webponce rants

I have an old paperback copy of Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach sitting on my bookshelf that’s torn to bits. It’s missing its cover and the spine is falling apart. When the spine finally disintegrates, I’ll probably just use a rubber band to hold it together. Trying to read the book in this state would be impossible, yet it’s one of my prized possessions because of its connection to a point in my life, like a tattoo made of wood pulp.

I still have this same attachment to offline, in fact, it seems to increase the more and more i spend online. I wonder if its a generational thing, as we maybe the last batch of humans who will make a distinction between offline and online. Can you build the same emotional attachment to a tatty Kindle from your university years? Does content and container seperate? Focus on the story and its meaning, more than the object which contains the words? If we lose the emotional connection to the tactile, will we lose feeling in our fingers? Why hasn’t my coffee cooled enough for me to drink it yet?

Read “The Transient, Digital Fetish”

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“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]