As attendees know, about 80% of the Gnomedex audience has a laptop open in front of them. Most of them (myself included) aren’t taking notes most of the time. So what are they doing?
At a couple of different times today, I walked around the back of the room, looked over people’s shoulders (from a, uh, respectful distance) and took a straw poll of what Gnomedex attendees seemed to be doing. These are the results:
Browsing random web page: 17
Coding or viewing terminal window: 11
Twitter: 11
Microsoft Outlook: 9
Microsoft Word: 8
Google Reader: 6
iPhoto: 5
Gmail: 5
Flickr: 5
Google Search: 4
Facebook: 4
Blogging: 3
Skype: 1
Pownce: 1
A couple of weeks ago, thanks to Christine, I discovered Rouxbe, a great-looking recipe site with really slick videos. More importantly, I showed it to the chef and gourmand in our family, Julie.
She signed up for the trial membership, and remarked that Rouxbe’s was “the most graceful sign up process I’ve ever seen.” Subsequently I’ve been the lucky recipient of several Rouxbe-powered meals. Tonight we had pan-fried dott (possibly the Maltese word for ‘halibut’) with a cilantro orange cumin dressing and rockin’ Moroccan couscous.
A while back I watched a Rouxbe video to learn the correct method of shelling (shucking? skinning?) prawns. I was super-impressed by the broadcast quality of the videos–it’s some of the best I’ve seen on the web.
You can’t embed their videos (which isn’t ideal nor surprising, as they’re widescreen), but I did find this little trailer on YouTube:
Julie’s sold, and is going to sign up for a year’s subscription. 15% of the US $49 yearly fee goes to feed children in developing nations. Don’t have the forty-nine bucks? They’ll try and find you a sponsor:
It works like this. You tell us what interests you have in the food and culinary world. We try and match you up with a sponsoring company that will pay your way on Rouxbe…
But wait, isn’t this just an ad? Here’s the difference. There are no large or expanding banner ads, no 15 or 30 second ads before or during the content and no pop-ups on Rouxbe. Remember, at Rouxbe the food is the celebrity. This will never change. We promise. Sponsors get to put their logo on the page and are able to provide links to their offerings, but our goal is that these links will be contextual to you and will never interfere with your cooking experience on Rouxbe.
Hey Rouxbe, if you need someone to help you with blogger outreach and online marketing, drop us a line. You’re the sort of company we love to work for.
Pownce is this month’s Twitter killer. From Wikipedia:
Pownce is a web service facilitating the transfer of messages, similar to an email or instant messaging system. It is possible for users to send messages, links, files and events to other contacts using the service.
Twitter wasn’t sticky for me, but I’ve got to keep track of what the cool kids are up to. So now I’m trying Pownce. Thanks to Tod, who invited me, I have six invitations to dispense.
And yes, Pownce reminds me to ‘ponce‘ (and, thus, ‘nonce‘), too.
Mister Wong is YASBS (yet another social bookmarking site) based in Germany. From the email pitch I received:
What makes Mister Wong standout from other Social Bookmarking sites is that every language has its own portal and database.
I’m having difficulty seeing the real advantage of this. Mister Wong doesn’t prevent me from adding foreign-language bookmarks–it just segregates the Chinese users from the Russian ones. Maybe there’s more language crossover problems than I thought?
There’s nothing in the app to move me away from Magnolia, but it looks pretty good .
In any case, if you want invitations to either of these services, let me know.
UPDATE: All the Pownce invites are gone. I asked a couple of invitees to subsequently invite a couple of people lower down on the comment list.
As you may know, Webware has been running this big ‘best of Web 2.0 applications’ competition over the past month or so. Yesterday, they announcedthe winners.
I was curious to browse through the winners (all 100 of them, which seems a tad excessive), and learn about those I hadn’t heard of before:
Cha Cha - Human assisted search (you chat with an apparent search expert who helps you find what you’re looking for).
Gaia Online - Online community and MMPORG for teens. Interestingly, at the moment, they have about two-thirds the number of users online that Second Life does, or did at this time yesterday (21K compared to 35K).
Stardoll - Dress up avatars–virtual version of the old paper doll kits. Popular, presumably, with the pre-teen and teen girls (and, no doubt, a few adults recapturing the dress-up days of yore).
Revision3 - Hosts a bunch of online shows, most notably Diggnation.
PollDaddy - Free polls for your blog or social network profile.
UPDATE: On a unrelated note, here’s 25 more web apps, many of which I hadn’t heard of. I immediately gravitated to BuzzDash and Swivel for the cool charts.
My step-mother is an avid painter, quilter and traveller, and she’s got lots of photos she wants to share with friends and family. “Friends and family”–remember those words.
For a Normal Human, she’s got decent aptitude with her PC. She worked with them in the latter part of her career, and she’s pretty skillful with the usual set of desktop apps. I got her set up with a Flickr account, and as you can see, she’s been uploading photos, adding descriptions, organizing them into groups and so forth. She mostly figured all that out on her own–she and Flickr can share the credit for that, I think.
Last week, my step-mother sent me an email saying that when she sent her photos to her friends, they could never see them. She wondered if she was maybe sending her friends the wrong URL or something.
After a little investigation, I figured out what the issue was. When she uploaded the photos, she was quite naturally selecting the ‘Private: Visible to Friends’ and ‘Visible to Family’ check boxes. This is total rational behaviour. After all, that’s her audience for the photographs.
Of course, in Flickr land, users need to have accounts and my step-mother needs to identify them as ‘friends’ or ‘family’ before they can view such photos. That’s pretty obvious to those of us who work with Web apps on a daily basis, but we’re only, like, 5% of the general population. Notably, in the pop-up help related to privacy, Flickr doesn’t indicate any of this.
I’m not trying to impugn Flickr or my step-mother here (she gave me her permission to blog about this little use case). I guess this is a little lesson in assumptions, and how web developers need to take care not to make too many.
More and more non-geeks are using these sophisticated sharing and collaboration online tools, which feature a whole schwack of new paradigms for people to understand. The web app needs to be many things to many people. It has to get out of the way of the expert user who’s ready to run, and it has to offer a hand to those taking their first tentative steps.
As attendees know, about 80% of the Gnomedex audience has a laptop open in front of them. Most of them (myself included) aren’t taking notes most of the time. So what are they doing?
