TechCrunch: “I’ve heard from three independent sources that YouTube may have very quietly raised another $25 million in venture capital [...] Forbes reports that YouTube’s bandwidth fees are approaching $1 million per month.”
Up at 3:30am and I’m in Dublin, Ireland, a wonderful country. Country, yes. Damn jetlag, I’ll be dead tomorrow. I wonder if my new clients-to-be read my weblog. :) They’ll let me know. They seem nice people.
Which brings me to: I got another email today of some startup wanting to work with me. It makes sense: you want experienced IA’s on your product. Anyway, more and more, I’m convinced about my policy of wanting to work with nice people first, on interesting projects second. Nice people are more important. It just makes life more enjoyable.
Enough ranting and raving. Dublin, here I am. The hotel is very nice. The bathroom has BIG handles on everything. Don Norman would be pleased. The pubs are good as well.
Visa Blog : Students Need Your Help!: “Tens of thousands of high school students have participated in school walk-outs to draw attention to comprehensive immigration reform. Their successes are well documented in national and local media. Sadly, many students are facing disciplinary and criminal action as a result of walking out of school. These students are in need of legal counsel and all participants need to know their rights. You can help!”
The difference between rethoric (”We want our kids to have values”) and practice (”When they stand up for themselves we punish them and trivialize their intent.”) is really amazing. In a way, we’re living in Big Brothers’ 1984. Especially in the US, these days, or perhaps it’s just more apparent there.
Joho the Blog: Karl Rove would sing in Spanish: “The immigration bill has turned into a fiasco, leaving the Republicans as the party that would build a wall between two countries — a wall! — and forcing the President to have to clarify his party’s position by saying that, no, putting 12 million people on deportation trains probably isn’t such a practical idea.
Then our President is forced to take a stand on a symbolic, wedge issue: Does the national anthem have the same value if sung in Spanish? Karl Rove would not have let the President get backed into that corner. And once in the corner, he would not have let Bush snarl his way out of it. How can the president of country of immigrants find our national song less beautiful sung in the language of those citizens who have chosen to come here? Why does it make him frightened — I do believe fear is behind this reaction — instead of bring a lump to his throat?”
BBC - Programme Catalogue - Programmes classified as pirate radio stations. The new BBC programme catalogue looks beautifully.. IA-like. Somehow. Check that black and white. Check those sparklines. Oh baby!
You should really pre-order this book TODAY! Amazon.com: Secrets of Videoblogging: Michael Verdi, Ryanne Hodson, Diana Weynand, Shirley Craig
Lucas wonders where the chinks in Myspace’s armour are.
Two words. Innovation and mullets. Myspace is locked into a certain model of interaction because of their history and size, and their innovation attempts don’t seem particularly successful (video).
Their interaction model is centered around identity creation: here I am! This is me! Be my friend! This works great with teenagers. Myspace will never be a LinkedIn, for example (LinkedIn seems to be doing great, by the way). MySpace also will never be a SecondLife, and not just because it’s a website rather than a gameclient. There are other interaction models around things that are not identity.
And mullets, of course, went way out of fashion.
Glimpse Inside a Metaverse: The Virtual World of Second Life - Google Video.
“Secondlife”. “MySpace”. Alternative realities, and what are they replacing? Mostly television.
Check out the new website of the Immigration and Health Initiative (IAHI)
I was wondering if Yahoo’s new Mediacenter clone supports RSS 2.0 with enclosures. And I realized: that’s not a feature. That’s central. A developer or product manager may think: “oh, we can build that in later”. But without RSS support, you have another closed media delivery system. Who cares about that? I am still waiting for the day that Tivo, Windows Media Center and so on truly support RSS. Really throw their weight behind it.
The granddaddy of all faceted browse systems, Flamenco, is now available as a free Flamenco Download
MediaGuardian.co.uk | Media | BBC unveils radical revamp of website: “The BBC today unveiled radical plans to rebuild its website around user-generated content, including blogs and home videos, with the aim of creating a public service version of MySpace.com.”
Mmm. Om Malik doesn’t like it. I’m worried too. The BBC team has clearly shown they’re very good at doing bottom up webby projects, but announcing something like this, like a big plan, is just setting it up to fail.
Hey, Yahoo is going for the TV space as well. Yahoo! Go - TV - What Is It?
I say why not? Microsoft is doing it, Apple is doing their darndest best, and all the old school tv players are doing it.
Whatever happens in the coming years, somehow internet tv will find its way to your television set. And if it’s somewhat open (and they’d be stupid not to be), that means videoblogs will too. I can’t wait.
Jeremy from Yahoo is listening again to Adam Bosworth’s (from Google) talk on the future of Mysql. The vision is that the new webOS will have certain data types (see
Google OS taking shape), and use RSS with a few extensions as its query language. And Google and others are building it like crazy. These are interesting times.
I wonder what Odeo are up to? They roll out little features now and then. But they’re surprisingly quiet for a startup. I guess they’re getting that pay service (whatever it is) ready to go…
All this chittah-chattah: “When you sign up online for Skywards, which is the frequent-flier program of Emirates, the international airline of the United Arab Emirates, you enter your name, address, passport number, and other information, and you select an honorific for yourself from a drop-down list. A few of the choices, in addition to the standard Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss, and Dr, are: Admiral, Air Comm, Air Marshal, Al-Haj (denoting a Muslim who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca), Archbishop, Archdeacon, Baron, Baroness, Colonel, Commander, Corporal, Count, Countess, Dame, Deacon, Deaconess, Deshamanya (a title conferred on eminent Sri Lankans), Dowager (for a British widow whose social status derives from that of her late husband, properly used in combination with a second honorific, such as Duchess), Duchess, Duke, Earl, Father, Frau, General, Governor, HRH, Hon, Hon Lady, Hon Professor, JP (justice of the peace?), Judge, Khun (the Thai all-purpose honorific, used for both men and women), L Cpl, Lt, Lt Cmdr, Lt Col, Lt Gen, Midshipman, Mlle, Monsieur, Monsignor, Mother, Pastor, Petty Officer, Professor, Senor, Senora, Senorita, Sgt, Sgt Mjr, Shaikha (for a female shaikh, or sheikh), Sheikh, Shriman (an Indian honorific, for one blessed by Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, wisdom, luck, and other.”
In information architecture, ratings are overrated. Not only do ratings often create competition around the wrong attributes, also, ratings often end up being meaningless in particular implementations. What does a 4.5 star rating mean? Usually, the answer is: nothing.
Ratings are overrated. Except when they’re not.
When you spend more time on design than on grammar: “You can specify your interest in some topics, pick from what other people’s interests, and even customize it by providing a reading list.”
We’re starting an informal conversation about being gainfuklly unemployed (ie. working for yourself) here: The poorbuthappy guide to being gainfully unemployed. Check it out, leave a comment!
Is there a way to use an iPod video to record audio interviews and such? Both Belkin’s microphone adaptor and the griffin italk don’t seem to work with the video ipod, as far as I can tell.
Rolling Stone : The Rise of the Video Blog: “Rocketboom may be the vanguard in the march of the vlogs, but it’s hardly alone. Video-blog monitor Mefeedia.com currently lists more than 6,900 vlogs. And while the vast majority are essentially home videos glorifying children, hobbies and pets, vlogs are beginning to infiltrate the mainstream media, part of the increasingly seismic shift in the way we get our news and entertainment.”
Big Media still struggles to understand what I like to call authentic media. It’s not just about homevideos or funny dogs.
Famous Hollywood People are starting to videoblog now. Here’s Jack Black’s videoblog.
Those crazy Famous Hollywood People!
Flickr: Photos tagged with harlemrosegarden. We had a bunch of volunteers in the community garden. I put some pictures online. It was great to work in the garden again, even though it was raining. And it’s my birthday today. Now I gotta run to hear Aiwa Ong talk.
uiGarden.net - Weaving Usability and Cultures: Practicing Usability in Hong Kong: “Here at the uiGarden, we have been having discussions on whether there are cultural differences between practicing usability in the West and the Far East. In an exploration of the theme, we interviewed Apogee’s own Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong. They give their own uptakes of the discussion and offer us their insights from their own experiences of working in Hong Kong.”
I was just at an anthropology conference where they were talking about the importance of the race/gender/… of the interviewer vs. the interviewee. A black lady said: “When I was interviewing in Africa, people told me they opened up to me because of my color and grey hairs”. The discussion was interesting, it made me think of the importance of a diverse team. In web development, usually everyone is white male, and I think it shows in the systems we build.
apophenia: medical marijuana: “Today, the FDA issued a statement saying that there is no scientific proof that medical marijuana helps patients better than other prescription drugs. This infuriates me. In 1994, i broke my neck. I was given valium (and a lot of other things) and became extremely addicted to it. I was in a constant fog. To make matters worse, it made my body unable to register pain so when i tossed and turned at night, i made everything worse. I kept losing vision and hearing, even while drugged out of my mind. Weening off of valium was hell and i was super resentful towards the medical establishment for getting me addicted to it. Without valium, the pain was brutal, but i refused to go back on that evil drug.”
Rosenfeld Media - Card Sorting. Donna Maurer, about THE expert on cardsorting, and definitely someone with a lot of practical experience, is writing a book about cardsorting. I can’t wait. I really like the approach Lou Rosenfeld is taking with his new book company. Practical UX books. Just imagine!
Through it’s API, Google is starting to define its OS for outside developers. The main characteristic of the OS seems to be its web simplicity. Everything has of course a URL. Google defines “kinds”, which are major content types, like “event” or “message”. A message can be an email, a blog entry, a comment or anything like that.
So Google’s services (calendar, mail, …) use a common language and common content types (”kinds”). This promises to be powerful stuff, and as we’ve seen with the opening of Amazon’s S3: we’re just getting started.
Common Elements:”Kinds”: “The collection of elements that together describe a contact is called the Contact “kind.” Some of the elements in the Contact kind are ordinary Atom or RSS elements; others are defined by Google in a namespace called the “Google data namespace.” By convention, the Google data namespace is usually referred to in XML code using the gd: alias; for example, the element that contains a telephone or fax number is
Google defines other kinds as well: Event (a collection of standardized elements that together represent a calendar event) and Message (a collection of elements representing an email message, discussion group posting, blog entry, or other message).”
Ryanne made a promo video for vloggercon2006: Peter Van Dijck is going (Quicktime Movie).
Seriously though, if you want to get in touch with the grassroots of online video, go to Vloggercon. And sign up now, coz I have a feeling they’ll be sold out very soon.
If you have a Visio doc with lots of pages, and need to get them in PPT, what I do is to Save As Webpage. Then click the Publish button and you can increase the resolution of the pictures (I choose .png and the highest resolution), and save it. Then I just pick out all the images from the folder Visio generates, and paste those into PPT.
The reason I have to go through these steps is that if you do Save As .gif or .png or something, Visio only saves the current page, not all pages. So it’s faster to use the Save As Webpage trick.
If you want to see how bottom-up media is being spread, check out the new Freevlog. Michael and Ryanne are doing a (ahem) “kick-ass” job of spreading the word.
Joi Ito’s Web: Japan’s “Free Press”: “I heard an interesting theory that I’d love for any Japan experts to confirm or debunk. Apparently, during the drafting of the Japanese constitution, the phrase “freedom of the press” was proposed by the US team. This was a big problem for Japan which had never really allowed any free speech. Instead of translating it as “freedom of the press” in terms of free speech they changed the meaning to freedom of “printing press” sort of press.”
Google has always been good at minimalism, but as they expand into more complex apps (UI-wise), there seems to be a move towards getting “designers” involved. Google calendar got help from Douglas Bowman, Google got Jeffrey Veen to join them with their purchase of measuremap from Adaptive Path.
The challenge will be to: a) create a somewhat consistent feel in all their new ajax apps (which is somewhat happening), and b) instill a culture among engineers that values “design” enough for their products to be usable.
They seem to be well on their way. The word on the street about Google is that they’re actually getting very advanced at doing usability testing and measuring results. I have the feeling they’ll be like Amazon: no apparent focus on design and such, but a very deep, measuring, “engineer”-like way of doing usability and design. So far, some of their apps have been horrendous to use (RSS reader), others I quite like (the new calendar).
SB Forum on Digital Transitions Vlog: this is a great example of the power of videoblogging to humanize conversations. (via Jay)
But is it just me, or did Michael Jackson take over Mena Trott’s body? And should that worry you if you have a Typepad blog? Mm. The plot thickens.
We Are The Media : What’s going on with Veoh?: The Veoh saga continues. Veoh is “stealing” (the quotes because it depends who you ask) videos from videobloggers, putting them on their site without attribution, trasncoded and hosted by them.
The poorbuthappy guide to being unemployed: together with my friend Paola, I am starting a blog/discussion site about working for yourself. I love working for myself, and I love to talk about it.
loadedpun: Veoh (a VC-funded video company) is pulling in videos, re-encoding them and hosting them on their blog with no link back. This kind of “re-hosting” (I just made that up!) should be done through an opt-in mechanism, Veoh doesn’t use opt-in. It is probably quite illegal, and the videoblogging community is up in arms. We’ll see how it goes. In a world of fuzzy content rights, this should prove to be an interesting case.
YouTube is in trouble. Apart from the obvious problems with copyrighted material, their businessplan (which I know nothing about) seems flawed: It
plans to start doing contextual advertising by the middle of the year.
That is a problem. If contextual ads is the best idea they can come up with (come on guys!), their brand will suffer heavily. And I don’t think their brand is that strong right now, although they are very, very popular. The problem lies also in their cost structure: YouTube must be quite expensive to run. So just placing ads on there? Contextual ads?
The thinking behind contextual ads is that the user is interested in them because they are “relevant” to them. Think about this in the context of YouTube (not a Google search). I’m not gonna give away what I think they should be doing, but it’s definitely not contextual advertising.
Amazon’s new “plog” feature (who the hell came up with that name?) is fascinating. It is basically a feedreader, personalized for you, with blog items by the authors of books you’ve bought. The authors write blogentries specifically for Amazon. And you can leave comments.
In other words, it’s a direct connection between you and the authors of the books you buy. It’s quite brilliant. If they can get the implementation right (and get rid of that silly name).
It’d make even more sense if Amazon were to aggregate the actual blogs of writers who have a blog already (many do), instead of making the authors write specifically for Amazon. Now, you get messages like this: “Speaking of which, I tend to blog pretty actively over there, so I probably won’t spam your Amazon pages with too much material.” That’s not good.
I’m trying out the newest Drupal, it is MUCH more usable and has most of the configurable options you’d want. Really, MUCH more user friendly. Congrats team!