Oct 12

Use of flash

I posted earlier about the Bling my Bomb sit and the agencies decision to use Flash 8. Ashley from Soap commented to explain the decision

So far there’s been a 20% visitor rate to the “noflash” page, which is 17% more than usual however the people who visit the app get a better experience. As this is a 6 month campaign we feel this figure will settle down to a negligible figure.

That’s a better figure than I expected given the barrier of having to download a new version before you could see the site.

You could read the comment – except I had a moment of stupidity and deleted it in stead of saving it as I edited it to remove an erroneous tag! (I hit the wrong button, still half asleep here) But the key reason for moving to this was a decision about file size; Flash 8 reduced it by about 50% and made the end user experience so much better and this was considered less of a barrier.

Oct 12

Girl Geek Dinner 2

I went along to the second Girl’s Geek Dinner last night. About 50 people turned up and, judging by the level of chat, it looked like everyone got something out of it. Ably organised by Sarah , there were two speakers. Eileen Brown spoke about evangelism in Microsoft and being a woman working in a perceived man’s world. Adriana spoke about blogs and companies, how the word is spreading and interest has taken off over the last two months (one mention was for Cillit Bang, whose clumsy use of the media is recorded on the BBC site as going a bit Pete Tong). Somewhere, there’ll be a podcast put up. The next one is planned for January, so spread the word.

Oct 11

Chips

A see a perfect set of poker chips as a Christmas present. All I need to do is learn to play the game – but I get that much spam for sites that want me to play, should not be hard finding somewhere ;o)

Posted in fun
Oct 11

Resignation over blogging

Shel Israel writes about an IBM emplyee in India resigning after the subject of one of Guarav Sabnis’s posts, the Indian Institute of Management and Planning, threated to boycott IBM machines, stage a student protest and burn the Thinkpads. He explains the decision:

Firstly, my intention to stand by my posts, since I believe in freedom of speech. I have written nothing that can be thought of as libel. IIPM is an organiation in free India which makes some claims in its advertisements. What I did was exercise my right as a citizen, by responding to the information contained in the ad……The second thing dear to me is IBM’s well-being. IBM has been a good employer to me. I have no complaints about them. Even in light of these events, they did not pressurise me to go against my principles and hush the matter up. Yet, IBM was being dragged into this unnecessarily.

An honourable decision. But indicative of trouble to come if you post in your own name?

Oct 11

More Searches

Two new searches were announced yesterday. Yahoo is adding blog search, not as a separate section but as part of their news search. The tool displays the blog searches in a panel, which can be expanded to explore deeper. You can save things directly to MyWeb from the searches. Tthe search results are currently confined to a targeted set of blogs whilst they work through the beta.

Chris Pirillo’s search, gada.be, is cool. Very cool. Simple in design, it pulls together results from multiple sources, displaying them cleanly in a list form. The key thing is that the search term can be included as the subdomain of the URL used, reducing clicks required and targeting this at mobile users. Even the domain name is easy to enter on a phone keypad. Nice – however displaying latest searches on the home page may not be the best idea without some filter, given some of the terms already on there.

Oct 10

Yahoo Podcasts

Yahoo have released a beta of a podcasting service. Nice webpages, great to have someone else in the space but I think I’m being particularly slow on this as I can’t get the subscription service to work in Doppler. It looks like I need some other software to do so, such as itunes or Yahoo Music. The listening function works nicely, and the ‘how to’ is clear. One to watch.

Oct 10

Teenage Internet Use

One of the sessions at Web2.0 was a conversation with 5 teenagers (17-18yo) from the Bay-area, California. Jeffrey Mcnanus and Kareem Mayan both post about this talk. As with the Social Computing Symposium back in April, (notes here) there seems to be some surprise about how this group of people are using the tools, and also how the tools change the behaviour.

From both sessions, the need to be connected comes through; cell phones, IM, web browsing, MySpaces. Communities and friendships are driven from online interaction (” gets home, goes on computer right away, on myspace, talks to people on IM; ” “Sadly I spend a ton of time on it when I get home from crew all I do is talk online and wait for friends to leave me friend requests,”

As Kareem summmarises:

This was one of the more interesting panels, because the perspectives that these teens provided were candid, novel, and insightful. At the same time, these teens were found on Craigslist, which means they’re probably more internet-literate than your average teen. In any case, the audience ate up this panel–my guess is because these folks rarely talk to customers.

. Sometimes neither online interaction (such as blogs) nor formal research works – sometimes you have to go out and talk to people.

Update: there’s a piece in the Guardian about teenage internet use today, looking at content generation and news consumption.

Oct 08

Blog and RSS studies

Yahoo and Ipsos Insight have released a study on RSS. (In pdf). Looking at RSS usage inthe US, it shows that many people who are using RSS do not know they are going so.

  • Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of users are aware of
    RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS.

  • 27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start
    pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling
    technology.

  • 28% of Internet users are aware of podcasting, but only 2% currently subscribe
    to podcasts.

  • Even tech-savvy “Aware RSS Users” prefer to access RSS feeds via user-friendly,
    browser-based experiences (e.g., My Yahoo!, Firefox, My MSN).

  • My Yahoo! has the highest awareness and use of any RSS-enabled product.

As a tool, it is working best when people do not know (or care) what the tool is, just what it can do for them. Convenience and ease of use are the sellers. Make the nuts and bolts invisible and just let it happen, make it easy and seamless for people to subscribe.

Another study out this week is the Edelman/Technorati study of bloggers. A self-selecting survey, it looks at why people blog, the trust factor that can be engendered thought the use of blogging and the interaction between companies and bloggers. Over 800 bloggers responded, over half from the US, and over 90% from English speakers so the use of results for business blogging can only be for certain markets. Unfortunately, there’s no analysis yet, but that is supposed to be coming.

In answer to why people blog, the biggest reponse was about being an authority in the field, followed closely by a record of thoughts (this blog obviously falls into the 2nd category, there being no ‘field’ here!) But when it comes to company interactions, people appear to want interactions – or at least free product. The contact would be trusted more if direct from the company, reflecting on PR being perceived as spin; the moot trusted contacts would be those employees who blog. Agree – I’d be happier talking to someone who believes in the product (they still work for the comany!) rather than those who are paid to promote it in a second way and also the contact would be better coming from soemone who understands the blogging world and how it is made up of people instead of consumers.

Finally, Google have released their RSS aggregator. Still feels very much in beta, I’m just not getting a feel for it. The lack of organisation in the listing pane, with new articles presented in date/time order as a single stream would not suit the number of feeds I read, I prefer to read sections separately instead of everything in order. I don’t see a way of rearanging the view or arranging the subscriptions. One ot keep an eye on, but no instant winner.

Oct 08

More weather

TheTimes took the Met offices policy decision about weather announcements becoming mroe friendly and explored.

“There could be a few showers when the match kicks off.” (Translation: You know that bit in The Matrix Reloaded when Neo finds that everyone on Earth has turned into Agent Smith? Remember their fight? With the rain beating down in droplets the size of watermelons? That’s your football match, that is.)

“Expect it to grow a little chilly in the evening.” (Translation: Expect conditions to rival those prevailing during the final moments of Captain Oates.)

“Earlier today a lady rang the BBC and said she had heard that there was a hurricane on the way. Well, don’t worry if you’re watching, there isn’t.” (Translation: Four horsemen ride, the Beast comes from the sea, it is the end of days, etc, etc.)

Of course, in this case the last one is true, being the exact quote from Michael Fish a few hours before a hurricane struck the UK in 1987, causing widespread damage.

Posted in fun
Oct 08

Ig Nobel awards

The IgNoble awards were presented on Thursday night. My favourites from the winners:

LITERATURE: The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters — General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others — each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them.

FLUID DYNAMICS: Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow of International University Bremen, Germany and the University of Oulu , Finland; and Jozsef Gal of Loránd Eötvös University, Hungary, for using basic principles of physics to calculate the pressure that builds up inside a penguin, as detailed in their report “Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh — Calculations on Avian Defaecation.”

Posted in fun
Oct 08

Weblogs

In the second Weblog sale this week, Dave Winer’s weblogs.com has been bought by Verisign. The ping server needs investment to cope with the exponential increase in blogs, plus the investigation and work on how to clean up pings from spam blogs. Verisign have put forward their vision for the continuation of the service:

  • Free‘Basic pings, the messages processed by weblogs.com, will remain free to submit, and free to retrieve from the service’. Although they will look at adding value-added services for fees.
  • Open‘In all cases, we endorse open formats, freely available, freely implementable by the rest of the community.’ ‘We want to excel in our execution and implementation of our services, rather than building a walled garden around a proprietary platform.’
  • Solid‘We have the skills, resources and experience in highly-scaled, high-performance infrastructure to deploy ping server services that will serve the blogosphere (and beyond) for the next stages of growth’
  • Informative‘we would like to make weblogs.com – the website – a useful destination for checking in on the infrastructure side of the blogosphere. We anticipate it being a handy place to check in for aggregated metrics’

So a vision of maintinaing an open, community service whislt strengthening the infrastrcutre and scaleability of the service to cope with increasing demands., Sounds good to me. Winer wrote about the day of the announcement, which appeared to be slightly ahead of schedule

Oct 08

Thoughful Reads

Lloyd Davies has a write up from a talk by Theordore Zeldin on the art of conversation, both face-to-face and online.

conversation is an art, so there is no guaranteed way of becoming a good conversationalist and everyone develops their own style. Until recently people had to fit into fixed categories. Now the individual is accepted and the mystery is what is going on for you.

So challenge yourself – the question is not what do you want to talk about, but what do you want to converse about, what do you want to share.

Ethan Zuckerman comments on the the book Brand New Justice, by branding expert Simon Anholt. But this is not marketing brands, but countries as brands. What does a country mean to a person, what brand does it carry. How can a country change thier branding, change the perception in the mind of potential visitors or investors. In London, you can see a conscious effort taking place to bring people back in after the July bombings. But this can be seen as a short term blip; how about countries that have a long history of negative branding, how do they turn themselves around. Ask yourself – is Croatia a war-set country that you cnanot visit, or a beautiful holiday destination? Anholt uses the ‘Nation Brand Hexagon’ to measure countries: ” which evaluates a national brand on six key characteristics, as well as a ranking score based on a sum of all those scores”. By measuring, it allows a country to put in a framework to change.

From the New Yorker, an article looking at the evolving admissions policy of the US Ivy League, primarily Harvard. When the university changed to standard entry tests in 1905, it was a pure merit test, based on academic ability. There were no other criteria present. But quickly this lead to an undesirable situation as perceived by the leading social class of the time. In 1922, personal characteristics started to come into play – the university was looking for certain types of people, not just academically successful ones. This was still going in the 1960’s:

At Harvard, the key figure in that same period was Wilbur Bender, who, as the dean of admissions, had a preference for “the boy with some athletic interests and abilities, the boy with physical vigor and coordination and grace.” Bender, Karabel tells us, believed that if Harvard continued to suffer on the football field it would contribute to the school’s reputation as a place with “no college spirit, few good fellows, and no vigorous, healthy social life,” not to mention a “surfeit of ‘pansies,’ ‘decadent esthetes’ and ‘precious sophisticates.’ ” Bender concentrated on improving Harvard’s techniques for evaluating “intangibles” and, in particular, its “ability to detect homosexual tendencies and serious psychiatric problems.”

And the process is still there today, but maybe not so obvious! There is still a personal selection criteria going on – will the student fit in, will they be successful And not just successful in college, but in life. For many of the top universities, that is a key measure of success. The article goes onto explore success of graduates post-college as being one of the reasons why subjectivity apppears to work. You can see the same practice in the UK – especially with grade ‘inflation’, where so many people are getting multiple A grades – the personal characteristics come into play and subjective choice can always be challenged.

Oct 08

Playful sites

Via Adverblog, a couple of very nice promotional sites that encourage you to play, before giving the company your precious email for them to continue their conversation with you.

The first is to create buzz for a new Australian men’s magazine (Explode) and lets you customise a car (‘Bling My bomb’)with all sorts of accessories, including the girl you want in the passenger seat. It’s a fun interface, perfect for wasting a few minutes at work. However, not too sure about going for Flash8; having only beenout a few weeks the penetration is not high so it introduces a huge barrier before people cannot get to the site. I’d love to see the drop off numbers.

The second is for MacDonald’s. In BBoyBattle, you pick a character and control their dance moves. No use without a fast connection, but slick and fun(but turn down the music which does get tedious.

One final one, Absolut have a addition to their poster campaign, with one advertsing the Beer Festival in Munich. I don’t think there’ll be much vodka on sale duringthe festival, but this is driven from their lifestyle targeting.

Oct 08

Serenity Publicity

Serenity, which opened here yesterday, continues it’s slightly unusual publicity drive. The Whedon fans have always being in a buzz about it but the hype was increased in May when special screenings of the unfinished movie were provided acorss the US and in a few other countries. Leading up to the launch, there were screenings for bloggers – but they were only allowed in on the commitment that they blogged the event. Over the last week the posters for it have been plastered everywhere around the Tube.

Universal have also taken the step of putting the first 10 minutes or so of the movie online, not just a trailer. They are using Vividas, which is a very nice piece of streaming technology allowing great quality full screen videos to be delivered You get to see the screen villain, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who, in the Holloywood cliche, has the cut-glass English accent. After all that – I think I better go see the film.

Oct 06

Snippets 5 Oct

Jason Calacanis confirms that his Weblogs Inc has been bought by AOL. A great scoop by PaidContent.

BBC Radio 6 confirms (presumptively) that Aplle will be unveiling the new video iPod with a press event at the BBC. Ben talks about the leak. But maybe not, according to ThinkSecret.

Don Dodge writes about how Napster came and went, but the record companies lost anyway.

Gnutella was an open source program and we were already seeing new variants of it emerge. We told the record labels that we (Napster) had a loyal audience of over 50M users. We had servers that could control distribution. If they didn’t do a deal with us and put us out of business then Gnutella and its derivatives would become unstoppable. There would be no company to sue and no server to shut down. If we worked together now we could convert the market to a paying subscription or per download model. If we didn’t do a deal chaos would ensue. They didn’t believe us and didn’t really understand what this Gnutella threat was. The record labels lost billions of dollars in lost revenue over the next several years, and may never squash the free file trading movement.

. Via Rick.

Oct 06

The Impact of Global warming

The weather in Britain is about to get better – or at least that is what the weather presenters are going to be telling us. The Meteorological Office have issued new guidelines, to ensure the presenters emphasise the positive and don’t dwell on the negative. So instead of Occasional Showers, it’s going to be mostly dry. Instead of Often Cloudy, it’s going to be Generally Clear. Doesn;t matter though – what ever they call it, we’ll still talk about it

Oct 06

NagMonster

At dinner last night, I was discussing procrastination and getting things done (in a round about way). And decided using a combination of AI and IM could be the way to go; a solution could be a friendly (or not so friendly) buddy who would ask me questions about whether or not I have completed the tasks that I told it about and be my personal NagMonster (the name may need working on!)

  • So start of with some decent AI, so that the questions and responses are not too jarring
  • Throw in something like the Myer’s Briggs test. This allows the presonality of the NagMonster to be adjusted so that it asks you things in your preferred style. It may spend 5 minutes beating around the bush asking about the weather and what you did last night – or just get straight to the point.
  • Next, a way of recording the tasks you want it to chase you on – a ToDo list with priorities. You can adjust how urgently the NagMonster chases you.

Now, the base version could be just text; it may only ever hold a few items at a time. But it could be premiumised: with the increase in voice on the IM clients, a vocal version could be done as well as a video version. And then downloadable voice files can be sold – to personalise the NagMonster in the accent and sound of your choice. Or choose the look of the video message. Lots of things to do. Of course, if I had it, I’d probaly kill it the second time it tried to nag me.

Posted in fun
Oct 05

Ning

Lots of people talking about Ning,

Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for building and using social applications.
Social apps are web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people.

.
I’m not really any kind of a developer, so can’t really test it well. However, is the name supposed to make me think of Spike Milligan?

On the Ning Nang Nong
Where the Cows go Bong!
and the monkeys all say BOO!
There’s a Nong Nang Ning
Where the trees go Ping!
And the tea pots jibber jabber joo.
On the Nong Ning Nang
All the mice go Clang
And you just can’t catch ’em when they do!
So its Ning Nang Nong
Cows go Bong!
Nong Nang Ning
Trees go ping
Nong Ning Nang
The mice go Clang
What a noisy place to belong
is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong!!

Oct 05

Newspapers run out of opinion?

A colleague at work had an interesting experience last week; the Evening Standard (local London paper) rang her to ask her to submit a letter to the paper on a specific subject (the resignation of newsreader Philip Hayton over personal clashes). She’d sent in a letter about a year before, so they had her details on file. She spent some time writing the letter and sent it on through, where it got published in the next issue. With edits – including additions. Although it had not changed the sentiment of the letter, she did wonder why she had bothered putting time into it if they were going to change things.

Do newspapers normally solicit reader letters? On specific subjects? I’ve never heard this before. But in this case, it’s ensured that my colleague is unlikely to do something similar again, and raise doubts about the rest of the stuff in the paper.

Oct 05

Buzz before Ad

Jeff Jarvis is advertising an ad. Or the potential appearance of an ad on his site before it actually reaches the site.

Sometime today (when my webmaster gets off the school bus), a big-ass ad will likely appear atop this page. It’s for a Warner Brothers movie and they came to me, which is cool.

.

A different type of advertising for blogs, bringing them closer to the other types of online advertising spaces. I guess that the types of ads will continue get closer to those on ‘standard’ advertising sites, so we;ll soon have to close those annoying ones that cover the content, forcing you to click something.