I can't seem to find a regular expression that turns links into a hrefs, and image links into img tags, and leaves the links in Youtube embeds alone. Anyone have something like that? (PHP)

wallpainting a tree

I made a tree painting in the kitchen today. I used paint samples, that have a round tip that you can paint with, so you don't need brushes or anything.



I did 3 layers, and I let each layer dry before putting on the next one. The idea was kind of a Japanese cherry blossom. Or rather, that's how it turned out or something. First the tree itself:



Then the cherries (pink), and then I had white left so I added the sun shining on the tree:



It came out nice :) The falling cherry was me trying to cover a spot of paint. I think with this one I knew when to stop, which always helps a lot.

Languages of the world. With a cool language map.

Which langauges to translate in?

When you think about which locales to choose, and which languages to translate in, I always recommend to think of locales as markets, not as languages. That way you focus on the right things when choosing locales. But still, I'm trying to improve my understanding of how to select locales. What are the things you consider when choosing which languages to translate your website in? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

links for 2007-06-25

• Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace
  Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and "so middle school." They prefer the "cl
  (tags: social networks, class)

I keep hearing about companies doing a browser based desktop, and I keep thinking "what a bad idea". It's just seems like a real misunderstanding of the opportunities and the gaps of the new canvas (the browser).

If browsers were to support OPML as well as RSS, I could click an OPML file, and the way my browser asks me which reader I want to use for an RSS feed, it would do the same for the list of RSS feeds found in the OPML. In other words, we could easily share RSS subscriptions lists. I hope that will happen one day soon. Then I could subscribe to all the Google blogs by clicking 1 link instead of visiting each one and finding the RSS.

If I have memorized a number in English, I can only recall it in English. The same with Dutch. Weird.

What to do with Yahoo? Some smart stuff again from Dave Winer.

"Some analyst told them they needed to gain economy and synergy from
their acquisitions by centralizing and eliminating duplication, but
this makes no sense. Their goal isn't to economize, the goal is to grow." Exactly.

"The problem with Yahoo is too many people for too few opportunities." - nail on the head!

I actually have a different analysis of Yahoo, from an information architecture point of view. The failed 360 experiment they did kid of moved them away from social networking, but they shouldn't. 360 was too geeky, and missed lots of social network opportunities. It's time to do it right.

http://paste2.org let's you copy and paste some code (PHP, HTML, ...) and then gives you a short URL to give to people to watch that code. It's simple and very useful. Posts are retained for up to 30 days since they were last viewed. "Paste2 was created because these days pastebin.com is never working."

Youtube going global. The process makes sense. First translate the UI (easy). Later make content in different locales specific to that locale (categories, comments, ...).

If in Mysql, you get "#1062 - Duplicate entry" error when trying to make a column with lots of data auto-increment, check if there's a row where that column = 0. If you remove that, it might work again. Not sure why.

Hackday brought people together by letting them do what they enjoy. Similarly, I remember the first two Vloggercons, which, however great they were, were trying to be too much of a tech conference. For videobloggers. Somehow. Pixelodeon on the other hand is a video event for videobloggers, where they can make and watch videos. Makes much more sense.

What did I learn today? When you organize events, don't try to be like conference X or Y, just let people do what they like to do, but together.

But weirdly for me, if you were looking for the heart of the event. If
you were looking for the absolutely best time that made it all
worthwhile for me, it was overnight. It was the period between nine and
two am where everyone was doing precisely what they wanted to do. Where
the lighting was atmospheric, where the coding was focused and everyone
seemed to flow, where the room was gently buzzing with key-strokes. And
the experience of all of those people turning around to the stage and
running like kids to watch Doctor Who on a huge screen with a hundred
of their peers and friends for one of the most extraordinary
cliff-hanging episodes of the series was just amazing. It was more like
being at home than being at home is.

Now that's radical: "Store as much data as possible on Amazon Simple Storage System (S3),
NOT in your database and just store the S3 key to the data in your
database. Consider putting any blob or large text fields in S3."

Would you dare that?

Back home. Hackday was cool. We got struck by lightning. English sandwiches are still soggy though.

I'm at Hackday London and that Wii sure looks like a lot of fun!

My How to make a documentary post continues to rock along.

This is cool.

This page that I did a few years ago still sums up my feelings about much of the US's warmongering. (is that a word?)

I redid my website, it doesn't make sense to have another blog so now it's a simple static page.

If you say "my photos are on my Flickr, there's plenty of space there" in Flemish (as I did recently), people may laugh out loud.

http://omg.yahoo.com/ OMG! Cool name, but they messed it up with the yahoo part. But seriously: bad branding decision. It's like Cherry Coke. I learnt that much about branding, I continue to be surprised that a company like Yahoo gets these basic branding things wrong (overextending the brand). Yahoo doesn't stand for celebrity news, so why make that part of the brand. They should have gotten OMG.com and created a new brand - now that has potential.

Children as young as seven years old were 'forcibly disappeared' by the
CIA, according to report published today jointly by six human rights
groups naming 39 people who are believed to have been held in secret US
custody and whose current whereabouts remain unknown. More

That's one big submarine:

• Her nuclear-powered engine will propel her through the water at more than 20 knots, yet the UK's first stealth sub makes less noise than a baby dolphin, making her as good as undetectable by enemy ships.
• Astute's sonar is so advanced that if she was lying in the English Channel she would be able to detect ships leaving New York harbour 3,000 nautical miles away (although the details of how she can do this are classified).
• The nuclear reactor will never need refuelling, and with an ability to make oxygen and drinking water out of sea water, the sub could stay underwater for its entire 25-year lifespan were it not for the needs of the crew.

Truly, only in the USA. Really.

2 lessons from building (& then selling) my startup

1. It's a marathon, not a sprint
2. Enjoy the trip

That's easy. And because some blogposts are better as embedded slideshows (I heart slideshare): To recap:

• In 2004, I built the first version of Mefeedia in a weekend based on an idea by Kenyatta. It was the first video aggregator.
• Then I spent LOADS of weekends on it, and over the years also took a few months off (twice!) to work on it fulltime. So the first lesson is: it's not a sprint, it's a marathon. It's easy to get started.
• I also put in about 15-ish000 $ for outside coders and hosting.
• In the end, I decided to sell it on eBay, but before could do that, I got an offer and accepted. It was a hard decision but also an easy one.

So with my new ventures, I'm very careful about the marathon I choose to run. And I still do it for the voyage, not for the possible reward at the end.

links for 2007-06-04

• Business Logs — Blog Design, Blog Consulting, Web 2.0 Services.
  (tags: designers)
• electric pulp, an interactive agency. we build websites.
  (tags: design)

Donald Norman has grown “sick and tired of hearing people praise
its clean, elegant look.â€? He’s angry that Google gets credit for being
so simple when all they’re doing is providing a single feature from
their homepage: “Anybody can make a simple-looking interface if the
system only does one thing.�

That's ridiculous. It is incredibly HARD to make a simple-looking interface, and Google does NOT do 1 thing. Incredibly hard.

Sourceitgood encapsulates some thoughts I have on outsourcing, and a possible future project.

And here's another one: "Rome had trouble maintaining a distinction between public and private
responsibilities—and between public and private resources. The line
between these is never fixed, anywhere. But when it becomes too hazy,
or fades altogether, central government becomes impossible to steer. It
took a long time to happen, but the fraying connection between imperial
will and concrete action is a big part of What Went Wrong in ancient
Rome. America has in recent years embarked on a privatization binge
like no other in its history, putting into private hands all manner of
activities that once were thought to be public tasks—overseeing the
nation's highways, patrolling its neighborhoods, inspecting its food,
protecting its borders."

And lets not forget, privatized prisons.

More proof that the US has definitely lost its "moral leadership" role in the world (which it took on after WW2 and has been abusing ever since). How can they recover from this? I don't think they can.

Christina has a good set of slideshows on IA's thinking about designing for socialness. (Was that even *English*?)

Christina on quitting Google: "As I walked off campus, debadged, I started laughing. Laughing loud,
like a crazy person, like joker in the old batman series, laughing and
laughing and laughing. My heart leapt out of my mouth and flew high
above the volleyball court and the cross-current swimming pool. My
heart flew high above the eight cafes with gourmet chefs, and the
Segways and the Japanese toilets. It flew across the bay and into the
sun where it was lit up with joy. I laughed because I had done
something only an idiot would do. I quit a job others would kill for to
do something that didn’t have a chance in a million to survive."

The more I hear about working at Google, the more it sounds like a kind of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory place.

Is Facebook the new AOL? I think not.

Facebook is opening up their platform (ie, becoming a platform). I can see the attraction of that huge userbase. I also hear people say that it's just like a new AOL, a new walled garden. I'm not sure yet, but I think, perhaps, not.

Here's why.

I remember that, a few years ago, we were working hard on spreading the gospel of videoblogging, and Kenyatta Cheese told me of some workshops he did with teenagers. It turned out that they enjoyed putting videos on social networks (LiveJournal) a lot more than starting their own blogs, and the reason was the feeling of community, the comments they got from their friends. Simple.

Us bloggers had a large discussion about this at the first ever Vloggercon, where we felt that it's much more important to have control over your own blog, and why would you want to put your soul on some social network owned by BigCo, and we need to teach these teenagers what's important. Old farts! So that's a huge cultural gap there (some people say it might be as large as the cultural gap between parents and kids in the 50s-60s), that continues to play in these type of comments on Facebook's strategy being old-school.

The second reason, and this remains to be proven, is that facebook seems much smarter about being "open". They let their own apps compete with provider apps. That means a healthy ecosystem can grow, and be it that crucial data is being controlled by 1 entity, it will be successful.

Of course, I still open some kind of open, distributed social networking thing will come next. It almost has to, you would think. So in that sense, yes, the Facebook stage is only an intermediate step. But it will still be big, because that next step in the evolution hasn't taken off yet.

Just some morning thoughts :)

Technorati's identity crisis

I haven't analyzed this in depth, but there is some stuff wrong with the new Technorati. They seem to continue having their identity crisis: what is technorati, anyway? Everytime a company launches one of these alternative homepages I think: identity crisis! Focus guys!

They did get one important thing mostly right with this new relaunch: instead of having 4 or 5 different search domains and having the user (that's me) choose, they now try to integrate these into one search. So you don't have to choose anymore between searching tags and text, for example. Mostly.

Their homepage (as homepages tend to do) illustrates their identity crisis: (and what's up with that *ticker*? Jeez.)

Technorati needs to figure out if they are a search engine, a search feature, a social network or what. And most importantly, they need to show this in the UI. Right now, there's no differentiation. They have a great brand, but what they stand for ("blog search") gets diluted and diluted by their wavering around their features and their UI.

And why the hell is their main UI feature (the search box) hidden in that top right corner? Why do video thumbs look the same as site thumbs, so I have to read some (vertical! white on blue!) text to know the difference? I can go on, their search results display needs some loving too.

Is it my morning coffee speaking, or do you feel the same?

Now I understand why Facebook didn't want to sell, btw. Their "platform" play is brilliant in a "let me put on my sunglasses for a moment until my eyes adjust" kind of way. And they seem to be pulling it off. Myspace just started looking a lot less interesting.

web 3.0: offline access, computing as a service.

It feels like the dreaded web 3.0 is on its way. It will include offline apps (Google Gears), it'll include computing as a service (Amazon S3 and EC2). Basically, we've altered what the browser/internet can do (the browser can go offline, the internet apps can scale using service computing), and this should allow some crazy powerful new apps to emerge. What else, I'm not sure - there should be a social aspect to it as well if it's to be a big shift. Perhaps focusing on small groups of people?

Which brings me to a question: can the Google offline API access local files on your computer? I'm trying to grasp the strategic advantages of all these new toys.

Facebook doesn't think that my friend Kenyatta Cheese is a real person.

But I didn't predict how Google would make offline apps possible (via a browser plugin), or that they'd make it open source. "Google Gears extends browsers by making new APIs available to
JavaScript code. [...] To take
advantage of the offline features provided by Google Gears, you'll need
to add or change code in your web application."

Ah, I predicted this: Google is starting to roll out their offline apps :) A logical step.

After moving from New York, I've been consulting from Belgium for the last month or two. Some of my clients are still in New York, and one of the important things I've found is to make sure you're available. I took a US phone number through Skype, and my clients seem to really appreciate it. The second part of being available is timezones, and sometimes it's hard to be there for meetings in their afternoon (which is my evening), but I haven't found a piece of technology yet that can solve that problem.

So Skype global phone numbers rock. They really give clients a feeling of local presence, I get the impression.

An anonymous comment: "i worked for the media group for about fifteen minutes last year, and i
can tell you what’s wrong: yahoo has no strategy, no leadership, and no
management. they routinely ignore user research in favor of the
flavor-of-the-minute fads written up in the business mags (and not the
good ones, but the cheezy behind-the-times ones)."

I wonder if we'll be seeing posts like these from Google employees any time soon?

3 things I learnt about PR by getting my "startup" mentioned in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Times, Business 2.0, RollingStone and Forbes.

OK after that title - enough showing off! I truly know nothing about PR. I was lucky enough to get some good PR experience while I was developing Mefeedia (which I sold since, and it's doing great actually, so everyone won there), so I thought I'd share some bits. And before we go on, let me say I suck at PR. I stutter, I don't get my message across, I'm too honest and so on. But also: that's ok. PR isn't necessarily about being slick. The press exposure was documented in the Mefeedia blog, we got interviews/mentions in:

• The New York Times
• The Wall Street Journal - this was my best interview - I got paragraphs of printed material in the WSJ. I still have a copy somewhere. Yey.
• Times online (can't find the link)
• Business 2.0 Magazine
• Rolling Stone Magazine
• BusinessWeek's Best of the Web
• Forbes Magazine's Best of the Web

The "best of the web"-type mentions were partly due to there simply being very few video websites back then. I also got in some smaller newspapers like the Denver Post (link died), but really, very few. Mostly mefeedia got mentioned in the big publications. To prove that press begets more press, we got a mention on the early Techcrunch too. What was also cool is that Mefeedia got prominently featured in all 3 of the first 3 books about videoblogging. And by prominently I mean about 10 pages worth. I believe (although I have no proof) that that's been the cause of at least part of the ongoing user growth. In any case. In 2004, I was lucky to be in the original, pre-Youtube, pre-anything wave of videobloggers. I also started the first video aggregator (pre-Odeo), which I called mefeedia. It was fun days. Somehow however, Mefeedia was being seen as a "startup", when it was really just a hobby. A time-sucking hobby, true. And money-sucking. Out of my pocket. But still, a hobby. But mostly time sucking. I took off months from my consulting job, more than once, to work on it. I learnt a lot, which was always my goal, and in that sense it was incredibly successful. I started to believe a bit in the "startup" idea, I even talked to some VC's (they called me). Crazy days. I remember talking to the AIC guys in their office in NYC after they called me, I think they wanted to see if they could pick some ideas for Bloglines. I wasn't really looking for funding, and I don't think they were looking to invest, but I gave them a presentation anyway. They were impressed with an experimental feature I had where you could quote a specific part of a video. (I removed that later because it wasn't stable.) I went away thinking I shouldn't bother with this investment thing, and I'm glad I didn't go down that path. At the same time, the press was liking this videoblogging phenomenon. And as journalists did their homework, they'd come across mefeedia, and they would get in touch. They'd call me, I'd try to be quotable. Usually, after a call, I'd get at least mentioned in the article. Which brings me to the first thing I learnt: access. I put my email and phone number on the homepage of Mefeedia. When a journalist is writing a story, they don't have a lot of time. The press revolves around a quaint concept called "deadlines", because they have these physical things called presses that start working at a specific point in time. Old school! Sometimes they'd call me when I was in Belgium, in the middle of the night, but I'd make time. Anyways, access. Whenever a journalist would call, I'd drop everything and try to help them with their story. Which brings me to my second point: it's their story. Not yours. So you try to help them. For example, at the end of every call I would offer to get them in touch with other people in the industry. After the call, I would also send a follow-up email with more information (that I forgot to mention during the call), links, stats and so on. Anything they might be able to use for their article. I don't really believe in what PR people call "staying on message". Supposedly you just have to keep telling them what you want them to write. How annoying is that? So the journalists would get in touch. Sometimes I would talk to them about videoblogging for a while, helping out with links and stuff, and I wouldn't be in the story, but they'd get back to me for another story. For example, this is a typical email from someone from the WSJ: "Hi, this is X from the Wall Street Journal. We've spoken a couple times in the past about videoblogging. Circling back to you for another story I'm working on ...". The point is: be happy to talk about your expertise to journalists, and they'll rely on you for their research. And then you'll get quoted in the stories, sometimes. Help the journalists get their story right. Be their expert. Also, share the love a bit. I would always try to point them to videobloggers that were not so famous yet. It's good karma. Since it's their story, I also soon realized mefeedia had a strong attraction to them for 1 specific reason. They were writing about videoblogging, an emerging phenomenon, and they needed numbers and sources. And since mefeedia was the first videoblog aggregators, the nr.1 question they would want an answer to was: "How many videoblogs are there, and how fast is it growing?". If I had made that information available even clearer (with graphs and such, which we could have done), I'm sure there would have been a lot more press still. So the lesson: it's their story, you're there to help. Here's a trick to end the story, btw. In those early days, when a journalist would write about videoblogging, I'd send them a bit of happy feedback on their story (and include what I was doing with mefeedia). Journalists are people too, after all, they appreciate some honest good feedback. Here's an example of an email I got back after an email like that: "Thanks very much for the great feedback. We mentioned Mefeedia in today's article." Finally, the last lesson I learnt from this: PR is better than advertising, but a large part of the value of being featured in the NYT, the WSJ and so on, is being able to say "as featured in the NYT, the WSJ etc.". The second part is that press from big publicatons begets more press. If I had played it right, we might have hit that moment where you become the de-facto mentioned place in articles about a certain topic. Next time! In any case, the traffic bumps from these articles were rather negligable compared to what a popular blog sends. Really, don't expect a lot of traffic from the press. Here's some more stuff on DIY PR.

I was all ready for Reboot9 and the Yahoo hackday in London, but I've canceled them both - too busy. Too bad.

Good article: Spolsky explains why the industry-wide collapse of the consulting
market was so immediate: “The consulting market is the derivative of
every other market. When a company is growing, they will hire a few
consultants to help them grow a little bit more rapidly. When they’re
shrinking, they’ll instantly fire all consultants.

Itchy feet is a great travel blog in India, I'm afraid I'll read their entire archive :)

OK, this is geeky, but I'm drooling over some of the Zend framework stuff. They implemented most generic framework functions in pretty much a definitive way (caching, auth, filtering, ...), saving all of us loads of development time and bad code. If only they'd picked a better (more fun) name :)

Damn that Zend framework rocks. I'm playing with it and it's really lightweight and easy. No including loads of files, no configuration, just include the classes you want to use and use them. It's not Rails, and I'm pretty happy with that fact.

The zend framework is actually looking quite nice: useful classes, and no crazy framework clutter.