Robot Loves Kitten

I’m currently developing a new Web platform for the company I work for, and for many many reasons decided to build with Ruby on Rails and a local Web software development shop. You might question the fact that I’m building back-end software vs. using an open source project — suffice to say, the business goals are such that I decided that it was worth it to build. I (probably rightly) question that decision every day, but so far, the answer still always comes up “build”.

One of the most difficult concepts for me to translate is the notion of “agile” development. Most people I’m dealing with are old-school RFP-types who want the entire project spec’d and priced. (Honestly, it’s a new concept for me, too, but I’ve taken the time to read up on agile development and contracts.)

One of the core tenets of agile development is admitting that specs are useless because software changes and evolves. This seems pretty self-evident, and yet we’re still talking about it. If software didn’t change, then why all the patches, updates and releases we see every day? Microsoft seems pretty confident that Word needs a new release every few years — while thousands of users rebel and decide to move to simpler word-processing alternatives. Even with super predictive powers informing your RFP, it’s not unreasonable to think that you’re going to be off-target after six months of development.

Of course, when it’s said that you can’t accurately spec a software project, I immediately think that I must be doing something wrong — I’m smart, there must be a way to get really really close, right? But there’s a more important way to define “change” than errors in your calculations of scope or something missing in your list of features.

We all want users to enjoy our software, so we have them test it. Testing gives us small course corrections and helps users feel more vested in the project, but I think more importantly, it can reveal where you’ve fundamentally misunderstood what users are doing. I suppose there’s cases where you can simply nail it, where you’ve got the user dead-to-rights and can build the perfect solution to their problem. But probably not many.

We did some testing the other day, which required our testers to play around with a form for inputting data. With one tester, it seemed like the form was working. It helped organize a lot of data and actually provided some nice shortcuts. It wasn’t perfect, but I felt like we were on the right track.

The second tester was a different story. She was perfectly reasonable and accommodating, but it was clear to all of us that she didn’t see clear value in using the form.

Why? Because we’d designed the form to help organize a complex set of data. It worked great with the first tester, where organizing was the prime concern. But our second tester wasn’t organizing data, she was writing.

If you’d written down a description for this feature, 100% of the time, you’d get a solution designed for organizing data. But when you realize she’s “writing,” it makes perfect sense. It’s not that she’s an outlying case, a finicky user, it’s that we subtly mischaracterized what she was doing.

So, it’s not really a question of understanding what a user’s doing, it’s understanding what they think they’re doing. And that’s a question you’re going to need a lot of user testing to answer.

Luckily, because the testing came so early, we can easily adjust. Many of the features that will help create a more “writerly” environment are already planned but not yet implemented. So, we’re still basically on track, but with some very valuable new insights to inform our work.

I think that’s probably as goood a reason as any to be “agile”.

Do you need to decide what you are? Personal or public? Should you write for one audience, or several? Do you need to put some effort into categorizing these posts to minimize audience confusion?

Disclosures? Do they have any value anymore? I think this one falls under the “any PR is good PR” rubric. Just because you add a little “disclosure” to your post, doesn’t mean you are being completely honest and ethical. You have to ask yourself the “disclosure” question BEFORE you begin writing. If you’re always name-dropping colleagues or your company, or friend’s company, it’s still name-dropping. In fact, it’s potentially more insidious, because by adding the disclosure, you’re admitting that you know there’s an ethical issue at hand, but you’re effectively dismissing it and not giving it the respect it’s due.

What is the value of comments? Do you want feedback? Do you want to deal with comment spam?

If you don’t have comments, and say, update your site manually like BoingBoing does, what’s a best practice? Most responses won’t merit an update. It’s up to the author’s discretion. Most people are going to craft a response that’s short and to the point, but isn’t necessarily 100% correct. Net effect is that an “update” comment will generate lots more “response” comments for you to deal with.

I mention BB specifically because Mark just posted updates to a post about Japanese candy and “Grave of the Fireflies”. A reader mentions that Grave is not a Miyazaki film, which didn’t seem completely correct to me. True, Miyazaki did not direct the film, but he is the head (and arguably figure head) of the animation film studio, Studio Ghibli, that produced it. The director of Grave is Isao Takahata, who co-founded Studio Ghibli with Miyazaki. So there is a clear relationship between Miyazaki and the film.

That said, Grave was apparently produced at the same time as Tonari no Totoro, which Miyazaki directed, suggesting that perhaps Miyazaki didn’t have much to do with Grave, as he was probably busy with his own film. This all also begs the question of what authorship really means in animated films, which tend to be ID’d by the film studio that created it, as in Disney films, although in Miyazaki’s case (at least in the US), he is more readily ID’d as auteur, due to his signature style as well as intense involvement inthe animation process.

And after that rambling jaunt, I conclude wondering if, given that most knowledge is subjective or at least difficult to present as objective and complete, there is much value in manually selected comments. They are, perhaps, more trouble than they’re worth.

I’ve been getting more and more interested in the concepts of being “green” and urban living (dense housing environments) lately. The two are inextricably intertwined, in my opinion, since a single-family home creates such a massive environmental footprint (as well as implicity condoning sprawl) that overwhelms whatever benefit your little Prius might have had. I don’t see a future in sprawl, but the current urban developments I see going up in Portland have serious problems as well.

This recent article in SFGate on the Santana Row complex in San Jose is a fascinating taste of the merging of home and commerce — living inside the mall.

This is a step in the right direction — they are trying to integrate community into the living space — but it is so one-dimensional in its thinking. There’s no space to play, just enough to create a shopping experience.

I don’t think you can fault the developers however, since they are motivated purely by capitalism. They will maximize the profit potential of their space by adding retail wherever possible. They do it all the time, albeit on a smaller scale than Santana Row.

Maybe it’s the city that needs to intervene on a microscale. Maybe citizens, banded together with an intelligent developer, could co-develop a new definition of space that integrates community in a more holistic manner. The trouble is that without knowing your future residents, how do you create spaces for them that aren’t so generic that they fall prey to either nonuse or a tragedy of the commons effect? We want space, but we want our space. Maybe DIY culture will come to our rescue here.

Above all, however, I think we’re going to need to abandon this “American” attitude of “F you, I’ll do what I want.” Toby Keith jingoist bullshit isn’t going to take us anywhere, especially when we can’t afford to fill up our SUVs. Community is about compromise. You will never get everything you want, and most people react extremely negatively to that concept.

I remember people complaining about gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District during the 90s. Trouble is, the people I heard complaining were the very people destroying the Latino fabric of the neighborhood when they moved in themselves. If you want to preserve a neighborhood, then you can’t move there, people. Maybe it’s a sacrifice, maybe I’m being unreasonable, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

This is the problem I’m having now, as I get to the point where I’m considering buying property. I like my space as much as anyone, but I feel more and more that a single-family home (and I’m renting one now, admittedly) is the wrong way to go.

But the upscale yuppie lofts don’t work for me either. Beyond their questionable aesthetic and the fear I have of what they’ll turn into 10 years down the road, they just don’t fit my lifestlye. I am a little DIY, I need some creative space, some community space.

We need to find ways to embrace our communities, to enhance and protect them. The benefits are there and outweigh any short-term commercial gains or personal sacrifices.

More thoughts later.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/turf.html

article totally missed two big points:

first, is this a bid by monsanto to reinvigorate its roundup brand? tying grass and pesticide together is like peanut butter and jelly. big pharma does this all the time to extend patent claims, btw – combining two drugs (usually one semi-innocuous) into a new flavor. story completely bypasses this.

second, if this strain of grass becomes popular, not only do you incur risk of the gene releasing into the wild, cross-breeding with other plants, you have created more or less eliminated the vast majority of other pesticides, meaning everyone will be using roundup for everything. there are serious risks involved with any pesticide, especially when you create a situation of casual use. the amount of roundup in our communities is going to skyrocket and i just can’t see anything good coming of that.

for the author to completely miss these two points is mind-boggling. i have to assume he raised them, but they were edited out. bad editor, bad!

reminds me of a sci-fi plot — unitended consequences …. careful what you wish for monsanto, you just might get it.

Today, I’m exploring “vulgarism,” on the David Report. It’s interesting so far, because I agree with the general assessment that there’s a lack of depth in a lot of design these days.

An adequate question to highlight is if we should call it design, art or design-art or if we have to invent a new category and word for these experiments. Some people call it neo-surrealism or expressionism-design, but we would prefer to refer to it as Vulgarism.

If incorporating “smartness” of function is a goal of design, then that would limit creativity, harnessing it in the service of that goal. I can see some designers rebelling against that constraint. But the truth is, in my opinion, that smartness does converge toward a point. Maybe not ultimately — there’s certainly not one perfect chair — but the genius of creativity is seeing how many great chair designs can fit in that locus.

Limitations spur creativity. Everyone knows this. And maybe growth and expansion in a global marketplace has superceded those traditional limitations, and the design work being created is simply an honest reflection of this.

The market certainly does not care about “smartness,” it cares about its own existence. And it will co-opt any idea (good or bad) that will help perpetuate itself. And so the seduction of democratization begins.

Is everything perspective?

While I despise market dynamics for many reasons, I am a part of the market — I consume — so it’s difficult to completely deride my own impulses. I know a lot about some things, less about many others. I’m somewhere in a middle of a mass of consumers churning and flowing through this market. And I buy stuff, too.

Everyone seems to be part of the mass psychosis, the market is praising it, the press is writing about it and the consumers are gaping. It looks like a scene from the HC Andersen fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes.

Isn’t it wrong to exclude the unwashed masses from coming to the show, simply because they haven’t reached some arbitrary level of “understanding” or “taste” that you yourself have set?

I see a general unease with the rise of the amateur these days. Because so many of our communications can be digitized, stored and shared through traditional media — text, audio, video — many are alarmed that critical discourse is drowning under a flood of meaningless, unqualified information. And it is.

It’s just that we’re talking about words here people. Having more of them doesn’t “drown” them. I’m stating my unqualified opinions about things, just as anyone does, only today, I get to do it in the same medium as The New York Times. Maybe it’s more difficult to know the difference, but I suspect that people have been talking shit since the beginning, so I don’t know that the medium in which they choose to spout makes any real difference.

And I’m not sure there’s that many pure expressions of design anyway. Design is subjective after all; everyone can (and does) enjoy bad design some times.

So why shouldn’t design be popularized as well? While the Internet gets most of the props today for launching our society into the digital age, it wouldn’t be nearly as fun without the advances in logistics that allow me to conduct online transactions with merchants in Singapore, and receive my goods in a week.

Goods flow these days, almost as fast as information. That increase in speed led the market toward populism — it needed more people, more transactions to sustain it at this higher speed. The market operates solely in its own self-interest. The sooner you realize that and move on, the better.

But there is a bright side to all this — the rising tide does lift all boats. The market leaves in its wake a bounty of tools to help us smaller, more elitist (read:niche) groups reach each other. And new niches, once thought to be too esoteric, will sprout and thrive.

There is this illusion that we, as societies and cultures, can be one global voice, one unifying mindset. And while that’s a compelling dream, it’s nothing more than that.

The reality is that we cannot convince, but we can converse. We can try and understand, even though we might fall short.

So get out there and teach.

Warren Ellis just published a great post on “burst culture”. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, given that I’ve been running a Web magazine (SMITH magazine) for more than a year now. I agree with Warren on the broad strokes, but I think he misses one big point.

I’m a little tired right now, so I’m just going to go through Warren’s and make a couple points in order.

* Web 3.0 (besides being a stupid catchphrase) isn’t a dumb idea. Structured data (my take on what Web 3.0 means) makes conversations more interesting. It’s going to lead to more mashups, APIs, and interesting ways to communicate.
* “Web 2.0″ implies too many things to have much meaning at all anymore, but I like to think of it as those technologies that (in the right hands) are making it easier to publish and communicate online. Again, not so dumb.
* The hurdle to publishing on the Web is commitment, which is still just as difficult to find no matter your medium.
* “Monetization” is making money without having to sully yourself by directly working for it. It’s a stupid word and everyone should stop using it immediately. Making real money from advertising is still challenging and you still have to go and work for it.

I think my biggest problem — and one that i’m currently struggling with — is whether we should be “publishing” on the Web at all. The web does love bursts. That’s Digg, that’s Twitter. It doesn’t love (though it does tolerate) articles, editors, and publishing.

Articles take a long time to write and edit. They’re often great and inspiring. More often, they’re not. You publish them to your site where they live out their 72 hour lives and then they slip quietly into your archives and you’re left needing another article to fill that blank space on the homepage. Sometimes they drive traffic, more often they don’t. Lather, rinse, repeat.

What blogs did is move the article a little bit toward the burst. Toward conversation. Digg made a game of linking and commenting on blog posts. Twitter stripped off everything to see how fast a blog post could be.

I’m not going to say that articles and editors aren’t valuable — they are. But “information wants to be free,” right? And free means flexible and fast. Free implies velocity. Twitter’s got velocity and its surfing that wave. What velocity allows you to do is make more connections, carry on more conversations. That’s what’s really valuable here. It’s not the nodes, it’s the connections between them. That’s what’s always mattered.

Most corporations still don’t get this. In the name of “the brand,” they still try and control their interactions with customers. It seems almost reasonable, until you reimagine the relationship as a conversation — at a party, for example. What’s it like chatting with Microsoft or Pepsi? It’s annoying. They never shut up or let you get a word in edge-wise. Every time you try and add something meaningful to the conversation, they interject and cut you off. So what do you do? You leave and find some other group to talk with.

Brands aren’t graphics or taglines. Brands are the sum total of your interactions with customers. Brands are comprised of everything you don’t control: your reputation, public perception.

I’ve been thinking that articles are a lot like brands. You can touch and control them, so that’s what you naturally focus on first. In most cases, magazines are too hung up on bringing publishing online, translating their print model to the Web, when they should be trying to discover what else they could do that the Internet (which is us, after all) would really love. Something with velocity that would strengthen those connections and get us talking with each other.

The article is valuable because of its power to spark conversation and connections. Without a platform for community, the article has very little power.

I’d like to maybe tag all content, then create a tag cloud that’s actually a generated graphic — a cityscape of towers, where each tower represents a tag. Vectors could include: number of tag occurances, most recent tag occurance. Number could represent foreground/backround position, and date could represent it’s darkness/transparency.

Could be cool representation of a field of monoliths — but still functional. sorta. :)

There’s a post going around, written by Henrik Werdelin, a current entrepreneur in residence at Index Ventures, that Twitter used to be a crappy company. I am not an apologist for Twitter, but this post is like a filo dough of wrongness, faulty assumptions on top of revisionist history on top of bad advice. I just can’t get it out of my head, hopefully working through it will help.

Graphs: Sexy When They Whisper

The attached graph from Alexa is really interesting on many levels. It shows twitter.com traffic for the past few years. Twitter started in March 2006 and although the graph only starts in 2008, it’s fair to assume that the traffic was flat from 2006-2008.

As this is Weredlin’s sole support for his arguments, let’s take a look. As serious web entrepreneurs who are versed in things like online measurement tools, we can immediately see a few things:

• This is Alexa data, which is notoriously unreliable, since it is generated solely from people who install their browser toolbar. It is not considered statistically relevant.
• This is a graph of reach (people who visit a site), not traffic (like pageviews)
• Alexa cannot count mobile or API traffic, which is a big part of Twitter
• The graph suddenly spikes in January 2009, which is weird, and suggests bad data
• He extrapolates two years of imaginary data, because graphs only go up, not down?

So, it’s not fair to assume anything about this graph. It’s worthless. If the Jan 09 spike didn’t suggest some error in data gathering, I’d say that this graph might suggest the mainstreaming of Twitter in 2009, an idea backed up by general experience and news.

“Inconceivable!”

So what do we learn from faulty data?

1. There are two ways to get market-fit – both require lean companies.

a) you can either keep on innovating your product until you nail a set of features that users like today, or

b) you can keep your product alive for long enough for the market to change û making your product relevant.

This is simply ridiculous advice. The assumption is that Twitter was languishing, but finally the market caught up. In reality, Twitter saw good traction almost immediately, albeit from a small group of early adopters in the tech community. Launched in July 2006, not March, Twitter was the belle of SXSW in March 2008, and around its first birthday, raised a $5 million series A in July. If it was really struggling, it sure had everyone fooled.

Twitter was innovating and searching for product/market fit the entire time. It first had to figure out if it was really a mobile service or not, given the hefty carrier SMS fees the company was paying. The iPhone launched around Twitter’s first birthday, and began to radically change the mobile web landscape. Twitter’s API was driving tons of experimentation via third parties.

Twitter was born as a platform, not a destination site. Even though consumer adoption might not have been as high as you might traditionally see, developer adoption was staggering, which in turn, eventually drew in consumers through a thousand third-party apps and widgets.

Lesson 2

Lesson learned: Build cool stuff with awesome people (both staff and investors) because you are likely to be stuck with them for a while.

It’s very seldom that projects are successful from the start. If you look at most companies that today are considered hits, they all had long initial periods where people didn’t ’get’ what they were trying to do and more often than not ran for years with little traction.

If we were talking about Odeo, the podcasting startup where Twitter began as a side project, this might make sense. But again, history doesn’t bear out that the Twitter team were shadowy, misunderstood malcontents for three years before we all, at the urging of Alexa, “came around” and embraced Ev, Biz and Jack as the geniuses that we now know they are.

Everyone’s going to have tough times in the beginning. Unless, of course, your founder sold Blogger to Google, and raised a bunch of money to start Odeo, your podcasting company. Twitter has been in the spotlight from the beginning. They drew backlash almost immediately because skeptics couldn’t understand how fans could get so deep into Twitter so fast. For every Twitter skeptic there were five aficionados.

Lesson 3

I actually like lesson 3. :)

Here’s a few required elements that I think are requirements for any successful media-focused CMS.

Personalization: I want to be able to be my own editor, and customize what sections, categories and topics are important to me.

SEO-friendly: this goes without saying I think. (All in one SEO Pack)

Premium advertising environment: This simply means limiting to one kick-ass ad placement per page.

Mobile: Mobile-friendly templates must be built in. (WordPress Mobile Edition)

Data-driven articles: Being able to easily integrate data tables, combine and compare them, even geo-locate rows. (WP-Table-Reloaded)

Geo-location: there’s a ton of potential here, it’s got to be a requirement. The emerging mobile future needs geo-located content, so again, might as well start now.

RSS-friendly: this is the lingua franca of web text, so again, you’ll need it to enhance value between your properties, both by exporting your content and importing other, related content.

As always, my recommendation would be to build this CMS/platform on WordPress, since most of this has already been done, as well as tons of other important features for site optimization, caching, and other fun features. And you get it all for free.

The one thing I don’t see here is a print content importer. This I’ve done by hand before. Adobe PageMaker does XML export, but for many publications, especially magazines, it’s not worth configuring. I settled on a pretty simple text export, manual cleanup, and import. You’ve really got to focus on the 80/20 principle here. Get the primary value of the article online, then move on to optimizing it for your website.

With the FTC wasting everyone’s time, holding panels on the future of journalism, the one thing missing in the discussion is what a viable business model might look like. For the most part, it seems that journos just want someone to keep paying their salaries so they can go back to their desks and keep pounding out the column inches. This is unlikely to happen.

Journos have valid concerns about their personal futures as well as the future of their profession, but