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
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PeterMerholz 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!
DaveWiner (link) 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.
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. PeterMerholz 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.
US Generals say they will "quit" if Bush starts Iraq war: "SOME of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources. "
When sense has to come from the military, things have gone far.
18seconds.org, which redirects to http://green.yahoo.com/, wants to encourage people to install energy saving lights. Like it.
Doc Searls points to DaveWiner thinking about the podcast device. Features that matter to Dave:
1. Self-contained, untethered synchronization, much the same way a Blackberry gets email.
2. Read-write, two-way, should be able to record and connect with a publishing system for automatic upload and feed production.
3. Must be a platform, that is, people other than the manufacturer can add apps.
About the third one, to be a platform, I wonder if being able to read RSS and OPML and let users access that would be sufficient? In other words, the device can access OPML directories and RSS feeds, and that way anyone can make directories and content available.
Or do you need to be able to program it? I'm not sure how much extra hardware/complexity/price that would involve (would it have to be a webserver itself?).
You would think there would be a website where you could browse webdesigners' work and find a freelance webdesigner? People always ask me if I know a good designer, coz they can't find any. But I haven't found that website yet.
Peter Forret emailed me with an idea: Yahoo Pipes + a query language = SWQL (structured query language for rss).
I think it's great, this could be implemented as a library for which we could then develop a PHP wrapper. The PHP would look something like:
$swql_connect("http://pipes.yahoo.com/api", "username", "password"); // where the yahoo pipes API serves as the database engine.
$res = swql_query("SELECT title, description, enclosure FROM rss:http://podcast.example.com/feed/ as rss_feed WHERE len(rss_feed.enclosure) > 0 ORDER BY rss_feed.title");
Brilliant!
I'm old. I mostly understand Myspace, but that's because I asked friends who are still young to explain it to me, and I still think I only get it 80 or 90%. My site doesn't have a picture of me. Hey, if I was young, I'd have a Myspace page, not a site. I've always felt kids should have blogs, when they seem to prefer to do IM and hang out on the social networks.
This NYT article explains why I'm old. It compares the new generation, with their lack of privacy concerns, and the *old* generation's reaction to them to what happened with rock&roll int he 50s.
I'm quite happy actually, a good old fashioned culture shock between young and old! The world has been way too boring for the last 40 years.
Ev is selling Odeo. Which makes sense - for similar reasons I sold Mefeedia last month: not a bad website, but it needs attention I'd rather spend somewhere else myself. I'm very happy with how selling Mefeedia turned out: the new owner is improving it and running it with the same vision that we always had when we started it. Which is kind of a good feeling.
Here's a thought: why hasn't anyone made a better UI for mailing lists yet? No money in it? I could totally see how it should look and work, and it shouldn't be crazy hard to implement.
- Yahoo pipes is just the first visual db editor.
- It'll be built on RSS, with some additional namespaces taking off (like MediaRSS, the iTunes extensions, ...). If you provide data you want to open up, open it up in RSS and add metadata with your own namespace if needed.
An interesting article that compares Yahoo Pipes with the invention of relational databases.
I love the "Everything Else" category, so I love the idea of "Everything is Miscelaneous", which now has a blog, which is in "beta".
From a mailing list today: "Also, we haven't covered topics such as graphics design, interactive design, creative production...which might be of more interest to female members."
My mom's chocolate mousse recipe:
200 gram PURE chocolade
50 gram butter
2 egg yellow
5 egg whites
75 gram cream
50 gram sugar
melt the chocolate and butter on a low fire.
Whip the cream.
Whip the yellows + 25gr sugar.
Whip the whites+ 25g sugar.
Take warm (but not too warm) chocolate, mix in yellows first, then cream, then carefully the whites.
Put in little cups 2 hours in the fridge.
A smart post by Jorge on his new culture blog: "One method Iâm exploring for studying other cultures more objectively
is to focus on a single âalienâ? element that the other cultures (and my
own) share in common, and then try to understand the ways in which they
engage with this element. I call this alien element a âbogieâ?.
Was reading this thoughtful post on gift giving in Bloglines, and I thought, Hey, that could have been written by Danah Boyd! Turns out it was, I just didn't know I was reading her feed.
A UK think tank has reports on where innovation will come from in the future, you can download the PDF's on Asian innovators. Interesting stuff.