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.

What went wrong at Yahoo?

I noticed something today: the Yahoo homepage contains multiple links to total spam sites. There's an online degrees site features that goes to an adsense filled page (a spam site in other words), and a link to the ripoff company "freecreditscore" (they will sell you a monthly subscription without you noticing to get your "free" credit score).

What's worse, these links are not advertised as "ads", but as editorial content.

That's not good for Yahoo's brand or credibility. (SEO's of this world, have your fun with it!)

I noticed today that surfing around some of the Yahoo properties really feels like surfing around an ad-filled bunch of rather useless features.

So what went wrong? I'm not sure, but these kind of mistakes tend to be institutional. I think this page was designed by good designers, tested for usability, but nobody really owns it as their baby and worries about its quality. If they did, things like this wouldn't last a day. Also, it's probably the most stodgily conservative page in the company (homepages usually are), but come on!

What's more, as I was playing with Yahoo, I started to think their information architecture is a mess. For example, there are links to Yahoo services scattered all over the homepage, mixed in with some crappy ads like the above and some really pretty useless "news" items. Come on guys, it's 2007! You can do better.

ok, petervandijck.com is now the number 1 for the peter van dijck search. That was easy ;)

The reported cluelessness of Google's interview process compares quite badly with the brilliance of Microsoft's, who really don't fool around when hiring people. Expectations!

Is there any lightweight app out there that lets you browse with other, ie: if 1 person goes to a different page, the other person is also sent there? No download preferably, should work with any website, hopefully lightweight (don't want to download a crazy whiteboard sharing app).

A good idea: a universal wiki edit button design. Hey, make it a universal "edit this page" button.

Hey, Google translate is like Babelfish (translate text or pages), but it also can translate search results. Cool, Babelfish hadn't had a competitor for too long.

Google bought Feedburner. Now that's an acquisition that makes sense. I still insist that Google's acquisition of Youtube was a short term win (that ad inventory couldn't fall in the hands of the competition!) but a long term strategic mistake (every piece of inventory Google owns makes its ad serving technology less independent).

By the way, in my dealings with the Feedburner team, I have to say they rock!

I added another great presentation, this time a video, to my page of scaling presentations.

If Google really made a deal to pay large news providers for the privelege of listing them in their Google news section, the person responsible for this deal should be fired immediately. It's also most likely not true.

"enhanced interrogation"? Or torture? One aspect not discussed in this article of questionable interrogation techniques is their effect on the perception of the US and any "moral authority" they might claim.

More great Simon slides explaining OpenID.

A great comparison of js libraries by Simon Willison.

A great Flash upload library to upload multiple files with upload indicators and everything.

Oooh, the new Google analytics is niice! That's a BIG leap!

Let me know if you want a Joost invite (leave a comment).

And: "Treat a startup as an optimization problem
in which performance is measured by number of users." Number of active users, that is :)

Always a classic: "If you're going to spend years working on something, you'd think
it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different
ideas, instead of going with the first that comes into your head.
You'd think."

I wonder if there is any coworking going on in Belgium or Antwerp? Anyone?

And for the record, I think 2007 is the year of offline web apps. In 2008 that market will be huge.

Firefox 3 has "online" and "offline" events. That's javascript-speak for saying: now your webpage can know when you're offline (and hence queue it's actions) and when you're online (and then send all the queued actions to the server).

In other words, offline apps will be possible in Firefox 3. Hopefully we'll soon see experimentation and then an open js library to enable easy offline app-making (like js libraries now make ajax easy for dummies). IE is the only problem factor then.

A PHP logger class to easily create logfiles.

The ux zeitgeist.

hkit to parse microformats in PHP: looks supereasy:

    $hKit = new hKit;
    $result = $hKit->getByURL('hcard', 'http://microformats.org/');
    print_r($result);

wayut is now running in closed beta. If you want an invite let me know :)

Belgium applicants to the European web2.0 startup contest. A LOT of education-related things, but nothing really interesting that jumps out.

I was calculating: let's say you take, say, 10 pictures a day, for 3000 pictures a year. And we can optimize a picture into a decent size jpg of 130K. Not perfect but better than nothing and reasonable size. That is 400MB worth of optimized pictures, a year.

In Amazon S3, we can store this for you for about 80 cents a year. (15 cents/G times 12 / 2 coz we only have 400MB). Year two, the price doubles.

Why hasn't anyone built a business like this: free backup of your photos (up to say 5000 photos a year at optimized quality), with additional services extra?

There are a whole bunch of services out there, but none that I know of that do this. Pointers in the comments. For free, I'd take the piece of mind knowing that if my computer crashes, I'd have access to a backed-up version of my photos, be it not in 100% resolution.

I've been using the free version of Mozy to keep my business files (word docs, ...) backed up, and it rocks. It reliably backups everything, I can easily restore files, and it's free. There's really no reason not to use that for backing up your files: it's free and works great. If you want to back up big folders (like your pictures and music), you can get a paid account. Check it out.

What I learnt from working from home.

15 startups in Europe.

The deadline for submissions for the European IA Summit is May 15th (in a week!). So hurry, they won't be extending the deadline this year.

hahaha

Kevin Rose listen up :)

Is there a word for "little optimization"? I mean, "early optimization" of code is the root of all evil, and that's kind of the same thing, but what I mean is making changes to your code and making it less logical/readable in order to do "little optimization", ie. get some gains that might as well be solved with an extra server or so?

(This post might not make sense, haven't had my coffee yet.)

Joost are gonna have to do better if they want to be successfull. This kind of sums up my feelings, too: "Unfortunately, the content they offered was crap. The colleague who
invited me said the same - after the first amazement at the coolness of
it all, you spend about 10 minutes zapping through the programs, and
then you switch it off, bored already".

Still, no good underestimating the Skype/Kazaa guys.

Barcamp Brussels was really cool, very Belgian and I saw a few Belgian startups I didn't know of before. Wikifonia does sheet music, and not so-so (not live yet but they have a blog) is in the get-your-friends-reviews-of-places business. I was impressed with how smart they were.

Old but good: "The user of social software is the
group, and ease of use should be for the group."

You could use Anguish Languish instead of Lorem Ipsum.