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@media Ajax 2007

I have the honour and terror of presenting at @media Ajax on home turf this November. It's a privilege to be speaking alongside the likes of Brendan Eich (creator of Javascript), Douglas Crockford (inventor of JSON), John Resig (JQuery lead) and about a dozen other top dogs.

In a lineup like that I clearly can't talk about nuts and bolts Javascript. Instead I'm taking a slightly unusual tack for me: revelations. Since Ajax came along my job has changed in ways I wouldn't have predicted. Technically I'm a flavour of designer yet after many years of specialising I've found myself having to skill up again.

To keep a handle on what the rest of the team produce I've become a testing fanatic;
I've had to go back and relearn how to program - not to necessarily produce back-end code but to understand what the real implications of my design decisions are;
I've been converted to Agile practices as a means of effective collaboration.

None of these things are traditionally within the remit of 'design' but they all feed into producing a successful app. To try and describe these changes and what I've done about them I will be presenting But I'm a Bloody Designer! on the first day, straight after the keynote by the Ajaxians.

So, the lineup's great, it's in London. @media Ajax: coming soon. Say hello if you decide to come...

Etech is over

Etech is over and a great time was had by all. Our presentation was dogged by technical difficulties that meant I ended up using old slides but everyone seemed to enjoy it regardless. With hindsight I think Charles and I should have been more clear with our objectives: the talk wasn't about collective intelligence per se but rather complexity and how that effects interface decisions... Still, I really enjoyed speaking and we had loads of interesting conversations off the back of it.

And that brings me on to the most important aspect of eTech - the conversations. I've never found that many sharp people gathered together in one place before. Every person I met seemed to have some combination of skills outside of the norm and brought unique perspectives to bear on every topic. Here are some examples:

I chatted with Timo from Nature about getting academia more involved in sharing knowledge and community building, something he's been doing for a while and I've been talking about with my friend Chris at the EES.

Charles and I talked to a chap called Karl from the Rockefeller Institute about socio-political development, the evolution of civilisations, the long tail of micro-cultures and weak signal detection.

We spent an afternoon with Peter Biddle of Microsoft discussing how the internet is effecting our culture, about what it's like to work for Bill Gates and where his genius is as a businessman, and how Peter's managed to carve out a semi-autonomous organisation within Microsoft. That was followed swiftly by a chat about his ideas for reverse market applications and massive medieval battles.

Over another lunch we talked to a bunch of guys about fostering types of community through design, game- and party- dynamics, and how online behaviour is bleeding into the real world.

It was an inspiring and humbling few days. I'm not used to having people not just know what I'm talking about but have had similar conversations before and already have an opinion worked out. It's not just eTech either. I went out for Matt Buddulph's leaving San Francisco dinner and drinks with Paul Yahoo, Richard Moo, Blaine Twitter, Tom OpenStreetMap and various Flickr and Yahoo folk. Yet again I was amazed by the level of conversation and the passion for the field we're in. The meandering conversation ended up on whether our online personas that post twitters for acquaintances to see and comment on strangers' MySpace pages are bleeding into the real world and changing our personalities. Don't get me wrong - there was plenty of non-geek chat but the fact that a conversation can take such a techno-philosophical turn says something about the culture out here.

I've spent a lot of time arguing that London has a vibrant scene for emerging ideas but after this week I'm starting to think that I was wrong. I've been quite involved in bits of the London scene for a couple of years and it's got a very different character to SF. Technology is to San Francisco what celebrity is to Los Angeles or finance is to New York and the result is a culture whose aspirations and ambitions are in sync. In London we've got some of the best executors in the world but do we have the innovators too?

Speaking at eTech

On Sunday I'm packing my bags and heading for San Diego for eTech. I've always wanted to go to eTech - it seems to be one of the most interesting events on the circuit - and this year I'm incredibly excited to be speaking! Fellow Tramponaught Charles Armstrong and I are tag teaming Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy, and the Illusion of Control... It's a bit of a mouthful, I know. It should be interesting though and I'm looking forward to it. Charles is doing the first half on the human need to build mental models of the tools they use and I'm going to quickly run through the increasing difficulty in letting them do that with modern emergent systems. Yep.

Straight after the conference I'm going to be hopping in a car and driving to San Francisco via the coast road. I don't exactly know why but it appeals to me for some reason. I did a long drive down to Key West during The Spring Experience in December and really enjoyed it. This time it'll be two or three days on the road, staying in motels along the way - a proper road trip. Then I've got a few days in SF to just chill, have a look around and take in the sights before heading back to London. It should be a good 10 days!

Leaving freelancing

After 5 good years I'm hanging up my freelancing spurs and settling into a more sedentary existence. Well, not exactly. I'm becoming Head of User Experience at Trampoline Systems. As a small start-up 'sedentary' is likely to be completely the wrong word... It's going to be hard work - we're up against the big boys - but it's a really interesting field and the product we've been working on, SONAR, is absolutely fascinating. I don't know whether anyone saw the Enron Explorer, which was our technology proof of concept, but it's a step-change from that in terms of complexity.

Freelancing has been very good to me. I've been privileged to work for and with some really talented and inspiring people, made some good friends and learned a hell of a lot. I've been on longer term contracts for most of the last 2 years because I wanted to give myself the time to really get involved in some bigger projects. Over that period I've become less interested in web standards per se (it's just how I do things so I take them for granted now) and more obsessed with problems and how to solve them. The logical next step is to get really involved with a single problem domain and see where that takes me. The Trampoline domain includes collective intelligence, social behaviour and semantics, all of which I love so I'm really looking forward to it.

I still have some loose ends to tie up though - if anyone wants a front end web dev job, check out my post on the Content with Style blog), but I'll be permanent within the next couple of months. It's going to be a busy period for me... I really want to get the work I've been doing with Wordtracker nicely squared away and I'm speaking at eTech in a few weeks too. I've also kicked off a personal project with fellow CwSer Matthias and there's a small festival site to do as well. Crikey, seeing all that written down is quite intimidating! Roll on 2007.

MySpace vs Facebook

I've been on MySpace for a while now, basically because loads of my friends are, but I've barely used it in the last 2 months, apart from checking on a few bands. It's just too much hassle. It's hard to wade through the hundreds of peoples' friends looking for bands I want to check out. It's a hassle trawling through all the spam comments and ads for clubs/bands/whatever to see what my friends are doing. But all my friends are there...

I was invited to Facebook a month or so back by a mate and I registered, spent ten minutes filling in info and then forgot about it. But in the last week it feels like there might be a change a-comin'... I've had maybe half a dozen friends join and all of a sudden I'm logging in regularly. With Twitter-like status, photos, the activity feeds, stories, comment threading and an interesting selection of participation functionality Facebook have done a far better job of the social stuff. It's an easier and more fun way to keep up with my friends.

The separation of my online social community from my music one seems right - the uses are quite distinct. A lot of people happen to use MySpace just to keep up with mates though, and I suspect things are about to correct... I think both sites would be the better for it too.

Music, London and MySpace

The London music scene seems to be on fire at the moment! I can't remember a time when there were more gigs to go to... In the last 10 days I've seen:

One interesting thing I noticed while putting together this list is that it didn't even occur to me to try and find the bands' own websites... I went straight to MySpace. MySpace has become the de facto standard for music urls - no mean feat. A lot of things about MySpace annoy me but I can't argue with how simple its made it for anyone and everyone to get themselves online.

Incidentally though - everyone should check out Metronomy. They're absolutely ace!

Building Modern Webapps at The Spring Experience

I've just done my Building Better Webapps presentation at the Spring Experience in Miami. I it went pretty well, as far as I can tell, but I realised that there were a whole bunch of links I wanted to give out that weren't on the slides. For anyone who's interested here they are, and for anyone who dragged themselves out of bed on a Sunday morning to come see me speak: Thanks, I really enjoyed it! Many thanks also to all the Spring folk who've made my weekend thoroughly enjoyable.

Introduction: Don’t bet against the internet; Web standards
Progressive enhancement: Graded Browser Support; A-Grade Browser Support Chart
HTML: HTML Mastery Links; CSS is Worthless; Microformats; Bill Gates: "We need microformats"
CSS: Div Mania; Modular CSS; A CSS Framework; Playing Nice with the Other CSS Kids; CSS: Specificity Wars; Specificity; How To Clear Floats Without Structural Markup; hasLayout
Javascript: A DOM Ready Extension for Prototype; The JavaScript Library World Cup; Notes on JavaScript Libraries; Javascript and Accessibility; AJAX and Screenreaders: When Can it Work?; Making Ajax Work with Screen Readers; FlashAid; Bringing new life to applets with Ajax; Web 2.0: Is Converging Towards the Desktop Good?
Unobtrusive Javascript: RailsConf Presentation Slides and Example Code; Hijax; The Enron Explorer

The Enron Explorer

This honestly wasn't planned but you know Jeff Skilling was just sentenced to 24 years this morning for his part in the Enron collapse? Well it just so happens that while developing the SONAR application at Trampoline we decided to use the Enron email archive, which was made public as part of the FARC investigations, as our test data set. The results were so much fun that we've turned it into a standalone technology demo... It's been in limited release to friends and family for the last few days but with the news today it seems to be spreading beyond our control. There are a few bugs in there (mine are almost all back button related!) but mostly I think it works. So, without any further ado I give you the Enron Explorer.

Just to keep things topical, it's also worth mentioning that Jeff Skilling is responsible for my absolute favourite email out of the whole lot. How's this for the head of what was the 7th largest company in the world: "Fuck you, you piece of shit. I can't wait to see you go down with the ship like all the other vermin. Smug, paranoid, unhappy mother fucker. Eat shit."

Internet Explorer 7 Graces us with her Presence

So IE7 has finally been released and the inevitable security exploits have already started surfacing. I'm very glad to see it, to be honest. The new CSS support is very welcome, even if it is playing catchup to the rest of the field.

And I've got it running standalone too. Jon Galloway's IE7 Standalone works just fine with a single change to the 'IE7 Standalone Setup.bat' file.

Download IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe from Microsoft, making sure you save it instead of running it. Follow all Jon's instructions but before running 'IE7 Standalone Setup.bat' change: IE7RC1-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe /extract:Installation /quiet to IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe /extract:Installation /quiet.

That's it. All done. Continue following Jon's instructions and it should all just work.

Why I won't music shop on the high street: a Long Tail case study

The Netflix $1 million competition to improve their recommendation engine has reminded me of something I said to my brother in Virgin Megastore the other night... I'd wandered in to kill some time while waiting for him to turn up for a gig, which is something I used to do a lot. I've spent hundreds of hours in music stores over the years. Mostly little indies but the big boys often get stuff the little chaps don't and the sales can be interesting. What struck me this time though is that I got bored very quickly. Now that never happens to me while shopping for music! So what's changed?

I've always been into fairly niche music. My vinyl addiction (now kicked) had me in and out of the hip hop shops around Brighton, Birmingham and London listening to dozens of records and chatting to other people in the shops. I'd take my stack to the desk to pay and the guy behind the counter, who I bought from and chatted to every week, would have another stack set aside for me to check out. Recommendations and pounding the pavement.

Then I moved over to buying a lot of my records from the internet. I'd chat to my mate J, who worked in a record shop in Leicester, listen to all the samples on Juno, read the Picadilly Records newsletter and make my choices. Recommentations and elbow grease.

When I stopped buying records I moved back to CDs. Both Amazon and Play do a decent job of divining my taste from previous purchases but I've relied a lot on late night MTV2, XFM, talking to friends and reading ArtistDirect bios to find new stuff. Over the last couple of years I've definitely not bought as much music as I used to. Recommendations, but more passive on my part.

In the last few months though I've started using Last.fm, MySpace and the iTunes Store. Last.fm, via AudioScrobbler, does an absolutely incredible job of figuring out my taste. And if I'm in a slightly different mood I can always go to the radio section and type in a few artists to get something that is outside of my normal listening preference. I also love the social aspect to it. Not from an interaction point of view but as a way of getting my friends' recommendations at my own leisure. Every week I'll have a browse through my friends' profiles and listen to anything I don't recognise. It's social proof in its rawest form - they're actually listening to this stuff so they must like it. If I'm taken with a track I'll either buy through Last.fm or head to iTunes for instant gratification. I own the tracks within 30 seconds.

I use MySpace the same way - it allows me to mine my friends' recommendations. I've found some great stuff just wandering through profiles. If I like what I find I'll either download songs direct from the band's profile or search the iTunes Store.

All of a sudden I'm back buying music again. And lots of it. I've bought 108 songs from the iTunes Store in the last month and that doesn't include the stuff I've got from Bleep and various other MP3 stores. Most importantly though, I'm absoluitely loving it.

I reckon that I'm a classic Long Tail consumer. Yes, I'm interested in some stuff from the head, but for the most part I'm niche. If you look at my consumer behaviour over the years I fit exactly the profile that recommendation engines are trying to cater to. And I have grown to expect that kind of service. Virgin just can't compete. It doesn't carry the music I want and it has no way of directing me to it even if it did. Even during sales their physical products aren't much cheaper than Play or Amazon Marketplace and I can get instant access to my purchase from iTunes or Bleep if that's what I want. So what can they offer me? Very, very little indeed.

The BBC popularising Podcasting

I thought that podcasting would take a while to take off... And by a while, I mean years. How many people have iPods? Yes lots, but how many people even have MP3 players? Still not a majority. Of those iPod owners how many know how to add podcasts from anywhere other than the iTunes music store interface? Very, very few, I think. It took me ages to find that text box hidden away in a dropdown into which I could paste feed urls. That means that the vast majority of podcasts, those further down the popularity curve (Long Tail anyone?!), will remain obscure. This morning it occurred to me that I might be wrong though.

The BBC is advertising podcasts on its World Service. News bulletins, documentaries, the works are all up for download. They were experimenting with this stuff when I freelanced for them 3 years ago but I just hadn't noticed how completely they'd embraced it. With that sort of exposure, on a global scale, podcasts could be tipped (buzzword bingo!) into the mainstream far sooner than I was predicting...

Think Blogging

I know I've not been posting here too regularly but I've not been completely out of the blogging loop... I'm using Donotremove as a place for my more general articles on things like the emerging web and online behaviour with more technical stuff going elsewhere. For a couple of weeks I've been posting news for the Carsons over at Vitamin, which has been quite fun. They've just kinda left me to my own devices and the kind of stuff I've been posting reminds me of the kind of thing I used to write when I first started blogging - short sweet posts with a couple of links and nothing more. I'm also posting every now and again over at the Content with Style blog. On top of these two I will have a couple of work blogs to contribute to as well so all in all, I'm keeping myself busy!

While I think about it, the Carsons are running another of their workshops towards the end of August. This time it's Professional PHP Development from the chap who wrote DropSend for them and it's safe to assume it'll be good.

The Spring Experience

Who's this bloke then? Yep, I recognise him too...

So, I'm off to Miami in December to speak at The Spring Experience! I'm excited and a little nervous. The sessions are super-long, weighing in at 90 minutes, but quite small so a workshop-type-thing might be possible, but I'll have to wait and see. Keeping peoples' attention for that long is a very daunting prospect.

I'd never heard of Spring (not surprising really, not being a Java programmer) until these guys contacted me but since then I've been seeing it everywhere. It turns out that the Trampoline guys are using it in the back-end of the app we're currently building and some of the Wordtracker folk have used it too. I still don't have a great handle on what it does so I'll have to collar someone and get a proper explanation.

The Rojo Newsletter

I've been using Rojo as my RSS reader for about a year now and I love it. I use a tiny fraction of its functionality, to be honest, but it does exactly what I want. I particularly like its recommendation engine - I can click on 'My feeds' and be shown entries ordered by my likely interest in them, which suits me much better than strict chronology thanks to the time pressure I'm normally under.

But of everything I most enjoy the weekly Rojo Newsletter. It's an edited aggregation of the weeks happenings according to the blogosphere. It exposes me to more stuff than I would see in a strictly pull system. I actually think it might be replacing Sunday magazines for me...

I don't follow the news as closely as I'd like, thanks to time. Being a web professional I have to spend a lot of my weekly reading time keeping up to date with emerging techniques in my field. I used to buy the Sunday papers for a summary of the weeks events and I particularly like the Sunday papers' magazines. The in-depth articles the magazine format offers help to bring me back up to date with the stories I've only followed vaguely. The Rojo Newsletter gives me an overview of what's been going on but the web format gives me links to more and more and more detail, if I want it.

It's hard to say how representative I am of other peoples' reading habits but I can really see more people moving over to this style of news consumption.

Podcasting vs Singles for small labels

I was listening to my favourite podcast (Radio SubPop) today and it got me thinking... It's a series of tracks given away by a record label. Why? Aren't they reducing their artists' saleability by giving away all this music? They get none of the licensing money that they would from radio either and there are no adverts to sweeten it for them. What's in it for them?

I remember being told by one of my friends that hardly anyone makes money from an indie single (unless you are Gnarles Berkeley) - they're tools to help promote the album. Releasing a single requires a lot of effort: design, promotion, distribution. All for 500-2000 units shifted... It must be incredibly time consuming.

Now consider a podcast. It's almost free to run and you have a base of subscribers from your target market receiving your music regularly. That must be the most cost effective album promotion possible. Consumers get some free music, the labels get some free promotion and everyone's happy.

There are a couple of catches though. Where do they get these subscribers from in the first place? Some promotion is therefore required. Further into the future, what happens when podcasts have become a mainstream medium? Surely it'll become increasingly difficult to get noticed as the big labels wade in with their hefty wallets. And finally, podcasts suffer from the same problem as RSS - pull technology reduces serendipidy. Why would you subscribe to a labels's feed if you don't know their music already?

So podcasts have their problems but the labels to crack them will have a year or more's head start on the rest of the game... So far I've bought 4 albums after hearing singles on the Radio Subpop podcast and it's not cost them anything to get me hooked.