought it would be useful to carry out the same sort of monitoring at simpy.com and ma.gnolia.com sadly I discovered that like many other online services, simply and ma.gnolia just do not provide good reliable real-time RSS feeds. The result was that many times my Netvibes boxes were empty. The easiest and most elegant solution to this kind of problem was simply to ensure that those kinds of feed were collected by Google Reader and then I made the RSS public from Google Reader. Now when I look at those feeds in Netvibes they are coming from Google Reader and whilst they may not be completely up to date they are never empty (Google Reader caches the information). Of course I can also combines feed and publish them as one from Google Reader.

Thanks to the new public Netvibes service I can make some of my "pot luck" feeds public, which acts as a nice way to demonstrate how this kind of RSS usage

As an aside I have often noticed that many of the less mainstream services are not consistent with the performance of RSS feeds (and searching). At the moment I wouldn't switch from del.icio.us to an alternative simply because nothing else I have looked at is anywhere near so reliable.

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Email is not dead, it just smells like it.

2008-03-20T16:23:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I think to myself there is little difference between Email and RSS (or I imagine ways in which I could manage my email in a way that might still make it marginally useful), I always come back to my senses though. Email is always going to be there and there is going to be a long tail of declining useage but I really try to interact with it as little as possible.

The real problem is seen in the use of email for communication in projects, both inside and outside of work. It really takes a lot of effort to manage email in a useful way, when discussions get multi-threaded and emails are copied, replied to, forwarded etc. etc. communication breaks down. Then of course there is the disaster that occurs when someone forgets to "copy in" someone else.

I was recently involved in a non-work project that involved communication by email and has now switched to use Basecamp already it is like a breath of fresh air.

Of course you need more than RSS to replace everything people do with Email, and elements of email can only look anything like RSS if you squint at it from a distance when very tired and forget to use one hemisphere of your brain.

Here is a tip, if someone at work sends you an urgent email, then try to ignore it for at least a day, If someone comes and actually talks to you help them as fast as you can, you can train them if you are persistent enough.

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Blog post in a Chinesepod bottle

2008-03-06T04:45:00.001-08:00

A short post this one but with a specific objective. The purpose of this this blog is primarily to act as a brain dump and thinking space, I am not aiming at attracting a readership (and on that measure I am succeeding admirably ;).

That being said It was interesting to note that some comments previous observations I made regarding problems with Chinesepod RSS feeds seem to have resulted in some action. I also noted a few hits from Shanghai in Google analytics. I was kind of expecting and hoping that this may be the case.

I would think that these days, if your online presence is important, then you should be spending some time peering into the dark corners of the web getting indirect feedback from discussions about you. It appears that the folks at Chinesepod have this covered.

I am curious to see if this post in an obscure corner gets read, it has some words and tags about Chinesepod, cpod and Ken Carroll that should do the trick. If somebody (anbody) from Chinesepod or Praxis reads this then please leave a comment, I will be very impressed and it will complete my experiment. The web version of the "message in a bottle" should in theory be much more discoverable than the traditional one.

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Lies damn lies and web stats

2008-03-01T07:45:00.001-08:00

Been a little while, but lots of things have been happening web-wise so I had better leave some thoughts here in case they fade from my mind (the main purpose of this blog is to prevent loss).

In my opinion if you have anything to do with web applications then it is absolutely vital that your marketeers and sales people and the like are aware that web statistics are invariably generalizations, they are not exact and not usually fit to be treated in the same way as accurate financial accounts. This does not detract from their value but does mean that don't don't waste endless hours trying to account for tiny discrepancies etc.

Of course it depends what kind of analysis you do but increasingly people expect more than you get from the average server log. Many ways of getting very good information about your users are not 100% reliable, for example Google analytics provide a whole host of useful information but that depends on your visitor having JavaScript; This is not a problem if you accept that and make allowances for it.

There are many reasons why things may not sync up exactly, one that keeps haunting me is timestamps between different pieces of the system or between the database and the software application, not matching up exactly, other reasons apart from the JavaScript problem mentioned above could be down to cookie problems (or even absence of cookies), proxy servers (if you are monitoring sites accounts by IP address). data and links between data actually changing between the time of the original event and the processing of the statistics.

What can you do about it?, well if the processing is complicated and you have to tie a lot of elements together to cook your final reports, it seems that it is always more reliable to capture as much of the relevant information you need at the source, as it happens and then log that. For a simple example if you have a linking between an account and an IP address range then capture the user id and put it in your logs, as it happens. If you really have a pressing need to capture usage information 100% accurately then log each occurrence as it happens rather than trying to derive it from a url in your log.

Sometimes people treat web stats as absolute, this is not wise recently a number of people trying to sell us tools that included mailshot facilities proudly told us that their tool could track who actually opens the email you sent out 100% reliably. Of course they ended up looking a little foolish as they were talking about tracking the request of tagged images in HTML emails; which although it might be useful, is never going to be a 100% reliable method to determine if someone opens the mail you sent.

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RSS and tagging working together

2008-01-12T08:44:00.000-08:00

A number of things prompted this post, the main catalyst was a question that came up at work and which I hope to provide and answer: Why would somebody want an RSS feed of their (article) tags?. I hope I can at least answer why they might

Partly it was also something I read on ReadWriteWeb, 5 Ways You Can Fall in Love With Tagging Again. Much of this wasn't new to me but one statement in particular One of the best things about tagging URLs is that all kinds of RSSfeeds become available. Made me think a little. The RSS feeds of tagged urls I have employed before and we have been using tags to identify interesting urls to work colleages for sometime. Why just restrict yourself to tagged urls though, anything that you can tag online could result in useful RSS feeds (although it is usually going to resolve to a useful url). In fact it is sometimes easy to forget that feeds from de.licio.us tags represent tagged urls (the comments are useful here to add further information), a feed directly from a set of tagged resources could in theory provide richer information.

Another element was the recent and very fruitful experiments I have been having with tagging and RSS feeds to help me with the process of learning Chinese vocabulary. I tag online dictionary entries on Chinese words as urls in del.icio.us, keeping the dictionary definition in the title and comment (along with other notes in the comment) and consuming the feeds in various places allows me to sort, search through, view and categorise the words I am learning in many different ways. Becasue these are not new items some ways of consuming RSS don't allow you easily remove items that have moved from one category to another, but using a combination of GoogleReader, RSSOwl, live bookmarks, Netvibes etc. I have all the ways to view, sort, search, archive my word lists that I could ever wish for.

Back to the orignal question, having access to RSS feeds of your tags in an online application allows you sort search and view your data in ways that suit you but that may not be supported in the original application. If you use two or more applications for similar purposes then RSS feeds can allow you to "silo bust" and combine similar information that you are interested in from many different sources.

Ouch unfortunately thinking about this has led to an uncomfortable conclusion, although del.icio.us is tagging links, these links represent resources.
If you are writing an application and providing tagging for your users then perhaps you should ask "how do these tags add value over them just tagging the resources in a service like del.icio.us?"

Perhaps one option is to co-opt your tagging systems to add other functionality to your site. By using a series of reserved "system tags" you can added a fileing cabinet of items for later reading or items for sharing etc. etc. In the same way that much new functionality is built on top of del.icio.us, (the readeroo plugin for example). If you already have data that maps tags to users why not use this to define other behaviours?

When RSS feeds disappear (Chinesepod)

2008-01-01T02:02:00.000-08:00

I am now completely reliant on RSS feeds to keep up with changing content from all over the Internet, they allow me to monitor changes and new posts on far more sites than would be possible if I just used my browser and web addresses. Also I can often read content without visiting the sites themselves. I prefer to monitor feeds online
using a combination of Netvibes and Google Reader.

Where the system really breaks down is when the RSS feeds vanish and a small part of your information update system fails to update. Unfortunately Chinesepod have done this to me twice now. RSS feeds either disappearing or being re-assigned to new urls, they even managed to destroy most of the feeds on their Netvibes universe so I just deleted the tab (a bit unfortunate after they went to the trouble to set it up).

For example, I like to read Ken Carroll's blog but the feed has shifted on me at least a couple of times now (if you include the move from Chinesepod to Praxis), at least now he has his own domain (ken-carroll.com) I should be safe :).

I guess I am saying that you should aim to keep your RSS as permanent as humanly possible, even if you change the url structure of your site then url-rewrites or re-directs should be employed to safegaurd your subscriber base.

It seems we all need to remember that your website is not your product data and content that you produce may be being used and consumed by people that never or hardly every visit your website. I was delighted to discover recently that one of the many online presences where I work is now almost exclusively accessed via RSS requests rather than the website itself.

Generally of course I feel that Chinesepod do a very good and innovative job, and the fact that I bother to re-find Ken's output is an indicator that along with people like Stephen Downes (who Ken also mentions) I am often interested in what he has to say, many other sources of information would just be lost.

When online services disappear (mojiti.com)

2007-12-28T06:32:00.000-08:00

Highlighting a peril of using online services, the peril being that they can upsticks and leave you in the lurch. Temporary unavailability can be a pain but a complete vanishing act leave me feeling .... somewhat annoyed.

I was using an excellent service a mojiti.com (which now just has a closure message). Yes mojiti has gone. This service allowed you to take online videos from just about anywhere and overlay your own annotations, graphics, sound, video etc. It worked well, you could embed the fruits of your labour in other webpages etc. A description of some of the features can be found on this bbc backstage page. To further increase my good mood though I tried leaving a comment on this page in the handy form provided and on submission was helpfully told my comment could not be processed because .... I am not allowed to leave comment (why show me the form then?).

What really annoyed me was that I was sent no warning email (at least giving me the chance to gracefully extract any of the data I had stored there). Mojiti created some interest it originated in China and the site was completly bilingual (Chinese and English). A post here at mashable.com has a comment from one of the originators of mojiti.com Eric Feng. Eric also leaves a comment on the ReadWriteWeb article here. I am guessing that currently Eric is not scouring the internet to leave comments about Mojiti.com.

Apologies for coming across a little downbeat but learning a foreign language is hard enough when you picked your way through some difficult translation and then find all that work is lost ..... I guess this is nothing to what a business enterprise could lose via a vanishing webservice though.

I want full RSS (but is that good for everybody?)

2007-10-21T07:30:00.000-07:00

Interesting to come across a controversial issue by experience rather than than reading about it. Wanting to keep up with increasing amounts of information from forums and blogs etc. I have been utilising RSS feed in Netvibes and Google Reader to more and more effect. I have heard it said that you can process around 10 times as much information this way. Not sure how that is worked out but for sure I can get through a lot more than visiting individual websites.

I hadn't really thought about this issue before because most (if not all) of the feeds I was most interested in were full feeds, I can read the full content in my online RSS readers. This reduces distraction and allows me to absorb more in less time.

It was only when I came to pull in a number of feeds from an online magazine into a Netvibes tab that I came unstuck. The feeds were partial so I had to follow each link to read the full content. The experience was not nowhere near as pleasant or convenient.

I had a look around the Internet and found a number of posts and viewpoints. Aside from any bandwidth issues, what might be good for me may not be so good for advertisers, may not be so good for tracing site usage (although feedburner can help here).

I still need to think about this some more. As a consumer I prefer full feeds by far but should I feel the same when thinking on the behalf of my Employer? (it seems I am finding this duality is common nowadays).

A line in the sand!

2007-09-30T04:33:00.000-07:00

Time to stop thinking so much about Dconstruct07 and attendant ideas. I should really present some sort of summary. I want to start thinking more about how to re-think our intranet. Hopefully the podcasts of the presentations will be out soon, to reinforce ideas and maybe spark off new ones, particularly around the presentations I have not mentioned.

The concept of the website not being your product and examining the potential dislocation and reuse of your data will remain with me. It is quite clear that this is the case from my own web use over the past year or so. Much of the content I use, is consumed elsewhere from where it was generated. And where I visit them some of the best websites just get out of the way and let me get the content I am after with the minimum fuss. This is just reinforced by the idea of not letting your design get in the way.

All things being equal, the experience is key. That resonates also, however with one caveat. There are sites that I visit regularly that have a bad user experience, it is just that the data I am after can only come from one place, if I have absolutely no option I will do almost anything to get important content. As I tried to explore with my evil iPod post, there are occasions where you can sell the experience almost separate from the content, I fear that is not the case where I work though (here the bottom line seems to be that content and access to it is king).

For me Dconstruct07 was surprisingly weak on community. As I attempted to explain, the large web communities and the meta-communities (I mean communities of people that have something to do with building communities) possibly don't teach us the best lessons (that are applicable to the average business with an online presence). As was pointed out in a meeting at work recently, a community can easily form online via forums and wikis etc., independent of any one company focus. Maybe more appropriate questions are how can you instantiate a community that is out there but has not formed around a nucleus yet? how can you absorb existing communities or stake your claim in them. It no longer feels like attempting to own a community is a good idea.

The biggest realization for me is that my way of thinking and learning has fundamentally changed, handling and processing of information has changed, and how Web2.0 has almost shifted some of my mind and consciousness onto the Internet. I can still remember hearing about RSS　and thinking "interesting but how does that help me", still remember thinking the same about del.cio.us etc. etc. (actually I can still remember hearing about email and thinking similar thoughts). Now it is hard to imagine acquiring and experimenting with knowledge without them. Like Jared Spool's chicken sexers, most of us have to acquire this knowledge through experience. If you don't play with the new tools, don't do concrete things with them on a daily basis how can you understand them. Of particular interest to me is the fact that by far the largest learning curve in this area was in my attempts to learn Chinese online and cram as much as I could about linguistics and elearning and Chinese language, rather than at work.

My last thought is a new one, or rather new to me. As I type this I am thinking of the various types of resistance the work environment will place against this new way of thinking (some even justified and requiring care). One perhaps that is not apparently often mentioned is that networking of a similar nature has always occurred. It has always been an important part of senior management life and career progression, also an important part of senior academic life. Like email did to conventional post, some of these new tools are enabaling this type of networking to occur much more easily. Although it appears clear to some that many workers can benefit themselves and their companies this way, perhaps there will be a backlash at senior management level (maybe even unconsciously)

"that is what we do, not them!".

Concerning Community

2007-09-29T12:53:00.001-07:00

George Oates and Denise Wilton gave a presentation on Human Traffic at Dconstruct07. They both occupied a sofa on stage and presented somewhat Baddiel and Skinner unplanned style. Unfortunately there was no opportunity for questions from the audience, which I think would have made things much more dynamic. Although this presentation was a fairly interesting recanting of some of the community experiences at flikr.com and b3ta.com it didn't delve very deeply into community aspects. I don't actually feel that a full grasp of community can be gleaned by looking at the big players, the dynamics don't feel right. Possibly more can be gained by looking at smaller communities.

In my experience one of the most interesting communities I have seen develop has been the one built up around Chinesepod, at some point I would like to take the time to carry out a more in depth analysis of this community and attempt to pinpoint why it succeeded whereas other similar online language community attempts failed.

For now here are some of my initial observations, mainly just here so I can refer to them later.

They started with simple community aspects right from the beginning but, these were fairly basic, what seems to have planted the seed was the ability to comment on the lessons they released. Key was the fact that they actually had material that was worth commenting on, sometimes funny, sometimes thought provoking etc. If you commented then you often got responses back from the key players.

They had personalities that came across in the content and in their interaction with the community.

There was a community out there already (Westerners learning Chinese) however this was mostly restricted to academic learners, Chinesepod put new spin on this and acted as a focal point for learners of all levels and intent. Amazingly independent of the Chinesepod site a forum and wiki was developed by the users. Eventually these were then pulled into and hosted on the Chinesepod site. Why did these users not just set up a Chinese learning forum and Wiki? They strongly associated learning Chinese with Chinesepod. People started to refer to "poddies" (users of Chinesepod) or "Cpodders".

They used blogging to their advantage, eventually hosting blogs for learners but also interacting with external learner blogs, etc. etc. The key players at Chinesepod blogged themselves and crucially didn't just restrict themselves to promoting their own wares. You could actually change things at the Chinesepod site via the blogs, and the discussion was frank and open. One of the founders of Chinesepod Ken Carroll regularly blogs and keeps in touch with the community.

Much of their growth has been on the back of viral marketing.

RSS feeds have always been a big part of the site (although on occasion they have not been as easy to discover as they should be).

They have never attempted to "own" the community. Discussion is frank, open criticism is fine, competitor content and discussion is welcome, bits of community often slop over into other places, you can interact without coughing up money or filling in a huge profile form etc. etc.

They always look for new ways to interact, whether by Netvibes or Facebook (the Chinesepod app. can deliver content based on who you are), sharing photos of China via Flickr, sharing videos via youtube, discussing the Chinese music scene etc. etc.

The end result of this is that on many occasions now I have seen people online mistake members of the Chinesepod community for employees of Chinesepod, because of their loyalty and commitment. I actually got to talk to a reporter over the telephone at one point, towards the end she asked 'you are not related to Ken Carroll are you?'. I hastily pointed her towards the numerous evidence online that my version of events was correct, and fortunately she appeared to believe me although as is usually the case with these things I didn't get my view reflected exactly correctly (I could provide feedback by far more than email for example).

The Chinesepod Facebook app. is great, the Chinesepod Facebook group has many members but little activity, why is this. I think simply because it is primarily used to find people you know from Chinesepod and joining it is just a way of tagging that aspect of your online presence on Facebook. There are so many other places to interact, rather than the Facebook group.

No one community has all the answers, but I believe looking at the big players pays few dividends in the same way that generalizations you could derive from things such as "the global Christian community" would be, errrr.... very general. Finding out what drives the small vibrant communities out there could pay big dividends for those who want to develop their own.

Evil iPod?

2007-09-29T01:11:00.000-07:00

I think is always healthy to think contrary to the flow. Throughout the Dconstruct07 conference iPod was consistently referred to as an example of successful design and experience, to the point where it became an "in joke". Being fairly easy to go with the iPod as a metaphor for successful design I felt duty bound to pursue the dark side.

Jared Spool mentions the experience of the iPod/iTunes combination contributing to the overall success of the product. How much of that success is down to managing the experience, and even dictating it? Apple do not need to provide the user with the best possible experience, simply sell the user the experience, and ideally convince the user it is the best possible.

If I plug a generic, cheap, usb storage/mp3 player into my PC, it identifies itself as just that. The PC is aware that it is both a storage device and an mp3 player. The best possible audio file management system would automajically work seamlessly with such devices and fall over itself to make the handling of any silly drm system or raw mp3, ogg etc. files as easy and transparent as possible. Also provide as many ways possible to export my audio to whatever I deemed appropriate. Apparently an iPod/iTunes combination doesn't quite live up to these expectation. Imagine it did, iPod identifies as usb mass storage device via usb cable etc. Then of course the barrier to other manufactures slotting in their player to the equation is removed.

What if some clever souls had produced a really slick music management software package that had an open structure (unlike the iTunes database), communicated intelligently with any Tom Dick or Harry online music store and recognised generic usb mp3 devices. What if they released this just before the iPod or iTunes. Things would surely have been different.

As for the ideal design of experience, many users have been convinced that huge storage and carrying around your entire audio collection (just because you can) is the way to go. This is against a backdrop of increasingly distributed data, and increasing opportunities for network connection etc. Mini hard drives contain moving parts and require comparatively more power, flash memory has a finite life, but consider that you can apparently get a 4gig SD card for under £10 these days. Does it make sense even in this day of video to be carrying around 40 gig of data or be restricted to a smaller amount of flash memory that you cannot change. An SD card slot is easy to drop into an appliance, potentially making it cheaper and not changing its nature one jot, you can have the same OS, the same neat circular control.

I actually find my "current music" that I am listening to comprises a very small library. Things I have got bored with may return later, new stuff may be added etc. but essentially at any one finite point in my life I am not happily listening to 10s of gigs of music (I am not the only person like this surely). Even more strange is that a lot of audio I listen to is not music. I listen to language instruction or podcasts to do with work type issues etc. This content is usually ephemeral, it merits listening to once or perhaps a few times, none of it needs to be lurking around on a 40gig mini drive. I actually know people who still have all the elementary lessons from a language they are learning on their iPods and can't bring themselves to delete them (even though they are no longer of any personal use).

Maybe in a Googlemail type philosophy the new thinking is that you will not ever have to delete anything again. I am not sure this is healthly. The printing press changed the way people think and learn, prior to that a scholar had to hold much more information in their heads. The printing press heralded the death of the memory palace and similar techniques as an essential part of the scholarly mind. Today the kind of extended mind that is enable by modern technology is likely to change thought processes once more. Perhaps though the process of deciding what to forget which has served our brains so well should not be entirely abandoned.

Armed with this hypothetical software, a library of audio and video that sits both on my computer and in a 'working' set of SD card and a generic player that takes the cards, where does Apple fit in. Well that generic player could have the same design and use as the current iPods which will appeal to many. However the barrier to me just shifting the whole lot to some other platform at a whim has vanished, if my iPod battery is shafted I don't have to buy another iPod, I can go straight out and purchase a cheap replacement to tide me over. Maybe another manufacturer will produce a player that entices me.

This is a thought exercise, I am not anti-Apple. There are many view-points. Some people may say "yeah so why is iPod so popular and pervasive etc. etc." well I have heard a similar defense of Microsoft. Others will say "but most people don't want the things you describe". Why do products like this exist, and why do I have to buy something from Apple to connect to a camera etc. Digging around on the internet will find many people who have to fork out a lot of money or proceed through a series of awkward non-friendly user experience steps to achieve something that should be simple.

I am a realist, even going to give iTunes a run for it's money, this is user-experience against the backdrop a consumerist, commercial society, Apple have done a good job and played this game well. I feel it is far from perfection though.

EDIT: this is far from perfection also, but here is a presentation of up-coming version (I have the current one. Not for general consumption but runs Linux and gives me enough flexibility (for instance playing two sound files simultaneously or reading Pdfs in Xpdf. Notice how the SD card comes out of the camera an straight into the device to view pictures (not hard really).

The Age of Experience

2007-09-25T19:40:00.000-07:00

The first talk at Dconstruct07 was given by Jared Spool and in my opinion kicked everything off to a good start. Jared's presentation was titled "The Dawning of the Age of Experience".

The emphasis of Jared's presentation was the user experience. Starting with the simple fact that technically the Ipod is nothing special (when you get right down to the technical specs.). It was the user experience of the Ipod/Itunes combination that made it an object of desire. The Netflix site is also highlighted and how it managed to take such a big slice of the online DVD rental market, apperently thanks to the user experience and word of mouth as opposed to advertising. Ipods keeping popping up during the day, it was during this talk that I started to try to think against the flow and find the "dark side" of the Ipod experience, the fruits of this labour will be detailed in a later post.

Good design is invisible, it doesn't get in the way of what the user is trying to do.

Jared also presented a few points that were apparently contradictory. On occasion it is possible for someone to circumvent countless hours of usability analysis, just by knowing the right thing to do (is he trying to put himself out of a job). Jared also highlights us to the fact that some skills are almost impossible to flow-chart or describe or even learn conventionally, rather they are acquired skills. His example is Chicken sexing. Jared also stresses the importance of conducting suitable usability analysis.

Jared does not seem to resolve the potential contradictions above, but I can see my own personal resolution based on experiences, maybe not quite what Jared had in mind but it works for me. Basically to ensure good usability you have to think like a usability expert, simply following a formula or studying a book won't cut it. How you come to think like a usability expert is of no consequence so long as you can do it. Don't know whether Jared would agree but hey it works for me.

By the way, I love the chicken sexing example it lends itself to so many thoughts.
"I have an innate ability to sex turkeys, but want to transition to chickens because the money is better!". "I am implementing the decisions of those who have an innate ability to sex dodos (which they still think is useful)" are just two hypothetical examples that spring to mind.

Still using books?

2007-09-24T13:23:00.000-07:00

Better get back to blogging about the presentations soon, but until then just another quick thought I had.

I was quite surprised to see a number of vendors selling books at Dconstruct07. There were even some prizes at the end that consisted of piles of books.

For quite sometime now I have been living an almost bookless existence. Working on the assumption that I usually have online access, I don't appear to have any difficulty finding information I am after online. This applies to computer programming and language learning.

I don't dislike books, and still read them for plesure, however if I wanted to learn about Ajax or CSS or Java, I would certainly turn to the Internet first, and may even end up reading an online book, or a tutorial, or a reference...

Maybe most people would still rather go straight to a book, something tactile that
they can hold.

Blocking it at the Firewall?

2007-09-21T05:21:00.000-07:00

While thinking about Dconstruct type things I may as well throw the odd thought that comes along especially if related to a thought that originated at the conference.

I sent a message to two co-workers today, a valid work message. Someone else was using Facebook at lunchtime (more people seem to every day). A comment was made, at some point they will block this at the Firewall. Where I work things get blocked at the Firewall.

Thinking back to Tom Coates and his web of data, then soon (perhaps now) blocking at the Firewall will be pointless, the web of data remember.

Block Facebook, I can still read my Facebook notes via RSS in Google Reader, can still get a summary via the widget in Netvibes. I have only just started using it there must be many more ways.

How would you go about blocking Twitter?

Block everything and block communication fullstop?

Edit: Somebody at work (thanks :)) kindly pointed out this Guardian article.

My Tagging Experiment

2007-09-19T04:28:00.001-07:00

A little tongue in cheek this one. This years Dconstruct07 utilized a pre-conference website at Backnetwork. I tried a little to make connections here but my personal network consisted of just two work colleagues. My attempt to discover mutual interests amongst the attendees, via a couple of forum posts only resulted in one response which being just before the conference I did not read until afterwards (doh).

It seems a little over half the attendees signed up to the site on backnetwork and although I didn't make any new connections there, there was some useful insider information posted. In some other arenas I would guess that the sign up would be lower but this type of pre-conference interaction is perhaps something that more and more people are going to come to expect.

At one point the evening before, my mind was bored and thinking of hand-held devices, I was also thinking of tagging and whether I had put up the right 'interests' on the Backnetwork site. Tomorrow I would presumably be spending sometime in a large crowd of total strangers and have no idea or way to discriminate those that shared similar interests (or complimentary interests). I flashed forward to the future and imagined a hand-held device that was not only wireless but also transmitted a configurable profile. The profile would contain information on my current interests and status. For example if I really was looking to chat and had free time it would indicate this (like the 'Skype me' option on Skype). Pull out the device and it would communicate with all the other devices in the crowd, I could pop-up a screen and scroll though options highlighting the position of other people of interest and their position.

There is of course scope for chaos, how long before some wag transmits "I am a 10 second bomb", "I am a 9 second bomb" "I am .....". Or rue the day a Supermodel wanders into the conference transmitting "Computer geeks make me hot, and I love Apple technology" (there would be deaths, I am sure of it). Is this a nightmare vision, something desirable or just something soon inevitable?

I had no such device so resorted to writing, "I study Chinese" in Chinese characters in the space below my name on the name badge. As expected this was entirely unsuccessful but never mind I had plenty of opportunity to chat with the Chinese community in Brighton during non-conference time.

Oh yes, later in the day Tom Coates introduced us to a feature world (not too distant) where the absolute position of everybody could be plotted and reported and Paul Boag in one of his podcasts in talking about the IPhone speculated on all shops and venues transmitting information that could be picked up as you wander by. Not a big leap to extend this to people and already happening in a limited way via Bluetooth.

Good Washing Machine

2007-09-17T04:41:00.000-07:00

Leisa Reichelt gave a talk at Dconstruct07 entitled Waterfall Bad, Washing Machine Good, Leisa has also put up the slides of her presentation. As of yet none of the podcasts from the talks seem to have appeared yet. Leisa also writes about her presentation on her blog.

Doh! just realised that because the slides were put on Slideshare I can embed them here, also these are from an earlier presentation. They do give a flavor of the Dconstruct presentation.

I could kind of relax a little during this talk, coming from a developer camp and having had experience of some agile methodologies, I don't need to be sold on it. Admittedly my workplace uses it only on some projects but I definitely prefer working this way. It was interesting to see a designer angle on it though and I quite agree that you do not have to get too anally retentive about the exact execution of your agile methodology (it is amazing how some people do, you can sit down in a stand-up meeting if you have a bad-back it still works, the only reason you are standing is to ensure that people remember that the meeting is supposed to be brief and to the point). I guess that the kind of people who get too anal about the execution of the methodology are the same ones that point out grammatical errors in spoken language (why do you think they invented the word colloquial grrrrr....).

Now I have to admit that I like Leisa's slides very much, since returning to work I have started organizing my brief notes and reminders on little colored post-its rather than on the back of scrap paper (bad for the environment but rather more aesthetically pleasing) perhaps there is a tiny piece of me not bedded in code and formula.

Of course life is more like a washing machine, anyone who knows the best answers at the right stages of the usual waterfall is either a genius or imbued with too little imagination and reflection.

Summaries (why re-invent the wheel?)

2007-09-15T05:59:00.000-07:00

This is still somewhat of an experiment for me, trying to review what I gained from a conference and yet being exposed to the reviews and comments of others etc. People commenting on comments and observations, it goes around and around like a wheel but surely fades overtime. Perhaps some pieces will be more sticky than others?

As many people can write better than me it seems sensible to just co-opt what they have written and finally when I think I have digested enough spit out a summary of my impressions and suggestions for how this may/should impact on my own work environment.

In that spirit my favorite swirly opaque summary of the whole dconstruct07 experience (check out the comment by Tom Coates. Also a slightly more fact based if sparse summary.

I will also dig up summaries of talks that may be worth reading where applicable. For example a short summary of the presentation given by Tom Coates.

I guess I should soon (about a week) be in a position to write up a summary and identify relevance and advantage to what I do day to day at work. If not was there any point in attending?

The Experiance Stack (presentation experiance)

2007-09-12T11:26:00.000-07:00

Matt Webb presented on the Experience Stack at Dconstruct07. This presentation was packed full of interesting ideas and slides, perhaps too packed full. Particularly as it was still too close to lunch time beverages for most of us to be at our brightest.

Luckily Matt has already analyzed his own presentation, restated part of it and put up slides and transcripts. Picking through this material I realize there is going to quite a lot of food for thought.

There is a very significant change noticeable for old timers like me. The presentation doesn't finish it continues after the event. Increasingly we can re-listen, watch slides, transcripts, comment, digest etc. Sometimes now I also see good presentations that were made within companies, released on the web. Probably correctly they realize that in these cases what they lose from releasing some good ideas into the wild is handsomely offset by building image and reputation (in these cases the presentations are inevitably branded).

Maybe presentations can be richer if we have more time and resources to digest them. Maybe in the future the ideal presentation will be layered, something to take away immediately and something to pick through later (a kind of presentation doggy bag). The experiance of those being presented to is certainly changing overtime.

Edit: just looked up the book Mind Hacks that Matt co-authored, O'Reilly tells me I can select and buy a chapter Yaayy, just the sort of approach I like. I fill out a whole bunch of crufty information over several screens before I discover I cannot pay with debit card or Paypal etc. Bad O'Reilly experiance.

A Web of Data

2007-09-11T03:51:00.000-07:00

Returning to the presentation made by Tom Coates, in my last post I extracted the "Your website is not your product" idea as that struck a particularly resonant chord. But there were plenty more ideas.

On the subject of meta data, Tom seemed to be in favor of retaining as much as possible (particularly if available for free as part of an automated process). You cannot easily second guess how your users will search and sift through your data, using Flickr as an example it was demonstrated just how many different ways that the photos can be sorted, obvious ones by user or tag and less obvious by Camera make/type and various camera settings when the photo was taken.

Tom also highlighted the idiocy of the taxonomy vs folksonomy arguments. Both have advantages so why not provide both, why not throw in parametric searching and anything else as well? This kind of reminds me of the way that small children absorb certain concepts. Ask them do you want X or icecream and they will see this as a choice that has to made. Once a certain age is reached and their mental processing of concepts they are familiar with improves they will think for a second and ask "errr can I have X and icecream please?".

This boagworld.com podcast talks briefly about Dconstruct07 in the news section towards the beginning (also has good things to say about Tom's presentation. Listening to this reminded me of a couple of things that I had forgotten or not noted, I think when they appear the podcasts of the Dconstruct07 will prove very useful for review. For now I have put the feed for the Dconstruct07 podcasts in the left column of this blog, but so far it only contains three pre-conference podcasts. Incidentally as a developer who is also interested in the front-end and user experiance I find the boagworld podcasts very helpful.

Your website is not your product

2007-09-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

One the most interesting presentations at Dconstruct07 for someone from my background was ironically at the end. Tom Coates talked about Designing for a Web of Data. It doesn't seem that the podcasts of the presentations are up yet, and I am sure I will get much more when I listen to them. However apart from his obvious enthusiasm and taking us through a world where the absolute location of everyone is potentially available online, the biggest message I came away with is that your website is not your product.

Firstly that fact that the audience general expectations and experiences allowed Tom to present this as possibly surprising, tells us a little. A maker of fine cheese, no matter how good his website and how it enables his worldwide market is never likely to consider that his product is anything but cheese for example. It is though easy to see why many people would naturally consider otherwise, and when I presented this casually as a thought from the conference to a few at work today there were a variety of responses.

Take Twitter, a prime example, the service this website offers is enabled via the network but most of the data people generate is viewed by others on other sites, on other devices (mobile phones for example), presumably via the magic of RSS and API. The data is the product not the web pages at http://twitter.com/.

Increasingly I view the things I am interested in other places than the website they may located on. With RSS feeds I can read blog posts and comments and forum posts etc. on Netvibes or Google Reader. A Chinese learning site I use has written a Facebook application so I can listen to and monitor the lessons in my own personal list of interests without leaving Facebook.

The place where I work is in academic publishing. Once our products were physical journals and magazines and books. What are they now, hmmmm they are not cheese that is for sure, it will require a great leap of technology before I can get my cheese directly via broadband, but in the end our products are words, and pictures and they like individual twits (the output of twitter? I find it hard to keep up) will go down the wires just fine. Already it starts, xml gateways enabling federated search etc. etc.

The Outsider?

2007-09-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is rather too heavy but I happen to like the story The Outsider very much. Whilst attending DConstruct07 I was made to feel very welcome and it was well organized. So why did I use this title.

I do not own a MacBook or any computer made by Apple (apart from an AppleIIe but I like old stuff).
I have often worked on the design and front-end of websites but this is not the main part of my job.
I don't know the keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop and would use The Gimp for any graphics I generated or altered (not very skillfully).
My network of contacts at the conference was restricted to people I worked with.
I have not heard of any of the 'famous' names that were there (or rather had no previous reason to remember them).

At one point I wandered up to the Laptop recharging points and thought I had walked into an Apple store. Obviously many of the attendees would consider themselves designers rather than developers. This also means that many of the attendees are working at a sort of "meta" level when they are interacting with online communities. Their understanding of network and community interaction online is often via communities and networks that are around the business rather than those of people who do not work in the business. Many of the attendees also work in companies that cater for web business which is not the same as working for a company that merely has an online presence. I am quite sure that most are aware of this but it is a distinction that should be made.

Having said all this the conference was not too design orientated and had interesting elements and ideas for all those involved in Internet work. It is interesting that clear distinction is made between roles these days but that where I work a number of people with very different skills and interests have the title "developer". Even more interesting is that these people may have started a few years ago with very similar skill sets but overtime as the Internet has become more complex it has forced differences. Would you hire a contractor who claimed to be a DBA, Enterprise Java Wizard and skilled designer of websites, if he was telling the truth could you afford him?

My own "Aha!" moments concerning things like RSS, tagging, online communities etc. came from doing things outside of work (yes I understood these things intellectually before that, but hadn't felt the benefits where it counted). I think it is important that people who work online have ways to keep up to date, you can't just put it down as something the youngsters are doing because it moves too fast (remember many intelligent business managers resisted e-mail at first). For somebody who doesn't spend too much time at the front end then attending a conference like Dconstruct can be a part of that process, perhaps even more important is to keep playing out there no matter what your age or position.

In conclusion was I an outsider? No not really, whilst my 'network' is unlikely to be expanded and I am not about to get snapped up by some new media startup the conference did engender some new thoughts and viewpoints.

About

2007-09-09T08:17:00.000-07:00

I have other blogs, mostly to do with learning Chinese. Part of the aim of learning Chinese on the internet, is to find my way around the internet again (it changes rather fast if you take your eye off it for a while). Where I work we tend to have to operate at many levels, from server stuff, databases, front-end etc. etc. I guess with all these layers we are like onions, or maybe layer cakes or perhaps even ogres.

I just attended the DConstruct conference in an attempt to revive one or more layers, that generated a bunch of thoughts, so I thought why not start blogging about webstuff.
Start with Dconstruct07 and then lump along sporadically with anything else.

I could have done this at work but then it would have been on the more constricted side of a firewall and besides my work colleagues can still read it here. Once I wrote some interesting and useful things on the wrong side of a firewall (hey it happens but I will not be held responsible for anybody stupid enough to hold their breath....) but now they might as well be buried in soft peat and recycled as firelighters because even I can't find them (and I would love to know what they were).