April 08, 2006 F*ck Web Standards
I spent the better part of a week in Austin, TX for the annual South by Southwest conference last March.
The panel I was on was a bit controversial in that it tried to prove a contrarian point-of-view to the heavily pro-web-standards panels at the conference. My part of the talk was about tables for layout and Flash. I was prepared for some tomatoes to be tossed at me.
We would get the funniest looks from people when they would ask us what our panel was about. I remember being at lunch with Sergio and Jeremy Keith when we told Jeremy about our panel. You could see him overcome by a mixture of shock and confusion.
There's a very simple example that we through out that made the whole thing much easier to understand: You have a box and inside that box you want to center (horizontally and vertically) another box that is of some unknown size (suppose it's an image the server passes to you).
If you are a loyal web standards advocate you will rack your brain to solve this simple problem. Horizontal centering is easy, but vertical-align in CSS 2 is meant to be used to align something within a line of text, not in an arbitrary block level element like a div. You could try to hack it by having a line of text (like a blank space) that is the same height as the bounding container and then offsetting the margin such that you account for the blank space. You could also hack it using Hicks's wrapper div trick (which is complex enough for me to avoid describing how it actually works here). There are also some JavaScript techniques that will dynamically compute the margin offsets and shift the images accordingly. Jeremy was saying he would use that trick to also shift the footer to the bottom of the browser window. The problem with it is that you'll see a noticeable jump as the browser renders the page because it has to shift and element to a new location from where it was originally placed.
Or you could just put the thing in a table that is set to valign center.
What is the best solution? What leads to the cleanest code and the best user experience (fastest load time, least amount of flickering, works in the user's web browser)?
A discussion like this will have even Jeremy Keith nodding his head that, yes, blind allegiance to web standards is not always the best way to go.
It was also nice having someone like Aaron Boodman on the panel. He works on the Firefox project at Google, so he is deeply interested in web standards, but at the same time he gave some great examples from the Google Page Creator project where deviating from standards was important to allow for rich wyswyg editing of the web page.
I had a number of people tell me that they really enjoyed our panel, and I did a round up of some of the blogs that mentioned us: Jackson West, Giga Om (written by Jackson West), Nathan Smith's Sospring, and Larissa Meek.
Larissa's opinion counts more than others because, well, she's a former model who is now a full-time web designer.
I had a great time at SXSW. I met a lot of people who I knew only through their blogs, had some heated debates about web development, and attended some interesting panels. My favorite was the Craiglist redesign. The redesign itself was nice, but the best part was that Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, was actually in the audience. He went up on stage later after people asked him to go up and gave his thoughts on the work he was shown. He was highly vague about whether or not the site would follow any of the suggestions, but the fact that he was simply there made the whole experience much more interesting. Oddly one person who wasn't there was Andrei Herasimchuk, who kicked off the initial "Design Eye" redesign on his Design by Fire site back in 2004. For some reason he wasn't able to attend in person and was just there via webcam.
I also pulled some of my favorite photos other people posted on Flickr:
Posted by johnnie at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)
July 17, 2005 Angelina Jolie Nude
Comment and Trackback spam on my website has increased over the last couple months and is driving me crazy. Everything from promises of nude celebrity photographs to poker to subjects that are not family oriented were being advertised on my site. The time came to do something about it. Here is my long, strange trip down the road of preventing spam:
Renaming MT-Comments.cgi
I started where everyone starts. Renaming MT-comments.cgi so that machines searching the web for that file have a harder time finding it. I hit a bug and reverted back. Spammers 1, Johnnie 0.
MT-Blacklist
Most people using Movable Type install MT-Blacklist, which blocks the IP addresses associated with spammers. I installed MT-Blacklist 2.0 but it was incompatible with Berkeley DB, my database. An older version (1.6.5) is compatible with Berkeley DB but not with Movable Type 3.1.x. Sigh. Spammers 2, Johnnie 0.
MT-DisguiseTrackbackURL
My next step was to install MT-DisguiseTrackbackURL. This takes the Trackback URL and uses JavaScript to render it on the page. This way a spambot will need to run JavaScript in order to learn about the URL. This isn't a very robust way to protect the Trackback URL, but it was easy to install, and I needed a quick victory. Spammers 2, Johnnie 1.
MT-Scode
Next I tried to installed Mt-Scode. This allows you to put a graphic with numbers and letters next to your comment submission form, and require people to write the value they see in an edit box. This keeps the spambots from being able to leave a comment. Unfortunately this required a graphics library called GD. I downloaded GD, but to install it I needed a C complier like GCC or CC, which I couldn't find when I SSH-ed to my account. Not looking good... Spammers 3, Johnnie 1.
MT-Bayesian
Then I decided to install MT-Bayesian. This uses a training algorithm to learn about the properties of spam and then hide those comments from showing up. The original MT-Bayesian is incompatible with Movable Type 3.1.x but I found an updated one. Unfortunately it was extremely processor intensive (read: painfully slow). It also did not rebuild templates in an intelligent way, requiring me to rebuild all individual posts even if the change was only to one. Training was taking a really long time, and due to some bug the comments were still showing up. I thought it was hopeless at this point: Spammers 4, Johnnie 1.
Asking a Question
Then I read about a simple idea: just ask a question and have the person enter the result in the form. You'll notice the question I ask in the comments area. This makes it harder for a spambot to leave comments.
The code for this was really simple. I added the input field to my Individual Entry templates with the name/id of X, and added this snipet of code to MT-Comments.cgi, right under the line that says 'use strict;':
use CGI qw(:standard);
my $data = param('X');
die unless (($data eq 'the-answer') || ($data eq 'The-answer'));
Spammers 4, Johnnie 2.
Movable Type 3.2
Movable Type 3.2 is currently in Beta, but it looks like it has MT-Bayesian type functionality built in. Hopefully the combination of the work I've done so far and Movable Type 3.2 will help me even the score.
Posted by johnnie at 11:55 PM | Comments (19)
June 16, 2005 The Power of Community
Last year I decided to buy a digital SLR. In the interest of getting the best deal I did a fair amount of Internet research using all the usual suspects: Shopping.com, Froogle, MySimon, EBay, Amazon, Ritz, etc. I found the lowest price at a company called Royal Camera (I won't link to them just yet). I placed my order and was instructed to call customer service to confirm my purchase. Over the phone the customer service representative told me in a rude and condescending manner about additional items that I could bundle with the camera (lenses, tripod) but the prices were outrageously high and I turned them down. Then he told me the battery was sold separately--asking $280 for the battery and charger--at which point I realized the entire operation was one big scam. I got off the phone, called my credit card company and had them issue me a new card.
But this post isn't about how Royal Camera is a scam. It's about how I made an error in judgement by not tapping in to the power of the online community to learn more about the company I was about to deal with. I had done my homework when it came to learning about the nuances between the Canon 10D, Nikon D70 and Nikon D100, but when the time came to make the purchase I was hasty.
The silver lining to this whole escapade was that in doing some web research on the company after the fact I came across their review page on a helpful site called Reseller Ratings. The site was full of testimonials posted almost daily warning people to stay away from this company.
One of the benefits of having people's thoughts and opinions available freely on the Internet is that it becomes very straightforward to use the power of the community to defeat scams like Royal Camera, Broadway Photo, and Express Cameras. That is, if you take the time to listen to what people are saying.
Posted by johnnie at 09:01 AM | Comments (3)
May 30, 2005 An Open Letter to Adobe Systems Inc.
Good Training and Support is Critical
I know from experience how beneficial it is to work alongside the people who engineer, design and market the products that I use daily to perform my job. What's the best way to convert a color image to a sepia duotone? Should I use FrameMaker to write my thesis or InDesign? How do I draw Scotch tape in Photoshop? If you don't have access to these people, life is not easy. How can that be? There is a world of information available to someone interested in learning how to use Adobe software: a manual which you receive if you buy the product, user to user forums, conferences, magazines, trade organizations, books, videos, and millions of websites.
Well, the reason it is difficult to find answers to questions despite all the support out there is that without having someone you can ask who will immediately answer your question, you need to search. Google is great at searching the Internet, but it is not optimized for helping people get information about Adobe software. For example, the results are, for the most part, pure text. When you need to learn more about use Photoshop to make something look like a piece of Scotch tape, having some pictures along with the search results is more than just a convenience (note that I didn't say a snapshot of the website as some tools provide; I'm specifically talking about an image that illustrates the tutorial).
Improving the Existing Help and Support Systems
If Adobe were to build infrastructure to allow people to search for, annotate, and document tips and tricks, it would create a space that would far exceed the value derived from a printed manual.
This online infrastructure would allow for the following:
1. A Wikipedia-like model for collaborative content and content moderation
Taking Wikipedia as an example, we can see that a community edited and moderated forum for information is sustainable. In fact, there are many benefits to a model like this when applied to the problem of support and training for Adobe software. The first, is that it is completely unpredictable how people will use this software. Although certain features are designed with specific uses in mind, the combination of the features applied across a diverse set of tasks creates instances where people are doing things with the software that the original creators never envisioned. Thus having a collaborative system for documenting and extending this information becomes invaluable.
One of the fears about the Wikipedia model is that a group can be its own worst enemy, but the challenges there have been addressed by Wikipedia and other companies like Six Apart. It is difficult to disregard their success despite this challenge. In fact, it may be easier to focus on the upside: the Wikipediholics who can't stop adding information.
2. Profile pages for authors
One of the differences between support and tips for Adobe software versus an online encyclopedia is that with Adobe software who you are and what you do for a living has a significant impact on how you use and approach the products. Someone in forensics is going to use Photoshop differently than a web designer. For this reason having people as an organizational structure within the system becomes increasing valuable.
Now, as with any system that allows for people to become an organizational system it opens up the possibility for a type of network to be created, and from that a sense of popularity and credibility naturally grows out of the system, much like what EBay and Google use to make sense of their customers or the world wide web respectively.
An additional benefit is that existing experts in the domain of software instruction, like Lynda Weinman, have a forum to promote themselves and their services along side free content. The advantage they have to working within a system such as this is that it gives them more exposure, particularly since they have the ability to deliver richer content and the network of people who would rely on them is greater.
3. Search optimized for the task at hand
When searching the contents of this online space, people will need to see previews of images, video, audio and PDF files. A text-only result set won't work. People should be able to tag the pages, and the tags should act as a way to search, sort and filter through the content. People should be able to rate content and authors, and that data should also be incorporated in to the search criteria.
Adobe Studio's Exchange is already setting a good precedent for this and the design of that site can and should be leveraged.
In addition to search, an RSS-based system for syndicating updates will help people stay informed when new content that is potentially relevant to them is posted.
Costs and Revenue
This proposal to move Adobe help from static documents that are printed and bound to digital media, moderated by the Instructional Communications employees at Adobe and volunteers outside of Adobe will be a difficult transition. It will be expensive to develop and deploy. Since I am a shareholder of the company and want to make sure that while the company develops new areas it does not lose sight of costs and revenue, I would like to briefly touch on the financial advantages of using this system.
First and foremost, it should be understood that a system such as this will reflect a typical long tail curve. That is, there will be highly popular information that is more useful and more frequently accessed by orders of magnitude versus other information. Particularly if published authors and professional instructors begin to use the site as a forum to gain exposure and document their work, the success of their content will far exceed that of an individual in a remote area who uses only one of the products for an obscure task.
As such the financial model should be fairly easy to predict. There will be premium, copyrighted content that costs the consumer a fee to access. Adobe and the writer of the content will split the revenue. This will be the head of the long tail. And then there will be content that is free and protected under the Creative Commons License. There will be significantly more content of this nature than of the premium kind as this will cover obscure areas by people who may only write updates from time to time as a hobby. Revenue generation in this area can take the form of donations and opt-in advertisements that will be presented to the reader. Again, Adobe, the writer, and the consumer of the information can split the revenues generated.
While Adobe should not look to this system as a way to generate significant cash flow, having a strong case for a profitable revenue model is not something to overlook.
Adobe Systems was started in 1982 and has done a miraculous job of redefining itself over the years so that it is consistently relevant and inspiring. I believe a change to the help and support system such as what I've described can be a part of redefining the company yet again for an age in which we are increasingly connected and interconnected.
Posted by johnnie at 11:30 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 15, 2005 Subscriptions: The Third Wave
Original Post: 15 May 2005
Updated: 17 May 2005
What Jim Allchin wants you to know
Subscriptions. When most people hear the word, they think about paid subscriptions for mobile phone service, cable, magazines, newspapers and so on. There are also a host of annoying subscriptions, such as those spam-like newsletters that get mailed to me from Classmates.com, which I assume are a result of me not checking or unchecking something years ago when I first visited the site. But for many people today who are at the front of the web technology adoption curve, the word subscription has come to mean something more. It also includes the idea of subscribing to feeds that are published by blogs, news sites, photo sites and other websites that have content that changes regularly.
In an earlier post I wrote that: "in his recent interview, Jim Allchin, head of the Windows project at Microsoft, said that syndication and subscriptions represent the third big movement for getting information on the web (the first was hyperlinking and the second was search)."
I'd like to revisit this and write about it in more detail. If the person responsible for Windows says that something is important, it seems like it would be wise to pay attention. The last time they had a focus such as this seems to be when it was around the web browser.
I believe that this isn't just Allichin's personal opinion, but is actually more fundamental and is shaping the direction of Longhorn, the next release of the Windows operating system. Two facts make me believe that Allchin has something up his sleeve. The first is that the Wallop team, responsible for social computing research at Microsoft, was moved off of the Wallop project and on to Longhorn. The second is that in the WinHEC 2005 demo, they mentioned a feature called, simply, Lists that would allow you to syndicate using RSS a feed of files on your drive (the idea being that co-workers could subscribe to this feed). Clearly with months to go before Beta, and a launch date that is more than a year away, we should expect to see more in this area.
If subscriptions are this "third wave", we should not only expect Microsoft to go after it aggressively, but for the competition to get ready for a battle. The first wave was defined by Netspace. Back in 1995, the company had a blockbuster IPO and went head to head with Microsoft for many years to see who would dominate the way people access hyperlinked web content. The second wave was defined by Google. In 2004 Google had a similarly spectacular IPO, and has, in many ways, challenged Microsoft more aggressively than Netscape had in the late 1990's. Who is the Netscape and Google of the third wave? Only time will tell. Subscriptions today are where web search was in 1998. Remember AltaVista? Excite? Google was good back in 1998, but it wasn't something you would point at and say "This should be a $100B company in ten years."
There is one company that stands apart from the rest... that seems to have learned the lessons from the previous generations. That company is FeedBurner.
FeedBurner
FeedBurner describes their service as: "an RSS/Atom post-processing service that allows publishers to enhance their feeds in a variety of interesting and powerful ways. By republishing their feeds through FeedBurner, publishers gain detailed feed statistics, maximum feed format compatibility, 'shockproofing' to absorb bandwidth spikes, and more."
Basically, that means that if you publish a feed, as almost every website will in the upcoming years, you can have FeedBurner do all the grunt work for you: compatibility, statistics, and other services. FeedBurner currently does this for free for lightweight websites. Bloggers have already started to use it, and recommend it.
As such, FeedBurner has positioned itself squarely in the same space that Google and Netscape had: the moderator between the publisher and the consumer.
In an interview with FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo, he noted that: "If RSS popularity continues to increase, and it becomes less and less a vehicle for driving site traffic but more and more its own content-viewing medium, that presents an interesting situation to publishers."
FeedBurner is positioning itself strategically to do all the things that were great about Netspace and Google: making it the way you want to access web content. We'll see what happens.
Update
After I wrote this post, Om Malik broke news that Newsgator is buying Bradbury Software, the makers of Feed Demon.
Nick Bradbury explained why he wanted to join Newsgator: "the biggest request - by far - that FeedDemon customers have had is the ability to synchronize their subscriptions between multiple computers." And Newsgator now gets a Windows RSS reader client application.
What does this have to do with FeedBurner? Well, as I originally stated, the subscription market is heating up, and I believe FeedBurner is well positioned to capitalize on it. The consolidation is only beginning.
Dave Winer wrote: "the motivation was to allow FeedDemon to tie into the subscription-sharing network Newsgator is building. It seems inevitable that they'll buy a Mac news reader product, they would probably like to buy NetNewsWire, and it would be hard to imagine Brent wouldn't take a reasonable offer (I have no inside knowledge). This is venture capital at work, not sales revenue. I imagine that Newsgator will roll up with Feedburner (they share an investor), and Technorati may become part of this deal too. The goal? Get large enough to go public or merge with something going public (SixApart) or get bought by Microsoft."
Dave Winer, as usual, is circling around the right ideas, but I don't entirely agree with him. In fact, I think Fred Wilson and Brad Feld have a better perspective:
Fred Wilson of Union Square Venture Partners noted, "It appears that Brad's (referring to Brad Feld) convinced the team at Newsgator to do a venture rollup. Its a smart play because the big guys have figured out how important RSS is and are coming after the early entrants."
Brad Feld of Mobius Ventures responded by saying: "I’ve seen a couple of posts speculating that Feedburner and Technorati are next in line to be acquired by NewsGator since they share an investor (me). While Feedburner, Technorati, and NewsGator are all complimentary and are discussing a variety of ways to work together, I think it would be a dumb idea to combine these companies. As an investor, I’ve placed my bets on three companies that are the current leader in each of their segments (Aggregator: NewsGator; Feed Management: Feedburner; Search: Technorati). You can argue about how you define the specific segments, but these are mine (the one I missed that I wish I had an investment in is the CMS segment.) I’d much rather try to create three separate platform companies that are complimentary then jam them together into one big mess and fight the battle on three fronts."
This is a critical component that Dave Winer missed. Yes, consolidating anything and everything that has to do with subscriptions in to one company may sound reasonable, but as an investor it is wiser to allow elements to grow organically. There are also too many conflicts of interest and organizational problems with mega-mergers that are easily avoided by having separate, but collaborative, entities.
Jeff Clavier, another venture capitalist, agrees with me: "Anybody checking (FeedBurner) RSS referrer logs sees that there is a page long list of aggregators out there, in a very fragmented market... Dave [Winer] predicts the acquisition of a Mac aggregator, like NetNewsWire - which would make sense, especially given the popularity of the product (based on my stats). However, like Tony, I am not really following on FeedBurner or even Technorati. Both for cap table/deal/integration/execution issues (even if these companies have both DFJ and Mobius as investors), as for 'impedance mismatch' from a product/commercial standpoint. Brad Feld actually dismissed the concept of piling up these three cos as 'a dumb idea' in his post regarding the acquisition."
The references to Dave Winer and Brad Feld are those I've already included above. As for Jeff's reference to Tony, here is what Tony Gentile had to say: "FeedBurner could certainly join the growing Newsgator empire, but that would be tying up with the wrong end of the micro-content stack. A more logical move would be backward integration with a publishing platform, or forward integration with a marketplace owner; of course Dave doesn't care for ads in Feeds, so if you're a fan of his, chalk his comment up to a clever, low-key dig. ;-) Regardless, unlike other components, FeedBurner is best served by achieving escape velocity as a standalone player providing a network service ala the collapsing Overture model of old."
One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is Microsoft's own plans to build syndication and subscription tools. Would they need to buy Newsgator? I doubt it. My bet is that Microsoft will roll their own solution as part of Longhorn and the version of Office that follows. This is why I still have my money (figuratively) on FeedBurner. They can be, potentially, much harder to shake.
Posted by johnnie at 11:57 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 02, 2005 The Syndication Mess
In general, I try to keep expletives out of my posts, but this one will be an exception. Tempers have run high. You've been warned.
Recent news about Google's new test feature to place ads in RSS feeds have caused a bit of a backlash.
Dave Winer commented: "... It wasn't just that they had failed to recognize RSS, they also tried to delete it. You know the mutant solidiers [sic] in Lord of the Rings, the ones the Fellowship keeps killing? That's Google. They do everything mean and evil, and in the end we'll kick their asses back to Podunk. Seems Silicon Valley can't resist fucking with a good thing. They won, they had us, and then they insist on taking the low road when taking the high one would cost them nothing. Fuckers."
These are strong words. Who's Dave Winer, what's RSS, what has Google done wrong, and what's the solution to this problem?
Who's Dave Winer? What's RSS?
What is RSS? It's a syndication format. It's a way to get web content. For example, the posts on my website are syndicated using RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom. If you use Bloglines, Firefox, Safari RSS or other software that reads RSS or Atom feeds, you can subscribe to my feed, and when new information is available it will show up automatically.
Syndication is relatively new, so many people haven't taken advantage of it (there's no support for it in Internet Explorer which is what most people use to browse the web) but it's catching on. In fact, in his recent interview, Jim Allchin, head of the Windows project at Microsoft, said that syndication and subscriptions represent the third big movement for getting information on the web (the first was hyperlinking and the second was search).
The thing with RSS, though, is that it's not a single format. It is an umbrella term that describes seven different formats. The original (RSS 0.90) was developed at Netscape.
It was dropped in favor of an updated format, 0.91, but that too was sadly dropped by Netscape. Dave Winer (here's where he comes in) picked up 0.91 and built a company called UserLand around the idea of RSS. Although a separate group picked up RSS 0.90 and updated it to RSS 1.0, Dave Winer and company used the 0.91 branch and moved it to RSS 2.0. Whew...
Google has had a rocky history with syndicating web content. Instead of going with RSS, it chose to use Atom for its popular Blogger blogging software. What's Atom? Well, Atom is a parallel format to RSS. Google and IBM weren't satisfied with any of the seven versions of RSS, nor the control Dave Winer and company had over the development and future directions of RSS 2.0. So they made a competing format.
Now you know why Dave Winer is so pissed off.
Yet, he seems to be one of the most sensible people in this entire fiasco. He recently proposed a merger with the newer Atom standard, insisting "it's time to bury the hatchet and move on."
What has Google done wrong?
Fragmenting the syndication space by introducing a new format ruffled some feathers, but people will survive. Photoshop can read and write dozens of competing image formats and, quite frankly, no one's life is ruined because there is no single image format that everyone must agree to use. So Dave Winer needs to just get over it.
Chris Pirillo puts it more bluntly: "Atom. RSS. Implement either one you want, or both. Aggregate either one you want, or both. Just STFU already so we can get on with more important things - like getting people to understand the simple power of desktop syndication. Or, ya know... keep trying to prove to the world which side has the bigger (collective) dick."
The recent issue with Google is that they have started allowing people to stick ads in RSS feeds. Doesn't sound like a big deal, right? As Brad Feld noted, "This has been long anticipated, is a completely logical extension of Google AdSense, and - while some people may fight ads in RSS – it’s an inevitable part of the RSS ecosystem. "
Particularly for Google, a company who bases 96% of revenue off of advertising and generates revenues from advertising that will eventually surpass that of primetime television, choosing to not stick ads in front of people would be newsworthy.
Although it hasn't been stated this way yet, I believe this is more about the way the ads are included than it is about the ads themselves. When Google initially placed ads along side of web searches it did so in a way that at the time was revolutionary: they were simple text-only ads, discretely placed on the other side of the page away from the data you were looking at (the search results). The point was to keep them subtle and separate. It was a homerun. People were tired of "shoot the monkey"-style, ugly, Flash-animation-banner-ad advertising. It was annoying, childish and needed to be eradicated. Thankfully Google was there to save us. Now they've given up, too. Pathetic.
What kind of example is this for the Feedsters and the Feedburners of the world? Are they going to copy Google with fugly banner-ad style RSS ads of their own?
Especially for RSS, which is based on XML and tries to separate the presentation from the data, this is unacceptable. We've even got Dave Winer going off the deep end, looking for hacks to yank the ads out. "Advertising in RSS is just starting now, for all practical purposes. If we wanted to, as an industry, reject the idea, we could, by asking the people who create the software to add a feature that strips out all ads. Make it default to on. Then, that would force the advertisers, if they want to speak to us, to do so respectfully, by our choice. Create feeds of commercial information that we might be interested in, and if we are, we'll subscribe. If not, we won't."
How do we solve the problem?
Before she and I left her house, a girl I knew in high school told me she needed to put on some makeup. "You wear makeup?" I asked. "The right way to wear makeup is so that people can't tell you wear makeup," she told me.
Google needs to step back and realize that interruption marketing and in-your-face ugly banner-ad style attention-getters are so 1900s. The advertising of the future is so subtle, so elegant, so relevant, so contextual, that it's not advertising at all. It's informative.
Posted by johnnie at 12:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 18, 2005 Web 2.0: Bottom-up and Self-Organizing
When I was working on the first release of Photoshop Album, one of the biggest areas of contention was around tags. It was clear that there was a benefit to building an organizational model around tags, but it was unclear whether or not building the product around such a feature would make mainstream adoption difficult. At that point in time (2001) this was a new model, for better or worse. In the end we did go out the gate with the feature as the core organizational model of the application, and the drag-and-drop tag approach was fairly well received by the users and the press. In retrospect, however, one area where we blew it completely was around collaboration. We didn't aggressively go after collaborative tagging, and I believe that was one of the most fundamental mistakes we made.
Earlier last week there was a buzz around Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking tool that allows you to store your Internet bookmarks on the web (instead of in your web browser), and associate tags with these bookmarks. The tags are public, so other people can search for, say taxonomies and find the sites bookmarked with that tag.
The reason for the buzz was that Del.icio.us, up to this point, was privately funded by the founder, Joshua Schachter. He recently accepted $2M in funding from some of the web's most famous names: Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Tim O'Reilly, and many others.
The term that people have started using to describe the type of organizational model created by Del.icio.us is "Folksonomies". Over the last year, it has picked up traction and changed the nature of the web: of how people find information. As Mr Schachter noted: "The top tags for Wikipedia are free and reference, which are not words that appear on Wikipedia's home page, so people are thinking about you differently than you are."
This is the crux of Web 2.0. In a system that is bottom-up and self-organizing, the act of consuming content changes the fundamental nature of the content itself. Because organizational systems evolve from the network that are bottom-up and self-organizing, a new set of complexities and possibilities is created.
It is not to say that collaborative tagging will replace alternative systems of organization, such as the directory and navigational structures created by the content providers, but it is a complementary system that cannot be overlooked or underestimated.
There are a host of companies building businesses around this idea. There is a controversial open-source Del.icio.us copy-cat called Delirious, another Amazon venture called 43 things, our old friend who was just recently snatched up by Yahoo! called Flickr, a video version of Flickr called Vimeo, and many more. (This PDF provides an overview of many other social bookmarking services.)
InfoWorld recently announced that it was going to move its keyword engine over to use Del.icio.us. Matt McAlister explains: "What I like most in this new architecture is that the related links are now driven by del.icio.us. Our edit team is tagging content in del.icio.us. The engineers are pulling down the del.icio.us RSS feeds. And then we create matching logic based on the common tags. We also link back out to del.icio.us pages via the tags for the article on display."
The content provider is now not only not alone in providing structure, but is also collaborating with the readers themselves.
As David Weinberger explains: "The old way provides the vocabulary we are to use. The new way lets us use our own words. The old way puts the control of the classification system in that hands of the owners of information classifying it. The new way gives control to the users of information. The old way creates a tree. The new rakes leaves together."
The part about all this that appeals to me is the simplicity of it all. It's so simple that it's easy to write off, but that is why it's so important.
It's the simple idea. There's no magic. Just a community.
Posted by johnnie at 09:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
April 03, 2005 Web 2.0: Yahoo!360 vs. Imeem
I've been using two different services that fall in to a category I will describe as the Web 2.0 Swiss Army Knife. My previous post describes what I feel Web 2.0 is. The Swiss Army knife is the idea that if you build a crappy knife, crappy screwdriver, crappy toothpick, and crappy tweezers but bundle them together in a convenient form factor, you can build a something useful. Yahoo!360 and Imeem are the Web 2.0 Swiss Army Knife. They combine underpowered (crappy) blogging tools, social networking systems and file sharing in one place.
There's been a lot of buzz about Yahoo! recently. Is Yahoo! back? Has it topped Google's Mojo? What's next? Should Barry Diller be worried?
Yahoo! has many advantages, the biggest of which is the fact that they have an abundance of services that can be accessed by a single login. That is one area where Google has made a mess of things. Wired put it best when it wrote: "While Google was busy becoming what Yahoo! used to be, Yahoo! has become what AOL should have been."
Yahoo!360 fits perfectly within this model. It brings together different Yahoo! services in a way that is cohesive and easy to understand. The integration with My Yahoo! is painfully missing as is the ability to use RSS to bring all the data in and out, but the assumption is that that functionality is coming in the near future.
Despite the hoopla not everyone is impressed. Azeem Azhar put it this way: "Yahoo! 360 is 180 degrees off". His complaints are well founded. For something that's supposed to unify the various pieces of the puzzle in to a solidified whole, Yahoo! has produced something that's too ugly, too corporate and too underfeatured to be the definitive statement that it needs to be. But can you really be that critical of a 1.0?
Imeem is a Windows client application. That means that people who use the Mac, Linux or other operating system are not invited to the party. It's great to be on the client. You can do things that are either impossible or a tremendous amount of work to pull off when you're stuck in a web browser. That said, this sends the wrong message. Web 2.0 is not Windows only. I know, I know, a Mac client is in the works. That's what everyone says. I'll believe it when I see it.
This mentality of a closed system has crept in to other areas. No RSS in, no RSS out. Again, I'm sure this is on the long list of things that will be built someday, but I find it prohibitive to using the system.
Conclusion
I have my problems with both Imeem and Yahoo!360. Both suffer from the 1.0 problem of having potential but not having the execution to make it worth using at this point in time.
Another problem with both of them is the approach. Despite being fundamentally about inclusiveness, both are invite only. As Dave wrote: "Everything about Yahoo 360 is for members only, and in the first few hours of its life in the blogosphere, most people couldn't get in. Now, after it's launched, there's no way to see anything other than a ghost town. Maybe that's all there is, maybe not. But for a service like this, the appearance of being a ghost town is just as bad as actually being one." Make You Go Hmmm weighs in: "It’s not Yahoo’s fault, really, they are just copying Google who pulled this with Gmail and the dead zone that is Orkut."
In the end, I'm left frustrated. As Michael Rollin pointed out to me a while back, it's underwhelming to work on a tool where you add your friends and write some stuff and post some pictures... not because it was inherently problematic but because there are a million things that do that. The right solution would be something that evolved organically and didn't try and work in to the system artificially. That's what Google did with search. The directory approach was flawed, and PageRank's backlink system was based on the inherent properties of the system. Web 2.0 is about the inherent properties of the system... of the network. Instead of making "things", you make that which allows the "things" to develop on their own in ways that could not happen prior to your intervention. It's the only way.
Posted by johnnie at 11:26 PM | Comments (3)
March 12, 2005 Web Content and Social Networks
The social network is a means, not an end. That may be a simple idea, but if you think about it within the context of Friendster my bringing it up will make more sense. Friendster popularized social networking software, which is built around Stanely Milgram's "small world phenomenon": we're all connected to each other by at most six degrees of separation. The idea is that if we all tell a database who we know, I can network my way over to Bill Gates or some cute girl that I want to ask out via my friend network. It's simple, fun, and promising; Friendster took off. Then we got a whole host of other social networking sites: Orkut, LinkedIn, Tribe, MySpace... the list is dozens long. Some were focused on business relationships, which kept out the twelve year-olds leaving love notes for each other... others like MySpace embraced it. In the end we were left with a lot of options for telling the database who we know, but little that would revolutionize how we share, collaborate and communicate with the people we care about.
In parallel with the social networking sites we've had a host of other products to help us tackle that last issue: instant messaging, blogs, photo sharing, peer to peer file sharing, Bloglines, and iPodders.
So what if we could slam all this stuff together in to a well-designed, unified package? It'll be fast, bug-free, and easy to use. When it's all done we'll call it Xanadu and spend our days drinking tea and playing backgammon with Ted Nelson.
Although I haven't talked to anyone in the company, this sort of mentality and ambitiousness seems to be what's driving imeem, a new application that allows you to create personal, private networks, chat with people, share photos and files using peer to peer communication, and create your own blogs.
imeem is currently in a private beta, but I started using it yesterday after a friend at Google sent me an invite. The minute I realized this was a client application and not a website it clicked for me that these were people who thought like I thought. Once I learned that the co-founders, Dalton Caldwell and Jan Jannink, came from Stanford the it started to make more sense to me. I feel like the students at Stanford understand the web better than students at other schools (thanks to Google and Yahoo!, this un-researched claim is easier to defend). And part of understanding the web is understanding that not everything needs to live in a web browser.
imeem has that 1.0 feel: lots to love, lots to hate. I applaud them for their efforts and wish them the best. Now I need to get back to work on my latest project, which is similar in spirit.
Posted by johnnie at 07:01 PM | Comments (0)
January 13, 2005 History of Browsing Web Content
Recently I’ve become interested in the user interface models that have been applied to browsing the Internet. The models that are use by popular web browsers (Internet Explorer, browsers from the Mozilla Foundation, Safari) are, for the most part, identical. But they don’t need to be. How did we get to where we are today?
1990 Tim Berners-Lee creates WorldWideWeb, later renamed Nexus, and introduces a back/next metaphor to navigate through a list of links.
1993 Marc Andreessen creates Mosaic at the University of Illinois which became the first cross-platform browser. Marc introduced the back/forward metaphor to help with navigation of hyperlinks.
1994 Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen create Mosaic Communications, later renamed Netscape, based on the Mosaic product.
1994 Opera developed in Norway.
1995 The popularity of the product helps drive the Netscape IPO--the 3rd largest in Nasdaq history--which creates a $2.6B company.
1995 Microsoft launches Windows 95 and Internet Explorer.
1995 Real Networks, founded by former Microsoft employee Rob Glaser, launches their first player and drives the market for passive content.
1996 Pointcast launched with 1.5M users by the end of the year and a total of $5M in revenue; the company was valued at $240M. Unlike Andreessen's browser, Pointcast used "push" technology that delivered channels of content to the customer's computer without him or her having to navigate, or pull, content from the web.
1997 Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. offers $450M for Pointcast, but the deal fell apart in what has been seen as one of the biggest blunders of the dot com era.
1998 AOL buys Netscape in $4.2B merger.
1998 Microsoft dumps all of its Real Networks stock and competes directly in the streaming media market.
1999 Entrypoint buys Pointcast for $20M.
1999 Internet Explorer surpassed Netscape in market share.
2003 AOL sets up the Mozilla Foundation with a $2M pledge.
2003 iTunes Music Store launched, serving as an example of a successful embedded browsing experience.
2004 Firefox 1.0 launched.
I read an article in Wired last year called Conversation With Marc Andreessen (Feb 2003) in which Wired asked Marc what he would do if he could go back and design the browser over again. Interestingly the one thing he said he would change was the metaphor that he popularized--back/forward. Here is an exceprt:
Wired News - "Ten years have passed since then. Has the browser evolved much in that period?"
Andreessen - "We always figured there'd be a much more sophisticated way of navigating, but no one ever came up with it. Things like the Back and forward button, we never intended that to be a permanent part of the interface. But people get locked into metaphors. You have to be careful with the metaphors you put in front of people because once they click onto one, that's it."
Of the companies that have been working in this space over the last ten to fifteen years, Pointcast was perhaps the most successful at creating a new metaphor but they suffered from user interface problems of their own. When EntryPoint came out many thought that this second attempt would resolve the problems, but in fact things only got worse. EntryPoint gained entry in to the
Interface Hall of Shame:
"EntryPoint preserves the basic features that made PointCast popular... It also includes many new interface problems, reduces usability and 'quietly' eliminated many options and features with no comment... It seems clear little consideration of what PointCast did well or innovatively was carried over by the new design team."
Recently Microsoft has been talking about "smart clients" or "web connected applications" as the hot ticket for the next ten years, which is understandable with their investment in XAML, Indigo and Avalon. The Konfabulator knock-off that Apple is introducing in Tiger seems to serve as a testament to this.
But as Marc Andreessen says "There was a huge amount of browser development from 1993 to 1998, then nothing much happened from 1998 to 2002. Now, there's a huge number of people doing all kinds of things and you've got real innovation going on." Things are just getting started.
Posted by johnnie at 09:35 PM | Comments (1)
December 15, 2004 Photography 2.0: Raw Processing
I recently spent three days in an advanced photography class with members of the Photoshop team. Eddie Soloway, who teaches at the Santa Fe Workshops, came in and walked us through everything from the basics to more advanced concepts in photography. I got a chance to put my Nikon D70 to the test and shot about 300 pictures over the three days.
So this is where Photography 2.0 comes in. Everyday I would come back from a shoot and use a prerelease copy of the new version of Photoshop to do all my work. 
I can't go in to the details of the new version for obvious reasons, but what struck me was that the raw processing workflow was much, much smoother and more pleasant than in the past. We've hit the point where you shoot raw not just for the added control, but for a user experience that you can't match by shooting TIFF or JPEG.
What is raw processing? It is the combination of a file format and a way to interpret the information within the file format. For example, my Nikon can save files in NEF format. This is a Nikon specific format that encodes the low-level camera information directly in to the file. This allows me to modify important attributes such as the White Balance or Exposure after the photo was taken, and do so in a non-destructive way. Photoshop's Camera Raw dialog allows me to revert to the original camera settings or save my settings as a profile to then apply to other images that I took (which is helpful if you're forgetful like me and don't remember to change your White Balance until after you've taken five or ten shots).
There is a lot of debate surrounding raw file formats, largely because they are proprietary and different for each camera and camera manufacturer. Nikon claims that they will provide backward compatibility and archival capabilities. Nikon has been around for 80 years and manufactures lenses in this way, which gives them a fair amount of credibility. Thomas Knoll has also introduces a new raw format called DNG which is publicly documented and, therefore, more suitable for archival. None of this will shake out any time soon, but it is clear that moving forward photographers will be spending more and more time working with the raw data and less and less time in what was the traditional color correction environments. From my experience, Thomas Knoll seems to understand this better than anyone else in the world. In a way this is what you would expect. I mean the guy did write the original version of Photoshop.
Posted by johnnie at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)
December 03, 2004 In My Dreams
Bruce Chizen: "Hi, can I speak to Eric Schmidt please?"
Eric Schmidt: "This is Eric."
Bruce Chizen: "Hi Eric, this is Bruce over at Adobe."
Eric Schmidt: "Hey Bruce, what's going on?"
Bruce Chizen: "I've been thinking about Avalon and XAML recently."
Eric Schmidt: "You mean the Microsoft stuff? XML-based markup language for describing interfaces and the hardware accelerated rendering engine?"
Bruce Chizen: "Right. Well, I keep hearing about you guys building a web browser over there based off the Mozilla code base. And I got to thinking… what if we helped you guys by building a hardware accelerated GUI rendering engine for that thing? I'm talking 32 bit floating point interfaces rendered at 60 fps. We'd use SVG as the base just like what Microsoft is trying to do with XAML. And now instead of Avalon, people would have something that works across operating systems."
Eric Schmidt: "Hmm… that would be cool. Gmail would blow the socks off of Outlook if we have that kind of engine. What's in it for you?"
Bruce Chizen: "We're building out our enterprise platform. A lot that revolves around PDF, the web, servers. I'm tired of IE. We need to be platform agnostic. With teamwork we could get a lot farther than if we work alone. You know, I'm sure a lot of people will say I sound like Marc Andreessen circa 1995. It's true that the issues may be the same, but the context is different."
Eric Schmidt: "This is true. I've got a meeting right now, but how about I stop by San Jose tonight and we sketch this out?"
Posted by johnnie at 02:59 PM | Comments (0)