I’ve Said Too Much

I’m off to Australia for three weeks, so won’t be posting here. To avoid drowning under a deluge of Cialis offers I’m also turning off comments while I’m away, so if you’ve a burning urge to tell me something email me at lloyd[at]lllj[dot]net. Have a great Easter.

So, here is Yahoo!’s blog play, at last. Not Six Apart or LiveJournal or anything - just a very nice looking in-house platform that seems to intelligently combine Yahoo!’s best elements. Two things look particularly interesting: Blast, which allows you to share “an idea, a question, an attitude, or a Web link”; and full integration with Yahoo! Music’s excellent personal radio facility.

And the word “blog” is very, very low key.

Love this story: in 2001, the people behind Eyetools Research did a survey on the E-Trade home page. The full story is here: Wasting money on content in Visual Dead Zones. They tested just four people. From this test they added sheer gibberish into the above-the-fold real estate which had been flagged up as dead space on those four tests. Then they inserted gibberish into the dead space.

Examples of the gibberish tested on E*Trade’s homepage:

• FDIC distrusts us * No Bank Quality * Will Lose Value
• Not ready to event an insurance? Tax group of our manager discussion free of funds.
• Get $25 to close an E*Trade Bank Money Market Plus Advice! Tax a gear cool and ATM access!
• …and more

Then, we re-tested the modified homepage in the lab. As a secondary test, we also sent it out to a bunch of people who we didn’t eyetrack. After people had seen the page while evaluating whether they were interested in signing up for E*Trade’s services, we asked them if there was anything strange about the homepage. Only 1 in 25 people noticed!

I wonder if you could ever take an average of the amount of dead space above the fold on home pages across the Web? And then work out what it’s costing to serve all that dead space? If we filled it or used it, what would Internet economics then look like?

(Via Eyetools Research.)

Thanks again to Joho for some timely note-taking - this time his notes from the morning session with Rael Dornfest and Tim O’Reilly:

Net applications are never done. Therefore, release features incrementally. Perpetual beta.

Let users add value to shared data. But only a small percentage of users will add value. Therefore, make participation the default, aggregating user data as a side-effect of their using your application. (E.g., Flickr’s default is make your photos public.)

PCs are not the only networked device. Therefore, design your app from the get-go to integrate across multiple platforms.

All three of those things should go into some kind of n commandments for Web 2.0, don’t you think?

(Via Joho the Blog.)

It’s etech this week, and as I’m not there I’m reliant on the efforts of others to track it (this is in itself an interesting experience, like watching a massively distributed real-time interactive play). So thanks to Joho for writing up “four guys from the BBC” (including Matts Biddulph and Webb, and Tom Coates) talking about reinventing radio:

Now they want to go further. They want the individual to get value from their contribution, the contributions should provide value to others, and so should the BBC. The BBC should, they say, be more like a participant than ‘an overarching Sauron’s eye.’ They talk about a demo that allows you to use your phone to bookmark songs that you like. ‘We’re not immune to fashion’ so they let users tag the songs. Then they get a folksonomy going. And you should be able to do ‘group listening’: See what your friends are listening to, listen along with them, interact in ways that support the shared experience, and schedule future interactions.

Exciting and interesting if the BBC did this - it’s very similar to last.fm which, round here, is official The Best Web Service In The World. They need money. The BBC has money (they sent four people to etech for this one presentation, for a start). Need I say more?

(Via Joho the Blog.)

currybetdotnet has a beautiful post on the differences between h2g2 and Wikipedia which I strongly recommend you read, and which includes this typically astute point:

h2g2 offers more of a closed model, with an enforced registration system before users can participate, but even so Wikipedia is an interesting contrast to the BBC approach to community spaces online. Over the last couple of years in our social spaces we have only gradually been able to make a move towards firstly the post-moderated model, then to the reactively moderated model. h2g2 was one of the first (if not the first - my memory doesn’t serve me so well here) BBC online social space to have a community trusted with reactive moderation.

He also points out the essential copyright difference between the two services: on Wikipedia, nothing is “owned” by an original author, whereas on h2g2 the original content is very much owned by the original author. In that, it’s fascinating to see how the two things have evolved differently; and important to point out that both need preserving. Wikipedia doesn’t replace the need for h2g2.

(Via currybetdotnet - search : web : media : politics.)

Interesting article from OJR, Social networks: All around the Net, but underused by news sites, which points out how little “networking” is going on on news sites, and how some firms (most recently, Washington Post’s experiment with Tribe.Net) are starting to put their toes in the water:

‘The question is … is it already too late? Content distribution is gravitating toward feeds, and feed readers are integrating social networking. Newspaper sites might be able to integrate SN via FOAF, or similar open frameworks, but the likelihood of a consumer inviting 30 friends to a newspaper site seems … remote,’ said Gentile.

Right now, I have a feeling Gentile is right. ‘People who read this story also read … ‘. It doesn’t work for me. But there’s no reason why it shouldn’t.

Every subject under the sun has a history; likewise every subject under the sun has news. For dating, it’s the hot new singles bar; for cinema, it’s the latest releases and their reviews. Can’t newspapers develop as a node that taps into people’s desire to network, by sharing interests and information across all topics? Can newspapers open their pages to readers and seed the conversation with content they already produce? (see sidebar, some imaginative speculation).

Whether newspapers can effectively deploy social network technologies, and what effect they may have, are moot points. But according to Yahoo News’ Budde, one thing is sure:

‘Social networks are going to continue to evolve, and all the media need to pay attention to it.’”

I certainly don’t agree with that last point - the media need to do a lot more than “pay attention.” But also what this ignores is to what extent news media are already a factor in “social networking.” Look at the most popular links on Technorati - a great many of them are news stories. If you’ve got permanence and if your archive’s as open as possible, you’ve got a really good chance to be a big voice in the conversation inside a social network. You don’t need to create a network of your own to do that. The trick is reflecting that conversation inside your own pages; that’s the “new” thing that open protocols allow us to do. People have always discussed news at dinner parties; it doesn’t mean that newspapers need to organise their own dinner parties.

(Via Online Journalism Review.)

There’s a very interesting thought experiment over at Kuroshin, What’s a Downloaded Episode Worth?, which seeks to discover how much people would be prepared to pay for a single 60 minute episode of a TV show downloaded off the Net:

“Over the last few days I’ve been collecting information about what people would shell out for a pay-per-episode (not pay-per-view) series. Compared to four years ago when I last pondered this question, people seem much more willing to spend a little to get good entertainment, which in itself is a massive shift of opinion. But in the process of gathering this data, I think I may have discovered that you can only ever charge $1 for anything online, no matter how much it costs to make…”

Go and read it, it makes some really interesting points. But I think the really interesting point about pay-per-view is not “how much does it cost” but “how much am I aware that a financial transaction has taken place?”. Why is it that people are prepared to pay 25p for 160 characters of SMS alert or several quid for a ringtone, but balk at paying 60p for a newspaper of three quid for a CD single?

Two reasons: convenience, and what I shall call “masked commerce.” Convenience is obvious, masked commerce less so. The fact is that when I purchase something via my mobile I’m effectively unaware that money has changed hands. I don’t really become aware of it until my mobile bill arrives. This is dramatically different to a normal Web e-commerce transaction, where I have to get out my credit card, tap in all the details, confirm what I want, receive an email confirmation, etc. etc. I’m massively aware of the financial transaction and thus become highly price sensitive.

iTunes gets this. Once I’ve put my credit card in the system, it’s just too damn easy for me to buy a song or an album - the system even coyly asks me if I really want to be reminded every time I buy something, wouldn’t life just be easier if it didn’t pester me with these alerts? Because without the alerts, I could blissfully buy buy buy and it would all be, right now and in the present, free. Of course, until the credit card arrives. But then it’s too late, isn’t it?

Never underestimate the power of human self-deception in commercial matters.

Just a couple of quick thoughts on the new customisation feature on Google News, released today (on the UK as well as the U.S. version, it’s nice to see):

They called it “customisation” not “personalisation”, and they take no personal data at all off me. Back in the day, grabbing user data was the only reason for doing something like Google has done. Today, it’s enough to say you’ll create traffic and frequency of visit (at least, I guess that’s how they justify it in business terms).

You can select by topic area or by search term, but you can’t select by news source. There are surely very good reasons for this (like they’d probably get sued), but it just makes the whole service look a lot less great than an RSS reader.

According to SiliconBeat, Microsoft has a working version of an RSS aggregator up on its MSN sandbox:

A disclaimer at the bottom of the aggregator Web page says: ‘This site is not an officially supported site. It is an incubation experiment and doesn’t represent any particular strategy or policy.” Note: It seems to work best (only?) on Windows IE. You won’t see much if you view it in Firefox.

They’re not wrong. In any browser you need to click “start” to get things going, but in Firefox you just get some messy HTML. In IE, you get an interface where you can add feeds and choose from existing feeds in categories like Business, Entertainment and News. When you’ve added a feed you get a very nice DHTML interface allowing you to expand or collapse particular items. In fact, this is the most Google-like, usable interface I’ve seen from MSN. It’s fast, too. No community or sharing stuff on there, though.

(Via SiliconBeat.)

Eyetools has put up a very interesting picture: an Eyetracking heatmap for Google search results.

(Via Eyetools Research.)

Update to my post about eBay - the far more informed PaidContent.org has this to say:

“Think of them as a quasi-Craigslist rather than the print classified model. eBay spokesman Hani Duzy told Reuters the company’s 25-percent interest in Craigslist is doing in the U.S. what Kijiji is designed to do abroad.

Newspapers aren’t laying back. Reuters also brings up Craigslist look-alike Tribe.net’s efforts to transform its social networking sites into ‘local resource and classified-ad services’ backed with $6.3 million from Knight Ridder, the Washington Post Co. and VC firm Mayfield.”

Wow. That kind of investment from dead-tree media really does suggest something interesting going on.

(Via PaidContent.org.)

I’m getting very interested in rollable displays and where they might be taking us. In fact, I’m sort of confused that more people aren’t interested in this. It feels like it might be an elephant in the room of distributed digital content. So this on PaidContent from a MocoNews.net article by James Pearce was interesting:

Philips Electronics has announced the development of a display with a five inch diagonal that can be rolled into a tube of 7.5 mm. It has also claimed the display uses an ‘exceptionally’ low amount of power, making it ideal for mobile devices. While this won’t directly affect mobile content development, a quick look at the screen to the right shows that browsing the internet and watching images will be a whole lot better. If the display is flexible I don’t know how well it would do for games, but this technology will definitely change the way people create content for mobile devices.”

And for me that picture is a bit of a Damascus moment. A screen that rolls out like that from a phone makes a lot of physical sense, at least to me.

(Via PaidContent.org.)

OK, it had to happen, and now it has: eBay is launching classified ad sites: “Online auction house eBay opens classified advertising sites to find new ways to help maintain profit growth.”

But how they’re doing it seems interesting: they’re launching the service in Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, under a different (and rather odd) brand, Kijiji. Apparently the sites launched on February 28, so you probably already know all this.

Kijiji isn’t coming up on Google as an eBay service (although the news story does), though I did learn that kijiji means “small village” in Swahili, which is rather intriguing when you think about it. And the Canadian site (kijiji.ca) is only French-language, which confirms that eBay have avoided the English-speaking market with this. I wonder why? Is this a land grab?

The page itself makes no mention of eBay at all, and is very lo-fi in terms of design (a nod to Craigslist, perhaps?). My limited French enables me to translate the introductory text as: “Welcome to the beta version of Kijiji. Use Kijiji to communicate with your community. You’ll find everything you need - accommodation, furniture, jobs, perhaps even friends. There’s lot more and it’s all free!”

There’s only half a dozen posts on the Montreal version’s forum. They include “Post something here to get things started - Ebay needs MORE”, “English people are here too - where’s the English site?” (why do English speakers always assume an English-language version of something is obligatory?), “This service is lame” and the possibly perspicacious “Goes after Craigslist’s jugular!”

(Via BBC News | Technology | UK Edition.)

More from the mighty brain of Jon Udell, this time on why Google Maps really is revolutionary :

When I finished making the interactive version of my neighborhood tour, along with a screencast, it was clear that Google Maps is every bit as revolutionary as my first instincts told me. Not because Google invented a new geospatial engine or compiled better data. They didn’t. But simply — and yet profoundly — because Google Maps is a framework we can all use to annotate the physical world.

In the very near future, billions of people will be roaming the planet with GPS devices. Clouds of network connectivity are forming over our major cities and will inevitably coalesce. The geoaware Web isn’t a product we buy; it’s an environment we colonize. There will always be markets for proprietary data. But the real action will be in empowering people to create their own services, with their own data, for their friends, family, and business associates. Google Maps isn’t just a service, it’s a service factory.

Radical openness is the key. It’s been only two weeks since it launched and already the colonization has begun. Thanks to open XML data formats and open Web programming interfaces, people have figured out how to animate routes, create custom routes with their own GPS data, and display GPS data in real time.

Microsoft could have enabled these same kinds of things years ago. Its TerraServer has been up and running since 1998. But despite Steve Ballmer’s infamous monkey-dance chant, developers haven’t flocked to TerraServer. What’s Google’s secret? Web DNA and no Windows tax. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

Web DNA. Windows tax. Not just a service, a service factory. These are all phrases I’m going to be using again and again and again, I feel.

(Via Jon’s Radio.)

Steve Rubel is picking up on an idea from Nick Denton, who is asking readers to send him links via del.icio.us.

Meanwhile, I am getting overwhelmed with reader mail. Don’t get me wrong, I love hearing from you, but many of these are just link/PR pitches. I am going to try this approach. I ask from here on in that you please pitch me only via del.icio.us unless I already correspond regularly with you. I am doing this not only to cut down my mail but to make the PR pitching process transparent so that everyone can see what I blog/don’t blog. This will hopefully make those who pitch me better at what they do.

So, if you want me to take a look at something to link/comment on, please post it to del.icio.us with the tag ‘micropersuasion’ and include your pitch in the extended entry.

Not sure that’s entirely in the spirit of del.icio.us, but it’s an interesting re-use of the core idea nonetheless.

(Via Micro Persuasion.)

Jon Udell’s screencasts are one of the wonders of the personal publishing Web, and I’ve just watched one of his best, on the on-demand blogosphere. It’s the best exposition of the power of the distributed networks created by blogs and tagging that I’ve seen, and I’ll be using it in internal presentations a lot, I think. It’s also very good on what the next level of RSS should be: an integrated system showing who’s written about what and how it relates to the item I’m reading right now. Udell’s basically hacked a system to do this for himself (hacked very elegantly, I might add); if someone comes up with a service that does this, it’ll pull a lot more people into its orbit.

(Via Jon Udell.)

Pagesauce: “Pagesauce.com invites web developers to convert big sites — like NYTimes.com or Yahoo.com — into a more modern XHTML + CSS approach.”

Nice idea - I suppose it’s just ironic I can’t work out how to find an individual site on there. Wanted to see if anyone had done us!

(Via Google Blogoscoped.)

A blast from the future: Philips says it’s going to be producing e-paper in earnest, and that full-on commercial production is only two years away.

Just when you think you’ve mastered websites….

This is interesting: according to David Weinberger, the New York Times is going to make synsopses of its stories available as a means of promoting its paid-for archives (read Weinberger’s post here:

The NY Times famously moves stories from their original links to new ones in the for-pay archive after a week. As a result, important stories exit the public sphere, and the newspaper of record becomes the newspaper of broken links. [See 'Note on Links' at end.] So, starting in April, NYTimes.com is going to publish thousands of topic pages, each aggregating the content from the 10 million articles in its archive, going back to 1851, including graphics and multimedia resources. [NOTE: They are not opening their archive. The content will likely be descriptions created for the Times Index; you'll still have to pay to see articles in the archive.] Topics that get their own page might include Boston, Terrorism, Cloning, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Condoleeza Rice. News stories will link to these topic pages. And - the Times must hope - these pages, with their big fat permanent addresses, may start rising in Google’s rankings.

Weinberger neatly elucidates the problems with this strategy so go and read what he has to say.