webponce rants

I’ve recently started working with Big Brother production company, Endemol. They do, of course, make much much more than just Big Brother, in fact, I’d be surprised if you haven’t at some point watched one of their shows. You may ask why someone digital would want to go work in television - the answer is simple - Endemol aren’t a television production company, but a content producer, and are already working with a number of innovative new formats and concepts in interacting with content, so this is a really interesting opportunity. We all love and want great content, whether it be on the gogglebox or internets, and Endemol are perfectly positioned to help television evolve in the right direction.

I’ve started blogging over at turnofftuneon.wordpress.com to get internal and external discussion around new formats and models in the digital content space, you can follow that if you’d like. I’m going to separate out work to that blog, general technology to over at http://yarned.co.uk and more personally interesting stuff here.

Here’s some more Clay which I just posted over at that blog.

Google have released their index from back in 2001 to celebrate their 10th birthday. It works too, and searching on the name of company i traded under as a freelance back then even works (V2 Design, second link!)- and then linking it through to the Wayback machine gives you the full experience. Apologies for the lack of semantic markup or accessibility.. it was 1998.

Huzzah! The Lucky Voice in home private karaoke service has launched in beta. I’ve been involved with the project over the past few months, primarily as technical consultancy, audience insight and some of the marketing activities. As they say themselves, Lucky Voice is a life affirming experience, and we’ve managed to bring an element of their quality and class to the digital space. No longer will you be tied to crappy plastic tape machines, this is karaoke for the 21st Century. Now, if they can start to push cocktails over IP, i’m sold.

If you’d like an invite, email me or post a comment, and we’ll sort you out.

Another quick build project for Andy at de-construct, who part-owns The Prince Regent, a pub down in SE24. Building this has made me hungry. They’ve just been shortlisted in the 60 under £60 category in the Evening Standard London Restaurant awards, so bravo! Its still a bit of work in progress, as we had to get it live ready for today’s announcement, but I’m sure i’ll tidy up the CSS and add some new content later next week.

A little build project for Endemol went live recently. For the Children in Need programme, an application form to have your haircut by a celeb’. Fancy getting shaved by Rachel Stevens*? Sign up here. The full site (which i’m also going to be involved in) will be launching later this year.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scissorhands/

NB. Rachel Stevens probably isn’t doing haircuts, as she’s doing the dancy thing this year. I’m not sure she’d have time to balance trimming and shimmying in her life.

I was going to write an article this morning about cheating, cheating and cheating, although i’ve lost the third page i was going to link to through the red mist decending on me after seeing this piece of laziness.

The new Number 10 site launched a few days back. I didn’t immediately visit the site, as I’ve not been online a huge amount recently for browsing purposes, but I fired it up this morning after reading another post about its launch, and oh dear.

I’m not going to comment upon their approach to using social media, as many already have.

What has infuriated me is the ‘beta’ logo they’ve plopped on the masthead, which seems to be used as a ’sorry we haven’t quite finished testing yet’ get of jail free card. NO NO NO!

The current fascination with launching betas confuses me a little. I am a big supporter of releasing early and often, smaller simpler offerings to test the water, and then expand and enrich from there on. Its agile, it means you can get your community feeding back on what they like and what they don’t like, and quite often helps in just getting content out there.

A beta does not mean public release, its an early release for testing purposes. Betas are designed to be opened out to a smaller population than your usual audience for feedback, testing and review. Many ’startup’ type sites or web applications launch in private beta in this way, as well as public beta to gain feedback, and it can be a useful approach if you haven’t yet ‘launched’ your application or site.

However, a beta release and a phased release of functionality over time are not the same thing. You can, very succesfully, launch a site with a percentage of your eventual vision for the long term, providing it passes certain acceptance criteria: is it enough for the audience, will it achieve what we need it to in the first release, and so on. Twitter is a good example of this. They launched with just simple messaging, then layered in IM, then added replies, etc. etc. That isn’t a beta. A beta isn’t your first public release, waiting for added functionality, a beta is for testing and review.

What Number 10 have done is released an incomplete and broken website, and sticking a beta label on it doesn’t justify or excuse this. Number 10 is a substantial government landmark, the mouthpiece of the PM, not some 2 guys in their bedroom startup app.

Firstly, it doesn’t validate against XHTML. Why not? It really isn’t that hard to get content validating against XHTML Transitional (they’re not even using strict). As a government who support legislation and penalties on companies who don’t adhere to accessibility guidelines, I’d say this was pretty hypocritical, but ultimately downright lazy.

Secondly, the layout doesn’t work in Firefox. You might have heard about Firefox, it is a pretty popular browser. I’m assuming it was developed and tested on another browser (although assumptions on their testing are foolish). I wouldn’t mind so much if the design was half decent, but wow, it looks like they’ve literally just grabbed the first wordpress theme they found, and vomited it up on the server.

Thirdly, on the day it launched, there were 404 errors all over the shop. A BBC article explains:

A Downing Street spokeswoman denied the site had crashed.
But she said users on some servers might experience glitches “for the next 48 hours”.
“It is just what happens when you launch a new website,” she added.

No, it isn’t. I’ve launched hundreds of sites without layouts breaking and 404 pages on topline navigation. Sure, i’ve had the odd bug crop up which wasn’t spotted in testing, but not topline navigation, and not basic layout issues.

I guess I’m just really disappointed in an organisation as important as Number 10 could launch something without basic checks and balances from purely a technical perspective. I understand that getting social media is a harder nut to crack, and I’m actually glad they’ve started making inroads to that sort of technology, but the fundamentals still apply, and hiding behind a beta label doesn’t not excuse ignoring the basics.

I’d email them, but they haven’t set up their contact page correctly yet. The only option seems to be to write them a letter. How very 2.0

More stuff from The Vacationeers

Flicking through a copy of .net magazine this weekend at a service station on the M4 revealed my smiling face peering back at me. For a minute, I couldn’t help thinking I was having an out of body experience; perhaps some Harry Potteresque moment where my soul had been captured in print, never to escape; maybe some fiendish teenager had put mirrors in all the periodicals to frustrate and annoy eager readers; or just my short article had been printed this issue. I purchased a copy in any case to do further tests. I hope for my own sake that my spiritual being is not trapped in ink and paper form.

I was out with CG last night, and we were talking podcasts. I’ve recently become the vaguely proud owner of a new iPhone (in fact, we’re now a two iPhone house, as my wife has also just acquired one), and never really having an mp3 player in my pocket before (I’ve owned them, but always forget to take them out; being my phone however, i have to take it out), i’ve not listened to podcasts that much. Now, however, is a different case. I have lots and lots of time on my hands, and lots and lots of storage on my phone. So, we were discussing good sources. As if by internet magic, Laughing Squid also posted a video of one of the shows we talked about, featuring Ze Frank, The Sound of Young America. I’m hoping they’re not all visually hilarious, as radio isn’t a media for the mime, but its been duly added to my feedlist.

I’m also starting to plan a trip to San Francisco. I’ve always wanted to visit, mostly to see if it really is that hilly; possibly to stalk this guy; but mostly to go visit some interesting people.

I blogged this over at the Disposable Memory Project, but I think its neat idea, and I know the founders of the festival would love as much coverage as possible, so I’m reblogging with a bit more gusto this time. Eric Slatkin and Carlton Evans started the Disposable Film Festival in 2007 to celebrate the ‘artistic potential of disposable video’:

“Everyone has become a Disposable Filmmaker: directors of Saturday night cell phone videos, actors under the eyes of security cameras, and narrators before their webcams. Let’s face it - we live in an age of disposable film. Now it’s time to do something creative with it.”

I couldn’t agree more, and I love it! This new world in which we live of such throw-away-able technology is truly awful - I can’t remember the last time i got something repaired over just buying a replacement, but the low cost of these devices (and increasing quality) also brings with it a generative side which is wonderful, and projects like the Disposable Film Festival bring the more talented homebrew film-makers to light. Being disposable and often low quality (in terms of their technical capability: grainy, blocky, jerky, poor zoom, poor focusing) often forces the producer to abandon all hope of making their work glossy and polished, and focus on the content and narrative. Whilst the ‘realness’ of the format has always given this sort of content a voyeuristic feel, which often seems to engender a certain type of story to be portrayed, increasingly talented people with nothing more than just a great idea or narrative they want to capture are doing just that. I think it helps bring forward the soul of the story. Surprise surprise, simplicity creates something special, yet again!

I went to listen to Clay Shirky yesterday afternoon, who very kindly signed my copy of ‘Here Comes Everybody‘ and I managed to have a brief chat with until Bill Thompson careered in and gave Shirky a bearhug. The majority of his discussions were over topics covered in the book, of how the cost (in pure economic terms) of creating groups or group activity has been so substantially lowered in recent years, that projects like this are bound to spring up. The rule for most is failure, perhaps only a half baked idea, or even just a great idea which doesn’t reach the audience it deserves, following a rough power law that only a tiny percentage of these generative and collaborative projects will succeed. Well, here’s hoping for success for the Disposable Film Festival, and any of its film-makers.

In other news, its the second week of my underemployableness. Last week was intentionally empty and devoid of activity. I took delivery of my new coffee machine (yom), played hours of XBox, watched all of the first season of Arrested Development, even went for a swim and ate copious amounts of food (in that order). This week, I shall mostly be doing ’stuff’. I was planning on taking a trip to Brighton (ice-cream, The Werks, the beach, and I like being on trains) this morning, but the weather is looking a bit crappy. Oh, and my iPhone needs charging after only a day of use. Lame.

Adobe have announced today their partnership with Google and Yahoo in order to advance their ability to index flash websites. Everyone seems rather excited by the prospect, but I’m less so. Why? Well, I think its potentially a bad thing for people in my industry.

“If our flash is indexable, why create an HTML alternative?”

I can’t help thinking this question is going to be asked, and decisions based upon this will be made. Building an HTML alternative is not only for SEO, it is primarily for the sake of accessibility, and users who don’t have, or choose to have Flash installed. Many people often used SEO as the reason to create an accessible site. I never mind this approach, as at least we can build the HTML alternative. There are approaches to building flash using screen-reader technology, but nothing does the trick like some good ol’ semantic HTML in this case.

Not to mention, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Clients will read this tidbit of information from Google, and expect their flash site to suddenly appear at the top of Google. Wrong again - most enterprise or substantial sites are not built using static SWF files, but utilise on-demand loading of assets and database calls. These sites will not magically appear in Google’s index.

I’ve yet to see how this integration works, but what about precedence, level of importance and semantic data? Those who will automagically appear in the listings are those developers who built their content in static SWF - and are less likely to have marked up the content in any sensible format.

Who gains from this the most? I think Google, in being able to inspect the content of flash sites, rather than users who are looking for content rich flash sites, are the main beneficiary. I hope I’m pleasantly proved wrong.

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The decon crew are on their way to Valencia this afternoon for a weekend of sight-seeing, sunbathing, cultural persuits and maybe a drink or two. If you hear any stories of this lovely coastside town being invaded by helvetica clad warriors, don’t worry, we’re leaving on Sunday, hangovers in tow. I’m (frustratingly) not taking a camera as my digital compact is dead. I might buy a couple of disposables and go old school.

We’re quite mainstream really.

1. The Beatles
2. Various Artists
3. Red Hot Chili Peppers
4. Massive Attack
5. Jay-Z
6. Groove Armada
7. Air
8. The Killers
9. David Bowie
10. Zero 7

See more at our last.fm account

Flickr image from arcticpenguin used under a CC License

I was in the audience for last night’s debate between Professor Jonathan Zittrain and Bill Thompson, on the subject of his new book “The Future of the Internet and what we can do to stop it“, hosted by Becky Hogge and the good people at the Open Rights Group. Having not read the book yet, there was fortunately a primer into his concerns over the “inevitable” reduction in freedoms we currently enjoy online, whether those freedoms come from threats such as malicious cracking, viruses and spam, tethered platforms, regulatory bodies or walled garden / happy valley situations like Facebook. Its a very interesting topic of debate, and I look forward to reading the book when the postman brings it next week. I can’t help feeling that some of Professor Zittrain’s points were a little ‘fear culture’ish to make people aware of the issues - in the same way that the instigator of the Y2K stories played up the significance of the problem to make sure it reached a wider audience (but of course turned into a media/social frenzy), but there is definately a great deal of truth in some of the points raised by both Bill, Johnathan and some of the questions posed by the audience. I’m not going to say anything more until i’ve read the book though, and he was an extremely interesting speaker - I can’t help thinking it will provide an interesting follow on from Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody which i’m reading currently.

As if by some form of perfectly organised timing though, RWW and the Guardian are running articles today about the public’s desire for some form of regulation into social networks like Facebook. I realised last night that regulation does not always have to mean restriction, and Sir Christopher Meyer of the PPC’s comment that “There is a need for public awareness about what can happen to information once it is voluntarily put into the public domain,” is absolutely correct, but I’m not sure that means OFCOM need to step in.

‘Public’ conversations in real life are aimed at the person or people you’re standing next to in your social circle and they can be overheard, but social norms mean we tend not to listen too intently to a mobile conversation taking place next to you. However, online, the flawless reproducability of digital conversations which also take place in this “public” arena added to the thought that a conversation online is therefore for “public consumption” make for bad juju. You wouldn’t photograph or record someone sitting opposite you on the train, but you might happily link to their twitter conversation, and that is quite a social disconnect. I think that might, in time, change, but whilst we’re learning new social mores to deal with this public/private dichotomy, self regulation is far more practical and relevant.

If you don’t want people to see it, don’t post it - even if you have privacy turned up to 11. That’s the rule. There are enough channels to privately get something from A to B without resorting to Facebook or similar, and that is about education. Teens are extremely savvy when it comes to privacy and posting on their social spaces, us adults are less aware. The Guardian article mentions journalists facebook doorstepping and whilst I can totally see how invasions of privacy are upsetting, if you’ve posted something on Facebook and haven’t considered who can access that, is that really private?

If regulation is placed on the social networks, it should be security focussed, imposing penalties for flaws in the code and the ability for crackers to get in and show supposed ‘private’ content, not user regulation.

Update: You can listen to an audio recording of the debate over at the Open Rights Group site. You might even be able to hear me ask about sewers.

“Tell me and I’ll forget
Show me and I’ll remember
Involve me and I’ll understand”

I love that.

Well done to unclephil for passing the 1000 images mark. He’s been a long time supporter of the visual dictionary, so a few months back we interviewed him:

1. How did you first find the visual dictionary?
   My friend Paul Burgess, the illustrator, sent me the address, knowing I had an abiding interest in recording lettering.
2. I assume you’re into photography?
   I have always enjoyed photography, but this is more about the word itself. My earlier interest (still ongoing) is in finding and recording interesting and unusual examples of lettering from wherever, especially examples of vernacularity, such as hand-made signs.
3. What keeps you coming back to the visual dictionary?
   The challenge of finding new words. Now that I am a contributor, sometimes the most ordinary word will jump out at me from the midst of a sign. Yesterday, while my wife was buying a ticket at the railway station, I spotted ‘approach’, ‘stay’ and ‘disabled’ all in the space of two typographically unremarkable signs.

4. You and minorbug are going head to head at the moment. Have you any strategies for domination?
   That would be telling. I am flattered that minorbug’s contribution remained dormant for about a year until I began assailing that third place in the pantheon. It all helps in the finding of words, though. I am sometimes less likely to go for words than I should be, simply because they don’t make interesting images: I will have to get over that.
5. What is your favourite word and why?
   Palimpsest. I like the way it bobbles around the mouth and engages many parts of the speaking process. I also like what it means: a re-used parchment, erased and containing a new message. This notion of a second layer of meaning within a sign or a word is a crucial one to me as a typographic designer.
6. What is your favourite image on TVD, and why?
   I have many. A favourite among my own is ‘bookseller’, painted on a silver globe in a bookshop window in Brighton. In the TVD as a whole it is a difficult question to answer, but I enjoy the contributions of scannedinski, particularly his commentary. I made a comment on his ‘grand’, but I think my favourite of his images is ‘pain’, about which he says: ‘I love France: you can buy ANYTHING.’
7. And finally, anything you’d like to see the visual dictionary do as future functionality?
   It does bug me that somebody is daft enough to enter 38 images of the word ‘Madrid’ and they all get put onto the site. Perhaps there could be a block on multiple images of ‘exclusions’ only (multiple images of every other word is a good thing). Although on reflection, it does make the look of the A-Z ‘cloud’ more interesting!

Thanks to Unclephil for his time chatting to us, and of course, his effort in building up the dictionary.

“If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” If you’re willing to take the company up on the offer, you obviously don’t have the sense of commitment they are looking for.

US etailer Zappos have a number of positive and refreshing approaches to running a business, being an employer and customer service. Their take on “you’ll love working here, or your money back” is an interesting method of weeding out those who just aren’t right for the company. Filling your organisation with like-minded (and that’s in terms of passion, enthusiasm not picking people who agree with you) people or even just individuals who have excitement and energy is a hard task no matter what your group does. Being open like this is just one of many ways to help find the right colleagues.

New site from de-construct.
A brand piece for Panasonic - Everything Matters

http://everythingmatters.eu/

Brandon’s band - The Outside Royalty - and their debut single video on the ‘tube

My wife is running two (count them, two!) Race for Life 5K runs this year in aid of Cancer Research, something which has affected, and is affecting both of us. Give her a little cash to help her towards her £10 target. Who said she has low ambitions?

I’ve been walking around the office barefoot for almost ten years - apparantly I’m not mental, but doing myself some favours.

http://nymag.com/health/features/46213/

Honestly, you wait for a site launch for a couple of months, and three come along at once. Big shout out to the team for the launch of three sites last night (in order of project length and blood/sweat/tears).

Vitra

This project has been a couple of years in the making, and the passion and effort put into the site shows. Chris, the lead developer, has pretty much worked on it single-handed since he started, and its a testiment to his dedication.

adidas Dream Big

A new campaign from the football team with some really nice video content.

adidas Cricket

The new adidas england cricket team shirts.

For those of you not following the disposable memory project blog, we sent the first two camera bags into the wild today. Squeak!

“Flickr users hate video. Digg users don’t want their site to become DiggSpace. Facebook users are sick and tired of application invites. Unfortunately for you, these companies couldn’t care less, and I’ll tell you why.”

There has been plenty of talk recently over whether social networks, or indeed any small loved app or site, which grow in both users and functionality, forget about their core idea which made them so great and loved in the first place. Twitter for instance is still relatively simple and holds true its original idea, whereas Digg are adding social networking tools, Flickr have added video support, amazon sell food, tesco sell insurance - okay maybe i’m over-extending. But the discussion is a valid one. Mashable, from which the quote above comes, propose the ’screw you coefficient’ - one method of deciding whether a new piece of functionality or approach will make improved revenue for your one-time-blog-now-mega-super-app.com, contrasting loss of users against increased wonga.

Personally, whether its a commercial decision or not, I’m not sure adding 100s of new features is always a good thing. In fact, I lie, I’m sure it is not a good thing.

For instance, as i mentioned above, twitter does one thing, and does it extremely (mostly) well. They’ve created a well rounded API which allows others to extend their core functionality, but twitter.com itself is staying true to the central idea. They do need to be a little careful, recent interface changes are adding more and more links, @replies and following topics etc. etc. are neat additions, but much more and it could go the way of Microsoft Word - a 1000 new features, where most people only use a handful.

This is why 37signals tools are loved and arguably hated in equal measure. Their perceived ‘arrogance’ towards developing applications the way they see fit is actually keeping their tools simple and effective, rather than curtailing to pressure to add this, add that. Heck, I still use notepad.exe daily, i love gtalk’s simplicity over any other IM, my favourite colour is whitespace (its actually red but works for making my point), and fit for purpose is always better than bloat for possibility.

In creating the first few pages for disposablememoryproject.org, I had to remind myself of that. i’d started creating page after page after page, one for contact, one for the concept, one for every paragraph in essence, until I stopped myself. This could go on a single page - everything the user needs within one screen - bang! and the dirt is gone! So, I rehashed, and rebuilt into a single page. So much simpler.

Having to write the postcards/instructions was similar. I originally wrote a longer set of instructions, but realising the text limit restrictions on moo.com postcards, I had to sub sub sub, into just a few lines - and for the user - that is SO much better - bang! and the waffle is gone!

Applications are the same - simple fit for purpose tools to enable you to do what you need/want in a super simple, low barrier to entry, way. The problem comes when you find yourself switching between 20 apps to carry out each distinct task, thats when the argument for bloating your product appears - but honestly it shouldn’t need to. Open APIs and data portability aim to allow for interchange of data between all of these apps (that’s the plan anyway), leaving each app’s interface to do what IT does well.

Simple is good, simple is powerful, simple is relaxing.

Whilst i’m not surprised to see it happen, its great to actually see quantative reports that giving away free music does have a commercial benefit. last.fm, since launching their full length tracks service, have influenced an almost 120% increase in real sales throught their partnership with amazon. Last.fm, who have over five million full length tracks available on their service, reckon existing users are purchasing 66% more music as a result of the free tracks being available via the site.

I’m personally one of those people. I used to discover new music on Pandora and immediately go and buy the albums via amazon - but since its UK closure, I’ve had to rely on last.fm to find new artists, and probably buy two or three albums a month of artists i’ve never heard on the radio - far more music than i ever used to buy before making use of sites such as last.fm and imeem. I just hope the record labels take these figures to heart and realise not all digital consumers are out to ’steal music’.

via [mashable]

de-construct launches www.jamesbrownlondon.com today, another project we’ve worked on with MadeThought.

de-construct is six years old (yesterday actually, but i forgot to blog). Our birthday present was a lovely FWA Site of the Day award this morning for the adidas football site.

We recently pitched for, and won a commission to develop the new Crafts Council website. Its going to be a really interesting job, and we’re currently going through the early scoping and UX processes to work out how the site will fit together. Fred talks about our vision for the site in today’s issue of Design Week, despite them not really grasping what he said.

Its our (decon) 6th birthday in September, so we’re in the early stages of planning a party. Themes currently tabled by some around the number six:

0110 (six in binary)
The atomic number of carbon
The number of points on a star of david
Number of strings on a guitar
Six Geese ‘a Laying
A boundary ball in cricket
Six Pack (Beer)
Six Pack (Belly)
Cubes /Dice
Lucky In Chinese
6 degrees of separation
666 (The Number of the Beast)
6 partners
Hexapoda (insects with six legs)
Sugar / Iron (6th anniversary)
The 6th day : God created animals, adam and eve and a nice little garden

…and in 6BC, Caeser Augustus sent ferrets to the Balearic Islands to control rabbit plagues. As you do…

http://www.roadtov.com/profile/11302

Brandon, one of my team at de-con, is the drummer for the Outside Royalty - featured on The Road to V programme on Channel 4 on Thursday. Support him if you can! (But don’t let him get too succesful, I don’t want to lose him from my team to superstardom ;)