Interesting changes at del.icio.us: inbox, subscribe, ignore?

Also: del.icio.us spam??

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Went to a ball game today ... for work! In the meantime, I got 83 non-spam, non-list, non-notification, addressed-to-me emails which I think is a record for this email user of over 13 years.

Also, today Sxip (goal: define a simple, open and trusted identity network) started lifting the curtains a little. Congrats to Dick and the team! (Dick founded ActiveState and is on the board of my company.)

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I'm default!

Odd it may be, but neither I nor any of the hardcore geeks I work with have ever used an aggregator (I tried Newsgator once, but had to uninstall it after a few days since it works in Outlook, and new items in your feeds look like new email and that just made me far too stressed). But people are constantly freaking out* about this XML syndication, so I decided that I am going to try it one more time.

And I installed FeedDemon on the recommendation of a few smart feed-knowing people, and it seems pretty good. I'll have to import my list from blo.gs and give it an honest try. But the thing I really noticed about FeedDemon was that my own feed was in it, as part of the set installed by default (took me a while to figure out that that was what was happening and it wasn't just a really smart installer.)

But, huh. Thanks whoever's decision that was! I guess I'll try to write more!

I try not to blog about blogging much, so I have to stick this additional unrelated link in here: lexBlog: Lawyer Blogs for Lawyers. (Why? Because blogs means 'Better Listings On Google'.) I guess it is not all that weird since it is 2009 or whatever now, but I am surprised to see blog tool makers/marketers targetting such specific niches.

* Exaggeration. 'People' aren't freaking out.

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Photos: Gender and Diversity at E3 (via GGA).

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Found: Al Sharpton

I have came to the
conclushin that Al Sharpton
whould be a grate
presedent.

and

...the particular poem I was using one day was told in the first person and was not gender specific. When we discussed the poem, the boys invariably spoke of the narrator as "he" and the girls spoke of the narrator as "she." I noticed this tendency all throughout the day with few exceptions.

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Perhaps the worst paragraph in the history of sports journalism (and that's saying something):

On Monday night, only those with an allegiance to the Lightning saw this game for anything but what it was -- a match devoid of much substance except the meaning. After all, one team would have the privilege of hoisting the Stanley Cup upon the conclusion of the proceedings, no matter how formless.

Huh? Link

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Contragts to Caterina on getting Bizwerk started! If requests from the audience are being accepted, I'd like some thoughts on Marc Andreessen's remarks reported here (found on John Battelle's blog, pin-poked by Jeff Jarvis):

... we now have 10 times more people on the Internet now than we did five years ago. We've got 10 times or a hundred times more broadband. We've got Internet advertising, which is a real phenomenon. We have a whole generation of citizens now used to doing business online, used to buying things online, and used to communicating online.

On the technology side, we've had over that period about a 10 times reduction in price in a lot of components that go into building the Internet and building services on the Internet, like servers and software and networking equipment.

All that's really adding up. The economics of the Internet have undergone something like a thousand-times swing. If you're going to launch an Internet site or an Internet business today, it's probably going to cost about a tenth of what it would have cost five years ago, but you're going to have 10 times more consumers you can address and probably 10 times the advertising revenue. There's a seriousness and commitment and dedication and effort and investment going into it now that is a lot more interesting and a lot more real than what was happening in the '90s.

Though I'd quibble a little of the factors there, and add in a minus along the lines of there being at least 10 times as much competition (balanced by another plus, being the reduction in the complexity/mysticisum on the development side and the availability of people who know what they're doing), the point is well taken. There are a ton of opportunities now that were not viable five years ago.

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Spacebloom:

Spaceblooms are autonomous, self-propelling and self-propagating cosmic plants belonging to the class of startonguites.

Cormathy, the first spacebloom, was designed by Matoni Wulffi and his sister Veronika. Cormathy was released on 21 March 2244.

If you're a fan of made up universes (like the Codex Seraphinianus), this is a very good thing to acquire. Those of you who know me well, will understand the pleasure I take in radial symmetry and the transgressions therefrom



When I first met the authors five years ago, they had already spent quadrillion of CPU cycles rendering the first versions and it is heartening to see the artifact (production quality on the book is fantastic) that is the realization of a singular and idiosyncratic vision. Good!

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I should blog again. So, here: Lookout, an Outlook plugin that actually let's you search you mail rocks hard. It is beyond me that Microsoft is unable to do search properly on the desktop, but it is, and that makes things hard. Lookout is fantastically responsive and helpful and if you use Outlook, you should really use it.

A little story - while I was searching for something, Lookout found this email from from seven years ago. It's munged archival state (probably from pine mbox files to Eudora to Outlook) makes it unclear whether I wrote it or my corrspondent did (I think I remember writing it?) but it is neat anyway, to have the vague memory twinged:

The greatest thing about the song Slip Sliding Away is the way
this whole complicated story is contained in a simple verse:

I know father who had a son:
He longed to tell him all the reasons for the things he'd done.
He came a long way just to explain.
He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping
And he turned around and headed home again

That sadness is archetypal. It is the same sadness as any; of
realizing your justifications don't matter, that your wishing
otherwise doesn't matter, that your longing for a return to
before is inconsequential. To have come to the end, and to have
just lost.

And now back to blogging.

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Over the last few days I've been sicker than I have been in a long time (which is what I think whenever I get sick; I also think that I rarely get sick, but I have no idea which side of average I am on).

But wow, I am usually floored by that 'you don't know what you've got till it's gone' phenomenon. Health, or the normal functioning of my body, is the ultimate taken-for-granted. Getting sick forces some perspective. (But we'll see if I really work less, sleep more, exercise more, eat better, etc.)

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Anil's moving to San Francisco. He already knows about it, but this is a good place to post about Hug Club, an 'association' I started a while back. There are many rules, but the three most important are:

1. You are encouraged to share about hug club.
2. You are really encouraged to share about hug club!
3. If it's your first night, you have to hug.

Welcome!

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Dear Overhauling, wherein Matt finds a great example of that weird old weblog-comments-with-a-life-of-their-own phenomenon.

Update: Matt finds another one where people think they are writing to Maury Povich. This one was hard to read though, because the people are so fantastically stupid it breaks my heart.

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Snowballs in Washington
Originally uploaded by George.

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When semantic coders go bad.

Matthew Thomas has a nice essay on silliness and markup, pointing out how false idealism can lead to a web that is worse off than what we have now. (I am a big fan of the <b> and <i&bt; tags because when I use them, I usually really mean bold and italic. The idea that you can ever have a truly clean separation between form and content is insane: you can do your best and maybe 90% of the time, 90% of the presentation can be abstracted away, but there will always be points where the presentation is an integral part of the content.)

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... and speaking of Flickr, people have been noticing that we put the first rev of notes up.

Notes are incredibly powerful, allowing people to articulate the stories that the pictures contain, but they definitely take some getting used to, and a lot of the images end up with funny and obvious annotations like these as people fool around with the feature.

Once people get comfortable with it, some amazing things could happen. Thinking back to the big gathering for my grandmother's 80th birthday, and the incredible albums of photos from the 10s, 20s, 30s, 40s that got put together, I'd love to see collaborative annotation of the family archive. It just makes no sense to not have that stuff online.

One thing that is not public anywhere yet is that we're committed to helping to develop and supporting a standard for annotation, based on Greg Elin's Fotonotes stuff. (Once there is something to be compatible with, Flickr will be 100% 'Fotonotes R/W' (read/write) compatible.) The JPEG format allows for 8 headers (of 64k each!) and EXIF is the only real respected standard right now, but once it's possible for people to upload photos with Fotonotes headers into Flickr we'll display the notes - and if you want to export a jpeg from Flickr with the notes intact you'll be able to do that too.

The same day we released this first rev of notes, we also added tags. Tags are like simple keywords that you can add to photos, except that doesn't capture it at all. Because it is done in the simplest possible way, it ends up much more powerful than trying to come up with The Complete and Accurate Categorization of Everthing in advance: just type in the terms you think are significant for that photo, hit return and that's it.

And then you can find, group or sort photos as easy as hitting flickr.com/photos/stewart/tags/maui (all my pictures of Maui; at least the ones visible to you) or flickr.com/photos/tags/flowers (all the public images in Flickr tagged with 'flower').

The implementation is a direct rip off of Joshua Schachter's del.icio.us (is it time to start talking about design patterns in social computing or what?). It took me a long time to grok del.icio.us, but once I did, I saw the light.

(Also, check out the 150 most commonly used tags where the size of the link represents its frequency of use.)

And that is that. We now have a clear idea of where we want to go with Flickr (not all of it is public yet) and I am happy. We've started on a giant refactor and clean up, going all the way from the fundamentals of relationships and permissions settings to the visual design. And sometime soon after that, notes and tags will be coming together in a beautiful way and there will be big enhancements to both. And thinking about it gives me an excuse to post an image that I've wanted to post for a while:


love is in the air, originally uploaded by Arya.

(Incidentally, that is the best bit of fan art I have received for any project I've worked on ... so cool!)

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Microsoft-Google Collision About More Than Search

Blind studies show that users can't distinguish between search results from Google, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, and Teoma. Yet when you put a logo on the page, users show a decided preference for Google. To me, that totally debunks the idea that Google's search algorithms built on the professional-journal-references model is the key to its success. As The Wall Street Journal's Lee Gomes put it: "Some say Google is the Rolls-Royce of search; maybe what it really is, is the Nike. Googlephiles may think they are exhibiting technical sophistication by their loyalty, but what they are really proving is the extent to which they have been conditioned to respond to logos and brands, just like street kids with their sneakers."

The whole article looks interesting, but that paragraph really caught my eye. I think in 1999, 2000, maybe 2001 and perhaps even into 2002, I could tell the difference between Google's results and others, but now it doesn't seem better than altavista did when the web was much smaller. It used to be like magic: most of the time I could hit 'I'm Feeling Lucky' and I'd have what I want, but now I have to find the things I am looking for within the results, just like I was doing 7 years ago.

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I'm speaking twice this month at different events: this Saturday night (May 15th) at re:design a student-organized local design expo and fundraiser for the interaction design program at SFU Surrey's Italia Design Field School. Other people talking, pieces donated from all kinds of famous artists and designers, photo exhibition, silent auction, and probably drinks. It's at Sugar and Sugar in Gastown and you can get tickets at TicketMaster (!)

And then on Thursday May 27th at 6:00pm, I'll be at the Vancouver User Experience Group (the event is not posted yet) doing a talk entitled "F*cking Up Fast (Or, How We Made a Lot of Really Bad Mistakes and Still Ended Up with Something Great)" which uses Flickr as a case study for on-the-fly design of a fairly complex piece of software.

We made a lot of mistakes in the early design of Flickr (and are still making them, I'm sure - hopefully just not as bad). But we also got it out there early, had people using it, and learned a phenomenal amount. I think the path that we are on now is much better for all of that, and this has been an amazing educational process for me (and probably for all of us).

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I'm about to hit the road again. This is now month four or five of travelling twice per month or more and I am starting to really hate it (even though, the last few trips - Maui, Tokyo - how can you complain? I complain).

I remember years and years ago, evaluating stupid dot.com jobs to take and judging them partly by the percentage of travel time required (higher being better in my books). Either I was dumb before, or I am just getting older.

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If you want to have a feed of this blog (nerd!) then use this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/sylloge. Nice button version:



This way, you get the feed in whatever format your reader likes and everyone is happy.

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Aaaaand, after just under one year away, we are back at this URL. S'funny.

Still need to move sylloge to a new server, and am still probably going to set up MT then, but I want things back at this URL for now: sylloge.com/personal is the place to be.

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