Fax service recommendations?
Send2Fax review by PC Magazine: "Send2Fax offers four basic plans."
I'm looking for a simple online fax service. Requirements: being able to receive faxes and send faxes, and cheap. I only send and receive like ten faxes a year, so monthly fees are kinda annoying. Any recommendations?
Keeping it reg!
Try on jeans and get free iTunes songs!
Watch movie 3.4 min 11.9 MB
(Original post, via Keepin' It Reg!)
Developing Mefeedia
Before I started this development effort on Mefeedia (we launched R1 last week, and we'll be launching a lot more stuff soon), I made a list of priorities. What makes for the ability to roll out cool stuff fast?- Short development cycles. I didn't get this at first, but mike from Blip.tv told me they use 2-week development cycles. So I started doing that, and it works. Two week development cycles rock. They really focus the mind, set deadlines. Two weeks I can handle.
- Few specs. 32 signals is famous for saying specs are bad (no functional specs!), but I disagree. The truth is, it depends on your developers, and the relationship you have with them. I have 2 developers in India, and every 2 weeks I write a 2-4 page spec with the new functionality. I also give them page mockups, already integrated in the site (ie. non-working pages). That seems to work so far. The trick is: I don't make a big spec in advance, I only spec things that we're implementing in that 2 week cycle.
- Take the time to remove functionality. The hardest part with innovating is: you have to find the functionality that rocks. Especially in a new field like videoblogging, where none of this has been done before, it is very easy to develop functionality that doesn't, well, rock. There are 100s of functions I could develop. It's not a lack of cool ideas. But some work, others don't. And you need to be lean. So what I do is rather ruthlessly remove functionality. It does take some work to remove a function, but in the future you've gained less testing, less maintenance, and more focus. So spend the time to remove stuff.
TipMonkies » Blog Archive » Find free video podcasts with Mefeedia
TipMonkies » Blog Archive » Find free video podcasts with Mefeedia: "Mefeedia is an awesome service I heard about on Rocketboom which is very similar to RSS aggregators like Bloglines and Rojo but targetting the emerging market of video podcasts (or videocasts, or vlogs, or whatever you want to call them). In this way, it is similar to my favorite podcatcher/podcast directory, Odeo. Unlike other videocast aggregators, there is no need to download videos as they are streamed right from the browser. I currently subscribe to about 10 different video podcasts so I have a few gigs worth of video just from that, so it’s nice to finally just be able to stream content. The interface could use a little work as it’s not as clean and intuitive as Odeo but there is lots of great content, and you can tag videos, send them to friends, and do a few other cool things."
ABC News: PODCASTING
ABC News: PODCASTING. A really nice evolution of the orange XML icon for podcast feeds on (of all places) ABC's site.
I heard them mention their videoblogs on the news today, couldn't find them though.
0000016: Feature: Unicode support - Mantis
I need a plan for Unicode support in Mefeedia. Amazingly, PHP is rather bad in this regard. I'm using PHP and Mysql. Here's a page that clearly shows the need for this.
So I have a question: what is the basic approach?
- Make sure stuff is stored in UTF-8 in MySQL?
- Make sure HTML uses UTF-8?
- What about the PHP part of the equation?
Any pointers to common sense around this are very welcome. Any good libraries?
I just had an insight. Metadata is determined by its usage, not its definition. That is, what people *do* with tags determines what they *are*, not how you define them. Same for lots of types of metadata.
Jon Udell: Good enough for government work
Jon Udell: Good enough for government work: "Here's the proof that tail doesn't matter much. If it did, we would not be successfully pouring the majority of our web writing through TEXTAREA widgets in blog and webmail composers."
What features matter and which ones don't? The question is driving me crazy, now that I'm developing my own software. What are the killer features? There really isn't a way to know without having users have a go at them. And then what - do you remove the not so popular features? A kind of featuritis darwinism? That's what I'm doing with Mefeedia for now, forced by limited resources. It might well be the best approach. Less features is less stuff to focus on, less testing, and faster improvement cycles.
Perhaps the answer is: throw out features you think will work, then get rid of the ones that didn't, then refine the ones that did until they *shine*.
But I may well be totally wrong here.
tags and facets
I've started to experiment with tags and facets.
Here's the live site: mefeedia video tags.
I'll report back more later, for now it's just a superbasic implementation, but it already helps break those tagclouds that tend to block the sun of findability (stretching the metaphor, I know) into little fluffy clouds.
Tagging tags to make synonyms / Atomiq
Tagging tags to make synonyms / Atomiq. Gene Smith posts a way to use synonyms in tag systems.
IA Summit - Architettura dell'Informazione
Emanuele Quintarelli seems to single-handedly have stamped out the first Italian IA Summit out of the ground. I'll be there.
IA Summit - Architettura dell'Informazione: "It’s here. It’s arrived! http://www.iasummit.t
The first ever Italian Information Architecture Summit it’s ready to accept new speakers, excellent presentations and a lot of listeners for an unforgetable learning and networking experience.
With the help of some wishful friends I’ve managed a meeting to collate the italian IA community.
The conference will be held here in Rome in the Marconi room inside the CNR (National Council for the Research) central site. An online registration is needed but the cost is 0 Euro!!
Spread the word!
The suggested topics are:
* IA Principles, Methodologies, Deliverables
* Classification Schemes, Taxonomies, Controlled Vocabularies, Thesauri, Findability, Knowledge Management
* IA, Business and Project Management
* IA Research and Studies (user research, personas, scenarios, etc..)
* IA and Education (courses, masters, workshops)
* Success Stories and Real Cases Explained (Deliverables, Best Practices, Case Studies)
* Interaction with related disciplines
"
nyc marathon video
The marathon came by today by our house in 129th St.. The NY marathon rocks. And Harlem rocks harder.
Watch the Quicktime movie (Quicktime movie, kinda large)
ben barren - rss'ing down under: WM Talent Agents, Viral Video + RSS
ben barren - rss'ing down under: WM Talent Agents, Viral Video + RSS.
Goddamn "viral" video. A lot of the new video sites' business plans revolve around putting ads around "viral" videos. Is that the best we can do?
It's this idea that the only valuable video coming from the "masses" is the "viral" video, that the best we're gonna see is the funny fat kid dancing, that really pisses me off.
What excites *me*, is that we can take back a medium from BigCo television. That real people can make interesting video. Fascinating stuff. Not just funny home movies. That anyone with a laptop, a camera and an internet connection can have a voice through this medium. I'm focusing Mefeedia.com 100% on *those* videos. I don't give a shit about the funny viral video of the day.
So I guess what annoys me today is the limited vision of these free-hosting-viral-video-ad-income companies that are popping up all over the place. In 18 months, most of them will be gone, thank god.
I think we need businesses to build this ecology of a million channels. But not with those business plans. That's just not going anywhere.
Mefeedia in Private Equity Week
I had a chat with a journalist last week, here's the article. I like my description. "Entrepreneur" ;)
Private Equity Week: "Manhattan based-entrepreneur Peter Van Dijck, who runs MeFeedia, says VCs are calling him about wanting to invest, but he's not even calling back.
"I'm not looking for any money, but I've gotten a few calls," he says with a laugh. "Usually, they email me first. I think they're trying to figure out what's happening in the market, and where it's going."
MeFeedia catalogs more than 1,000 vlogs (or video blogs, which are Web logs that use video as the primary content), which encompass tens of thousands of videos, up from 100 vlogs six months ago. Van Dijck says the business costs just $2,000 a month to operate with the help of two contractors. He says he doesn't know how he will make money, though like many entrepreneurs in the space, he envisions growing profitable either by selling ads or by charging fees for premium levels of service, which he says that he is currently developing."
the weblog of Lucas Gonze
the weblog of Lucas Gonze: "I am surprised to find that there isn't much community will to work with Apple to fix the one-click spec, but there isn't, and given that it doesn't make sense for me to pursue it on my own. On top of that, it turns out that others' attempts to get Apple to clean up their RSS have made much difference.
My guess is that the addition of podcasting to iTunes knocked the wind out of the first generation of podcasting software developers. They're working like mad to carve out a niche, and feel like this is a minor issue at best."
Lucas is a pioneer. He's right, I think most developers feel they have better things to do than to get Apple to clean up their act. Me included.
We're wrong though.
Apple is contaminating the ecology of RSS with its implementation, and that spells bad news for everyone.
They're like a 1,000,000 pound oil tanker, leaking oil all the way, drifting slowly into the beautiful natural coral reef that is RSS.
Fixing 1-click subscriptions (not just Apple's, but everyone's) should be a priority of everyone in this space, but I personally can't be bothered to fight this fight. Fighting for standards is tiring. Been there done that.
It worries me that Lucas can't be bothered either though. He's a crusader. He fights the good fight. When he gives up, it's like the Greenpeace guys saying: "You know what, whatever. I got better things to do."
Videoblog archive tutorial for blogger
Freevlog tutorial: how to put an Instant Visual Video Archive on your Blogger Blog. Ryanne from Freevlog made a tutorial movie - it's fantastic. A good example of good video tutorials.
Open media
"1. When Google first unveiled video.google.com, you had to use their patched version of VLC to play videos there, and if you used Google's patched version of VLC, it would only play items hosted on http://video.google.com. (They have since changed over to a Flash player using FLV, which is not like this).
2. If you want to watch news video on MSNBC.com, you have to be using Internet Explorer or you will get an error message saying that IE is required. It's not good enough to have Windows Media Player as either a standalone or plugin, and it's not good enough to use an alternate media player like VLC which is capable of rendering Windows Media. It's possible that there are technical issues associated with this (probably the site relies on features specific to IE) but not that these technical issues were insurmountable.
3. If you want to browse the iTunes music store over the web, you have to be using iTunes as your web browser. With Internet Explorer or any other browser aside from iTunes, you get an error message saying that you must use iTunes.
What these have in common is that the server and client are tightly coupled, so that the same entity must own both.
So here's a potential litmus test: what makes media open is whether any potential pair of clients and servers can work together to fetch it and render it."
Wordpress question
Template Tags « WordPress Codex.
I have a Wordpress question, if someone could point me in the right direction...
I have wordpress in domain.com/blog/. On another page (domain.com/index.php), I want to display the latest 10 posts in certain categories. How can I do that? What files do I need to include, and such.
A pointer in the right direction would be enough - I'm just not familiar with the whole Wordpress Way, so not sure which files to start hacking.
Thanks!
A VC: The Looming Attention Crisis
A VC: The Looming Attention Crisis: "I have been using a lot of new web services lately. It's part of my job to do that. New companies submit business plans for us to evaluate. The first thing we usually do is use their service. Most of what is getting built today requires a fair amount of user participation and thus a lot of attention."
Boxes and Arrows: Ambient Findability: Talking with Peter Morville
Boxes and Arrows: Ambient Findability: Talking with Peter Morville: "Unfortunately, Tim is suffering from apophenia. I think he caught it from Clay Shirky. I hope they both get well soon. People have been predicting the end of hierarchy since the beginning of hierarchy. But it’s not going away."
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005: Beyond the basics
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005: Beyond the basics: does Windows media Center support RSS 2.0 with enclosures? In other words, can you plug in an RSS feed with video enclosures and will it automatically download videos? (like iTunes does?) I haven't been able to figure this out...
RashmiSinhaSaturday10AM - TagCamp: Rashmi's notes - good reading.
Yahoo travel rocks
Yahoo travel is rocking the online travel world. I just noticed this innovation: instead of making you enter dates and then telling you what prices they have flights available for, they let you look for prices for a destination on any date, tell you the cheapest offerings, and then let you search for dates that those flights have seats available. Amazing. The UI for that part is functional and looks like this:
As far as I know, no other online travel service lets you search like this. I've been waiting for this for years.
iTunes 1-click is pretty fucked up
the weblog of Lucas Gonze: "Dear Apple developers working on the podcasting portions of iTunes, ...".
The Apple 1-click subscription technology is broken. What's worse, after Lucas told me I should remove the content-type application/rss+xml from my pcast files in Mefeedia, so I did but it breaks iTunes compatibility. So iTunes is totally messed up here. Let's hope they fix this soon and we can leave this behind us.
Archive
In the old days, before the blog, I used to write "articles" (yes, actual html pages), "upload" them and everything. They're not particularly relevant anymore, some are embarrasing, but here they are, for posterity and because nice URLs stay around. The only one that's still really relevant is Themes and metaphors in the semantic web discussion. Old pages on this website:- How people really browse.
- A short and easy introduction to everything. (I still love that title!)
- Content management: how to let users add formatting
- Email interface design 101 (this one has a few interesting ideas in it)
- Funky forms for interface designers. (pre-AJAX)
- Finding blind spots in navigation. (still somewhat relevant)
- Illustrating ease (my attempt to start a library of illustrations of the idea of ease of use
Wired News: We're a Hit in Manila! Now What?
Wired News: We're a Hit in Manila! Now What?: "Friendster, which today has millions of Filipino members, is one of a number of advertising-supported internet sites grappling with the dilemma of how to take advantage of unforeseen overseas popularity. Such sites are finding that business models that work in large, developed countries need serious readjustment in nations with small populations or low internet-penetration rates."
Sam Ruby: Actually innovative
Sam Ruby: Actually innovative: "If youâre working for an actually innovative startup, please consider thinking about i18n, unicode, and all that jazz. Actually, do more than consider it. Just do it. Not everyone speaks English, and thereâs no reason to restrict âWeb 2.0â? (thereâs that involuntary shudder again) to English speakers."
And: "
Totally disagree. i18n is extremely resource intensive. Everything being equal, the startup that iterates on the English product will easily beat the one that doesnât iterate on the multi-lingual product."
It depends. I18N can let you win over a lot of markets the other guys are ignoring. Big deal.
braintag: Mark Napier @ Eyebeam 10/27/2005
braintag: Mark Napier @ Eyebeam 10/27/2005: "In order to preserve his work beyond the "life" of his pieces, he's archiving his source code to microfilm."
That's an idea.
braintag: MySpace vs. My Space
braintag: MySpace vs. My Space: "Jay raised a fantastic question Saturday that I haven't been able to get out of my head since:
Do the benefits of MySpace outweigh the benefits of My Space?
Rendered unclever: Which is better? To publish and participate in a closed social networking environment or to publish a blog/videoblog/podcast on your own server with your own blog installation?"
An insightful post, check it out.
Some tips for new Typepad vloggers.
Now that Typepad has integrated videoblogging, I wanted to share some tips for new videobloggers. Some of the stuff that we've learnt over the past year or so doing this.
1. You have something to say. Try the videobloggingweek (where you post 1 video every day for a week) for yourself and at first, you'll feel like "what can I have possibly to say". Then you realize everything is interesting. Every day, there are at least 5 videobloggable moments.
2. It's about connecting people and speaking truth. Vlog what you really believe. It's a great exercise in not becoming the fake person, the corporate drone you always feared of becoming. I think people become that way because they just lack the practice of saying what they really think.
3. Small digital fotocameras (the Canon elph for example) work fine. It's not about the gloss.
4. As you become better, you can do most editing while filming. As you film, your edit-eye knows what to film and how it will be used.
5. Make sure to always put your url at the end of a video. You don't know where it might end up, at least like this people will be able to find your blog.
Go to Mefeedia.com to find about a 1000 videobloggers. And add your feed if you're videoblogging too.
Finally, if you're really into this stuff, join the videoblogging mailing list, the best place to learn more.
Enjoy!
Google Base = RSS database?
Google Base Was Sort of Live. So Google is doing a simplified kind of database.
Why would they do that? I heard a talk with a Google engineer addressing the SQL crowd a while back, saying that a massively distributed, simplified database (no complex queries), using RSS as a data transport mechanism is the wave of the future.
Presentations 101: have a fight.
VCLP0112.MOV (video/quicktime Object) Somehow, having a fight during a presentation seems more entertaining than not having one. (Not that I had it planned that way.)
All that alpha, limited beta and so o web2.0 stuff these days. Them kids! Mefeedia went into public beta after I coded it together in two days in December 2004, and has been running happily ever since.
Oh, and today we moved to the new server. Dedicated and shiny :)
You’re It! » Blog Archive » Peter Morville: the Tagsonomy interview: "the semantic poverty of tags."
We're fixing that, though.
ACNielsen News Release - 19 October 2005 - One-Tenth of the World’s Population Shopping Online
Just when I wanna try AdWords, I get this: " AdWords will be offline for 4 hours beginning immediately." Damn!
petervandijck’s blog - hey, Wordpress does blog hosting now! They're sending out invites.
socialight launches. It's a mobile location aware app, I did some user testing for them earlier this year. Check it out. Basically, it lets you annotate your environment with photos, text and such, and then your friends can pick up those annotations later.
What it's not
I'm working on version 2 of Mefeedia, my personal crazy project. In about a month plus some, it'll go live. And:- It's not Web 2.0. What happened with web 1.0? Or the plain web? Is anyone getting excited about that anymore?
- It's not the Flickr for video. Clearly, Flickr will be the Flickr for video.
- It's not 'an amazing new way to'. OK, so it is the best place to find indie video. But it's not that amazing. Jeezes.
Findability and folksonomies
I am blogging some stuff from the iainstitute mailing list, whose archive is currently not public, which is kinda ironic for an organization that focuses on findability.
Anyways. Peter Morville (with a new book on findability) and Thomas Vanderwal (who coined the term folksonomy) sparring over folksonomies:
Thomas, refering to an article Peter wrote:
"I really like most of the article. I agree with the Wikipedia section, but have more scepticism as the *folksonomy* entry is nearly always wrong these days with the definition and examples it gives.
I do start running into problems with your article in the folksonomy area. I agree that early on the Technorati folks coopted the folksonomy term, but they have shied away from its use of late as they realize it is not what it is doing with their tagging effort.
What Technorati is doing is what Cory Doctorow labelled Metacrap.
Technorati tagging is a gory mess, it adds little value, it captures a variety of tagging (and decidedly non-tagging -- commercial weblog tools have their categories counted as tags by Technorati) practices with various points of view and gumbles them up. It could even be worse than Metacrap. I have talked with them a fair amount about how to approach fixing it and time will show if they have an interest.
It seems you have had blinders on with the folksonomy tools since the IA Summit in Montreal Peter. As the serendipity tools like http://del.icio.us have been growing up into fairly decent findability tools as their corpus of materials grows. The creator of del.icio.us has left his day job and has been focussing on the tool as a full-time job and has five other developers now making the product better. They built their own search engine which has just gone live and is permitting their corpus, which is based on their contributors' point of view, to be used more easily.
Having just returned from Europe from the Euro IA Summit, I had a lot of discussions with people there about folksonomy. Many wished I had presented on that subject or were writing a book on the subject (hmm...). There is a problem in Europe and with the rest of the world
that folksonomies help resolve, it is a cross-cultural tool. It easily leverages the language of those tagging from one culture and uses the object being tagged as a pivot to find other cultures vocabulary for similar objects. Folksonomies are quite a popular tool in non-parochial Amerian eyes. They help greatly with findability.
The key piece is that the folksonomy tools are broad folksonomies so people can pivot.
[...]
Peter answers:
I'm glad you enjoyed (most of) the authority article, and I appreciate your thoughtful response. I do think folksonomies as an experimental subject are very interesting, and I don't dispute that tagging can improve findability and refindability. I'm just not sure that most people most of the time will find it worth the investment in the long-run. I forced myself to try del.icio.us before the IA summit panel so I'd have something useful to say about it. I haven't used it since. In any case, I think we'll have to agree to disagree on some (but not all) of these issues.
Thomas:
You really should try del.icio.us again, particularly since most of what you stated is has not been the case for many months and you are a voice of authority. You should also try Yahoo's My Web. Yes, they do take a little time, but the pay off is quite grand.
[...]
Peter:
When I get a chance, I will revisit del.icio.us and explore Yahoo's My Web.
Then I will be much better prepared to criticize them :-) In the meantime, I
will maintain my skepticism, based purely on my problem with the following
proposition:
"Yes, they do take a little time, but the pay off is quite grand."
Google Desktop takes no time and the refindability payoff is arguably much
better.
The case against findability.
Things should be easy to find - an information architect could agree with that.
The recent problems surrounding Google maps sound, from a distance, silly. That crazy Indian president! What is he talking about?
But culture is a funny thing. At the IA retreat a few weeks ago I showed a screenshot of the levis website. Totally offensive to me (from Belgium), none of the attendees noticed a particular problem. The thing with culture is, what makes 1 person from 1 culture angry, won't mean a thing to someone from another culture.
I wrote about the Maori a while ago. A really important concept in Maori culture is âtapuâ?. It means that certain knowledge shouldn't be shown to just anyone.
I guess I'm trying to say: this idea that information should be freely available is a cultural one. And it's not always necessarily (this is painful to say) right.
This is a real wheelchair ad!
Colours In Motion Spazz_G Everyday Wheelchair: "Have you been dreaming of that unique custom wheelchair that would not cost you an arm and a leg?"
Unbelievable.
alarm:clock: Peter Rip Lets It Rip: "So where are we not investing? In companies that are only focusing on the social/collaborative aspects of the Web (for example "collaboration-assisted search engines"), There will certainly be some big successful companies, but it is hard to have an informed opinion about which of the many will have a sustainable advantage. We are in the prediction business and we don't know how to predict those markets."
Apple put Steve Jobs' speech online. Apple - QuickTime - Apple Special Event - October 2005
"It's great, it's fantastic, it's fantastic, it's fantastic."
And: "It's great!"
People keep talking about what a great presenter Steve Jobs is, but he pisses me off. He's got charisma, but the "great fantastic" bit, god, that's just... amazing! Fantastic!
Selection readers
Yes! That's me!
Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : Saddle Up to the MiniBar: "We also know there are "selection readers" out there. (I'm one of them.) Selection readers are just what they sound like: people who select text in a document as they read it. Maybe it's a kind of nervous habit. For me, I think I do it to kind of help me keep my place in the document."
Compelling experiences
How to make money with digital lifestyle aggregators - Part I :: AO: "So personalization and customization find their destiny intermixed with Integration and Aggregation. The only way to produce compelling enough experiences is by integrating a wide range of built-in constructs, combining that with agregated web servcies and content and topping it all off with unprecedented levels of control and customization. In one product or service."
Marc Canter is so full of bullshit. Or, he just writes really badly. "Compelling experiences"? Spending too much time with the suits Marc? And get a spell checker.
And then: "branded memes and viral uptake". No, not just bad writing, he's lost. Bye Marc. See you later.
Yeah, I'm in that mood again.
Refactoring or starting from scratch?
For the next version of Mefeedia, I got 2 great developers. That's important for what follows.
I coded Mefeedia in PHP, in a weekend, because it seemed like a good idea at the time. A lot of projects start that way.
Over the past year, I've been spending months and months of real time developing the site. The architecture and the code aren't bad. It's kinda scalable.
I was talking to my devs, and they said: "Why not use Rails". It's the new hot thing. And i'm sure it's got lots of advantages. But I also know the power of refactoring, and that's the way I really wanted to go.
In the end I decided to go with Rails. Throw away all that code. And we didn't have a lot of technical discussions about the pro's and cons of both approaches. I made up my mind when one developer said: "I've been dreaming of a chance to work with Rails."
Happy developers are productive developers. And that's all there's to it.