The Origin of FAIL?

After recently discovering the awesome interview archive at charlierose.com I've forgone my usual music playlists for his lively, intelligent discussions as the soundtrack to my working day.

It was a couple of days ago while playing a Bill Maher interview from 1996 that something he said jumped out at me. After replaying the soundbite and re-checking the interview date the evidence was undeniable: Bill Maher was using "Fail" as a stand-alone interjection almost 15 years ago.

Know Your Meme traces this usage back to 1998 -- a couple of years after Bill. And Wikipedia simply references the KYM article on the term's origin. So here's the excerpt (with typography added by me) to hopefully correct, or at least update, the meme's origin.

The Fab Faux

Sound in Sport

The Vuvuzela. Yes, there's already an app for that (actually there are about 15 apps available at the time of writing). Hated by many, but now an indelible part of the fabric of African football, this popular horn produces a B-flat note at around 127 decibels. To put that level of noise in perspective, the Vuvuzela produces a tone louder than most rock concerts - about as loud as a jackhammer or chainsaw. And that's just a single horn. Imagine a stadium full of them!

Together, these thousands of Vuvuzelas create a deafening cacophony inside the stadium where they are relentlessly blown, with little regard to the action on the field. While it must be tough for the players and referees to communicate, adjudicate and otherwise hear themselves think, it does make me ponder what a small part audio generally plays in sport.

Television viewing seems to me to be unaffected by the instrument, if not enhanced a little. Few people will think of the 2010 Word Cup without recalling that signature sound. Other than the commentary, football seems to suffer very little from a lack of on-field audio. As do many other sports - how important really is sound to cricket, baseball, basketball and most other popular sports?

Perhaps I am just not paying enough attention. Although, I can definitely appreciate the grunts and crunches found in a televised game of Rugby (Union and League) and never tire of listening to the angry canned-hornet buzz during an onboard shot of an F1 car.

It seems to me soccer (any many other sports) could use sound in a much better way. Let's hear (or with the right home theatre setup, feel) the percussive thump of a Xavi Alonso missile, brutally struck from outside the goal box. Or listen to the goal keeper bark his disappointment at his defenders -- even if it's in Italian! We need a ton more microphones on the field and maybe even on the players. It certainly would have shed some more light on the events leading up to this:

I do wonder whether it's the players are the issue. With the sledging and foul-mouthing that allegedly goes on, it could be that the broadcasters exclude player audio so we don't realise these men, so often held up as role models and heroes, spend 90 minutes carrying on like a pack of immature school children.

My Unsuccessful Smith's “Do Us a Flavour&rdquo Entry

Hard to understand how I didn't get a guernsey!

The Foolproof Way to Block Gmail Ads

I've been reading about a hack where people add tragedy keywords to their email signature to force Gmail into 'respect' mode -- a mode designed to prevent displaying ads for "Blazin' Fast Back-ups" next to an email about a children's hospital fire. In fact, if Gmail determines a subject matter might be sensitive it will suppress all advertising.

Google being Google, this determination is made with a statistical algorithm. And of course with statistical methods like this it's all about the ratio of disaster words to non-disaster words (one determined individual posits a ratio of 167:1). While adding words like death, fire, earthquake etc. to a signature may prevent advertising within a one or two paragraph email, it probably isn't going to work for longer emails where the standard words overruled the tragic ones.

I took it upon myself to come up with a more robust method. It's both simple to implement and 100% effective when installed correctly. Take a look...

Why your Twitter spin-off's days may be numbered

If Twitter is a start-up with no business model, what on earth do you make of the many Twitter-centric web sites, blogs and applications that are springing up daily?

Not that you can blame the people behind these projects &mdash if there's one thing a social network loves to do, it's navel gaze. Nothing rises to the top of Reddit or Digg like a self-referencing story. In the same way, Twitter-based projects often attract great attention and spread rapidly within the Twitter community.

Of course, we've seen this kind of situation before. Both MySpace and Facebook had their moments as the platform du jour. Anyone who follows such matters has seen many a project crushed at the whim of its dictatorial host. More than once MySpace has dropped the guillotine on a developer's widget, blocking it from being posted to profile pages, and thereby suffocating it of users. Or perhaps even more cruelly, these networks might develop an in-house version of a popular application and use the power inherent in owning the bat, ball and whole damn baseball field to divert the torrent of users towards its own alternative.

It's really only a matter of time before we see such occurrences within the 'Twitterverse'. For a start, the number of projects using the words Twitter™ or Tweet™ in their names is astounding. This shows very naïve thinking on the developer's part — both these terms are trademarks of Twitter, Inc. We see Digg, for example, quite readily force developers to take down and rename projects using the Digg trademark.

So if your project isn't shut down by lawyers and manages to actually start gaining traction here's your next big problem: whatever you've built, Twitter can probably build and promote its own version more effectively while integrating it more tightly.

One of the most successful applications within Twitter ecosystem must be Twitpic, a service that allows the quick and simple posting of images to Twitter. With well over 3 million unique visitors in April alone Twitpic is growing strongly. Indeed, parasitically, as Twitter grows, so too does Twitpic swell with users, albeit at a slightly gentler pace.

I am sure Twitter is going to soon take on media sharing and rise above its ASCII-centrism. I would also bet they're grateful to Twitpic for shining a light on this path. Links, videos and pictures are commonly passed around on Twitter and this content is perfect fodder for advertising. And hey, it could even bring in some decent revenue for @ev and his crew.

How can I be so sure of this? On September 22, 2008 guess who registered twimg.com?

Llumo - Image-based Feed Reader

Wanted to announce a new project I just launched, Llumo.

From the about page...

Llumo is an idea that I had almost 5 years ago (the domain was registered in July 2004!). At the time blogging had really started to take off but photoblogging, as it was called, was still pretty new. In fact Flickr had barely launched a few months earlier and feed readers were only just gaining traction. Google Reader was still over a year away from launching.

It seemed to me that it would be great to have a way of keeping up to date with your favorite photographers in the same way you could with authors. While many photographers (or the services they use) now provide RSS feeds of their photo streams, current feed readers and the email inbox model they use just don't work well for images. You can see my solution demonstrated in the screencast on the Lllumo homepage.

Llumo presents all your image-based feeds as a scrollable, draggable time-ordered image strip. You can drag it back and forth, zoom in on interesting images and "heart" the ones you like. Llumo remembers the time of your last visit and puts you right back there each time you come back. There are no unread item counts - images added since your last visit are found by dragging the image strip right, old ones are to the left.

So please check out Llumo and let me know what you think!

Head of Skate

Domize Widget

Get your domain on from anywhere...

Font Conference

Cool Tool - Wordle

Meme: Go to your blog/website/whatever. Select-all (ctrl-a) and copy. Then head to Wordle, paste your clipboard into the text area and voila! Your life in a nutshell...

The New Domize - One-Hit Wonder!

A couple of weeks ago I launched a new version of Domize, my domain name search tool. I spent a bunch of time optimizing the design and HTML as much as possible, including deferring 3rd-party JavaScript includes until after page load (see below) and trimming down CSS and JavaScript as much as possible.

Probably the most interesting optimization I made was in reducing the number of server requests needed to display the Domize homepage. Reducing HTTP requests has become a fairly common optimization, seen in everything from concatenated JavaScript files to creating images sprites, a technique where all the many small icons and visual flourishes are combined into a single composite image file and then pulled apart using CSS. This last technique can speed up a site significantly (especially in these broadband times, where setting up the connection to download a small image can often take longer than the download itself!)

With Domize, I took this strategy a step further still and was able to render Domize, images and all with just a single request -- the page itself. How? Well Firefox, Safari and Opera (IE users fall back to loading images the old fashioned way) all support the ability to encode a binary file (such as an image) into a "Data URL" structure. A Data URL is a collection of text characters that a web browser can then decode back into the original binary file. The great thing about data URLs is you can put them directly into your HTML source. Using this technique I was able to take my images, combine them into sprites and then embed them directly into my page as data URLs. Enabling GZip compression on my webserver further compresses the page and mitigates the slight inflation of file size you see when a binary file is converted to a text equivalent.

The upshot of all this is that Domize is super-fast to load now. For the particularly technically curious, if you check out the source code of the page you can see how I use JavaScript to embed these data URLs at the very bottom of the page to better support progressive page loading. Go check it out or read up some more on Data URLs at Wikipedia.

Big Ideas (Don't Get Any)

Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

BMW GINA

Great experiment, if not exactly a super good-looking result. Shows an inkling of the true potential in automotive design if you can break away from the conceptions of the past.

How to Defer Google Analytics Until After Page Load

I'm working on a project to super-optimize a web site. By super optimize, I mean to go way beyond the bounds of reason and get every last millisecond back I can.

If you have a web application that uses an onload listener you will no doubt have waited in agony for some 3rd party JavaScript include on your page to finish loading so your page can get on with some function or another. One of the more common JS includes must surely be Google Analytics which, while often pretty quick, can still lag sometimes.

So I decided to do a quick bit of experimenting to see if I could defer the Google Analytics include until after page load, and thus allow my onload code to run sooner. It turns out to be pretty simple actually. Here's my code:

var _googleInterval;
function addGoogleTracking()
{
	var sc = document.createElement('script');
	sc.type = 'text/javascript';
	sc.src = 'http://www.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
	document.getElementsByTagName("head").item(0).appendChild(sc);
	_googleInterval = setInterval(activateGoogle,250);
}
function activateGoogle()
{
	if(typeof _gat != 'undefined') 
	{
		clearInterval(_googleInterval);
		var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("YOUR-TRACKING-ID-HERE");
		pageTracker._initData();
		pageTracker._trackPageview();
	}
}

Obviously you need to call addGoogleTracking() in your onload function. In a nutshell we're adding the Google Analytics JavaScript and then checking every 250ms to see if it has loaded (i.e. the _gat object has been created). Once it is detected we call the tracking functions required. Simple as that!

Battle at Kruger

Unbelievable footage

Domize Instant Domain Name Search

Quick note about a small side-project I recently launched: Domize. It's an as-you-type domain name look-up tool, pretty similar to Instant Domain Search. Really, it's an iterative improvement on that tool. The improvements, however, are big ones.

The first improvement Domize provides is that it will query domains as you type them, building up the word a letter at a time and looking up that incomplete string. So if you type "google", Domize will search "goo","goog","googl" and "google", querying the .com, .net and .org variations of that name.

Secondly, Domize provides previews of unavailable domains. This can help when you want to understand whether the unavailable domain is a legitimate website or, more likely, a holding page for a domain squatter. In the case it is owned by a squatter you may want to investigate purchasing it, or at least feel reassured that you can use a slight permutation of that name without worrying about the conflict with a substantial web property. For example, the Flickr or Twittr brands would probably not have existed had the correct spellings been something other than place-holder domain squatting sites at the time.

Domize also offers an iPhone-tailored version (if you navigate there on your iPhone). I think this makes Domize the first and only domain name look-up tool for iPhones. At least the only with as-you-type search

Check it out!

Kiwi Gold

These are pure kiwi tv magic!

The Sneaks

Ever since MTV debuted in 1981, the music video has become an increasingly important vehicle for a band to get their music out there and, er, heard. Producing this requisite video can be quite a challenge for the budget-constrained indie band. Groups like OK GO have worked great magic on a shoestring, but not everyone has such a knack for producing viral hits. And whatever is produced needs to stand up against the highly polished multi-million dollar productions coming from the likes of Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry and Hype Williams.

NZ on Air, a government run fund in New Zealand, has come to the rescue for New Zealand bands, offering $5000 grants to pretty much anyone with a demo tape. Of course five grand isn't going to buy you a whole lot of music video. Unless of course, you gamble it all on a 6-1 long-shot at the race track and win!

That's exactly what The Sneaks did in producing a music video for their single I'm Lame. The video starts off documenting the band taking their novelty sized check to the race track and betting it all on one horse. At this point you're watching decidedly amateur footage, most likely shot using a borrowed handycam. When their horse comes in however, the video takes a decidedly dramatic turn, with the band blowing their entire winnings on a huge finale! I won't give it away, you've got to check it out:

YouTube's Two Kings

Headed down to Hotel Nikko last night to watch Wired Mag's editor, Chris Anderson, interview YouTube co-founders Steve and Chad. To be honest the interview wasn't really what I was hoping for -- it mainly consisted of questions on YouTube as a competitor to TV, copyright issues and monetizing their user base. I mean, here are two guys that created a 1.6 billion dollar company in 18 months -- surely that's the real story here.

A few interesting stats did come up -- YouTube is responsible for 60% of the traffic going through Comcast's infrastructure; every minute YouTube receives 6 hours of video; and uuhh they're big and stuff.

Probably the most interesting story in the rise of YouTube is the way users grabbed hold of it and shaped it into something they wanted. It's apparent that the founders didn't quite realize what they'd created until their users told them! Sure, they may have had the right ingredients but not necessarily the correct recipe. It would seem you can break down YouTube's initial success into three factors:

YouTube firstly took the pain out of uploading video. The transcoding software they licensed could take practically any video format at any size and spit it out as a standard Flash video. It's interesting to note this software is developed by the people behind the Flash video codecs and can be licensed by any company interested.

Secondly, the Flash player was based on a technology polite enough to not drill users on bandwidth and other technical details so many of the other video solutions require. Streaming turns out to be a pain in the ass, and YouTube avoided this, going for a 'fast-start' approach which allows dial-up users to (eventually) watch videos, as well as allowing multiple plays with no additional bandwidth overhead.

The final and probably most important ingredient was to make the video very accessible. YouTube videos sit on real pages instead of JavaScript driven pop-ups and can be embedded on any page on the web. This move would have initially seemed counterintuitive to their competition as YouTube wasn't and doesn't show ads before or after the video clip. In fact the reason they did this wasn't because they had the foresight to see the promotional opportunity the millions of burgeoning blogs could provide them, but in fact because the service was initially seen as a way for eBay sellers to provide video footage of their wares, and this would require the clip be embeddable in an eBay auction page. In fact Chad said YouTube now "[treat] the embeds as our marketing budget" which is great advice for those site that persist in locking video away in a pop-up context.

The Bees - Listening Man

Felt like posting a video today. Nice clip & song

Social Software 101: User Behavior and the High Score Table

A couple of weeks ago Penny Arcade linked to my supporting Firefox extension,Pennypacker, and fired down a good 20,000 or so new users into what had previously been a fairly small, niche user base. Within days this newly inflated user base had viewed half a million strips and cataloged them with over 17,000 tags.

The sudden injection of new users was an interesting thing to watch. It's fascinating how much the needs of the system change when you go from a small, organically grown user-base to a much larger one overnight. The sense of community and shared etiquette adopted by the smaller group of people is quickly swept away and there becomes a much greater reliance on the software to police user behavior. In my case, I suddenly had a new problem: tag spam. That is, tags that were either unrelated, offensive or otherwise inappropriate. Tags took on a new role, and were now used for all sorts of communication, from insulting other users to pointing out when a strip was broken.

I think this hints at a really interesting area of social software. Maintaining a healthy community who behave responsibly seems more often than not to be the question mark between step one: get users and step three: profit. Most articles about successful social applications focus on user acquisition and not so much with managing that user base and its behaviour once acquired. Perhaps few of the big players even care about many of these issues (such as churn, or losing users) at this stage -- they're all drinking out of a metaphorical new-user firehose. How does MySpace handle the spammers, deviants and general miscreants? I have no idea. Browse a few MySpace profiles though and you'll see an insanely high amount of noise punctuated by an increasingly scarse signal. To me, this is probably the hardest, but most neglected area of building a successful social platform. All of those carefully set-up catalysts for adoption and engagement can become weapons against you once you've hit critical mass.

A cursor glance at any social app will reveal virtually all of them use the oldest trick in the book for prodding that few percentage points of userbase to contribute more: the high score table. This is one of the most effective tools a social app can employ to encourage usage and you'd be hard pressed to find a successful social website that doesn't have some form of a high score table: LinkedIn and MySpace both have a friends/connections counter, Flickr has photostream views and until recently Digg had it's top user list. Of course Digg recently began to find this feature was working against them. Once you've a hit a critical mass of engagement, these methods can encourage bad behaviour. You'll find yourself with an application where quantity rather than quality becomes the sole motivation of users.

My Giants of Arcade page may have initally been a great way to encourage user participation. And indeed, the "top observers" column was amazingly effective at having users browse 1,250 pages of a web site (often in one sitting) that many of them had seen before. But now these devices are in danger of becoming simply a come-on to the overly competitive. The goal is now to transition to that next level of the evolution of a social network, to enable the self-policing community.

Your Friday Haiku: RSS

Your design took hours,
A CSS masterpiece!
I just browse the feed.

Sorry, I promise I won't do this again!

Hey Odeo Users, Your Mother Doesn't Love You Any More!

Hey Odeo users, your mother doesn't love you any more! Kind of a rough message for a community to hear. And wouldn't a potential buyer be somewhat reluctant to lay down some serious cash for a toy that now bores one of THE web 2.0 poster boys?

I'm just saying there's a reason people sell cars because they're "moving overseas", "need to sell to pay mortgage" or "need a bigger car for the family". No one wants to feel like they're buying something the previous owner doesn't want. You gotta come up with a better back-story concerning your sale, that's just good bidness!

And who is going to sign up for an Odeo account now? Seriously, Odeo's mojo just left the building and checked in to a cheap hotel.

I think these are some of the issues that have stalled Carson System's sale of Dropsend. It's just not sexy, buying someone's trash.

An interesting question these sales beg is why are these small companies building sucessful products only to grow bored with them and attempt to flip? I think there are two key factors: 1. Both companies are run by engineering minds that love the thrill of the chase (solving new technology challenges such as podcast creation/sharing and a web-based file dropbox), but quickly tire of rounding out their solutions; and 2. These companies are too small to have the resources to delegate this i-dotting and t-crossing work.

A product's momentum is just too easily lost when its company is unable to make this step into the less glamorous world of continuous improvements. It's something sites like Flickr and Digg have really excelled at. It's also the reason Slashdot is almost irrelevant these days. They hit upon a succesful formula and then stopped improving it. It was only a matter of months ago they finally switched over the CSS/div-based layout! Digg ate their lunch and is still coming back for more, innovating and adapting at a frenetic pace.

Flickr has gone another route to Digg. They have expanded their team enough to have people to hand off this less interesting work to. For example, they just annouced an email notifications system. I guarantee this was on Butterfield's to-do list from day one. It's a feature that some users will love, that better rounds out the product, but is a complete chore to build.

This is why your start-up should be something you love. It's not enough to have a good idea and execute it well. For the next few years you'll need to live and breath it. It's about continuing to have the enthusiam and passion for it after the glowing blog reviews have subsided and you're left with a demanding, vocal user-base that's never satisfied.

The Qwerty Myth

Despite the commonly held belief, the Qwerty keyboard was not actually invented to slow down typists and thereby reduce typewriter jams. It was created to reduce jams, yes, but it did this by separating common letter pairs from each other. It also attempted to increase speed by having many letter pairs on different hands. Notice how much faster you can type the word "pair" than the word "oily".

I imagine it would have been quite an interesting statistical challenge to work out the layout and in truth the Qwerty layout was probably a fairly rough attempt. Others have attempted to create better layouts but their efforts have all been in vain, unable to sway enough typists from the familiar.

Anyway, that's enough of the keyboard geek-out. You can read up more on the Wikipedia page (where I stole all this info). OK, one last thing...

According to an urban legend, the top row was designed to have all the letters for the word "typewriter" so that typewriter salesmen could "hunt and peck" the word "typewriter" with one finger for demonstration purposes.This was in the period when typing was considered women's work and men rarely could type.

Webjam 2 - The Second Coming

Quick post - Webjam is back again. Join us March 1 at the Jam Bar, Hotel CBD for another great night of show-boating and horn-blowing. We still have some presenter slots so if you've got something that'll wow the masses then now's your chance to get out from underneath that bushell! Register to present or at the very least RSVP.

Would like to give a big shout out to our sponsors: Campaign Monitor, Webdirections South, Red Square, Microsoft Expression and WebDU. These guys have kicked in some great prizes (details on the site soon) and financial support for the gig, so a big thanks to them.

See you there!

Dial-Up Web is Dead

I recently hit the monthly usage limit on my "unlimited" plan on Bigpond cable plan (no thanks to two seasons of Alan Partridge I had to have). Now I must ride out the rest of the month in cattle class, permitted a mere 64kbps trickle of bits. Horribly frustrating. Especially, as I found out, now that web developers no longer consider the poor, wretched dial-up user

Loading up Gmail often takes so long (presumably pulling down all those 1000's of lines of fat, Ajaxy client functionality) I am displayed a message that something may be amiss and perhaps I'd be more comfortable reading through my correspondence in the discreet surrounds of a JavaScript-less, bare-bones version. To which I say NAY! Maybe it is YOU, Larry and Sergey, who would be more comfortable. I am fine waiting right here. And Richard Gere is paying me $50,000 a night so trust me, you want my business. Or something.

It is easy to forget I am now far from the frothy rapids of broadband, as I laze in my inner-tube on a fetid slow-moving pond of algae, I will still sometimes absent-mindedly click on a YouTube link only to realize this is yet another club I am no longer welcome at.

Google maps is but a pipe dream. Gone is that illusion of interactivity Web 2.0 clings to like a shower curtain to your clammy wet leg. I curse those cute, airbrushed, drop-shadowed, light refracting logos. Their bloated alpha channels taunting me as I wait for them to load, thinking back to a time long-passed where you could get a logo, some rounded corners and a background image or two and still have change from a kilobyte. And so I'm calling it. Dial-up web: time of death January, 2007.

Getting the Most Out of Gmail's Search

One of Gmail's killer features is its search. In fact, it's much to my chagrin that other Google products don't have this search built in. That's right I said it. Chagrin. Google Reader, for example, would be a much better product if feeds and posts were searchable. Anyway, I have a few key search tips for Gmail I thought I'd share:

The basics

OK, so entering simple terms will search the subject, to, from and body fields. However you can narrow down you search to just one or more of these fields using the qualifiers "from:", "to:", "subject:", "cc:" and "bcc:" You can search specific labels by using "label:" or for mails in trash with "in:trash". Actually, "is:", "in:" and "label:" all mean the same thing so "is:spam" "in:spam" and "label:spam" will return identical results. They work for labeled email, email statuses (read, starred) and for spam and trash. To search every single email use "in:anywhere". By default Gmail won't search deleted emails and emails marked spam.

Unread email

I currently have about 1500 unread emails in my inbox. It is often desirable when I feel like knocking the stack down a few hundred or so to just view unread emails. Unfortunately Gmail doesn't have an unread filter down the left side. No matter, just enter the query "is:unread" to see these emails. You may also want to filter read emails ("is:read") or starred ("is:starred").

For personal note takers

6 months ago i decided to dump 37s Backpack for note taking. I now just email myself a note within Gmail. If you're like me and you want to review these gems of wisdom, you'll need this search: "from:me is:unread"

File types & size management

Getting close to that 2.8 gig limit? No? Me neither. But if you were the search "has:attachment" will give you a list of all your paperclip toting mails. You can also list specific attachment file types. "filename:mp3" will give you a list of all emails with MP3s attached. Nice.

Finding false positives in spam

I often run the query "in:spam anson" to find any real emails that have been incorrectly marked as spam. Spammers, unlike your friends, hardly ever refer to you by name so looking for your name in the spam folder can often turn up legitimate emails that have been mistakenly tarred with the spam brush.

Date ranges

These are great for narrowing down your search results. Use "after:" and/or "before:" followed by year/month/day to restrict results to a date range. For example, to clean out all your unread email from 2006 use "is:unread after:2005/12/31 before:2007/01/01"

5 Upcoming Dates I'm Looking Forward To

Well then, happy new year. My posting flurry of late December hasn't quite survived the crossing over into oh seven but 5 days into the new year I thought I 'd throw out a quickie. So here are the 5 upcoming dates that are keeping me going right now: (in order of appearance)

1. January 9: Steve Jobs' Macworld keynote. Tablets, iPhones, iTv? Who knows, but with 2 hours scheduled I'm expecting fireworks!
2. January 15: The Australian Open kicks off. That freak Federer is back to defend his title.
3. February 17: Good Vibrations rocks out in Sydney. Beastie Boys, Jurassic 5, Nightmares on Wax, Cut Copy, etc. etc. etc.
4. March ??: Webjam is back for round two!
5. March 18: Albert Park hosts the opening F1 round. Excitement will (as usual) surround Webber, appearing this year in a Newey-designed, Ferrari-powered Red Bull machine.

If 37 Signals Had Designed YouTube or Flickr They Would Both Be Dead By Now

If you ever checked out Flickr in the early days you would have encountered something very different to today's Flickr. The web-based photo sharing application actually started out as a kind of chat room on steroids. The big idea was real time photo sharing -- you could upload photos to something called a "shoebox" and then drag them directly into live conversation windows. This was all executed in Flash.

YouTube started out as a video version of the web social phenomenon HOTorNOT. Founder Jawed Karim explains:

"I was incredibly impressed with HOTorNOT, because it was the first time that someone had designed a website where anyone could upload content that everyone else could view. That was a new concept because up until that point, it was always the people who owned the website who would provide the content."

Of course both these applications are now a world apart from where they started. Flickr have eschewed their Flash roots and moved entirely into HTML/AJAX for interaction. The real time elements are long gone. Similarly, YouTube shows no sign of it's HOTorNOT past and has become the defacto destination for sharing any kind of video online.

The key to their success was a combination of two things: 1. having enough flexibility to allow emergent behaviour from users (in YouTube's case "as the site went live in the spring of 2005, the founders realized that people were posting whatever videos they wanted.") and 2. accepting and adapting to this new use of their tool. Flickr realised people really just wanted a better way to share photos on the web with their family and friends. YouTube saw people wanted a way to share any kind of video easily without the encoding/hosting headaches of Real Player or Windows Media Player.

But imagine if 'original' YouTube had been designed by 37 Signals. It would have been beautifully designed for sure, emcompassing only the functionality required to allow the posting/browsing of HOTorNOT style videos. It wouldn't have had the wiggle room to allow for a different use. Likewise with Flickr. So sometimes it's perhaps better (maybe even 1.65 billion times better) to have a bit of looseness in your applications. When things are so tightly defined and resolved to making a single goal you do lose the flexibility for users to define for themselves what your product is really good for.

Charlie The Unicorn

Couldn't help it. This is just too damn good.

The 20 Best Ever Penny Arcade Strips

It's been 5 months since the launch of Pennypacker, the Firefox extension that adds tagging and favourites to Penny Arcade, and the uptake has been fantastic! Over 2,500 users have viewed over 90,000 strips, added over 7,500 tags, and recorded 5,500 favourites.

Of course not all strips are viewed equally. Because Pennypacker has only been around for a short time new strips are viewed more often than older ones. The popular strips page will therefore tend to favour newer strips as they get more exposure. However, by dividing the number of favourites a strip has received with the number of people that have actually viewed the strip we can produce are more balanced rating. We've done just that and present to you the 20 best ever Penny Arcade Strips.

Continue reading...

Webjam, The Movie!

I'm Just Saying, Is All...

How many times a week do you read those articles that go something along the lines of "People who eat Salmon every second Thursday live years longer"? Usually their purpose is to pimp some attention-starved statistics gathering organisation or, in the case of the Salmon example, a thinly veiled campaign to move more product, backed by totally objective scienticians, of course.

But anyway, my issue is that more often than not these articles make the mistake of confusing correlation with causality. Just because two things are found together doesn't mean one is caused by the other. A recent study suggests vegetarians are more intelligent than meat eaters. Kind of the opposite of what you'd expect, right? At least in the animal kingdom you find this. Herbivores are required to spend most hours of the day grazing bulky plants low in nutrition (cows, sheep, etc) whereas carnivores whose meals are high in protein and fat have more leisure time, not to mention the higher social functions that had to develop to allow hunting/stalking.

Of course that no longer applies to us. Vego's can find plenty of nutrition within the framework of 3 squares a day. But perhaps the higher protein/iron intake would still hold some advantage for the meat eaters. Who knows? I do think there is probably a high correlation between educated people and the choice to become vegetarian. But I think this is more a product of environment and nothing to do with a vegetarian diet. It's silly to imply dropping meat from your diet will make you smarter.

More likely a vegetarian family who raises their child as a vegetarian (the study looked at kids when they were 10 and then again, 20 years later) is fairly socially conscious (OK, or complete hippies) and sure, it's a stereotype, but probably more likely to encourage their children in academic pursuits.

Announcing Webjam!

If you're within reach of Sydney this December 12 you should definitely come down to Hotel CBD. Head up to level 4 and enjoy a demo / jam session like you've never seen before. 20 presenters will have 3 minutes each to wow, amaze and educate the audience. And I'm pretty sure the beer will be flowing just as fast as the buzzwords!

You may even have some hot tech up your sleeve you'd like to show, register here if you'd like to present. Otherwise, please RSVP and let us know you're coming.

Pennypacker Update

When Pennypacker was released in July it was as a simple Greasemonkey script (Greasemonkey is a scriptable addon to Firefox allowing the customization of sites using JavaScript). Pennypacker enables users to tag and rate Penny Arcade comics and within a week of its release all 1100+ strips were quickly catalogued and tagged. The fruits of which can now be enjoyed, for we can for the first time easily see what Gabe and Tycho have to say on topics ranging from the Nintendo Wii to Star Wars.

Pennypacker is now available as a native Firefox extension for both Firefox 1.5 and the upcoming 2.0 release. Get it here.

The Acid Test for AJAX Apps

Kottke recently linked up an application from the "labs" of metroblog Gothamist.

Gothamist Maps uses Google Maps to pinpoint news alerts (fires, robberies, car accidents, etc.) on a map of NYC. Pretty cool.

OK, so it's being done by about a thousand other guys too, but in any case I went to check it out. Unfortunately all I got was a standard satellite view New York with no signs of the promised thefts, fires, carjackings and other great stuff. Obviously their data source is unavailable for some unforseen reason. The real issue I have though, is that the application makes absolutely no apologies for this. There is no way to tell whether the application has a problem or there is just no current news available. This is something that's all too common in AJAX applications -- the developer never considers what should happen when things don't go as planned.

So here is the acid test for an AJAX application. At the very minimum your application should behave nicely in this scenario:

1. Load the application.
2. Set your browser to offline mode
3. Start clicking!

Have a look around at a few of the AJAX applications out there. You'll find some that deal with this pretty well and others that fail miserably.

New iPod nano Signals Way Ahead for Apple

Apple co-founder and god amongst nerds Steve "Woz" Wozniac seemed non-plussed after Apple's recent Showtime press event. He commented to Wired News after the show "The thing I'm still waiting for is lyrics,". Of course you are Woz, you and your Segway polo team. "Cmdrtaco", the editor of Slashdot infamously declared of the orignal iPod "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.". Tech pundits have been notoriously bad at predicting the market's response to the iPod, and as the audio player further moves from gadget to fashion accessory, I think they will continue to miss the mark, possibly by an increasing margin.

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Digg to Federated Media: "Show Me the Money!"

This phrase, first coined by star wide receiver Rod Tidwell in the movie Jerry Maguire (and oft-repeated by goofy bastards in shiny suits all over the world), must be on the tip of Digg CEO Jay Adelson's tongue. Community-filtered tech news site Digg, certainly one of the hottest web properties going right now, has yet to capitalize on their phenomenal growth and loyal userbase. With ad sales represented by John Battelle's Federated Media, Digg are finding themselves more often than not forced to fall back on Google's Adsense program to generate revenue.

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US Open 2006 Widget

The final slam of the year is here. Flushing meadows is ramping up for 2 weeks of some of the best tennis you'll see as the top men and women battle it out for over $12 million in prize money. Mac users can track every game of the tournament with the US Open 2006 dashboard widget. Instructions on downloading after the jump...

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A Better Tag Cloud

Tagging is everywhere. Long considered a tedious task fit for librarians and taxonomy nerds, the process of assigning keywords to information has recently become near-ubiquitous for all manner of assets. Photos, websites, audio, comics, news and even browser extensions now enjoy an elevated status amongst the metadata'd. This tagging information is then displayed in what's commonly known as a "tag cloud". The standard tag cloud is a list of tags denoting popularity through point size. It has been hastily adopted by the masses as de rigeur and pretty much left at that. I think there are plenty of creative opportunites to display this data beyond the confines of simple typographic manipulation. So allow me to present, then, "a better tag cloud".

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Is Netscape Eating Itself?

As the Netscape vs. Digg & Co. battle rages on, Netscape are looking more and more like they're becoming swallowed-up by the fighting. The Calacanis-led fascination with waging a very public debate with Digg (and any other social news site prepared to step into the ring with him) is taking over Netscape.com. At the time of writing this, 7 the of top 10 articles on Netscape's technology channel are related to the rhetoric of the last few weeks. Even on Netscape's front page 5 of their 25 stories (20%) are spent discussing Digg, paying contributors and various other points and counter points to this debate. While back at Digg.com, it's business as usual, albeit with a few references to these events peppered throughout their usual fare of Apple rumours and Google minutiae.

Announcing Pennypacker!

A couple of months ago I recognised that to be any sort of respectable web developer I needed to have 1. a Google Maps mash-up and 2. a Greasemonkey extension under the belt. Pennypacker is my attempt at the latter. As the name may suggest, it's an extension for the brilliant Penny Arcade comic, providing tagging and favourites functionality to the comic pages. Read on for more details.

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The Rise of Samsung

Since a major brand realignment in 2001, financial columnists have been singing the praises of South Korean electronics powerhouse, Samsung. BusinessWeek's 2005 compilation of the top 100 global brands saw Samsung shoot up to 20th, above the out of favour Sony (28th) and comfortably above blue-chip innovators such as Canon (35th) and Apple (41st). But for me, it's only in the last year or so that Samsung's products have started to stand out from the pack. Here are some that caught my eye...

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The Difficult Second Album

Over the weekend I watched Ricky Gervais' follow-up to The Office, Extras. The first season contains just six half-hour shows in which a cast of "background artists", including Gervais as Andy Millman, eek out a living occupying the lowest rung of the showbiz ladder. Each episode features a dyed-in-the-wool star, with appearances from luminaries such as Samuel L Jackson, Ben Stiller and Kate Winslet. I gotta say, it is a brilliant show.

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Wimbledon Debrief

After the huge interest surround my breaking of the IBM / Napoleon Dynamite story, things are starting to settle down again. Let's take a look at the reaction around the web and IBM's response.

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IBM using Napoleon Dynamite quote to encrypt data

"Knock it off, Napoleon! Just make yourself a dang quesa-dilluh!".

This phrase, from the movie Napoleon Dynamite, is the cipher key IBM are using to publish encrypted XML at this year's Wimbledon grand slam. But is this a rather glaring lapse in security, or simply an anticipatory nod to curious hackers, many of whom surely rank amongst the fans of this quriky 2004 movie?

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Wimbledon 2006 Widget

I'm happy to announce the release of an OS X Dashboard Widget for the current Wimbledon 2006 grandslam. I've been building these tennis widgets since the French Open last year and I have to say this is the best one yet. Read on for the download and more info...

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Top 10 Free Hipster Fonts

The late 80s and early 90s heralded a creative explosion in typeface design. The Macintosh had become firmly entrenched as the graphic designer's tool of trade and Fontographer, a type design package originally released by Altsys in 1985, was revolutionary in opening up vector based design to the masses. It was the beginning of the end, if you would have asked any type purist. It was true: ugly, incomplete fonts designed by enthusiasts who didn't care for the finely honed discipline of letter kerning, nor paid heed to the conventions of consistent letter metrics, were in abundant supply. It was an awesome time!

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The next big programming language

I don't know what it's going to be. But it's going to be as accessible to beginners as PHP, have the media support of Apple's Objective C (core image / audio / video), and it's going to run in a web browser.

It might just be Flash. It could even be something built atop an existing language as Processing is.

Gridlove Launches

Labour-of-love / albatross-around-the-neck project, Gridlove, launched today.

Go take a look!

Seven things that don't work yet

1. RSS feed [here]
2. Tags
3. Article pages [done]
4. That grey projects link [deleted]
5. Voice recognition [Pogue's into it]
6. Flying cars [here]
7. Robot butlers

Welcome to phasetwo

Hey. This is the phasetwo blog. This site has been around for a while, but previously as a motley collection of JavaScript experiments and the odd Dashboard widget. The name was originally a dig at the mythical second phase of a project's development -- where all those postponed good ideas are sent, with no chance of ever seeing realistion.

So I guess that would imply phasetwo is a utopia of ideas, where great concepts roam free, unhindered by timelines, man-days or development cycles. Let's run with that then...