Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

I’m not sure why I like to check Mashable and Techcrunch every day. They profile a bunch of startups every day. Part of it is that I like to see what’s out there. But I do wish they’d be a bit less web 2.0-y.

It just occurred to me that Borat is a much more appropriate character to show America than Ali G, who worked better in the stiff upper lip English environment. Borat shows America’s racial problems, Ali G showed the UK’s class problems.

ok I turned off that automatic link to performancing. I understand why they do it, and since it’s free and very useful I’ll go with it, but that was almost evil.

I’ve been very happy with Windows Livewriter, especially for its handling of rich text and images, but it loads up slightly slowly, so I’m testing out the performancing blogging plugin today.

powered by performancing firefox

the weblog of Lucas Gonze: “I remember times in my life where I had a strictly limited music collection, and I kept things fresh by listening at finer and finer levels of detail. Those days should be over for most of us, though. It’s important for individuals to grow their collections past the “enough” marker, whether that’s 50,000 songs or even just 500, because at that point you stop listening in the old way.

The new way is to treat music more like a newspaper than a book, so that a continuous stream of fresh content is intrinsic to the media. If you hear a good hook somewhere, the next day you should find that hook remixed into another song. You should never again, post 20th century, post the era when music and manufactured goods were synonomous, think of music as something so static that 500 songs could encompass it.”

Interesting. I always have fun with calling stuff “the X of Y”. So this is the psychology of abundance? :)

The Dilbert Blog: Good News Day. Need some happy thoughts? Read this.

And on a related note: that page is an example of the Joy of Scrolling Long Pages. Don’t break that page up and destroy the magic. Don’t commit informationarchitecturitis. :) Sometimes, a really long page should just be a really long page.

Bllshit Google how clueless can you be?

Official Google Blog: Do you “Google?” “Usage: ‘Google’ as verb referring to searching for information via any conduit other than Google.
Example: “I googled him on Yahoo and he seems pretty interesting.”
Our lawyers say: Bad. Very, very bad”

So now Google is telling us when to use the word “Google”. That’s not even funny. That’s just clueless.

Who knew there were so many? Health , Diet and Fitness videoblogs and podcasts - a list of videblog and podcast RSS feeds on mefeedia

Somehow, Vox (SixApart’s new service that came out of beta today) just doesn’t appeal to me. Not sure why that is.

evhead: The Birth of Obvious Corp.: “We are attempting to create a new model for building and running web products. Nearly everyone I know in the Internet business is either at one of the giants, wishing they were at a startup, or at a startup that hopes get bought by a giant.”

swipr.com: “swipr is basically a plug-in toolset for Microsoft Visio. It allows you to create a set of HTML pages that integrate screenflows or sitemaps and wireframes. Anyone can navigate thorugh your sitemap and see the wireframes of the pages in the sitemap just by clicking through it. You can also create links on your wireframes, effectively turning your basic wireframe deliverable into a low-fi prototype.”

The new Firefox is pretty nice with feeds: it displays a “nice” looking page for feeds and gives you the option to subscribe using various feedreaders. Smooth and friendly!

Cool, the new firefox now has close buttons on each tab. Just as I suggested in 2004. World domination next!

Are 35,000 people in America’s secret prisons? That is fucking crazy. Is America the new nazi state? Is that a question I shouldn’t ask?

35,000 in Secret Prisons | CorrenteWire: “I’m at the Center for American Progress, listening to Sid Blumenthal and Glenn Greenwald talk about the Imperial Presidency, and one thing is important enough for me to want to live blog. Sid says that Wilkerson, Powell’s old chief of staff, believes that the correct number of victims in secret Bush prisons is 35,000, only %5 of which “mayâ€? have to do with terrorism. More than twice what I thought, and hardly any to do with the “war on terror.â€?

This page has a mixed list of all the podcasts (video and audio) of the BBC.

In the spirit of good citizenship, it also has an rss feed, but all the links in the RSS feed point back to the BBC as much as possible, instead of republishing stuff and pointing back to mefeedia as seems to be the norm with directories these days.

Why the hell would this post for the search query whotel send me lots of traffic to this page: curry: podcasts and videoblogs about curry?

That’s just weird. I can’t even figure out what a whotel is?

A good story about very specific categories (Lost A Cat? Suitable For Marriage) that sell more cards.

I proceed to the Marketplace floor of the department store (that’s on the same level at the Skytrain ticket booths, just at the bottom of the first escalators in Granville station). They’ve recently renovated as well - there’s a pharmacy and a new deli counter and yes - a card section (right next to Godiva Chocolates). A big huge multi-aisle card section was just what I needed. So I start browsing the rows of greetings and sympathies. I look under the heading “Religious” and it’s not there… I eventually find it right under “Baptism”, how convenient. Oh, but the convenience didn’t stop there. I discovered ALL kinds of card categories that the Bay has laid out for us and I’m not talking about the usual sections of “Birthday - Son” or “From all of us”.

Oh no, The Bay really wants us to find what we’re looking for. Here are some examples of their card section categories:

“Still thinking of you”. In case the “thinking of you” cards just don’t cut it anymore.

“Loss of Cat” was a category in the Religious section, next to “Friends are praying for you”, well okay that’s understandable I suppose pets can become family members and their loss can be profound.

“Suitable for Remarriage” Now, I’m not sure if the card itself is suitable for someone who is getting remarried or if it’s to congratulate you on being suitable… for marrying again.

Now here’s where it just gets outta hand.

An entire section of cards labeled “You’ve been through so much but you’re never alone” and another couple rows reserved for cards that all express, in some way or another, “We stay friends despite our busy Schedules”.

Link to Metroblogging Vancouver: All in the Cards

A great diagram about how the internets work. Finally we understand!

Link to Xark!: How the Internets work

And here’s a list of secondlife podcast rss feeds

I made a  List of BBC Podcasts, using a new lists feature on mefeedia. I coded the list feature in a few hours, launched it this afternoon, and so far we’ve already gotten a few useful lists:

• A complete list of NPR audio podcast RSS feeds
• A list of Vloggercon source feeds
• List of IBM podcasts IBM is doing well with adopting blogs and such internally.
• A complete list of ABC News Feeds

Enjoy! OPML and all that goodness is for later, the next few days I have no time whatsoever :)

Josh Wolf is in prison now because he didn’t want to hand over his source material as a citizen journalist. You can go donate something for the good cause on his site. Prison is no fun, so I think he needs some support.

Link to The Revolution Will Be Televised

You know how people who invent a technology can often look into the future better than people who grew up in it? Dave Winer is like that. I think it might be because they see the technology for what it, technologically, is. And they see it’s limits.

We, who grew in with a technology, we just think the world is like that and how can we change it? Anyways, Dave:

A few years back we wrote about cars with interfaces for MP3 players, and now they’re starting to make them. That’s good. Okay, the next thing is to put fractional horsepower HTTP servers on board, with simple programming interfaces (I like XML-RPC because it interfaces easily with every programming language, but lower-level interfaces would be okay, just more work for the programmer). While you’re at it, home theater systems should also have HTTP servers with programmable interfaces, so I can write a script on my desktop computer to move stuff over to the hard disk on the music system. Oh that’s right they don’t have hard disks. Add one, okay? They’re really cheap.

Source: Scripting News: 10/12/2006

Yahoo is doing a project where they let people from all over the world submit pictures and video and such, and then they will treat it like a “timecapsule” for future anthropologists.

The timecapsule idea is a bit weird (are they engraving this? or building a 10,000 year lasting server?), but I love the idea of creating interesting ways for people to collaborate and discuss and create “content” online. Social networks are getting boring.

Oh, and the UI is funky too:

(Yes it really swirls around the way you imagine.)

Link to Yahoo Time Capsule - by Jonathan Harris

I wrote a post estimating how much time I spend on different kinds of work:

• Peoplework: 15% (about right)
• Paperwork: 5% (not enough)
• Real work: 30% (yea, really!)
• Information work: 50% (This is way too much!)

What are your percentages like?

I always cringe when people say things like “clickable link” or “interactive forum”. ”Can we add some clickable links there?” I guess it’s just that they lack familiarity with the medium. But come on guys. I hear this from people who are responsible for some large websites! 

"Meeting eBay?s top developer, Eric Billingsley". Interesting interview about eBay’s search engine. It has very specific requirements: if I add something for sale, it has to show up in searches very quickly. And you need complete retrieval: ALL items have to show up.

He also talks about a flexible datamodel that can accomodate various datafields for a teddybear to a car.

Technically, one interesting bit is that the whole system is IN memory.

Watch movie

Original post on October 11, 2006 from ScobleShow: Videoblog about geeks, technology, and developers: (RSS feed)

Eric Billingsley used to design nuclear power plants, but his new job is no less interesting: he is the senior director of eBay’s new research labs. Come along and listen as he tells you what eBay is up to and how he built eBay’s new search engine. He also gives us a demo of the latest stuff from their research labs. It should be said that this stuff is experimental and has not been shipped to eBay yet. Tags: Eric Billingsley, eBay

(Via Mefeedia)

For quite some time, I’ve known how seasons affect search needs among an academic institution’s searchers. After some seat-of-the-pants manual clustering of queries by topic, the seasonality of search seems to be validated once more. I’ve color-coded the clusters in spreadsheet snippet below; you can download the entire spreadsheet here (942Kb Excel spreadsheet; each column represents a single week’s worth of queries from each month, September 2005 through September 2006):

This graph illustrates top searches in the university:

Source: Rosenfeld Media - Search Analytics for your Site: The seasonality of search demonstrated

"The Adventures of Dancin’ Dan"

Watch movie (1 MB, 0.4 min)

Original post on April 30, 2006 from Undergroundfilm > Comedy: (RSS feed)

Dancing Dan has a problem. Every time he hears his favorite song he dances out of control, leading to embarassing moments and painful memories.

(Via Mefeedia)

We launched a new version of mefeedia today. Not many new features, most of the work was to make the backend scale - we moved to an entire new datamodel.

But we did add a few conversation tracking features. I’m learning a lot about the information architecture of conversations :)

Link to The best videoblog and podcast directory

Trying a search for  hack at Google Code Search is fun:

I am trying Rashmi’s new slideshare product. I really think she’s on to something here. Below are my slides from a talk I gave at the IA Summit 2006.

I love this. Lou Rosenfeld often puts the slides of his seminars online, but downloading a huge PPT is no fun. He used the new service of Uzanto (by another information architect, Rashmi Sinha and the team she set up that’s partly US, partly India) called Slideshare to embed his slides on the website. Much easier to skim through. I think this might be a hit.

Link to Bloug: Whole lotta slides

Embedded, it looks like this:

I never really thought much about same language subtitling (I saw a lot of it in Thailand, but for karaoke), but it turns out it’s a great way to teach literacy.

Back in June, Dr. Brij Kothari, the president of PlanetRead, was given a grant from the Google Foundation to use ‘Same-Language Subtitling’ of movies to increase literacy in India. It’s a very cheap, effective and creative method of teaching people to read, and can be broadcast over the Internet at almost no cost. They hosted SLS movies on Google Video and on Youtube.

Source: Smart Mobs: Google’s Literacy Project

Dreamhost writes about their problems in the recent months. My sites are fairly fast again, but they did have a lot of problems. On the other hand, you have to love how honestly they write about them, so I’m sticking with them.  

We are very sorry for all of the headaches this has caused everyone. Believe me, there was no one who wanted this problem resolved more than we did. Providing sub-par service is no fun and isn’t the way we like to spend our time.

Source: DreamHost Blog » Anatomy of a Disaster, Part 2

At vloggercon last year I talked about values and technology, and how we need to tell companies what the values are and how to stay in line, and how technology evolves together with values and how that makes it even more important.

Anyways :)

In the past few days we had a nice example. I stumbled accross an audio feed that was being republished by Odeo, which is not a good thing. Replublishing feeds without permission means stealing subscribers.

So Jay contacted Odeo, and after some emails back and forth clarifying the issue, they said they would fix the problem, no longer republish feeds and basically be good net citizens.

Yey!

So speaking up works. And this stuff is important - we’re still setting examples here.

For reference, below is my email to Odeo. After some confusion at first they got the point and promised that in the next rollout things will be fixed.

I don’t know, this is good stuff. I know how it is to develop, sometimes you don’t even realize that what you’re doing is wrong, or sometimes you’re focussed a little bit more on your company and a little bit less on the user, and what you’re doing doesn’t seem so evil. So it’s good when users speak up.

——
Hi Crystal,
thanks for the clarifications. Unfortunately, Odeo *does* republish
feeds, let me explain.

http://odeo.com/channel/4442/view is the channel page.

It has indeed a link to the original RSS feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/diaryofafauxjournalist

*However*, and this is what I am complaining about, that page *also*
republishes the rss feed here:
http://odeo.com/channel/rss/4442

The channel page also points to the republished feed in its
feed-discovery html, which means that anyone who uses Bloglines or
mostly any other reader on that page will subscribe to the Odeo feed,
*not* to the original feed.

At this point the original producer looses out on stats and subscribers.

What’s worse, in that republished feed, Odeo uses all links to their
own channel pages and audio pages. It’s ok for Odeo to have pages for
the channel and the audio, after all, you do provide links back. But
it’s not kosher to republish RSS feeds with those links in it.

As a good net citizen, Odeo should send traffic *to* the podcasters,
not take it away.

So yes, Odeo is republishing feeds without the author’s permission.
And through the feed-discovery mechanism, Odeo is spreading those
feeds wide and far.

You might be familiar with the podshow debacle and others. This is not
acceptable.

Please let me know if you have questions about this, and please let us
know what you plan to do about this.

Cheers,
Peter Van Dijck

Here’s a picture from my Flickr account inserted through Livewriter’s very promising plugin architecture. Yes, I’m a fan of a piece of Microsoft software. Who’da thunk it.

I’ve been a fan of Livewriter and the new version is even better - and still beta! It’s really a blog writer’s dream. The new version does microformats, tags and all sorts of goodies.

Here’s a screencast by Jon Udell.

(And yes, this is a Microsoft product.)