Tag Tuesday

With many thousands of users adopting tags, we thought it would be a good idea to gather tag developers every month to exchange ideas, and encourage code that works well together.

Our inaugural meeting will be:

June 14, 2005 - 6:30 - 9:30pm - Tag Tuesday First meeting - at Gordon Biersch, 2 Harrison Street, San Francisco, CA USA

Meet other Bay Area tag developers, and hear Stewart Butterfield of Flickr and Kevin Marks of Technorati talk about tags.

Also, there is a new Tag Tuesday blog.

Technorati Tags: tags, tagtuesday

WWDC Keynote in chunks

Jobs demo'd Podcasts with chapters in iTunes, so how about his keynote with chapters too?
WWDC 2005 Keynote with chapters

Here's Apple's tutorial on how to make chapters - QuickTime has had this feature for over 10 years, so we can only wonder why Apple don't use it themselves.

As to the topics of the speech, running bits of Mac OS on Intel has been going on since 1996; the tricky part of it is getting endian-flipping right when serialising to disc, as Greg Chapman's technote from 2000 makes clear. You don't know you have it right until you have written and read files both ways between different endian architectures.

Chapters in podcasts is a good idea, but this needs a bit more to be actually useful - it needs iPod support (the skip button going to the next chapter), and we need the info back from the iPod about which tracks and chapters have been played, and which ones skipped. With that there are a lot of interesting things that can be done.

Technorati Tags: iPod, movie, podcasting

Missing the point completely

Scoble issued an invite to Bitman's place, a site supposed to teach children about computing.

So, always keen to find something interesting for my boys, I had a look.

The first 'game' is 'configure the computer system for the characters'. You get some virtual money and have to choose a system config (CPU, RAM, drive, Fan, video card etc) for different uses.

Hello?

This is exactly what is totally bloody annoying about buying PCs
You pick a bunch of components and the bloody thing flakes out because of some internal dependency between them.

This is not teaching about computers, this is teaching how broken the Wintel purchase process is. Sorry Robert, go buy that team Logical Journey of the Zoombinis and get a sense of how you teach through play.

Bacon Bacon Bacon

Andrew and I made a movie while cooking breakfast the other day:

Download Bacon movie here.
It's in homage to the badger movie

Technorati Tags: bacon, breakfast, creative commons, egg, movie, mushroom

Pulp's Common People meets Tank Girl

Pulp's Common People meets Tank Girl
You either just said "Yes!" or "Huh?" Anything I could say in either case would be superfluous.

Solving Lileks' dilemma

James Lileks has been writing on the web for years, and is consistently brilliant. Tonight he posted a dilemma he has:

I have this template: title on top, illustration, text below, navigation button on the bottom. Everything I’ve done has been a tweak of that basic idea, and it gets irritating; you see the picture, scroll down, read the text, scroll back up to see the picture again, scroll back down to click next. What if –

Nah.

No! What if I do the unthinkable, and make the text a graphic? I’m still playing with this – it’ll mean larger file sizes, but maybe I should start to think ahead to a day when the majority of visitors have modems faster than a cold slug on sand. Here’s the old version. Here’s the new idea. It's still too busy, but you can see what I'm aiming at. It means more work – an incredible amount of work, frankly – but it makes the site look more like the book version I’d love to do.

Now Lileks is used to the tables and spacer images layout model, but there is a way he can have his text and his layout without making everything a graphic - HTML + CSS.
I spent 15 minutes in BBEdit and CSSEdit to make a 21st century XHTML+CSS version.
Note that it is simpler HTML than his old version, but has the approximate layout style of the new version (I'm an engineer Jim, not a typographer). I even got drop shadows in Safari.
I have nothing against DreamWeaver - friends of mine work on it - and I'm sure it can do CSS too.

Done right, this should actually be less work than either of Lileks’ alternatives.

My tail is longer than yours...

This is a belated response to Dave Rogers and friends, which started out in Shelley's comments, where I said:

The long tail is not a myth, and the many do outweigh the few. Pick a few words around a topic that you are interested in and search for them at Technorati and see who you find.
The top 100 is not the most interesting page on our site by any means. I wrote about this before - Call off the Search

Dave replied:

I think Kevin misunderstands the use of the word "myth" in this context. Whether or not "the many do outweigh the few," it is the few that most profit. If the Top 100 is not the most interesting page on Technorati, then where does it rank in Technorati's hierarchy of interesting pages? Second? Third? Why is it on the front page at all if it isn't very interesting? Is it not in Technorati's interests to maintain the attention of those in or near the top 100 to influence their attention-directing authority for Technorati's advantage?
Finally, why can Technorati claim to be "the authority" on what's going on in weblogs, and then specifically disclaim any responsibility to anyone who relies on that "authority?"

I still have hope that Kevin Marks will reply, it is the weekend and he probably has a life, but so far, nothing heard.

Mike Sanders in Main Stream Bloggers (MSB) Assert Their Authority:

It didn't take long, but the Main Stream Bloggers (MSB) are asserting their authority.
Last week I wrote:
The long tail is a blogging myth in which the heavy-traffic bloggers try to convince the little guys, like you and me, that we are really the important ones in the blogosphere. And we should keep on blogging and linking to the big guys, since collectively the bottom 99% has much more viewership than the top 1% - or something like that.

then characterized my statement above as a decree. I don't follow this; the Top 100, like most of the rest of Technorati, is a reflection of others' links. Mike doesn't understand the difference between a gaussian and an exponential distribution either.

That was last weekend when I was suffering from food poisoning, and I saw this needed a considered response, rather than a dashed-off one, so I put it off. Dave prodded me again this weekend:

Technorati, again, as near as I can tell, is held in positive regard, at least by the members of the "A-List." I'll leave it to the reader to decide if this was an act of inspired genius to create a list that simultaneously flatters the egos of the people most in a position to criticize the company, draws attention to itself, and exploits the attention-directing "authority" of high attention-earning webloggers (the A-List) to draw even more attention to itself. I'd say probably not, since it's been done before; but it's still a pretty effective way to garner attention and achieve a measure of insulation from criticism.

But here we are a week later and I find myself talking to myself. Neither Keven Marks nor Dave Sifry deigned to entertain my questions. Perhaps I wasn't obsequious enough to merit being taken seriously. Perhaps I lack sufficient authority. I'm absolutely certain there's a "reason." But I don't think there's any explanation that can restore the fiction that "markets are conversations."

Well, I'll try. I got into blogging in the first place after following the Cluetrain writers here. In particular, Chris Locke goaded his newsletter readers into starting blogs, and I did so. My first few posts had a similar blustery tone to the one that Dave and Mike have employed with me here, pointing out where I thought others' pronouncements were unsupported or based on misreadings. That Mike thinks I am now a 'Main Stream Blogger' gave me pause, as I feel I have been having a conversation with those who are interested in some of the same, often esoteric, things as I am. What I found over time was that neither obstreperousness or obsequy added value, but considered discussion did. I found that things I wrote could be reflected back to those I cited, and they would sometimes respond, or others would join in. When I met the people I'd been reading and writing with face to face, the conversation was easily picked up and carried on.

By tracking people linking to me or mentioning my name, Technorati helps me in this distributed asynchronous conversation (thats how I found Mike and Dave's comments, after all). However, as I've said before, "I can read your thoughts, as long as you write them down first". In order to be in the conversation, you need to be writing and linking. Perforce, this means that those who write and link more, and are written about and linked to more, are those who most see the utility of it.

As blogging spread from ten thousand people writing about technology to ten million writing about their lives, their interests, their hopes and fears, characterising any of it as 'mainstream' is a readers choice, as you can only focus on a few narrow tributaries of the Mississippi of writing that surges through our computers every day. Technorati's top 100 list, and listing of the number of inbound links and blogs by search results is a way for you to see how others have linked before - you can click on the little speech-bubbles and see what they said in linking to them, we expose that directly. The top 100 are not some fixed group, they come and go, but in general they link a lot themselves, and write frequently.

Dave continues:

Markets are about exchanges of value, and those with something to sell will always seek to manipulate the buyers' perception of value. Even if that means pretending to be engaged in the latest hip, trendy, feel-good, manufactured belief system created to garner attention and manufacture the perception of authority for its authors.

Markets are indeed about exchanges of value, but the market price is an emergent property of this spontaneous order of transactions between individuals, an information network that defies representation and measurement. A market is a spontaneous order, as is a conversation. The subtleties and complexities of these interactions are a source of fascination for me, as they do defy easy representation or theory, and we know that the analyses we can derive from blogging are only partial reflections of a complex reality, but we hope that they may be found useful, and that we can improve them and add to them over time.

He concludes:

If this criticism garners attention, that is not my intent. My intent is merely to state the truth as best I can perceive it. Any effort to engage in a conversation regarding whether or not Technorati believes "markets are conversations" at this point is merely a further effort to manufacture and shape perception. Hopefully that will inoculate me from having to engage in any pointless, back-and-forth, damage control efforts with either Mr. Marks or Mr. Sifry. If all of you would continue to do me the good favor of ignoring me, I'd appreciate it.

Bullshit. Of course you wanted my attention, or you wouldn't have repeated it in different places and phrasings. So quit the passive-aggressive reverse psychology posturing and think a bit.

Of course conversations are meant to shape perception; if they didn't there would be no point. Doc Searls and David Weinberger express this well, and differently. Doc explains that the root of information is that we are trying to form one another. David points out that without each other we are not human - look at children raised by wolves, and says we are writing ourselves into existence online.

Blogging is an arrogant act, as you say, Dave, and a personal one, but we are accountable and responsible to one another, and we reveal a lot about ourselves by writing continuously over time.

A while ago Dave Rogers wrote:

To be as authentic/truthful as possible, corporate Web sites must be shaped--as are all conversations--by the voices of the participants. And because the best conversationalists are also the best listeners, this requires Corporate sites that demonstrate that the company knows its visitors--not as mere statistics, focus groups or fat wallets, but as living, breathing, unique individuals--each of inestimable value, not because of what they can give to the company but because of who they are. As Tom asserted, these are sites that "have an interest in what the world says"--not just themselves.

We're trying to build a site that reflects what the world says, but it will also reflect what you look for within it. The web is Caliban's mirror, and Technorati a magnifying glass in front of it. If you don't like the reflection, you can change where you look, but you can also change what we reflect back with your writing and linking.

Technorati Tags: long tail, technorati

10 million blogs on Technorati

Around 20 minutes past nine last night, Technorati indexed its 10 millionth blog.

As far as I can tell 飞啊,飞啊,飞 - 博客.CN[blogger.cn/blog/中国/china] is a chinese blog about art glassmaking. It has some beautiful Chihuly photographs.

The endless variety of blogs continues to amaze me.

Technorati Tags: long tail, technorati

Creative Commons licensing the Katherina movie teaser trailer

An old friend of mine in the UK is making a movie, Katherina, which I am looking forward to seeing. It's a big-budget 35mm production, using British and American talent both in front of and behind the camera about Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who was famously martyred by being broken on a wheel for challenging church authorities in 329AD.

He's put together a great teaser trailer based on what's been shot so far, and he asked me how to get it up on the net, as I know this online video stuff.

A few years ago the answer would involve complicated hosting and mirroring, and an upfront guess on how many people downloaded it, but it struck me that this was a chance to show how things are different now.

I convinced him to use a Creative Commons license on the trailer, and I've put up a high-quality Bittorrent of the Katherina trailer.

So, download it, tell your friends, and tag any comments with spikedwheel.

Technorati Tags: bittorrent, creative commons, katherina, movie, spikedwheel

What are they saying about me?

A very natural human question, and one Technorati can help you answer.
The lastest group of people we're helping directly are the Salon journalists. That page shows which of their stories are getting the most attention from bloggers in the form of links in the last 48 hours.
Richard has a more detailed explanation, with screenshots.

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

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

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.

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

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]