A Whole Lotta Nothing

Why adsense for feeds is a bad idea (at least for now)

I've been thinking about advertising in RSS for a while (and Google's foray most specifically) and always with a general distaste for it. It wasn't until recently that I was able to put my finger on exactly why I think it's misguided, but I think I figured it out. From my experiences in using Adsense nearly two years on PVRblog, I've noticed a great deal of my traffic comes from search engines. I only have stats on those viewing the site via the web (bloglines says 4k users read it via RSS, but there's no way of knowing the full number), but a random swath of stats will frequently show 75% or more of the web traffic has google.com as their referrer. Here's a screenshot of my Typepad stats, showing a single page of accesses in the past few minutes as I'm writing this. The ones with no referrer listed were reading the site directly. These are folks looking for information on products I reviewed and mentioned or tips I might have divulged in a post. I have no way of verifying this, but I would assume that my adsense click-throughs are mostly due to this search engine traffic and not due to my daily readers. At the very least, the random searchers simply outnumber the daily readers, but I think it goes beyond that (which would assume both groups click through ads at the same click through rate). I don't have any data to prove this, but I'm going off on a hunch since that's how I tend to use google's text ads myself. If I'm searching for information about a baby monitor or trying to figure out when the superbowl is starting, and I end up on a site with Google text ads, I often click on the ones that seem to offer better info than the site I'm viewing. If I'm viewing a page that mentions the text string "Superbowl" and "start" and "time" but doesn't answer my question, and there's an ad that says "Plan your Superbowl Party Here" I would probably click it, hoping they happen to mention the kickoff time. Let me circle this back to ads in RSS feeds. You can be fairly sure that every single person subscribed to your feed is a daily reader and it's not likely random searchers would add your feed. The people reading your feed are using a feed because they don't want to miss a single word you're saying. They're not just fans reading your site, they're more die-hard than that. Who would you subject to advertising, if you had a say in the matter: random visitors or your biggest fans? I've come to the conclusion that I do have a say in the matter, and that I do my best to decrease advertising pitches to my biggest fans. On MetaFilter for instance, there are blogads and google text ads for outside browsers, but when you get an account there you don't see any of it and the site is ad-free. PVRblog has both blogads and google text ads on the site but I won't be adding anything to the feeds. None of this is set in stone, of course. Currently, the technology that does text matching in all the RSS ad examples I've seen is quite poor. Out of the context of a site with thousands of words, giving a unique ad to every single post that might only have a handful of words seems to result in totally random ads. I find myself looking at a someone's blog post on iPods and seeing a text ad for refinancing a mortgage far too often. If ads in RSS were more sophisticated and actually were pitched at the very things you were discussing in a post, I might reconsider. The other main thing that might change over time is that RSS readers are typically technology-savvy and a small minority of your audience. If RSS grows to the point that random visitors become the majority of your traffic, it might be time to reconsider this, but for now it seems pretty obvious: don't clobber your biggest fans with pitches to ads and instead relegate ads to areas where it might help people find more information or related products.

South by Etech recollections

During breaks in travel last week, I wrote a bunch of notes about both SXSW and Etech conferences and finished it off last night while waiting for a flight. What follows is a loose bunch of thoughts on various subjects.

SXSW

SXSW was fun, and good to catch up with everyone. At this point, I think it's officially a conference by and for bloggers, as the number of mentions of code or new products was minimal and every panel seemed to focus on the ins and outs of blogging, with some CSS thrown in. I enjoyed myself and the party atmosphere of the week even though I was nervous about having two talks. I don't recall anything too mind blowing as the conference has turned into a mix of summer camp reunion with friends and a four-day excuse to party. About the only interesting panel I recall was the one on minorities in blogging. Even though anyone can blog, it's still the domain of white males by and large, and while the speaker list at sxsw has plenty of women now, there were few people of color. The panel was a good one to have since it was just about the only one to force everyone to take a look at the medium critically. There's a difference between navel gazing and critical introspection and I think this one handled it well. I'd like to see more panels challenging conventions instead of celebrating them. One weird thing I noticed is that I rarely brought out my big digital SLR camera. Usually on a four day trip like this, I'd take probably 100-150 shots but thanks to my cameraphone and flickr, I left my SLR at the hotel and ended up taking barely a dozen photos with my full-sized camera, while I probably uploaded 30-40 shots to flickr that week. I imagine if cameraphones get up into the 3-5 megapixel range, people will just use those instead of dedicated cameras. There's no photo downloading, manipulation, or resizing necessary. You just shoot, mash a couple buttons, and send it off to flickr. It's a lazy photographer's dream.

Etech

Etech and SXSW used to be quite similar, with one a bit more technical than the other, but I think this year they really diverged. Etech felt a bit weird this time around, much less hackery and technical and much closer to what I assume conferences like PC Forum or Web 2.0 are about. The long story short is that Etech suddenly seemed to be about money. Everyone talking about getting or giving angel funding, dropping tips on talking to VCs, and half the crowd sported gray hair and suits instead of fauxhawks and cargo pants. It was odd. The cutting edge geeks at etech have always pushed code and potential product trends but it seems the bubble is back and the money guys have wised up, and they descended this year to check it out. In this year's money-ified etech, Joshua from delicious seemed like the last unfunded, unincorporated guy with a great idea and he was the belle of the ball. I saw him get mobbed after every talk, surrounded by what appeared to be VC types.

O-fucking-deo

Every time I attend SXSW or Etech, it seems like the really amazing moment doesn't happen until the final day, when for one reason or another a panel or demo blows my mind. Late on the last day of Etech, that demo was Odeo. I've long thought of podcasting as being technically cool, but problematic. You basically only have two options: download mp3 files off a website one by one by hand, or subscribe to a podcast and get everything, whether you wanted to hear it or not. There has to be a bandwidth-saving happy medium right? Odeo looks like it, offering in-browser previews and playback, a shopping cart-style download system, and the ability to subscribe in classic "download everything" podcast style if you want. The biggest innovation of Odeo in my mind was the browser-based multitrack recording studio. You don't need to own expensive, sophisticated audio software or hardware, you can just use your browser and built-in mic to record your voice and add music bumpers or other recorded audio. You can even edit your final tracks, all in the browser. It has to be seen to be believed. Powerful tools, all inside the browser and they'll work with any browser on any system with the Flash plugin. It makes basic audio technology available to anyone, and I can't wait to see what kinds of shows pop up on Odeo once they lower the technology bar for all. I got to talk to Ev for the first time in a couple years after his panel and I told him that while Odeo seemed to have a lot in common with flickr (you have friends and contacts and can easily find new tracks by your circle of friends), the in-browser recording set it apart. I remember telling him "It was like a flickr that included a free camera for every user." Just as Blogger+Blogspot lowered the bar and let anyone with an idea share their thoughts with the world, Odeo appears to be poised to do the same for sound.

Damn that Merlin Mann

While stuck awaiting delayed flights on the return home, I finally gave in and downloaded quicksilver and read all the tutorials. The strange thing is that while sometimes I feel like a slow, money-losing contestant on jeopardy when tabbing and auto-completing, the simple app launcher stuff is great. After training it to grab my ten favorite apps with just a couple keys, I closed down my dragthing launcher. Then I got used to the "open files with..." feature and cleaned my desktop of clutter. Now I have this zen-like clear desktop and anything I want is a keystroke away in quicksilver or expose. It only took a couple hours of tinkering but I definitely see what everyone is raving about. It feels like my mac just got that much easier and faster to use, and I finally got rid of my desktop clutter. I'm a bit of a lazy slob, often having dozens of folders and files on the desktop and now I have none. I've added App Rocket to my PC for the same effect and it's working pretty well as an app launcher too.

Conference IM stalk hacks

I was poaching folks from rendezvous in austin one day when I started to feel guilty and asked the person next to me if they ever felt pangs of guilt when doing this. "When doing what?" I heard back. I asked around, and no one among my friends had discovered a great (and potentially problematic) feature of iChat, so I might as well tell everyone here. Open your rendezvous buddy list and your aim buddy list and put them side by side. Now, in the conference-populated rendezvous list, look for a name of someone you've always wanted to talk to over IM but haven't yet. Click, hold-down, and drag their name from the rendezvous buddy list to the aim buddy list. Ta da! You just poached someone's public aim name onto your perma-buddy AIM list and they have no idea. When you leave the conference and return home you can chat with them over AIM. This is incredibly useful for getting friends onto your buddy list that you know personally but didn't know they used AIM. The more sinister fun/scary/stalky part is that you can also add famous people you'd never have aim names for, but that you happen to be on the same network with. When I first discovered this, I checked to see if it worked by putting Tim O'Reilly and a bunch of famous tech journalists on my list. The following week I realized I could tell when they were at their desk and it sufficiently creeped me out so I got rid of them. iChat should probably have a preference for whether or not you want to allow this feature (I would allow it personally, it's fun to touch base with conference goers afterwards), but for now it's a handy dandy free-for-all that no one seemed to know about. Now you know, so remember to poach everyone you'd like to talk to after the conference the next time you're at one. (update: several people emailed to say that it's in iChat's preferences, under privacy, so turn if off if you're concerned about this)

On Speaking

This year's conferences were a bit stressful for me because I had to talk three times in the span of four days, and two of the three talks were on subjects at the edge of my grasp. I don't get much practice talking in front of crowds so I always sweat these sorts of things. I think my community panel went well even though I prepared the least of all three talks. It was almost completely off the top of my head and fun to dive into the ins and outs of community management with Craig and Molly (it helped that she was an incredible moderator). My second panel at SXSW was my first time ever as a moderator and I think I did an ok job letting everyone talk and keeping the panel moving, but I did a terrible job introducing the subject and delineating the scope of the talk. My talk at Etech was more of a classic powerpoint-bullets-for-20-minutes kind of thing and in the formal confines of a standard lecture format, I think I did pretty bad. That kind of speaking takes practice and right before my talk I got to see a seasoned pro. I think I've honed in on what it takes to give a good talk in that format. Clay's talk that preceded mine was fantastic, one of the best I've seen at a tech conference. Clay teaches at NYU and his polish from regular lecturing showed. He knows how to work the crowd and drop jokes at appropriate times and he moves his arms and body enough to keep you from drifting off but not so much that it's annoying. What really wowed me was his command of audience attention span. I've seen Lessig do it well but I think Clay does it even better. Most folks have an attention span that cycles every 90 seconds or so, as they drift between total concentration and something less so. Clay had a knack for doing two things: he'd stay on a slide/point for about that long, and when he went to the next thing you were always ready to take it in. The other thing he did well was work with attention span on the macro level. He'd have pauses between shifts in subject matter to let the audience relax and cue everyone up for the Next Big Point he wanted to make. This entailed having a title slide for every section of the talk (maybe 8 or 9 of them in 40 minutes), which was completely black and only contained one or two words centered. Your eyes and mind could rest a bit on each one, which he used as a quick intro to a section, then he'd dive into charts 'n graphs or a meaty slide filled with bullets. After 3 or 4 slides on that section, he'd transition to another title slide that you could rest on. On an even more macro level, the entire talk created a thread between each section and made sense, and his conclusion simply reiterated the connections. It was just about as perfect as a talk could be and I can tell I have a lot to learn and a lot of practice ahead of me if I ever want to get any good at it. Until next year...

Two things that suck about Intellectual Property Law this week

Earlier this week I heard Seth Green on Fresh Air, talking about his new stop-motion sketch comedy show, Robotic Chicken. It debuted last week but I caught a rerun and enjoyed it. The show basically follows the model that Saturday Night Live, In Living Color, and MAD TV have followed for years -- a bunch of sketches making fun of pop culture, but the twist is that they use action figures, animation, and claymation instead of actors. Before the opening credits even rolled, the law got in the way. The show opened with a message saying what you were about to see was parody, which seems like an unnecessary opener to a comedy show. Then I remembered from the interview Seth Green said that before they could show a 30 second goof on the "This is your brain on drugs" commercial, they had to get an ok from The Partnership for a Drug Free America. Apparently, since they used the woman that voiced the originals, the phrasing and her voice were "the intellectual property of the organization" and the bit didn't get into the show until they signed off on it. What's shocking is that I've seen 3 or 4 parodies of this commercial on shows before and I doubt anyone ever had to ok it first. The Simpsons did a joke version of a Schoolhouse Rock song, parodying "I'm just a bill" with the original voice talent, and now I wonder if had to get ok first. The other sucky thing this week was when Sony got Beatallica's site shut down. Sony owns the rights to some Beatles songs and the guys in the rock parody group Beatallica sing send ups of Beatles classics, as if they were done by the guys in Metallica. They feature bits of lyrics from both bands along with lyrics they make up, and they play off The Beatles' melodies. It's a cultural mashup of 60's rock and 80's metal and it's a rocking good time. They don't charge for their songs and freely give them away online, so when they had hosting problems last year I volunteered to be a mirror for their first two albums. Now that Sony convinced their host to shut off their account, I'm one of the few places to find it and I hope Sony doesn't strong arm my host as well. Their work is non-commercial parody and I would think they were safer than a band like Dread Zeppelin or Mini Kiss that does shows for money, but Sony doesn't like parody works that build off their property, so they're offline for now. I love comedy, and if I had a sketch show or a jokey band, I would never in a million years think that I have to ask for permission before I make a work parodying something from pop culture. What if the Partnership for a Drug Free America didn't like Seth Green's fake anti-drug commercial? Since when does the subject of a joke get to decide when and how you get to tell it, and since when do they employ lawyers to decide that? So much of comedy exists in order to poke fun at our culture and these two examples make me think that lawyers using intellectual property law may have disastrous effects not just on culture and comedy, but on everyone's freedom to say what they want in the future. update: The National Prostrate Cancer Coalition issued a press release playing off another bit from the same first show, where Optimus Prime gets prostate cancer. Kudos to them for having a sense of humor about the whole thing.

The Sony Ericcson s700i/710a Review

There's been a lot of buzz over the new Sony Ericsson 700i/710a in recent months. As soon as I heard about this 1.3 megapixel bluetooth cameraphone on Gizmodo last year, I coveted this device. In late summer of 2004, a few people got early versions and started posting photos from it along with rave reviews. In November of 2004, I bought an unlocked one from this grey market phone site, for about $550. Today, cingular wireless finally launched it in the US, but still at the $500 price point. For the past couple years I've used a phone that was one of the first to be good at bluetooth, a Sony Ericsson t68i, and one of the first phones that was good at photos, a Samsung v205. Moving up to the s700i was the best of both worlds for me. All about the camera Simply put, the camera is fantastic on this phone. It's one of the only phones you can buy today with a real CCD camera in it, just like a real digital camera. In fact, the way the phone is built, it's pretty much like a Sony Cybershot compact digital camera from early 2000, but with phone guts attached. Here's a gallery of my favorite photos taken with it. What's great about the photo quality and small form factor is that for the first time, I always have a camera with me and it even has instant post-to-the-web capability. The drawback of my digital SLR is that it's big and I have to remember to bring it in its bag, along with the lenses I want to use. While the 1.3 megapixel photo quality from the phone doesn't compare to the 6 megapixel SLR, it's not that bad -- miles ahead of other pixellated, blurry cameraphones you've probably used. I take a lot of photos to remember a place or a moment and since the phone is so small, I've always got a decent camera with me. I've also found the camera comes in handy to the point that it's downright practical. Recently while going to a garden center to pick up seed and fertilizer, I noticed a few plants I was interested in, but felt I needed to do more research at Google before I could decide what fit best in my backyard. So I took shots of the labels to look up later. I've also taken to using it while shopping, when I need to remember if a price is better than what I can find online, or if something will fit in my home. Everything else Overall, I've found little to complain about when it comes to all the other phone features. Getting it to work on t-mobile was a matter of dropping my sim card in and having tech support send the MMS and VPN settings. The screen is bright and gorgeous, and the swivel keypad is smooth, though I only use it when keying in new numbers or text, otherwise I use it closed. While it doesn't iSync yet over bluetooth, I was able to send all my address book contacts to the device using bluetooth. On t-mobile it's just $20/month to add unlimited data so I can use it as a bluetooth modem when I travel away from wireless, and I can send as many photos as I want to flickr. It comes with a web browser that understands xhtml and css, but the bright screen is just too narrow to be useful for web browsing so you end up scrolling around and around. I kind of wish it converted pages instead and only sent text. I replaced the stock 32Mb memory stick with a 128Mb one I found on ebay shortly after getting the phone (about $30), and with that setup I can take hundreds of photos (they're only about 200kb each) while at the same time being able to carry about an hour's worth of music for the mp3 player (the phone uses proprietary ear bud headphones though). It has a java gaming engine that has some pretty impressive graphics, but I've barely touched that feature. One of the few gripes I've heard from folks is that the OS can seem buggy or slow. I've never had it crash on me, but I have noticed some lag when jumping through menus sometimes, though it is nothing like the horrible slow interface my t68i offered. The only other problem with the phone is the price. I splurged and got it as an early xmas present to myself and I'm surprised to hear it's still going to be about $500 months later. If a carrier can get this phone down to $200-300, I suspect it will be so popular as to be ubiquitous. Conclusions Overall, a great phone, a good camera, and something I'm heartily reocmmending to all my friends, especially the ones that are also photographers. This is the phone you've been waiting for, one that combines all the basic phone functionality you'd want, along with a fairly respectable point-and-shoot digital camera that fits in your pocket.

Pieces of the Future

I haven't rented movies in months (seen plenty on HBO thanks to TiVo and *cough* downloaded from the internet) but recently grabbed a couple gems. Pieces of April was something I wanted to see last summer, but its life was short-lived on the Oregon art house movie circuit, and before I knew it, it was gone. The movie is fairly strong, it's a little slow in parts, a little flat here and there, but has some really great emotional parts that make up for its shortcomings. I guess I'd give it a 80/100 if I rated movies on a quality scale. But while I may consider this a pretty good film, I think it's a real breakthrough work; a milestone of sorts. The real breakthrough was the format. Now, I'm not focusing on it because I know it's sort of a gimmick to do a mainstream movie on cheap DV cameras, but it's worth looking at this movie as a sign of things to come. I'm sure someone in 1979 (or whenever Wordstar first came out) made some bold prediction that in five years the Great American Novel was going to be typed out on a computer running their software and I'm sure people laughed. And when you think about how 99% of the publishing industry works today, through laptops and copies of Word, the Great American Novel is being written every year, thousands of times over, on cheap computers running cheap software that allows for easy writing and editing. Pieces of April is the first thing recorded on digital video I've seen that finally felt like a "proper" movie. I'm going to say it was the performances and script, not just the actors involved that made it shine. The picture quality definitely feels like a step down from regular cinema, but after the first 10 minutes or so you don't notice any jaggies or the harsh exposure and focus instead on the story. The entire film was made for about $160k, using prosumer-level cameras. When iMovie came out soon after MiniDV cameras became popular, I heard a lot of people predict that someday soon, the next great film was coming out of some unknown person with a computer, a good script, and a few grand to film it. There has been a few attempts at this already. Sundance recently screened a film edited in iMovie. Although Pieces of April came out of the "Hollywood Machine" it's the first DV feature I've seen that made me forget it cost nothing and was produced with cheap gear. It was a good movie that happened to be shot in DV, and as technology marches forward, there's no doubt that ten years from now anyone will probably be able to buy a high-def DV camera for about a grand that could shoot a feature. Of course, you're still going to need the basics that no piece of software or hardware can provide: great story, actors, locations, sound, and editing, but the prices of tools are dropping so fast that maybe someday we'll get to the point where an artist won't be limited by the cash in their pocket, but by the ideas in their heart.

All Hail Bluetooth

While I've known about bluetooth phones for the past few years and heard you could do cool stuff like use it as a modem, control your pc, and sync your computers with your phone, I didn't really give it a try until I got back from Etech this year. In the few months I've been playing with it, I can say one thing's for sure: it's like living in the goddamned future.

What it is

Understanding bluetooth is pretty easy, it's just a name for a low-range networking standard. It's essentially "personal area networking" meaning you can connect a phone to a wireless headset or a mouse with a computer, all without wires. There are a bunch of bluetooth enabled phones and PDAs out now, and thanks to USB adapters, powerbooks and PCs can play too. My current setup entails a Sony Ericcson t68i phone on t-mobile, paired with a 12" aluminum powerbook. The follow's a run down of how to set it up and what you can do with it once it's in place.

The setup

I started by swapping the sim card from my old phone (a samsung I bought specifically to take photos and post online) into my partner's t68i and vice versa. I was surprised that this Just Worked, but it did. Once it was my phone I called t-mobile customer service and dropped my t-zones service for transferring photos and signed up for their unlimited GPRS internet service for $20/month. I asked for setup help, and they forwarded me to a tech that helped me figure out how to setup the account on my phone and what the CID settings were. I got an SMS a few minutes later with all my settings automatically stored onto the phone as well. I fired up my powerbook, updated bluetooth to the latest firmware, then ran the "Setup a new bluetooth device" option in the bluetooth menu. I left everything on the defaults then when it asked for an access number to get online, I simply entered in *99***(your CID value)# where (your CID value) depends on your phone but is simply a number. That should add a bluetooth modem to your network preferences and I added the icon to my menubar so I could connect whenever I needed to. And just like that I had a permanent backup connection whenever wifi was not available. No more worrying about which hotels have network connections and how much they cost. No more getting lost while traveling because I forgot to print a map. I just pop open my powerbook, start the bluetooth connection to my phone, and I'm connected. In the 20-30 hours I've gotten to use my phone as a modem I've enjoyed a connection that seems to run right at the reported 20kbps speed. It's just a tad slower than a 28.8 modem, but is entirely serviceable for email and web browsing. Reading weblogs with lean code and CSS and RSS feeds is easy as well as reading email on the connection. Bluetooth does seem to suck some battery life out of the phone. I went from a full charge to about 50% left after a couple hours of bluetooth'd connection at an airport recently. The time to connect is fast, only taking a few seconds to establish a connection and bluetooth seems to work fine if I leave the phone in my pocket. There's something impressive about leaving the phone in your pocket and getting a connection just fine (though you do have to fight the urge to yell "Hey everyone! I've got the internet in my pants!"). WiFi is revolutionary but I take it for granted. Playing with data connections over bluetooth, it feels like the first time I tried WiFi. It's almost magic that I can stand almost anywhere in the US, and pull down data from the air, via a wireless local connection to my phone.

While operating heavy machinery

You know how you can talk on your cell phone while driving at a high rate of speed? If you've got a good cell connection, you can transmit data as well. I'll give you a second for that to sink in. This means while you're (or better yet, someone else is) driving down the freeway at a high rate of speed, you can connect and browse the web and download email from your laptop. I don't know why, but at first I figured this was impossible to do reliably. I've had tons of calls drop off in the last ten years I've used cell phones and voice quality is often less than 100%. If I want to downlaod 50kb of email, at some level I thought every byte is sacred and less than 100% perfect service would result in an unreliable data connection. In practice however, driving across the country at 70mph while downloading email and browsing the web works just fine. It even worked perfectly fine when I tried it on Caltrain, the commuter train line in the Silicon Valley.

Connected via bluetooth on the Caltrain, my laptop near the window as the houses roll by

This recent revelation that you can connect on freeways and trains has really opened up the possibilities. There's little stopping someone from doing a 2004 version of Travels with Samantha, but using a cellphone to post stories and photos from the road along the way.

Bridging the usability gap

One thing about cell phones that's always annoyed me is the keypad interface. You end up spending hours keying in your contacts whenever you get a new one, only to lose them afterwards if you ever switch phones or lose one. Bluetooth on the mac makes this problem a thing of the past by allowing you to link the address book application to your phone via bluetooth. When I switched to this new phone, I simply added a few entries to the Address Book that weren't already there, then sync'd up my phone and I suddenly had 40 phone numbers loaded up. As long as my future phones are bluetooth equipped, I'll never have to key entries in by hand. This is a very cool thing and one of the reasons why all my phones will have bluetooth from now on.

Nerdy fun

A cool bluetooth/t68i helper app I had to try out was Sailing's Clicker app. It installs a whole bunch of little applescripts that can be fired off from your phone. While it was fun to stand 10 feet from my laptop, point my phone and advance songs in iTunes, change the volume, and give powerpoint and keynote talks using my phone's buttons, I can't see this being totally practical for frequent use. The only actual useful feature I did find was incoming calls could be triggered to pause iTunes and set your iChat status to away. I usually leave my phone on vibrate and unless it's nearby on my desk or in my pocket, sometimes I miss calls. With the visual and audible changes on my mac desktop, I most certainly would know there's a call. The downside of this app is battery life on my phone. Without bluetooth on, I can go 3-4 days before I need a charge, but with Clicker connected via bluetooth all the time the phone's nearly dead in about 24 hours. After a day of playing around, I haven't used it since.

More Gadget Freakdom

Lastly, there are a whole host of bluetooth devices out there that you can connect to your phone, laptop, or both. I've got a Jabra Freespeak wireless headset, and it can connect to my phone and my mac. The sound quality is really good on phone calls and after you get used to tweaking it around your ear and jamming the piece into your ear canal, it's really comfy and you hardly feel it after a few minutes. On the mac, you can use it to iChat people using video or just live audio (using iChat as a phone), and it's ok, though the sound quality is kinda so-so. I haven't tried out bluetooth mice or keyboards on my powerbook since I hear they don't wake sleeping macs (you can't just shake a bluetooth mouse to wake it up like you can with a usb mouse), and I hear the battery life is an issue (changing batteries once/month or recharging often). I'm looking forward to the integration with cars. This has been problematic so far, but I think it's only because we're in the early stages of adoption. I can't wait until I have a car that is aware of my phone and can turn down my music when it rings, or transmit data (directions, car status, location, etc) to and from my phone.

Conclusion

It all started when a friend smuggled a phone from Finland into this country 2-3 years ago, and I saw his wireless headset that seemed too Star Trek to be real. Fast forward to today, and my own personal setup isn't just feeling Star Trek, it's actually useful. So far the killer app is data over the connection. Whenever I'm out of my office and beyond the reach of free wifi, I'm on bluetooth. I hear that pricing for Bluetooth is still all over the map (which can bite you in the ass if you travel a lot) but my t-mobile plan has been a solid $20 in the months I've had it, and it even allowed for free data use when I was in Canada recently (on the rogers network I think). I'm still amazed you can speed across the land while downloading email at the same time, and the little gadgets like headsets are also quite useful. I know Bluetooth has been around for a while and no one ever thought it'd be ready for prime time, but that time is now, and the useful applications of this technology are plentiful and easy to use. updates: A lot of people have sent in tips but here's one I didn't know about: "One thing your article didn't mention is the how Mac's Address Book can work with Bluetooth. When you have Address book open you have the little BT button enabled, address book will have a popup with the name (if in the address book) and number of the person calling. This is great when you're at the computer but you're phone is across the room or in your pocket or whatnot. The popup will let you send the call to voicemail if you don't want to take the call." -- Kirk

Social Software ideas

While social software may be the internet revolution du jour among venture capitalists, as a user I'm still waiting for the killer social software app that lives up to all the market hype. Recently I've been thinking about how the current crop of options could be improved upon, or at the very least, how they could be leveraged to be something useful for users. I've come up with a few ideas, some half-baked, others fully baked. I offer them here in the hopes that someone, somewhere already built it or would like to build it.

Colloquial mapping

The gist Yahoo Maps + Slashdot Have you ever been literally steered wrong by automated mapping systems like Yahoo Maps or Mapquest? Either the maps are out of date or the algorithm that determines the shortest distance between two points doesn't account for local traffic patterns. I find the difference between how Yahoo Maps says I should get from a point A to a point B and how a friend or family member would tell me how to get there differs about half the time. I find that the more rural or off-the-beaten-path a destination is, the bigger the difference. I'm finding that in Oregon, the speed difference between two lane roads with stop signs and four lane freeways is substantial. Yahoo Maps suggests the shortest distance and it almost always includes backroads that are riddled with delays. Where these systems fall short is that they are not aware that a quick 5 minute jog over to a major freeway can save 20 minutes or more on an hour long drive. The idea Create a mapping service that allows the community to suggest alternate paths along with reasons for it. Suggest the routes to be taken as dictated by the software's GIS information, but also list user suggestions, and to ensure quality, also add ratings of user suggestions by others. If I wanted to go from San Diego to Ventura, CA, there are several paths I could take and it would depend on time of day, day of week, time of year, and/or the weather. Software would dictate that I go directly up the 5 and 405 freeway to the 101, but that'd be murder during rush hour on a weekday and might take 4-6 hours to cut through three major metropolitan areas. During a holiday period, you'd probably save lots of time taking an eastern route around most of Southern California even though it would be a longer distance. The rub The biggest obstacle I can see is normalizing all the data. By its very nature, getting directions from people would be "dirty" and require some significant logic to normalize and get it into a database format that could be queried. You could store the paths based on the geographic start and end points, and perhaps take long/lat points along the way, then you could show users paths suggested by users that had start and end points that were shorter or longer than their desired path. The trickiest thing would be providing user suggested paths for a trip between say Los Angeles and Ventura, CA that could correctly draw upon some of the suggested paths from the San Diego to Ventura submissions. Allowing other users to rate the quality of suggested directions would hopefully keep bad directions to a minimum and at the same time float the best alternate paths to the top. With proper reputation management in place, the service could keep track of a user's overall quality of suggested directions and highlight those ingenious travelers that always seem to know the quickest way to get somewhere. Along with the proven utility of internet mapping, adding a suggested route system could fill in the last remaining gaps and produce a hybrid automated and human created system that any amount of AI programming couldn't match. Mapping software relies on simple mathematics and a conceptual map of the earth's surface that imaginary vectors can be plotted along. Humans that are veteran drivers in a particular region have extensive knowledge based on years of experience that simple mathematical models can't replicate. This service would attempt to bring those two worlds together to provide the best possible experience for users trying to get from point A to point B.

2. Geographical opinion systems

The gist Epinions + Friendster Last summer I moved to a town in a place far away from where I've spent the past few years, and one of the first problems I had to solve was finding the perfect everything. I quickly amassed a bunch of questions that took months of trial and error to answer through a network of new friends and neighbors. Where could I get a good haircut? Which one of the local dentists would be most understanding of my dental anxiety? Which store should I shop for food at if I want a lot of organic, natural, and meatless food? Are there any trustworthy mechanics in this town? Which one of the two Thai places is "the good one?" Where should I go for a nice night out here? Which theater plays the art house movies? Which one of the furniture stores should I trust with my money? The idea Even with a small network of friends, it's tough to find answers for all the questions you might have when you move to a new city. Worse yet is traveling to a new place and having to send off emails to friends that live there, asking them for all their favorite places to eat and have fun. The crux of this idea is to build something that combines a service like Friendster with a review site like Epinions. Basically the site would serve as a digital representation of the connections and knowledge one builds over time when living in the same place. I'd be more than happy to write detailed reviews of all my favorite places in San Francisco for friends. Currently I do it over email when asked by friends and on localized or private email lists when the questions come up. It took me years to find the one honest mechanic, the nicest dentist on earth, and the best sushi in San Francisco. I share knowledge freely with my friends and they do the same right back at me, but it's tough to keep track of this stuff. This site/service would serve a place to share this information among a trusted network of friends or strangers given appropriate levels of privacy control and reputation management. The rub The hardest part of course is weeding out the tainted information. If limited to your friends network, this wouldn't be too hard to manage, as you probably do it currently. I might not treat my friend Jonah's opinion of hairdressers highly because I know he is married to one and talks up his wife's business too much. The bigger rub is when you expose the reviews to strangers, because it quickly becomes a minefield where trust management is paramount to keeping the service useful. Given any system that tracks quality or quantity of any property, participants will game the system to rise in rankings. People signing up fake accounts to rate their own services highly would be the death keel for this service among the many possibilities for tainting data. Another obvious problem is why anyone would enter all this information somewhere. Sure, epinons could someday do this and it was fun at first, but writing reviews takes work, and I believe epinions relied on encyclopedic reviews and should have instead allowed shorter 1 paragraph reviews that might only be meant for friends. Reducing some of the formality and perceived amount of work would reduce the friction of getting information. Using perhaps an existing network like Friendster, keeping reviews private to only those close to you would also help. If you wanted to share a review of your favorite bar, it wouldn't mean spending fifteen minutes writing to help out some nameless corporate website network, if it was for your friends only, then you'd have the more immediate feeling of helping people you care about out. This would also give an incentive to expand your friend networks, in order to access to this privelaged, private information. Tribe.net sort of does this by putting some emphasis on geographical location, though they seem to be more of a Craigslist style classified ad network. When I log in, I usually see a list of strangers trying to sell a guitar amp or get a knitting group together, which is fairly different than what I envision here.

3. Collaborative consumed media

The gist Friendster + ??? (some sort of media management service) Friendster currently lets you list interests in a free-form way and those become links to others interested in the same subject matter. What I want here is something a bit more formal than "rock music" or "AC/DC". I'd love to know the last five books my friends purchased and the last five CDs they liked. I'd love to know what's spinning in their MP3 player currently and what DVDs they enjoyed watching recently. While this may be a potential privacy problem, as long as my friends are the only ones that can see this info, I wouldn't mind sharing it, and I'd love to check up on what media they've been loving recently. The idea A central service perhaps built upon existing systems at Amazon or Friendster that allows you to share as easily as possible all the media you are consuming. Currently my friends do this using a mish-mash of web services, spaghetti code scripts, and their weblogs. I might think about getting the New Pornographers album after I hear my friend Andre rave about it on his site, or if I see Jason's "now playing list" that features the tracks. The rub As with the last idea, reducing the friction as much as possible is key to allowing people to enter data into the system. At amazon, simply let people share their recent purchases with friends and perhaps let them write micro-reviews that don't show up as formal amazon reviews. Provide javascript bookmarklets to let users quickly add movie listings, book ordering pages, and band homepages into their media library to share with friends. This would be trivial to tie into an existing commerce system like amazon, which already has the data and only needs to make it easy as possible for me to say "hey friends, I just finished reading Word Freak and it was a blast from start to finish!" Privacy concerns would have to be addressed, as this could be a Total (media) Information Awareness listing of everything you've bought, watched, listened to, and read. Users would have to trust the company running the service and trust that their data wouldn't be used against them in any way. Currently Erik's ingenious service All Consuming does this by scraping weblogs (and letting you dictate which ones are your friends) and creating pages and sending you alerts when friends mention new books, though it doesn't do music and movies, and it sort of does a end-run around the data by grabbing it from your site and normalizing it into an amazon-like framework. Audioscrobbler does "what's playing" lists pretty well (here's my out-dated profile), perhaps if they could be incorporated into an amazon purchase history, it could be extended to movies and books.

4. Reputation management ideas

The gist Multi-variate reputation management Reputation systems have been around for a few years and it's about time to improve upon them. I've noticed that after using eBay for a few months that the simple +/- rating system doesn't always tell you what you want to know about an unknown seller, nor does it equate with trust in some cases. This could work with any reputation system, but eBay comes to mind as the most obvious application. The idea This is less of a product or service and more like a bunch of ideas around reputation systems. Add additional variables for tracking reputation in a community system. For eBay, there are numerous informative data points that could help calculate trustworthiness. I'm going to trust someone that has high ranking for selling ten $1,000+ items more than someone that sold 50 $5 trinkets, and doubly so if I want to buy a $500 item. After having been burned by an overseas transaction gone wrong, I'm wary of buying from sellers that are very far away, unless they have extremely high marks. Similar to the "grade inflation" problems common in colleges everywhere, everyone at eBay seems to have the same positive rating of "GOOD COMMUNICATION WOULD USE AGAIN A+++++++++++" which doesn't really tell you much and becomes meaningless if every bit of feedback looks like that. If you plumb someone's profile and all their previous transactions, you can eventually figure out if they've moved any big ticket items but it'd be great if that information (which is already in the database) could be surfaced and used to assess an adjusted reputation ("This user has been rated positively on 125 sales of items over $500". Other bits of info could include things like location of both the seller and the buyers (I'll trust a seller in Spain if they have lots of high ranking sales to others in my country). Besides eBay, a system such as the one in use at Slashdot that keeps tally of a user's karma could be expanded to include additional datapoints, such as # of words per highly rated answer. You might prefer encyclopedic answers, or you might instead like to know the efficient users that pack the highest ratings in the fewest words/post. Additional data would really help out sites that involve larger sums of money changing hands. The eBay-like freelance job site eLance and the home improvement finder site Service Magic could improve their simple +/- systems with a cost calculation. I wouldn't hire a handyman that typically does $50 doorjamb fixes to hang $10,000 worth of windows and at eLance, if I was looking for a cheap $500 website for my business I'd hire someone that had successfully done those jobs in the past and had a portfolio filled with low-cost jobs. Update: Jay Allen lists an idea I would also love to see, an address book that could be shared with friends. This past xmas I had to email my new address out to a couple dozen people that asked, and most all of them were already connected to me in friendster.

Blogging for Dollars

In mid-July of this year, the new weblog service Typepad launched, and after a couple months of beta-testing I was hooked on the features. Rather than try and move my highly-customized blog over to the service, I decided starting a new site would be much easier, so I decided my next site would be housed at Typepad. I've long been a fan of TiVo, having owned one for the past three years. Last year I finally started hacking them and found it to be much easier than I thought. I have always followed TiVo news, I'm often writing long emails evangelizing the product to those that ask, and I've wanted to write easier how-tos than the ones I'd read on TiVo hacking. I realized then that a blog focused on the digital recorder space would be perfect for Typepad, and PVRblog was born (actually I originally wanted to call it DVRblog, but accidentally bought pvrblog.com before I realized my mistake, so pvrblog it is). When I started planning and designing the site, I realized that since it was at Typepad, it was going to cost me some money to run it each month. Currently I already have one commercial unix account, a co-located debian server, and a co-located windows server. I wasn't looking forward to another monthly bill, so I looked at my options and realized I could throw Google's Adsense textads into the template and perhaps defray the costs. I designed the site templates with this in mind, making sure there was room for it. My dream with PVRblog was to make five dollars a week, in order to easily cover any hosting costs I've run Adsense textads on Blogroots since Google launched the service, but they weren't very lucrative. I figured it was probably because "blog" wasn't too highly sought after of a keyword, so consequently Blogroots usually make only a couple bucks a week, tops. My dream with PVRblog was to make five dollars a week, in order to easily cover any hosting costs. I've been blogging for four years and paying for it throughout, but if I could write a blog I enjoy doing and have it pay for itself, well, that certainly would be something. I launched PVRblog publicly on July 16th with half a dozen posts, then announced it on my personal blog. In a matter of hours, dozens of other sites linked to it, the site ascended Daypop and Blogdex's lists, and all told the debut was a big success. Late that night I remembered the ads and logged into my Adsense account to see how the day went. I clicked over to reports to see the activity. From approximately 3,000 visits (not too shabby at all), enough people clicked through that I made $40 in the first 24 hours. The first thought that came to mind was this:

Great googly-moogly, holy crap. Crap, crap, crap. What the hell just happened? What did I do? What does this mean for weblogs? Would the world be covered in textads when I tell people about this? Shit!

To say the least, I was a bit freaked out. I was measuring everything in increments of $20, hoping to make my monthly hosting and in one day I had enough to pay for two months of hosting. The next day brought another month of paid hosting, and this continued until a few days later I was a Yahoo pick for new site of the day and it resulted in twice the traffic I'd seen so far and over $100 in click-thrus came in during a 24 hour period. Once again, I freaked out.

Micropayments suck. No, really.

I've been a big fan of Scott McCloud's comic works for years and I have optimistically followed his essays and speeches about someday paying writers and artists online through micropayments. I've been a user of Paypal since May of 2000 and have bought many a CD and shirt from local musicians selling online. I've followed the recent launch of Bitpass and have used it to view McCloud's latest work and buy a pile of MP3s from various bands. I've used all these systems but I realize their limitations: uptake is minimal when compared to most web surfers, and few people probably go through all the trouble to pay anyone for content. after using micropayment systems like Bitpass, and compared to something like Google's Adense, I've come to the conclusion that micropayments indeed suck Clay Shirky recently tore McCloud and Bitpass a new one over this (Scott wrote a response), and after using micropayment systems like Bitpass, and compared to something like Google's Adense, I've come to the conclusion that micropayments indeed suck. There are a whole host of reasons for their suckitude, but the biggest obstacle has to do with user experience. People are lazy. You are lazy. I am very lazy. I don't want to lift a finger to do anything generally, unless it is really worth it. When you're reading stuff online and you're hit with signup forms, registration forms, or worse of all, payment forms, most people close their browser or go somewhere else. It's just how we work. I haven't read the LA Times website since last year when they instituted a draconian registration process that requires your email for their spam cannon. When users are faced with what looks like work when they were expecting to enjoy reading something, you can bet they will leave, be pissed, or both. Now don't get me wrong, I love Scott McCloud's work and I'd gladly pay him a buck a day to produce the high-quality comics he's capable of, but if I was randomly hitting Bitpass "pay me to see the next page" screens in my web wanderings, I wouldn't be wandering for very long. I'd be leaving. And no matter how far micropayment companies take the technology, there is always going to be a cost (no pun intended) involved with paying for content. You'll have to click buttons, log into extra screens, authorize your accounts and the like. Not all of those steps can be automated and the process will continue to be slightly painful for anyone going through with it (the vast majority will not go through with it). With unobstrusive textads like Google's, the experience for users of your site is only slightly changed. They now have to see an ad (depending on how well you integrated it into the site), and a few of them may very well click on the ads. As the site owner, you get money trickling in, everyone and anyone can view your site, and some people will even find better information or bargains on stuff they wanted. Your readership can grow as much as you want, and usually this carries with it higher click-thrus and more money. Compared to micropayments, unobtrusive textads look a million times better for both the author and the reader.

Google's innovations

Google doesn't get much credit for what it has done to revitalize online advertising. Google's textads aren't just a great technology because they are less of a hassle for readers (compared to micropayments or banner/popup/popunder ads), they are also better than any other textads I've ever seen. I built my own system in fall of 2001 for MetaFilter, and while it did mimic the format, it didn't have any of the content-sensitive filtering, nor did it have any performance limits built-in. When I launched MetaFilter's textads, the first ads were terrific. They were often members' blogs or new services other members had launched. People clicked on them like crazy because they were loaded with fun new sites. It was ads by the members, for the members of MetaFilter. This is typical of other services I've launched online — the early adopters are knowledgeable and enthusiastic, so their first contributions are terrific. A few articles were written about MetaFilter and the new ads and soon after several copycat systems sprang up. People talked about a new revolution in unobtrusive advertising on corporate and hobbyist sites. I enabled anyone to advertise on MetaFilter, and although I kept some standards to keep erotica sites and spammer sites out of the system, eventually most people advertising weren't members and didn't know MetaFilter too well. Many placed ads based on the promises the highly positive textad articles talked about. Their ads were often for things that no one was interested in, even though I warned many advertisers before taking their ads and their money. As people realized the majority of ads weren't that great, they started to ignore the textad box on the front page. The click-thru rates fell like a brick, from 5% in the first month down to the typical advertising industry average of 0.5%, and like that, the revolution of textads was over (there are still ads at MetaFilter and a few dozen people use them for some fairly high-quality ads these days). Google did two amazing things to prevent the same activity in their own system. First off, most everyone knows they do content-sensitive filtering on ads. This is vitally important for sites like PVRblog, but at MetaFilter, any ad was randomly placed next to any content. Google goes to great lengths to make sure that any ads you see have something to do with your searches or the content that accompanies them. The second innovation is their performance metrics and lower limits imposed on advertisers. Simply put, if your ad sucks, you will get booted, so the quality system-wide of the ads never goes down. It's brilliantly simple, but if your ad was written poorly or you picked the wrong keywords, the click-thru rates will reflect that, and Google often ends campaigns that don't meet a minimum of criteria. This Darwinian system ensures the strong survive, that ads are highly targeted, well-written, and used by a good percentage of searchers and readers, making the system as a whole work. Simply put, Google not only invented the textad, they perfected it, and thanks to those innovations, Adsense carries those benefits to site owners and readers.

Adsense advantages

I've met with some great success from Adsense, beyond my wildest dreams, but one of my first thoughts was "what does this mean for blogs." When I asked a few friends during my initial freakout phase, even those that had low opinions of blogs in the past saw this as a ray of hope. People creating websites for the fun of it have never really had a way to be compensated directly for maintaining high quality sites. "This is a wonderful thing" they said. "For once, writers can get a break, by finding a way to pay for hosting and maybe even encourage them to write more" was something else I heard. When was the last time you heard someone say they received a check for advertising on their hobby site that could be used to purchase a fully loaded Aeron chair? I think the success of Adsense means a lot for not just blogs, but for any website produced by writers, historians, artists, and fans. One of the first great things about the web was the plethora of amazingly informative sites maintained by passionate individuals in their free time. There's no reason any topic-focused site can't benefit from Adsense. It's my hope in writing this piece to show how this is a potential boon to other website authors. Make no mistake, last month PVRblog made a lot of money from Adsense. When was the last time you heard someone say they received a check for advertising on their hobby site that could be used to purchase a fully loaded Aeron chair? Sounds like something you might have heard in 1998, no? Well it's true today, and I hope a lot more people meet with the same success.

Tips for a successful Adsense site

I know that a lot of the PVRblog's luck with adsense was just that: accidental luck. I had no idea so many people would like the idea of a blog about DVR technology. I didn't know TiVo was such a sought after keyword at Google. I had no idea my previous projects' Google ranking would help my site out when I first linked to the site from my blog. The whole thing was one big happy accident, but I've noticed some trends between what I did and what others have tried. What follows are things I've noticed worked to my advantage. 1. Pick a topic Blogs are about anything and everything and it isn't every day that you find a good blog focused on a topic. In order to have any remote chance of success gaining an interested audience and getting good on-topic ads showing up, pick a narrow topic you are passionate about and run with it. I would guess that I do just as good or better than Gizmodo on textads (Gizmodo certainly covers the same area of PVRblog, just not as in-depth) even though I probably have 1/10th the traffic because my site is more tightly focused. If there's anything in this list that requires a drastic change on the part of website authors, this is it. Focused blogging isn't that popular but I'm convinced it's the only way to have a chance to carve out a niche on the web. If you want to proclaim yourself as an expert on a topic to both an audience and search engines so that people will know you're the one site to go to for information, you'll have to focus. Focus and be as specific as you can. 2. Consider your topic as it relates to the web If what you are aiming for is ad revenue, it helps if your topic is something you can buy products related to it. It also helps if those products can be bought online and people are comfortable with it. One of my favorite topic sites (arguably slightly blog-like) is Kicksology. Professor K knows everything and anything about basketball shoes and about once a week I drop into the site to see what's new in cutting edge shoe design. Often when I see a rave review on a cool looking shoe, I want to know how much it costs and if I can buy them. It's an impulse buying thing, but if you notice Kicksology recently added Google's ads to the site, but they're not super-focused. Ideally, if I was reading about a new shoe, I'd want ads offering the same shoe for purchase right now. I've checked out a few dozen of the reviews, but the new air jordan review is the only one that carries with it targetted ads. Generally speaking, Kicksology is about something not normally ordered or sold online and the ads are often a poor fit for the content (no one's fault really, people just don't buy that many shoes online). TiVos are very close to the web. People buy them online, they look up tips and hacks for them, and resellers have tons of TiVos to move. I didn't really think about it when I started the site, but thanks to the mass availability and customers looking for deals on them, the web's a natural place to shop for a new TiVo. If you're really interested in knowing how well a topic might work out, try going through the process of placing a Google Adwords ad. During the process they'll tell you how much a keyword will cost you, and you can use that to determine if writing a blog about goldfish is going to be more lucrative than the one you could be writing about golden retrievers. 3. Be passionate and write your ass off Don't start a blog just to turn a buck, because it's going to be clear to your audience that you don't really care about the topic if you don't offer much beyond press releases from companies. If you want to have a site that ranks highly at Google, write how-to article after how-to article and offer content no one could find anywhere else. I love this guide to ranking higher in google because it doesn't focus exclusively on HTML tricks or stoop to tips on gaming the system, it simply says: write the most useful website on earth and everyone will link to you, which will make you #1. I started PVRblog because I've been following the space for the past three years and I have dozens of in-depth tutorials I've written and want to write about the subject. I'm enthusiastic about the topic and I look forward to spending a few downtime hours writing articles, conducting interviews, or reviewing books and hardware for the site. 4. Designing for Google and your audience Don't underestimate the power of Google and google-ability of your site. About half of all the traffic to PVRblog is from a Google search. If people are looking for information on how to upgrade a tivo, they might find my articles about it, and alongside every article are four links to upgrade kits at various prices. I wouldn't be surprised if the click-thrus are crazy high on those links, for those users. I do the same thing myself, often looking up reviews on cellphones and following ad links to help find the best prices I can. On the technical side of things, having an accessible, valid XHTML site, with good semantics, good page titles, and good filenames helps Google index your site. Typepad does all these things extremely well right out of the box. After I launched PVRblog, Google indexed the entire site within hours and reindexes it often. The site shows up in the top ten for many common TiVo hacking or TiVo feature searches. Searchers are often looking for info to help a purchase, and are likely to click an ad, so it's worth thinking about them. Nick Denton recently wrote about the design of a weblog may change based on Adsense, and I'd say he's got a lot of good points, but be careful that you don't go too far, forcing people to make extra clicks just so you can stream more ads at them. Your audience will pick up on this eventually and bail. What not to do Of course now that I've given you a few tips, it's important to reiterate what you shouldn't do. Don't just slap ads on your blog and expect to get rich the next day. If every blog about anything on earth is going to carry adsense boxes, their utility is going to go down and people won't be likely to click on them. Don't be disappointed if you're not pulling down big bucks on your topic-focused, well-googled site. It takes time to build an audience and gain links from people that find your content useful. If you follow these guidelines, it's quite possible you'll be able to pay for your own hosting. Eventually, you might make more.

The downsides

Like anything, it's not all roses and Adsense is far from absolutely perfect. It's got two big drawbacks: the approval system and the terms of service. The approval system is evidently run by humans, and they state upfront they won't accept personal sites. I would guess that's likely because most personal sites aren't focused on much of anything besides a specific person, and hence would be hard to advertise to. For even focused sites, some people have had real trouble convincing the Adsense folks to approve them, even when their sites could potentially produce great on-target ads. The decisions are sometimes arbitrary and will likely work against Google if it continues to mistakenly deny legitimate sites. The other big problem is the terms of service for Adsense which have received a lot of scorn recently after a few people were booted from the program without any recourse. Google took it a step farther and beefed up the legalese to even prohibit the discussion of the TOS, which is kinda nuts. Of course, I've benefited greatly from Adsense, and it's probably no surprise that the TOS issues weren't a dealbreaker for me personally. Google's between a rock and a hard place on this issue. If they were more transparent, like they have been with their search results, people would no doubt spend their lives gaming the system. What Google hasn't stated upfront about how pagerank works, people have reverse-engineered to great effort. There are whole sites and thousands of people that dedicate their lives to getting their sites as high as possible in Google, whether or not their site has good information or helps out web surfers. These folks see no problem in making Google less useful for searchers if it means their clients are happy with their rank. Google's spent every day since their launch in a cat-and-mouse race to beat those that seek to game the system. If Adsense were transparent, say if they told you how many clicks were allowed per hour from a page or an IP, you can bet that within a couple hours people would produce adsense link clicking bots and bot farms that carried hundreds of IPs solely to produce fake click-thrus for cash. So it looks like they are trying to keep a lid on this, keep their methods as secret as possible and went as far as to put a gag order on the entire subject. I don't know what's going to work out for them in the end, but I think they could potentially lose a lot of money whether or not they tell everyone how Adsense works exactly. The future will tell us if they made the right move here. Areas for improvement The tools offered for authors using Adsense are pretty paltry. It's a new service and I expect it to change, but it'd be nice if the results were more granular so you could compare which pages produced the highest click-thrus, and tailor your content to that. It'd be nice if you could see a breakdown of each domain/site you were using the ads on. The new custom colors and layouts are great, but it'd be nice if you could track how different sizes/colors were performing to enhance your design. Currently you just see a number for views, a click-thru total, and a dollar value assigned to that.

Conclusions

A long-ago promise of the web was that people could share their expert opinions and thoughts on anything, and others in the world would find them. Search engines have helped the web live up to that promise and it works well today. Google's Adsense goes one further, in that someone writing passionately and expertly on a topic can now also make some money doing it. Nick Denton has been saying niche blogs could turn a profit for a while now, and after my experiences I'd have to say he was right. The opportunity is now there — if you've ever wanted to write a topic-focused blog and wondered if you could get paid for it, Adsense could make it all work for you.

Beyond the Blog

I've spent the past year and a half playing with the possibilities in Movable Type (MT), through my personal and client sites. Like all weblog management tools, MT is basically just a lightweight content manager, but it's power is in its flexibility. This article is aimed at people comfortable with HTML and creating their own MT templates, but if you're new to the tool there might still be some tips worth picking up. The template system is the core feature of MT I'm tweaking in all the following examples. MT came onto the scene in Fall of 2001 and introduced a feature not many other blogging tools shared (then and still now), and that is the flexible way templates are handled. Instead of just skins for your weblog, or a predefined limit of templates for your index and archives, it not only ships with templates for every aspect of a weblog, you can have as many additional templates as you want and they can do any number of things you need.

Easy tweak: publishing the rest of your site in MT

It's pretty common for people new to weblogging to embrace the simplicity of publishing, and crave it in the rest of their tools. Once you start blogging and the pain of FTP and hand HTML coding is gone, many people start wishing their blogging tools could handle other pages on their site, but virtually none of them do out of the box. About six months ago, I was asked to help with some updates on Stanford's Center for Internet and Society site, and I learned that the entire site was editable in MT. It was so extensive and powerful that I spent a couple days making layout, content, and site-wide navigation changes and didn't even have a server FTP login. The ever brilliant Kathryn Yu used a combination of server side includes (to hide redundant markup) and MT templates to control every single page on the site (both static and weblog). Then she gave some people rights to modify templates, in order to let them edit the text of static pages. As you'll find out, it's pretty effortless to power a site's about page, a resume, and/or a contact page with MT. The secret is simple: create new templates that hold your static content. Although templates were designed to feature output by the MT weblog content engine, there's no requirement for that, and this is a easy tweak of the system. Example: adding an About page to an existing MT-powered blog. Log into Movable Type and select "Templates" on in the left hand menu. To make things easier, you'll want to copy the design of your Main Index template so the HTML is identical on your About page. Click on "Main Index" to get the template edit screen, then copy all of the template code. Hit your back button to return to the list of templates. Follow the link to create a new Index Template. Give it a name like "About page" and an appropriate filename. Paste the Main Index template code into the textarea. Remove everything between the MTEntries tags, including the tags themselves. In the place of the weblog code you just deleted, enter your About page content, with appropriate markup as necessary. Figure 1 shows a conceptual diagram of how this works.

Figure 1. Conceptual diagram of how a normal weblog page works in MT and how a static page works.

If you want to make things easy on your server, check off the option that says rebuild this template automatically, since it won't have any weblog data that will be changing constantly (otherwise it'd just be wasting server resources every time you posted a new blog entry). Whenever you do want to update the page, edit the About page template HTML and make sure you rebuild just that template by clicking the Rebuild Template button below (note: not the rebuild link that will shown above your template information, the form button at the bottom). While it's a slight bit tedious to setup each static page in this way, you will gain the convenience of being able to update any page on your site directly within MT. You can continue creating as many pages as you need, such as a page for your resume, a page linking to your photo galleries, a contact page, a search page, and/or a links page. I've converted all the static pages on my site using this technique and find I only have to update a static page once a month or so, but having them all accessible from a web browser makes updates easier and I find I make changes more often.

More Advanced tweak: using MT as a simple database application

While movable type was designed to handle all the data associated with weblogs, you'll soon see that MT can also be used to create a photo gallery, power a design portfolio, keep a recipe catalog, or anything else you can imagine. I've been building database-backed websites for the past four years and there's one simple reason I love building them: once you've done the extra work and created the code to output a single page, you can then output ten thousand pages. After building site after site like this, I've found one of the problems is that coding the database layer and scripting layer is time consuming and requires a lot of work. Then I realized that I could use MT for simple database needs. It all began when I starting thinking of how I could convert this featured essay section from a system I built myself to movable type. My custom application used these fields to describe each essay: title, subtitle, image, the essay itself, and the date. I realized there were at least that many pieces of data in a movable type blog and went about converting things over. Basic database concepts I tend to think of databases a lot like simple spreadsheets. If you imagine every piece of data a Movable Type blog can have, it looks something like the table below.

MT field name	Data type	Sample data
Entry ID	number automatically generated by MT	624
Entry Title	text	Catching a ball game
Entry Date	timestamp	September 12, 2003
Entry Body	text	I scored two tickets to the World Series game between the...
Extended Entry Body	text	When I got to the ballpark, I realized I forgot the...
Entry Keywords	text	baseball, stories, World Series
Category	numeric pointer to another table of category names	Sports

Note: You might not be able to see all these data fields in your Movable Type installation, make sure you have the latest release (2.64 or later) and be sure to click the "Customize this Page" link on the new entry page, then enable everything you can in the "Custom" view. In the table above, the title, body, extended body, and keyword fields are totally open-ended text containers. For this section of my site devoted to featured essays, I re-used the data in the following way.

Essay section names	MT fields used	sample data
Essay Title	Entry Title	Beyond the Blog
Essay Subtitle	Extended Entry Body	Powering an entire site with Movable Type
Essay Image	Entry Keywords	beyond.jpg
Essay body	Entry Body	I've spent the past year and a half playing with...
Essay date	Entry Date	July 14, 2003

As you can imagine, Movable Type's weblog engine can be re-used for all sorts of pages. I am currently using MT to power my press list at MetaFilter and the press at Ticketstubs, it powers my mobile phone photo gallery (Additionally, I'm using a piece of email-to-MT software that saves the images and puts the image names into MT fields), and it also powers my list of photo galleries (I designed a separate app to host the images -- eventually I'll move that to exported iPhoto galleries). Example: Creating an online portfolio with MT I use a database application whenever I have content that repeats and follows a distinct pattern. For this example I'll create a portfolio of web sites I've designed. A portfolio generally follows a pretty set pattern where you have a screenshot, description of the site, and associated data (name, date, etc). I'll start by listing the bits of info needed for each entry in my website portfolio.

Portfolio entry name	sample data
Name of Site	Creative Commons
Screenshot image of Site	creativecommons.gif
Description of the Site	For the non-profit Creative Commons, I set out to...
Date Site launched	December 16, 2003
Type of work	Employee

Looking at the available fields in MT, I'll map them as follows:

Portfolio entry name	MT field name
Name of Site	Entry Title
Screenshot image of Site	Entry keywords
Description of the Site	Entry Body
Date site launched	Entry Date
Type of job	Entry Category (category types include Employee, Contractor, and Volunteer)

Keep in mind that for media files like images, audio, or video, I typically put simply the filename in a MT field, then build a link in the template like so: <img src="/portfolio/screenshots/<$MTEntryKeywords$>"> and I upload the images separately into the folder. To be honest, I'm still working on my portfolio pages and can't show you the output with a link, but Ryan Schroeder recently emailed me to show how he'd done his portfolio in MT here. You can see that he's using categories to split his type of work into Web Sites, Print, Presentations, and Identity, and each entry features screenshots and text (probably all within a single entry field I'm guessing). Caveats and limitations Now obviously MT can only go so far with this, and you'll have to limit any site to six different types of information, but it should be clear that for a lot of websites it's all the complexity you need. Anything you want to keep track of online that is limited to several properties can be handled by MT. The other major downside to repurposing MT is that you're still stuck with the MT posting interface that clearly asks for all the pieces of a weblog, even when you're using it for posting recipes (which, by the way, could be done using category as the meal type, the name of the dish would go in the title field, the instructions in entry field, and the ingredients in extended entry). I know the Movable Type folks have talked about creating a developer program and after doing things like this with MT, I would suggest that MT someday become flexible enough to where a developer could customize the interface to posting for client sites. I'd love to deploy a site intended for an aspiring author to track all his articles written, books reviewed, and favorite sites, but give them a custom backend that clearly labels each thing appropriately. Sort of like a template system for MT itself. Just the other day I noticed that Jay Allen has done just this for one of his clients. So what have we learned? I learned these techniques slowly, and as the lightbulbs went off I thought it might help to share it and hopefully spark ideas in others. I didn't realize what a flexible and powerful system I had right under my nose and now that I've started playing with the possibilities, I can't wait to see what others come up with. Updates This article has sparked some great additional hacks. Brad Choate, grand master of MT hacking, tells of a smoother way to add static pages to your site. Scott mentions how to tweak output paths. Doug Bowman explains exactly how he uses MT to control his portfolio, using a bit of PHP to go beyond just a handful of existing data fields. Some example sites I forgot to include, and from people that emailed me are below. Some examples of innovative MT uses Boxes and Arrows An online magazine with over a year of archives and dozens of articles (with comments) that span multiple pages (how that was done). Looking at this site, it's not much of a stretch to imagine Wired News being powered by Movable Type someday. The Morning News Another magazine-like publication that uses MT for both articles and their front page's blog-like headlines. Features nice use of categories for stories and a robust page for every author, with pointers to all their previous contributions. Adaptive Path A business organization's site that features both static and dynamic content, AP's newest site went through a recent redesign and is now entirely powered by MT (see comment #80 in that thread for pointers to how it was done). About.com I don't know how they did it, but every sub-sub-sub category at About is running its own MT blog (with RSS!). Examples: index of a category, single entry Redland Baptist Church MT being use as a whole site CMS for a church's small site. Touch of Hope Charity site built entirely with MT (info on the setup)

SXSW 2003

I didn't start out feeling gung ho about this year's south by southwest interactive festival, in fact I wasn't having that good of a time until the last day. Last year was fun enough, but I sort of felt that maybe the conference had been replaced by others. While the market has been down for the past few years, it didn't seem to negatively affect SXSW too much in the past. It weeded out the stupid and the weak: no one talked of synergizing their sticky eyeballs after 2000. This year however, not only had the crowd of hucksters returned to the golf courses from whence they were created, but unfortunately so had many designers, writers, photographers, and bloggers. The crowds seemed smaller this year, and there were several designers that didn't choose to attend. Friday night, I rolled into an amazing Austin evening. Watching the previous week's forecasts and seeing cold temps I thought the festival's theme might become "everyone in sweaters." A quick warm snap made this year as perfect in terms of weather as the past. But after settling into my hotel and catching up with pb after he arrived, we noticed a lack of peers in the area. While we missed the big event of the evening already, there didn't seem to be anyone else around. We had a quiet dinner with Andre and Dana, and afterwards noticed the Omni's lobby was totally dead. We got back to our hotel around 10:30 and the night was prematurely over. What happened the packs of 50 geeks roaming every nook and cranny of the city like in years past? After getting the first long sleep and big breakfast in days, we caught the very end of the Kick event and I was happy to finally see everyone was here. Saturday's keynote broke the champagne on the boat for me and David Weinberger got up to share his common sensical long-range view of why the web matters, and it didn't disappoint. The convention space for panels seemed a bit smaller this year, with most rooms holding maybe 50 people, and a big room that could handle 150 or so. There were oodles of bloggers around, perhaps the decline in attendance was only in the professional sector. I can't remember seeing a lot of people sent by their workplace in the halls and presentation rooms. Hugh and the gang seem to tweak their setup every year based on feedback and the new panel schedules worked pretty well this year. Most presentations were a short 60 minutes, with 30 min breaks in between. There were plenty of panels to see, though if I was pressed to share any downsides, the 30 minute breaks seemed a tad long when there were a string of panels I wanted to get through. I don't know if everyone would agree that 15 minutes was a better time, but although the breaks let me catch up with speakers after their talks, and take time to check email and write up notes in the hall, sometimes it felt like too long of a break (especially after the 2nd or 3rd one of the day). As always, there were times when I didn't want to see any panels and times three great things were happening at once, but there's not a lot that can be done to combat that kind of scheduling. At one point I thought "why doesn't Hugh ask some bloggers to look over the schedule to point out conflicts" thinking that we webloggers had our fingers firmly on the pulse of the conference, but then I remember attending Po Bronson's "What should I do with my life" panel. A condensed version that showed up in FastCompany a few months back rocketed to the top of daypop/blogdex and stayed there for a few days upon its debut, but Po's panel was only about 1/3 full when I would have predicted a packed house. The subjects of panels themselves were for the most part interesting, though I noticed a lack of vision in many. My memory may be fuzzy, but I seem to remember the most exciting panels at SXSW (and any other tech conference for that matter) focused on what was next. Instead of looking towards the future, I felt far too many panels talked about the present. The theme of some panels (including my own) could be summed up as "This is how the world views weblogs (right now). This is what CSS is currently like. This is what it means to run a non-profit site (right now)." The most interesting panels this year seemed to be all the non-technical panels that discussed social issues. The panel on how communities could deal with online deaths, Kevin Warwick's talk about his cyborg-ness, the Po Bronson reading about how to find ones purpose in life, and Bruce Sterling's panel on the future. As usual, the social gatherings eclipsed anything the official conference sessions could offer, and the organizers did a good job steering attendees towards parties, open bars, and site launches. The Fray Cafe was a blast, and maybe it was due having an in-house bar. As the night wore on, people loosened up and got up on stage, probably due to the social lubricants available from the bar. The 20x2 event was a lot of fun. Hearing Dakota Smith play at the familyalbum.com party was a highlight. And it was the first time I made it out to Bruce Sterling's house party. Like I mentioned earlier, this year's conference didn't really click until it was almost over. I think it was a combination of good panels (Po Bronson's morning panel asking the audience to think about their life's passions and Bruce Sterling's afternoon talk that looked into the wacky frontier of the future) and talking with new folks that brought me a bit out of my element. I got to see new creative projects people were working on. I got to feel a little out of place talking to people I barely had met. While I didn't have any direct discussions or see any panels that discussed specific issues I faced, the environment of the last couple days in Austin sent my mind racing. I came up with a dozen new innovations for my personal website that I wanted to work on as soon as I got home. In the dead time between panels I came up with novel ways to optimize MetaFilter that hadn't occurred to me before. Seeing other people's projects spurred on a new idea for a photo essay. On the plane ride home I started writing what I hope will become my first story either performed or written for the Fray. I brainstormed ideas for a technology story I'd like to pitch to a magazine. After seeing digital video cameras everywhere, I came up with an idea for a short film I'd like to someday do. I'm happy that I got to attend this year's SXSW. After days of panel discussions and nights filled with drinking and socializing, I came away rejuvenated and inspired to work on lots of new projects. In the crowds that only come together once a year, I found motivation and I've already begun to work on all the new ideas I got there. While the content of panels wasn't ground-breaking across the board, the conference itself has carved out a niche as a place for creative minds to gather and interact, and that's where I find the real magic lies. Photos from this year's SXSW

Mozilla: Blogging's Killer App

Last summer, I found that IE on my mac was so completely screwed up I was forced to use another browser until they released an update. While I had only occasionally used mozilla for testing, after a couple weeks as a browser refugee I was a mozilla convert, and have been ever since. I use IE for testing only now, and can't see any reason to move off mozilla anytime soon. I always wanted a resource to point friends to that were not yet mozilla/phoenix/chimera converts and decided a few months ago to finally sit down and write it. The following instructions and screenshots are from November 2002 releases of mozilla 1.2 betas, but the tips and tricks should translate to current and future versions without too much trouble. Living in an Ad-Free World The first thing that got me, and what has kept me coming back to Mozilla is the ability to live in a world free of annoying advertising. I've gotten so used to it that I'm surprised when I see a coworker or friend's desktop mired in popunder windows or flashing banner ads. Why live with it if you don't have to? Killing popups and popunders The current 1.3 betas have an easier method to do this, but the following thumbnail links to the Advanced | Scripts & Plugins settings that will ensure you'll never see another popup or popunder ever again. The unchecked "allow unrequested windows" option is key here. The other settings prevent other annoying behaviors as well.

Hit Ok, and that's it. You can now surf any major newspaper, media site, or search sites without ever being distracted or annoyed by another x10 ad window ever again. Dropping Ads Mozilla also allows you to block ads, which presents a bit of a moral dilemma. If you block all ads, you'll never see them again, but the website operators will never see a cent because you'll never click on a hidden banner ad. Some people go as far as saying that reading websites after filtering out all advertisements is "stealing" content. Personally, I block ads from certain servers for two reasons. The first is basic annoyance. If a banner ad is flashing, or shaking, or otherwise distracting, I find I can't read the text on the page. Mozilla makes this easy to do on a case-by-case basis, with a right-click menu option, shown below.

The other reason I block ads is for untrustworthy sites. I make a point to block the major networks like doubleclick that have a history of shady data mining practices of internet surfers' browsing habits. You can go as far as you want with ad blocking in mozilla. To illustrate the point, I blocked a few servers that advertised on one of my favorite content sites. You have to admit, it's a lot easier to read sans distractions, though the jury is still out on whether or not it's a good idea to take it this far.

Alternately, you can also set your Mozilla preferences to only allow animations to loop 1 time (I don't have screenshots of this, but the newest versions make this easy). This eliminates annoyingly animated ads because they finish their animation loop very quickly and stop flashing in less than a second. Tabs, Tabs, Tabs "Tabs" are exactly what they sound like - ways to layer several web pages into the same window. The tabs themselves are then shown across the top of the browser window and are used for switching between views. They're not exactly a new idea, though the mozilla implementation is a bit different than things I had seen before. A few years ago Opera added the MDI (multi document interface) option to their browser, but it required an either/or option when you first ran it. Given the choice between a desktop full of windows and a single window restricted to a dozen views, the cluttered desktop seemed easier to work with for me. Mozilla (and other browsers adding support) added flexibility by letting you selectively add tabs to a window. This way, you could have five browser windows on your desktop, but within each you can also have as many screens as you like. Tabs for writing weblogs For blogging especially, I've found this to be a useful feature, because it allows me to organize windows into specific working spaces on my desktop. I might have a browser window with a page pointing at my weblog posting tool, and the same window will also have a tab for each link I will be mentioning in a post. As I write my entry, I can quickly swap to the other tabbed links, reading, excerpting, and copying/pasting text for my post as needed. Or if I'm surfing around and find something interesting, I can save my place there, open a new tab with my blogging engine, then switch back to the site worth blogging and work on a post from there. If you check out the next screenshot, you can see me doing just that. I've got a new entry in Movable Type, with two links mentioned in the post, and those two pages are tabbed in that browser so I can quickly copy and paste as needed.

Tabs for reading weblogs I find that tabs are just as useful for reading lots of blogs because they allow you to organize your reading and branch your surfing into many different directions, without losing your place. The preferences for tabs in mozilla allow you to enable a couple cool features. You'll want the "load links in a background" and "middle-click or control-click" features enabled as you'll soon see.

Loading tabs in the background (and with a keystroke) means if you're reading a blog post, and there's a link in the middle of a sentence, you can simply control-click it, and continue reading. Mozilla will open the link in a new tab, but in the background. This means your browser won't change focus, and can finish what you were reading without interruption. When you hit the end of the post, you can swap over to the tabs you loaded for additional background on whatever the weblog author was trying to say. To illustrate the power of tabs for reading further, with the recent proliferation of sidebar link lists, there are quite a number of things to look at in a given day. For a site like the following pictured, I simply hold down the control key (or command on a mac), and load links from the sidebar list in new tabs while I read the captions and titles leading to them. This allows me to quickly read through 10-12 links pretty easily.

Tabs let you organize The bottom line is that tabs allow you to organize your desktop just as you would with folders on your hard drive. I find myself now using two or three browser windows at any one time, each with several tabs within each. One will be my blogging window, as I read through sites, jump to links within them, and start new posts based on the sites I see. My other window will be news to read, and I'll start at cnn.com or google news or sfgate.com and open a new tab whenever I see an interesting story from scanning the front pages of the sites. I've often got a third window filled with a bunch of MetaFilter administration windows, to help me manage the site. Overall, it lets me organized my web wanderings and I can't possibly see moving to a different browser until they support this. Other Nice Features While the following features aren't solely in Mozilla, they make the browser even better. Sidebars Ever since I used the sidebar features in IE 5 on windows, I've loved the utility they offer. Mozilla's sidebars are simple and depending on how web applications use them, they can be pretty powerful. On MetaFilter, I provide a sidebar feed for quick scanning/reading of the site and quick link loading in the main window.

One of my favorite ways to read blogs is by using BlogTracker. It lets you build a customized view of weblogs.com, only showing you your favorite blogs. While it takes quick a bit of wrangling to setup, once everything is in place, it's a great use of the sidebar feature. I find myself actually using blogtracker more than an RSS reader, since I can accomplish the same thing -- keep up on lots of sites, and since it's in a browser, I can jump to offsite links quickly and easily.

Incidentally, I usually shy away from mozilla variants like Phoenix and Chimera due to the lack of sidebar functionality. Remote Blogging I have to admit, while I'm impressed by the xml-rpc powered Mozblog as a proof-of-concept (in a "wow, it actually worked!" sort of way), I honestly can't find a good reason to use it everyday. I've found the best uses for xml-rpc apps are those that live outside the browser, allowing you to do web things easier, or more powerfully, inside a real application environment. Since you're already in a browser, I don't see why you wouldn't just go to your Blogger or Movable Type backend page to post an entry, or use a bookmarklet to make it easier, than to pop open mozblog to do the same.

Skins While skins have been historically synonymous with turning any app into "tiny font, too dark to read, quake clan-ified" versions, there are a few tasteful things being done with Mozilla skins. The basic benefits are there -- if you don't like the way Mac/IE looks, there's not too much you can do, but with Mozilla, you just click a couple buttons to install a new one, and if you're really into it, you can make your own. Personally I find the Orbit variants are highly usable, providing large, easy to read buttons that are high contrast as well. Alternate Navigation Interface While this is a bit geekier than the other features here, I love the site navigation bar (hit View | Show/Hide | Site Navigation Bar | Show as Needed to enable it) because it presents an alternate way to navigate weblogs that also puts the functions in a predictable place. For most weblogs, it gives me a visual indication that they've got an RSS feed and I can auto-discover it with good readers. For sites like MetaFilter with lots of posts and comments, I frequently use it to jump between discussions more often than the hard coded next/back links on the site itself. Some have taken their use of the link element pretty far, with sites offering all sorts of information about the author, quick links to other sites, tables of contents, and copyright information. When a site uses this feature, it means I can find the search engine, about page, and archives instantly, which comes in handy when you're doing research. Greg Knauss proposed a standard for web site organization five years ago, and this feature comes pretty close to offering just that.

Web Searching Google integrated with Yahoo Maps a while back, and I find it incredibly useful for searching multi-line addresses. Set your prefs to use Google first off.

Then just highlight addresses with your mouse and right click to get a "web search for..." menu item to appear. Following it for an address will give you a map as the first result, making it easier than copying and pasting multi-line addresses one at a time.

Cross platform, open source, and other rah-rah Finally, I really like that there's finally a cross-platform web browser I can depend on. I split my time about equally between a mac laptop and a pc desktop, and in the past I've had to go without win/IE dhtml features in certain web applications when I was on my mac, and I've had to figure out ways to accomplish the same thing between the versions of IE for each platform. With Mozilla, once you get something working, it's going to work on all platforms. The fact that it is open source is a good thing for the user. While it certainly dragged the project down a bit at the start, now that we're a few years into community development of mozilla, new features and fixes seem to come pretty quickly these days. The mozilla team has really hit their stride, just in the past couple months, they've fixed a handful of bugs that made my favorite browser even better. And if a good idea pops up in one browser (like the google toolbar in windows IE only), the sheer size of the community makes development of those features in mozilla rather speedy and complete (like the google toolbar for mozilla). It also happens to be free, and if you're so inclined there are numerous hacks out there to extend mozilla further for the user.

Yosemite, 2003

Yosemite is a magical place for many. The thing that draws me there is the absolute awe that comes from being surrounded by so many natural wonders. Of all the places I've camped and hiked, most memorable places have one or two amazing views or remarkable formations. What makes Yosemite special is that it's got at least a dozen amazing things to see in a very small area. No matter where you look, you're rewarded with an awesome view. Even after being surrounded with natural beauty for days, the sense of awe never wore off. Around every corner and with the changing light, one new perspective after another was offered. The wintertime ghost town The drawbacks to enjoying Yosemite (for me at least) is dealing with the crowds. I can recall one summer trip involving a crowded campsite where one set of campers kept everyone else up all night as they played radios loudly while we tried to get sleep so we could climb Half Dome the next morning. The great thing about heading to Yosemite in the dead of winter is that no one else is there. During our time there (a Monday through Friday stay), we never had a problem finding parking, never had to wait in a line, and rarely had to share a location with anyone. There was almost no one around which contributed greatly to the solitude and relaxing experience we had. It's also dirt cheap. Due to it being the off-season, the winter offers only a few choices of places to stay and we picked the Yosemite Lodge. In the summer, rooms go for about $150 a night for a place with the decor and amenities of your average Motel 6. Our winter, midweek prices were only $79 a night, and they gave us a newly renovated room in a single floor building, which was also nice. The week's lodging ran about $350. The whole trip (including a couple $100 meals and a day skiing with lift passes and rentals) cost less than $1k. Things to do, places to see While most photos I've seen of Yosemite are taken in the summer with lush green meadows and raging waterfalls, winter in Yosemite looks amazing on film. A coat of white snow makes anything look nicer, and the addition to Yosemite's natural wonders is breathtaking. I quickly learned about the importance of light in photography. I read up on photo sites before I left, and seeing the changing light first hand brought the points home. The light on the walls of the valley looks best in the hour or so after sunrise and the hour before sunset, when the light is colorful and low in the sky, casting interesting shadows. Everything shot between those two times has a flat grayish quality. Shooting before sunrise or after sunset produced very blue, drab photographs. The middle of our stay included a full moon, which was bright enough to walk around by at night (and produce shadows on the snow), but sadly beyond my camera's capabilities to photograph. Winter also meant there were new things to do in Yosemite. We skated in the outdoor ice rink under a full moon. We skied up at Badger Pass (which was a great small, mellow mountain). We hiked in snow to see trees without anyone else around. While we could have snowshoed, the air was cold enough that the snow stayed firm and we simply walked on packed snow. Next time, we'll probably give cross-country skiing up to Glacier Point a try. The catch? The down sides were few and far between. It was cold, but given enough layers (all non-cotton -- never wear cotton in the winter while exercising), we were perfectly fine stargazing outside at night or hiking in the middle of the day. We got used to the 30 degree (F) temps and the powerful heaters inside our hotel made for warm nights. While we shared the area with a small number of people, we noticed on the way out (the start of a holiday weekend), there were some crowds showing up. If you want to relax and have a quiet time to yourself, midweek during the off season is the best. Being the off-season did mean that a lot of things were closed like other hotels in the area and some of the eating establishments. For food we were limited to just 2-3 choices for each meal. While we had clear skies and perfect weather, it could have turned at any time and made for a miserable day or two. Memories Looking forward to this trip got me through the last few months of 2002 (hadn't had a real vacation since summer of 2001), and now that I'm back from it I can say I wasn't disappointed. It was closer to the bay area than I thought, the driving was easy (we also took advantage of the free shuttle buses in the valley instead of driving everywhere), the prices were cheap, and overall it was the first time I got to relax and forget about everything in a long time. Here are a few photos from the week Here's a 3 minute (7Mb, quicktime) movie of us goofing around (since hiking isn't the most exciting thing to film, I had to make due). The song (used without permission) is from Rilo Kiley's new album.

Copyright and the Commons

Today's the big day in court. After four years of work, Larry's finally getting his chance to turn the tide, almost singlehandedly. I have high hopes for the Eldred case, though many predictions are for a landslide loss. The curious thing for me is hearing friends on both sides of the political spectrum (I have some big time Bush supporting pals) agree the extensions have gone too far, which is a good sign. A year ago, I had little idea what the concept of public domain really meant aside from really old books and movies. Over the past 7 or 8 months that I've been working on the Creative Commons, I've come to recognize and respect what a true commons for our culture would mean. Of course, it's mostly imaginary, as copyright has encompassed almost everything from the better part of last century and limited the use of works. There's the old saying that good artists copy and great artists steal, and that's not based on outright theft, but the acknowledgement that we are all influenced by others' work, and things like hip hop music and photoshop collages point out how great new art can be created when combining other works into new works. There are more turntables sold today than guitars. People use both instruments to create music, but what specifically do people do with turntables? They play (usually) two previously released (and copyrighted) vinyl records, mixing them in various ways (scratching, layering, etc) to create new music works. I tend to think of "View Source" the same way. I don't copy others' code and layouts outright, but I started learning HTML from Justin Hall's source, I learned Cascading Style Sheets after sampling Zeldman's homepage in 1998. I learned javascript by copy and pasting rollover code people explicitly shared with the world. We all learned how to do layout tricks like tables, frames, and use of invisible gifs from looking at how others did their sites and visually deconstructing their work. I can create pages with 3-column CSS layouts today because Eric Costello, Owen Briggs, and the Bluerobot.com guy have done the legwork and shared their experiences with us all. The past 8 years of web development depended upon and blossomed due to sharing code with one another. In the beginning there were no books, only sparse documentation. Then there were a few books and a lot of pages to learn from. Eventually you had new media college programs and books on any aspect of web development imaginable, and they owe their existence largely to the view-source menu option. I've seen perfectly good web technologies die from atrophy, because viewing and sharing code was close to impossible. When viewing others' source isn't possible, code exchanges fill the gap, and without them, the technology would go nowhere. Right now, I'm listening to some music that has roots equally in rock and jazz. Each song fills ten minutes of time with meandering melodies, abrupt pauses and starts, and is layered with speech samples from 1960s political activists. To say the songs were developed in a vacuum would be ignoring the obvious. We all have influences. I've toyed with the free resources at iStockphoto (as have others), and I've played with public domain video in the prelinger archives. If someday copyright was a different story, allowing people to use and reuse others' works instead of letting them decay and rot until they someday enter the public domain (in many cases over 100 years after their creation), our culture could benefit greatly in ways we can't possibly fathom today. The great promise of the internet was to house and make instantly available the entire scope of human knowledge. Without new works entering into the public domain, that knowledge is largely lost. As the law currently stands, this very piece I've written here and the image I made to accompany it are protected from someone trying to sell it and pass it off as their own, and that's great for me as an artist/writer. Yet that also means neither will be available for reprinting, repurposing, or any other use without my permission for a very long time. If I die on my 75th birthday, you'll be free to reuse the above image or this text in 2117. Is that what copyright was intended for? While most people are betting against Eldred and Lessig, I'm hoping the Supremes see the light and remember what the original framers intended. Here's to the public domain, the greater good, and the creative commons that someday might be.

TiVo's Next Move

TiVo's 3.0 operating system began quietly rolling out earlier this week, and among the improvements is the ability to load schedule data via both cable and ethernet. While it appears this feature is simply a way to streamline the unit, and get rid of the requirement for a phone line (I had to install a new phone jack just to accomodate the TiVo when I installed it), I think there's a bigger reason why TiVo is looking for alternate data delivery: TiVo wants to become a distribution network, and even at 3am, sending data through the straw of phone line is no match for the wide pipe of broadband. There are a lot of TiVos in the world now, and people are getting used to their different view of media content. Who could have predicted that people would flock to a device that only keeps programming for a brief period of time? VCR tapes can last for years, holding baby's first steps as well as last night's syndicated Simpsons rerun. TiVo simply embraced the transient nature of most television programming, and filled that gap. Although their easy software and no-brainer recording system did a lot to help their success, VCRs have had several similar automatic timer setting features, and additonal hardware (like VCR Plus barcode scanners) for years, but it never really caught on. I think the big brains at TiVo realized this and also realized there's no need to commit episodes of almost any TV show to a tape that lasts ten years when you'll delete it the next day, after watching it once. Dust in the wind This embracing of the temporal nature of things previously thought of as permanent or semi-permanent is key. Ten years ago, who could have predicted that people would listen to music through their computers with files that were regularly deleted, added to, and/or erased en masse? I buy CDs to simply rip and forget about in storage. I've lost tens of gigabytes of music to hard drive failures, and it's not the end of the world. The storage on my Rio is regularly formatted, changed out, then formatted again. In regards to media content, consumers are buring the candle at both ends, so to speak, by constantly churning through television shows, music, and movies. As a hyperconsumer of media with a digital hub at the center of my life, I want new, new, new stuff to watch and hear and I want it now, now now. The same way I treat a single episode of the Simpsons, I can also treat movies. A single episode of the Simpsons requires a lot of work and money, but it's still going to be deleted five minutes after I've seen it, even if I know it is something a team of writers worked months creating a storyline for, something the studio paid hundreds of thousands to produce, and something that took a team of overseas animators six months to create. Movies require more time and more money to produce, but a good lot of them are fluff pieces I wouldn't want to have in permanent storage, but still provide entertainment value. The new TiVo features Imagine the thousands of TiVo units are all on some sort of broadband connection, getting data through a fat cable line or a DSL-powered ethernet port. Now imagine them becoming a real distribution network, sending me the latest hollywood films for a few bucks. The satellite TV (including DSS) and cable TV industries have all realized that pay-per-view is a goldmine for them, and it's only a matter of time before TiVo embraces this. Imagine paying two or three bucks directly to TiVo to see the movies you wouldn't want to fork $20 over for the DVD, the movies that have interesting enough previews, but aren't anything you'd go directly to the theater to see. These are the same movies you likely rent if you have a VCR and a Blockbuster Video nearby, and TiVo stands a good chance of replacing them, and saving you a trip to the store. In my DVD collection, I have the Godfather box set, I've got every Coen brothers release, and I have Criterion releases of every one of my favorites they offer, but I'd never own Charlies Angels, Zoolander, or Shallow Hal. I wouldn't bat an eye, however, to pay a buck or two to see those titles show up in my TiVo's Now Showing list.

...from my couch, I could pay a few bucks directly to TiVo for instant, ephemeral entertainment

I don't know about you, but I love the simplicity and ease-of-use of all things TiVo, and I could easily imagine how this new type of content delivery would seamlessly slip into my recorder. TiVo already has my credit card info, as I pay them ten bucks a month for the program data, and they already know what types of TV shows I like, so it's not too much of a stretch to think of how a new system would work. Imagine setting aside 10% of your TiVo's storage to keeping 2 or 3 suggested movies ready to play (this would be much less noticable in the new 60 hour units), then selecting them from your Now Playing list, operating some sort of keystroke (like three thumbs up, then select) to confirm you want to pay for it, then watching the movie instantly. No need to schlep down to the Blockbuster and fork three bucks over to the Viacom empire when from my couch, I could pay a few bucks directly to TiVo for instant, ephemeral entertainment. TiVo wouldn't have to maintain a 24/7 television channel, they'd simply be selling premium content direct to the customer on demand. While their competitors like SonicBlue enable a napster-like app on every RePlay hard drive and fight the numerous court battles to let their customers "steal" content, TiVo could instead be making a profit on every copy of a movie watched by their users by following a proven profit model that has been working for over ten years. The sad truth of the P2P revolution is that people want to pay creators for their content, but it's never been easy or possible. TiVo is the king of ease-of-use, and could make both things possible in their media distribution network. The bottom line Providing content the customer wants, in a quick and easy fashion is TiVo's forte, and it'd be nice to see TiVo make a profit and stick around. The increasingly hermit-ized, couch potato nation loves TiVo and loves movies, and would be a goldmine for TiVo if they simply put the two together. And like every episode of handcrafted Simpsons brilliance, I'd send those movies whose writers worked for months, whose budgets ran well into the millions, and whose actors worked on for six months, straight to /dev/null/ and the digital ether five minutes after finishing them.

The future of music

The problem with music and mp3s today I was introduced to the format in spring of 1997, when my then domain host sent a mass mail to all users saying that .mp3 files were banned and sites serving files would be shut down without notice. I hadn't even heard of them, and had to dig search engines for half an hour to find anything I could understand. I eventually got that it was a compression specification, but the real impact didn't come until six months later when a friend said I could have a copy of a new CD from his mp3 files. Five years have passed since then, and in that time Apple has fully embraced the format, putting playback, ripping, and recording features deep into their digital hub as lifestyle philosophy. Along with iPods, Rios and Nomads adorn the hips of many geeks. PDAs and even cell phones tout mp3 playback as features. Everyone with a computer I know uses them, rips them from their CDs, and shares them with others. Napster (and later on, Kazaa) built massive worldwide networks based on the sharing of these files, spreading terabytes of files to millions of users. And yet, you can't walk into a store anywhere in America and buy a physical form of media embedded with mp3s. Imagine if DVD players worked on the same philosophy. Imagine if you couldn't ever buy a DVD movie on disc, and the only way to get content was to use cumbersome software tools in your PC, with an attached VCR as input. Now where would DVDs be if that were the only way to get new content? Looking at the world of mp3s, you see that even despite that daunting hurdle, they are everywhere. A whole industry has blossomed to sell players for your pocket, your car, and your home. Computer companies have embraced it, Apple the most unapologetically, with many an iBook destined for music ripping, playing, and burning. Five years of the record industry ignoring the problem, then trying to stifle and silence it, and it is easily the most popular method of listening to music on a computer. Five years of combating piracy by the RIAA and the "virus" has spread to everyone and everything. Even as the recording industry admits defeat and tries their own approach, they continue to stick it to artists and do everything wrong. When dealing with the internet and mp3s, the RIAA has always seemed to operate based on fear. Fear that they'd lose their stranglehold on musicians and artists, that they'd lose their precious controls on distribution of product, and fear that their carefully crafted marketing campaigns wouldn't have the same impact in a world where consumers don't respond to the same old broadcast methods. Given the ubiquity of mp3s among consumers, the continued rise in popularity of the format despite anything that's been put in place to stop them, and the millions of dollars being spent on mp3 encoding/decoding software and hardware, I no longer think the RIAA operates solely on fear. At this point, they're simply running on stupidity. A Solution The solution to the problem is a simple one, but would require an ambitious person (or persons) to take some gigantic risks. Just like Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, someone is going to have to stand up to the RIAA, at the risk of killing any chances of ever getting signed themselves. The Recording Industry thrives off its hyper-controlled means of production and distribution, but in the internet age none of that matters. Smart musicians have always understood the means of production and distribution and the business savvy among them have started their own labels, done their own packaging and pressing, and even done their own distribution. Artists like Aimee Mann that have decided to go it all alone had to face stiff opposition, but thanks to some luck and plenty of well-timed publicity, she was allowed to enter her material into the traditional channels. You can buy her CDs at your local record store, but it wasn't without a fight. An ambitious and courageous band or artist could single handedly bring the whole system crashing down by going internet-only, and selling mp3-only, at a reasonable price. They would have to do a few things to accomplish this, and each step would entail great risk. Given the potential benefit, it's only a matter of time before someone successfully goes through with it. If an unsigned band were to take this on, they'd need to have a huge underground following. This could happen easily if it were a new music genre, one where there is demand, but few available records. If an established artist were to do this, there is a strong potential that they'd be kissing their conventional careers goodbye, so it would probably have to be someone who is so sick of the system they're open to that risk. The band or artist taking this risk would release their music via the internet only, at a reasonable price. The means of production used to dictate that a CD cost $15 to create, market, and deliver to the consumer. As the price of blank media went down to almost nothing, the price of CDs did not, as record companies enjoyed larger profits. For an internet only, mp3 release there are comparatively little costs for distribution, and once a song is produced, a million digital copies could be made, sold, and distributed at about the same cost of producing, selling, and distributing one copy. An infinitely popular song could create an incredible profit margin, without the problems that physical media presents. The price would have to be reasonable. The mp3 format is a notoriously pirated format, but most people aren't going to go through the trouble of locating, downloading, and organizing pirated tracks if they could get them all in one place, legally, for a small fee. A band selling unencrypted mp3s at a low enough price wouldn't have to worry about piracy. In a sense, it would be like "legalizing" the mp3 format, if cheap and convenient, there'd be no reason to "black market" the music via the pirate networks. Unbound by the needs of record store shelves, trucks to ship units, and record companies, a band could charge a fee of say, $0.50 per track, so an "album" of music would run about $5-6. Of the few attempts by record companies to offer downloadable or streaming electronic versions of popular music, they've often set prices as high as $3 per song (scroll down to "digital downloads" and compare to the CD price), making an album cost two to three times the cost of a conventional CD, allowing companies to write them off as failures and say there is no market for electronically distributed music. As a consumer, if I had the option to search morpheus/kazaa/napster/hotline for tracks from an artist I'm interested in hearing, or just paying 50 cents for a perfect 192kbps or higher recording I can have now, I'm most likely going to pay the money to save time, and feel better about supporting the artist. An artist making five to six dollars from a single album may not sound like much, but it's higher than most music contracts would ever allow. In terms of sales, selling just a few thousand songs would be enough for small artists to be fairly adequately paid, and if sales continued or grew, they could stand to make quite a bit of money. If someone made the choice, took the risks, set their prices, and began selling big, there would surely be more to follow. Once a few become a handful, there is no turning back, and an entire industry could be born. Conclusion Here's the deal: I own a Rio mp3 player. I listen to all my music in mp3 format, and whenever I buy a CD from a store, I typically come home, rip it onto my home computer, send the files to my laptop and Rio, and set the CD aside. I currently only touch CDs if I want to hear them in my car, but soon I'll buy a mp3-encoded CDR reading stereo and be done with conventional CD media altogether. I'm not much of a media maven, though I may be a slight gadget freak, but I'm by no means alone. There are millions of people out there using mp3s everyday, on thousands of devices, but not a single artist is willing to sell them the media format they currently enjoy. The market is out there, just waiting for an ambitious artist to take the risks and reap the rewards. In so doing, we could bring an end to an archaic, controlled distribution system known as the RIAA. Musicians could be free of their contractual shackles, supporting themselves and controlling their own destiny. Consumers would be completely free to pick and choose from any type of music they like, and support the artists directly. You know what the best part is? You might never hear a boy band ever again. (update: consider this a first draft to something bigger. I clumisly made a lot of points and there are more points to make. Keep on the lookout for something more fully fleshed out soon)

Reading list

On a weblist, I responded to the question: What books have been most influential about the way you see the web now and in the future? with the following, and felt it was worth sharing. 1 - In 1996, I read Douglas Coupland's Microserfs and it got me thinking that I could and should work in this technical industry, if for nothing else, to be surrounded by smart people doing interesting and fun things. After a few months as an environmental engineer (after getting my masters in environmental chemistry), I chucked it all to do web development full time and haven't looked back since. 2 - Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think brought all the best lessons from usability down to a readable text that began a discussion, and explained the give and take that usability and design sometimes have to work against. It was refreshing to read after hearing only decrees from on high, delivered in the full style of academics telling everyone how Things Should Be Done. If I had to pick one web-specific book as my all time favorite, this would be it. 3. Philip Greenspun's Philip and Alex's guide to Web Publishing did much of the same things Krug's no nonsense text did: it brought down cerebral discussions of how to separate content into databases from display structure, how to build those database-powered applications, and how to scale them into a community. It's general enough to almost read as tool/technology agnostic (if you can ignore the "oracle is the best, ever!" type sentiments) as it teaches the basics of how to think like a database programmer and how to construct web applications where there were once only web pages. 4. Chris Locke, et al's Cluetrain Manifesto is pretty much the short version of Futurize Your Enterprise by Siegel (the person asking the question mentioned this in their list), and presented a lot of good ideas at how to conduct business in an honest, upfront way that doesn't pander or patronize the customer. I thought it was mostly hype at first, but after helping build a business that subscribed to many of the same goals as the book, I found out how rewarding it was, to treat customers with respect, and as humans, and see how they loved us. 5. Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point isn't a technical book by any stretch, but was a great read into how ideas spread like wildfire. If you're into tracking internet memes or trying to market something someday, it's worth picking up. 6. George Olsen (list member I didn't know at the time) suggested I read a comic-turned-book in 1997, called Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, and I thought he was crazy. Then a week later, I heard another web developer mention Understanding Comics was the best thing they'd read in ages. Then I found out a friend's internet company gave him a stack of books at his time of hire, among them Understanding Comics. I finally picked up a copy in 1998 and read it. It's about comics, but general enough that there are clear lessons to glean for web work. How to tell a story in a limited space, with limited words, limited attention spans, and limited color palettes applies both to the sunday newspaper as well as the average win98 box running IE on a 17" monitor. He breaks down comics to the essential mechanics that could be easily applied to web page design, web copy writing, banner ads, etc. I'd say these are all a must read, in addition to texts about the medium itself and its future, like Weaving the Web, the various books about recent internet history offer some great background (there are several good netscape-in-1995/Microsoft-vs-Netscape-browser-war titles I've read in the past couple years). A fantastic pre-web interface book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum is another must. If you're doing design, it helps to get a little history, perspective and inspiration from the profile of Tibor Kalman in Perverse Optimist and Andy Goldsworthy's amazing natural stuff. Taken together, these books build a foundation for critical thinking about the web, help solve current problems you may face in day-to-day web development, and lay the groundwork for how to process new technologies in the future.

Stroke

She shook him awake and said "Matthew is here." "There's Thay?" he mumbled out. "What?" I had to ask. "Thor thife, thor thife" he said, to clear things up. "Oh, my wife! She's in San Francisco, has another week of school left to teach and was sorry she couldn't come. How are you doing?" My mom was perhaps too optimistic when she spoke to me on the phone the previous day. It was far from the speedy recovery she described. Quick recap On Friday, December 7th, around 5:30AM, my mom and dad were setting out to begin their workday (They sell food on a lunch truck, a sort of convenience store on wheels that is sometimes affectionately described as a "roach coach." Growing up, I was usually too embarrassed to have such blue collar parents, and would hide it from friends by saying "they're caterers, they do catering, you know."). They were fully stocked and ready for their first stop at 6:00AM, but as my dad sat at a green light, my mom piped up from the grill in the back "go, it's green." My dad slumped over a bit, and she could tell something was wrong. The next thing she knew, he punched the pedal and fell to the right. The truck jumped the traffic island and knocked over a street light, but thankfully within minutes paramedics and firemen were on the scene. My dad is a large man, and it took them a good 20-30 minutes (according to my mom) to get him out and onto a strecher bound for the hospital. He was speaking at the time and reasonably coherent. Around 10:30 that morning I got a call from my brother. Seeing my caller ID popup with "Michael - Home" didn't bode well. My first thought was "Why the hell is my brother calling me from his home on a Friday morning? This can't be good." He explained the problem and the prognosis. Later that day, I spoke with my mom and heard the same thing, a stroke, probably caused by a clot going up to the brain, his left side paralyzed. Saturday brought better news, that he could move his left foot down a little bit, and his left arm raised up involuntarily when he waved goodbye to someone. I felt powerless at home, didn't know what more I could do down in Southern California, but I headed out late Saturday to get down for an early morning visit Sunday. The hospital When I got to the hospital Sunday morning, no one else was there with him in the Neuro ICU, just me standing at the foot of his bed. His body laid almost completely motionless while he slept, with tubes coming out of every possible place, connected to monitoring devices nearby. My thoughts ran to a couple days before when I read a few emails he sent me, and responded to his instant messages. Friday afternoon, I got a package he mailed me the day before. All that was lively just days before now looked empty. A battered machine lay before me, a machine that pumped blood and air and electricity through flesh and bone that used to talk to me was now still. The machine was hooked to other machines, cold, beeping, machines. My hearing suddenly went into tunnel mode, and my urge to faint was only being held back by my inability to breathe. Outside, under the trees I sat in the breezy shade for about twenty minutes before my mom walked past. When she woke him up, he'd look up at us on his right side, and request handshakes. He had a surprisingly firm grip and mumbled a few short phrases to us. Later on, my mom told me about how he didn't recognize his brother or her brother from their visits the previous day but was happy to hear he knew who I was and recognized me. He asked to see the TV, watched it for about a minute and fell back asleep. We stayed a couple hours, following much the same routine. Wake him up, ask him questions, talk, and watch him fall back asleep. It seemed clear his mental capacity was there, and like I mentioned before, his language centers were probably not affected. He can talk alright, it's just that his muscles seem to be causing the slurring. The damage appears to be physical and after three days, most likely long-term if not permanent. Mom mentioned he had lost 45 lbs on his most recent diet, but that he was up to his all-time high of 380 lbs when he started the diet. Recovery and physical therapy are sure to be slow, as he wasn't much of a walker before the stroke. the aftermath I talked with my mom about what big changes this would bring about. They're about twice my page, at 58 and 57 years old, but had figured retirement was still a decade away. Their house is a two-story one, with their bedroom at the top of a long curving flight of stairs and would have to be sold asap. Their business could be sold, and their truck along with it, or my mom could continue doing it with a new driver if my dad recovered to the point he could stay at home alone. She didn't seem to like the idea of her own early retirement or starting over with a job. They had various retirement investments, but she wasn't sure if now was the time to start drawing from them. She hoped their health insurance was good enough to pay for the long stay and post-recovery period. She brought up the problem I had pointed out years earlier, the fact that my dad did all the finances, and how she wasn't sure what bills needed to get paid or where they were at. She had been staying at her parents place (my grandparents) and would continue doing so. My grandmother is currently battling alzheimer's, so there would be two major problems she'd have to deal with on a daily basis from now on. The worst part of this whole thing seemed to be the toll his current absence would cause. They've been married almost 35 years, and during the last 25 years, they've spent almost 24 hours everyday in each other's presence. They slept next to each other, went to work together, worked alongside each other, came home together, ate dinner and watched TV in the house together. I look at my mom and see a woman that is missing something right now. I couldn't imagine what it would be like if he were gone forever. Shared experiences I had received dozens of emails from people that had experience with their parents' strokes. The aftermath for each seemed to run the gamut. Some recovered fully in a short time. Some required a few months. A good deal responded to therapy, some in short periods of time, others taking longer. For some, the therapy seemed to reverse the process as the brain re-mapped new ways of controlling muscles, for others, the therapy seemed to simply make the paralysis manageable. A small portion didn't talk about recovery, and mentioned follow-up strokes and their parent's passing. It was wonderful to hear how others felt in the same situation, what I could expect, and what typically happens. Part of me wishes there were someplace to share such experiences online, to be browsed when the need arises. It still remains to be seen what will happen next, but for now I can only hope for continued stabilization in his vital signs and a possibility for recovery.

Riding again

From the age of about 7 to about the age of 22, I rode a bicycle everyday. Between the ages of 14 to 20 I would ride it two or three hours each day, in small flat areas, and always twirling, twirling, twirling. Fast forward to age 21 - after the first couple years of college, I had to lighten up on my riding. I was doing alright in school, but not excelling in my coursework. I liked riding a great deal and it was my life for so long that it was hard to give it up. I can still remember riding in my street and being idolized by the neighborhood kids. I can remember riding whenever life got stressful, to keep a bike upright and spinning required absolute concentration, and when I was concentrating on riding, I couldn't think about anything else. It was a popular study break. I missed it at first, but still dreamt about new tricks, I kept in touch with my friends that chose bikes over college, and I continued reading bike magazines and watching videos. After a few months though, things began looking up. Spending a couple more hours studying each day meant I started enjoying all my classes, and getting the highest or second highest grade in every course. There were a few dark moments in college; once while delivering pizzas on a friday night (a shit job I've never wish upon my enemies), a pack of guys rode past and my thoughts immediately went back to being 16 in southern california. I'd ride with 3 or 4 close buddies every weekend night, sometimes in downtown LA (no cops or security to bust you), sometimes at the local college campus, or sometimes in the industrial parks near home. When I got home that night from work, I told my then-girlfriend about it, and she likened my saddened state to being a domesticated dog, and catching a glimpse of your old wolf pack buddies running past. I rode occasionally throughout college, maybe a couple hours here and there, enough to re-learn everything I'd forgotten until then. When I first met my wife, she would stare at my back in fascination, due to some weird musculature bike riding caused. When I moved away to attend grad school, I remember leaving my bike in my parents' garage. It was the last nail in the coffin, and since then I've ridden only once or twice. Over the past year though, the x-games inspired marketing machines have put bike riding back in my life. Every time I crank up tivo, there's a few episodes of Bluetorch TV waiting to be watched. On the day of my wedding, there was a bike contest less than 100 feet from my apartment. And when I parked my car today on Hayes, I was just a few feet from the "Frisco Freestyle Bike Shop." Kay mentioned a few months ago that she popped in the shop, and noticed it was filled with bikes like my old one. I've been wanting to visit it for a while, but it always seems to be closed when I get home from work. A couple months ago, I started doing research. I found the bike I wanted, and began saving up for it. Five hundred bucks was beyond the "what the hell?" level of impulse spending, and I had to wait. Leaving a job and looking for a new one didn't help matters either. I entered the shop and looked around. They carried the brand I wanted, but unfortunately, only the top of the line models (~$700 each). I asked if they could order the exact one I wanted, and the owner said yes. I bought a video, and on the way out, he said "hey you want to test ride it?" I said no, thanks, and walked out... maybe ten feet. I turned around, he took it out of the racks, and the next thing I know I'm riding a freestyle bike for the first time in four or five years. It didn't feel as sketchy as I thought it would, and I even tried a few tricks. Megaspins? Check. Steamroller? Check. Hang five? Check. Oh god it felt good to be riding again. I put the bike back in the racks, thanked the owner, and walked home. The whole way back I ran calculations in my head. We've got that trip to Australia coming up, but with our big tax return, my current savings and upcoming paycheck I could easily cover it without any problem. Of course I could cover it. Isn't this what being adult is all about? I can buy anything I want, can't I? Of course I can! Next month we won't go out to eat much. I'll keep eating breakfast and lunch at work. No frivolous purchases for the next few months, I promise. Sound good Kay? Great! I watched the video I bought, looked down at my watch, and put my shoes back on. "Where are you going?" Kay asked. "I'm going out to buy that bike I've always wanted." "Cool." she said. As I walked back to the shop, a "full circle" thought ran through my head. When I was fifteen years old, I won first place in a flatland competition held in Southern California. The person that came second behind me was named Day Smith, and today, thirteen years later I was buying his pro model from Hoffman Bikes. (note: the cover image above is a shot of me, when I was sixteen or so, practicing at a contest in the Rose Bowl parking lot)

Towed

Working on the web the past few years, I've grown hyperaware of the interfaces I use everyday, and not just those limited to web sites. I'm talking about typical things like supermarket checkouts, automated telephone menu systems, and freeway on-ramps. Why are they constructed the way they are? How do they make you feel? How could they be improved? So last week, when I had the unfortunate opportunity to go retrieve my towed vehicle, I couldn't help but notice a pattern developing throughout the day, from one interface to another. You have to go downtown, in a part of town where no one lives, so it's automatically a different part of the city than where you normally hang out. The towing office is located in the same building as the police station, requiring you to go through a series of metal detectors and security checks, while people are being dragged in and yelling in angry outbursts. Once inside, you have to make your way down long, dark, windowless halls. The walls are black marble, and the floors are dark green. When you make it into the room where you must pay, you're met with something resembling a theater box office in prison. Workers sit behind windows of ultra-thick bulletproof glass, with small circular holes for speaking through. To top it off, the bottom four feet of walls and the entire floor is covered with a layer of textured aluminum you might see lining the back of a large truck. By the time I got in line, I could feel the anger and rage building inside. It was going to cost me over $150, I was taking a couple hours out of my day to do this, and I was in a dark and cold place. The room drove home the point of how powerless everyone was. Even if a gun-toting maniac ripped through the assembled crowd, I could imagine the workers taking a five minute break to hose out the room before getting back to work, taking $150-300 from each and every person waiting in line. The police station was also mere footsteps away, to remind you of what happens to people that can't keep themselves together. I also noticed that after dealing with getting there, waiting in line, and paying, I was demoralized, powerless, and still very angry, and that feeling prevented any semblance of coherent argument and ensured payment for my wrongdoing. When the room was most busy there were 3 people in front of me and four behind, and two people in line were so angry that they audibly muttered one explicative after another to themselves. These people were not in any position to make valid protests, and the likelihood of them getting the infraction overturned was close to impossible. Now that I think about it, it's no accident that the entire process came out feeling that way. It's almost engineered for prompt, protest-free payment.

Participant/Observer

A thought just ran though my head that I felt like writing down. Driving home from this past wedding weekend, I was thinking hard about memories vs. "living in the now." I thought about the difference between documenting something and participating in it. I think about this whenever I feel like I'm doing too much of one thing and not the other. At the last SXSW, in one 24 hour period I took something like 70 or 80 photos of people. Instead of meeting and talking with them I was documenting them, and I didn't feel at all like a participant. Though, throughout the wedding weekend, I was all participant, rarely stepping outside the participant role to document what was going on. I took almost no photos, and didn't blog or write a single thing (didn't touch a computer until the last day and it was just to check email and to make sure metafilter was still working). I tried not to chronicle the event, and instead live it up and enjoy it. I figured others would do it for me (like the photographer). But looking back, and having little physical record of the event right now (photos are still being developed), it's almost like it didn't happen. It was all a blur, and I think I realized why I like photography so much. Keepsakes and physical reminders of memories are more important to me than I thought. Also, I realized most of the photos we'll get back will be staged, posed images meant to highlight how young and perfect we were that day. My memories aren't always like that, and I love seeing candid, natural shots from an event instead. I guess this is a roundabout way of saying I wish I took more photos last weekend, to help me remember how absolutely beatiful Kay was, and how wonderful all my friends and family were at the event. Years from now, it's going to be hard to remember much beyond what the photos we have show us. What brought all this on in the first place? I read Zeldman's piece about his mom, and memory ties into it a bit. It also moved me to tears, and got me thinking about the importance of people, and memories of those people in my life.