Google's acquisition chief: ``The crazy ones mean they ignore the usual restraints of investment levels required or design parameters or `Gee I need more servers than anyone ever thought was possible','' Ullah said. ``When you free yourselves from these constraints, you create crazy, cool things.''

Google wants companies that can build revenue streams from their users, instead of buying firms with a lot of users that don't bring in much in sales, Ullah said.

``We don't do traffic for traffic's sake,'' he said. ``It has to be highly monetizable.''

Scaling Rails: "By various metrics Twitter is the biggest Rails site on the net right now. Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues - issues that any growing site eventually contends with - far sooner than I think we would on another framework."

Turns out Rails *does* have some scaling issues. Nothing you can't work around I'm sure, but still. And that wouldn't stop me from using it, either.

MySpace, founded by rather ruthless marketeers and now owned by Murdoch, never had much ethics. Now they're blocking Photobucket, a company that embeds a LOT of pictures and videos on Myspace pages. Is this when MySpace will finally become uncool?

Some handy utf-8 testing strings.

I had another look at some of the popular PHP frameworks, and my short conclusion is: (disclaimer: these weren't in depth investigations and my opinions are just that)

Symfony: Too "enterprise" focused. Nono: when I create a table I then have to create a YAML representation of that data so symofony can do its thing. Don't like that.

Code igniter: this was a promising one, but they force you to use their wacky url scheme. Don't like that.

CakePHP: also looks promising, but it still seems like a lot of framework learning to get started.

If I was making lots of websites for clients with lots of forms and stuff, I'd definitely use one of these. But for a startup, I'm not sure. Too much abstraction, it feels like.

Why do kids do drugs? Coz they're fun and forbidden, of course.

Looks like a great lentil dish. I love lentil dishes. In Belgium, some supermarkets don't even carry lentils, they're not very popular.

De Belgica!: "No hace falta que os diga que pitufais un gran peligro. Los negros son contagiosos!"

I never knew a simple SELECT in mysql is case insensitive!

For once I agree with Mike Arrington: this "code of conduct" thing is nothing but a (typical American?) knee-jerk reaction not much different than the reaction to 9-11 back in the day, and we all know where that got us.

"We won't say anything online that we wouldn't say in person" or "We connect privately before we respond publicly" - that's just plain silly.

And "We do not allow anonymous comments" is WAY over the line. Police state online, is that what we want?

twitter spam?

I like Vimeo: it tries to make video personal, and there's no top10 list anywhere on the site. But like blip.tv (although they've gottn better), I don't think they sell themselves well enough on their homepage. Now it says: "Everyone can upload 250mb of video every week. Free." and "Vimeo is a free and easy service for sharing your videos with friends and family or people you meet here. Join Vimeo now and share your first video today."

Let's edit some copy.

First, "Everyone can upload 250mb of video every week. Free." is not a value proposition if by now everyone knows you can upload video easily for free to the internets. Two years ago not, but now they do. Huge amounts of Youtube press have taken care of that. So you need a different value proposition and especially, a different way to distinguish yourself from youtube. I know you've just raised your upload limits but new visitors don't care too much I'd think.

Second, "Vimeo is a free and easy service for sharing your videos with friends
and family or people you meet here. Join Vimeo now and share your first
video today."

The important part is "with friends
and family or people you meet here". Vimeo is all about sharing personal videos, you won't find SouthPark on there. I think they need to say that clearer.

Something like: "Share videos with friends, family and the Vimeo community. It's free and easy. Join now." You get the idea.

Then, redo the homepage to show us more about this community and the type of videos you can find here. You might also want to work in some messaging about how this is NOT like YouTube, although I'm not sure about the best way to do that.

Just some thoughts :)

btw, the new Boxes and Arrows design is very very pretty.

Trying out Axure

More axure pain.

The little preview windows when hovering over pages are just way annoying.

Also, I am getting desperate trying to use masters as backgrounds. When I put a master that has the 'background' property on a page, it seems I can't edit it, but when I click it twice then I can? And there's something going on with green and red borders, indicating something. Sorry guys, but this is WAY confusing and bad UI. Be better than Visio, I want you to!

The way I'd like it to work, is:

• If I click on a page or master in the nav, that is shown in the middle main screen.
• If a master is set to 'background', it shows in the left nav (little icon perhaps), and I can NOT move it around or edit it when editing a page, even not after double click, and just get rid of that red/green border coz I have no idea of what it means.
• The previews are no fun.
• And: why can't I make more stencils myself? Or do the 'masters' provide that functionality.

Final verdict: not great, not because of any inherent problem with the concept, but I can't figure out the functionality to do what I need to do.

Now tell me it's my fault.

I'm playing around with Axure and it's nice but I can't seem to use backgrounds like I do in Visio. The masters don't seem to work like backgrounds, or else I just haven't figured out yet how to do it.

I do love the ability to add annotations and specific fields for annotations to various things.

http://continuouspartialattention.jot.com/WikiHome: "I believe attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit.   We can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals.   In the end, though, we are fully responsible for how we choose to use this extraordinary tool."

Attention is definitely underappreciated in the theory of IA, although it is there.

I am working on some startup ideas that I want to develop while in Belgium, and I'm looking for people to work with. So if you're in Belgium (or somewhere else, that can work too), and you can hack code, and you want to talk, get in touch :)

Another link to Maria's static site, to get the Google juice flowing.

So again, this is a great talk. "You grew up with Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame; they're growing up
with being famous amongst 15. They're collecting friends as a way of
demarcating audience in a world without meaningful signals about who's
watching. If you're not in their list of friends or aren't like the
people in their list of friends, you are not the intended audience."

Perhaps the breakdown of privacy is creating the biggest cultural shock since the 50s/60s when rock&roll and all that happened.
 A lot of people really don't understand what teenagers do on Myspace (as an example).

Incantations for muggles, a great talk transcript about different age groups and what their priorities are and how that affects the tech we build.

ITS, the Internationalization Tag Set has been published as a W3C Recommendation.

ITS is a set of attributes and elements that are designed to help the internationalization and the localization of XML material.

For example, the same way you can use <p xml:lang="es"> to specify a the content of the <p> element is is Spanish, you can now use <p its:translate="no"> to indicate the content of <p> should not be translated.

Donna has a great post about blogging about her business as an IA consultant/freelancer. I love that idea, might steal it. If she doesn't mind :)

I always wanted to do State of the Vlogosphere posts, but never found the time. Frank did a great one at the Mefeedia blog today.

Lou's UX Zeitgeist attempts to capture the themes and memes floating around in the UX world and is in alpha. Check it out.

Midwifes in belgium

It's not very widely known because doctors don't tend to mention midwifes, but in Belgium, you can have a midwife who helps you before, during and after the pregnancy, and it's 100% free. They are trained professionals, and they come to your house for every visit. They deliver the baby and even follow up for weeks and months afterwards as well. It's really a big step against the medicalisation of pregnancies, and I find it quite incredible that this level of personal medical care is free. Yey for Belgium!

http://www.slideshare.net/tag/iasummit07 has a bunch of the fresh IA Summit talks.

I did miss going to the IA summit this year. So I'll be looking for slides on slideshare.net and posts on Technorati and stories on Boxesandarrows.com

Gmail continues: "Server Error

We're sorry, but Gmail is temporarily unavailable. We're currently working to fix the problem -- please try logging in to your account in a few minutes."

Peter Merholz writes about how he feels IA needs to innovate to avoid dead. I feel the same, mostly. This is the first year I didn't go to the IA summit (it's in Vegas and I'm in Belgium, that's 1 reason). I don't particularly find it interesting to talk about IA's future so I don't post a lot on it here, I do find new ideas interesting, and not enough have been coming up. But there's smart people there, so I have hope. And if IA becomes just a valuable part of the design process and not perhaps the leader it was at one point, perhaps that's ok too. Or not. I'm not married to IA, although I still happily call myself an information architect.

I think today the whole web2.0 thing was really over in my mind. Yes I'm late.

Hey, Gmail has been down for a while now.

I'm connected again with Belgium's Telenet (cable). So far so good. ISP's in Belgium do have the annoying habit to limit the amount of gigs you can up/download every month though. Weirdos.

http://ficlets.com/ great idea, bad ia. I spent 5 minutes browsing the site trying to read a story, couldn't do it, and signing in with my OpenID gave me an error.

Test Aankoop is a Belgian consumer organization, one of the things I like about living in Belgium. They continually redefine common sense - which supermarkets are cheaper, if it really makes sense to get that mobile phone plan with 1000 free minutes, is it worth to shop around for different banks, and so on. A must read.

Skype lets you charge for phonecalls from today on. It works worldwide, and Skype takes  (hefty) 30% cut. Video too. Hello "many services that were previously unfeasible" (ie pron industry).

Scribd (lets you upload documents) is supposed to be the "Youtube for text" :) Funny, I thought the Youtube for text was a little something called the internet.

Put any video (Youtube, Quicktime, ...) url in Mux, and use the output as your movie stream in SecondLife!

http://mux.am is still beta, but becoming a powertool for online video conversion, with api's and the works, based on Amazon's EC2 and S3. I'm confident Nathan will have a very reasonable pricing model once it gets out of beta (it's free now), and it will become a tool for everyone creating online video services.

Will my blog suvirvive me? Back it up with the Catholic Church!

Dave Winer talks about preserving your online legacy, like your blog, after you die. I see 2 important ingredients:

• Static html copies. Your blog and all that are probably dynamic sites, the only way I see those sites survive a long time is to make a static html copy of it. Databases, php scripts and so on just take too much maintenance, it's not doable. Anything static might loose some functionality (commenting), but it's easy to just keep on serving forever.
• Multiple copies, and to encourage that, CC license your content. A very open license will encourage multiple copies of your content. The only way to long-term survival in my mind are multiple copies. Think library of Alexandria - any server or company will die eventually.  

I think static HTML and multiple copies give your content the best chance to survive long-term. PS for Dave, blip.tv already has cross-posting to the Internet Archive, so set that up, cc license your movies and there's a much better chance your movies will survive for longer.

PS: if you want long-term institutions to back your backup service (I don't believe in a centralized backup service - they'll die too), why not go with the Catholic church? They've proven their sticky power :)

OK I'm out of Joost invites.

If anyone wants some Joost invites let me know :)

Adobe is going to create an online version of Photoshop, using their own Flex platform, within 6 months. It'll be free and ad-supported.

Customer acquisition

Customer acquisition is often a kind of forgotten part of building websites. Relying on just "viral" growth isn't all that's it made out to be. It's usually hard work.

I've had the pleasure to work with some people that are very experienced in this area, and I've learnt quite a few things.

One, it's easy enough to get 10,000 or even 100,000 users for your website. It's much harder to get 1,000,000 or 10,000,000, and active users mean a lot more than just people who signed up and never came back.

Two, it's hard to get paying users. The same numbers apply, but divided by about 100. So it's realtively easy to get 100 paying users or even 1000. It's a whole different ballgame to get 10,000 or 100,000 paying users. That's very hard work, and it will cost you probably around 5 to 20$/user.

These numbers of course don't mean a lot, but they give an idea. If you're planning for a million paying users for your startup, you better realize it's gonna take at least a year or two of hard work to get to that point even *if* you're successful, and cost you millions, perhaps 10s of millions in customer acquisition cost (advertising, rewards, the whole customer acquisition engine).

If you're going for a few 1000 paying users, that's something that's much easier to achieve. Just build a kick-ass useful product. If you can be way profitable with 10,000 paying users, you're good.

I kind of hestitated to put numbers in this post, because things vary so much, but perhaps this can help some unexperienced entrepreneurs so here we are. Grain o' salt please!

Hey, a coworking wiki. If things go well in Antwerp, I've been toying with the idea of starting a coworking space.

Would it be fair to say that when coorporate blogging fails, it does so most often because of the cultural problems? The coorporate culture doesn't allow for the free flow of ideas, hence the "blogging" effort becomes nothing more than a news channel, and the whole point is lost.

When it does work, it's because it supports an existing culture of openness. True? (ps: I know the comments are broken..)

Sitemaps at the bottom of the page: the evolution of a design pattern.

I'm sure this would have happened anyway, but back in 2000, I did some usability experiments with having a sitemap on every page of the website. Peter Merholz wrote about it (I didn't have my blog yet back then). I actually measured clickthroughs on that sitemap, and it turned out to be very popular.

Years later, that idea started to get picked up by more and more sites, and these days it seems like everyone is doing it (because it makes sense). So in a sense I could be the father of the sitemap at the bottom of every page pattern. Then again, it's one of those things that would have happened anyway.

Like the navigation in the main column pattern that Amazon is using these days. They used to have left hand navs, but over time, slowly, undoubtedly with lots of testing, they moved to having almost no left or right-hand navigation on their product pages, they're just one long page. The navigation is in the main column. I expect that pattern to take off more and more as well, since users quite effectively blind out the classic left hand nav.

Oh, in Peter's post, in the comments, a beauty: "Putting a site map on every page really riles me, actually. It's just laziness on the IA's part. Come up with a navigation that makes sense, and there won't be a need for it." - Hahaha.

Check this for a laugh and some insights:

"The kids in Iran are pissed off at the way the old Mullahs won't let 'em rock and roll, but the idea that they'll support an American invasion because they're bored is totally insane. It's like imagining that the kids in Footloose would've backed a Soviet invasion of Nebraska because John Lithgow wouldn't let them hold school dances."

and

"If we attack Iran, that'll make three Muslim countries invaded in three years. We may as well dress our soldiers in white tunics with red crosses on them, like they did in the Middle Ages."

The newly relaunched Ning is very much like Typepad for running your own social network. A basic account is free, your own ads or domain name cost money.

Hatred of America unites the world: "The best explanation is in fact the simplest. Being hated is what happens to dominant empires."

Oh, wouldn't that be a nice, soothing explanation Americans can live with? It's wrong though, America is hated for it's arrogance and imperialism.

Until just 10 years ago, America was still widely loved in about half of the world. Then Bush happened. I saw it in my family and friends in Europe: old people who lived through the war and were immensely thankful to the US for their role in that all their lives, suddenly started to actively, from the gut, hate the US when the Bush policies became clear. I never heard my old aunties express that much hatred for anyone in my life as for Bush and "America" which is represented by Bush and his policies.

It's not because of its power that the USA is hated throughout the world, it's because of how it chooses to use that power.

That's not an easy thing to live with, or even to understand perhaps, if you're American, but that's what I see is going on. Americans generally are unaware and don't seem to care what their country does to other countries.

I tried Google Reader for a few days, to replace my trusty Bloglines. It's very good, got lots of easy-to-find functions I'd like to use.

But one thing made me go back to Bloglines: Google reader leaves "unread" any items you haven't hovered over, which results in lots of unread items in feeds that don't actually have new items (coz I've read the latest one).

Bloglines makes everything unread once you read the latest item, which makes it so that I can 'clean out' (make 'unread') my feeds by checking the latest items. Much better, and enough reason to stick with them after a few days of Google Reader.

Also, the Google Reader UI is a bit too cluttered and geeky.