Archive: Posts about Web 2.0
April 29th, 2009, 1 Comment »
There are few blogs (and link blogs) that I’ve been reading longer than Andy Baio’s. He’s superb at finding the web’s weird and wonderful stuff before anybody else does, and is a passionate documenter of the web history. He also, as it happens, created Upcoming.org.
Yesterday he launched announced a new project: Kickstarter. From the announcement post on his site:
Kickstarter aims to let creative people of all kinds — journalists, artists, musicians, game developers, entrepreneurs, bloggers — raise money for their projects by connecting directly with fans, who receive exclusive access and rewards in exchange for their patronage. Like Josh Freese and Jill Sobule, the site allows creators to have multiple tiers of rewards (e.g. $20 for the book, $50 for signed copy) with optional limits for each.
It’s a terrific example of spotting something that people are doing in an ad hoc basis, and creating a site to formally organize and enable that behaviour. It takes a ton of deep observation and insight, I think, to identify these opportunities. Here’s a list of early projects.
I’m not sure how I might use it in the future, but I’ve squatted my namespace, just to be on the safe side.
UPDATE: I misunderstood Andy’s role in the project. He’s an adviser to Kickstarter and sits on its board, but he didn’t create it.
1 Comment »
March 10th, 2009, 4 Comments »
For a while, I’ve been banging on about the question of what happens to your digital assets once you’re gone. Today, via LIVEdigitally, I encountered Legacy Locker, which promises to solve that problem:
Legacy Locker is a safe, secure repository for your digital property that lets you grant access to online assets for friends and loved ones in the event of death or disability.
Of course, for the process to work, Legacy Locker itself has to outlive its users.
4 Comments »
October 19th, 2008, 4 Comments »
Anyone paying attention to the web over the past five years ago is aware of the rise of crowd-sourcing and all its permutations. Whether it’s the amateur editors at Wikipedia or zillions of reviews on Amazon, it’s become commonplace to rely upon the wisdom of crowds.
I do this all the time. Before going to the cinema, I consult aggregated reviews at Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. When booking holidays, we’ll check hotel reviews on Travelocity or Expedia. And when I want to dip my toes into what the web’s talking about, I visit popurls or Techmeme or twitt(url)y.
We Need a Lot of Stuff
As regular readers know, we’re building a house. And, as you might expect, that house is going to need a lot of stuff: fridge, stove, dishwasher, TV, stereo, washer/dryer, etc. No matter how you slice it, the cost of this stuff adds up.
So how to choose the right stove or television? We’re pretty ignorant on this front, and I don’t fancy visiting a ton of showrooms. We could rely on the wisdom of crowds, but in this case, that seems a bit insufficient. Instead, we’ve bought a subscription to Consumer Reports. My family has relied on this publication on and off for as long as I can remember. I can picture the photocopied and highlighted pages, complete with dense little graphs, that would kick around my father’s desk.
It’s $25 a year for a subscription to the Consumer Reports website, but really it’s $25 for piece of mind. I’ll still google for opinions of the stove or TV we choose, but I’ll do so with the experts’ opinions in my back pocket.
I guess, at the end of the day, I can’t place all of my trust in the crowd.
4 Comments »
August 28th, 2008, No Comments »
On Twitter, Marshall just pointed to Tag Galaxy, a super-slick and fun new way to browse Flickr photos by tag. You enter a tag and it renders that tag as a sun, with a bunch of related tags orbiting it:
Add a new tag and it drills down into all of the photos and related tags that share those two tags. Finally, when you’re sufficiently happy with the filtering, click on the sun itself and it lays all of the photos on the surface of the sun…planet…er…heavenly body:
You can then manipulate the sphere, spinning it to browse using the scroll wheel to zoom. I’m not sure how practically useful it is, but it’s sure fun to play with. It’s kind of graphically-intensive, and brought my old Windows PC to a crawl. It was quite speedy, however, on my MacBook.
On a related note, Waxy just linked to WolfenFlickr 3D, which uses Castle Woflensteing 3-D, an old-school first-person shooter, as a Flickr browser.
No Comments »
August 25th, 2008, No Comments »
Reminded by Rebecca’s post, I wanted to post two quick notes about the forthcoming BarCamp Vancouver:
- We only have two sponsor slots left. If you’ve got $500 burning a hole in your company’s pocket, please consider sponsoring BarCamp.
- If I can get enough bodies, I’m going to run a hockey pool this season. The draft will be at The Backstage Lounge on Granville Island immediately following BarCamp, starting at 5:30pm sharp. For more details and to sign up, visit this page on the BarCamp wiki. I know there’s a reasonably small convergence of geeks and sports fans, but hopefully we can scare up 10 or 15. Non BarCampers welcome, of course.
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August 12th, 2008, 9 Comments »
When you spend as much time as I do exploring the shiny and the brand new in the technology world, it’s easy to forget that the middle of the bell curve is receding into the distance. I sometimes get frustrated when Normal Humans, who (quite legitimately) don’t know any better, make poor decisions about their web presence.
Take, for example, the Victoria Fringe’s website. It’s nicely-designed, and accommodates almost all of my Fringe-going needs. There’s one glaring exception: the online schedule. They appear to have just converted the offline, hard copy schedule into HTML and dumped it on the site.
As you can see, it’s sorted by venue. There’s one page for each location where shows are running. That’s possibly a reasonable option for the printed schedule. On the other hand, it may be evidence of a classic information design mistake, where the designer chooses a structure that fits their needs instead of their users’. After all, the Fringe sorts its volunteers, technicians and shows by venue. You’d expect Fringe organizers to think of the schedule in those terms, too.
However, users may want to browse or search the show listings in different ways:
- They may only be in town for a couple of days, so they only want to see shows for a particular date range.
- They may only want to see comedies.
- They may only want to see shows from out of town. All things being equal, traveling performers tend to produce better shows.
- They may want to search for performers they’ve seen in previous years (either by the performer’s name or, for bonus points, by the titles of old shows).
Happily, this is a problem that the geeks have already solved. We can think of each show listing as ’structured data’–each listing (or database record, if you like) has an expected series of values–show title, performers’ names, venue, dates, times and so forth. It’s really easy to host this information in a database and display it so that it’s easy to browse, sort and search.
I’m not sure about front-ends for these, but free database services like Google Base or Dabble DB would be a natural place to start. Even if the user interface was a little clunky in the first year, or a little messy to look at, I’m betting it would be an improvement on the current approach.
The problem, of course, is that this looks like a hard problem for a Normal Human. We need more Common Crafts, who are expert explainers of the new.
9 Comments »
August 12th, 2008, 7 Comments »
The reknowned SXSW Interactive Festival uses crowd-sourcing to sort through their speaker submissions. They publish all their submissions in an interactive ‘panel picker’ and encourage the public to vote on the talks they want to see.
As you can see by the pie chart on this page, the voting is worth 30% of the total selection process.
On Twitter, Boris suggested that we ought to organize a Vancouver ‘vote for my panel, I’ll vote for yours’ squad of voting keeners. So, here it is. Leave your panel names and URLs in the comments, and I’ll add them to the bulleted list below. Vote for the ones that sound good, the people you like, or just randomly until you come down off the drugs.
UPDATE: Er, hang on, Dave beat me to it with an enormous post. If you don’t see your panel over there, feel free to add it both places.
7 Comments »
July 27th, 2008, 7 Comments »
As regular readers know, we’re writing this book about social media marketing. I’m currently working on the chapter on social news and bookmarking. As part of my research, I’m gathering some real-world numbers about Digg, and just how big the Digg Effect actually is.
To that end, I’m running a survey. Has your site ever been ‘Dugg’? That is, has it ever been featured on the front page of Digg, and suffered a torrent of visitors as a result?
If so, please consider taking three minutes and filling out this very short survey.
Site Crashes Welcome
It requires you to look in your stats program (Google Analytics or whatever), and determine just how many visitors arrived from Digg on the day you were Dugg. I’m also asking for the URL of the page on your site that was Dugg, to confirm each entry. If you don’t know how to do this, send me an email and I’ll explain.
As an example, Get a First Life was Dugg on January 21, 2007 and received 10,829 visitors from Digg.
I plan to publish the results (though not your name or email address, obviously) on this site and possibly in the book. So you’re disclosing this data point for the world to see.
It’s okay if your site crashed–I’m interested in how many visitors you actually captured and reported in Google Analytics or your stats program of choice.
UPDATE: I’m only going to accept five submissions per website, to ensure one particular topic or site doesn’t bias the results too much.
And There’s a Prize
As an enticement, one lucky submitter will receive one of the brand-new iPod Shuffles I’ve got kicking around the house. They’ve become a common speaker gift, so I’ve got two or three of them at the moment. I probably won’t get more than 20 or 30 submissions, so your odds of winning are excellent.
If you don’t want the Shuffle, I’ll give $50 to the charity of your choice.
7 Comments »
July 24th, 2008, 2 Comments »
In the early years of Capulet, as with most businesses, we said ‘yes’ to nearly everything (we did refuse the mail order bride project). For the past couple of years, we’ve had the luxury of being selective about who we take on. These days we have to decline most enquiries because we’re too busy.
We obviously try to choose winners and avoid those companies that give us a queasy feeling in our stomach. But it’s nice every once in a while to take on a client who’s social goals really align with my own. DreamBank happens to be one of those.
Long time readers may recall this 2003 blog post about how I’ve come to think about gifts:
On a more ascetic level, I have so much stuff already. So does everybody else in my family (with the exception, perhaps, of my more ascetic brother, and he doesn’t want anything). I have more difficulty creating a wishlist for myself than I do choosing gifts for other people (with the exception, perhaps, of the aforementioned Spartan brother). This isn’t humility on my part, it’s just a lack of wanting things. Particularly things that I don’t choose for myself. I suppose I should just ask everyone to give me vouchers for travelling. Hmm…that’s not a bad idea.
DreamBank is a Vancouver start-up with a mission that addresses this issue. Here’s the elevator pitch:
DreamBank.org is about helping dreams come true and doing it in a way that helps the planet and important social causes. Instead of giving gifts that, although appreciated may not really be wanted, with DreamBank you contribute to someone’s dream. As well as helping fulfill a dream, your contribution helps spare the planet some of the nasty side effects of manufacturing and packaging unused gifts. Plus your gift automatically generates funds that are given to important social causes.
It’s essentially collaborative giving with a charity angle. Or, if you prefer, a gift registry for everything. Here are a few sample dreams:
It’s a charming idea, and we’re pleased to be helping them with their online marketing. We’ve been blogging up a storm on their site, and running a fun outreach campaign to local bloggers. Plus we had a fun launch party at a French bistro.
2 Comments »
July 23rd, 2008, 3 Comments »
As you’ve probably heard, Google Knol launched publicly today. It’s considered a more or less direct competitor to Wikipedia, as it permits anybody to author an article on pretty much anything. It doesn’t have the same degree of ‘wiki’ collaboration as Wikipedia, though–it’s more about individual experts. From the Google blog:
The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good.
With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call “moderated collaboration.” With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it!
What’s the marketing angle? In the coming days, I anticipate a great land grab as people author ‘knols’ on topics that matter to them. They’re going to permit multiple knols, but I anticipate something of a first-mover advantage. If Google Knol takes off (and odds are that it will), then it’s probably a good idea to write a knol on a topic in which you’re an expert. Knols may not be direct traffic drivers, but they may help cement your expertise in the space.
Julie and I put together a knol on social media marketing. It needs work, but I think it’s a satisfactory start. If you have the time, please consider rating, reviewing, editing or commenting on it.
And now I must try to resurrect my blog on Google Knol.
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