Excellent Ted Talk by Clay Shirky on on-line communities. While it’s a bit dated, much is still very relevant today.
Archive for the 'High Tech' Category
WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg gave a talk at Web 2.0 where he presented what’s coming for the WordPress platform. Didn’t know their office was completely virtual–they all work from home. And their unique users growth numbers are pretty impressive: 2006-2M, 2007-43M, 2008-168M uniques. His main announcement in the talk was launching blog similarties which he titles “Possibly Related Posts” (or readers who read this blog article also read…). You can watch it below. Make sure to watch to the end. The closing note showing WordPress photo blog themes looks incredibly cool.
My favorite Joe on Software post of all time is his piece on Architecture Astronauts. If you’ve ever worked for a large high tech company, you can’t miss architecture astronauts. They’re everywhere. They either work on projects that never ship or ones that become hopelessly and unnecessarily complex. Joel nails this phenomenon in this article.
These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts. It’s very hard to get them to write code or design programs, because they won’t stop thinking about Architecture. They’re astronauts because they are above the oxygen level, I don’t know how they’re breathing. They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don’t contribute to the bottom line.
He just posted a follow-up to this post. It’s mostly a rant about Microsoft shenanigans and the evils of big companies. But he also provides some examples of the latest architecture astronaut output from Redmond. His related anecdote about big company recruiting impacts is also interesting:
…between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy…
Interesting survey results for what BlackBerry users care about in a phone versus iPhone users. Very different for now.
I spent some of the weekend working on a new style for my blog. My goodness, Movable Type was a serious pain in the butt. It’s the first time I really used the new 4.0 version. Six Apart did a pretty big refactor in how the templates are put together. Basically, you start with an index template with only about 10 lines of code. Here’s where the headache begins:
MTInclude module=”Header”$
$MTInclude module=”Entry Summary”$
$MTInclude module=”Footer”$
Yes that’s right, those simple includes, turn into more includes, which in turn into yet more includes. Six Apart componentized all the template code into small pieces. I suppose maybe to OO types this seems logical. But it makes it ridiculously long to track down exactly what code you want to update. Then there’s the CSS. It’s already tough enough reading CSS someone else wrote. But rather than simply opening up a single style sheet, you’re greeted with something like this:
@import url(http://blogs.mobileduo.com/mt-static/themes-base/blog.css);
@import url(http://blogs.mobileduo.com/mt-static/support/themes/cutline/cutline.css);
Yes, that would be includes for CSS. I can see there must of been an architecture astronaut at work here. And as an extra bonus, you can’t edit either of the primary CSS files directly. They’re stored in some mystery directory on the server. You need to override them with your own CSS include via the Movable Type UI.
The icing on the cake is Six Apart’s documentation is terrible. Bob setup our server to handle Action Streams, so our blogs can report on our other other RSS data sources. Documentation was almost completely non-existent. I had to Google for bits and pieces. To learn how the heck the Movable Type admin interface worked, again had to Google for that. Thank goodness for Learning Movable Type.
All and all I was completely underwhelmed with the latest Movable Type release. It’s neither tailored to the non technical user nor the technical. Makes me think that there could be a market for an easy to use blogging system. No small company is going to want to use tools like this. I wonder if WordPress is any better?
Anyone who knows me knows I’m a Mac fan. I like Apple products because they’re usually well thought out, elegant and easy to use. The iTunes Music Store is well thought out, elegant and easy to use. But I’ve noticed I dropped it in a heart beat when Amazon launched their Music store. Why?
I don’t find the Amazon site particularly more elegant. The helper app method to download albums works well but is prone to misfires. Yes, the price is a bit less than the iTunes store. But a buck here and there isn’t a big draw. The higher quality MP3 files is nice but frankly, I can’t year the difference with my crappy iPhone ear buds. There’s two big draws for me: 1) DRM free and 2) Amazon recommendations.
DRM free is an obvious attraction to consumers. But features not based on price or convenience aren’t so obvious and those are the ones that pull me back. One thing Jeff Bezos got right many years ago was customers need more reasons to return to your store than just price. I use Amazon a ton because of their reviews, wishlist and personalization features. I expect the price to be low. But it’s not my main factor for returning regularly.
It took that launch of the Amazon MP3 store for me to really understand my personal shopping behavior. Because it would take a lot to get me to use a non Apple product. The iTunes store has “listener’s also bought” feature like Amazon’s “customer who bought also bought.” But that’s about it. From a merchandising features perspective, there’s not a lot available.
Full disclosure, I do work for Amazon. But (I think) I shop just like anyone else. It would take something pretty major to pull me away from the Mac platform. Amazon did it with community and personalization. That was an interesting epiphany for me.
Says Palo Alto venture capitalist Jean-Louis Gasse, a former Apple executive who once worked with Jobs:
“Democracies don’t make great products. You need a competent tyrant.”
Ridiculous: Sony BMG Confirms DRM Free Music, But Will Force Customers to Visit A Store To Buy It
“When we first wrote about Sony BMG offering DRM free music we were positive on the move, and it still is a step forward, but forcing customers who want to buy digital music into a physical store where they will be forced to pick the album then and there, then go home to download it…WTF?.”
(Via TechCrunch.)
Just purchased some tracks by the Kronos Quartet. Created an iMix from the grouping. iTunes users can listen to samples here.
<a href=”http://www.deutschegrammophon.com”
Deutsche Grammophon just opened an on-line store strictly for classical music. That’s super exciting for the classical genre as it doesn’t get a lot of attention in the music world these days.
The good about the store is its general clean lines. All tracks are very high quality 320kbps MP3 tracks with no DRM poo included. They’re opening up the catalog to titles that are no longer available on CD (600 non published titles so far). It’s internationally available from day one–that’s rare these days. Usually the US market gets all the good stuff first. Looking at their new releases list compared to Amazon classical new releases, you can tell it’s a site targeted for people serious about classical music. On Amazon you see the wisdom of the crowds at it’s worst where top selling titles are mostly drivel making discovery hard for serious buyers–the equivalent of pop overwhelming more serious artists in rock and alternative genres.
The bad about the store is as nice as the site looks on first glance, it’s actually pretty clunky to use in comparison to an iTunes or Amazon for MP3 downloads. When you click on a title, you get a pop-up window. Ugh. Sound samples aren’t available for all tracks. The sound samples that are available are in Real format. I refuse to load Real and Windows Media Player on my machine. It’s Quicktime, Flash or nothing for me since they work best on the Mac platform. Nothing happens when you click on product images–they should lead to the product detail page–that’s a basic ecommerce 101. Some cocoanut web designer actually chose to use frames. So you see ugly scroll bars all over the site. You select which tracks you want to download via 1995 style check box form elements. Again, what web designer would choose to use something like that in 2007? There’s no RSS for easy tracking of top seller or new releases by customers.
All that said, I could imagine myself buying on the site, but only after sampling music somewhere else unless it’s truly a rare title. I also imagine myself checking their new release lists from time to time. But the site has not changed my mind about building a classical music site with Amazon Web Services to make it easier for people passionate about classical music to track and search for new releases. I got to get going on the project. I’ve been thinking about it for years.
