BuiltByDave.co.uk The Wireframe of a Blog </> feed

If you’ve not already heard of “join the video conversation” Seesmic, you must have been hidden under a [virtual] rock. It’s Loic’s current startup and they’ve released a WordPress plugin that allows you to leave video comments on a WordPress blog.

While I still have my doubts about Seesmic (it hasn’t grabbed my screen time [..yet]), I’m happy to support in anyway I can. So taking this “why not” attitude you can all leave video comments on my blog. If I don’t know you please introduce yourself in a short video.

Just over a year ago Josh and I were playing around with one of his ideas, similar to the Make Poverty History white band for the web that he did, but this time for the (red) campaign- just add a line of javascript to your site/blog and anywhere the characters R, E, D appear in that order we’ll change them to red’s branding, and link to joinred.com. You may have even spotted it happening on this blog of mine, for example in my post Google Application Engine vs Facebook f8.

We prototyped, we got feedback, we asked a few well known bloggers if they’d put it on their site, and all was good, however we came across a problem that I didn’t have the time, patience, or uber-javascript-l33t hacking skills to solve well enough. I’ve put the problem to a few fantastic developers, it’s made for great discussion, proved they are amazing developers with very creative minds, but yield a solution it did not.

Chatting with Josh the other day we decided we’d release it, incomplete & hacky. Should someone tackle the problem, fantastic. Everything is over at http://redyoursite.com (/test.html as well), if you do decide to tackle the problem please let us know, there’s a free beer or two on me if you solve it.

Update: So I didn’t explain the problem as pointed out by Dave and Mike on Twitter. I did that on purpose because in theory it seems far easier than it is in practice, and discovering that yourself is key (that and being over year ago my memory isn’t perfect). But, to summarize the issues are around a pages content, and not breaking it, so:

• “powered” should become “powe(red)”, however not if it’s a link as that would break the link
• changing attributes shouldn’t happen
• changing a node’s content should but not within certain node’s: textarea; select; input, etc.
• using the DOM was too slow for me (please prove me wrong) and it has to be fast, we can’t break other people’s load time
• RegEx speed was fine, however cross-browser issues plague it

Statistics can take over in a negative way if you’re not careful, they can cause pain as well as gain. That is a more in-depth discussion for another post, these particular statistics are very much a no-brainer, however few execute it well. It’s also very unlikely to gather incorrect information.

Take “holding pages”, they’re often the first place you register your interest about a product/company/event by giving up your email address. Doing that already? You’re interest register-able per se. Take this screenshot taken from LaunchSoon.com’s demo:

This is extremely limiting- you’re left with two statistics: percentage of visitors who “convert” and give you their email address; percentage of fake email address. Sure, you’ll gain a list of potential customers who care enough to be contacted once more, but compare that with the statistics you’d gather from this holding page:

• percentage of visitors who “convert” and give you their email address
• percentage of fake email address
• percentage of podcasters with-in your current reach
• percentage of podcast subscribers within your current reach
• ratio of podcaster & subscribers within your reach
• percentage of podcast subscribers who are also podcasters

If you want to start tracking referrers statistics you can also make an educated guess (careful of those) on: percentage of podcasters that convert; percentage of podcast subscribers that convert. It’s worth noting that the more complex your page the higher the chance a visitor finds a barrier that “blocks” them, these have to be minimized: if they don’t want to tell you all that data, they don’t; if they are both a subscriber and a podcaster, no problem. Checkboxes work here, radio buttons would not. Small barriers, maybe, but a barrier non the less.

Maybe your product is aimed at podcasters more than subscribers, with the first template you could have 90% of email addresses owned by subscribers and never know. To have a list of 10,000 potential customers and on launch day find that only 1,000 are the slightest bit interested is very disappointing, not to mention if you know why a potential customer is interest you can speak to them in their language, e.g. telling a podcast subscriber about audio editing software aimed at podcasters is probably an unlikely convert, they don’t care about mixing levels, compressors, or microphones. They download the mp3.

Further more, if you’re building web applications you’re probably going to run a public beta. If you don’t already have a beta list why not include these users? They cared enough to give you their email address, they were the first people to sign up, they are probably early adopters… well, at one point. Web 2.0 has defaced the term “beta”. These days, I’d probably double check if a customer wants to beta test, possibly another option on your holding page?

Through whatever means, once you have the statistic that x% want to be beta testers, don’t use it as a one off. Beta test every release, allow this select group of customers pre-access, allow them to switch between the production & beta version of your web application.

Holding pages are just one aspect of registering interest. Wherever your copy says “coming soon”, or “at x time and y date”. Even if you can’t gather as much data about potential customers as possible that’s not an excuse not to at all. Start a Facebook Group. Register a Twitter account and allow people to follow you. Have a feed for them to subscribe to. In this day and age I think it’s just common good practice, don’t ask your customers to keep checking back, you’ll get back to them. Register their interest now, don’t increase your drop-off rate.

I’ve been tagged by Beth to participate in the Eight Random Things meme and while I’ve always ignored meme’s I’m going to participate just this once! The rules:

1. Let others know who tagged you.
2. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
3. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
4. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.

8 Random Things About Me

• I’m vegetarian, however I try and eat vegan while at home. I believe it’s far healthier, however I’m constantly considering going pescatarian when dining out to make life easier.
• I don’t read fiction. Ok, “don’t” is a strong word, I’ve read a handful of fiction books in my adult life and I only enjoyed one, 1984. Much prefer factual books.
• I once spoke languages, maybe not well, but given I lived around the world in my youth and have traveled a little in my time so far I’ve spoken; Arabic, Cantonese, Malay, Spanish, French, German, English, Mandarin. I remember none, but fully intent to learn some again.
• Without music I get depressed, usually within a week or two. It’s my drug of choice. Music on naff monitors drags the process out, I need my fix. It taught me the word Eargasm.
• Musical, most my friends will know I play guitar (RSI permitting) and once “sung” in a band learning on my own as I went. However, within the academic system (while about 6) I took grade 1 theory, violin, and piano. My teacher told me I shouldn’t carry on.
• I quit smoking by accident, twice. I chose to start again once, starting is a decision however quitting just seems to happen. I wake up one day and realize I’ve not smoked for a week. I never smoked much and currently don’t, I plan on keeping it that way.
• I own a nail kit. Most guys don’t, and it’s possibly the best birthday present I received many years ago. I took it to every gig I ever played.
• I have an anonymous Twitter account, for the topics of my life that most don’t care to share. You won’t find it, and if you follow me for web/business reasons it’d be inappropriate. I don’t give out the account details, try as you may.

Rule 4, tag 8 other people. So:

1. Relly AB
2. Paul Annett
3. Jenna Walker
4. Danny Hope
5. Rosie Sanger
6. Rebecca Cottrell
7. Jenifer Hanen
8. Stephanie King

… however, I’m not going to notify them as the rules stat. I don’t care about meme’s enough.

Pistach.io which I’m co-founder of with Aral Balkan is built on top of Amazon Web Services, so I watch what Amazon does. When this appeared over my feed reader this morning I have to admit I got a little over excited!

Jeff Barr posted on the official AWS blog, Storage Space, The Final Frontier, and by the code examples it looks similar to Elastic IP in that the storage is not [unless specified] linked with an instance. Smart! Together with Elastic IP, Availability Zones and currently unnamed persistent storage Amazon really provide a reliable, scalable hosting solution! Why wouldn’t a start up choose Amazon?

A quick search around the web and you’d think Google’s Application Engine announcement was Google taking aim at Amazon’s Web Services. While there maybe some cross-over, for the most part I don’t believe Google is taking aim at Amazon, but Facebook’s f8. I’d also like to point out that amongst all the news everyone seemed to forget about Microsoft’s SSDS, while not an application engine yet is a large part of the offering. Also missing are the startups, e.g. Zoho creator.

So, from the top…

Your phone is your social network.

If you don’t believe this in my opinion you’re mad, bonkers, a fruit cake. I carry my social network, my contacts, my friends in my pocket. I have access to them via voice, text/sms, and email from my iPhone. I had the same access on my Nokia N73 before that. Blackberrys do it, Skype does it, everyone does it. I’ll assume you do as well.

Enter Jaiku. For those that don’t know, Jaiku was acquired by Google on October 9th 2007, many people talk about Jaiku as a competitor to Twitter, Joi Ito described it as a ‘bunch of Helsinki mobile jocks getting into the Web 2.0 of it all whereas Twitter is the Web 2.0 crowd “getting” co-presence.’. The Jaiku vs Twitter discussion is for another time, but of relevance here is Jaiku’s J2ME client. Even while it was a battery sucking beast it proved it’s worth, it linked the online-ness of Jaiku into you phone contacts, synchronized and kept you updated.

p.s. this thinking makes all the ‘Sign into your Gmail/Facebook/Twitter to get contacts’ some what redundant, but we’ll wait for everyone to catch up. (oh, if you’re a J2ME guy/gal with time and are interested in that, ring me…)

The mobile platform, Android.

If the phone is your social network, what are companies doing? Well, the long and short of it is, not much. Sure, Facebook has possibly the best iPhone application in the market, and a mobile friendly version, however it’s not enough (and if you know of a mobile social network with traction please let me know). Contacts integration? Application platform? Oh, wait, yes, Android. I’ve not looked at Android, but I’m pretty sure it’ll allow contacts integration. Jaiku is moving to Google Application Engine, what about the mobile application? It’d make perfect sense to move it to Android as well.

… a summary in my theory so far…

• Contacts, integration of the new[er] thinking of ‘your phone is your social network’ with the worlds current thinking of ‘your mail client is your social network’. CHECK
• Data portability, see Contacts Data API. CHECK
• Mobile application platform, Android. CHECK
• Web application platform, Google Application Engine. CHECK
• Mobile & Web application platforms that are open as a platform and ecosystem, while solving a number of issues for entrepreneurs making adoption an easy process. CHECK
• A great demo application to show it all off, Jaiku. CHECK

Voila, an open application platform with more features than Facebook and I believe Google has more users then Facebook. I’ve not touched on OpenSocial, however isn’t this just Google taking a step back from OpenSocial and aiming for the bigger picture? e.g. Google Application Engine powers OpenSocial applications, that distribute onto all social networks.

p.s. no disrespect to Jyri Engeström and the Jaiku folks, Jaiku’s much, much more then a demo application.

The knowledge worker

Knowledge worker, a term coined by writer Peter Drucker in the late 50’s and related thinking summarized basically is: hire the top-notch, smartest, most efficient people you can find… put them together, and let rip. Good things will come.

I am a believer of the knowledge worker model and to quote my own Twitter, “API’s basically allow for the Knowledge Worker pattern to exist outside your business, while on-topic to your business”, so what does that mean for Google? They’re in the business of among other things, web applications, they’re opening their internals to the world via API allowing the world to build on-topic applications to their business (changing their famous 70/20/10 to 70/20/10/100). The proof in that is the launch of OpenID provider, built on Google Application Engine, in under 24 hours development.

Leaving notes

Many questions are unanswered, at least from an outsiders point of view. I’m sure I’ll post observations as and when, probably on Twitter. But, for now I’ll be thinking about:

• What does this mean for us? Among other things, that the first Google acquisition that runs on their Application Engine will be a notable event.
• How will Google Application Engine and Android integrate? Will they?
• Google Gears is mobile, no talk about integration yet. Maybe a Google Gears SQLite to GQL synchronization?
• Google Checkout integration. It’ll happen, follow the money…
• The google.appengine.api.urlfetch inside Application Engine fetchs URL’s, a long shot, but they could pump those straight into their Googlebot. Another way to boost their main business?
• Yahoo is embracing the Semantic Web, is this an attack on Yahoo? They’ll be a lot of semantic data in GQL. Mix that with Google Base.
• How’s users data ownership/privacy going to work across the board on this?

Please leave me your thoughts.

Wow, what a city! I didn’t really know what to expect from Beijing, the closest I came to China previously was living in Hong Kong, about 2000 km south of Beijing, and that was about 12 years ago! I’ve come away with two main views; it’s massive, it’s over-crowded.

The word massive just doesn’t do the size justice. Greater London is 1,577.3 km² vs Beijing’s Municipality 16,801.25 km², it’s just massive! Take the Forbidden City for example, it’s literally a city in a city! Or the Great Wall of China, it really is great, it’s vast, it’s never-ending!

And the over-crowdedness made me feel uneasy at times. I got the impression that jobs were been created as something to do in many instances, just keeping the population active when often there was no real need for said job. This seemed to breed an attitude of apathy to the surrounding world on many topic; self awareness, politics, social. It was as if an acceptance of mediocrity was present (a concept I personally struggle with), however when the alternative is the wrath of the CPC… but then, while in China I heard stories of entrepreneurs in Beijing and Shanghai who obviously don’t accept that mediocrity, and the current Tibetan protests happening is a very bold move, obviously not accepting the CPC, reminding me of lyrics from Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder they Come:

"But I’d rather be a free man in my grave, than living as a puppet or a slave"

That brings me onto the topic of censorship, for that reason alone I couldn’t work in China, ignoring any freedom of speech beliefs, I literally couldn’t work, sites we take for granted such as Wikipedia, blocked. Blocked by the Great Firewall of China.

I had planned to get together with some of Beijing’s web folk, however jet lag kindly canceled that for me. I also managed to sleep through Beijing Bloggers Dinner which was a shame. Next time. I did however make it to the CBGB’s of Beijing, D22, and also found the most amazing monk-run restaurant, Pure Lotus. Go to it, ’nuff said.

All in all though, I had a great time. Beijing has killed my somewhat poetic view of China established from the various China history books I collect, however walking through the Imperial Gardens while listening to Be Good Tanya’s did have a romantics, poetic ring - it certainly put a spring in my step and a smile on my face. I’m already looking forward to my next trip there, whenever it may be. Photos, as I’m sure you expected are on Flickr.

Plugg is over, it was the first of I’m sure many Plugg events to be held. Overall the event was great; organized well, wifi worked perfectly, fantastic venue, adequate food, etc. however I couldn’t help but feel an overall lack of direction while at the event. It flowed a bit like an amateur band… stopping between every song at a gig, that however didn’t stop it being a great event.

The numbers presented about the games industry in Max Niederhofer’s session were not what I expected at all, the market for flash games massively out-weights console games. I got a question in about Silverlight’s game capabilities, Max however isn’t a Silverlight expert (.. turns out he’s a hell-of-a WoWer though!)

Both the Entrepreneur & the Investor panels were interesting conversations with a number of good questions from the audience. It was great to meet Paul Fisher, he seems to know the advertising world like the back of his hand, days of conversations to be had there I’m sure!

From what I saw of the Start-Ups Rally sessions they worked well (although, I’m convinced there’s a better solution to collect the votes from the audience) which Viewdle won, while Zilok got the best audience rating. I also skipped most of Tom Raftery’s session ‘Radically reducing your IT carbon footprint’ fearing it would be similar to previous sessions of his, however the topic is very relevant and only becoming more-so.

Jet lag was starting to get the better of me and I needed to stand up to stay awake so got some “LobbyConning” in, which is always interesting, meeting a number of interesting folks.

Jet lag was really setting in so I never made it to the official after party, but not before enjoying dinner with a bunch of great folks. A big thank you to Robin Wauters for organizing Plugg.

Looks like I’m going, hopefully next week (still need to get Visa!), then back to Europe for Plugg. Just wondering if any of my readers have any “you’ve gotta” tips. I’m also interested in any web startups/networking in the area, that are happy for me to drop in and say “hi”.

Yes, I’m a work-a-holic, live with it!

Aral is one of Brighton’s resident flash/flex guru’s. He’s doing a intro course to flex. For more info, check his blog post on the topic. If Flash/Flex is your thing, tomorrow there is a Flash Brighton focusing on Framework Development, or check out Sussex Digital for more Brighton events.

(Disclaimer: Aral is my partner in crime working on Pistach.io)

I wrote this on August 15th, 2006 over on barenakedapp.com. Just republishing here so I’ve got a copy (orginal post).

In Amigo we’ve got percentage bars! This was the image that Jason came up with:

In turning this part of the design into something flexible on the website I saw two options; clever CSS, or ‘Lots of Images’. I decided that ‘Lots of Images’ was a bad idea:

• If they were generated in PHP you’ve got that extra overhead
• For each percentage bar you’d need to download another image - extra bandwidth & slower for the user
• Could get difficult for a designer to update (and, it’s an image after all)

… so clever CSS it is.

The Code

Okay, it’s not really that clever, it’s CSS not rocket science. It does however mean that no matter how many percentage bar’s will be displayed on the page the user will only need to wait for two images to be downloaded. I think it’s a nice solution that you might be interested in. Here’s the XHTML & CSS:

<img src="/images/percentImage.png" alt="9.5%" class="percentImage" style="background-position: -110.315px 0pt;" />
img.percentImage {
 background: white url(/images/percentImage_back.png) top left no-repeat;
 padding: 0;
 margin: 5px 0 0 0;
 background-position: 1px 0;
}

If you understand XHTML/CSS, you’ll see there’s two images involved. The first image is the border for the widget, inside of the border it’s transparent:

The second image is the bar’s color, split into two halves. The first 50% is the "full" color, the remaining 50% being the "empty" color:

What’s it doing

Notice, the alt attribute of the img tag (I’m with you Roger) is the percentage that the image represents for screen readers etc. - this is important information and we want to make sure it’s accessible!

The width of the img tag will always be the same regardless of the width of the background image we set in the CSS, knowing this we can position the background to the top left (as default) and set it not to repeat. The background-position is set to 1px so that the image fits within the border in the first image, however, we could make the image a little large if we wanted to.

The inline style handles what pecentage we want to display in the box by changing the position of the background-image. In our case a PHP script handles all the math for us (which is why it’s a little too exact, however I believe browsers will round that to the nearest pixel).

I’ll throw a few other thoughts out there for anyone interested in using this method:

• When inline styles become redundant in the XHTML standard
• Page Zoom (IE7) - how would that change the display of this widget

A few of you probably spotted the “What is” badge appear over on the right of the site, if you clicked it you’ll have learnt nothing, until that is last Monday the 4th of February. Aral announced with his blog post This is Singularity that Singularity is an online conference.

(Disclaimer: Aral and I are business partners working on Pistach.io)

I’ve known about Singularity for a few weeks now, and it’s sounding very impressive, no small fete & with some great speakers “over 100 of the world’s top web visionaries, developers, designers, thought leaders, and celebrities” [some of which haven't confirmed so I can't blog, but, wow]. If Singularity wasn’t on your radar, make sure it is!

Join the Facebook group, subscribe to the blog at Singularity08.com, it’s not one to miss! Here’s Aral being interviewed on the topic while at LIFT last week.

My good friend Ben told me about his workshop for non-geeks on Friday while at the weekly coworking. I think it is a fantastic idea, and if you know someone in the area that would benefit from an introduction to any of the following, let them know:

• How the web is changing
• Social Bookmarking
• Feeds (RSS)
• Blogging
• Collaboration
• Shared Calendars

I’ve worked with Ben in the past, and known him for nearly 10 years (… really that long already Ben?). I’ve been following him on Seesmic recently, much to my enjoyment, because he’s a thinker, and in-turn continually makes me think. I’m sure he can get your non-geeky friends thinking about what social media can do for them.

Sign up over at the Upcoming event, or check out Sussex Digital for more Brighton events.

MyBlogLog (acquired for $10m about a year ago by Yahoo!) is a nice idea. You include a small line of code on your site & it displays who your readers are. I won’t go into the stats you can collect from from doing something like that, but needless to say you can get a lot of information. It’s valuable information as well.

To your website visitors it provides social proof; that they are in the right place, that your content is worth reading, that their friends read your site. For you it provides reputation by association. But, it’s a lie.

• Visiting a site doesn’t make me a reader
• I don’t consider myself to be associated to someone because I read their blog
• By visiting a site, I don’t endorse it, or it’s content.

It’s not social proof, but it’s cleverly disguised as social proof. What’s more, I think people trust it as social proof.

p.s. screenshot of MyBlogLog’s widget nicked from Will McInnes’s blog. Few familiar faces in there; Nic Brisbourne, Ivan Pope to name a few. See, social proof?

p.p.s. with people moving from visiting sites to feed readers how valuable is it really? Google saw that, and with Google Reader & Feedburner need I say more…

p.p.p.s. without manually removing cookies from your browser there is no way to stop it tracking you (logging out won’t work)

You are an influencer.

When you blog, people listen. When you don’t like a product, share prices drop. You might speak at conferences and write books. You reach people. You are your own brand.

You have spent years building your reputation but reputation alone does not pay the rent. Now, you are looking for a way to monetize your blog or web site that enhances rather than tarnishes that reputation.

The last thing you want to do is fill your site with ads that annoy your loyal visitors and cheapen your image. And who has time to spend finding advertisers and negotiating rates?

You need a solution that just runs itself so you can concentrate on what you do best: writing, speaking, creating…

Welcome to Pistach.io: an exclusive ad network for people just like you.

Pistach.io has topical packs of web sites and blogs belonging to the top influencers in our industry so you will be in very good company. Each pack accepts a limited number of highly vetted advertisers and each site displays just one ad, by itself. The ads themselves are elegant and understated.

Pistach.io ads don’t shout their message; they whisper it.

Pistach.io is about to enter Beta with the Flash Pack, a group of top influencers from the Flash Platform.

To be alerted when Pistach.io launches, sign up at http://pistach.io.

If you feel that you belong in the Flash Pack, are interested in advertising on the Flash Pack, or have an idea for a new pack, email aral@pistach.io.