Epeus' epigone

Thursday, 12 May 2005

JAH - Ajax without XML

With all the AJAX excitement, it's worth pointing out a simple technique I call JAH - which can be Just Async HTML, or Javascript Async HTML to taste.

This works on the microformat principle that XHTML is XML, but with the added advantage that Javascript already knows how to handle XHTML DOM's so no xml parsing is required.

You just include <script language="javascript1.3" src="jah.js" ></script> in the <head> and then link to dynamic pages with <a href="javascript:jah('kevin.html','target');">kevin</a> where target is the id of the HTML element you want to replace.

Here's a very simple static example.

If you want an elaborate dynamic example, go see Kottke, he gets paid for this kind of thing.

Technorati Tags: ajax, jah

Wednesday, 11 May 2005

Long Tails, Big Heads and Feet of Clay

One thing that struck me after talking with Chris Anderson about The Long Tail was that his formulation is in some ways only a small step towards the end of the tail; his focus is mainly on how to exploit niche markets for products like books or movies.

There's an old joke that seems apposite here:
Q. How do you get to run a small newspaper business?
A. Start with a large newspaper business and wait a bit.

A true long tail business is one that copes with the ultimate niches - where there are just one, or even zero customers. You need to be sure that your submission model can cope with these limiting cases and not choke, especially as you do not know a priori which ones are going to garner customers.

So, what businesses fit this model? The obvious one is eBay. Omidyar's model of a perfect marketplace is tuned so that it is stable if you don't find a buyer (eBay takes a small listing fee), but works better if you do (eBay takes a percentage). Most auctions only have a single successful buyer, but they expanded the model to allow multiple identical goods to be sold too.

Another example is cafepress. They don't even set a listing fee, working on the assumption that the effort to build a product list is enough of a hurdle, and have prices set so that a production run of one item is cost effective for them (they aggregate sales and pay monthly). They also have a higher payback rate if you do gather more orders and let economies of scale kick in on their back end.

Longer standing examples are the venerable photo-processing by mail business (now undermined by digital cameras) and the newer videotape to DVD service offered by YesVideo. In a similar field, there is CustomFlix, which does on-demand DVD distribution, though with a setup fee that puts breakeven above a single copy (and expects you to make the DVD yourself first).

Perhaps the purest of all these businesses is PayPal, which gives away free small transactions, and makes it up in volume from bigger retailers.

If you plan your business to cope with this end of the tail, you'll be perfectly placed to reap economies of scale as you attack from below both the niche seekers and those still mesmerised by the Big Head.

Technorati Tags: long tail

Tuesday, 10 May 2005

Hoist on her petard?

Hilary Rosen still doesn't get it. Her iPod can play several kinds of open music formats, as can all MP3 players. But she blames it for DRM's Value destruction.
Remember this, Hilary?:

"Building a legitimate business model from scratch -- one that involves literally hundreds of millions of copyrights and interlocking creative rights, navigating incompatible DRM's and players and building customer service and ease of use that music fans have always enjoyed -- isn't quite as easy as people might think," she said.
Zooko, a software engineer at Mojo Nation, asked Rosen if she truly understood the physical impossibility of effective Digital Copyright Protection.
Rosen nodded. "I get it," she said. "It's going to be very hard."
"Not hard: Impossible!" Zooko and the entire crowd exclaimed.
"I get it! I get it!" she insisted.

Monday, 9 May 2005

Google's Singularity machine

Last Thursday I was invited to Google's Open House night by a friend who works there. I'd have blogged it sooner, but I think my bout of food poisoning at the weekend could have been due to my over-enthusiastic consumption of the rather tasty ceviche there.

A lot of what came through from the speeches is (naturally) already public knowledge - the engineer-led culture, the 'index all human knowledge' mission, the 'no scarcity of computing power' mantra.

Taken together, however, some aspects of this struck me as interesting. Sergey's talk of the 'founders awards' bonus grants as meaning Google employees didn't need to create a startup to make it big, were an interesting indicator of where he sees their competition, and the vagueness of their terms certainly implied a continuing role for founders fiat in running the company.

Larry's talk of 'brute force AI', combined with the triple emphasis on their highly redundant and parallel platform design, and two talks including one by Rob Pike on the Map/Reduce processing model gave a strong indication that they are building a platform designed to do the kinds of parallel, layered computation that modern neural computation models use, and they are planning to feed in all that they can digitize of human knowledge.

So while they didn't say 'we want to build the AI that transcends humanity', I suspect that somewhere in their dreams perhaps Mike from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, or what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Mountain View to be born?

Lets hope it resists corruption better than their shrimp.

Technorati Tags: singularity

Tuesday, 3 May 2005

10 years of streaming and still no progress

In the light of Real's 10 year anniversary, I'd like to discuss the impact that streaming has had on [buffering, please wait]

Friday, 29 April 2005

Revisiting Waugh and Armstrong

To celebrate the release of hReview, a couple of quick ones:

Robert Murray Davis's Waugh novel

I stumbled across this today, while looking for one of Evelyn Waugh's short stories, and was drawn into it instantly. Davis evidently knows his subject extremely well, and manages to pull off writing a fictional biography of Waugh that carries through his style well, especially the later style of Pinfold. I'm dying to read more then the 3 chapters available so far. If you, like me, have used up all the Waugh novels, this is what you have been missing.

★★★★★

Review by Kevin Marks, April 29th

Oops I did it again, by Louis Armstrong

It's wonderful to hear this long lost recording of Louis in his prime, though the tempo is slower than was usual for his Hot Five period, the rich and measured tones and suprisingly contemporary lyric make this an unforgettable addition for any collector.

★★★★☆

Review by Kevin Marks, April 29th

Monday, 25 April 2005

Social Computing Symposium - urban/social

I'm at the Social Computing Symposium today, and absorbing thoughts faster than I can write them.
One theme that recurs is the analogy between urban architecture and social software.

When I read Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities, I kept getting recognition flashes for things that make online communities work too - the need for 'public characters'; how high foot traffic streets are safer than open parkland; how places used for multiple purposes are richer than distinct purpose-designed zones.

Lilia Efimova has written on this, combined them in blogwalk and points me towards Life Between Buildings.

Molly Steenson is giving up online communities to study architecture.
Genevieve Bell has found very different urban/rural patterns of technology use in asia - Weinberger summarizes.

Eric Paulos has been experimenting with found art, dropped postcards and interactive dustbins.
The conference tag is scs2005

Technorati Tags: blogwalk, scs2005

Saturday, 23 April 2005

Maximalist delusions and another modest proposal for the BBC

James Boyle has an excellent essay on the regulatory capture of IP law:

The first thing to realize is that many decisions are driven by honest delusion, not corporate corruption. The delusion is maximalism: the more intellectual property rights we create, the more innovation. This is clearly wrong; rights raise the cost of innovation inputs (lines of code, gene sequences, data.) Do their monopolistic and anti-competitive effects outweigh their incentive effects? That’s the central question, but many of our decision makers seem never to have thought of it.

The point was made by an exchange inside the Committee that shaped Europe’s ill-starred Database Directive. It was observed that the US, with no significant property rights over unoriginal compilations of data, had a much larger database industry than Europe which already had significant “sweat of the brow” protection in some countries. Europe has strong rights, the US weak. The US is winning.

Did this lead the committee to wonder for a moment whether Europe should weaken its rights? No. Their response was that this showed we had to make the European rights much stronger. The closed-mindedness is remarkable. “That man eats only a little salad and looks slim. Clearly to look as good as him, we have to eat twice as much, and doughnuts too!”

Part of the delusion depends on the idea that inventors and artists create from nothing. Who needs a public domain of accessible material if one can create out of thin air? But in most cases this simply isn’t true; artists, scientists and technologists build on the past. How would the blues, jazz, Elizabethan theatre, or Silicon valley have developed if they had been forced to play under today’s rules? Don’t believe me? Ask a documentary filmmaker about clearances, or a free-software developer about software patents.

Which brings me back to the BBC Creative Archive. Some of the reaction I got to the previous suggestion was that the cost of rights clearance would make it impractical, and why should the UK subside the rest of the world?

Sound recordings in the UK made before 1955 are now out of copyright. The BBC was founded in 1922. Start with those 33 years of material in the global pubic archive and see how it goes. If we're right about building on the past encouraging creativity, once the rights-holders see what this does for awareness and CD & DVD sales from those eras, they'll be lining up for a new contract.

I'd like to let Douglas Adams get a word or two in here:

Thursday, 14 April 2005

BBC goes MP3

Tom led me to the BBC press release:

The trial means the BBC will offer its first daily podcasts - the Today programme's 8.10am interview - along with weekly titles and speech highlights from Radio 1 programmes for listeners to download and transfer to portable audio players. [...]
The three programmes taking part in the first mp3 download trial - In Our Time (Radio 4), Fighting Talk (Radio Five Live) and TX Unlimited (1Xtra) - were downloaded a total of 270,000 times in the first four months of the trial.

that means my long campaign to listen to BBC programmes as MP3's, not streams, is finally getting traction. As I said then:

WHAT WE WANT:
MP3's not streams - we don't always have a live internet connection. Instead of streaming RealMedia versions of recent programs we can only play on computers with live net connections, we want MP3 files we can download and play later on portable players.
WHY WE WANT IT:
Taking programs with us while doing other things. We don't sit around the radio any more - why sit around the computer? Listening to spoken word radio while at a computer is unsatisfactory - it makes reading and writing text very difficult. Listening to spoken word radio on an iPod while cycling, walking the dog, riding on the bus or tube or even driving the car is much better.

The fact that the Beeb is putting up single items from Today, rather than the whole show, is an important step - this move further along the road I outlined at Bloggercon 2003, to making online media more bloglike:

Something I said a few times at Bloggercon is that video and audio are missing the essence of blogging. You can do live video, or you can use your computer to edit together a professional-looking video presentation, but the equivalent of the 'just-in-time' publishing that blogging provide is not there.
Adam Curry and I had a chat about trying something more like blogging using the RSS 'enclosures'. I have the beginnings of a tool to automatically move audio posts into iTunes (and hence iPods) as I just can't listen to speech radio at the computer - I need to do it while driving.

If we can have an auto-assembled morning commute playlist of brief items from lots of people, rather than a 45-minute 'experience' from one, that is a great improvement for both listeners and creators.
The BBC Creative Archive proposals show promise here - imagine people mining 75 years of historic recordings for great snippets, like the wonderful Douglas Adams at the BBC CD set that brightened my commute last week.

What might block this is the parochial UK-only remit of the Creative Archive, and I have a suggestion there that I mentioned to various BBC hands at eTech - use the World Service 'Nation shall speak peace unto nation' remit too:

Providing a forum for the exchange of ideas across cultural, linguistic and national boundaries.

To be a global hub for high-quality information and communication.

Promoting the English language, learning and interest in a modern, contemporary Britain.

Offering a showcase for British talent across the world.

Sounds like a perfect match - let the World Service globalise the Creative Archive.

Tuesday, 12 April 2005

Podcasts in your car, easily?

That was what came to mind when I saw Damien's in-car computer at eTech. He's just started a Car Hacks blog. I hope he has a few posts planned on 'why is it so bloody hard to hook an iPod up to a car stereo, and what you can do about it'.
Shifting audio blogs from my computer — where I can't type and listen to speech at the same time — to my car or bike — where audio is a welcome enhancement — was exactly why I wrote the first RSS enclosures to iPod tool back in 2003, so I could listen to Chris Lydon's interviews while driving around. You can see me demo it at BloggerCon I (58 minutes in). Calling this idea podcasting came later.
Imagine it built into the car...

Saturday, 9 April 2005

Welcome to the world

English cut
Indian undercut

Sunday, 3 April 2005

Law of unintended consequences?

Cameo explains what happens when prefetch and sponsored links meet:

So- for my friends that automatically accept cookies- you are now downloading a page and a cookie nearly every time you use google and firefox together.

Another question- When I prefetch a sponsored link- does google charge for that as a 'click through?'

I wonder if google will see a change in click-through rate by browser. I wonder also if people with high hits on Google for otehr words will see a lot of spurious referrals.

Monday, 21 March 2005

Flickr and Yahoo!

Congratulations to Stewart, Caterina and all. Well done on selling a company with bottom-up tagging in it's DNA to a company with "Hierarchically Organized Ontology" in it's name.

Wednesday, 16 March 2005

The long tail of tags

Sitting in the folksonomy session at etech, I thought I'd look at the distribution of tags, and guess what, it's a power law, oh sorry 'it has a Long Tail'.

Tom says we should use the word fauxonomy...

Monday, 14 March 2005

Bloggers and diversity

Steven Levy picks up on Halley & Rebecca's discussion of the lack of diversity seen at Harvard conferences about blogging and media, but doesn't link to either of them.

Now, we do track Millions of blogs at Technorati, and all human life is there. Steven describes our top 100 as 'a list dominated by bigmouths of the white-male variety', but there are Japanese, Brazilian and Iraqi men and women there too.

The blogosphere is big enough now that my 'Caliban's Mirror' rule applies - what you see in it is what you go looking for; it reflects you and your interests.

While I am reading Jeneane, Shelley, Dorothea, Suw, Halley, Liz, danah, Denise, Megan, Stephanie and others regularly, you might not be (and it is your loss).

If you look at which bloggers the mainstream media have picked up on, the men tend to talk about politics, and the women talk about sex.

This superficiality is pointed out by Brian Micklethwait but he holds out hope as we can and do discuss ideas at length online, cross-linking, interjecting and, as Shelley does masterfully, satirizing.