Video is fantastic for user engagement.  We frequently see video positively affecting important click-paths and/or funnel entries.  Video also often positively affects contributing factors such as Repeat Visitors (%), Time On Site, and Page View Per Session. 

With all of the comedic bold statements about the future of Flash between Steve Jobs and Shantanu Narayen, as well as the recent failed attempt of YouTube to convert its massive video platform to HTML5, the focus seems to be on whether or not Flash is going to have such as significant hold on the future of the media on the web.  But it makes me wonder, what about other media platforms.  Currently Flash Video is supported on 96%+ of the PCs followed by Windows Media (~69%), and QuickTime (~61%).  These 3 video formats dominate the way we all watch video on the web.

HTML5 has not officially declared which video formats will be supported, but so far the video formats discussed are very interesting.  The initial supported video format in HTML5 was the open source OGG format.  Other non-common formats such as Theos were added at later dates. Undoubtedly, over the next 12-24 months, HTML5 video will become more advanced and start to be able to scale to sites such as Hulu and YouTube, but should Adobe be the only organization afraid about losing market share?  The open HTML5 video formats will likely cause Apple (QuickTime) and Microsoft (Windows Media) to lose some share of the market as well.   If a significant segment of the video market is dominated by open source video formats, perhaps organizations such as Adobe and Apple should start focusing on having superior video creation tools.

Wondering lately where I want to land on the spectrum between convenience and quality when comparing an ultra-portable Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS (Digital Elph) and a Canon Rebel EOS. The PowerShot is the size of a deck of cards and weighs ounces. The Rebel (a DSLr camera) easily weighs five times more and has much more bulk – it’s not going to fit neatly into a belt holster that doesn’t get in your way while hiking or biking. I’m not eager to have several pounds dangling from my neck, but at the same time, wouldn’t mind stepping up my game quality-wise in the photo department. Neither camera at my disposal is the latest model in its respective line, but I assumed the Rebel would take far better pictures by default.

Decided to do an informal test to find out. Running both cameras in fully automatic mode (since that’s what I use most often, and since it’s the only way to compare fairly), I took a handful of shots in the back yard, attempting to make the images as close to identical as possible. Tried to get a range of shots in full sun, mixed shadow, and shadow. Included one flash shot and one macro shot as well.

One significant difference not accounted for here is the fact that the Rebel has a full range of manual options that the PowerShot doesn’t have. On the other hand, the PowerShot has a quite good movie mode, which the Rebel lacks completely.

The results weren’t nearly as clear cut as I expected. Comparing the images below, I have a fairly clear preference for one of the columns, but prefer a few images from the opposite column. Can you tell which column is which camera? Which column do you prefer overall?

• Exhibit A: Cracked’s Irony Flowchart
• Exhibit B: The Oatmeal’s “Three Most Common Uses of Irony” comic
• Exhibit C: The Wikipedia Irony article and discussion thereof
• Exhibit D: This debate of a BP sign on FriendFeed

Whereas, there is widespread debate about the definition of irony;

Whereas, there are at least three entirely separate types of irony;

Whereas, much time has been wasted and will continue to be wasted debating what constitutes irony; and,

Whereas, the Alanis song is still awesome even if some of the examples aren’t really very ironic;

Therefore be it resolved, that the world begin using the neologism “ironee” to incorporate all types of irony PLUS all of the things that people call irony but purists reject. Furthermore, let one additional properly of ironee be that if someone calls something ironeek, it automatically becomes ironeek if anyone debates them on whether or not it’s an example of ironee.

Here, I have a useful illustration of ironee for you:

All in favor?

Passed unanimously. Proceed!

Half a year ago, I got this crazy idea to build a site where people could log and record all the things they wanted to accomplish before they died. But more than just simple list-making, I wanted to make it easy for people to tell stories about their goals, and to add images and video. I wanted to let people “follow” other people’s lists, to receive email when their friends accomplished their goals, to start discussions about getting the most out of life. I wanted it to be a place where people could get inspired by the goals of others, and to easily make copies of those goals in their own bucketlists.

The result is bucketlist.org.

I had a pre-existing love affair with the Python-based Django framework – there was never a question of what platform to build on. But no matter how good the platform, the devil’s in the details.

Data Modeling

While the basic concept was pretty simple, some of the implementation details became challenges. First, there was abstract stuff, like how to do the data modeling and logic for items copied from one list into another. If we wanted to have views like “most copied items,” it was important that people not be able to edit the copied items (if they did, the copy would no longer be a copy). But if copied items weren’t editable, no one would want to use the feature. Should a copied item have a foreign-key relationship to the original, or be a free-standing record? And what about copies of copies? Would we track them in the aggregate by traversing a relationship chain, or by counting references to a single original? Wrangling data can be a brain buzz. After trying several approaches, I decided it would be most performant to make copies into free-standing records, but with a “copied_from” relationship field. Users would be allowed to edit the details of the item, but not the title. That protected the integrity of the relationship but still allowed enough freedom to keep the feature useful.

User Registration

Handling user registration and profiles is something nearly every site needs, and the magic pairing of django-registration and django-profiles covers all the bases, keying off Django’s built-in base User object with a lot of implementation flexibility. But the documentation for them is written for rocket scientists, and customization can be a chore if you don’t have a CS background. In fact, the “Missing Manual” I wrote for django-registration a year ago has been one of the most popular items on Birdhouse since it went up.

During the Bucketlist soft-launch period, I began to realize how different user expectations can be from the assumptions you make during build. For example, a lot of people now expect to be able to use email addresses as usernames when signing up for a site. But I’m using the username as part of the user’s bucketlist URL, and personal email addresses change. No go on that. Ironically, Django 1.2 started supporting email addresses as usernames, so I had to figure out a way to disable the new feature.

I’m no fan of anonymity on the internet. One of the few things Facebook (which I generally dislike) really gets right is that it strongly encourages users to use their real names. So my signup form initially required First and Last names, and bucketlist pages were clearly labeled as such. But within days of the soft launch, I had several users trying to find ways to work around the last name requirement. Who am I to judge? Backed off and made last name optional, and found conditional ways to represent the user’s name depending on how much info they were willing to give.

Also had to figure out things like how to modify the base User object when fields in the linked Profile object is changed.

Rich Text Editor

Because they’re difficult to do securely, rich text editors in form fields are most commonly found on the back-end of content management systems, not on public facing pages. Since a user can bypass the options provided by the rich text editor simply by turning off JavaScript, input has to be carefully inspected and post-processed on the back end as well.

To get around this problem, my first versions of the site used Markdown to allow fancy formatting, but I was never happy with that approach. Developers may think Markdown is “user friendly,” but trust me — it isn’t. And because it requires a unique syntax, you always need a helper guide to go with it, which is just not user friendly. I really wanted a proper rich text editor, but needed it to be secure.

Took a lot of trial and error, but I documented the solution I finally came up with: Allowing Secure User Input With Django. I’m happy with the results.

Handling Media

From the start, I wanted to make it easy to for users to add images and video to their stories. But I didn’t want to get into the business of storing huge amounts of media – people already have accounts at Flickr and YouTube and Vimeo, and there’s a wealth of freely embeddable content at those sites ready to be re-used (Bucketlist users are encouraged to add media created by other people if they don’t have their own). At the same time, I wasn’t willing to allow users to paste embed code from those sites – that’s a security nightmare waiting to happen (even WordPress only lets site administrators paste embed code – not normal authors or end users).

My first stab at a solution was to build some kind of shortcode solution, where users could type something like:

[youtube 83kx78y]

and have that string auto-replaced with proper embed code. There’s already a django-shortcodes project out there, and I figured I’d build on that. But after spending a few evenings working with APIs of various providers and realizing how many more I had to create, decided that was a fool’s errand (I even submitted patches to the python-flickr API interface tool along the way).

Then I learned about the awesome oembed system. Oembed is a standard that lets you hand a media ID to a supporting provider, and they pass back all of the metadata for that piece of media. So a site can implement a tool that parses user-submitted text for URLs of supporting sites (like Flickr or Vimeo), extracts the media ID, and uses the returned metadata in json format to reconstruct a known-safe embed code block. Thus, users need only paste media URLs into the rich text field and the rest happens automagically.

Started off with the various forks of django-oembed, with mixed results. The codebase was really large (for what it did), and the results were buggy. URL fragments would be left in the text, and some providers simply failed to resolve (that part turned out to be a problem with the ooembed endpoint, which I was able to fix by switching to embed.ly. After trying and failing to fix django-oembed, switched to jquery-oembed, which did a cleaner job with half the lines of code. I’d rather not rely on Javascript for this functionality, but will wait until someone writes a leaner, cleaner oembed implementation for Django.

Twitter API

From the start, I had planned to let users Tweet their new goals directly from the site. Found a nice Python library for working with the Twitter API, but posting content without sending passwords around meant learning all about the OAuth dance – a little tarantella that involves passing request tokens and auth keys back and forth. In retrospect, it doesn’t look too nasty, but it took several evenings to get it just right. It’ll be easier next time :)

I didn’t implement Facebook’s posting tools into this version of the site – in part because of all the politics and privacy concerns swirling around them right now, and in part because I understand they’re moving everything to OAuth2. Will wait for the dust to settle on that a bit.

Of course posting to Twitter meant I needed shortened versions of Bucketlist URLs, so I got to play with the bit.ly API too. That part was a cakewalk – no tarantella required.

And of course I needed a character counter in the Tweet field. Found a nice JQuery plugin for that.

Design

I’m more of a developer than a designer. I know good design when I see it, and even teach a lecture to visiting journalists on Web Design Principles. But when it comes to conceptualizing original designs, I kind of freeze up. Also, I wanted to keep on trucking with the 960 Grid system I use elsewhere — 960gs makes it trivial to manipulate columns in complex layouts. Unfortunately, there are few freely available designs based on 960gs – you’re still on your own to come up with look and feel. What I ended up with isn’t ideal, but it’s not bad either. Rather than designing the whole thing in advance, I just started filling out the grid as I went along – it evolved through chipping and plucking away over time. If the site does well, I may hire a real designer at some point.

Comments

Getting the Comments system working the way I wanted them to was fun too. Django’s native commenting framework works well out of the box, but when implemented per the docs, always presents a name and email field to the user. But I only want to take comments from authenticated users, making those fields redundant and annoying. Ultimately did find a way to get this working, and decided to contribute documentation to save future users the same hassles. The ticket was accepted, but the patch was never committed (got lost in the ramp-up to Django 1.2, I think). A common problem with open source projects — to make it worth the while for the public to submit patches, those patches need to be handled in a timely way.

Deployment, DVCS

Along the way, also learned pip and the virtualenvwrapper, using requirements.txt for tracking dependencies rather than doing it all manually. And switched from svn to git for version control. Lots of learning steps through all that, including a fun version incompatibility between dev and production that yielded awesomely dadaistic error messages like:

fatal: fetch-pack: unable to fork off sideband demultiplexer

But nothing I couldn’t work through. Overall, really happy to have made the changes. Deployment onto new development machines, and onto the server, is almost trivial now.

Birdhouse runs on cPanel and cPanel doesn’t yet support Django natively – admins have to jump through quite a few hoops to get Django sites running. I’ve filed an official feature request for cPanel to support Django like it does Ruby on Rails, and it’s getting a fair number of votes, but it needs more. If you’re a cPanel admin, please add your voice! For now, my Django-on-cPanel process looks something like this.

Avatars

Thumbnails for profile avatars are provided through two mechanisms: User’s choice of Gravatar or an uploaded image. If the user does not upload an avatar, and if their registered email address matches an account at gravatar.com, their Gravatar is automatically presented via the django-gravatar template tag. If they do upload an avatar, we verify and resize it with the sorl-thumbnails library… which unfortunately appears to have been recently abandoned. Still, sorl isn’t going to break anytime soon, and I’m not seeing anything out there that looks like a great replacement, so went with it. sorl-thumbnail depends on the ubiquitous Python Imaging Library. Which is fine, except that I got dragged through the trenches trying to get PiL working on Snow Leopard. Little obstacles every step of the way add up.

Bits and Pieces

The dynamic list reordering (see the bottom of your own list) came from some Ajaxy bits I assembled from various sources when building django-todo last year – that code ported over pretty clean.

The slippy slidey two-pane views that let you toggle/slide between incomplete and completed items came from a JQuery plugin by Gaya Design (original concept here).

All of the various RSS views were assembled pretty much according to the docs on Django’s syndication framework.

The “Featured Items” (best items rotating randomly in the banner) are selected (by me) with a custom admin action which was trivial to write. The resulting queryset is randomized with the little-known “?” syntax on order_by in a global context_processor:

def featured_items(request):
    return {'featured': Item.objects.filter(featured=True).order_by('?')[:4]}

I’ve heard that using “?” isn’t very performant with large querysets, but this query will never return a large recordset, so it should be fine.

Tagging of course comes via the awesome django-tagging package.

Overall, the project took six months of intermittent nights and weekends. And despite the many hassles, it was a fantastic learning experience, and a gas to build. Now that summer is pretty much here, it’s harder to stay indoors and hack. Time to get out and actually do some of the things on my bucketlist :)

For as long as I can remember, every discussion I’ve had with Libertarians ultimately goes to the same syllogism:

All government is a form of force.
All force is bad.
Therefore all government is bad.

I question line #2 of the syllogism, and therefore don’t agree with the conclusion. Why is all force bad? Don’t we need force to protect us? Most Libertarians agree that we need a police force to protect us from bad guys. But we need protection from more bad elements than just bank robbers.

Corporations, driven by the desire to maximize profit (i.e. greed) place financial goals above all others. Left unchecked, they deforest continents, exploit workers, spew pollution, sell unsafe goods, and exploit loopholes in financial markets. Lax regulation led to the recent banking crisis and the BP oil spill. Child labor in unregulated 3rd world countries continues to be a problem supported by our free market, which is far more concerned with cheap jeans and TVs than it is with the welfare of humans. A world where corporations are unregulated is not a world we would want to live in.

It would be awesome if there were an alternative to regulation (force). It would be wonderful if the free market could control the power of greed, but history shows us that it does not… mostly because consumers either don’t know or don’t care what they’re supporting with their purchases. Corporations will work tirelessly to cut corners and find loopholes in order to maximize profit at the expense of the interests of the general population. Not even Adam Smith believed that an unregulated free market could work to the good of the general population.

We need to know that our citizenry are educated; therefore we need force to make sure all of our children go to a satifactory school. I would prefer if force weren’t needed for that, but it is. To keep our population healthy (and from going broke), we need protection from the exploitative practices of health insurers, so we must apply force in two vectors – we must limit what insurers can charge, and we must force our population to have insurance of some kind. Insurance companies have shown us what they’re made of — their interests are personal greed, not public health.

Without government “force” we would have no National Parks — all of that land would have been razed and populated long ago. Without government “force,” we end up with broken systems spiralling out of control at the expense of the people. What alternative to government “force” do we have?

Of course government force can be a dangerous thing too – it needs checks and balances to keep it fair and safe. But our representative form of government, and our system of checks and balances, ensures that ultimately WE ARE the government. We can remove entities that don’t serve us well. We get to look inside of government and control its workings. We don’t have that option with the free market, since we can’t look inside of corporations, can’t take control of them. Healthy governance is open and transparent in ways that the “free” market will never be.

Libertarians, help me out here. When you trot out the old “But government is a form of force” argument, what exactly do you mean to convey? That it’s OK to let greed drive our world rather than common sense? Do you really believe that free market forces can protect us and our land/water from the power amassed by corporations? Do you really want to live in a world with no government?

Twice before I’ve written about the “celebrity deaths come in threes” superstition, in 2008 and 2009.

With the recent passing of Art Linkletter, Gary Coleman, and Dennis Hopper, this superstition has again resurfaced.

I feel my previous arguments have already been quite persuasive, but now let’s add a statistical debunking.

To analyze the superstition, we need to define it. That includes two tasks:

1. Who is and isn’t a celebrity
2. The timeframe for the deaths to occur

I extracted the data of all 1,422 celebrity deaths that have occurred between January 1, 1995 and May 31, 2010 from a site called stiffs.com, which is the location of a death pool contest. (The contest has entrants predict which celebrities will die in the upcoming year and assigns points for correct guesses. Last year’s winner took away over $3,000.)

This addresses the first question, who’s a celebrity. At stiffs.com they have a panel of judges determine whether or not a person who passes away is famous, based on simply whether or not five or more members of the panel have heard of the person. They then create a list of celebrities ahead of time, and then monitor that list to see who has passed away.

You may well disagree with the fame assessments of stiffs.com. Certainly the data included plenty of people I personally had never heard of. But it’s a list that exists independently of the superstition, and is pre-existing, so it doesn’t suffer from the selection bias that arises when you assess whether or not a person is famous only after they have died.

As for the timeline, I decided to analyze it with as much leeway as possible. One day between each death? Up to two days? Three? Five? Seven? Who knows. I analyzed with a number of tolerance days all the way up to 10.

Before we get into the numerical analysis, let’s visualize the data.

(Click to enlarge; depending on your browser, you may need to click again to view at 100% and then scroll from left to right)

As you scroll back and forth in the listing of deaths from 2004 through today, your mind can certainly pick out groups of three. But is it ALL groups of three? Is it even MOSTLY groups of three? Your eyes already tell you the truth, that of course it’s not.

The numbers back up that visual refutation.

There are quite a few ways to analyze the data, and I tried to be comprehensive. Here are the approaches I took:

1. Rolling timeline: This is probably the best method. (It was suggested by Patri.) When a death occurs, I start a counter. The counter lasts up to x days. (I analyzed with x from 1 to 10.) I keep track of how many celebrity deaths occur within that period. The counter resets after x days, and starts again whenever the next death occurs. With x at 7, for example, it’s basically an analysis of how many deaths a week, using rolling weeks.
2. Continuous grouping: When a death occurs, start a count. Look at the next death. Is it within x days? If so, increment the counter. If not, start over at 1. Again, I analyzed with x ranged from 1 to 10.
3. Separate tests: For each death, I calculate if it’s part of a group by looking at the date of death of the first member of the group, and see if it’s within x days of the last death. For the first death, it should be more than x days. For the subsequent deaths, it should be within x days. I then judge “pass” or “fail” for each death. I applied this analysis to groups of 1, groups of 2, groups of 3, groups of 4, groups of 5, and groups of 6. I also let it “roll” by varying where I started the counter. This analysis also looked at x ranging from 1 to 10.

So, what are the results?

For rolling timeline, we see the following results:

No matter how many days of leeway you give, groups of three never actually best explain the data. If you give a lot of leeway, such as 10 days, larger groups occur. If you give only a little leeway, most deaths happen alone or in pairs.

The best performance for groups of three is when you allow a leeway of 7 days, but even then the superstition fits for just 25% of the deaths. (Groups of two deaths are not far behind, at 23%.) A superstition that’s only right one time out of four — and does no better than several of variants of the superstition — well, that’s not a useful superstition.

So, for this methodology, groups of three never really succeeds. With 7 or more days of leeway, three is the average and median for groups of deaths, but only with a 23% success rate. No interpretation of this data with this method would lead one to agree that celebrity deaths come in threes.

For the second method, continuous grouping, the results are similar. You can get some pretty big groups with this method — using three tolerance days, the largest group turns out to be a group of 21 celebrity deaths. And with 10 tolerance days, the largest group is of 243 deaths!

However, no matter how many tolerance days you allow, groups of three never amount to more than 14.3% of all groups. So at best, groups of three explains about 1 death in 7 with this method.

The third method I used was separate tests. To be honest, this is a pretty stupid method, since if, say, two deaths in a group of three fit the pattern but one doesn’t, it still scores as two out of three when really the entire group should fail. And the groups are highly dependent on previous groups, so if there’s a missing celebrity or a person included who isn’t really a celebrity, it throws off the entire test.

Under this method, groups of three still score very poorly. No matter how many tolerance days you allow, from 1 to 10, it always turns out that some other grouping (such as groups of 2 or groups of 6) beat out groups of 3. Groups of 3 performed best with 10 days of tolerance, but with that high a tolerance, groups of 4, 5, or 6 fit even better. At most, 64% of celebrity deaths would pass a group of three test but at the same time 72% fit a group of 4.

The data, analysis, and chart are all available for you to examine (Google docs share, 6.6 megs, Excel format).

If you asked me, the best method is the rolling timeline method, and the most reasonable number of days of tolerance is three. Going with that, we find that, on average, the group size is 1.7.

But “Celebrity deaths come in 1.7s” doesn’t have a winning ring to it.

I have three things I want to say about the BP oil disaster.

First, a note on terminology. Let’s not call it a “spill.”

A “spill” is when my son knocks over his glass of milk. A “spill” is when you slip on some ice and graze your knee. A “spill” is what you do to the beans, as in someone accidentally letting slip the date of a surprise party.

BP’s CEO Tony Hayward is happy to call this a “spill,” because that word fits his position that this is only a “relatively tiny” event.

The truth is, of course, that it’s already been over a month, and this is now the world’s second worst oil disaster ever (probably) — and it’s not over.

BP’s original estimate of the flow rate was between 1,000 to 5,000 barrels per day. Current estimates suggest it was actually 95,000 barrels per day. So far, up to 491,000 tonnes of oil may have been released. In comparison, Exxon Valdez was 37,000 tonnes, and we’re still seeing the effects of that 20 years later. The current disaster is already more than 13 Valdezes.

So I reject “spill.” I use “disaster” and am considering “catastrophe.”

Second, there is a sliver of a silver lining. That formulation is this:

Three Mile Island is to nuclear power
as
Deepwater Horizon is to offshore drilling

Now for the record, I support nuclear power. I believe today’s nuclear power plants are safe and efficient. (France, the world’s leader, generates more than 75% of their power via nuclear plants.) Just 300 new nuclear power plants would end our dependence on fossil fuels for powering our cities — eliminating the need for coal mining, ending mining disasters. But because Three Mile Island happened, almost no politician will ever risk their career by advocating more nuclear power plants. That one accident, which killed no one, slowed our adoption of nuclear power dramatically.

In contrast, I oppose off-shore drilling, mostly due to spills and environmental factors. Because of Deepwater Horizon and the public outcry, it’s likely now that moratoriums and state-by-state bans will be enacted that last many decades. I’m glad of that, at least.

Finally, let’s do a quick comparison. Oil company profits are obscene. BP earned $6.1 billion in profit for Q1, which ended 20 days before the disaster began. As of May 24, they estimated they had spent $760 million on the recovery. However, it appears that about a third of that is the lost profit of $6 million per day because Deepwater Horizon isn’t operating. Separately, they also pledged $500 million for research into the environmental impact of the disaster.

So they’ve managed to find it in their hearts to spend a mere 17.3% of their Q1 profit on the disaster.

That’s insulting.

Miles and I have a perfect track record so far at Maker Faire, attending every year since its inception in 2006. This year was our fifth time out, though things took a slightly different turn this year. Rather than it being father/son bonding time, my extended family trekked out to the Bay Area for the experience. Corralling nine people meant a bit less explore time, so we saw less of the cornucopia, but what we did see was amazing, as always.

Highlights: RC-controlled neon land sharks chasing kids around in the dark. Tall bikes everywhere, including one with “roots” that could be deployed at the flip of a lever so the rider could stop at lights without toppling over. A grand steampunk calliope with half-sawn tubas, whoopee whistles, cuckoos, and tubes galore honking out a rendition of Yellow Submarine. The giant Tesla coils throwing lightning, but this time generating music at the same time (remember Hot Buttered’s “Popcorn?” Imagine that set to explosive blue electricity). A guy playing drums, didgeridoo and bass at the same time. 6-ft.-wide plates of paella. The life-size mousetrap, as always.

Unfortunately, the Wooden Bikes crowd was nowhere to be seen, and the Cyclecide crew’s human-powered carnival rides were shut down for a break when we arrived. Still, Maker Faire remains “Burning Man for families” – an explosion of creativity and weld joints like no other. Won’t be the last.

Took fewer photos than usual, but managed to put together an OK Flickr set.

Rain + bushes => snails

Quick, head to Google.com. Sure sure, there’s that playable Pacman logo there today, but while I was there for that, I noticed something interesting, similar to what Slacy posted about bit.ly recently.

Type a letter in the Google search box. Immediately after just one letter, the auto-search populates, and you can see the most popular search term for that letter. (It’s not case sensitive.)

Here’s an example with the letter a:

It’s important to note that the results appear to be regionally specific. Here in the Bay Area, when I type “b,” I see “bart” (for Bay Area Rapid Transit) third. My brother, in Canada, sees “bmo” (Bank of Montreal) third at google.ca, or “bed bath and beyond” third at google.com (whereas for me “bed bath and beyond” is listed sixth).

Even the first place is regional, since x for me is xkcd, but for my brother it’s xm radio.

Nonetheless, owning the first result is definitely an indication of local mindshare. I find the results very interesting and in some cases very surprising.

Now, before you look at the list below (after the break), you can play the Google Alphabet Guessing Game! Just choose a letter and predict what will appear on top. Did you guess correctly?

Numbers and a handful of punctuation characters also work.

I didn’t try any extended ASCII or other unusual characters, but these last three were the only non-alphanumeric characters that had auto-search results.

Yesterday, Amy posted this on Facebook:

Amy Dutronc wishes that iPlayer worked properly. It’s like listening to the radio and watching a really boring slideshow.

It soon turned out that lots of other people were having the same problem. They all have good Internet connections, so that wasn’t the issue- actually, even when bandwidth is low, iPlayer has some amazing built-in logic for detecting this and respondng accordingly. The issue is that some of the high-quality video now available on iPlayer requires lot of decoding power, and some computers – especially older ones and Apple Macs – aren’t up to the job. (NB. I believe there are improvements in the pipeline which will help iPlayer to improve playback even on slow machines – but if you’re still unable to get decent quality playback, the tips below may help).

The first thing to check is that you have the most up-to-date version of the Flash Player plugin. Adobe have done a lot to improve video performance (and performance in general) in recent releases. If you’re feeling particularly brave, you can install the beta version of Flash Player 10.1 which has even more performance improvements. This will especially benefit Mac users, as the new “Gala” preview release is the first one featuring hardware video decoding for Macs. NB if you do install the Gala preview, you will sometimes see a white square in the corner of your video – so you may want to wait instead for the public release.

If, despite having the latest Flash Player, video still runs jerkily, here are some tips. Try them in the order shown below until you reach a level of quality which your computer can play back without stuttering.

• Don’t play the HD version of programmes. Obviously, HD is amazing; if your machine will play it then you should definitely choose the HD option. But if your machine is a bit old, or does not have a good video card, then HD can slow it down to a crawl. On each HD programme page is a link underneath the video saying “Also in normal quality”. Click that link for a version less likely to hammer your machine.
• Play the smaller version of the video. On “normal” programme pages, the video has an icon in the top right-hand corner showing two arrows (Update: on the new beta version of iPlayer, the size-toggle icon has moved. It is at the bottom of the media player, in between the volume and fullscreen buttons.). If you click on this, it will toggle between a big and a small version of the video. If you have problems playing the big version, click on the arrow to shrink the window down. The two actually use different video files (encoded at 1500kbps and 800kbps) – you can tell which version of the video is playing by right-clicking in the video window: a menu will pop up, and the second line will say something like “1500kbps | h264 | AK 3.5 (1) | 832×468“. The first part of that line tells you the bitrate.
• Play the low-bandwidth version. If your machine is so clunky that it struggles even with the 800kbps video, then there is one more option: the low bandwidth version. Normally you would only see this version if your Internet connection is very poor – but you can force iPlayer to play it by clicking on the “Use lower bandwidth version” hidden near the bottom of the page. Once you’ve done this, right-clicking on the video will tell you that you’re looking at a 480kbps version. If you want to swap back up to the higher-quality version, the link at the bottom of the page will now read “Use normal version” – just click it.

Hopefully by following one or more of these suggestions, you’ll be able to find the best performance level for your computer.

Disclaimer: this is not an official post from the BBC: although I worked on iPlayer and am familiar with most of the technologies used in the Embedded Media Player, I am no longer affiliated with the BBC in any way. Also, iPlayer technology can and does change rapidly: I cannot guarantee that all of the above information will still apply.

• Pollywogs Redux
  → scot hacker's foobar blog | 19 May 2010 | 7:12pm GMT
  

  Back in 2006, I posted a digitized copy of a 1950s Coast Guard hazing ritual on YouTube. In July 2008, the video suddenly became unavailable, with no reason given as to why, other than “Violation of terms of service.” I suspected that the video may have angered veterans who felt that the video depicted the military in an unflattering light, and that they had flagged it enough times that it was removed. I blogged about the takedown here.

  A few nights ago, the Knight Digital Media Center (where I work) had as a guest speaker YouTube’s news manager Olivia Ma, who delivered a fantastic presentation. I took the opportunity to talk to her and try to find out what was behind the takedown, and whether anything could be done. In my view, the video was far more tame than tons of stuff on YouTube, and had historical/documentary relevance as well.

  Ma took up the issue with her team and today let me know that the video had been reinstated, noting that it “qualified as EDSA (educational, documentary, scientific or artistic).”

  While the version I put up on Vimeo in the interim is of higher quality, I’m happy to again be able to embed the YouTube version:

  I’m now trying to learn what I can about any official appeals process for this kind of situation.

• Allowing Secure User Input with Django
  → scot hacker's foobar blog | 12 May 2010 | 7:27pm GMT
  

  Building a site that needs to accept formatted user input? There’s no way you’re going to let random users input any old HTML – you’d open the door to all kinds of cross-site-scripting attacks and other nastiness. Nor can you just filter out the tags you consider dangerous – that road is fraught with peril. The only solution is to white-list a small subset of tags and unceremoniously drop the rest.

  There are two layers to the problem – how to support formatted text on the front-end, and how to process submitted text on the back-end.

  For the front-end, some developers are drawn to the Markdown syntax – a supposedly user-friendly wiki-like syntax that can be re-rendered as safe HTML. But while Markdown may look friendly to developers, it doesn’t to normal users – trust me on this. Even for tech-savvy users, Markdown requires that you place syntax instructions on your site (inelegant). A better solution is to use a rich text editor for the web, like TinyMCE or WYMEditor.

  

  Ever notice that you often see rich text editors in content management systems run by trusted users, but seldom on public-facing web pages? That’s because it’s tricky to do securely, and without giving users enough rope to hang themselves formatting-wise.

  With a bit of configuration though, you can deploy public-facing rich textareas securely, allowing only the input of tags you specify. But you can’t stop there – all the user has to do is disable Javascript in the browser to bypass your rich text editor. You must process submitted text on the back-end with the same set of rules in your view logic.

  Configuring TinyMCE

  Let’s say you’ve already got TinyMCE installed in your Django project, and you want users to be able to use the following tags – nothing more:

  p i strong b u a h1 h2 h3 blockquote br ul ol li

  django-tinymce defaults to the “simple” theme, which allows a few of these, but not all of them. The “simple” theme cannot be modified – it is what it is – so you’ll need to start by switching to the “advanced” theme. django-tinymce accepts arguments passed in from your project’s settings file, so add something like:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

  TINYMCE_DEFAULT_CONFIG={ 'theme': "advanced", 'remove_linebreaks': False, 'convert_urls': False, 'width':'100%', 'height':'300px', 'paste_auto_cleanup_on_paste' : True, 'theme_advanced_buttons1' : "formatselect,separator, bold,italic,hr,separator, link,unlink,separator,bullist, numlist,separator,undo,redo,", 'theme_advanced_buttons2' : "", 'theme_advanced_buttons3' : "" , 'theme_advanced_blockformats' : "p,h1,h2,h3,blockquote", 'theme_advanced_toolbar_location' : "top", 'content_css' : "/media/css/tiny_editor.css" }

  Most of this is self-explanatory, but a few notes:

  theme_advanced_buttons1: By default, the the advanced theme will have three rows of buttons. We only want one. We put all the buttons and options we want to appear on this one line. Notice that the buttons2 and buttons3 lines are empty – required if you just want a one-row toolbar.

  theme_advanced_blockformats: This is the list of block-level containers that will appear on the formatting picklist. I removed several of the containers that were there by default.

  convert_urls: By default, when a user pastes in a URL, it will be converted into a link. This won’t work for our purposes (see oembed, below). Fortunately, this behavior can be disabled.

  paste_auto_cleanup_on_paste: If users paste out of Word or from a rich web page, all of the formatting crap will be stripped out automatically, so only your site’s styles are in play.

  That takes care of the front-end nicely. Using just the wysiwyg, users can’t inject anything dangerous into your site. But it’s far from secure – anyone who turns off Javascript in the browser will still find a plain old textarea, happy to accept any random crap code they drop in.

  Whitelisting tags on submit

  Yes, there are Django template filters that can strip out HTML or allow only certain tags to be displayed. But that’s not good enough. We want to prevent bad stuff from ever getting into the database to begin with, so tags and filters (which only work with output, not input) aren’t the answer. There are a few functions suitable for the job on djangosnippets.org, but the best solution I found was this function on StackOverflow. The nice thing about this version is that it lets you also specify valid attributes (so you can still use onclick, e.g.), and it prevents things like “javascript” from appearing in an href (so naughty code can’t be inlined).

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

  import re from urlparse import urljoin from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup, Comment   def sanitizeHtml(value, base_url=None): rjs = r'[\s]*(&#x.{1,7})?'.join(list('javascript:')) rvb = r'[\s]*(&#x.{1,7})?'.join(list('vbscript:')) re_scripts = re.compile('(%s)|(%s)' % (rjs, rvb), re.IGNORECASE) validTags = 'p i strong b u a h1 h2 h3 blockquote br ul ol li'.split() validAttrs = 'href src width height'.split() urlAttrs = 'href src'.split() # Attributes which should have a URL soup = BeautifulSoup(value) for comment in soup.findAll(text=lambda text: isinstance(text, Comment)): # Get rid of comments comment.extract() for tag in soup.findAll(True): if tag.name not in validTags: tag.hidden = True attrs = tag.attrs tag.attrs = [] for attr, val in attrs: if attr in validAttrs: val = re_scripts.sub('', val) # Remove scripts (vbs & js) if attr in urlAttrs: val = urljoin(base_url, val) # Calculate the absolute url tag.attrs.append((attr, val))   return soup.renderContents().decode('utf8')

  Obviously, your whitelist of allowable tags is stored in validTags.

  Save the code above to an importable function somewhere in your project — I placed it in a utils.py. You’ll need to make sure you’ve got the amazing BeautifulSoup parser installed in your path as well: pip install BeautifulSoup. Then, in the view function that handles the form submission:

  1 2 3

  from appname.utils import sanitizeHtml # .... item.notes = sanitizeHtml(request.POST['notes'])

  That’s it! Now test your form with Javascript disabled in the browser – no matter how hard you try, no tags beyond the ones you specified will make it into the database.

  What about the embed tag?

  So much great cross-pollination of content between sites is enabled by the embed and object tags – remote video on YouTube and Vimeo, Google Maps and mashups, widgets and feeds from dozens of providers… but if you allow “embed” or “object” on a public-facing form, you’re opening yourself up for a world of hurt.

  An excellent alternative is to take advantage of the oembed standard. Oembed is a straightforward API agreed upon by dozens of content distributors. The idea is simple – rather than allowing “embed” code, allow the user to simply paste in the URL of the page on which the content appears. Your site can parse submitted text for these URLs, then reach out and grab the correct embeddables from the remote host. This prevents users from messing with embed sizes, fat-fingering blocks of intimidating code, or from embedding content from unapproved sites. If you’re working with Django, django-oembed provides a complete toolkit.

  But django-oembed is a bit finicky – it wants to see plain old URLs, not URLs wrapped in other tags. And that’s why we disabled convert_urls in the TinyMCE config above.

• 14 Improvements in Designing Websites for Microsoft SharePoint 2010
  → Extra! Extra! | 12 May 2010 | 4:19pm GMT
  

  Periodically we find that some designers find Sharepoint 2007 to be a limiting platform.  This often stems from the amount of time it takes to build out free-formed design elements and/or integrating media components such as Flash.  To set the record straight, it is not that Sharepoint can’t do free-formed, table-less designs – it’s that most Sharepoint engineers have been trained to do rectilinear pages and it therefore takes more time to do free formed designs. 

  The newly released Sharepoint 2010 makes good strides to eliminate some of the hurtles in designing unique public facing websites.  As Elisabeth Olson described at Mix10, SharePoint 2010 allows engineers to implement “pixel perfect” designs.  SharePoint 2010 gives designers more freedom with enhancements in the following areas:

  1. Complete layout management with CSS, XHTML, and Div’s – Tabless layouts! - in other words you don’t have to fight SharePoint to implement non-rectangular designs.  Some Webparts do still require rectangluar Tables, but the designers can create nice liquid graphics.  There are also new capabilities in terms of placing Widgets outside of rectangular Zones.
  2. Enhanced reusable controls with elements such as ribbons, dialogs, and status bars.
  3. New functions for Blogs and Wikis allow engineers to implement this functionality within SharePoint 2010 as opposed to 2007 which favored integration with outside systems.
  4. Better browser support for IE 7, IE 8, Firefox, Safari, and some mobile browsers.
  5. Less effort is required to create unique Theme’s for simple designs.
  6. Enhanced development features in SharePoint Designer enable engineers to make code updates and preview layout changes simultaneously significantly decreasing the amount of time it takes to implement unique designs. 
  7. Better functions for pre-rending elements of a page for faster loading design elements. 
  8. Completely new Theme functions for managing design elements (i.e. fonts), custom CSS can be used for generating themes. 
  9. My favorite – improved integration with JavaScript.  A completely new set of JavaScript libraries that grab dynamic data from SharePoint (i.e. ActiveX, JQuery) allows designers to use cool JavaScript functions within a site. Client OM allows engineers to easily get data out of SharePoint in JavaScript without web services.  jQuery now comes as a built-in JavaScript library.  In fact, SharePoint 2010 uses jQuery all over the new interface
  10. The Silverlight Web Part is completely updated allowing multiple dynamic data feeds for rich media designs
  11. Designers and Web Developers now have at their disposal an arsenal of methods to access SharePoint data and present it in the most creative ways such as using the new Client Object Model right within a Silverlight animation.
  12. External Content Types allow the user experience team to more easily include dynamic data outside of SharePoint (i.e. product pricing information). 
  13. With Business Connectivity Services (BCS) an engineer can easily mashup data from existing backend systems and easily display, sort, filter and report on dynamic date right from SharePoint 2010 pages.
  14. SharePoint 2010 now has more social features such as content tagging and the ability for users to “Like” posts by their peers and colleagues on various content

  There are some features that have not changed considerably.  The templates still rely on .Net 2.0 Master Templates, XSLT is still the favored platform for managing presentation, and only a few changes in menu controls.  Web Part Zones are still rectangular although this is not a significant limitation anymore.  SharePoint engineers still speak a unique language when discussing elements such as templates and widgets. 

  Both the designers and the egnineers are exicted about these features and we are looking forward to seeing new sites taking SharePoint 2010 in new directions. Some of our favorite SharePoint site designs are below:

  • AMD Gaming
  • Ferrari
  • Carlsberg (A good site and a good beer)
  • Hawaiin Airlines
  • EDP
  • Cimail Solutions
  • New Holland Agriculture
  • Entre Voisons 

  *Written by Mark Ryan and Oscar Medina

  
• Second Annual “Predict the Summer Box Office Champ” Contest
  → Zeigen | 24 Apr 2010 | 1:04am GMT
  

  Last year, I ran a contest to predict which summer movie would perform the best. With summer fast approaching, now it’s contest time again!

  

  The Prize: A pair of AMC movie tickets.

  How To Enter: Leave a comment here or on FriendFeed with your prediction for these four questions.

  1. Which of the below 33 films will have the biggest U.S. box office opening weekend as determined by The Numbers?
  2. Which of the below 33 films will have the biggest worldwide box office take as of Labor Day, as determined by The Numbers? (Note that movies released later in the summer will be at a disadvantage.)
  3. Which of the below 33 films will have the highest Rotten Tomatoes score?
  4. Tiebreaker: How much money will the correct answer to question 1 take in on its opening weekend in the U.S.?

  Deadline to Enter: Monday, May 3, midnight Pacific.

  The List of Movies

  Here’s the list you can pick from, ordered by date of release:

  1. Iron Man 2 (Robert Downey Jr., dir Jon Favreau) — May 7
  2. Babies — May 7
  3. Robin Hood (Russell Crowe, dir Ridley Scott) — May 14
  4. Shrek Forever After (Mike Meyers) — May 21
  5. MacGruber (Will Forte, Val Kilmer) — May 21
  6. Sex and the City 2 (Sarah Jessica Parker) — May 27
  7. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (Jake Gyllenhaal) — May 28
  8. Killers (Ashton Kutcher, Katherine Heigl) — June 4
  9. Marmaduke (Owen Wilson) — June 4
  10. Splice (Adrien Brody) — June 4
  11. The A-Team (Liam Neeson) — June 11
  12. The Karate Kid (Jackie Chan) — June 11
  13. Toy Story 3 (Tom Hanks, Tim Allen) — June 18
  14. Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin, Megan Fox, John Malkovich) — June 18
  15. Grown Ups (Adam Sandler) — June 25
  16. Knight and Day (Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz) — June 25
  17. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (Kristen Stewart) — July 2
  18. The Last Airbender (dir M. Night Shymalan) — July 2
  19. Despicable Me (Steve Carell) — July 9
  20. Predators (Predator sequel: Adrien Brody, Laurence Fishburne) — July 9
  21. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Disney: Nicolas Cage) — July 16
  22. Inception (Leonardo DiCaprio, dir Christopher Nolan) — July 16
  23. Salt (Angelina Jolie) — July 23
  24. The Adjustment Bureau (Matt Damon) — July 30
  25. The Other Guys (Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg) — August 6
  26. Eat Pray Love (Julia Roberts) — August 13
  27. The Expendables (Sylvester Stallone, Jet Li) — August 13
  28. Takers (Matt Dillon) — August 20
  29. Nanny McPhee Returns (Emma Thompson) — August 20
  30. The Switch (Jennifer Aniston, Jason Bateman) — August 20
  31. Piranha 3-D (Elisabeth Shue, Richard Dreyfuss) — August 27
  32. The American (George Clooney) — September 1
  33. Machete (Danny Trejo, Robert De Niro, dir Robert Rodriguez) — September 3

  It’s a much more crowded field this year than last year, packed with the predictable assortment of sequels and remakes. Some curiosities: Two SF films with Adrien Brody within a few weeks of each other? A-Team vs. Karate Kid on the same weekend? Such a crowded field means there are probably going to be a lot more money-losers this year.

  Just as before, I’m leaving off a lot of films that are coming out this summer. And some of those not on the list will probably do better than some of the 33 I’ve listed above. But to keep things simple, let’s just consider these 33.

  Gory Details: I will pull all data from the appropriate web sites on Labor Day, 2010. Each entrant will score one point for each correct answer to the first three questions, with a maximum of three points possible. Highest point total wins. In the event of a tie for highest point total, I will use the answer to question 4 as a tiebreaker. Closest to correct wins.

  Thanks for entering!

• Music Software Wishlist
  → The Fever Of Phineas | 21 Apr 2010 | 11:37pm GMT
  

  I like to listen to internet music services (I hate calling it “radio”) like last.fm and Pandora. I also have a substantial private music collection, which is somewhat well organized but could always be better tagged. I get a little frustrated with the either/or nature of music listening options I have. I can either listen to the internet streams or my own collection. But to get a good playlist from my own collection I have to do a certain amount of work to ensure that the files are tagged properly and think up good playlists. To be honest, I don’t even know all of the items in my collection well enough to know whether I’d like to listen to them. I wouldn’t mind a little help from the internet music services.

  Music discovery is one of the most valued benefits internet music services offer. I would like to apply “discovery” algorithms to my own collection.

  Today most music player software can “scrobble” to last.fm, informing last.fm of your tastes and play history. When you listen to last.fm that data is then used to drive the streaming playlist decisions and recommendations. But it would be nice to go the other way — have last.fm tell your player software to create a playlist based on last.fm’s data about you, based on last.fm’s own algorithms. Or let Pandora take over your own collection and stream that back to you based on its logic.

  It would also be cool to play a stream based on your collection plus the internet stream, at a ratio you can adjust (80% my collection, 20% suggested content from Pandora, e.g.). Sort of like a feed aggregator does — allow you to pull a stream of data from multiple sources including your own collection and merge them according to your own preferences.

  This should be achieved not by a proprietary music service, but an open standard that services and player software can follow to allow users to put it together themselves, as an audio stream mashup.

  I also wish playlists were easier to share. Right now they are based on file system specific. Your “Stairway to Heaven” is not located or named in the same way on your system as mine, so your playlist won’t work for me. Playlists should be metadata-driven, so we can share them. Of course then metadata has to be of high quality and complete, but I think that sort of thing is continually improving. By “share playlist” I mean I give you a file that will play these same songs from your collection. That’s not the same thing that is meant by iTunes iMix playlists, or other online playlist sharing services I’ve seen.

  Does anyone else wish for this sort of “discovery” applied to personal collections, or is this just a dumb problem to have?

• Home for a sweet and smart cat needed
  → Zeigen | 14 Apr 2010 | 7:32am GMT
  

  Two Fridays ago I took Sammy in for an appointment with an allergist. His eczema was really bad and he was waking up frequently with itch attacks. We knew about his nut, peanut and salmon allergies (which I share), but wanted to find out what else was causing him trouble. He was very brave during the scratch test, which I’m sure was uncomfortable for him.

  The results surprised me: Strong reactions to wheat, rice, corn, sesame, shrimp, cats, grass, and one of the tree groups.

  On the doctor’s advice, we started an elimination diet, and for 11 days Sammy focused on avoiding the foods on the list, which meant he ate a lot of meat and potatoes and vegetables but not a lot of starch. (Breakfast was the hardest.)

  Thing was, he was still breaking out. Kimi took him in today for a follow-up test, and the allergist suggested his reaction to these foods was mild. She suggested the most likely cause for his eczema flare-ups and midnight itch attacks was the cat.

  Stormy is 9 years old and a beloved part of the family. But if it’s her or Sammy, there’s no choice. She has to go.

  She’s soft, clean, sweet and patient, affectionate but independent, and (in my opinion) very beautiful. She loves being an indoor-outdoor cat but could probably adjust to one or the other. She used to have a brother, Mourny, who she would fight with a bit, so she’s probably happiest as a single cat. She’s also a bit of a genius: When she wants to come in, she rings the doorbell. (Video to follow.)

  It breaks my heart to kick her out, but maybe we can find a home for her nearby. Anyone want a doorbell-ringing cat?

  

  

• Researching traffic behaviors on 21 sites and their endeavors into social media.
  → Extra! Extra! | 12 Apr 2010 | 9:06pm GMT
  

  There is a lot of talk about Social Media and the new opportunities that it brings to organizations.  Large untapped communities, unprecedented demographic data that can be used for better targeting,  loyal communities spending more time online than any other marketing channel in history, and the list goes on and on.    Unless you’re a game developer or a trendy charity, it can be extremely difficult to harness the  power of these communities.  Honest relevant content becomes significantly more critical and it needs to be updated as often as the community wants it. 

  I was at eMetrics Toronto last week and I had the opportunity to talk with web analysts about their Social Media campaigns.  As an analyst passionate about conversion opportunities, it only makes sense that I look at Social Media as an opportunity to get more leads, revenues, customers, cross-sell opportunities, etc.  I heard about a lot of innovative campaigns and organizations that were very successful creating large communities on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  But little talk centered on ROI.  I believe that for most sites to achieve ROI they must attract social traffic from a social media site (i.e. MySpace) to their own site for conversion.  For example, if I am selling trendy shoelaces, I would start/moderate a community around tennis shoes as well as target advertise on other shoe communities such as facebook.com/adidas/or myspace.com/nike/.  But ultimately, my ROI comes when the social community navigates to my ecommerce site and buys shoe laces. 

  This got me curious about some of the behavioral data around traffic from social networking sites.  I started to study traffic on 21 different sites.   I created a focus group of 21 sites across a wide variety of industries comprising everything from brokerages to tattoo parlors to national banks to local yoga studios to international network equipment manufacturers, encompassing both B2B and B2C sites, Fortune 500 sites as well as small organizations. I looked at the traffic sources for these sites and segmented traffic from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter (and various tweets), Delicious, LinkedIn, and Yelp.  I then compared basic data points such as repeat traffic, time on site, and page views per session to see if there are trends in the general quality of social media traffic. 

      

  Below are some general trends that I found:

  1. Traffic from Social Media sites typically accounts for less than 1% of all site traffic.  I found this in both my research group as well as casual conversations with many web analysts at eMetrics.

  2. While the average page views per session was 12.8, Social traffic only averaged 3.8 page views per session.  Social traffic viewed 70% less pages in a visit than average visitors. 

  3. Social traffic spent 17.2% less time on site than average visitors.

  4. The bounce rate of Social traffic was 9.9% higher than average visitors.

  5. Visitors from Social sites were 7.7% less likely to return. 

  Considering the amount of time it takes to maintain a social media campaign, these numbers looked a little grim. But remember, I picked these sites at random. 

  As I looked through the 304 traffic sources on 21 sites accounting for approximately 27 million visits I found some successful components.  Check out site #3

  Site	Referrer	PPV	TOS	Bounce Rate	Returns
  Site #3	ALL TRAFFIC	2.19	69.00	58.14%	12.62%
  Site #3	ALL SOCIAL	2.56	150.04	65.15%	19.14%

  The visitors from social media sites to Site #3 are viewing more pages per session, staying twice as long as other traffic and are approximately 50% more likely to return.  I was impressed and curious; what was Site #3 doing differently?  This B2B company with a small B2C offering wasn’t selling products that are popular in social communities such as games, retail items, or charitable contributions.  Looking at the Social Campaigns for Site #3, it was obvious why they have such great Social Traffic – they are taking Social Networking seriously.  While Extractable comes across many companies that have some of the lower members of the marketing teams maintaining the Social Communities, Site #3 had LinkedIn contributions from the CEO an average of 4 times per month.  The company blog has 7 different contributors on a regular basis.  Their Facebook community gets to see relevant industry research several times a week.  Site #3 is clearly making Social Media a priority and is seeing the benefits of it.  Site #3 is not a large organization with a lot of resources to throw around; they are a small company with good focus.

  For each of the sites researched, conversion came in different formats.  Some companies are selling products on their own site (like Site #3), some were selling products on distributor sites, some were doing lead generation, and so on.  Therefore it was difficult to produce a straight comparison of ROI between the sites.  But it is obvious from the data above that conversion rates on traffic from Social Sites was either lower than average or non-existent.  Determining the costs of Social Campaigns is challenging as the majority of resources are usually internal content writers.  Generating an ROI analysis for Social Marketing is as easy SEO ROI reports.  The analytics applications allow analysts to generate conversion reports isolated to traffic that originated from Social Media sites.  From there, an organization needs to calculate the amount of time and people spending time on content for Social campaigns.  The following is an example from one of the sites. 

  Traffic Source	Visits	Visitors	Leads Generated	Conv Rate	Ave Lead Value	Total Value
  Search	709,121	347,469	9,382	2.7%	$49	$459,701.87
  Referral	503,476	176,217	5,991	3.4%	$49	$293,576.80
  Social	24,819	19,111	363	1.9%	$49	$17,792.16
  eMail	49,638	36,732	514	1.4%	$49	$25,198.47

  NOTE: As a precursor to this blog post, I asked a group of Web Analysts on LinkedIn if they saw traffic from Social Networking sites converting at different ratios and I got some interesting responses:  www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers

  
• Happy birthday, TiVo! The DVR turns 11 today
  → Zeigen | 1 Apr 2010 | 12:36am GMT
  

  On March 31, 1999, the world’s first DVRs shipped from San Jose, CA. We had a party today at TiVo HQ to celebrate.

  

  

  

  

• Kate Bush’s 1984 “Experiment IV” video — they don’t make ‘em like that anymore
  → Zeigen | 27 Mar 2010 | 5:53pm GMT
  

  In 1986, Kate Bush’s record label pushed her to write a new song for her first best-of album, The Whole Story. Under what she called her tightest deadline ever, she ended up writing a song and directing a video that was a stylistic bridge between her previous album and next album.

  This is the video she made. (And this best copy I found on YouTube; very grainy, sorry.)

  Did you spot Hugh Laurie and Dawn French?

  Unbelievably by today’s standards, this video was considered too “adult” to be shown on British television when it was made.

• Using Facebook Insights and MySpace Dashboards to monitor community web analytics
  → Extra! Extra! | 21 Jan 2010 | 8:49pm GMT
  

  One of the strongest Project Managers that I have ever worked with, Nick Giordano, is also the lead guitarist for the band Monsters are not Myths.   Yesterday, Nick walked me through some of the analytics that he monitors on his band’s fans base (groupie analytics?) on both Facebook and MySpace. 

  Facebook Insights has come a long way in the last 12 months. After creating a page and gaining fans, administrators can see a large variety of reports. Most of the reports focus on two main areas (1) How successful a page is at creating interaction within a community and (2) How successful Facebook advertisements are at getting Facebook users to act (convert).  The most impressive piece of data that you can find is your Post Quality.  This variable measures engagement by tracking each of your posts (text, video, photos, etc) and how many of your fans comment, like, or write on your wall.  While the report does not necessarily tell you which demographics in your fan base react more than others, it gives you an excellent idea of how strong your content is.  This would be an awesome feature for any site.  While Facebook puts a little too much emphasis on their simple demographics data (literally just age and gender), the export feature and the graphs on data such as media consumption give administrators an excellent understanding of their ability to create an interactive community.  Facebook Insights would be more useful if they offered the ability to integrate with offsite analytics applications such as SiteCatalyst, Webtrends, or Google Analytics to show downstream analytics – one can only dream.  With some work, an analyst could start to track trends between the applications – for instance, when Facebook Post Quality goes up, Facebook traffic to our site (and conversion) increases.

  While the MySpace Dashboards are not as user friendly, the data offered is still very impressive.  The dashboards provide similar demographics to Facebook with age, gender, and location being the primary tracking variables.  MySpace gives a little more insight into interactions by showing posts, comments, views, and kudos over days, weeks, and totals (Facebook focuses on the last 7 days).  What impresses me the most about the MySpace dashboards is their unique variables suited for the goals of the administrator.  For example, Nick’s band uses the MySpace music player to let fans play the band’s songs and their dashboard shows how popular different songs are on MySpace.  It measures the song popularity by plays, dedications, iLikes and trending data.  For Monsters are not Myths, “Old Soul”  tops their MySpace charts. 

  Most importantly, Nick can log into the bands Google Analytics account and see how traffic from Facebook and MySpace to their band’s main webpage (http://www.monstersarenotmyths.com/) interacts with the site.  For instance, he can see if visitors to the site that came from MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter were more likely to be repeat visitors, viewed more content, and/or signed up for newsletters and events.  To isolate traffic from URLs posted on a fan page versus random users posting URL’s on a social networking site, be sure to append tracking variables to the URLs you post.  For instance, if Nick was to post his tour dates the URL might look like this - http://www.monstersarenotmyths.com/v2/music_shows.html?source=facebook.  If you are using a URL shortener such as ow.ly, tr.im, or bit.ly, be sure to append the URL variables before you shorten them. 

  http://www.Facebook.com/pages/Monsters-are-not-Myths/6306011877

  http://www.myspace.com/monstersarenotmyths

  
• The Positive Side of Negativity
  → Extra! Extra! | 19 Jan 2010 | 6:30pm GMT
  

  I am feeling a little philosophical this morning and thinking about some of the behaviors of web analysts. 

  It’s funny how most web analysts present the positive side of analytics.  They may produce reports which illustrate that 9.8% of the visitors converted to quality leads, that 749 users signed up for the newsletter, and that 56% of the customers came back for a second purchase.  The traffic reports often start with the keyphrases that get the best click-through-ratios and the best conversion rates.  Web analysts seem to be always looking on the bright side of the data.   The analysts are also often complaining that their web teams are not acting on the data they report.

  I wonder if the analysts focused their reports on the 90.2%  of the visitors who didn’t convert, the 6,567 users who didn’t sign up for the newsletter, and the 44% of the visitors who never came back – would the web teams be more likely to act on the data? It might help site owners to make more objective decisions if all reporting tools showed both sides of the story.  For instance, traffic reports might show the 98 visitors that came from organic search results as well as the 7,528 visitors that searched for our phrases but decided not to click on our link.

  
• Web Analytics for Twitter
  → Extra! Extra! | 6 Jan 2010 | 11:41pm GMT
  

  While the buzz around micro-blogging is all about what is new and cool, marketing groups should realize that a successful Twitter imitative takes a significant amount of work and though you can’t thoroughly track your Twitter activities with your traditional web analytics suite, you should be tracking trends in your Twitter community. Many tweeters out there are simply posting 140 characters about the main course of each meal and/or retweeting every article they see online (or on other tweets).   Extraneous banter may create an active feed but it will not create a loyal fan base or ROI.  

  A successful Twitter community takes continuous thought about what your followers want to read.  If your content is good, the analytics should prove it.  The following is a list of some variable that you can track on your Twitter initiative:

  1. Traffic to your site: Track the amount of traffic to your site from Twitter (i.e. ow.ly,is.gd,bit.ly) as well as from Twitter aggregators (i.e. LinkedIn, Facebook).  Be sure that when you post articles to Twitter you’re embedding URL parameters to help track how much traffic is coming directly from Twitter.  This report will help you determine ROI for your Twitter initiative.  Typically the best ROI for a Twitter campaign is cost effective traffic that converts. 
  2. Traffic from your site: Track how much traffic you are sending to Twitter and how much of it is coming back. This is often surprising to site owners how much a link to Twitter can influence abandonment.
  3. Followers / New Sign Ups: Keep a count of how many new followers you tweets are getting on a daily or weekly basis.  Remember that followers are not always reading your tweets!  A follower is not necessarily an impression.  One common mistake is to assume that your followers are reading your every word – remember that approximately 60% of Twitters don’t come back to the site after their first month.
  4. Tweets: In order to make sure your content is fresh, record the number of tweets you produce daily/weekly.  This may come in handy if you need to correlate it with the growth of your community.  If you content is good, you may find that your community grows proportionately with your tweets. 
  5. Replys, Retweets, Lists:  How many replys or retweets are your post getting?  This is best indicator that your posts are getting read and appreciated.  Dive deeper and determine if it is a small group of followers that are retweeting often or a broad group that is retweeting when they see fit.
  6. Competitors: Many of the Twitter tracking tools out there allow you to track the variables above on your tweets as well as your competitors.  While I don’t typically see a lot of value in watching the competition, this may give you a good indicator of how well you are interacting with your community (or how well you should).

  Determining ROI in Twitter can be difficult.  The most challenging step is determining the costs in creating a successful Twitter initiative.  Use of the website is free, the followers (if your copy is good) are free. Typically the largest cost is the time put into producing relevant tweets.  As you plan and implement the Twitter campaign, keep track of your time and associate a fair value for all time spent (Cost = time spent * value of time).  The return on your investments comes from the traffic you derive from Twitter that converts on your site. 

  Below are some great tools for simplifying you data gathering on your Twitter campaigns.

  1. Great for tracking article promotions – twiterurly
  2. Great for tracking community development – twittercounter or twitteranalyzer
  3. Learning about your community – tweeps and twitter.grader.com
  4. Hashtag tracking – whatthehashtag
  
• A Thing You Can’t Do Anymore
  → The Fever Of Phineas | 1 Dec 2009 | 9:03pm GMT
  

  Here’s a thing you can’t do any more. Given a printed form, you used to be able to feed it into your typewriter and type the form data. You can’t do that any more. Today, if your doctor’s office hands you a printed form to fill out, you have no choice but to fill it out by hand. Arguably, you shouldn’t have to do this any more. This data entry could be done electronically. But nevertheless, printed forms are still around. Presumably some clerk or intern at the office now has to take your handwritten form and enter it into the computer. It would obviously be easier on them if they could actually read the data. In the case of my handwriting, they’d be lucky to get half of it right.

  So really, I think it’s fair to say, this is a capability we’ve actually degraded as the result of new technology. I’m not talking about sentimental loss. I’m saying a bit of functionality that used to be a little better has actually gotten a little worse.

• Web Analytics influencing Wireframes and Information Architecture
  → Extra! Extra! | 3 Nov 2009 | 3:38pm GMT
  

  A lot of focus is put on using web analytics data to make incremental improvements in site performance.  But as audiences, brands, products, and technologies change – sometimes a site needs a complete redesign.  When it’s time for a complete site overhaul, it’s important to dive deep into the web analytics for the site early in the process.

  Data and insight derived from web analytics should be a key driving force in the creation of wireframes, information architecture, and usability testing.  The following is a partial list of bits of data that help User Experience experts make informed decisions, when creating the layout for a new site that will more effectively achieve the intended goals:

  • Navigation Preferences: By categorizing your navigation types into groups such as drop-down menus, primary navigation, content navigation, quick-links, content links, text links, graphic/button links, flash/media links, etc you can start to see how visitors prefer to navigate across the site.    This becomes more exciting when you are able to compare these numbers with the navigation preferences of other sites. 
  • Visitor Tasks:  Content popularity and/or click-paths are essentially the visitor showing you what tasks they are performing successfully (conversion) or unsuccessfully (abandonment). 
  • Vocabulary / Nomenclature / Taxonomy:  The visitors are telling you how they describe and categorize their needs in 3 important ways.  First, the choice of words and phrases they use on public search engines such as Google.  Second, their choice of words and phrases on your site search engine (i.e. Endeca).  Thirdly, they are exposing what words make them click within the navigation and content in the site (as well as what words they don’t click on). 
  • User Research:  Often overlooked is the data that tells us what company the visitor is at when navigating the site as well as demographic information such as if they are using an expensive ISP or a more practical one.  Their technical aptitude can be loosely derived from their connection speed, browser, operating system, and plug-in preferences.  The language, region, country, state, and county of your visitors also helps in defining web marketing strategies.   
  • Conformity / Variance: Analyzing the deviation in variables such as visitation (frequency / latency), click-through-ratios, and search trends shows degrees of loyalty and dependencies within your visitors during a sales cycle/product research.  

  Generating a report of these variables and more helps the entire team review and evolve site layouts more intelligently.  Often in projects we find that if the wireframes and information architecture are data-driven, the revision of designs becomes an informed process rather than one of personal preferences.

  
• Prioritizing Marketing Budgets - When Conversion is Not an option for analysis.
  → Extra! Extra! | 21 Sep 2009 | 5:37pm GMT
  

  Many of our clients ask us how to justify larger web marketing budgets to their executives.  One of the obvious places to start is an ROI analysis or a cost/benefit analysis.  If there is no straight forward conversion event (i.e. Lead Generation or eCommerce), it can be difficult to measure how effective web marketing is.  In some cases, web budgets need to be analyzed as a cost of doing business.

  Marketing budgets are often divided up into channels/segments such as events, print, mail, television, radio, etc.  The sales team, often operating on a separate budget, actually spends budget on some channels with the same goals as marketing - such as inside sales.

  When analyzing how the marketing budgets should grow (or shrink) an organization should analyze how the different channels stack up against each other for common variables. 

  For example, as a touch-point (impression), ask your team to quantify how often each channel serves as a touch-point for potential and current customers.

  Average Touch-Points (Impressions) / Month
  	Potential Customers	Current Customers	Total
  Events	4,700	9,400	14,100
  Website	28,750	19,950	48,700
  * Print Adv	4,825	4,825	9,650
  Email	22,490	25,785	48,275
  Mailers	5,750	4,980	10,730
  Inside Sales	4,250	2,370	6,620
  **TOTAL	70,765	67,310	138,075
  * Because there is no data on users, this is split evenly
  ** There are likely a high degree of redundant users

  Another example would be to put a cost to each impression.  Take the total budget per channel and divide it by the number of touch-points (impressions). 

  Average Touch-Points (Impressions) / Month
  	Budget	Touch-Points	CPI
  Events	$29,890	14,100	$2.12
  Website	$28,590	48,700	$0.59
  Print Adv	$37,450	9,650	$3.88
  Email	$56,475	48,275	$1.17
  Mailers	$49,750	10,730	$4.64
  Inside Sales	$27,250	6,620	$4.12
  TOTAL	$229,405	138,075	$2.75

  From these numbers, as a channel for interaction with potential and current customers, the website and email are the most cost effective.  Adding conversion rates to this table may paint a different picture.  Analyzing budgets in this fashion shows that online channels are more cost effective at interacting with potential and current customers.

  
• Martinis
  → The Fever Of Phineas | 30 Aug 2009 | 4:47pm GMT
  

  Martinis last night.

  Why martinis? Could it be Mad Men fever? Actually, it was because of Julie and Julia. They were drinking Martinis in just about every scene. So after the movie, Julie and I (the real Julie) went to CostPlus to obtain the paraphrenelia. Then we went to Safeway to obtain the hooch. Then we came home. I looked up the recipe for Martinis. It’s not too hard, as it turns out. Couple cubes of ice, a bunch of dry gin, a splish of dry vermouth, and shake. I was unable to achieve the full on sexy shake, but nevertheless. Soon we were drinking home-shaken, dry Martinis.

  They were OK. I prefer beer.

  The only other time I ever drank a Martini? Saudi Arabia, 1989. Things were just peachy in the Gulf before the Gulf War, let me tell you. I was teaching English to Saudi naval cadets. Saudi is as dry a country as they come, hoochwise, as everybody knows. But at the Dharan airbase the U.S. military maintains a tiny bit of sovereignty, sort of a diplomatic briefcase but bigger. And inside that briefcase, you can drink. If you can get in. We got in. To the Officer’s club. So we’re in this semi-swanky space, drinking real drinks (not the homemade beer we drank back in our teacher’s quarters). Everyone was having Martinis, so what the heck, sure, I’d have a Martini. So guess who else was there having Martinis? Norm Schwartzkopf. The US had recently invaded Panama, so my buddy James, who was bold about this sort of thing, talking to generals about classified military operations and such, engaged Mr. Schwartzkopf about it. Norm, I’ll call him Norm from now on since it’s easier to spell, Norm’s a pretty intense character. Especially armed with a Martini. Norm and James went at it a bit, not arguing, but Norm obviously proud and conscious of his power to impress, inhibited by the classified aspects of the story, James trying to get him to spill. Since none of you know James, unless you do, go ahead and picture James Woods, circa Salvador. All politics aside, if you’re going to have a Gulf War, I guess Norm was the guy you’d want to be your general. And if you want someone to needle him about it, James was your man.

  Anyhoo, that’s my Martini story. I hope not to have very many more like it.

• Not Homer, Not Marge
  → The Fever Of Phineas | 16 Aug 2009 | 6:25pm GMT
  

  You’ll have to take my word for it, but I drew these cartoon characters before I ever saw the Simpsons.

  

  Not Homer, Not Marge

  The Simpsons first appeared on the Tracy Ullman Show in 1987, which I definitely did see. But I drew and conceived of these characters in college prior to that, more like 84/85/86. Can’t prove it, but it’s true.

• Data Driven Globalization: Using Pilots to Determine Priorities for Localization.
  → Extra! Extra! | 12 Aug 2009 | 8:41pm GMT
  

  Marketers love the opportunity that the web offers to promote a product or service to a global audience.  But when the costs of translating/localizing content, integrating a Web Content Management that supports localization, implementing localized SEO/PPC initiatives, and maintaining sites in multiple languages get added up – the value of localized sites gets questioned.  Companies which have products and services that can be marketed to a global audience often let their websites follow their sales teams into new regions.  That is, the sales teams start to sell a product into a specific region and when the sales team is able to show a fertile market, the marketing team localizes a web presence to support the sales reps. 

  But what if the product/service is marketable to a global audience and the company cannot afford to send a sales team to every major country/region where demand may reside?  How does a marketer decide which regions to make investments for global growth?  Knowing that some regions are more expensive to localize for and some regions are more competitive than others when it comes to SEO/PPC initiatives, how does a marketer weigh the cost against the opportunity?

  The answer should be simple: 

  1. Use global keyphrase research tools to see if customers in various regions are searching for your product or service on the web. It’s typically OK to make the assumption that if there are surfers using relevant keyphrases to find your services, that customers are out there. 
  2. For the regions that have online audiences for your product, pilot as many micro-sites (2-5 pages) as possible with small campaigns for driving traffic and see which sites demonstrate growth.  Translating a few pages and posting them as static pages is significantly less costly than fully building and deploying integrated/localized web sites. 
  3. While the pilots are running, monitor site analytics to see if your micro-sites are attracting the traffic you expect and if the sites are able to convert traffic at acceptable conversion rates (i.e. Lead Generation). 

  Note: 2-3 page micro-sites are not always successful and generating leads for complex products.  Allow your micro-site to link heavily to your primary corporate site (even if it is in English) to help sell the company along with the product/service.  The analytics will show if the language barrier causes abandonment.

  The pilots will cost significantly less than full-blown web sites and will allow you determine which regions have more opportunity for growth giving your team a prioritized list of regions to localize into.  Remember that these sites will require maintenance overtime as you are budgeting a pilot and full blown localized sites.

  
• Hetch Hetchy thoughts
  → The Fever Of Phineas | 11 Aug 2009 | 12:56am GMT
  

  One slightly negative thing about my Lyell Canyon hike: One person that I had spammed to ask for support for my “Restore Hetch Hetchy” pledge hike decided to reply to that by being a dick. A dick is not someone who declines to support, or even who disagrees with the goal. A dick in this case is someone who decides to pick a fight with me about it, imply that I’m uninformed (but he of course knows everything), that I am trying to “destroy” the water supply, that my position is “crapola”, etc. I mean it was totally unnecessarily aggressive and insulting. Compounded by the fact that it’s a “family” person (not my family, but an in-law) so he created this new awkwardness. He ends his email with “Please do not bother me with this crapola again” yet sent me a second email along the lines of  “and another thing…” So I spent a good deal of time on my hike last week mentally arguing with this guy. That was both negative but had its value. I guess if I’m going to do an activist thing (doing this pledge hike) I need to be prepared for challenges and questions. So working it out in my head helped me clarify my position with regard to Hetch.

  His basic objection was that Hetch Hetchy reservoir is a major (but not the only) source of water for the city of San Francisco and if the dam (which is in dire need of earthquake proofing upgrades) were to be destroyed by an earthquake, it would be catastrophic, disrupting the water supply at a time of drought, etc.

  Well of course. The objective of restoring Hetch Hetchy is NOT about “destroying” anything, or allowing the dam to deteriorate. It is about revisiting the problem. The problem the turn of the century engineers and policitcians were trying to solve was: “How can we provide water for the current and fast growing population?” They solved that problem with the dam. But we in the 21st century are trying to solve a new problem: “How can we provide water for the current population, allowing for a reasonable degree of growth, in a sustainable manner with low impact on fragile eco-systems?” That problem was not at all solved by damming Hetch Hetchy, nor would it be solved by damming Yosemite valley, or all the valleys of the high sierras. We are trying to solve a new problem with new values and new technology. We need not be beholden to bad decisions made a hundred years ago by engineers and politicians long dead. The fact that the reservoir is currently in use is merely a variable in the equation, not a reason to accept the status quo.

  So to be clear, my position is that it is possible and desirable to restore Hetch Hetchy valley while not disrupting the water supply to the users downstream.  That is also the position of the Restore Hetch Hetchy organization which I am attempting to raise money for. No one anywhere is lobbying to stick it to the city of San Francisco. No one favors allowing the dam to deteriorate.

  The only reasonable questions that can be argued over are:

  1. Can it be done, from an engineering perspective?
  2. How much will it cost, really?
  3. Is it worth it?

  To question 1, I believe the answer is of course. If we can dam water upstream, we can also move water to a downstream reservoir. No question about it really.

  To question 2 — well there’s a lot of numbers to argue over I suppose. But when you factor in real, meaningful water conservation efforts, the cost of upgrading the current dam, and other number crunching one could do, I believe a realistic number could be arrived at (FAQ says $1-3 billion).

  To question 3, well, this is a value judgment. My feeling is that reasonable, sustainable growth is better than uncontrolled growth, that low impact environmental solutions are better than high impact ones. I believe the valley is a precious and very special resource that was destroyed by short sighted minds and is worth restoring. I can’t argue with a person who does not share those values.

  But please be assured, the goal to restore Hetch Hetchy is a proposal to embark on a civil engineering project that solves 21st century problems with 21st century values and solutions, NOT an attempt to protect a spotted owl at the expense of jobs. If anything, a large civil engineering project like this could be viewed as a very timely stimulus which would create jobs.

  So whenever my dick in-law tries to engage me again, I’ll be ready for him.

  If you share my concerns about this cause, or if you merely want to stick it to the dicks of this world consider donating to my pledge drive.

• Lylle Canyon Hike
  → The Fever Of Phineas | 11 Aug 2009 | 12:16am GMT
  

  We’re back at sea level — the air is so thick and balmy compared with 10000 ft! Terry and I hiked 10 miles into Lyell Canyon (basically to the end of the meadowy part halfway up the switchbacks to Donohue Pass). So it was basically about 25mile hike in total, including a day hike on day 2.

  

  This was a pretty easy hike — mostly flat (although we gained 1000′ feet from Tuolumne Meadows to the pass area). It was unseasonably cool — we were warned about a snow storm. It definitely was freezing overnight and did snow lightly, but no accumulation in our area. This was a pretty spontaneously planned hike. Terry just happened to be in town and I snagged some days off. Most of his gear is at my house, but he was a little under-equipped for cold weather.

  Anyway, we lit out early Wednesday morning, arrived to get our permits at the ranger station around 9, and after gathering some last minute supplies (warm clothes for Terry and some lunch) we were finally on the trail around 1:30.  We hiked in about 6 miles to a point beyond Ireland Creek where we had never been before. It’s always fun to explore virgin terrirory. We found a really excellent site — flat, soft earth, plety of trees for our hammocks (Terry’s tent is a hammock dealy. I have a simple hammock for resting during the day but my tent is a single person tent on the ground.) Close to the Lyell Fork for water, a pretty little falls. Previous campers left some little presents for us — a copy of the novel All Tomorrow’s Parties to use as kindling, some sunblock and a handkerchief.

  There seemed to be tons of pack trains on this trail — this is a segment of the John Muir Trail and most hikers are going much farther than we did. Lots of groups were hikers plus horses plus mules. We also saw one Llama train! That was cool. Two hikers leading around four or five llamas. They did not carry as much load as the mules did but they were really beautiful and exotic.

  On day two, Thursday morning, it was snowing. We had some hot coffee and Ramen noodles for breakfast, then head down the trail for a day hike. We passed more pack trains and chatted with hikers. One British dude we met was 6 days into a 4 week hike of the full JMT — which culminates with a hike up to the summit of Mt. Whitney. He’s out there now, presumably, so do raise a pint for him. He bid us “Cheerio!” which struck us as archaic, although I greeted him with a “Howdy” so…

  We hiked up the switchbacks at the end of the meadow — it really isn’t Yosemite unless you do switchbacks, according to Terry anyway. Got more views of the pass and the meadows we had just come from. But it was a little too cold to linger too long. We hiked back down to camp, lit a nice fire and mixed ourselves some High Sierra Margaritas: water + instant lemonade + tequila + snow.

  Friday morning we lingered at the site. The sun threatened to emerge but basically it was still cloudy and windy and cool for the hike out. We drove to Oakdale for our traditional Mountain Mike’s post hike pizza and it was a wrap.

  In terms of wildlife, we saw: mama deers with their fawns, a garter snake (first non-poisonous snake we’ve seen in Yose), horses, mules, llamas. No bears, so our success rate for this area dropped from %100 to %66.666. But that’s OK, especially since we saw something rarer. It was either an American Marten or a Fisher. We had stopped on our hike out at Rafferty Creek by a bridge. Right as I was ditching my pack, I saw across the stream an animal that scurried across the rock and stoop and looked at me. I said to Terry, “That’s a huge marmot!” Then the creature slinked away and as it did so I noticed it had a more elongated shape than a marmot. It had similar coloring — a brownish coat with a light colored chest. But the behavior was not at all marmot like — a marmot would have come right up to us to steal our food. Also I have never seen a marmot at this elevation (around 8800′) — they usually appear higher than that and in more rocky terrain. This was woodland. The elongated shape and size were the main giveaways. I came home and wikipediaed the thing and basically narrowed it down to Marten ro Fisher. It looked more like a marten but the size was more like the fisher. So cool, I saw my first new mammal, and a hunter as opposed to a scavenger.

  That was a real highlight. Also the lack of mosquitoes or bugs due to the cold weather. Virgin territory, new animals, no skeeters, and snow added up to a really pleasant, highly successful hike. Also cool is that this canyon is a fork of the Tuolumne River, so I essentially hiked all the way to the very headwaters of the source of the water that is eventually captured in the Hetch Hetchy reservoir. Next month when I do my “Restore Hetch Hetchy” hike, I’ll connect up by hiking from Tuolumne Meadows down to the reservoir. So that means I’ll have walked the length of the watershed.

  

• My Life in Photography
  → Life Less Literary | 22 Jul 2009 | 10:03pm GMT
  

  A while ago, Theo Simpson interviewed me about my photography, for a project he was doing. I just stumbled upon the interview, while cleaning up my hard disk, so here it is:
  

  How did you first begin interest in photography?

  In childhood – my dad gave me a Kodak Brownie when I was 4 and we developed & printed the photos together.

  Have you had any formal training in photography?

  I took a photography O-Level when I was 17 in 1986, and did a week’s photojournalism course in 2006, but am mostly self-taught.

  What kind of photographer would you say you are?

  Always hard to categorise, but I think the term “documentary photographer” more-or-less covers it.

  Is there any particular photography you prefer?

  Photographs of people, photographs at night… but to be honest most types of photography interests me.

  How did you start working commercially?

  I was approached by the Mail on Sunday to buy a photo I had taken. Most of my commercial work has been through approaches from others, but this is because I don’t make most of my living from photography and still often feel uncomfortable about promoting myself as a photographer.

  Did you start working alone?

  Yes, I always work alone.

  What steps did you make to set up a company/business? Or did you test the waters so the speak first?

  See above – I haven’t gone very far in this direction. I already have a company, specialising mainly in website development, so have used this to manage the commercial side of my photography, but I’ve never formalised my commercial work.

  What are the pressures you have found working commercially?

  There is a great pressure to perform and get everything right, although this mostly comes from myself. Also I suppose keeping the business side of things organised: keeping notes of expenses, insurance, tax etc.

  What kind of portfolio do you have?

  I have a self-produced book, as well as a website. I also have a large, rather chaotic but more often updated Flickr account.

  How do you get people to see it?

  Various ways – I give out copies of my book to people who may be commissioning photography. But mostly I tag my photos extensively on Flickr and ensure that my website has good, descriptive and relevant text, plus plenty of links, so that search engines will rank it highly.

  Has your website been a part of your commercial success?

  Yes, my own website and my Flickr portfolio have probably been the main source of business for me – although I don’t think this would be sustainable if photography were my main business.

  How much competition is there?

  There is a lot of competition, although a lot of it is not great quality.

  What do you do to advertise yourself?

  I have done some online advertising, e.g. using Google Adwords and Bidvertiser, but mostly I just use Search Engine Optimisation techniques to make my photographs easy to find online.

  What makes your work stand out from other people?

  I like to think I have a fairly well developed personal style – this is not necessarily something I’ve planned, rather something I can’t help. I don’t like covering the same ground that people have already covered, so I am always looking for different approaches to a project, and I think this helps my work to stand out.

  Do you advertise?

  See above – I have done a small amount of advertising in the past, but don’t at the moment.

  How much creative input are you allowed when working for certain clients?

  I’ve usually been allowed a fairly good degree of creative freedom. I’ve come to realise that my photography doesn’t always fit easily within rigid guidelines, so I would be unlikely to accept any future commissions without a great degree of creative freedom.

  How much free time do you have for yourself to work on other photography projects?

  Not a great deal, but I squeeze in whatever I can.

  What advice would you give to someone starting working commercially?

  I’m not sure that I’m best placed, but I would say try to stay true to yourself while always pushing yourself in new directions. Don’t write anything off out of hand – learning can come from the most unexpected directions.

  How do you maintain your client base?

  I don’t really have one

  What equipment do you use?

  Camera bodies: Canon EOS 40D and 20D.
  Lenses: 16-35mm f/2.8
  24mm f/1.4
  50mm f/1.4
  70-200mm f/2.8 IS
  Flash: Canon 480 EXII
  Tripod: Manfrotto

  What computer software do you use?

  Mainly Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Also occasionally Adobe Photoshop.

  How do you back your work up?

  External hard disk.

  How do most clients want the work presenting to them?

  Initially by web gallery. Then prints, photobooks or high-res files.

  How are you equipped for that?

  I use Lightroom to produce quick web galleries, and produce other formats as required.

  How is your client base spread?

  Most of my clients have been in Sheffield, with a few in London.

  How far do you travel to get work?

  Usually not far, but will travel all over the country for the right job. Furthest so far has been to Glasgow.

  In a situation where you might feel technically challenged, what steps do you take to make sure the job is carried out properly, for example in unusual lighting conditions?

  Experiment with conditions, check details of photos (and download to computer if possible), take as many photographs as possible, using different settings/lighting.

  What do you do if you make a mistake?

  Keep going and try to learn from it!

  What photographers have influenced your current work?

  So many… but particularly Garry Winogrand, Brian Griffin, Terry O’Neill.

  Is Sheffield a good place to set-up a business?

  Hmm… not sure!

  Do you maintain copyright on all your work?

  Yes.

  Do you arrange royalties and rights before you do a job?

  Generally.

  Do you ever work for free?

  Yes, depending on the client and the job.

  What are the most important aspects to working commercially?

  I am lucky in that I don’t need to make most of my money from photography, so for me the most important aspects are the opportunity to learn & to take interesting photos.

  How do you take yourself forward?

  In fits and starts, but usually through intense bouts of taking photos & contemplating photos.

  What are your plans for the future

  Watch this space!

• Desert Island Disco
  → Life Less Literary | 22 Jul 2009 | 12:45am GMT
  

  A few weeks ago, Cherry Red Promotions very kindly asked me to play my Desert Island Discs at their monthly Desert Island Disco at The Shakespeare in Sheffield. Here are the tracks I picked, in the order in which I played ‘em. Lizzie also produced a little booklet, handed out on the night, and the following descriptions appeared in it:
  
  1: The Lake of Puppies – Largelife
  I got married to this song! “To have and to hold, the stuff in my hands, and if my hands are small, all that I hold must be even smaller…. Be it a large or a small world, nothing is larger than life.”

  2: Cardiacs – Manhoo
  Cardiacs are the one constant in my life: I could have filled this entire list with their songs. Manhoo is perfect pop, something the Beatles would have written if they’d still been on-form in the mid-90s. I like to think of it as the final word on all the Blur/Oasis nonsense going on at the time.

  3: Material – Disappearing
  As a student bass player, I had four heroes: first Lemmy, then JJ Burnel, Chris Squire, and finally Bill Laswell. Laswell introduced me to a world of music I had no idea existed (after 20 consecutive listens to Last Exit’s Noise of Trouble, I suddenly “got” free noise). He made me realise I didn’t need heroes any more. This is one of his funkiest tracks, which also introduced me to the sax of Henry Threadgill and guitar of Sonny Sharrock, both of whom also deserve to be on my desert island.

  4: The Fuzztones – 1-2-5
  Makes me feel like a teenager again.

  5: Ronald Shannon Jackson & The Decoding Society – When We Return
  A beautiful, mysterious beginning and ending, joined by the most insane-yet-somehow-logical magical manic middle mess. The world’s greatest drummer keeps time while Vernon Reid rocks his fucking socks off. If I could just keep one of the eight, it would be this.

  6: Claude Debussy – Claire de Lune
  It feels like these five minutes describe an entire lifetime: from the first tentative movements of a baby, through increasing confidence and experience, to a noble, wise and peaceful death. When you bury me, please do it to this piano piece.

  7: Caspar Brötzmann Massaker – Tribe
  …and when I come back as a zombie, I’d like to hear this pumping out at a few hundred decibels. Immense! Terrifying! German!

  8: Ooberman – Blossoms Falling (accoustic version)
  Sunday morning lie-ins. True love. Warm, fuzzy perfection. Love you Gill!

  Book:Viriconium Nights by M John Harrison
  Reading this, during a lost-weekend in Amsterdam, changed my life. Made me realise stories don’t need endings, fantasies aren’t real, and some people waste a lifetime trying to get to the other side of the looking-glass. I think I grew up that weekend. This book contains nothing but language and imagery; but I could lose myself forever in it.

  Luxury: an oojamaflip
  One thing I’m forever searching for, so I probably ought to have one handy on my desert island.

  Of course, eight records is never enough. I brought a few extra, in the hope that there’d be some spare time at the end, and indeed there was – I managed to slip a while side of the Cramps’ Off The Bone in. But what really limited me was not being able to play many very long tracks. Here’s a couple which have just as much right to be included as the other eight:

  9: Henry Threadgill’s Very Very Circus – Hope A Hope A
  One of the most sublime orchestrations ever created – who else but Henry Threadgill would replace the bass with two tubas, and back up battling electric guitars with a trombone and a french horn. I saw this live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with my friend Ed: probably the best gig I’ve ever been to.

  10: Igor Stravinsky – The Rite of Spring
  When I was around 19, I decided to “get into” classical music. So I picked a CD at random from my Dad’s collection. Boy, was I surprised. It knocked me off my feet, punkier than the punkiest punk I’d ever heard. It was The Rite of Spring, performed by the New York Philharmonic (still the most violent version of this music I’ve ever heard – and I’ve heard many). However, for my desert island I think I’d pick Fazil Say’s four-handed piano version: surprisingly, just as rich and dischordant as the orchestral version, at times more so.

  Finally, one of the other desert islanders picked a Blur track for his list, and explained that he’d listened almost exclusively to classical music until Blur awakened him to the possibilities of popular music. I hadn’t though about this beforehand, but Blur did something very similar for me: from around 1990 to 1995, I listened only to jazz, improvised music and other forms of avant-garde noiseism. I considered myself above crass pop songs. Then by chance I saw a Blur video, Sunday Sunday, on a late night TV show, and I was surprised by the intelligence and beauty of it. From then on, I never looked down on pop music, and my tasted expanded to include a bit of everything. So I really owe a place in this list to Blur, and of all their tracks I think the one I’d pick is the oh-so-beautiful Tender.

  Postscript: I’m loving the SEO Smart Links Wordpress plugin, if only because its automatically-generated links remind me of stuff I wrote ages ago and have forgotten. Case in point: Check out the “Henry Threadgill” and “When We Return” links above.

• Treacle Song, Radio 3
  → Life Less Literary | 1 Jul 2009 | 12:06am GMT
  

  Her voice, singing,
  Baked in a land of brown, black and purple.
  Light, milk coffee clouds;
  Dark, cook chocolate shadows;
  Sparkle Stabs of Sugared Violet.

  Ohne Zucker Bitte.
  Kein Kandis.

• Live at Fetico Gallery, Chicago 2001: Mixed Beats
  → CraqueCast | 15 Jun 2009 | 10:00pm GMT
  Part 3 of 3: A gallery show in Chicago where I was accompanied by dancers being painted with flourescent paint and performing under blacklight with similarly coloured plexiglass panes hung from the ceiling.
• Live at Fetico Gallery, Chicago 2001: Dubnbud (Live Extended Version)
  → CraqueCast | 15 Jun 2009 | 9:00pm GMT
  Part 2 of 3: A gallery show in Chicago where I was accompanied by dancers being painted with flourescent paint and performing under blacklight with similarly coloured plexiglass panes hung from the ceiling.
• Live at Fetico Gallery, Chicago 2001: Opening Improvisation
  → CraqueCast | 15 Jun 2009 | 8:00pm GMT
  Part 1 of 3: A gallery show in Chicago where I was accompanied by dancers being painted with flourescent paint and performing under blacklight with similarly coloured plexiglass panes hung from the ceiling.
• Books that Changed My Life
  → Life Less Literary | 31 May 2009 | 11:36am GMT
  

  A meme’s been doing the rounds on Facebook. Instructions are as follows:

  Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

  I did that… but then wanted to offer more explanation of why these books are so special to me, and why you should probably read them as well. And so, I spent far too long writing up 16 potted book-reviews (After posting the original 15, I remembered one other which absolutely had to be on the list). Here they are (in no particular order), complete with links to Amazon via my associate account, so that you can buy them and earn me a few coppers if you like the sound of any of the books here (if anyone knows of a good alternative to Amazon for a very low-volume affiliate account, please let me know).
  

  1. Viriconium Nights, M John Harrison. I read this aged 17. At the time, I read only fantasy/sci-fi (which I thought this was). It is, in fact, anti-fantasy: all of its short stories seem to finish unresolved; no quest is ever completed satisfactorily. Suddenly I understood: this is what life is like; there is no beginning, middle and happy end. Despite this, the writing is so beautiful, the choice of words so unconventional and vivid, the stories can be enjoyed for those reasons alone. Reading this book taught me that sometimes it’s all about the journey, not the goal. I realised the fallacy of fantasy, and have never really bothered with it since. This one book completely changed my reading habits.
  2. Pastoralia, George Saunders. Probably the funniest, but also the saddest book I’ve ever read. Again short stories, they are a perfect exaggerated satire of life in the corporatised early 21st century (just as Gogol nails the early 19th century and Kafka the 20th). Saunders started, and has continued, in the same vein, but this his 2nd book is the peak of his originality & brilliance.
  3. All Quiet on the Orient Express, Magnus Mills. Like Pastoralia, warped sad, funny, chilling satire, and also a 2nd book which I prefer to the (more critically acclaimed) 1st, or subsequent ones. A young man camps in the Lake District, and takes on some farm work to subsidise a planned motorbike trip to the Orient. The atmosphere is very similar to League of Gentlemen. But nothing happens. Ever (except for one shocking, terrifying incident). But it "doesn’t happen" in such a way that makes this book the most compelling of page-turners. Surely, any moment now, something will happen! I read this for a book club once, and one of the other members said "how could anyone identify with this book? The hero is so spineless, nobody could be like that in real life." I identify 100% with the hero, I could be just that spineless, and I can appreciate that a story this unlikely could all too easily just happen. (I should also add that the original, Ladybird-style cover for this book is gorgeous. Sadly they’ve reprinted it in something generic and instantly forgettable).
  4. The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Angela Carter. Angela Carter writes like an angel on acid, and nowhere is her writing more trippy than in this book. It’s a story of a young man from a ministry in an unspecified city in an era which seems to hover unobtrusively somewhere between medieval times and the 21st century. The city is under siege from Doctor Hoffman and his hallucination engine, so that nothing is ever what it appears to be. Carter can use language like absolutely no-one else I’ve ever come across. I’ve never experienced synesthesia except while reading her books. She can put one word unobtrusively alongside another in such a way that you can actually smell what she’s talking about, even though that smell is contaned in neither of the two words. Nearly 20 years after I read this book, I can stll remember its exact taste (and still don’t understand why it’s persistently out-of-print).
  5. Geek Love, Katherine Dunn. Again (like Carter) there is a smell, feel, taste which I associate with this novel. Without meaning to sound sexist, it sems that female authors often have a more sensory way of writing than men (although Harrison sometimes comes close). The story of an American family of circus freaks, deliberately and lovingly mutilated during gestation through a variety of bizarre and sickening practices. It’s an extremely beautiful, extremely moving study of the bonds and dependencies which arise within a group who are alone within society.
  6. Gödel, Escher, Bach – an eternal golden braid, Douglas Hofstadter. This was on my 3rd year psychology BSc reading list, for a course in Cognitive Ethology taught by Dr. Susan Blackmore. The book (and the course) changed my life completely: showed me all kinds of metaphors for how human consciousness may operate, and banished the need for any kind of "magic spark" from explanations of consciousness.
  7. The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins. Part of the same Susan Blackmore-led module as Gödel, Escher, Bach, this book did the same for my understanding evolution.
  8. Songlines, Bruce Chatwin. Chatwin’s brand of half travel-writing half musing and philosophising is, in my experience, quite unique and quite magical. This is the story of his trip to Aboriginal communities around Australia, but it is also the story of the human race. He builds up a theory, that humans are natural nomads who draw their energy and inspiration from the rhythms of walking, and who have lost much of their spirit by being coralled into permanent residencies. It’s very convincingly argued, and another example of a book which changed my opinion of what it is to be human.
  9. The Engineer of Human Souls, Josef Skvorecky. I read this during my first two weeks apart from Gill – she was in Egypt while I was buried under a duvet in a squat in Leytonstone. It still conjures up memory of the magic of our young love mixed with the melancholia of separation. The story follows hero Danny (a not-even-thinly disguised version of Skvorecky) during two periods in his life. He is an aging Czech literature professor in a University in Canada, lusting after his young students, but his mind wanders back to his forced-employment and ultimately meaningless sabotage in the Messerschmidt factory in WWII rural Czechoslovakia, lusting after his tuberculosis-stricken co-worker. The novel is divided up according to the authors Danny is teaching at the time – Poe, Hawthorne, Twain. It’s incredibly complex, and I’m sure there is much here which I don’t quite "get", but its melancholy synthesis of youthful uncertainty/optimism and aged wisdom/cynicism really, really buries its way deep inside my heart.
  10. The Photographer’s Eye, John Szarkowski. Szarkowski is my favourite writer on photography (though I’ve long meant to read Geoff Dyer, who is by all accounts a genius on the topic. Sontag and Barthes I’ve struggled with but not yet engaged with). Although this is mainly a (very good) photobook, with an all-encompassing survey of photography at the time of the accompanying exhibition (1964), what most insprires me is the accompany essay and the way the book is structured: split into 5 aspects the photographer must tackle (even if subconsciously) when making a photograph: the thing itself, the detail, the frame, time, and vantage point. His explanation of these 5 is so clear and succint that even a child could read it and instantly become a master of photographic critique. It also articulates (again quite perfectly) what it is that makes photography different from other art forms (it’s all in the frame – quite literally).
  11. Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut. Extremely clever, extremely moving, extremely thought-provoking. An example of the kind of sci-fi which I still find quite acceptible, post-Viriconium. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. While captured during World War II, Billy is abducted by aliens who live simultaneously in all times, and he begins to see reality as they do, jumping from one point in his life to another, via old age, the death of his wife, the marriage of his daughter, a WWII bombing raid in reverse where aeroplanes mercifully suck fire & destruction out of a German city, to the finale in a fire-bombed slaughterhouse in Dreseden. One of the most powerful anti-war (but not anti-glacier) books ever, and a constant reminder that every single death is important, yet unavoidable. So it goes.
  12. Exquisite Corpse, Robert Irwin. Robert Irwin is one of the most intelligent, yet one of the most easily readable, authors I know of. This is a fictionalised autobiography of an English surrealist painter, which tells the history of the surrealist movement from the 30s to the 60s. Again, I find myself drawn to the WWII period, where surrealism was unnecessary with "a white horse galloping around inside a burning meat market… a girl in a blue dress emerging with her skipping rope from clouds of black smoke and skipping calmly by… facades of buildings curving and distending like the sets of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari… staircases which led nowhere, baths suspended apparently in mid-air, brick waterfalls flowing out of doorways and objects jumbled incongruously together". The novel also has one of the most audacious twists of any novel I have ever read, truly worthy of a surrealist. Read more of my thoughts on Exquisite Corpse here.
  13. The Good Soldier Švejk, Jaroslav Hašek. I was made aware of this (and also the excellent War with the Newts by Karel Čapek) through frequent references in the work of Josef Skvorecky. I usually struggle with books more than about 50 years old, but this one proved to me that during the First World War there was at least one author who shared a sense of humour with the writers of The Young Ones, Blackadder and The Office. Side-splittingly funny (but sadly uncompleted due to the author’s death), Švejk is the archetypal "little man", who subversively stands up to, and is much cleverer than, those in authority. By obeying their orders to the letter, he brings chaos everywhere he serves. I’m told by various friends that this is one of the absolute classics of Eastern European literature; also that the English language does not contain the range and nuance of swear words required to accurately translate the book.
  14. The Tin Drum, Günter Grass. The Tin Drum. An epic novel on the making of modern Germany. Again, it stays with me particularly because of the imagery and unusual incidents: Oskar’s violent birth, the worn-out drums, his father’s fall into the cellar, and (especially) the horse’s head with the eels. I also have a DVD the excellent Oscar-winning film of this (which only covers about the first half of the novel), plus a copy of the book in its original German (Die Blechtrommel, if I remember correctly), which I dream of one-of-these-days reading even though so far I’ve not managed to struggle very far into page two.
  15. À Rebours (usually Against Nature in English), Joris-Karl Huysmans. I read this on the recommendation of my friend Caroline Simpson, and am very glad I did. The story of Des Esseintes, a fin de siècle decadent aristrocrat who, having experienced all of life’s supposed pleasures and indulgences, tires of it all and has himself bricked up inside a house (with only a small hatch through which his servants deliver his meals). Like the Magnus Mills book, this sounds like it could be a tedious read, but its limitations are part of what make it quite magical: the attention to detail is as breath-taking as an intricately jewel-encrusted tortoise. The writing is quite dense, and this book taught me that reading is also an activity which can benefit from a "slow movement" approach: I lingered over and savoured every single word, and got a huge reward from doing so.
  16. Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban. A post apocalyptic parable written entirely in not-quite-English (I know some people find this kind of thing very hard to read, but I find that if you let the sounds of the morphemes wash over you then within a couple of chapters it all makes sense). I’m told that every single word in the book has at least two meanings (prime among them: Addom, the biblical first man whose splitting caused the nuclear event which created the current state of this Kentish archipelago). Biblical and scientific double-meanings abound, parliament is a ritual carnival carried out by Punch-and-Judy men, and tradition and survival determine everything in this harsh future environment. Absolutely unique, absolutely genius, and once read never, ever forgotten.

  I could have added at least another 15 kids books to this – especially the Uncle & Agaton Sax books. And When Little Bear met Great Bear (or was it the other way around), which I’m sure I didn’t dream up, but I have never managed to find listed in any online catalogue or in any of the booksellers in Hay-on-Wye. Anyway, I hope that you enjoy these reviews and that you’re inspired to read some of the books as a result.

• Simple process for homepage optimization.
  → Extra! Extra! | 27 May 2009 | 8:07am GMT
  

  During the initial phase of an engagement and during the post launch optimization, we’re always looking for simple methods for improving a sites ability to hit specific goals.  Below is a fairly simple process for bringing your users closer to what they are looking for and hopefully gaining a couple conversion points in the process.

  1. Start by estimating the value of a conversion event on the website. Let’s use lead generation as our primary goal.  If we have an average web lead / converted customer ratio of 4% and our average value of a web customer is $7,500, then the average value of a web lead can be estimated (roughly) at $300.00. 
  2. Next, in your analytics tool associate the value ($300) with the conversion event (Lead Generation).  Most Analytics tools will help you do this if you can associate a dollar value with your conversion event.  For our demonstration, we will assume that there is a Thank You (and next steps) page after each lead form.  Users that reach the Thank You page are worth an average value of $300.  The way to do this in each analytics tool is a little different.  For example, if you are using Google Analytics this would be the $Index value. 
  3. For the next step, log in to your analytics tool and decipher which content is most highly valued to your converted users.   Again, this will be different depending on which analytics tool you use.  Sticking with our Google Analytics example, go the Reverse Path report see which pages are viewed before conversion events and go to the Top Content report to see the value of those pages.
     
  4. Now you know which content your web leads are looking for and which content is most influential to them!! !  Update the link structure on your homepage by adding prominent links to the most valued content and eliminating links to the least valued (or least visited content). 

  2 Notes

  * First: Be sure to measure your average conversion of the event (lead generation) both before and after the homepage has been optimized.

  ** Second: Use common sense when optimizing links on the homepage. Some links require context before you put them in front of a user.  For example, just because terms and conditions on a home loan application are highly valued and highly visited by customers that convert, doesn’t mean that it is the first page a visitors wants to see on your homepage. Customers looking for home loans may need to see rates first in order to put the terms into context.

  If you have questions about how to implement this process, please contact us at 650-212-3900 or info@extractable.com

  
• Fake it
  → The Fever Of Phineas | 25 May 2009 | 3:58pm GMT
  

  

• Idea for Travel Food Show
  → The Fever Of Phineas | 16 May 2009 | 7:47pm GMT
  

  The best Margarita in Alberta?

  The best sushi in Florence?

  The best Mexican food in Shanghai?

  The best bacon burger in Calcutta?

  Best canolli in Rio?

  Best falafel in Bangkok?

  Take that concept, add one obnoxious anti-social snob and you’ve got yourself a show!

• Overheard on the plaza in Santa Fe
  → The Fever Of Phineas | 17 Apr 2009 | 2:06pm GMT
  

  Down the old Santa Fe trail sits La Fonda Hotel.
  

  Old lady: “Oh, look, it’s Jane Fonda’s hotel.”

  Old man: “Hanoi Jane? I’m not going in there.”

• Music Re-org
  → The Fever Of Phineas | 31 Mar 2009 | 3:40am GMT
  

  I’m re-organizing my music a little bit. I dropped my “Cowboy of Hope” blog and plan to just drop my tunes here as “Pages”. For now the “Music” tab above gives the playlist with everything. I’ll create a dedicated page for each song with liner notes eventually. Here’s the starter page, for my new song “Mr. Universe“. Again, I’ll add liner notes soon.

• Sue Schofield
  → Life Less Literary | 24 Mar 2009 | 7:23am GMT
  

  To celebrate Ada Lovelace day, and the importance of women in technology, I’d like to introduce you to Sue Schofield. Sue is a journalist and author who was writing about hooking computers up to telephone lines when I was still in short trousers. You could, perhaps, call her the mother of the UK Internet (in fact, I just did).
  
  In 1994 she wrote “The UK Internet Book”. And, yes, it was: The UK Internet book. Until then, all our Internet advice had come from Americans who had a rather different Internet infrastructure from the UK (and no need for BT-approved modems). In those days, we had very few ISPs (in fact, there was only one real UK ISP – the fledgeling Demon Internet – although other “online service providers” such as CompuServe offered small windows onto the Internet). Sue’s book was exhaustive, informative (although the section on gopher was wasted on me) and, unlike the books coming out of the USA, it had a wry English sense of humour.

  It also came with a voucher offering a month’s free membership of Demon Internet. So I abandoned my CompuServe training wheels and set off into the world of ftp, nntp, smtp, archie and, yes, gopher. Without Sue Schofield, it would have taken me another year or two to get to grips with the Internet. And so she bears some responsibility for the fact that, in 1995, I started working for one of the UK’s fledgeling web agencies, starting a thrilling and eventful career which has led up to my current work on the iPlayer.

  By 2002, when I’d all but forgotten the name Sue Schofield, my friend Phil Franks introduced me to “the girl who left those wacky entries on my guestbook about me being Elton John’s dad”. The name on the email headers looked familiar and… it can’t be… it was! I found myself bantering with the very same Sue Schofield who had hooked me up at 14,000 baud all those years earlier. And thus started a three-way email conversation which lasted several years. (In real life and in private emails, Sue’s peculiar brand of gonzo-tech-journalism is even wittier and more beautiful than in print).

  So here’s to Sue, tech journalist extraordinaire, 30 years in the industry and still going strong. It’s highly appropriate that she’s writing for The Guardian today, on the subject of women in technology.

  While we’re on the subject of women in technology, I’d like to extend the high-fives to two of my colleagues at the BBC who have made, and continue to make, huge contributions to the iPlayer project: Gemma Garmeson and Marina Kalkanis.

• Hans Aarsman
  → Life Less Literary | 23 Mar 2009 | 9:13pm GMT
  

  A few weeks ago I went to the Photographers’ Gallery for a lecture by the Dutch photographer Hans Aarsman. I’d never heard of Aarsman before, but the description piqued my interest, particularly the line "if, and how, artistic ambitions, aesthetics and useful photography can coincide". I’m so glad I went! Aarsman described his journey through photography, and I found strong echoes with my own feelings and development as a photographer.
  
  He started by talking about his early influences which, like so many aspiring photographers, came mainly from Magnum images. He showed some of his own photos from this period, I guess around the late 60s. He explained how, like the best Magnum photos and indeed all of photojournalism, they relied on conflict. Even a charming photo of girls and boys was mainly interesting because of the contrast between the girls and the boys.

  And so, after a few years, he grew tired of this type of photography. He discovered the work of Garry Winogrand and described it as "an alien’s view of the world". He explored a similar aesthetic, using unexpected angles on otherwise-uninteresting subjects to provoke fresh ways of seeing. But this style was too unfettered for him. He imposed limits on it by buying a large view camera, which needed a tripod and a good deal of preparation. He drove around the Netherlands in a van, photographing chunks of the modern landscape, and finding ways to obscure the dreadful clarity and sharpness produced by a large format camera. But eventually, once again, he tired of this. He started to see echoes of centuries-old landscape painting in some of his compositions, at the same time as "art photography" was elevating faux-painterliness as its highest virtue (something I’ve written about before in relation to Tom Hunter). He realised that there was no way of taking a photo without his many years of visual training imposing themselves on the resultant image.

  Disheartened, he gave up photography. For many years he didn’t own a camera.

  This changed when he had to move into a smaller apartment, not long after his mother died. He had to get rid of many belongings, including little dolls which his mother had made for him while she was in terminal decline. He couldn’t justify keeping them, but felt that by throwing them away, he would be betraying his mother’s memory. So he bought a small point-and-shoot camera, and photographed every single thing he got rid of.

  This led to a realisation: many things are important to us only because of the memories they evoke. And a photograph is a storage space for memories. Suddenly, getting rid of things became easy. He went even further with the declutter, rejoicing in the ease with which he could simplify his possessions. He even used this approach on potential new purchases: photographing things in the shop so he would never have to buy them (he showed us a photograph of a locked-down Powerbook in a shop, then pointed at the laptop which he was using to give the presentation: "I managed to delay buying this computer for 12 months because of this photograph").

  Suddenly he became interested in photographs again. But not art photographs: rather, everyday photographs, photographs with a practical use. He would collect pictures of meat from the promotional supermarket leaflets which came through his door. He began to trawl EBay for interesting pictures, eventually settling on photographs of ashtrays (of which, he says, there are 8,000 new ones per week on EBay). He realised that many photographs have a backstory, and for him this is the most interesting aspect. Over three weeks, he realised (by comparing backdrops and wallpaper) that three of his ashtray photos came from the same person; he began to wonder why this person was selling different hotel ashtrays, and why one per week rather than all in one go.

  He started a blog, analysing photographs, and through this he was offered a monthly column in a Dutch Newspaper doing the same thing. He ended the talk by giving a detailed analysis of a photograph of Iranian uranium enrichment, which he analysed for the newspaper. The photograph was originally printed alongside an article stating that Iranians were ramping up their nuclear capability, but by careful analysis of this photograph and others from the same source he was able to demonstrate that this was not the real story. What was actually happening was the Iranians were trying to demonstrate to the West that they were ramping up their nuclear capability. Numerous clues pointed to this conclusion, from the huge number of men needed to wheel a one-man trolley, to the dozen-or-so photographers in the background of what seemed ostensibly to be a hastily-snatched photo smuggled secretively out of the country, to the (meticulously researched) conclusion that one of the men in the photograph had dashed out of the toilet in time to be included into the picture.

  Aarsman’s final slide was a quote from Garry Winogrand which he said now defines his relationship to photography. However, unlike virtually every other Winogrand quote I’ve ever read, this one didn’t quite ring true for me. Or at least, I think, it was badly worded. The quote, if I remember rightly, was "beauty is a fact explicitly described". But for me (and I think, if he’s honest about it, for Hans Aarsman), it’s not the explicit description which makes a photograph beautiful. It’s the information which leaks between the gaps; the backstory; the space left for the imagination; the painstaking detective work. Those are the things which, for me, bring a photograph to life and make it dance in the mind.

• I’m Qyper of the week!
  → Life Less Literary | 22 Jan 2009 | 5:56pm GMT
  

  A while ago, I signed up to review site Qype, but it was only last week that I really started using it. So it was a really nice surprise when today I got their weekly email newsletter (which, I have to admit, I normally kinda ignore) and saw that I’d been made Qyper of the week.

  Here’s what they had to say about me:
  

  Northern lad Dansumption likes the finer things in life: good beer, good food and the odd bit of culture.

  According to the man himself, Dan has "eaten in most of the restaurants in and around Sheffield city centre", which means he knows where local MP’s choose to "entertain world leaders", where you’ll pay premium prices for a supermarket-bought faux-baguette, and where to head for if you have an absinthe craving.

  And if you’re after a bit of steel city art (and you don’t mind maneuvering around some dustbins to get to it) then Dan’ can point you in the right direction.

  I’ll be posting more reviews to Qype soon.

• ITV gave me my BBC Micro
  → Life Less Literary | 21 Jan 2009 | 6:57am GMT
  

  Last night, I was reminiscing with a BBC colleague about the UK micro-computer boom of the early 80s, and it struck me: like many programmers of my age, I cut my programming teeth on the BBC Micro (and also the ZX81). But unlike many, I got my BBC from the ITV.

  

  BBC Micro

  
  
  In about 1982 (and for most of his working life), my Dad worked at Thames TV, and was a member of the computer club there. Dad and his fellow club-members foresaw the increasing importance of computers in the workplace, and petitioned the management to provide subsidised computers for their staff to take home and learn on (I remember being kept regularly updated on the progress of these negotiations, excited at the prospect of swapping my rather worn 16k Sinclair computer for a spiffy new 32k BBC Model B). Eventually the management were persuaded, and Thames staff were offered a free three-year loan of a BBC Micro.

  I played games on it, of course, many of them (I still remember the first night after we got it: Pacman was so burnt into my visual cortex that he continued to chase around my brain all night). But I also wrote games: typing in code from magazines and inventing small programs of my own. I even, along with my schoolfriend David Swaddle, set up a software company DSoft (which took its name from our shared initials). That never went very far (although bunking off school to hawk vapourware to all the local computer shops was kind of fun), but it was a start to something.

  At around the age of 16, I started to lose interest in computers. There were too many other things in life to grab my attention. But when I came to write my university dissertation five years later, my dad had just got a new PC, so I laid claim to the old BBC (which had been sold on to us by Thames for a nominal amount once the three-year loan was up) and used it for essays and revision notes.

  It took a few more years to rediscover programming: in fact, I was working for Olivetti, writing letters to debtors, when one day I looked at the computer I was typing on and thought “hey, I used to program these things when I was a kid. It was a lot more fun than this, and I bet I could get paid more money for doing it”. I went back to college to study C & C++, and never looked back.

  So eventually I’ve pitched up working at the BBC, and I guess (like many in BBC “Future Media & Technology”) you could say it was the BBC Micro which got me here. But, unlike many, it was an ITV company which had the foresight to give me that micro, and plant a seed which continues to bear fruit. I can’t imagine many companies being quite so forward-thinking nowadays, especially as in the intervening years all companies, private and public, have been “rationalised” to the extent where such costs are impossible to justify to shareholders/tax-payers. And I think that’s a very sad thing.

• 2008: Life
  → Life Less Literary | 19 Jan 2009 | 1:17am GMT
  

  In part one of my “2008 and thereabouts” retrospective, I talked about what I’d been up to work-wise. Now I’m going to focus on my personal and family life. I find this side of things a little harder to talk about, and recall, if only because for most of the year, I spent five days per week at work (usually in London, away from my family) and the other two days recuperating. But here goes…
  
  Of my immediate family, Rowan (now thirteen) completed her first year of secondary school, and Lola (a few weeks shy of eight) entered juniors. For Rowan the summer holidays of 2007, between primary and secondary, were some sort of chrysalis phase. Within a few weeks of starting King Edward’s she was a different person: not only in character, taste and habits (a new taste for fashion and music, a stand-offish muteness towards her parents and, for a short while, a boyfriend), but also physically: she seemed to grow about six inches in her first year (or should that be Y7 – I still can’t quite get to grips with our new American-style system) and very soon developed from a big girl into a young woman. Watching her become rapidly more independent has been wonderful, though sometimes painful. At times she can be incredibly argumentative and hurtful – like most teenagers I guess – but on those odd occasions when she lets me into her confidence, or tries unsuccessfully to hide her excitement about something, it melts my heart. I’m also immensely proud of the fact that she writes and draws keenly, and is showing real talent in both areas (she just won a Waterstone’s writing “supernatural love story” competition with a lengthy and very original tale of a girl who falls in love with a boy nobody else can see, only to find out that he’s a ghost).

  Lola hasn’t yet reached that troublesome age (although she can be troublesome in her own, usually much cuter, way). She is every inch the daddy’s girl, eager to please; but as she gets older she is becoming cleverer at using this to her advantage, turning on the cuteness tap when she knows it will get her what she wants. She excels at school (like her big sister before her), and seems to have an incredible quality for peace-brokering, whether this be bringing calm to a rowdy classroom or helping two friends to resolve a dispute. Teachers and other parents love her because she can (usually) be relied upon to be sensible and helpful, although I worry that as she gets older the sensible part may slip. She has also recently started piano lessons, and is learning incredibly quickly. Every week when I’m at home, she shows me her piano practice, and I have a go two, which is wonderful as it means I’m also getting to learn to play, and to read music.

  Gill too has been finding more outlets for her creative side. For a while she was working at a vintage clothes shop in Sheffield, but at the same time she was discovering eBay, buying and selling at first old nighties but increasingly a range of weird and wonderful items, retro and new, including dresses, handbags, purses, badges and jewellery. You can often find her abusing my eBay account. Recently, she has started to customise and combine items, so she may sew a 60s cloth doll’s face onto a 40s handbag, or make a brooch out of some tiny dollies attached to circles of Victorian lace. I bought her O’Reilly’s Fashioning Technology book for Christmas, so hopefully we’ll soon have antique accessories combined with flashing LEDs and intelligent textiles.

  The two of us have continued fostering with FCA, although obviously with me out of town most of the time, 99% of the work and responsibility has fallen on Gill. We are currently without a placement (and taking a bit of a break from it all – although we do have Gill’s cousin’s daughter Zoe staying with us, and her boyfriend Tyler, which is at times not too different from a foster placement). But for most of 2007 and 2008 we fostered two of our longest placements: N___, a Somali girl who was with us from the age of 15 to 17, and A___, an English boy who lived here from 16 to 17. With kids that age, for the most part you just let them get on with it. The biggest problem is getting them home on time: we have to set them curfews and, under strict foster agency/social services instructions, have to phone the police and report them missing if they’re not back by midnight. As you can imagine, this results in phone calls to missing persons on average about 3 times per week. Then we have to wait for the police to turn up, which they’re duty-bound to do, and which usually happens around 3am. Couple that with the odd petty crime and misdemeanour that kids in care tend to get themselves into, and we soon became pretty familiar with most of the local force (in fact, we were already fairly well known to them after we had a panic button installed when a previous placement, a young Muslim girl, heard that her family were threatening to burn her alive after hearing rumours that she’s been seen out with men).

  Which kinda brings me on to the subject of challenging situations. We’ve had a few: alongside the panic button incident, having most of our electrical goods stolen (a Powerbook laptop, several digital cameras, a mobile phone, iPod…) was one of the more minor incidents. Other stuff, I wouldn’t ever want to go into on this blog, but it makes you thankful for who you are and the fact that you come from a stable, supportive background. While appalled at some of the things human beings do to one another, and saddened at the things people do to children, I’ve felt myself growing as a person as a result of my ability to deal with some of these crises, and support Gill as she deals with them. But it doesn’t half make it difficult reading the newspapers, which make me alternately despair all over again at some peoples’ cruelty, and despair even more at the cluelessness of some newspapers’ leader and comment-writers, wittering on in the most judgemental terms on subjects they truly know nothing about.

  And me? Where have I been throughout all of this? Well, as I mentioned I’ve mainly been at work, travelling backwards and forwards to London. And my personal development hasn’t been solely related to fostering incidents: freelancing has taught me lessons which would have passed me by had I stayed closeted-up in my office. Most of all, I’ve learned to embrace the new, to constantly experiment and re-invent. Part of the problem with my previous long stretch at home was that I was never exposed to new influences, and so I became more and more stuck in the same groove, the same way of doing things. I don’t think that will ever happen to me again: I now know that, in order to stay alive, stay fresh, I need to seek out adventure and learning wherever I can find it.

  The only downside of this year of discovery has been that my photography career, which was really starting to blossom over 2007, has had to take a back seat. Although I’ve done some half-dozen weddings this year, and early in the year I was hired to cover some amazing events like the Creative Sheffield launch and the Vivienne Westwood exhibition VIP party, I haven’t had the time I’d like to edit photos, or to push my career forwards. Towards the end of the year, I’ve photographed a few private views in London galleries, but my rate of photography has gone right down, and as a result I’ve got a bit rusty (photography, like sport, is something you need to practice almost daily in order to stay on top of your game).

  I did manage to produce a wonderful little Working Nights photobook in June this year but my (slightly unexpected) BBC iPlayer career swept me off my feet so fast that, to date, I’ve only managed to hawk it round a few shops, and haven’t found time to send it out to all of the magazines, galleries and, indeed, friends who I had intended. My New Year’s resolution for 2009: get some books in the post!

• Metaphors
  → AlienFlower Blog | 18 Sep 2008 | 3:13pm GMT
  Subject: Metaphors
  To: aliflo, alienflower.org
  
  Hello,
  
  I require some help regarding the definitions of descriptive, organic and structural metaphors. What definitions I have found are very vague and do not give me enough data with which to differentiate between the different definitions.
  
  Any help that you could give me would be most welcome.
  
  Thanks,
  
  Chris Hamilton
  
  ---
  
  Dear Chris,
  
  Thank you for sending your question. My first thought is for us to search for poetry dictionaries that clearly define these terms. In my search this morning on the internet, I have not found anything yet. I will keep searching for dictionary definitions and share any new information.
  
  Let's start with organic metaphor (vs dead metaphor?). I found Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.'s web page on Organic Metaphor:
  
  http://www.ajdrake.com/e491_fall_04/materials/guides/gd_rom_organic_metaphor.htm
  
  He begins his text by quoting The Portable Coleridge (Samuel Taylor Coleridge):
  
  "Coleridge says that "the spirit of poetry" must "circumscribe itself by rules"; it must "embody [itself] in order to reveal itself.""
  
  Does organic metaphor "embody" the poem?
  
  ---
  
  Tim Love's article (link shared below) asks,
  (in reference to descriptive metaphor?):
  
  "Are they metaphors of animals, or nature, or politics?? Maybe the image that is used is of importance in the reader's understanding of the stories."
  
  ---
  
  Structural metaphor is defined on the Summer Institute of Linguistics web site:
  
  http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAStructuralMetaphor.htm
  
  "A structural metaphor is a conventional metaphor in which one concept is understood and expressed in terms of another structured, sharply defined concept."
  
  Example: "I demolished his argument."
  
  ---
  
  I am curious to know what definitions you have you found so far, even though they are vague. Will you share them with us please? And also what definitions might any other AlienFlower reader have to share with us?
  
  ---
  
  Metaphor in poetry enlivens, paints a better visual image with words, adds depth and breathes life, and brings beauty and understanding that might otherwise be lost to the reader. I found a metaphor essay written by British Teacher Tim Love on Tim's Web site:
  
  http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/workshops/metaphor.html
  
  ---
  
  The University of Oregon is home to the Metaphor Center:
  
  http://philosophy.uoregon.edu/metaphor/metaphor.htm
  
  ---
  
  And I found a web site article that discusses "Making Sense of Metaphor" as it relates to the American legal discourse and system. There is discussion of cultural uses of language and metaphor. Here is one of the reviews quotes of the article:
  
  "In 'Making Sense of Metaphors', Professor Bernard Hibbitts mines the richest possible vein of understanding, one that leads directly to the heart of the transformations affecting not just contemporary legal discourse but also the nature and structure of our entire legal system. Words and language are not a mere assemblage of clichés or conceptual archetypes: they serve as an organ of collective perception. And metaphor is the matrix of all verbal activity. The media of the last century and a half have rendered written codes obsolete: the electronic word is oral and kinesthetic and invested with a paradoxical permanence far more stable than that which writing can confer. In this provocative analysis of the medium, Professor Hibbitts uncovers the patterns of change that inform present events and will continue to do so for generations to come."
  
  Eric McLuhan
  Co-author (with Marshall McLuhan), The Laws of Media; co-editor (with Frank Zingrone), The Essential McLuhan
  
  "A truly astonishing article...surely one of the most significant of contributions to the relative role of the senses in social life."
  
  John Urry
  Professor of Sociology
  Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
  Author, The Tourist Gaze
  http://www.law.pitt.edu/hibbitts/meta_int.htm
  
  ---
  
  Here is the general definition of metaphor for those who like dictionary definitions:
  
  http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=metaphor
  
  ---
  
  metaphor
  
  n.
  
  1. A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in “a sea of troubles” or “All the world's a stage” (Shakespeare).
  2. One thing conceived as representing another; a symbol: “Hollywood has always been an irresistible, prefabricated metaphor for the crass, the materialistic, the shallow, and the craven” (Neal Gabler).
  
  [Middle English methaphor, from Old French metaphore, from Latin metaphora, from Greek, transference, metaphor, from metapherein, to transfer : meta-, meta- + pherein, to carry; see bher-1 in Indo-European Roots.]
  
  n : a figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity
  
• Craque DJ set: The Commonwealth Lounge, Fullerton, CA
  → CraqueCast | 22 May 2008 | 8:00pm GMT
  Wednesday night I played a closing set for the private CD release party of jazz quartet Stop Time, led by John Harrington of Delta Nove fame. Styles ranged from jazzy to semi-dark electronica, but mostly it was some good smooth loungey big beat, broken beat and house. Enjoy!
• Amalgamation: Live at Smartbar, Chicago, 2002
  → CraqueCast | 9 Jan 2008 | 8:00pm GMT
  A set I did at SmartBar (beneath Metro) in March of 2002. I'm playing many looping devices driven by live sampled sound from miscellaneous objects and guitar, and a laptop for softsynth control and vocal samples.
• Craque + Viv + Carol : Uir
  → CraqueCast | 11 Oct 2007 | 6:00am GMT
  Matt Davis (voice, sampled objects and electronics), Carol Genetti (voice) and Viv Corringham (voice) : Part 2 of a free improvisation at The Nervous Center Festival of Electronic Music, Chicago 2002
• Craque + Viv + Carol : Evo
  → CraqueCast | 11 Oct 2007 | 6:00am GMT
  Matt Davis (voice, sampled objects and electronics), Carol Genetti (voice) and Viv Corringham (voice) : Part 3 of a free improvisation at The Nervous Center Festival of Electronic Music, Chicago 2002
• Craque + Viv + Carol : Ava
  → CraqueCast | 11 Oct 2007 | 6:00am GMT
  Matt Davis (voice, sampled objects and electronics), Carol Genetti (voice) and Viv Corringham (voice) : Part 1 of a free improvisation at The Nervous Center Festival of Electronic Music, Chicago 2002
• Phonography 1, 2006-2007
  → CraqueCast | 10 May 2007 | 6:00am GMT
  Five unedited recordings from the past year as juicy slices of concrete life: a charcoal grill, a santa ana windstorm, a juice blender, more fire in the grill, and the departure of a locomotive.
• Improv at Myopic Books, Chicago, 03/19/2001
  → CraqueCast | 19 Apr 2007 | 6:00am GMT
  Free improvisation with turntable and electronics in Chicago a few years back.
• Social software provides buffer for shy people
  → xian's running monolog | 15 Aug 2006 | 2:25pm GMT
  

  I think 12 frogs is onto something here with Why social software is good for introverts.

  [The Power of Many]
• Blogging and identity panel proposal for SXSW
  → xian's running monolog | 14 Aug 2006 | 2:05pm GMT
  

  Hugh Forrest, the indomitable lead organizer of South by Southwest Interactive has announced a public process for voting on and vetting panel ideas for next year’s conference. Apparently it will take several rounds, with the first round narrowing down the 173 panel proposals.

  The voting is open to anyone, but the votes of past attendees of SXSW are weighted more strongly and those of past presenters are given even further weight.

  Here’s part of Hugh’s announcement:

  I wanted to alert you that the online interface for panel proposals for the 2007 SXSW Interactive Festival is now live. This page allows users to give us their feedback on which of the many outstanding panel proposals they feel are most appropriate for next year’s event.

  …

  Complete directions for the voting process are listed on the site. Deadline for voting is September 8.

  I’ve got two panel proposals in the running, the first of which is more directly related to the mission of this blog:

  Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online

  No privacy? Spy on yourself and commodify your attention stream! Countless representations of ourselves flood the net with information daily. What is happening to our models of attention? trust? reputation? Rate my new fighting style unstoppable and I’ll trade you this artifact I forged in Worlds of Warcraft… Expect a lively debate from noted experts on attention and identity and skeptics who think most of the sentences above are content-free.

  (filed under blogging and education / sociological)

  and

  You’re It! Tagging is so over! It’s the People, Stupid!

  Resolved: the tagging meme has overstayed its welcome. No, tags aren’t going away but they are not a user-experience panacea. Are we folksonomic yet? Some ideas about the next frontier in malleable, emergent information architectures and classification schemes. Plus, how to apply the lessons of the global social internet to more niche oriented web application development projects. Tag pioneers, theorists, and skeptics beat a dead horse.

  (filed under social networks and user generated / open source)

  Vote for my panels and eight others! (occasional RFB contributor Liza Sabater has three great proposals up, including one on net.art and another on blog "sheroes" and Jon Lebkowsky, my partner in hosting the blog conference on the Well has a couple more worthy of a vote). I also recommend Prentiss Riddle's panel idea bout teaching children to program with Lego Mindstorms.

  [Radio Free Blogistan]
• Speaking of 'Connecticut for Lieberman'
  → xian's running monolog | 11 Aug 2006 | 1:17am GMT
  

  Looks like his team forgot to register the domain: The Connecticut for Lieberman Party

  [Edgewise]
• Another tactical blunder by Lieberman
  → xian's running monolog | 10 Aug 2006 | 6:13am GMT
  

  Even if you grant that Lieberman should run in the general election as an independent (and I do not), shouldn’t he at least have taken a page from Jed Bartlett and Howard Dean and called his party-of-one “Lieberman for Connecticut” instead of the self-centered sounding “Connecticut for Lieberman”?

  [Edgewise]
• Jason Scott on 'the great failure of Wikipedia'
  → xian's running monolog | 8 Aug 2006 | 10:51pm GMT
  

  I was looking at the Haddock blogs aggregator and in their links gutter I came across a transcript of a presentation given at Notacon 3 (whatever that is) in April of this year by Jason Scott. You can listen to the audio if you prefer.

  I tend to like the Wikipedia idea, warts and all, but this talk is a pretty compelling look at its flaws. Here are a few choice excerpts that jumped out at me:

  What Wikipedia has taught us now, is that in a vacuum of politics, politics will be created. There is no vacuum of politics. People who are encountering this space where they can not lord over others for technicalities and gain power for themselves will then proceed to invoke technicalities, take power from other people. They just do this. This is what human beings do.

  and

  One of the big fallacies that people currently have is “well, even if people undo your work, at least you can see it.” It’s not true. People will go to the history of an article that’s disputed, and they will find that that history’s actually been utterly and completely purged from Wikipedia. The history is gone.

  and, also

  Wikipedia tends to be, at this point, the first hit for most proper and non-proper nouns. Putting in anything gives you the Wikipedia entry. In fact, if you have Trillian, Trillian has an automatic setting so that any word you have in there that matches on Wikipedia ends up as an underlined word. You click on it, and it tells you what the answer is. To someone who’s using instant messaging, they don’t know where this entry came from when they clicked on it, they also tend to be out of date because they index it across the Trillian … and so on. So as a result, you can’t say just go in and change it, because it’s actually using older and older indexes. That’s what I mean by the concern I have, the worry that I have, when I make these big points.

  [The Power of Many]
• OpenID info evening (for developers)
  → xian's running monolog | 7 Aug 2006 | 8:36pm GMT
  

  Kaliya “Identity Woman” Hamlin writes:

  Webwide distributed SSO is finally happening… Learn more from the core guys behind this emerging standard for user-centric digital identity. August 10th 6-9 in Berkeley at 2029 University, Upstairs. RSVP to me kaliya (at) Mac (dot) com and please pass this along to those who might be interested… OpenID is the emerging standard for web wide distributed single sign-on. It works with OpenID enabled URLs and i-names. The goal of the evening is not to geek out on identity but to connect with developers working on applications that require users to log in. Find out more about what it is… how it works… how you can install it. The incentives to learn are high with the $5000 bounty for having OpenID in Open Source projects. Presenting and answering Questions:

  • David Recordon formerly of Live Journal/Six Appart now of Verisign will be presenting a bit about the origins of OpenID but most importantly how it works… and how you install it.
  • Andy Dale from ooTao will talk a bit about i-names and how they work with OpenID2 and looking forward to what comes next after authentication - profile sharing. ooTao is also data sharing, are running ibroker services.
  • Scott Keveton from Jan Rain a development shop in Portland that has been ond of the leading instigators of OpenID. He just posted a walk through on his blog.
  • Mary Hodder CEO of Dabble will talk about the work happening around the development of itags.

  If you know a developer - pass the word along.

  Perhaps the vision of a universal single sign-on on the Web isn’t just a utopian pipedream after all?

  [The Power of Many]
• zorca interviews xian
  → xian's running monolog | 7 Aug 2006 | 5:27am GMT
  

  Suzanne Stefanac is writing a book on blogging called Dispatches from Blogistan (catchy title, eh?) for Peachpit / New Riders. Naturally, she’s been blogging the whole process and posting snippets of work in progress and the texts of interviews she’s conducted for the book.

  I know Suzanne from The Well, where I host the blog conference and where I’m known as <xian> and she’s known as <zorca>. A while back she interviewed me via email and she recently published the results on her book’s blog: Dispatches From Blogistan - interview with christian crumlish.

  In the interview we talk about blogging (of course) as well as social media, RSS, wikis, politics, media, authority, trust, online presence, the long tail, and other stuff I hope you’ll find interesting. I know I had fun doing it.

  [Radio Free Blogistan]
• Is ANWR as ugly as they say?
  → xian's running monolog | 1 Aug 2006 | 3:02am GMT
  

  Jim Goldstein was up in Alaska in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge recently and brought back these photographs.

  He says, “A conservative friend asked me, ‘Is ANWR as really as ugly as they say it is? This alarmed me a great deal after having one of the best photo trips I’ve taken to date. The beauty of ANWR is almost unparalleled.”

  [wake up!]
• 'Tamper' Chapter Four
  → xian's running monolog | 17 Jul 2006 | 5:20am GMT
  

  1978 - Psychoanalysis

  by Bill Ectric

  “You should stop blaming your parents for your quarrel with reality,” said Dr. Carnes, casually. He leaned back nimbly in his chair, hands behind his head, framed diplomas on the paneled wall behind him. I almost thought he was going to prop his feet up on the desk in front of him. My psychiatrist wasn’t much older than me - maybe thirty.

  “I’m not blaming my parents,” I said to the shrink. “I’m just telling you what happened.”

  “Well, go on, then. You say your mother gave you paregoric?”

  I studied the pastel Aztec pattern in the arm of my comfortably stuffed easy chair. Nice texture.

  “You know what paregoric is, right?” I asked, still looking down.

  “They stopped making paregoric in the late fifties,” Dr. Carnes answered correctly. “It was a medicine made from camphor and alcohol with a small amount of morphine. They gave it to children for cough medicine.”

  “Very good,” I said, looking at him. “Well, my mother says she used to rub it on my gums when my teeth were coming in. When I was a baby. I have this memory of lying in my crib in my bedroom. There were these cartoon pictures on my wall. Eight pictures – two on each wall. They were Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. You know, Happy, Sleepy, Doc…”

  “Yes, I’m familiar with the dwarves,” said the shrink, a bit impatiently, I thought. “But you were very young. You actually remember this?”

  Ignoring his question, I continued, “So I’m lying there, and I look at the picture of Grumpy, and he seems to be frowning at me. It was scary. His eyebrows moved up and down and he blinked. Then I looked at Happy, and his red grin got wide and crazy and his nose started stretching and bending sideways. His big eyes were crossed and his tongue stuck out! It scared me so I looked away and closed my eyes. Then I could see stars glittering, and a big, bright golden crescent moon. In slow motion, a cow floated up into the black, starry sky and sailed over the moon!”

  “Were you traumatized?” said the doctor, stifling a laugh.

  “I think so. But I felt so good I didn’t care."

  “But, Bill,” the shrink frowned. Relying momentarily on his neck muscles to support his head, he used both hands to brush back his hair in a motion that ended with his hands clasped again behind his head. “You were too young to even know what paregoric was. How…”

  “No, listen,” I said. “Years later, my mother found those pictures of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when she was cleaning out the attic. She said, ‘Do you remember these?’ and I said, ‘Yeah’ and then she told me how, when I was a baby, teething, I would cry and cry, because teething hurts, so she said she rubbed paregoric on my gums. After that, she said, I stopped crying and just looked up at those pictures until I fell asleep.”

  “Did you use any other drugs when you were a kid?” asked Dr. Carnes.

  “I had bad hay fever.”

  “Allergic to pollen?” the shrink clarified unnecessarily.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It made my eyes itch I sneezed a lot. I had to take antihistamine for years. Sometimes the antihistamine allowed me to dream these amazing Technicolor dreams if I took it at night.”

  “I’ve dreamed in color,” said the shrink. “Some people say we only dream in black and white, but I’ve dreamed in color.”

  Whoop-de-doo, I thought. Big deal. I never doubted people dreamed in color.

  “Sometimes,” I continued, “When the pollen was extra bad, I had to stay indoors. While other guys were playing baseball, I was inside drawing pictures and writing stories. Our kitchen had a linoleum floor with all kinds of squiggly designs in it, and if I stared at those squiggles I saw faces and other things.”

  “People do the same thing looking up at clouds,” said the doctor.

  “I’ve seen big shapes in the clouds,” I said. “But there is something more … intimate, when faces emerge from the floor tiles. I also saw them, sometimes, in the towels hanging in the bathroom. In the little threads.”

  “Is that why you are so interested in Richard Shaver’s art?” asked Dr. Carnes.

  Very astute.

  I should explain who Richard Shaver was. Primarily a writer of science fiction, he also created some unusual art. He split rocks open and saw patterns in the grain, then used paint and ink to enhance the images so that other people could see them. He called these "rock books" and said that an ancient civilization had created them.

  Shaver was, by all accounts, a strange man. You can read about him on the Internet, but I’ll give you a little background.

  A man named Hugo Gernsback created the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926. Amazing Stories is the magazine that Forrest J. Ackerman famously says, “jumped into his hands” when he was a boy and inspired him to become a literary agent and later the editor of Famous Monsters magazine.

  Around 1940, Richard Shaver sent a story to the magazine about a race of evil mutants, called Dero, who lived in underground caverns and sometimes captured humans to torture and eat. According to Shaver, aliens from another planet had abandoned these subterranean creatures on Earth, back in ancient times, and centuries of inbreeding underground had made them insane and sadistic. Shaver also claimed that the Dero were using some kind of energy beam to send disturbing voices into his own mind. He called this mental harassment "tamper." The story was all the more remarkable because Richard Shaver claimed that it was entirely true!

  It was never clear whether Ray Palmer, the magazine’s editor, believed that Richard Shaver was serious or not, but Amazing Stories continued publishing Shaver stories because it increased their sales and thousands of letters poured in. Some of the letter writers claimed that they, too, heard strange voices in their heads. This annoyed the more serious science fictions fans, who looked upon the "Shaver Mystery" as a ridiculous hoax.

  Years later, in an interview, Palmer admitted that Shaver, like me, had spent some time in a mental institution

  [Telegraph]
• Democratizing the art market
  → xian's running monolog | 17 Jul 2006 | 5:11am GMT
  

  David Hinojosa has got a project called Stock Artist that offers a simulation (for now) of a rationalize the art market.

  I’m not sure I fully understand the concept, but this appears to be the nut of it:

  The central nucleus of Stockartist is the “transformed art piece’s concept.” This concept consists in dividing the value of one work, or a group of them into little pieces called “stock-art.” The stock-arts have two characteristics: they represent one part of the value of the “transformed art piece” and they are themselves art works. In other words, the stock-arts are at the same time art works and an instrument of investment that besides of representing their own value, they represent other’s. The stock-arts share some common physical characteristics as: maximum weight, maximum size, security codes, etc, and they contain unique characteristics imposed by their creator.

  [The Power of Many]
• Navigation
  → Mediajunkie | 23 Feb 2006 | 6:08pm GMT
  

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• Mediajunkie clients
  → Mediajunkie | 23 Feb 2006 | 6:05pm GMT
  

  A reminder to our hosted bloggers: I occasionally post tips about our blog content management system at Above the Fold.

  And author clients, we have a new author/agent agreement available. If you’ve signed up under the older agreement you can continue to be represented under those terms or you can “upgrade” to the new agreement. It’s up to you.

• Response Poems
  → AlienFlower Blog | 13 Aug 2005 | 4:38am GMT
  
  
  Weathervane Sketch
  by David Kaneda
  
  ---
  
  maggie and milly and molly and may
  by E. E. Cummings
  http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15406
  
  ---
  
  Writing Response Poems
  by Thom Williams
  
  *e.e.cummings is so great. I remember distinctly how I felt when I read it the very first time. I was sort of copping an attitude about its childlike ethos. Then, it slammed into me. He deployed a universal theme, a vast theme-the idea that we are alone, yet tied-in to everything. Each thing that the girls found opened their world and made them come back to themselves. I am healed by the simple things: water, a starfish, the otherorldliness of a crab. I have gone to the sea so many times for peace. In the churning of the sea beneath the jetty, I feel the power of life, and I am part of it, too. The sea reminds me of the power I have to make or break my own way. The true genius of the poem to me is the way it leaves you with an idea you already had but you forgot. A good poem sort of wakes you up to something like a recovered memory, a good one.
  
  When I think about writing a response piece to a poem, I make sure to give myself maximim freedom. My intention is not to analyze the poem; this is not schoolwork. I look at the poem and I let myself find a connection without rules. Pick anything; but pick something that pushes your buttons. I might write about the time I got stung by a jellyfish; how I lifted my arm from the sea and saw the tentacles wrapped around it, how I handled the situation, how it scared me.
  
  I might write about the idea that we are alone and are not alone. Sometimes I think life is like a shipwreck where we are washed up on the shore of existence. We have each other and survival. The constellations stretch over head; they turn by the hour. The sea shows me how to survive. It tells me to be blue and keep many things below the surface. The sea shows me that danger is nearer than I thought, but so is beauty.
  
  Let your response seek its own level, like water. Poetry can be like a river that has been flowing always. It is only for the poet to dip into the flow. Let the current of inspiration push you along a bit. Perhaps imagination is just about to come in on the tide. Perhaps in one more moment some healing or some hope might wash up at our feet. Let your response find you. You'll recognize yourself quite soon.
  
• Testing out the new banner
  → Mediajunkie | 28 Jul 2005 | 5:48pm GMT
  

  Not animated yet, and probably messes up the motto, but I'm tired of Times New Roman.

• Why we were down last week.
  → Mediajunkie | 28 Jun 2005 | 6:02pm GMT
  

  We were hacked by script kiddies. They didn't accomplish anything but they did trash the web server. We're back up now and we've tightened security measures. I won't go into details because why draw the vandals a map?

• The essence of publishing
  → Mediajunkie | 28 Jun 2005 | 2:20pm GMT
  

  Patrick Nielsen Hayden from Making Light points us to an article he's quoted in from the Book Standard:

  The Book Standard, an up-and-coming online trade magazine about the book industry, does a reasonable job of covering experiments in the online distribution of free-and-unfettered novel e-texts as a means of building an audience, including ventures from entities as diverse as Cory Doctorow and Baen Books. Among those quoted are Cory, Jim Baen, Charles Stross, Tim O'Reilly, and me. I'm particularly glad they used this bit of summing-up:

  "Publishing is not about just making a paper copy of a book," says Hayden. "The essential enterprise of publishing is finding texts that audiences want to read and signaling to those audiences that, hey, this is something neat," he says. "Those skill sets are going to be just as valuable with new forms of publishing."

  Not as well-put as I might have managed if I hadn't been blathering over a long-distance phone line, but it's a point I find myself making a lot, and I'm glad to see it passed along.

• Avoid getting unpaid
  → Mediajunkie | 26 Jun 2005 | 10:07pm GMT
  

  Some fresh book-deal advice from Matt Wagner, my old agent at Waterside (after Bill Gladstone and before Danielle Jatlow and Margot Maley), warns about how, if presented with a book deal, you should do all you can to avoid agreeing to a cross-collateralization clause: The Varieties of Co-Accounting.

• 
  → Mediajunkie | 23 Jun 2005 | 12:33am GMT
  

  View image
  

• Art Department
  → Mediajunkie | 22 Jun 2005 | 10:52pm GMT
  

  Media Junkie's New York Office Art Department has officially opened
  with veteran image maker Xourmas at it's helm!
  

• Book site shaping up
  → Mediajunkie | 11 May 2005 | 12:11am GMT
  

  After a hurried site launch to coincide with the author's book tour, Marie Myung-Ok Lee's site for her novel Somebody's Daughter received some long overdue attention today and is now much more nearly ship shape. Please drop by and let us know if anything isn't as it should be.

• East Bay for Democracy
  → Mediajunkie | 12 Apr 2005 | 8:59pm GMT
  

  We've relaunched the East Bay for Democracy site using CivicSpace, thanks to expert assistance from Scott Chacon.

  We're still fleshing out some of the content areas, but the site is no longer in the staging area and is ready for signup by locals.

• Let Me Sing Longer
  → AlienFlower Blog | 5 Mar 2005 | 3:01pm GMT
  Writing a Cinquain
  
  ---
  
  A cinquain (sing-KANE) is a short, unrhymed poem. This style was named and created by Adelaide Crapsy (1878-1914) in the early 1900's. Her poems were not published until after she died.
  
  Its form consists of 22 syllables:
  
  First Line: a one word title (two syllables)
  Second Line: a two word phrase that describes the title or you can just use two words (four syllables)
  Third Line: a three word phrase that describes an action relating to the title or just actions words (six syllables)
  Forth Line: a four word phrase that describes a feeling relating to the topic or just feeling words (eight syllables)
  Fifth Line: one word that refers back to the title (two syllables)
  
  The title, due to the shortness of the poem, takes on a greater weight because it is one sixth of the poem.
  
  --
  
  Niagara, Seen on a Night in November
  by Adelaide Crapsy
  
  How frail
  Above the bulk
  Of crashing water hangs
  Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
  The moon.
  
  ---
  
  Moon Shadows
  by Adelaide Crapsy
  
  Still as
  On windless nights
  The moon-cast shadows are,
  So still will be my heart when I
  Am dead.
  
  ---
  
  Amaze
  by Adelaide Crapsy
  
  I know
  Not these my hands
  And yet I think there was
  A woman like me once had hands
  Like these.
  
  ---
  
  Carl Sandburg wrote a poem about reading her poetry and to honor her memory.
  
  Adelaide Crapsey
  by Carl Sandburg
  
  Among the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July,
  I read your heart in a book.
  
  And your mouth of blue pansy—I know somewhere I have seen it rain-shattered.
  
  And I have seen a woman with her head flung between her naked knees, and her head held there listening to the sea, the great naked sea shouldering a load of salt.
  
  And the blue pansy mouth sang to the sea:
  Mother of God, I’m so little a thing,
  Let me sing longer,
  Only a little longer.
  
  And the sea shouldered its salt in long gray combers hauling new shapes on the beach sand.
  
• Inside the Rhyme Machine
  → AlienFlower Blog | 2 Mar 2005 | 2:40am GMT
  A sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric poem usually in iambic pentameter with a carefully patterned rhyme scheme. The shortness and strict rhyme scheme create a musical effect. This is a good form to practice because it focuses and challenges much of the poet's technical and artistic skills.
  
  There are two main types of sonnets: the Italian (Petrarchan) and the English (Shakespearean).
  
  The Italian sonnet has a first division (octave) of eight lines rhyming abbaabba and the second division (sestet), consisting of six lines rhyming cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce. The octave presents the narrative, states the proposition, or raises a question; the sestet brings the narrative home by making an abstract comment, applying the proposition, or solving the problem.
  
  The English (Shakespearean) sonnet has four divisions: three quatrains (each with a rhyme-scheme of its own) and a rhymed couplet. The typical rhyme-scheme for the English sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg. The couplet at the end is usually a commentary on the foregoing, an epigrammatic close.
  
  Here is a Web site with a long listing of sonnet poets and their poems:
  
  http://www.sonnets.org/alpha.htm
  
  After reading through the poems at sonnets.org for awhile, you might find it easier to write your own.
  
  Here is one Italian sonnet I found there written by Katharine Lee Bates:
  
  To a Crow
  
  Come hither, taunted bird, and I will stroke
  Thy ruffled plumage with a verse, O triste
  And sombre minstrel at our Twelfth Night feast,
  A music masquerading in thy croak.
  How often, when the wild March mornings broke,
  Have I descried thee, like a demon priest,
  Heaping hoarse curses on the riotous East
  From the bare branches of some tossing oak!
  Yet ever welcome is thy wizard flight,
  --Most welcome now, when Earth lies imaging
  The sleep of death beneath a winding-sheet
  Of frozen snow intolerably white,
  A pallid waste crossed by the sudden, fleet,
  Beautiful shadow of thy sable wing.