The MentalGator » Items by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Items by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

SixthSense Input

Posted: May 16, 2012, 6:03 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

The Thrilling Potential of SixthSense Technology: If you watch one Ted video, I’d recommend this one. This is Pranav Mistry demonstrating SixthSense, which is a touch and gesture based input device. It gets pretty remarkable as the video goes on – this guy has completely rethought input devices, and the result is amazing.

Use Canonical URLs, Please

Posted: May 12, 2012, 11:19 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

If you want to be friendly to the web, do the world a favor and start using the canonical URL LINK tag. More things than you realize depend on the simple principle of identifying a page by a unique URL, and it's getting harder than you think.

It turns out that a web without canonical URLs is like a database without primary keys.

I recently wrote a web crawler (yes, seriously), and I was forcefully introduced to how vague URLs can be. The idea that a unique page of content has a single URL is laughably naïve.

Turns out that the absolute hardest part of writing a crawler is “normalizing” URLs – taking two URLs, and trying to figure out if they’re actually addressing the same resource. Fact is, you can address a page of content in more ways than you think.

Some examples --

You need to account for SSL vs. non-SSL. A lot of sites will accept inbound requests for both � [http”] and � [https”] to the same URL, and return the same page of content. This technically results in two separate URLs, and if a crawler is cataloguing URLs, it needs to account for the same that this is really the same page of content, even if the bytes of the URL differ.

Now, that one isn’t too hard. There aren’t many pages that differ remarkably if they’re secure or not. But what about domain? Your website could respond to multiple domains. It could be as simple as the same content coming up under “www.gadgetopia.com” and “gadgetopia.com", or as complex as hundreds of different domain names generating the same pages.

It gets worse – what about querystring arguments? The fact is that different arguments have different degrees of import. Some are critical in determining the content of the page (“article_id”) and others really only matter to humans interacting with the page (“return_page”). There’s a whole bucket of querystring arguments that really have no effect on the core content being returned to the user agent.

(URL arguments for analytics are especially bad. Click a link out of a Feedburned blog post, and you end up with "utm_source" and "utm_medium" as querystring arguments, none of which have any bearing on the actual content of the page returned.)

Differing capitalization could technically result in different pages too (although this would be terribly bad form…)

I could go on and on about URL vagaries, but just understand that this URL --

https://domain.com/page.php?article_id=5&return_page=6

-- and this URL --

http://www.domain.com/Page.php?article_id=5&return_page=7

-- may return the exact same page of content, but I have no way of knowing this.

On a known site (a site I own or am crawling for a client), I can make some rules, like always knowing that I should swap “domain.com” for “www.domain.com,” but if I’m doing a crawl of a site I have no connection with (a “hostile” crawl?), then I just have to assume those two URLs are actually two separate piece of content and index them as different pages even though “article_id=5” probably indicates they return the same thing.

And none of this takes into account the new world of visitor segmentation and anonymous personalization. If you live in California, you might get a different page then if you live in New York. So where is your crawler coming from, and how is it ever going to emulate someone from somewhere else?

(For a while, I tried to abandon URLs and hash the actual HTML returned, then compare the hashes. This would tell me, more clearly, if this page is unique. But that too is problematic for a number of reasons – sometimes querystring arguments, for instance, change the page in tiny, effectively meaningless ways, but ways which result in an entirely different hash.)

This is where canonical URLs help. For each page content, have a canonical META tag which indicates the one true URL this should be accessed under anonymously. Here’s Google’s page about them, and here’s what one of them looks like.

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/my/url" />

It's not just crawlers that depend on this -- any site which needs to tell one URL from another would benefit from this. If you submit a URL to Reddit, it checks to see if it's been submitted already. To do this, it depends on the fact that the URL has some consistency.

If you are writing software that somehow keys of a URL, look for a canonical LINK tag and use it if you find it. By including it, the site owner is doing you a massive favor. Don’t ignore it.

Using a canonical URL is like declaring a primary key on your content. You are saying, effectively, that “no matter how you actually got to this page of content, this URL is the official URL for this page and should be used when discussing this page.”

The web will be a better place for it.

What does “published” mean anymore?

Posted: May 12, 2012, 10:40 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

"Self-published" is not in any way analogous to "published": There’s a very interesting discussion going on over at Reddit that’s very similar to something a line of thought I’ve had for quite a while.

The Internet has made it very easy to “publish” writing, in some form. Pre-Internet, to get “published” meant to send a book off to a publisher, go through a long vetting process, and see your book on the shelves of a store somewhere. Not anymore. With Lulu, you can get a hardcopy from a PDF, and with Amazon, you can have your book distributed as an ebook quite easily (it doesn’t even have to be a book – you can “publish” a glorified blog post as a Kindle Single, even).

So, does this mean you’re “published”?

Nononno! Being published is not just about having a hard copy of one's work - that misses the forest for the trees. Being published is about convincing a third party that your work is worthwhile enough to support and make public. It's about earning the respect of a group completely independent of you and having them fund the dissemination of your ideas.

Some of the comments are quite good and thought-provoking:

I was just having a discussion on this yesterday in my library studies class. A lady in the class kept referring to herself as a 'published author' and when I investigated further I found that all she does is chuck her romance novels up on her website as eBooks.

[…] I came here to say something like this, specifically about the wrench that sites like kickstarter throw into the works. As the original post states, "Being published is about convincing a third party that your work is worthwhile enough to support and make public" but traditional publishing houses are no longer the only viable way of doing that.

The Facebook IPO Effect on Real Estate

Posted: April 30, 2012, 6:52 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Silicon Valley real estate: The Facebook effect: The pending Facebook IPO is affecting Silicon Valley real estate. Sellers are keeping their homes off the market until the IPO is done and there’s a new batch of buyers, flush with cash.

Though the number of actual prospective home buyers with Facebook connections is only a fraction of all buyers in the Valley, their psychological effect on the market is unmistakable. In Palo Alto, in particular -- which Mark Zuckerberg calls home --sellers are either keeping their homes off the market until the IPO or ramping up expectations. For the first quarter of 2012, according to BrokerMetrics, the median price of a single-family P.A. home went up 11%, whereas inventory declined 57%

The Rise of the Brogrammer

Posted: April 29, 2012, 4:35 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

"Gangbang Interviews" and "Bikini Shots": Silicon Valley’s Brogrammer Problem: Here’s an article about the apparent growing sexism in the programmer business.

Remember, a few years ago, we discussed the guy who used Playboy’s CyberGirls in his presentation, and then there was the guy who used a running porn metaphor to describe CouchDB.

This article starts off with a similar story about a presenter at SXSW:

He said he'd won over Digg's elusive cofounders by sending them "bikini shots" from a "nudie calendar" he'd put together with photographs of fellow students posing in their swimsuits.

Van Horn continued with some tips for hiring managers: He cautioned against "gangbang interviews"—screening prospective employees by committee—and made a crack about his fraternity's recruiting strategy, designed to "attract the hottest girls" on campus. He seemed taken aback when nobody laughed. "C'mon, guys, we all know how it was in college," he muttered.

The article then launches into a long discussion, complete with too many examples to follow, about how women are marginalized in the programming trade, and how this has led to the rise of the “brogrammer” – a geek who revels in the male-centric culture to the point of being blatantly sexist.

It’s an interesting read.

The Virtues of eBooks

Posted: April 28, 2012, 6:56 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Books: Bits vs. Atoms: I’m trying very hard to get over my attachment to physical books. Jeff Atwood nudges me further in that direction.

At the risk of stating the obvious, if your goal is to get a written idea in front of as many human beings as efficiently as possible, you shouldn't be publishing dead tree books at all. You should be editing a wiki, writing a blog, or creating a website.

For some reason, I’m addicted to physical books. I previously discussed my experience with an original Kindle, which wasn’t great.

There are two things that ebooks still just don’t do for me.

They don’t provide some physical reminder of their presence.
I love being surrounded by books. I seem them, and I think about them. I stack them up as visual representations of knowledge. Whenever my eyes drift across the titles of their spines often makes my mind drift in interesting directions. I need books lying around, it seems. They’re like…trophies.
They can’t be shared easily.
I would guess we have almost 1,000 books floating around Blend. We refer to them by title all the time. We pass them around. We drop them on each other’s desk. They are a communal repository of knowledge, owned by the collective, that can be used by the individual. I can’t get the same architecture from ebooks.

Interestingly, Atwood talks about a lot more shortcomings later in his article. He concentrates a lot DRM, and the layout and presentation differences between ebooks and printed books.

But, other than those things, ebooks are so much more practical in every way. I need to get over this hang-up, and transition away from physical books.

The Hyper-Addiction of Casual Gaming

Posted: April 28, 2012, 6:31 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Just One More Game ...: This article is a neat look at casual games, and why they’re so addicting. How did we get from Call of Duty to Angry Birds, and was Tetris just a gateway drug? Why are these games so addictive?

The game was an anesthetic, an escape pod, a snorkel, a Xanax, a dental hygienist with whom to exchange soothingly meaningless banter before going under the pneumatic drill of Life. Soon I found myself struggling in the net of real addiction. Even as I pressed “New Game,” my brain would be thinking, very consciously, I have to stop playing this game. But I didn’t. Instead, I spread the Drop7 virus to other people: my wife, my friends, my mother, my in-laws. I found myself playing in all kinds of extreme situations: at 3 a.m., during a severe gastrointestinal crisis; immediately after an intense discussion with my mother; shortly after learning that my dog — the warm, emoting mammal I lived with for 12 years — was probably dying of cancer.

The Limits of Spam Algorithms

Posted: April 27, 2012, 1:22 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Yelp, You Cost Me $2000 by Suppressing Genuine Reviews, Here’s How You Fix It: An interesting story of a false positive spam algorithm doing some damage.

Yelp flagged poor reviews of a moving company as spam, and hid them. Turns out, they were legit – the moving company were not nice people – but since this guy never saw the reviews, he hired the company anyway.

Turns out, the behavior meant to indicate spam overlaid perfectly on the behavior of people trying to complain about this company.

Your algorithm typically hides entries by people who only post one review and who don’t otherwise engage in Yelp. Your assumption is that if a user only posts one review, posts no comments, has no friends etc. then most likely they are fake and trying to game the system.

[…] In each case the one star review was left by someone who would never normally leave a review… they were simply so outraged that they were motivated to signup to Yelp and try to warn others how bad this company is. None of them ever used Yelp again. Furthermore, they didn’t have the knowledge or inclination to try to make their Yelp profile look acceptable to Yelp’s automated suppression systems.

2012 Intranet Innovation Awards

Posted: April 22, 2012, 6:04 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

The 2012 Intranet Innovation Awards are now open for entries!: My friends over at Step Two have opened up the Intranet Innovation Awards for 2012.

The Intranet Innovation Awards are global awards that celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the enhancement and delivery of intranets. The goal is to find these remarkable solutions, and to share them with the wider community.

I had a long travel stretch late last year, and I actually bought all five of the previous award reports to read on planes and in airports. It was great reading. Intranets can be so inscrutable, because you can see anyone else’s, so if you’re wondering what cool things are people are doing, buy this report when it’s released. Until then, consider entering something – you’ll be in good company.

Social Media is Taking Over Corporate Blogs

Posted: April 20, 2012, 8:25 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

More companies quit blogging, go with Facebook instead: On a lesser scale, this is happening to entire websites as well. Some companies are just redirecting their home pages to their Facebook pages.

With the emergence of social media, more companies are replacing blogs with nimbler tools requiring less time and resources, such as Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter.

A survey released earlier this year by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth says the percentage of companies that maintain blogs fell to 37% in 2011 from 50% in 2010, based on its survey of 500 fast-growing companies listed by Inc. magazine. Only 23% of Fortune 500 companies maintained a blog in 2011, flat from a year ago after rising for several years.

The Hailstorm of Lawsuits in the Mobile Industry

Posted: April 8, 2012, 6:06 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Apple's War on Android: My normally vitriolic stance towards Apple is softening a bit, but I still need to post this article that details the intellectual property war between Apple and…everyone else, it seems. Specifically, Apple and Samsung are suing each other, mainly because Apple can’t sue Google directly over Android.

Here’s the crux of one of the suits – a description of what Apple feels is a “trademarkable” thing:

a rectangular product with four evenly rounded corners, a flat clear face covering the front of the product, [and] a large display screen under the clear surface.

I find it absurd that you can try to trademark something that general. Hell, the coffee table in my living room resembles this description perfectly. The article itself has pictures of a couple of pre-iPhone products that match that description too.

But, the fault doesn’t just lie with Apple – everyone in the mobile space is suing everyone else, which seems to be the only reason Google purchased Motorola’s mobile unit:

Google announced it would pay $12.5 billion to acquire the company’s mobile-phone operation and its 17,000 patents. The deal, said Google CEO Page, will “enable us to better protect Android from anticompetitive threats from Microsoft, Apple, and other companies.” In other words: You sue us, we sue you.

The last paragraph of the article sums up the mess quite elegantly.

In the short run, the tech giants could save themselves considerable legal fees and distraction if they were to lock their lawyers in a hallway of conference rooms and refuse to release them until they had crafted a series of comprehensive cross-licensing pacts. This process eventually resolved similar litigation in the desktop computer field. Such a solution “is still probably what will happen here,” says Stanford’s Lemley. “But in the meantime, these companies have paid their lawyers more than $400 million” over the last several years. “It’s not clear what they’re getting for that money.”

Why List Articles Are So Popular

Posted: April 7, 2012, 1:52 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

The List of N Things: Paul Graham nails the psychology of the list article and why it plays so well on the web – it guides us through the topic, and doesn’t force us to think too hard.

Structurally, the list of n things is a degenerate case of essay. An essay can go anywhere the writer wants. In a list of n things the writer agrees to constrain himself to a collection of points of roughly equal importance, and he tells the reader explicitly what they are.

Some of the work of reading an article is understanding its structure […] As well as being explicit, the structure is guaranteed to be of the simplest possible type: a few main points with few to no subordinate ones, and no particular connection between them.

I’ve talked about this before: The Psychology of the Bullet Point.

Bullet points signify a complete, contained, discrete thought. They encapsulate some nugget of information, separate from everything else. A bullet point tells us, “this piece of information is absorbable solely from the text in it,” and the text is usually short.

Is there a point to pagination anymore?

Posted: April 7, 2012, 1:41 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

The End of Pagination: Jeff Atwood makes the case that pagination may just be an outdated concept.

I can understand paginating when you have 10, 50, 100, maybe even a few hundred items. But once you have thousands of items to paginate, who the heck is visiting page 964 of 3810? What's the point of paginating so much information when there's a hard practical limit on how many items a human being can view and process in any reasonable amount of time?

I’ve talked about this before: The Pointlessness of Category Archives.

Keanu Reeves on the Drawbacks of Digital Film

Posted: March 21, 2012, 2:23 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Steven Spielberg & Martin Scorsese: the joy of celluloid: The Guardian asked several film people what they thought of the switch from celluloid (“real”) film to digital film meant.

Keanu Reeves responded with a couple really thoughtful observations about how the physical limitations of film affected how he acted in front of the camera. By extension, some of this is lost by digital.

The biggest difference I have found when working photochemically versus digitally on motion pictures is the length of time the takes can last. Broadly, a 1,000ft roll of 35mm film lasts around nine-and-a-half minutes before running out, while a digital tape or recording card or hard drive can last from 40 minutes to over an hour and a half. This translates to a very different rhythm on the floor; the pressure to "cut" to save film is alleviated.

And the temporal nature of digital – the fact that it can be wiped out and reshot with nothing lost – changes the vibe he gets.

When the director says: "Action", and the film is rolling, it feels like something is at stake. It feels important and intense. In a way, death is present in the rolling of that film – we live, right now – and the director says: "Cut". And that moment in time is captured on film, really.

The Next Evolution in Open CourseWare

Posted: March 21, 2012, 11:42 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

The Higher Education Monopoly is Crumbling As We Speak: The Internet is threatening to destroy higher education.

First you had Open CourseWare, which was great, but incomplete. The problem is that there was no test for mastery. You could say you took a course, but there was proof of this, nor was there anything that certified that you learned something, so it was really nothing more than a “hobby option.”

Now, however, more cracks are appearing in the form of certifications from online courses given by some of the top universities in the country. How long before these begin to substitute for credit?

The news was that the Stanford professors were letting students in their global classroom sit for the midterm, at proctored sites around the world. Those who did well on the A.I. test and a later final exam got a letter saying so, signed by the professors, a pair of well-known roboticists from Silicon Valley.

A few days later, MIT made a major announcement: The world-famous research university would be creating a new non-profit organization called MITx. It, too, would be offering free online courses, designed from the ground up to serve tens or even hundreds of thousands of students worldwide. And it, too, would administer exams to students who, if they passed, would receive a certificate saying so from MITx.

Comedians on the Web

Posted: March 21, 2012, 5:28 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

A few months ago, Louis C.K. released a straight-to-the-Net, non-DRM performance video, and sold it for $5. It went nuts. Now, Aziz Ansari has done the same thing.

The Times smells a trend:

While this straight-to-the-Internet strategy is far from ubiquitous in stand-up, it is already having a profound impact on the comedy landscape, enabling online content providers and individual artists to take more turf from television networks and empowering comedians to be as candid (and as explicit) as they want in their material.

What Killed Brittanica

Posted: March 21, 2012, 4:03 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Wikipedia Didn’t Kill Britannica. Windows Did: An interesting look at what doomed Brittanica. The authors argue that it wasn’t Wikipedia, but Encarta that did it in.

In 1990, the company had $650 million in revenue. In 1996, it was being sold off in toto for $135 million. What happened in between was Encarta.

[…] Encarta was an inexpensive, multimedia, not-at-all comprehensive encyclopedia that helped Microsoft sell Windows PCs to families. And once you had a PC in the living room or den where the encyclopedia used to be, it was all over for Mighty Britannica.

When Wikipedia emerged five years later, Britannica was already a weakened giant. It wasn’t a free and open encyclopedia that defeated its print edition. It was the personal computer itself.

I also read a couple of eulogies for Brittanica this morning that are worth looking at. Both argue that it wasn’t the actual knowledge in Brittanica that provided the value, rather it was the organization of that knowledge – the ambitious drive to amass all off human knowledge into a single volume.

Google and the Dancefloor of The Semantic Web

Posted: March 21, 2012, 3:41 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Google Knowledge Graph Could Change Search Forever: You know that great, unrealized dream of The Semantic Web? The thing that everyone acknowledges would likely be great, but that no one actually does anything about? Yeah, well Google might finally be taking a step in that direction.

[Google Fellow Amit Singhal] outlined a developing vision for search that takes it beyond mere words and into the world of entities, attributes and the relationship between those entities. In other words, Google’s future search engine will not only understand your lake question but know a lake is a body of water and tell you the depth, surface areas, temperatures and even salinities for each lake.

[…] Google now wants to transform words that appear on a page into entities that mean something and have related attributes.

[…] Google is “building a huge, in-house understanding of what an entity is and a repository of what entities are in the world and what should you know about those entities,” said Singhal.

This is fairly huge, because it promises a “URI of record” for real-world objects or concepts. What you find when starting work with RDF – Resource Description Framework, the de facto language of The Semantic Web – is that it works best when everyone agrees that Thing X is represented by URI X. That way, you and me and everyone else can use URI X in our RDF, and be talking about the same thing.

And therein lies the rub – getting the entire web to agree on what URI X was for Thing X was nigh impossible. But now, if Google endorses URI X (and Y, and Z, etc.), that would be akin to kicking a snowball off the hill.

The biggest problem with The Semantic Web, really, has been a variation of The Empty Dance Floor Problem. A party isn’t a party until everyone starts dancing, but if no one is willing to take a risk and be the first one on the dance floor, then it stays empty. Google may have just taken that first step out there.

If you want to learn more about RDF, I highly recommend Programming the Semantic Web by O’Reilly. This is a great book that shows you what’s really possible. (Also, it was my first introduction to Python, which was a bonus.)

And if you’re looking for a little history, read the original article about The Semantic Web by Tim-Berner’s Lee from 2001 over at Scientific American.

Are Comments on News Articles Pointless?

Posted: March 19, 2012, 12:50 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

I’ve always maintained the commenting on major websites – especially news sites – is just a complete disaster these days. Comment threads on sites like CNN and USAToday (especially USAToday, for some reason…) make me not want to live on this planet anymore.

Nick Denton, of Gawker fame, agrees. Apparently, he doesn’t even go near the comment threads on his own sites anymore. He was quoted at SXSW:

"The idea of capturing the intelligence of the readership -- that's a joke."

[…] "I don't like going into the comments. ... For every two comments that are interesting -- even if they're critical, you want to engage with them -- there will be eight that are off-topic or just toxic," he said.

Over at the Neiman Journalism Lab, they’ve been following the death and resurrection of comments at the New Haven Independent. In an editorial explaining the removal of comments, the Independent wrote:

The tone of commenting on the Independent—the remarks readers post at the bottom of stories—seems to have skidded to the nasty edges and run off the rails. We’re responsible for reading, vetting, and posting all comments on the site. We’ve failed in our responsibility to keep the discussion on track.

We started noticing it during last fall’s mayoral campaign. Both sides became apoplectic every time their opponents were simply quoted in a news story. They resorted to personal attacks and relentless fury. Or they spent the day trying to pick fights with each other through the comments section. The tenor bled onto unrelated stories.

I’ve noticed that worse than the general inanity of the comments on news sites, they get so, so nasty, so quickly. And there are regulars that pick on each other. Based on some of the comments I’ve seen get through, I wonder what’s being filtered.

And what is to gain? Never once have I seen a comment on a CNN or USAToday story that has one one single thing to further debate in any constructive way. They could shut down their comments and lose not one iota of value. Contrast this to the New York Times, which seems to do much better, for some reason. Comments there seem to be vastly more cerebral and seek to further the debate in some reasonable direction.

(It reminds me of this site, which compares random comment threads on MetaFilter to random comment threads on YouTube. The difference is striking. Reddit, in particular, does amazingly well with comments. Read the bestof Reddit for some really phenomenal threads.)

My sadness about this reached it zenith (nadir?) last week when I read this analysis from an Australian news site which tracked down several trolls and asked them what made them troll people. The answers were just…

"It just makes me happy when I can make someone angry. It sounds weird but I kind of feed off their anger. The angrier I can get them, the better I feel,"

[…] "I'd feel responsible but I wouldn't care. I've pretty much lost all hope for humanity anyway, I don't believe that anything can save people,"

[…] "I randomly targeted a lady for no reason, humiliated her for no reason - just to be a bitch. Looking back now it was petty. I'm one of those remorseful trolls, I suppose."

Solving Your Own Problems By Writing Good Questions

Posted: March 19, 2012, 5:47 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

I really like Jeff Atwood’s post about the Rubber Duck method of problem solving. Apparently, the name comes from a manager who would have people ask their questions out loud to a rubber duck. Usually, in the middle of asking the question, they would stumble on the answer.

I’m a big fan of asking good questions. Several times, I’ve linked to Eric Raymond’s treatise on asking good questions, and just a few months ago, I was enraptured by this method of breaking down analysis into different question categories.

Like Atwood mentions, I will often find the answer to my problem in the middle of asking the question. I have an account on Stack Overflow, and whenever I post, I ask myself, “If I was interviewing for a job, and the interviewer looked up this account, would this question make me look stupid?” I hope there’s nothing in there that would.

I have an account on the EPiServer forums as well, and my motivations for asking good questions there are much the same, except exacerbated by nationalist pride. When I joined back in 2008, I was one of the few non-Scandinavians on the forums. Thus, I was paranoid about not wanting to be “the stupid American,” so I went out of my way to support my questions with testing and debugging output. And, as I mentioned earlier, for every 2-3 questions I asked, one question never got submitted because in the process of writing and documenting it, I figured it out.

I’m to the point where, if I have a sticky problem, I’ll start taking notes on it offline in Evernote, just to start documenting it and my thought process around it. When I’m at the end of my rope on one, I’ll ask myself, “If I submitted this problem to a public forum, would I look stupid?” If the answer is “no,” then I’m ready to ask.

Fixing Apple Gadgets is Hard

Posted: March 19, 2012, 5:25 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Three Ways We Hoped the iPad Would Be Better (But Wasn’t): Here’s an interesting perspective on Apple products – since you can’t open them, you effectively can’t repair them, which means when they break, you more-or-less throw them out.

We’ve given the new iPad one of the lowest repairability scores we’ve ever given a major product: 2 out of 10. […] We’ve also retroactively downgraded our original iPad 2 score from 4 out of 10 to 2. These devices are very difficult to get into, and they’re selling like hotcakes—slick hotcakes encased in breakable glass.

[…] If Apple is going to be at the head of the pack, we must ask them to lead responsibly. And in electronics, leading responsibly means that your devices must be sustainably made and designed to last. Designed for use. Designed for repair. Designed for a more sustainable future.

The guys at iFixIt might be a little biased, since their site appears to be all about fixing Apple products. If you can’t fix them, you have little need for their site.

The corresponding Reddit thread has some good commentary on both sides of the argument.

Generating Automatic Bookmarks in Text

Posted: March 19, 2012, 3:37 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Recently, I sent someone a link to a long Gadgetopia post, and I wanted them to read one particular paragraph. So, I had to tell them, scroll down about halfway to the paragraph that starts… It was annoying. What I needed was automatic, stable bookmarks applied to every paragraph in that long block of text.

The New York Times did something like this with a system they called Emphasis. They released version 2 of it some time ago, and it works really well once you know how to use it. For instance, here’s a link that highlights a specific sentence in the first paragraph of an article (but, weirdly, it doesn’t scroll you down below the fold).

The biggest trick here – and the thing that will derail most attempts to do this – is being able to identify paragraphs consistently, even when editors start rearranging things. Text elements are not stable like managed content or database records. In fact, paragraphs of text within a larger page are fairly volatile– people edit, and they can move stuff around – so getting a stable key can be tricky.

The Times did something fairly impressive here. They generated their key using the first letters of the first three words of the first and last sentences of the paragraph. So, each paragraph would end up with a six-letter key. For this paragraph, it would be: “TTdFtp”

When someone comes in with that key as a bookmark, they try to match it exactly. If they can’t (because the article changed), then they try to match half of it, hoping that only one of the sentences was changed. If they can’t do that either, then they use some form of the Levenshtein distance to find a paragraph with similar-enough text that it might be our missing paragraph.

(The code for Emphasis is on Github.)

I was reminded of this while reading a blog post series of someone trying to do something similar with EPiServer. In this case, they’re trying to allow commenting on intra-text elements, and they’re going a route using GUIDs and changes to TinyMCE to keep those GUIDs stable during editing.

And, just the other day, I saw the same thing with the Django Docs. What they do is generate a bookmark with every heading, which lets people deep link into text, however there doesn’t appear to be a matching algorithm – it just uses the text of the heading, lower-cased and dash-delimited. This will work in more cases than not, but it’s fairly brittle.

Has anyone else seen other attempts at this? I’d be interested in other ways to do it.

Pinterest Can Be Scary

Posted: March 15, 2012, 1:30 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

So, Pinterest is all the rage these days, but it turns out that their terms and conditions are a little scary. This article sums it up.

When you pin something, you’re effectively saying that you own the rights and are allowed to pin it. By pinning it, you give Pinterest the right to sell it. And then you assume responsibility for all of Pinterest’s legal fees, and assume all risk associated with legal troubles arising from the use of the item, or from you pinning it.

Here’s the scenario they lay out as being problematic:

You pin a picture of a cat without permission.
Pinterest sells it to ABC Marketing.
ABC Marketing prints it on kitty litter boxes.
Cat picture owner sees kitty litter box in store and calls lawyer.
Lawyer calls Pinterest.
Pinterest calls you.
Bad things happen.

The Fed is on Twitter

Posted: March 15, 2012, 9:47 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

So, the Federal Reserve is on Twitter now. I agree with Boing Boing that this is very much the wrong thing to do. Given the sensitivity of financial markets, communication coming out of The Fed should be as slow and measured as possible.

I wonder what kind of governance they have over this? In terms of financial damage that could be done, the password to The Fed’s Twitter account might be the most dangerous string of text in existence.

I read a book last year called Overconnected, which discussed the idea that lack of connectivity is better for several situations, financial markets being one. Remember the Flash Crash of 2010? This happened because so many people and computers are monitoring the financial markets, that any move in any direction can cascade into a financial disaster, turning innocent or inadvertent events into massive feedback loops that just snowball.

I would love to see the technical and organizational governance around this Twitter account. The potential for damage is ginormous.

R.I.P. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Part II

Posted: March 15, 2012, 4:05 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Why Encyclopedia Britannica mattered: Not everyone is happy that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print. The guy makes some very good points.

This is, however, part of a trend that assumes expertise is overvalued. Today, most technology users value connectivity and experience. Newspapers and magazines are in decline, bloggers and content aggregators are on the ascendant. The problem with crowd-sourcing the answer to any particular question is, of course, that you're as likely to find ideologically driven opinion as hard fact. You also have little in the way of support for judgments about credibility, reliability, and accuracy.

What he’s dancing around is that the barrier to content production gets lowered, both in the ability to create original content, but also in our desire to consume it. Let’s face it, people would rather read some short rehash of a long news item (like, uh, this post, for example) than the news item itself.

Content curation and aggregation is becoming the way things are done now, and it’s getting to the point where actually creating new content is almost novel. I had this exact conversation with Erin Kissane the other day – she’s embarked on actually creating original content for Contents Magazine, as opposed to just recycling existing content (which is, I’m now embarrassed to admit, sort of what I do here all day).

There’s not quite enough of this to go around, it seems. The blogosphere (is that still a word?) sometimes seems like a massive echo chamber just feeding on itself all day.

In the process, I think we’ve lost our regard for experts, which the editors at Britannica undeniably were. It’s not enough to say something smart, because you can sound just as smart repeating something that another smart guy said.

(You know, like I did right there.)

The New York Times Topic Pages

Posted: March 14, 2012, 3:08 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

I really enjoy the Times Topics pages, and I think the New York Times does this exactly right. We’ve talked several times in the past about posts vs. pages and how they’re fundamentally different. To wit:

With Wikipedia, you’re not seeing a series of posted items. You’re seeing a single body of information, continually updated and groomed. Thus, the basic information stays right where it’s easy to see. Wikis are more “speak to me like I know nothing” information, rather than “tell me the very latest nuance” information.

The ideal is really a combination of both — keep the basic (wiki-ish) information right there, and have a sidebar of the latest (blog-ish) information as it comes in.

The New York Times is a newspaper, so articles are really equivalent to posts – timely pieces which explain the latest developments on a situation. What’s lacking with most newspapers are pages, wiki-like backgrounders on specific topics, so that I can read a situation from the beginning and completely understand it.

This happened today. I was reading an article about a settlement agreement NYC just made with a contractor about CityTime, a piece of software the contractor was writing for the city. The article seemed interesting, but I had no idea what CityTime was, so I felt like I was coming in on the middle of a conversation.

But, lo and behold, I clicked on the CityTime link and I got sent to this page, which was a completely backgrounder on the CityTime saga, including links to all 29 news articles about it, including articles about the scandal, and the original article announcing the project five years ago.

I’m really interested in how The Times keeps these topic pages updated. Whenever a new article is published, do they review the topic page to see what information it impacts? Do they have to wait for an article to be published? If they hear something new, do they immediately update the topic page, Wikipedia-like? What is the dividing line between information that gets an article, and information that only rates a change to the topic page?

Regardless of the complexities of producing it, this is a great mix of topical and background information. This is really how it should be done. Bravo.

R.I.P. Encyclopaedia Britannica

Posted: March 13, 2012, 2:19 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

After 244 Years, Encyclopaedia Britannica Stops the Presses: This was a long time coming, but I predicted it the first time I fired up Microsoft Encarta 96.

After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print. […]
In a nod to the realities of the digital age — and, in particular, the competition from the hugely popular Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools, company executives said.

A Call for Instant Software Pricing

Posted: March 11, 2012, 9:54 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

How Not To Sell Software in 2012: This is a polemic calling for “instant pricing” for all software. The author rants his way down a list of complaints of the practices of enterprise software vendors, and I really can’t fault him for any of it.

Today’s startups are tomorrow’s enterprises. Many of the other startup folks I know share the same expectations about how software should be sold. Basically, if a given software package or service isn’t free/open, it should be as easy as humanly possible to try it, pay for it, and start using it in production. If it isn’t easy to get started with your product, I’m going to find another vendor.

Still, it would be tough to get this idea to take root among enterprise vendors, for at least a couple reasons – one legit, one less so.

First, enterprise software pricing can be notoriously complicated. Many packages are made up of multiple components, with dependencies that may be hard to explain. (Of course, one could make the argument that if you can’t explain this in a publically-available forum, then it’s too complicated…)

Second, enterprise software has the list price…and then the price you actually pay. Actual pricing depends on a lot of factors, including your perceived budget, the current sales load, the potential for future sales to your organization, proximity to the close of a sales period, etc. Like it or not, these all play into how software gets priced, whether a vendor is willing to admit it or not.

Bigamy Ratted Out by Facebook

Posted: March 11, 2012, 9:43 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Washington woman finds husband's other wife on Facebook: Worse than the legal punishment would be the sheer embarrassment of letting this happen.

Alan L. O'Neill married a woman in 2001, moved out in 2009, changed his name and remarried without divorcing her. The first wife first noticed O'Neill had moved on to another woman when Facebook suggested the friendship connection to wife No. 2 under the "People You May Know" feature.

"Wife No. 1 went to wife No. 2's page and saw a picture of her and her husband with a wedding cake," Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist told the Associated Press.

Towards Blanket SSL

Posted: March 10, 2012, 12:25 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?: I find it tough to fault this. I’m beginning to think, as Jeff is, that blanket SSL wouldn’t be so bad.

[…] maybe encrypted connections should be the default for all web sites. As tinfoil hat as this seemed to me a year ago, now I'm wondering if that might actually be the right thing to do for the long-term health of the overall web, too.

The problem comes when you switch back and forth for particular pages. We’ve built this functionality several times in at least two content management systems, but it introduces overhead on every request to determine if this page should be encrypted or not. If the user needs to switch modes (between SSL and non-SSL), then that eval and redirect probably introduces more overhead than just going full SSL for everything.

Citing a Tweet

Posted: March 8, 2012, 6:34 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

How do I cite a tweet?: MLA has published a standard for citing a tweet in academic papers:

Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author’s real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.

Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet)

You may think is trivial, but they give this example, which you might recognize and is not trivial at all.

Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.

Teleflix?

Posted: February 28, 2012, 6:01 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Once Film-Focused, Netflix Transitions to TV Shows: Interesting observation: Netflix is more for TV than movies these days.

TV series now account for more than half of all Netflix viewing. That helps to explain why this Wednesday — the long-awaited moment when motion picture classics like “Scarface” and newer hits like “Toy Story 3” will vanish from the streaming service — is not the doomsday that it was once expected to be.

[…] The new-release movies provided by Starz account for just 2 percent of all viewing, Netflix says, down from 8 percent a year ago — illuminating the fact that the company has spent lavishly on new streaming titles that subscribers want to watch instead.

The Future of Green Power is in Batteries

Posted: February 28, 2012, 3:00 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

How Big a Battery Would It Take to Power All of the U.S.?: I enjoyed this article which confirms something I’ve always believed: the secret to a renewable energy future is battery technology. The problem with solar and wind is that they’re intermittent. – clouds and calm become issues.

Experts, however, are increasingly skeptical that even supergrids or smart grids would suffice to cover the intermittency of wind and solar power. The solution, they say, must include storing massive amounts of energy for later use. Ideally, the U.S. could build a really gigantic battery and be done with it. But we are talking gigawatts (billions of watts) of power, and such a battery would be prohibitively expensive, at least with current technology.

But if you can buffer power and overcome this, the results would be spectacular. As the article says: “The U.S. Southwest's deserts get enough sunlight to sustain the country's thirst for electricity—20 times over.”

I love the idea of the pumped hydro facility. It’s like a caveman battery, on a massive scale.

A pumped-hydro facility consists of two reservoirs with a substantial drop in height between them. When there is excess electricity to go around, electric pumps move water from the lower reservoir into the upper one, thereby storing energy in the form of gravitational potential energy. When wind and solar wane or simply cannot keep up with demand, operators let water flow down and through turbines, generating electricity.

Mobile Broadband Naming and Standards

Posted: February 26, 2012, 7:57 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

3G vs. 4G: What's the Difference?: Good summary on the unholy, craptastic mess that is naming standards for mobile broadband. Basically, terms like “3G” and “4G” mean very little.

4G phones are supposed to be even faster, but that's not always the case. There are so many technologies called "4G," and so many ways to implement them, that the term is almost meaningless. The International Telecommunications Union, a standards body, tried to issue requirements to call a network 4G but they were ignored by carriers, and eventually the ITU backed down.[…]

There's one rule to follow: Each generation will offer faster Internet speeds than the last, that is, on the same carrier. Sprint's WiMAX 4G is almost always faster than its CDMA 3G. But AT&T's 3G HSPA can be faster than MetroPCS's 4G LTE. You can rely on speeds to move up within your carrier, though.

Intra-link Management in Content Management

Posted: February 25, 2012, 7:37 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Linking pages in a CMS can be tricky. It helps to understand why.

Say some text in Page A links to Page B, both of which are in the same CMS. This link is buried in some HTML, deep in a WYSIWYG field of Page A. What URL do you use to link to Page B?

Well, you could just use Page B’s public URL, right? Sure, let’s just put that as the HREF in the A tag, and bake that into the HTML that we store. That’ll work just fine.

Actually, not so much. What happens if Page B gets deleted? How will we know that’s there’s an outstanding link from Page A? What if the URL for Page B changes – either Page B moves and this changes the URL, or some marketer decides she likes dashes better than underscores? Now we’re screwed – we have a broken link, and worse, we don’t have no way of finding it without stumbling across it.

(This is not at all an academic problem. Gadgetopia has switched URL schemes twice in its 10-year history. I still have a big lookup table of old-URL-to-new-URL pairs.)

The simple fact is that a link between content is two things. It’s of course the actual HREF tag that visitors will click on. But, in a larger sense, it’s also a conceptual relationship between content. This relationship transcends the idea of what the link is – an HREF, usage of an image, whatever – and instead represents the basic idea that Page A relies on Page B for something, and if Page B were to change, this may have ramifications for Page A. This is an important thing to know.

When you link between two pages in a CMS, your CMS really needs to do to things:

Make the link durable, meaning it survives changes to the target URL.
Make the link discoverable, meaning we have some way to finding out that Page A is depending on Page B in some way.

Making the link durable is a little tougher than you might think. The obvious solution is that you link to some identifier for Page B, rather than to Page B itself. This is the value that gets hard-baked into the HTML that’s stored in the repository. This is the simple part.

This consequently raises the question, when do you do the replacement? When do you swap out the identifier of Page B for the actual, current URL of Page B? I’ve seen a couple options.

Ektron never did. When you linked to Page B from Page A, Ektron stored a redirection URL – something like :

/workarea/linkit.aspx?id=356

When a visitor hit that link, they got sent to a page which read in the ID, looked up the correct URL, and bounced them over to the current location of Page ID #356. This is the simplest method, because it requires no processing of the HTML – the HREF that’s stored is the same location that gets output to the page and the same location you get sent to, you just get redirected from there.

There are a couple disadvantages, however. First, every internal link ends up being the same, so users can’t mouseover a link and look in the status bar to see where they’re going. (How many users do this? I have no idea, but I do it myself a lot.) Additionally, purists just find this redirection idea…icky.

Additionally, there may be some drawback with search indexing. I had a very SEO-focused client who hated the “One URL to Rule Them All” method, so they manually entered and maintained “pure” URLs in an Ektron installation to avoid it. I don’t recommend going to this trouble for SEO, however, as it’s assumed that the value of self-referential PageRank is negligible. (I have no idea whether an internal search tool like the Google Search Appliance tracks self-referential PageRank, or whether or not it has some method of matching up redirects to their destination pages. It possible.)

(Also, whenever I discuss Ektron, I have to mention that my knowledge of their system is a couple years old. Things may have changed since I worked with it last.)

EPiServer, on the other hand, stores the link as an identifier, and then does a very late swap – I believe as late as a Response Filter which filters the HTML as it leaves the server. So, they pick through the HTML, finding everything hyperlink, check if it’s an identifier link to an internal resource, then “fix” the HTML.

Now, this method is super-clean – this delivers HTML with links that were correct at the instant the response leaves the server. However, it’s resource-intensive. EPiServer has stated that this operation takes between 5% and 20% of the entire computational load of a page request. Consequently, they have written their own optimized HTML parser to streamline it as much as possible, and now they’re rewriting it to make it even faster.

Making the links discoverable generally involves parsing the HTML on save, and maintaining a graph or network of links. This is not a complicated process, but can be computationally expensive and is often done asynchronously. So, when a content is saved, some separate thread or process comes through and picks through all the HTML items in the content looking for hyperlinks. With each link, it has to determine if the link is to another page in the CMS, and then enter some record binding those two pages together.

This record needs to store identifiers for the two pages, obviously, but it should also store the directionality of the link (if A links to B, then A is dependent on B, but not vice-versa), and the type of relation. Beyond your basic hyperlink, there are a few other relation types worth noting:

Relational property links (e.g. – the “Author” property of an article links to the author’s content record)
Image usage (e.g. – this particular image of a teapot is used on this particular page)
Embedded content usage (e.g. – a common fragment of managed text is used on 27 different pages in the CMS)

If someone tries to delete or unpublish the target, this graph can be consulted to see what other pages it might affect.

(Automatic content expiration can be problematic here. We had a client who would schedule content to be expired automatically. However, the expiring content would often be the target of inbound links, which would then break without warning. Our solution was a nightly job that would look for pages expiring in the next 72 hours, and check the link graph to see if they were a target of any links. If so, we sent an email warning to the webmaster.

An argument could be made that you should warn the editor of inbound links when they schedule content expiration, or warn them when they link to content that has an expiration date scheduled. But if they it anyway, which is worse – not expiring content when it should expire, or knowingly breaking a link?)

eZ publish actually has a really nice system here where each content item has a “Relations” tab which shows you all the relationships between this piece of content and any others in the system (regardless of directionality) and the nature of those relationships, so you can instantly see all the different ways this content item is used by or is using other content in the repository. (Now that I think about it, I could build the same thing for EPiServer in about 30 minutes.)

Link management can be unpleasant. It’s one of those things that gets overlooked and is often ignored or handled poorly. I worked on a Drupal install a couple of years ago, and I couldn’t find any clean way to effectively manage links that editors inserted into content (this may have changed since then, I have no idea).

The result is this lingering, background unease, as you contemplate multiple editors inserting URL after URL into WYSIWYG editors. All those URLs, just sitting around waiting to break and start growing content rot. It’s almost enough to keep me up at night.

In the End, Amazon is Gonna Win

Posted: February 22, 2012, 6:00 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller: This guy calls BS on the whole “let’s save the independent bookstore” lament and instead praises Amazon. In the process, he slaughters quite a few sacred cows.

As much as I despise some of its recent tactics, no company in recent years has done more than Amazon to ignite a national passion for buying, reading, and even writing new books. […]

What rankles me, though, is the hectoring attitude of bookstore cultists like Russo, especially when they argue that readers who spurn indies are abandoning some kind of “local” literary culture. There is little that’s “local” about most local bookstores. Unlike a farmers’ market, which connects you with the people who are seasonally and sustainably tending crops within driving distance of your house, an independent bookstore’s shelves don’t have much to do with your community.

Why do I feel so bad for agreeing with him?

On Reddit some time ago, someone asked “I want to open a bookstore. How should I do this?” (I tried to find the post, but failed). The answers were snarky as hell, and went along the lines of “First, gather up all the requisite bankruptcy forms to save time later…”

Supplemental Indexing in Content Management

Posted: February 21, 2012, 4:48 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

I’ve suddenly become quite interested in the idea of supplemental indexing in content management. This is primarily because I have a long history of hating content management query capabilities.

I’m mystified at systems that are less adept than a simple relational database at letting you have your content back. You put it in the system, then go to get it back out…and the API just sucks.

This still gets me, to this day. The fact is, the query abilities of most content management systems just suck. It’s as if they wanted us to put our content in, but never expected us to want to get it back out. Vendors, if your CMS isn’t at least as good as the SQL databases we all started building back in the day, you really need to re-examine your priorities.

Traditionally, a CMS forces you to rely on their provided API. The two systems we work with regularly have facilities for querying: eZ publish has their Fetch architecture, and EPiServer has what they call Find Pages With Criteria. Both are…okay, if a little verbose. (We worked with Ektron in the past, and their system has traditionally been completely hopeless in this regard, though they’ve done some neat work lately with their new Framework API, and I hear they’ve solved this problem.)

But, there are times when even the most well thought-out API breaks down. With EPiServer, a client needed to do a simple parenthetical query – WHERE A=B AND ( C=D OR E=F ) – and the Find Pages With Criteria API did not handle it well (or at all, really). In discussions with other EPIServer developers, the proposed solutions were all some form of code acrobatics for something which SQL handles natively.

I’ve run into the same problem with about every CMS I’ve ever worked with. Querying APIs are fundamentally wrappers around SQL (insomuch as most every CMS is still using a SQL-based database), and they always lose something in the abstraction. They’re built to handle 90% of the things you can come up with. The last 10% is where things break down and where you find yourself lamenting, “But I could do this in straight SQL in about two seconds…”

And this is a real problem, because as I passionately wrote in the previously-linked post:

Retrieval APIs are foundational. They are not an add-on. They are one of the pillars of content management, period.

In most cases, your need for content retrieval is not that advanced. But there are situations when you really want to use a CMS (or part of one) as a big relational database, and unless you’re using a natively relational framework like Rails or Django, or a ORM-based CMS like WebNodes, you’re going to test the limits of your API.

So, recently, Blend has done a few projects where we had to do some advanced querying and we just…punted. We created companion, query-friendly indices of CMS content alongside the CMS repository, and used them for querying. If your CMS has a decent event-based API, this isn’t hard, and I’ve found it to be a fantastic way around sticky problems.

For the first project, we used Lucene.Net. Though Lucene is traditionally used for full-text indexing, we used it here for straight-up field-based search of a subset of the CMS content. In this case, we denormalized the data considerably, which is a great thing about a supplemental index – you store content in the method that makes it easiest to query, regardless of how many data modeling rules that breaks.

In the second case, we went even more basic – we wrote a plugin for EPiServer which converted portions of the page repository to a set of flat SQL tables. So we essentially write out a companion database, next to the CMS database, which we use for advanced querying. This is for a client who is converting existing SQL queries, and it’s worked beautifully to re-use their existing query logic.

For the third project, we hooked up Solr, and used it to store an separate index of all the content in a truly massive eZ publish installation. We’ve got this dialed-in to the point where could effectively use this separate index for any queries of the repository – you can fundamentally drive the entire site out of Solr, if you want.

These have been great solutions, but using a supplemental index hinges on a couple things –

First, your CMS has to be such that you can keep the index updated. This means you need an event-capture API so you can be notified of content changes and update the changed content in the index. Additionally, you need to make sure you capture cascading updates – changing page A may change page B, can how do you capture this? In a tree structure, changing the parent may change every page below it in the tree, so you need to make sure you can correctly re-index content, even when that content might not have changed directly.

Second, your CMS needs to have a decent filtering API, meaning you can toss a bucket of content at it and say, “Just give me back the content this user has access to,” or “Just give me back the content that’s public and published.” Your supplemental index probably knows nothing about your permissions model, so you need to make sure your CMS can pick through a raw pile of content and take out what the current user shouldn’t see.

Third, you need to faithfully treat your supplemental index as disposable. It’s truly supplemental – it’s a querying facility, and nothing more. You don’t actually read content out of it, rather you just read some page identifier that you then populate through from the core CMS API. You should be able to wipe out and re-create this index without concern. A sure way to run into problems is to start using your index as more than just a querying tool.

My initial reaction to the idea of a supplemental index was that it was somehow less “pure” than a real-time query of the actual CMS repository, but my experiences of the last year have completely changed my mind. Writing your own index can alleviate so many problems that it can free you up spend more time on the more challenging aspects of your integration.

Trying to force a query API to do what even something as simple as SQL has done for years shouldn’t be the hardest thing about a CMS. Sadly, it often is.

On Finding Great Ideas

Posted: February 21, 2012, 12:53 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Kirby Ferguson just competed his four-part video series, Everything is a Remix. This project has been a Kickstarter darling for a couple of years now – funded entirely through donations.

It’s totally worth watching – I took in all four parts last night in about 30 minutes. It’s a great look at where ideas come from and how they get re-used and re-combined with other ideas to form new things. He gets a little political in the fourth part, which I found a bit boring, but the rest of it is a highly entertaining look at the art of the remix in media and popular culture.

Just recently, I read about this exact same thing in a wonderful book called Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. It’s a really deep dive into the seven major sources of innovation, which includes the combination of two ideas to form another. Wonderful book – probably the most important book I’ve read since Cluetrain.

Along these same lines, be sure to check out Matt Ridley’s TED talk on “idea sex.” Same concept – great things are made up of smaller ideas put together in new ways.

The Curse of Being Connected

Posted: February 18, 2012, 10:01 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Happiness Takes (a little) Magic: I really enjoyed this reflective post on how technology and dehumanize us. Brian writes about how he’s backing away from most online media, which is suspect is how a social media backlash will eventually start.

I owe my livelihood to technology and I love the raw capability it offers us as a tool, but I fear it a bit more than most people do. It's a tool, but it's not quite a hammer, because a hammer doesn't seduce you into sitting around lonely in your underwear for 6 hours at a stretch clicking on youtube videos and refreshing Twitter. I fear technology because I fear that bad feeling I get after a three day XBox binge I go through every year around the holidays. I fear technology not because I think it's evil, but because it's too easy to start clicking and never stop, even if the stream of data starts to go from meaningful to useless after the top 5%.

The author mercilessly cut down the media he consumed.

The first thing I did was to take back my time. I quit all the online content that was id-provoking and knee jerk. I stopped reading the stupid hyped up news stories that are press releases or rants about things that will get fixed in a week. I stopped reading the junk and about the junk that was new, but not good. I stopped reading blogs that write stories like "top 17 photos of awesome clouds by iphone" and "EXCLUSIVE ANGRY BIRDS COMING TO FACEBOOK ON VALENTINES DAY."

I can’t say I’m doing the same thing, but I’ve started to try and be more conscious about what I consume. I went through an RSS purge some time ago, and that’s helped enormously.

Additionally, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Reddit, but I’ve just discovered that 90% of the trivialness of Reddit is found in three subreddits: Pics, Funny, and WTF. Unsubscribe from these three, and it’s an entirely different site.

I tweet consistently, and I probably spent too much time on Facebook – I check in about once an hour, even if it’s just for a few seconds. (But, for the record, Facebook has really enabled me to stay in touch with some people I never would hear from otherwise.) I’d like to put some distance between be a the news, but I’ve been a CNN junkie for years.

I read a great book some time ago called 59 Seconds, which is about ways to improve your life in less than a minute. While it doesn’t talk about social media specifically, it does talk about the need to disconnect, and discusses some scientific studies that prove we’d do better giving more quiet time to our inner voices to solve larger problems. (I talked about a related concept six years ago in Are you procrastinating? Or are you just thinking?) It’s worth reading.

The Economics of the Automotive Touchscreen

Posted: February 18, 2012, 5:12 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Saturday Drive: 2012 Fisker Karma: This is from an article about the Fisker Karma, which is snazzy-looking electric car. It explains the economics behind using a touchscreen in the dashboard as a control device. Apparently, it’s not just futuristic, it’s cheaper.

Using a screen like this serves an economical function for Fisker though. Designing and manufacturing the switchgear one might expect in a traditional car costs several piles of money (that's the scientific term). When done on the scale of major automakers that can use similar components throughout their vehicle lineup, the cost is reduced.

When you're Fisker, that potential cost can be a dealbreaker. Using a screen requires minimal engineering and manufacturing. Fisker can also update the system (which it says it plans to do) throughout the lifespan of the Karma without major retooling or cost.

I never considered how much all those switches and dials must cost a carmaker.

What is Big Data?

Posted: February 17, 2012, 4:06 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Why 'big data' is a magnet for startups: This article is interesting for a couple reasons. First, it sort of formalizes this idea of “big data” that’s floating around – explains what it is, how it’s different, and why this matters. Second, it talks about some neat things people are doing:

The startup Recorded Future collects 100,000 to 300,000 documents an hour from the Web and analyzes them in real time to gain insight into global trends. The software is being used to monitor riots in South America on Google Earth and also to predict the volatility of stock prices based on media coverage.

Translation Proxies

Posted: February 16, 2012, 5:53 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Introduction to Translation Proxies: Seth introduced me to these yesterday. Honestly, I’m slightly embarrassed to say that I had never heard of these before:

A translation proxy is a service that sits in front of your website and applies translations so that different audience segments can see your content in their local languages. You point various DNS entries to the proxy so that request goes through the proxy service to your native language website. On the return trip, the proxy applies translation rules to the HTML in the response.

Look at Smartling.

How Ebooks are Different

Posted: February 15, 2012, 8:29 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

8 Unexpected Downsides of the Switch to Ebooks: Cracked is not known for insightful commentary (though it arguably should be), but this is a great article about ebooks are changing stuff. Consider:

If our society moves to e-books, textbooks will probably go electronic as well, which is, on the one hand, great, because maybe college students will finally stop being constantly ripped off on textbooks. On the other hand, it may be the end of a proud tradition of drawing mustaches and Satan horns on important historical figures.

Or how about:

[…] many times when you're looking for something handy, there just isn't anything around that will do a better job than [a book]. These important tasks include table stabilizing, spider killing, cat fight breaking up and makeshift camera stand making.

Or:

Probably one of the most relevant concerns about physical paper books disappearing to the point where the average person isn't familiar with them anymore is: how is this going to affect movies with spellbooks and books like the Necronomicon in them? Will people stop using them in movies? Will they continue to use them in movies as archaic artifacts that the audience will increasingly struggle to understand?

Whoa.

We’ve talked about the cultural impact of ebooks a couple of times before.

Lady Gaga and Backplane

Posted: February 14, 2012, 5:00 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Lady Gaga launches social site, 'Little Monsters': Lady Gaga is rolling her own social network, via Backplane. I just don’t see the point of another social network, though if anyone has the critical mass to make it go, it’s her.

An early look at the site suggests it will be designed a lot like Pinterest, the fast-emerging mobile app that lets users "pin" locations and items that they like. Gaga's site also will emphasize sharing and creating photos and videos, as well as letting other users promote content from others that they like (something similar to sites like Reddit and Digg).

The site is the first project by Backplane, the startup where Lady Gaga's manager, Troy Carter, is one of four founders. The company will focus on online community-building.

Mobile Apps vs. Sites

Posted: February 14, 2012, 1:34 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Mobile Sites vs. Apps: The Coming Strategy Shift: Here’s a fantastic article from Jakob Nielsen on the state of mobile apps. He argues that apps are better now, but this will change in favor of mobile sites, and he explains why. Really great arguments.

The expense of mobile apps will increase because there will be more platforms to develop for. At a minimum, you'll have to support Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. Furthermore, many of these platforms will likely fork into multiple subplatforms that require different apps for a decent user experience.

For user experience purposes, iOS has already forked into iPad vs. iPhone. Although they officially have the same OS software, the two devices need two very different user interface (UI) designs. (See our free report on iPad usability for tablet usability considerations.)

Amazon.com's recent introduction of the Kindle Fire effectively forked the Android user experience with a fairly different platform. And, as our Kindle Fire usability study concluded, you need a separate app with a separate UI to deliver decent usability on this nonstandard device that's selling like hotcakes.

It's only realistic to expect even further UI diversity in the future. This will make it extremely expensive to ship mobile apps.

Desknots

Posted: February 5, 2012, 1:59 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Desknots: I love this idea.

More and more, when we refer to mobile, what we really mean is “non-traditional computing devices and environments,” a stodgy mouthful that really boils down to not the desktop. Our usage overloads poor mobile to include gizmos like phones, tablets, game consoles, e-readers, even TVs. Let’s give mobile a break. I propose a new catch-all term for our myriad non-desktop screens: desknots.

Mounting Tree Houses

Posted: February 4, 2012, 4:38 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

I really enjoyed this video of a guy who has created a series of tree houses in Oregon. A lot of the video is about the houses themselves, which is very neat, but I especially liked when he discussed the different mounts he invented to keep them in the trees.

He shows off several of the mounts and attachment points towards the end, and how they move with the tree – when the trees start swaying in the wind, you have to have a mount which allows some freedom of movement. This is especially true when you’re talking about a bridge between two trees which has to account for movement of both trees.

He even uses the phrase “open source” in there, about how he worked with another engineer to design these mounts, and you can presumably use the same designs.

(One of the tree houses he shows off has what appears to be a full-size, standard toilet. I’m dying to know how that works.)

Short Interview with Scott Brinker

Posted: February 3, 2012, 4:27 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Interview with Scott Brinker: This is a good three-minute interview with Scott Brinker about the emerging role of the “marketing technologist.” Scott has popularized this term, and he explains it in this video.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Scott last week in preparation for a talk at the eZ publish Partner Summit I’m giving in Lisbon next week. Great guy, with some great insights.

We Consistently Use Very Few Apps

Posted: February 1, 2012, 2:08 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Consumers ignore most apps on their smartphones: This confirms something I’ve suspected for a long time – we’re creatures of habit with phone apps, and we really consistently use very few.

Of smartphone owners, 68% open only five or fewer apps at least once a week, finds a survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. Seventeen percent don't use any apps. About 42% of all U.S. adults have phones with apps, Pew estimates.

"The novelty wears off," says Pew researcher Kristen Purcell.

Right now I’m thinking about jumping ship from Android to a Windows Phone, so I took inventory of what apps I would have to have to make the switch. I only came up with three: Spotify, Runkeeper, and Evernote. (Not coincidentally, I’m a paying customer of all three.) Every other app I use is just assumed to be in there (browser, email, calculator, etc. – the “core” apps) or something I tried but didn’t stick with.

I think games are an exception – people tend to cycle through those a lot. But for every Angry Birds there are dozens that get played once or twice and then tossed. And I can’t think of any phone game that would prevent me from switching phone platforms if other reasons dictate a need.

Whenever anyone raves to me about all the apps available for their new phone, I have to stifle the urge to say, “That’s great, but let’s see how many of those you’re using in six weeks…”

Prosecuting Scientists for Being Wrong

Posted: February 1, 2012, 2:02 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Top Italian Scientists Who Failed to Predict 2009 Earthquake Now Face Manslaughter Charges: Here’s a short but thought-provoking article about Italian scientists who publically stated that the risk of a major aftershock to an Earthquake was low. A few days later, an aftershock killed 300. They’re now being charged with manslaughter.

Local citizens claimed they had been planning to leave their homes after the smaller quake, but had changed their minds after the committee's comments. In August 2009, the citizens filed a formal request for investigation, and earlier this month the chief prosecutor stated that his office had enough information to indict the individuals named in the case.

Suffice it to say that this would have a chilling effect on science. And I think there’s a real difference here between just being wrong, and being clearly negligent. I’m thinking of the British scientist who allegedly published fraudulent research linking vaccines to autism – that seems like another situation entirely.

Interestingly, another scientist did predict the second Italian quake, but no one took him seriously.

Assume Everything is a Lie

Posted: February 1, 2012, 1:50 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Twitter tattle and the trouble with twitchforks: Great commentary here on what’s a very genuine problem.

[…] social networking militates against thinking for yourself. As the Twitterati jumps on the day's bandwagon, we are increasingly seeing the unedifying spectacle of what's been dubbed "twitchfork mobs" – and it can get ugly. Social media is a wonderful tool for networking and communication, but the flip side is that it encourages laziness of thinking. The need to verify information also seems to have been forgotten.

I’m automatically very suspicious of any militant bandwagon that comes through social media. Even back to the days of email forwards, my default setting was “it’s not true.” That applies even more with social media.

The Skechers WTF

Posted: January 29, 2012, 7:21 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Sketchy Skechers.com: Today’s DailyWTF is a pretty good one discussing the horrors of the Skechers website and how it’s delivered as XML then transformed via XSLT right in the browser. Standard WTF stuff, really.

But – lo and behold! – the head of the Skechers web team leaves a comment…and it’s a good one. He sets forth some of their reasoning, and it starts to make sense. I’m not totally on-board with all of it, but he makes some great points and it’s totally worth reading, especially if – like me – you have an irrational hatred of XSLT.

[…] here's the great thing about XSLT-- it's cacheable on your browser. Instead of browsing from page to page to page, each time getting 25k+ of html, we can frontload a lot of that by having you download the XSLT. Once you've downloaded the file once, you have the layout for the entire site already cached, and the next page you go to is 2k of XML.

[…] My original thought was-- your desktop machine, and very quickly your phone, have just as much CPU cycles available as a commodity server. Why not shift as many cycles to the client as we can while still making it a relatively fast experience?

[…] IE7 and IE8 actually have better support for XSLT transformations than Firefox does.

[…] Is it any more insane than hunting through Struts code, or JSF, etc etc? Now, both our front-end CSS/Javascript developers, and back-end Java (now Scala) coders understand Xpath now, so we don't run into the "I don't want to touch that Velocity template" problem.

I really commend this guy for jumping in, and I have to respect his desire to try something new. Did he succeed? Well, I browsed the Skechers site and it certainly seems fine to me, so I certainly can’t say he failed.

And serious props to him for jumping into that conversation without being a douchebag and turning it into a constructive discussion. What a great sport.

Hiking Through Software Development

Posted: January 28, 2012, 4:18 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?: This is an epic answer at Quota to the question of my software development estimates are so consistently poor. The author has a running analogy of a hypothetical hike from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which looks simple on a map, but is not so simple once you’re on the ground.

OK, that line is about 400 miles long, We can walk 4 miles per hour for 10 hours per day, so we'll be there in 10 days. We call our friends and book dinner for next Sunday night. They can't wait to see us!

We get up early the next day giddy with the excitement of fresh adventure. We strap on our backpacks, whip out our map, and plan day one. We take a look at the map. Uh oh […]

Online Ad Spending Surpasses Print

Posted: January 26, 2012, 12:22 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

US Online Ad Spend to Close in on $40 Billion: Interesting.

This year, US online ad spending will exceed the total spent on print magazines and newspapers for the first time, at $39.5 billion vs. $33.8 billion. And as online shoots up, the print total will continue to inch downward.

The X-47B

Posted: January 26, 2012, 5:00 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

New drone has no pilot anywhere, so who's accountable?: When Skynet goes self-aware, this is going to be a real problem.

The Navy's new drone being tested near Chesapeake Bay stretches the boundaries of technology: It's designed to land on the deck of an aircraft carrier, one of aviation's most difficult maneuvers.

What's even more remarkable is that it will do that not only without a pilot in the cockpit, but without a pilot at all.

The X-47B marks a paradigm shift in warfare, one that is likely to have far-reaching consequences. With the drone's ability to be flown autonomously by onboard computers, it could usher in an era when death and destruction can be dealt by machines operating semi-independently.

The Legend of Kimble

Posted: January 25, 2012, 8:57 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Mega-man: The fast, fabulous, and fraudulent life of Kim Dotcom: Here's a great profile of Kimble [insert honorific here].

The man once known as Kim Schmitz (and as Kimble, and as Kim Tim Jim Vestor, and finally as Kim Dotcom), now awaiting extradition from New Zealand to face charges of conspiracy, money laundering and copyright crimes in the US, has enveloped his actual life in a cloud of hype and bluster that echo the worst of the dot-com bubble from which he took his new surname. In 2001, the Telegraph called Schmitz "a PR man's nightmare and a journalist's dream."

I loved Kimble back in the day. I was starry-eyed over his “Kimble: Secret Agent” video, and his supposedly amazing lifestyle (one NSFW image in there). Kimble was the embodiment of the “anything is possible” vibe at the peak of the bubble when I was a young developer.

Alas, this has all caught up with him. Kimble currently awaits extradition in New Zealand.

Google Now Analyzes Page Layout

Posted: January 25, 2012, 3:09 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Page layout algorithm improvement: Google has started analyzing the actual layout of pages, and is now penalizing pages that don’t have a lot of content on top. This is an official Google announcement:

If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

It used to be that search engine crawlers were oblivious to CSS and layout, and just analyzed markup. Not so much anymore.

Why China Makes iPhones

Posted: January 23, 2012, 12:40 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Apple, America, and a Squeezed Middle Class: Ever wonder why all your gadgets are made in China? Low wages, right? Well, it may have started out that way, but since then the supply chain and infrastructure are simply grown up there, and there’s no way to change that. And since manufacturing involves the physical movement of goods, they need to be close together.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

[…] “Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”

The flexibility and availability of the workforce is another huge factor:

Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

[…] The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

The Legend of HyperCard

Posted: January 23, 2012, 5:01 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Why HyperCard Had to Die: This is a well-written polemic that laments the death of HyperCard, around which there’s been a cult of fandom for decades. In the middle of this post is a lo-o-o-ong set of screencaps that give you a nice introduction to just what HyperCard is (was), so if you’ve never heard of it, you can see what all the fuss is about.

If you already know what HyperCard is, keep scrolling to the bottom where the author explains his view on why HyperCard and Apple are no longer compatible.

The reason for this is that HyperCard is an echo of a different world. One where the distinction between the “use” and “programming” of a computer has been weakened and awaits near-total erasure. A world where the personal computer is a mind-amplifier, and not merely an expensive video telephone. A world in which Apple’s walled garden aesthetic has no place. […]

[Steve Jobs] returned the company to its original vision: the personal computer as a consumer appliance, a black box enforcing a very traditional relationship between the vendor and the purchaser.

Jobs supposedly claimed that he intended his personal computer to be a “bicycle for the mind.” But what he really sold us was a (fairly comfortable) train for the mind. A train which goes only where rails have been laid down, like any train, and can travel elsewhere only after rivers of sweat pour forth from armies of laborers. (Preferably in Cupertino.)

Given the popularity of HyperCard, I’m surprised there isn’t some web-based emulator that hasn’t caught on and ignited the fervor of the HyperCard faithful. This guy doesn’t think there’s anything, but if it was so successful as an installed Apple product, why couldn’t it work in the cloud?

(I’ve always thought that the best part of HyperCard was the acronym of the International HyperCard User Group, or iHug. That group may be defunct too, as I couldn’t find a website for them.)

I found this via Reddit, and the comments are worth reading. Here’s the top comment as of this writing:

Hypercard was the last vestige of Woz in Apple - of the hacker spirit that said development was just another neat thing anyone could do, like drawing and writing. Jobs excised the program because he had never agreed with that spirit. He wasn't just dispossessed of it; he was its enemy from the start.

He wanted the original Apple computers to be glorified word processors. He went to his grave still viewing 'his' computers as appliances. He's the reason iOS won't run your 'hello world' app unless an unseen authority has rubber-stamped it for use by all ages. He's the reason OS X won't install on any computer lacking an Apple logo. His grand contribution to modern computing is that everything is clean and shiny so long as none of you primitive user-types touch anything.

Good riddance, you tightassed marketeer.

If that’s true, perhaps this explains why Woz loves Android so much.

Methodologies in the Creative Trades

Posted: January 23, 2012, 4:51 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Corey is Blend’s content strategist. He was asked to write an article for the inaugural issue of Contents Magazine, so he wrote about methodologies and how they apply to content strategy.

Some people may think that methodologies are rigid and don’t fit the free-flowing nature of creativity, but Corey manages to summarize why I pushed him to get our process documented:

In our field, there’s no single set of rules, and there’s no progress without a little bit of guessing and testing. There’s room for wiggling. But before we can wiggle, we need to know how much space we’ve got to wiggle in.

You need to have a baseline – some framework on which to hang your efforts. If you can step out of line, you can depart for it if you want, but remember that you can’t deviate from something that doesn’t exist. You need some type of roadmap with a tension that keeps nudging you back onto a known path or else you wake up one morning and find your project wandering through the forest with no idea how you got there.

[…] your methodology keeps you honest. We’re humans, and humans like to skip things. With each step explicitly outlined, you can better decide which steps to skip. You can refer back to the methodology when you’re questioning your process, too.

In the IT industry in general, there’s too much “management by magic” – you don’t know exactly how things happen, but they always work out, sort of. If you’re good at this, you can get fooled into thinking this is okay, and that projects that run wild are outliers and just the nature of the beast.

At Blend, we’re going to spend a big chunk of 2012 documenting processes, even ones we don’t think need to be documented.

Decoupled CMS is the New Black

Posted: January 23, 2012, 1:53 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Fun with Static Publishing: Seth writes about how he’s come full circle back to static publishing of websites. They’re content-managed (-ish) in the background, but written to files then uploaded to Amazon S3 to be served.

And this brings me to my little obsession with static publishing. I am hosting a few sites on Amazon S3. The cost is ridiculously low and the speed is crazy-fast. Publishing them is fun too. For example, I publish my little personal site (www.sethgottlieb.com) using a site generator called Hyde, which is a Python port of a Ruby-based system called Jekyll. The way these generators work is that you enter your content in HTML, Markdown, or some other syntax and then run a script that renders static HTML pages with your presentation templates. Presentation templates can also do useful things like create listing pages. The Hyde sample site has a blog and there is a script to migrate from WordPress.

There’s lots of goodness here. For some background on static publishing, consider my blog post of a few months ago: Decoupled Content Management 101.

The trick Seth is doing here is sort of content managing them on the background, but then “freezing” them to disk, and publishing the result. So, he has a “repository server” in the form of a local CMS, and a delivery server in the form of Amazon S3.

And, often, CMS isn’t even needed. If you’re comfortable working in code, you can just version manage in some kind of SCM, and use a TMS (template management system – an acronym I totally just made up) to make consistent output. I wrote about Nesta a few months ago, which is worth checking out (incidentally, I rewrote about 80% of Nesta in ASP.Net MVC in about two hours one afternoon – it’s that simple).

This feels very comfortable to me because this blog is still published with an ancient version of Movable Type, which caches to disk. I’ve wired it up with a lot of PHP (MT is pretty much just writing PHP include files, at this point), but the principle of storing the data somewhere and using a TMS to get decent output in another repository (the file system, in this case) is the same. I liked Seth’s idea of pushing to S3, and perhaps there’s a viable model where I publish on an EC2 instance that drops content into an S3 volume for delivery.

(An aside: something I always find funny when talking about this is how we often say things like, “we’re going to write a physical file out.” Really? A physical file? How physical is that file, really?)

Will LinkedIn Promote Honesty in Job Applicants?

Posted: January 22, 2012, 6:08 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

I was at a J. Boye Expert Group meeting last week (love this program…) when one of the participants brought up an interesting story, which got me wondering if the ubiquity of LinkedIn will help keep job applicants honest.

They related a situation where a newly-hired executive didn’t have a LinkedIn profile for some reason. This struck them as odd, because everyone has a LinkedIn profile these days. Why would a professional in the Internet industry not have one?

It turns out that this person had been really fast-and-loose with the facts concerned their employment history over the years. He had essentially told every employee what they wanted to hear, and the stories didn’t all match up. So, they couldn’t risk a LinkedIn profile, because they had to present different stories to different people.

This is an interesting side-effect of single-sourcing information. LinkedIn has fundamentally become a single-source of our employment situation and history. When using LinkedIn, it makes it tough to lie about your background, because it’s effectively the same as having a published resume online at all times. If anyone can look up your resume whenever they want, lying about it is tougher, unless you tell the same lie to everyone, and no one knows the truth.

As a business owner who is in charge of a lot of hiring, it’s got me thinking that I should compare submitted resumes to LinkedIn and make sure they match. If they don’t, that needs to be explained. Furthermore, if there’s no LinkedIn profile at all, should that tell me something?

My New ASUS UX31

Posted: January 22, 2012, 5:23 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

I finally bought a new laptop last week. I had been working off a Dell Studio XPS 16 for almost three years.

When I purchased the Dell, my biggest concern was performance and size – I essentially wanted a desktop replacement, and I got it. The “big Dell” (as I’ve come to call it) was wonderfully fast with a dual-core 2.8 GHz processor and had a nice big screen. But, you paid dearly for this in battery life, size, and heat.

I had the extended battery, which hung down off the back and made it uncomfortable most of the time. Still, you only got three hours max even with everything on power-saving mode. And the heat produced was just crazy. You couldn’t work with it on your lap for an extended period, and if you put a pillow down to insulate yourself, you could hear the fan chugging away trying to cool it down. Even then, you could feel the heat through the pillow – the machine was really a mini-nuclear reactor.

My role has changed at Blend – I’m doing more sales and consulting (and, consequently, more travel) and less hardcore development. Because of this, I decided to go as far in the other direction as I could with the new machine – I wanted the smallest size I could get, and the longest battery life.

I briefly considered a MacBook Air, on which I would run Windows. I really hate Apple as company and culture, but their hardware is first-rate. However, I just couldn’t bring myself f to do it, for philosophical reasons, as well as the single-button mouse/trackpad (I really do use all three buttons on a Windows mouse), and the fact that I’m pretty sure at least some weirdness would pop up from running Windows on a Mac long-term.

So, after some research, I brought one of the new breed of Ultrabooks – an ASUS UX31. I got it for $1,450 from NewEgg.

It’s been about a week, and I’m still getting used to it, but it’s a fairly amazing machine. Some highlights:

It’s tiny – like, really, really tiny. It’s a half-pound lighter and a tenth of an inch thinner than a MacBook Air. I believe it’s even thinner than my first-gen iPad.
Despite the size, it feels solid. It’s some kind of metal (titanium?), and really has a feeling of substance to it.
Battery life is astonishing. At the lowest possible power level, it runs over eight hours, and will sit on standby for almost 10 days. (Mind you, at this level it runs Office apps pretty slow, so this isn’t practical for any substantial usage.) As I write this, I’ve been working on it for 2-3 hours – it claims to have 72% of the battery left, which it calculates at 6 hours, 48 minutes of life remaining.
It doesn’t seem to produce any heat. That’s not an exaggeration – as near as I can tell, when I use it on my lap, my body heat is actually heating it up, not vice-versa. I don’t even think it has a fan.
It’s instant-on. When you lift the lid, it will produce a Windows logon screen even before you have the lid all the way open. I timed it from pressing “Restart” to getting a fresh login screen – so, a full shutdown and full startup cycle. That took 32 seconds. Closing the lid is so much more non-committal than my old Dell.
It has a SmartLogon feature that will log you on by face recognition. I haven’t tried this yet, and don’t know if I will. Typing my password is not a big deal, and at the office the laptop sits to my right side, so I don’t know how well it would recognize me.
It comes with a snazzy Kevlar-looking carrying case, about the same size as a manila envelope. There are also two adapters (see below) that come in their own matching pouch. Packaging in general was very cool; very Apple-like. Unboxing seemed like an event.

There haven’t been any real downsides yet, but there are some oddities that may or may not suck as I keep working with it. The jury is still out on this stuff:

There’s no optical drive – no CD, no DVD (hell, where would they put it?). I might miss this – it was nice to be able to watch a DVD on my old machine. But, I do this less and less, so I don’t think it will be a huge issue.
The keyboard took some getting used to. You have to be more deliberate than usual when typing. I made lots of mistakes at first, but I seem to be doing fine now.
There’s no standard VGA port. Instead, there’s a VGA-to-Mini VGA adapter.
Likewise, no Ethernet port, just an Ethernet-to-USB adapter.
No HDMI port either – it’s micro-HDMI instead. It didn’t come with an adapter, so I’ll need to find one.
Surprisingly, the screen size hasn't been an issue. It’s small at 13.3 inches (they have an 11.6-inch version too), but resolution is 1600 x 900, which is more than enough. I really haven’t thought twice about the screen size, which I find surprising, since I’ve traditionally been a sucker for a huge monitor.
It seems to take a long time to charge the battery. I timed it at about 1 minute, 15 seconds per 1% of battery life. So, a full charge would take two full hours. Joe tells me this isn’t bad, but I swear my old Dell could go to a full charge in an hour. In this sense, the new machine feels a lot like my iPad – a super-efficient battery that stores a lot of power, but which takes a long time to replace.
The keyboard is so small that several keys are invoked in conjunction with a “fn” key. This includes keys I use a lot, like Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End.
The “Delete” key is right next to the power button at the top right of the keyboard. Hasn’t been a problem yet, but you have to think it might be.

Finally, here’s one thing that I already know will suck.

The keyboard is not backlight or illuminated. Working in the dark is a real problem. If I crank up the screen brightness, this can make up for some of it, but it’s still not great. I might get a little book light to clamp on it, and carry that in my laptop bag.

Other than the dark keyboard, the machine seems fantastic so far. The combination of size, battery life, lack of heat, and instant-on really make it feel like more of an iPad than a laptop. My use of it is about a casual as my iPad, whereas firing up my old Dell involved much more…friction. When you turned that thing on or shut it down, it required a fair amount of commitment to either course of action.

Let me use it for a month or so and I’ll post a follow-up. With any luck, I’ll still be in love with it.

Stealing Code

Posted: January 19, 2012, 9:55 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

U.S. Charges Programmer With Stealing Code: I imagine all programmers are guilty of this to some extent. Maybe not for his exact reasons, but I defy any long-term programmer not to have at least some code on a drive or backup device somewhere outside their employer’s control.

Federal prosecutors have charged a computer programmer with stealing software code valued at nearly $10 million from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, according to a criminal complaint filed in United States District Court on Wednesday […]

The authorities said the software, owned by the Treasury Department, cost about $9.5 million to develop.

Selling Wikipedia Content on Amazon

Posted: January 16, 2012, 5:39 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Authors?: Interesting discussion on a growing tendency to repackage free web content as for-sale public content.

[…] VDM also extrudes thousands of paperbacks every year using content available without cost on the Internet. These books, or booklike products, lie in wait for the distracted shopper, someone who might think, Oh good, I really need a tome on Spearman’s law of diminishing returns, so I’ll just go ahead and pay $84. And with one overhasty click on the “Place your order” button, the shopper can pay a lot of money for a book that turns out to be warmed-over Wikipedia.

What got creepy is when the author saw an ad for a book about himself. He purchased it, and:

Within a few days, the book appeared on my doorstep. The cover was adorned with a stripy abstraction that looked like a beach towel. Inside was the Pagan Kennedy Wikipedia entry, and then a random collection of wiki-text tenuously connected to my path through life. (About a quarter of the book is devoted to Dartmouth College, where I worked as a visiting writer a few years ago.) Some of the text is so small you might need a jeweler’s loupe to read it. So the book was, as advertised, Wikipedia content — though it’s hard to imagine anyone would want it in this format.

I wonder if they’re using the Wikipedia Book Creator we discussed a couple of years ago.

Flipping the Teaching Experience

Posted: January 16, 2012, 5:23 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Flipping the classroom: Here’s an interesting discussion about a new method of teaching – having students view the lectures online, and then do interactive education in the classroom.

They will not get a lecture from Ms Cadwell, because they have already viewed, at home, various lectures as video clips on KhanAcademy (given by Salman Khan, its founder). And Ms Cadwell, logged in as a “coach”, can see exactly who has watched which. This means that class time is now free for something else: one-on-one instruction by Ms Cadwell, or what used to be known as tutoring.

So, essentially, you’re “flipping” the experience. The idea is that lectures are very one-way, so it’s inefficient to spend valuable classroom time on this when it can be delivered via other methods. Classroom time should be spent interactively working through problem sets while you have the teacher and students in the same room.

Did Social Media Bring About the Protestant Reformation?

Posted: January 15, 2012, 5:29 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

How Luther went viral: This is a really interesting analysis of how Martin Luther’s “95 Theses” might have been the first piece of media to “go viral” and can be considered one of the first examples of “social media.” It was famously nailed to the door of a church, but later spread far and wide and led to the Protestant Reformation.

The unintentional but rapid spread of the “95 Theses” alerted Luther to the way in which media passed from one person to another could quickly reach a wide audience. “They are printed and circulated far beyond my expectation,” he wrote in March 1518 […]

The media environment that Luther had shown himself so adept at managing had much in common with today’s online ecosystem of blogs, social networks and discussion threads. It was a decentralised system whose participants took care of distribution, deciding collectively which messages to amplify through sharing and recommendation.

Obviously, this broadens the definition of “social media” quite a bit. This is just how news was spread back then. However, that fact might help us put things in even more perspective: is the current world of social media just a return to how things used to be, before we got inculcated into consuming single source-ish media?

The furor surrounding Luther’s paper also marked a rare thing in the time of limited communication – a public two-way debate, conducted through pamphlets distributed across the region.

Being able to follow and discuss such back-and-forth exchanges of views, in which each author quoted his opponent’s words in order to dispute them, gave people a thrilling and unprecedented sense of participation in a vast, distributed debate.Arguments in their own social circles about the merits of Luther’s views could be seen as part of a far wider discourse, both spoken and printed.

OASIS Takes on WEM

Posted: January 14, 2012, 10:07 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

OASIS Web Experience Management Interoperability (WEMI) : Web Experience Management (WEM, or any of about a half-dozen other crapronyms) is getting serious about standardization.

The OASIS WEMI TC works to define a simple domain model for delivering aggregated content into a total Web Experience. When complete, WEMI's abstract feature set will constitute an international open standard, widely implementation by WCM/WEM systems.

I think they’ll have a tough go of it – there’s just so much interpretation in this space right now. Here’s a couple prior blog posts about it:

In general, it refers to the concentration of functionality in the delivery tier – things like personalization, marketing automation, etc. At least, that’s what I think it refers to, and therein lies the problem. Looking at scope of work on the OASIS site, they cite these use cases:

For the initial set of deliverables, the TC will target a very focused set of use cases:

Display and Mashup Content from a WCM

Index Content and Metadata

Export all Content / Migration

I guess that sorta fits my definition. Maybe.

Pricing Car Service in Real-Time

Posted: January 14, 2012, 6:06 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Disruptions: Taxi Supply and Demand, Priced by the Mile: Much like Los Angeles’ ExpressPark experiment, a company called Uber is using technology to dynamically price car service in New York according to supply-and-demand.

However, the murky variance of rates is causing people some distress – this article tells the story of a guy that paid $27 to go on a one-mile ride, and $135 to take the same trip back, due solely to the demand for cars when he returned.

“With regular day-to-day decisions, consumers like predictability and don’t like to see prices change,” said Dirk Bergemann, a professor of economics at Yale. “People are trained that there is a level of predictability with purchases. There will be a regular price for a bottle of ketchup and a relatively average price for a taxi.”

Professor Bergemann said that as technology continually made it easier for companies to change prices in real time, businesses would try to do so. He said, however, that companies would have to be prepared for repercussions.

Another example of technology being a general disruptor.

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The Slippery Definition of a Digital Channel

Posted: January 13, 2012, 10:05 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Working in web content management, we tend to place an inordinate amount of emphasis on a single channel: the web, and naturally the website that pushes information into it.

But, more and more, I’ve been beating the drum of multi-channel content delivery, as it relates to content management. The idea of multi-channel delivery is that your CMS stores content that’s delivered to all sorts of places, your website just being one of them (and perhaps not even the most important one). See these two posts for (lots) more on this:

In this vein, I decided to do a quick “digital channel audit” for Blend (prompted by some great discussions I had at the J. Boye CMS Expert Group meeting in New York yesterday). I wanted to determine all the digital “touchpoints” where information from was projected to the world.

Simple, right? Well, yes and no. On the surface, it’s simple, but as you get deeper into it, you realize it’s not entirely straightforward.

Quickly, you have to consider scope – what do you include in this list? Your website, sure. But what about third-party system on which the organization has a presence? What about your employees’ blogs? Their LinkedIn accounts? Their Facebook profiles? I’ll talk much more about this later.

The fact is, information about your organization is projected from all sorts of places, and your level of control over the different channels varies. Over some, you have complete control. Over others, indirect control, or none at all. We directly control what goes on Blend’s website. However, if one of my employees wrote something derogatory about the company on their Facebook page, we could ask them to remove it, but there’s no guarantee they would.

I think the litmus test for qualification as a “channel” is whether or not your organization has the ability and the authority to directly inject information into it. If not, then it might be a marketing touchpoint, but it’s not a digital channel.

For example – Blend is a partner with both EPiServer and eZ publish. On both of their websites, we have company profiles which are displayed to people looking for an implementation partner. These profiles are, without question, important marketing information that needs to be monitored and maintained by our marketing staff. However, it’s not a digital channel. We do not “publish” to it, we can simply request changes to it when it needs to be changed.

So, with that definition in mind, off we go.

Our Main Website

This one is obvious.

Our Main Website’s RSS Feed

There’s a tendency to just lump this with the website itself, but I’m going to break it out on its own. It’s “chained” to the website in the sense that everything that all news that gets posted there also gets posted to this feed, but the presentation and delivery methods differ so much that it’s really its own thing. Additionally, we’re toying with the creation of a “Blend Firehose” feed which would aggregate all our channels, and in that sense, RSS would become a very different thing than the website itself.

Gadgetopia

The blog you’re reading (here’s a link!) is owned by Blend and is a representation of the knowledge and competency of the company. It has a fair amount of recognition in the content-management space (one of our core services), and is referred to whenever I speak at a conference or webinar. It’s as much Blend’s website as the actual website.

Gadgetopia’s RSS Feed

All the same information about our website RSS feed applies here too, which the added wrinkle that Gadgetopia’s feed is much more well-traveled – I’d guess that 80% of the eyeballs that read a Gadgetopia post come from the RSS side, not the HTML side.

Our Twitter Accounts

We have two of them: @blendtweets is for general information and is the one people reference when tweeting about us. @blendquotes is another one we created to catalog the (many) stupid things people say around the office. Both have several hundred followers.

Our LinkedIn Page

There’s not a lot that happens out here, but some information requires occasional updating. The biggest thing we do with this is ensure that all our employees are correctly linked to it. (Though, now that LinkedIn is allowing company status updates, this might change.)

Our Flickr Account

We get a lot of use out of this – we post pictures of about every event that happens at the company, and it becomes a core way to communicate the culture of the organization, especially when trying to recruit.

Our Email Newsletter

We just started this (you can sign up here). It’s run out of MailChimp, and has several hundred subscribers.

Our Main Email Account

We have a main email account: info@blendinteractive.com. This is a inbound channel only, in that we don’t proactively send emails from it, but emails come into it that need to be responded to, but the quality and timeliness of those responses are a reflection on the company, so it’s channel all the same. (This is the only inbound channel we have, though I’m sure other companies have many more – every form submission from your website could be considered an inbound channel.)

Our Facebook Page

There’s quite bit of information about the company out there. It has several hundred subscribers, and we post information to it regularly. It’s an important channel in that it’s “push-ish” – information we put on the page is push into subscribers newsfeeds, which makes it much more visible than channels which require someone to proactively visit.

Our Google+ Page

Google+ is an untested medium, and who knows it will really take off, but anything we post to Facebook, we also post here. Likewise, everything that can be said about the Facebook channel also applies here, albeit with less eyeballs looking at it.

Our Slideshare Account

We recently opened a Slideshare account to post all the decks from various Blend speaking engagements.

So, that’s it for direct digital channels. From here on out, things get a little more blurry –

There’s one another channel that’s “official-ish” – Corey’s blog at eatingelephant.com. We encouraged Corey to start this blog to capture some mindshare in the content strategy space, but we also insisted that it belong to him, not us. As such, Corey owns the domain name, and we stay out of it. However, the blog is a direct reflection of a core service offering of Blend, and I refer clients to it, so it becomes a somewhat official channel for Blend-related information.

Beyond this, there are channels which are sources of information about the company, no-doubt, but are personal to our employees. These channels have differing degrees of relevancy to the business.

For instance, all of our employees have Twitter accounts, and many of them tweet about core competencies of company which means they’re a reflection of the capabilities of the company. However, we have no control over them. I single Twitter out here because it’s the one employee-controlled channel which reflects most directly on our business – Seth tweets about .Net development a lot, Corey tweets about content strategy, etc.

There are other employee-controlled channels which slide further and further down the “chain of relevancy.” Our employees’ LinkedIn profiles, for instance – I’m quite interested in what information they provide here since it reflects on their competency as a professional, but I have no control over it. Their LinkedIn profile will outlive their time at Blend.

Then, at the bottom, we have things like our employees’ Facebook pages. I don’t know any employee that talks about business much on Facebook (I think I’m friends with all the employees at Blend), but there’s a potential that they could do something here that reflects on the company in some way. However, again, I have zero control over this, so its not a channel anymore than what an employee says at a dinner party is a channel.

(I can think of only one instance where an employee put something on Facebook that we took issue with. It wasn’t derogatory, but it did reveal something that wasn’t quite ready for public disclosure. We asked the employee to remove it, and he did.)

So, in the end, the definition of a “digital channel” can get slippery, and it starts to drift into things like corporate social media policy. Your organization leaks information from a thousand holes, and you only have control over a select number of them.

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ExpressPark

Posted: January 8, 2012, 11:38 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Between the Lines: Los Angeles is trying to solve its parking problem by using technology to price parking spots by supply and demand, in real-time.

Called ExpressPark, the 6,000-meter array will be installed on downtown streets and lots, along with sensors buried in the pavement of every parking spot to detect the presence of cars and price accordingly, from as little as 50 cents an hour to $6. Street parking, like pork bellies, will be open to market forces. As blocks fill, prices will rise; when occupancy drops, so will rates. In an area like downtown, ideal for Shoup’s progressive pricing, people will park based on how much they’re willing to pay versus how far they are willing to walk to a destination.

So, the price for a spot will vary based on how often its filled vs. empty, and how many other spots are available in the immediate vicinity.

ExpressPark is just one item in a larger, excellent article about the problem of parking in general in Los Angeles.

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The Drive to Structure Data

Posted: January 8, 2012, 11:20 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

How Trello is different: Joel Spolsky makes a lot of great points in this article about Trello, but this one really stuck with me:

Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations.” Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table.

[…] most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.

Bing! A light went off in my head.

The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures.

“Just fancy data structures” – there’s a lot to that statement, under the covers. I’m convinced that people have a fundamental drive to structure data, and that’s really all that a lot of applications are doing – letting them take some amorphous domain of information and put structure around it. Excel is the granddaddy of this idea, because rows and columns – the classic tabular structure – makes the most sense to humans and fits the most situations.

When Joe and I went to Chicago for the first Building of Basecamp seminar, Jason Fried talked about some of the unexpected things people were using the app for. One that I remember was to plan a wedding – there’s a lot of information involved with planninga wedding, and Basecamp let them structure it. Then 37 Signals came out with Backpack, which essentially let people put structure around their random thoughts.

We can even trace this need for structure all the way back to the wiki itself – pages of content with text grouped into headings, and organized into categories and a network of inter-linked pages. This concept of organizing and structuring information is innate to humankind. I’m convinced that libraries weren’t just about the accumulation of knowledge, but were also some subconscious need to structure and organize it all.

Anyway, the article is absolutely worth reading. There’s quite a bit information in there about business models, horizontal vs. vertical applications, web-based vs. installed applications, and how they intend to make money with Trello. A great read all-around.

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What an RSS Purge Taught Me About How I Consume Information

Posted: January 7, 2012, 1:32 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

I’m making a very concerted attempt lately to cut down on the RSS feeds I consume. Earlier this year, it had reached neurotic levels – Google Reader was like a heroin addiction. Because of this, longer-form media was getting squeezed out – I was reading less books, which bothered me. My life had become a series of updates.

So, I went on an RSS purge. In doing this I made some important distinctions between volume, signal-vs-noise ratio (SVN), value, and depth.

First, some definitions –

Volume is the raw number of posts per…month, let’s say. A low traffic blog might have one or two. A high traffic blog might have 200 or more (5-6 a day). Some really high traffic blogs had 20 posts a day, even.

Signal vs. Noise is the ratio of stuff that interests me compared to the amount of stuff that doesn’t. Some blogs have a non-stop stream of stuff that I star in Google Reader because I really want to know more. Some blogs have a non-stop stream of stuff I just don’t care about.

Value is the subjective value of the content to my life as a whole. While I think lolcats are very funny, they’re also pretty trivial and they add virtual nothing to my life in the big picture. Conversely, there are many blogs with content that I toss around in my head for days and that has a very real impact on my life and career.

Depth is highly related to value – it refers to what level the content requires analysis. One thing the lolcats have in their favor is that they’re the cotton candy of blog posts – they’re gone in an instant and require very little thought or follow-up. I never blog about lolcats. I might Skype a link over to Joe, but that’s about it. So is depth good or bad? It’s tough to say. Low-depth means easy to process, but this usually also means lower value. High-depth means more commitment to analyze the content, but also (presumably) more value.

So, with this in mind, I came to some conclusions –

Low volume blogs were easy to evaluate – low volume, low-SVN and low-value got thrown away. I had a lot of those. They just accumulate, and since they’re so low volume, you don’t think about them much. Now, understand that low-volume almost automatically means higher SVN (less noise, after all). Still, a lot of them had little value or depth, so I tossed them.

Also out were the blogs with such low volume – maybe one post every couple months – that I could barely remember what they were about and had to struggle redefine the context of what I was reading every time. If every time you post something I have struggle to remember who you are, it’s tough to be interesting.

On the other side were low-volume and high-value blogs (looking at you, Seth Gottlieb). These obviously stayed. This is really the winning combination: low volume, high SVN, and high value – that’s a recipe for a good blog. I have some blogs where I kind of dread new posts because I know they’ll have such high value and high depth that I’ll get sucked into them. This is a good problem to have.

So, low volume blogs were easy. The high volume blogs get more complicated –

Blogs that were high-traffic and low SVN were easy kills. MetaFilter, for instance. I like MetaFilter and I’ve subscribed to it ever since I first started using RSS, but the number of posts I was interested in versus the total volume made this a no-brainer. Every day there’s probably one meaningful post for me, out of 50-60 total, and that post is usually of fairly meaningless value in the big picture. Interesting, sure, but trivia usually.

However, let’s consider CMSWire. It’s the same as MetaFilter in terms of traffic and SVN – lots of posts, but relatively few that I’m interested in. This is nothing against CMSWire, it’s just that it covers a really broad spectrum of the industry, and I just do WCMS work, so there’s a lot that doesn’t apply to me. But, in this case, the value is high – this is my industry, and that one out of 30 that interests me is usually pretty important. So, CMSWire stayed.

Low depth became a positive in a lot of cases. Consider Bring a Trailer, which is a neat blog about cool cars found for sale around the internet. It’s high traffic and medium SVN – I’m interested in maybe half the posts. Value is middle-of-the-road – I’m a car guy so I like it, but it doesn’t really contribute to my life in any meaningful way. But the saving grace of Bring a Trailer is a lack of depth – I can review a post in 10 seconds, enjoy it, then – poof! —- it’s gone, out of my head. Posts are nice and superficial, not requiring much thought, nor much follow-up. So, it stayed for now.

This brings us, then, to the really problematic ones, and the ones that caused me the most pain to get rid of: high-volume, high-SVN, and high-value. These are blogs that push a lot of traffic, and most of it is really good.

A couple come to mind: The Atlantic Cities and Stowe Boyd. Both were tough calls, but I had to drop both because they were consuming too much time.

The Atlantic Cities was high traffic, for sure. SVN ratio was high too – I was interested in a pretty high ratio of posts. Value was high, not for professional reasons but because I find urban planning really interesting. Finally , depth was high strictly because most of their posts are long. They’re really full articles, not just links and excerpts, so I would usually star them to read them later, which meant there was follow-up involved.

Stowe Boyd was similar. High traffic, high SVN, and high value for professional reasons – Stowe finds a lot of great information about web culture. Depth was also high, but for different reasons than The Atlantic Cities. Stowe’s posts were short – mainly links to things he found – but I’d always follow the link and the content behind the link would be sticky enough to suck me in.

These two blogs forced me to confront a sad fact – sometimes, less is more. Too much good content can be intimidating and stressful. That sounds ridiculous, but it’s true – both The Atlantic Cities and Stowe Boyd suffered from the fact that they were both so good and had so much volume. With both of them, I just felt like I couldn’t keep up, and – worse – not keeping up would cause me to miss a lot and I would feel bad about this fact.

What I found is that I about star these posts in Google Reader, or put them in Instapaper to read later. And then I wouldn’t get to them. They would stack up. It got to the point where Saturday mornings become “RSS catch up” time. I would spend up to five hours reading saved posts. While this sounds awesome, it took on the tone of compulsion – I just had to clear the queue, and I wasn’t really giving them as much thought or analysis as I wanted to, or as they needed to really absorb them.

So, paradoxically perhaps, I abandoned both of them. This sounds a little absurd, I know, but I suspect there’s a much larger point here about the fear of missing out – you can’t feel bad about missing something you don’t know about. Knowing I wasn’t getting to all this great content caused background stress.

When it comes to blog volume, you have to take your depth into account, though I don’t have any hard and fast guidelines around this. If you’re just tossing out links, then you can afford to post more. If you’re writing feature-length articles, then you post less.

(The problem is, as Stowe proved, depth and value are intertwined. Even just tossing out links is problematic if the consumer is riveted by your subject matter. Interest creates depth. The same link, sent to two different people, will be consumed at different depths, depending on their interest level. There’s probably a long discussion about personalization lurking in here somewhere…)

And, finally, this brings us to the most important question of all: did I keep lolcats? Sadly, no, I didn’t. Traffic was too high. While SVN was high – they’re mostly all genuinely funny – and depth was low, I just couldn’t quite figure out what value lolcats was bringing to my life, so I deleted it from my reader.

May Ceiling Cat have mercy on my soul.

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Content Choreography

Posted: January 7, 2012, 10:35 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Content Choreography - The Art of Dynamic Web Content: I like this new name – “content choreography” – for a summation of all the skills and governance required to make content work, along with the coordination to make them all work together.

It’s relatively straightforward to distill content strategy and information architecture down to their bare elements, and then make sure those elements are covered in your organization. It’s much harder to get your arms around all of those elements and get them working together towards a common goal.

It turns out that the whole is more than just the sum of its parts.

Earley and Associates relates a story of how they were working with an organization on a huge taxonomy project, when they ran into a problem.

While we could explain in detail every taxonomy, technique and task, and how it would be used in every workgroup on the project to coordinate the dynamic content experience, it took too long to communicate the vision. By describing each element individually, it looked like it was already covered by each of the teams. It crossed every system layer and organization, but was too big for any one team to take on the responsibility of making sure all the pieces were designed to work together.

This is one of those situation where you have a checklist and you can go down each item and say, “yeah, we got that.” But there’s no item at the bottom for, “Now, make it all work together.”

I wonder if there’s a special discipline of project management, just for content projects?

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Do Programming Puzzles During Interviews Work?

Posted: January 7, 2012, 10:22 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Why we don’t hire programmers based on puzzles, API quizzes, math riddles, or other parlor tricks: I’ve always had a very uneasy feeling about those job interview programming puzzles because I suspected I would be terrible at them. I’m glad someone else feels the same. Having a candidate perform under such unnatural circumstances just can’t be an accurate indication of their potential value to your organization.

I’ve known fabulous programmers flame out in the quizzing cage and terrible ones excel. So unless you’re specifically hiring someone to design you the next sorting algorithm, making them do so on the white board is a poor gauge of future success.

The only reliable gauge I’ve found for future programmer success is looking at real code they’ve written, talking through bigger picture issues, and, if all that is swell, trying them out for size.

Read some of the comment – they’re quite good. The first one is great and completely true.

I once did not get a job because I couldn’t do vanilla JS on paper, and I couldn’t solve a faux columns problem in pure CSS without hacks or something…[…]

Anyway… I remember saying to the guy, “I don’t know how to do this but in a normal situation I would spend 5 minutes googling for it, find the solution, and implement it. After a couple of regular tasks, I’d probably have it memorized for a while.”

It’s like, dude: No one works like this. No one is forced to write code on whiteboards and paper in front of their boss without the internet to look things up. That would be very counterproductive.

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Palantir

Posted: January 5, 2012, 8:45 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon: I love this article about Palantir, software that government/military is using to coordinate anti-terrorism operations (and lots of other stuff, no-doubt). Based on the description, it’s essentially every awesome movie-style data interface come to life.

In Afghanistan, U.S. Special Operations Forces use Palantir to plan assaults. They type a village’s name into the system and a map of the village appears, detailing the locations of all reported shooting skirmishes and IED, or improvised explosive device, incidents. Using the timeline function, the soldiers can see where the most recent attacks originated and plot their takeover of the village […] “It’s the combination of every analytical tool you could ever dream of,” Reading says. “You will know every single bad guy in your area.”

[…] Using Palantir technology, the FBI can now instantly compile thorough dossiers on U.S. citizens, tying together surveillance video outside a drugstore with credit-card transactions, cell-phone call records, e-mails, airplane travel records, and Web search information.

[…] “I don’t think Palantir the firm is evil,” he says. “I think their clients could be using it for evil things.”

This is hardcore gee-whiz stuff, but I’m sure it’s also the type of thing that keeps privacy advocates up at night. The potential for abuse here is huge, obviously.

This reminds me similar software from a couple of decades ago called Inslaw. The story behind what that software did and what became of it is amazing.

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Why Trolling is So Prevalent

Posted: January 5, 2012, 8:38 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

How the internet created an age of rage: A good post that examines why comment threads are such a disaster these days. There are lots of reasons, but I maintain that this is 90% of it.

The psychologists call it “deindividuation”. It’s what happens when social norms are withdrawn because identities are concealed. The classic deindividuation experiment concerned American children at Halloween. Trick-or-treaters were invited to take sweets left in the hall of a house on a table on which there was also a sum of money. When children arrived singly, and not wearing masks, only 8% of them stole any of the money. When they were in larger groups, with their identities concealed by fancy dress, that number rose to 80%. The combination of a faceless crowd and personal anonymity provoked individuals into breaking rules that under “normal” circumstances they would not have considered.

I’ve long-maintained that the average comment threads on a mainstream news article make me sad to be alive.

(Worth nothing too – the atheism subreddit went beyond the pale recently with comments on a post by a 15-year-old girl. I’ve been around the Net for a long time, but some of these are just unreal. These are things these people would never (1) say to this girl in-person, or (2) say if their identities were known. Deindividuation writ large.)

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Do Your Home Page Wireframes Last

Posted: January 4, 2012, 1:08 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Why you should do your homepage wireframe last: Seth absolutely nails this.

When building websites, I always recommend developing the home page last because the purpose of the homepage is to highlight content within the site. You need build out the site so you have something to highlight before you build the homepage.

The bottom line is that the home page is a window into, and an aggregation of – all the other content on the site. If don’t know what that content is, you’re going to have a tough time pulling together a wireframe for the home page.

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Human Names Defy Any Assumptions

Posted: January 4, 2012, 1:02 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names: So, you need a split a full name into first and last names? No problem – split them on the space. That will work perfectly, right Mary Jo Van Dyke?

This guy is an American making a living as a programmer in Japan. He has a lot to say about assumptions programmers make about names. (Note, there are all myths…)

1. People have exactly one canonical full name.
2. People have exactly one full name which they go by.
3. People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name.
4. People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.
5. People have exactly N names, for any value of N.
6. People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.
[…]

And it goes on and on and on. He has forgotten more about working with names than I am likely to ever know.

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The Art of Asking Good Questions

Posted: January 2, 2012, 4:13 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

How to Ask a Smart Question: I absolutely loved this article that dissects the art of asking a good question. It groups questions into “levels” of depth, and categorizes them.

For instance, Level One includes Definitions and Clarifications like:

How do you define X?
What does X mean?

Also in Level One are Contextuals and Analyzers. In Level Two, we find things like Comparatives:

How is X like Y?

And Causals:

What caused X to happen?

In Level Three, we find advanced questions like Counterfactuals:

How things be different if X happened (or did not happen)?

This is just one part of a very well-written article that really digs down into the anatomy of a question and figures out what makes a good one, and what type and phrasing of a question will give you the most bang for the buck. Essentially, if you encountered your intellectual idol, and were only able to ask them X number of questions about a specific topic, this would help you form those questions in such a way that you got the most benefit.

It absolutely mirrors how I approach learning something new – working my way down through deeper and deeper levels of questions, getting more and more abstract.

The art of asking good questions is becoming more and more ignored as it becomes easier to ask them. These days you can toss a question out on the Net and have thousands of people see it. That means more people who might understand it (not matter how poorly you word it), might take pity on you, or might want to just shut you up. Because of this, there’s less and less reason to really want to learn how to ask questions well.

If you also like this sort of thing, open-source guru Eric Raymond has written a similar guide more geared towards Usenet back in the day: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way.

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The End of the PostSecret iPhone App

Posted: January 2, 2012, 3:50 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

The PostSecret iPhone App is Now Closed: Sad end to the PostSecret iPhone app.

99% of the secrets created were in the spirit of PostSecret. Unfortunately, the scale of secrets was so large that even 1% of bad content was overwhelming for our dedicated team of volunteer moderators who worked 24 hours a day 7 days a week removing content that was not just pornographic but also gruesome and at times threatening.

Bad content caused users to complain to me, Apple and the FBI. I was contacted by law enforcement about bad content on the App. Threats were made against users, moderators and my family. (Two specific threats were made that I am unable to talk about). As much as we tried, we were unable to maintain a bully-free environment. Weeks ago I had to remove the App from my daughter’s phone.

I was always a little ambivalent about the app. I appreciate that it made it easier for people to submit secrets, but one of the cool things about PostSecret has always been that people had to write an actual postcard and send it in. It took a certain level of time, creativity, and commitment.

I thought that perhaps the app diluted the quality of the submissions by making a little too easy.

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Habits of Information Consumption

Posted: December 31, 2011, 11:31 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

A Unified Theory for Information Consumption: I enjoyed this article from Rob Malda (of Slashdot fame) about the headaches of information consumption. He laments the lack of a uber-tool around this task:

Right now, my browser requires 4-6 tabs open at all times into different systems with different UIs, and different requirements. What is required of the user of an RSS reader, a Mail User, and a couple of social networks, and a few popular news aggregators is complicated and confusing. And it seems like the tools required to happily consume one is rarely available in another.

I found this post from a subsequent post about the reliability of email, and how different mechanisms lend themselves to two-way communication or not.

Other streams vary in their reliability: SMS sometimes doesn’t deliver. If you log out of IRC, you might miss 20 minutes of discussion. After you reboot, you forget to re-launch iChat and nobody can get ahold of you on AIM. These are highly unreliable networks. In a great many cases, you won’t even get the message. They might be very rapid delivery mechanisms. A text message will make my phone vibrate (wooo, thanks!) but my phone might be off. Or my cel coverage might be spotty. And I might never get that text. I just don’t trust it. And neither do you.

I enjoyed his theorizing about different streams of information and what they require in terms of tools. I’m quite interested in information consumption habits and how the Internet has changed them.

As humans, we’re becoming “trained” to consume “posts,” feed to us in “channels” in chronological order. I feel like we’re adapting our thought processes to account for this. The amount of consistent information we consume in one sitting is going down, and we’re becoming inculcated to expect a stream of smaller bits, fired at us in order.

I’m fascinated how this will change the generation that has grown up knowing nothing else.

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Comprising a Network Through the Printer

Posted: December 30, 2011, 11:31 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Printer malware: print a malicious document, expose your whole LAN: Holy cats, this is so not cool.

As part of his presentation, he performed two demonstrations: in the first, he sent a document to a printer that contained a malicious version of the OS that caused it to copy the documents it printed and post them to an IP address on the Internet; in the second, he took over a remote printer with a malicious document, caused that printer to scan the LAN for vulnerable PCs, compromise a PC, and turn it into a proxy that gave him access through the firewall (I got shivers).

So, by just getting someone to print a certain document, he compromised the entire network.

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Write or Die

Posted: December 27, 2011, 7:07 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Write or Die: And with this, the consequences for distraction come full circle.

Write or Die is a new kind of writing productivity application that forces you to write by providing consequences for distraction and procrastination.

As long as you keep typing, you’re fine, but if you become distracted, punishment will ensue. Everything is configurable, name your word goal, time goal and preferred punishment, then start writing! Once you’re done, export your writing to Dropbox, Email, Clipboard or Text file.

You can set consequences to “Gentle,” “Normal,” and “Kamikaze.” Some of the consequences are that it won’t save or it plays an unpleasant noise. However, in Kamikaze mode, it starts deleting your words if you stop typing.

I don’t know if this is brilliant or sad.

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Volkswagen’s Email Blackout

Posted: December 27, 2011, 5:09 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Volkswagen Agrees to Curb Company E-Mail in Off Hours: Volkswagen has come to an agreement with their labor union to block email to mobile devices during off-hours:

Under an agreement reached this week with labor representatives, staff members at Volkswagen will receive e-mails via BlackBerry from half an hour before they start work until half an hour after they finish, and will be in blackout mode the rest of the time, a spokesman for the company said.

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A History of Word Processing

Posted: December 27, 2011, 4:14 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

The Muses of Insert, Delete and Execute: I enjoyed this article about someone writing a book about the history of word processing and how it has affected writing throughout the ages:

Uncovering a clean answer to the question “Who was the first novelist to use a word processor?” is a trickier business, though Mr. Kirschenbaum has promising leads. Through his agent he recently heard that the science-fiction writer Frank Herbert, the author of “Dune,” who died in 1986, may have submitted work to his publisher in the late 1970s on 8-inch floppy disks.

Here’s his website. The book is due to be called “Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing,” and will be published sometime in 2013.

It’s probably high time someone looked at this. I imagine that word processing has driven enormous change in the way we write, and the way we present text.

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Cloudmakers: The AI Game

Posted: December 20, 2011, 1:37 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Artificial Intelligence: I loved this description of an augmented reality game played online with the released of AI in 2001. I had no idea this happened:

On the bottom right “S” in “Summer 2001,” you may notice five little hash marks. The “U” has none, but the other letters and numbers each have at least one — 3 on each of the “M”s, two on the “E,” etc. In total, including the blank “U,” we get ten numerals — which, in the U.S., is the number of numerals in a phone number. In this case, it’s (503) 321-5122. Call that number today and you’ll be asked to set up your voicemail box. But if you called that number in 2001, you received a clue […]

It goes on the involve websites, email, etc. There’s a detailed guide to the game available via Wayback here.

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Article Length and Read It Later

Posted: December 20, 2011, 1:33 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Is it just 8,000-word epics that make people hit “Read Later”? Some interesting stats in this article about the type of pages that are being saved with Read It Later (which stands in here for any number of similar tools).

What you can see here is that, by far, the largest number of articles that are being saved are short — under 500 words. The number of articles saved drops off quickly at word counts higher than that.

[…] the evidence seems to be that people find time-shifting useful regardless of length, and that using these tools for really long work is more of an edge case than common usage. It appears the user’s thought process is closer to “Let me read this later” than “Let me read this later because it’s really long and worthy.”

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Nissan GT-R’s Launch Mode Governance

Posted: December 8, 2011, 6:28 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

The Nissan GT-R is a blindingly fast car. It has a “launch mode” for hard acceleration runs that’s apparently pretty rough on the drivetrain. Here’s how they make sure you’re not too stupid (read the last sentence):

[Launch mode] is activated by setting the Transmission and VDC to “R” mode (the Suspension settings can be left in normal mode), holding the brakes, then the throttle, and finally releasing the brakes. The engine speed is now held at 4,000 rpm in this mode, and it no longer voids the warranty. However, the system allows a maximum of 4 consecutive hard launches before locking itself out, after which it can be unlocked by driving normally for 1.5 miles.

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Assault with a Deadly Panda

Posted: December 6, 2011, 7:55 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Is This the End For Content Farms?: Google’s attempt to stifle content farms (the “Panda” algorithm changes) just might be working. CMSWire reveals this email from Bright Hub to its freelancers, effectively firing them all:

The last few months have been particularly challenging. Like many companies we are facing the reality of a changed economy, while simultaneously working to increase visitors in a post-Panda world.

I commend them for honesty. A lot of companies would be oblique about their reasoning, but Bright Hub names Panda specifically.

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Readability is the New Black

Posted: November 29, 2011, 5:17 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

The Readable Future: I’ve noticed a big trend in this direction. I think it’s a natural backlash against invasive advertising.

The ability to read uncluttered web pages is going mainstream.

I made the point recently that technical people can avoid, or at least cut down on, ads, sharing buttons, and clutter when reading web pages — they have RSS readers, Instapaper, Readability, Safari’s Reader button, AdBlock, Flipboard, Zite, and so on.

Not all of these technologies were made with the goal of uncluttering web pages, but they have that effect.

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Heating Your Home with a Data Center

Posted: November 27, 2011, 4:35 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Turn On the Server. It’s Cold Inside.: This is either brilliant or ridiculous. Perhaps both? I love the idea, though.

The paper looks at how the servers — though still operated by their companies — could be placed inside homes and used as a source of heat. The authors call the concept the “data furnace.”

They acknowledge that it is more likely that data furnaces, if adopted, would be placed first in basements of office and apartment buildings, not in individual homes. But as a “thought-provoking exercise,” the authors give homes the bulk of their attention.

I worked at Citibank in Sioux Falls for 10 years. The call center floors each had hundreds and hundreds of cubicles, each with a computer. The accepted rumor was that the buildings were not explicitly heated, but just warmed by the CPUs of what amount to probably 5,000 individual machines. It seemed a little far-fetched to me, but everyone swore it was the truth.

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Checking the Box: How CMS Feature Support Is Not a Binary Question

Posted: November 26, 2011, 6:51 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

I really hate CMS feature matrices. You see these in RFPs all the time – “Check the box if your CMS does X.”

The problem: support for a CMS feature is often not binary. Read that again. Here, I’ll indent it for you, just to make sure you don’t miss it:

Support for a particular CMS feature is often not binary.

The problem with a feature matrix (or, honestly, sites like cmsmatrix.org), is that they try to “flatten” what can be a nuanced question into a simple yes or no, and this is detrimental to anyone evaluating a CMS. You can’t stick a square peg into a round hole, and you often can’t answer “Do you support X?” with “yes” or “no.”

A couple years ago, I wrote this on a post about writing CMS RFPs:

A feature matrix reduces everything to a simple binary question: yes or no. Sadly, in content management, there are few things that are either yes or no. As with the scenario situation above, it’s often a question not of whether a feature exists, but how it works.

To try and flesh this idea out a bit, I sat down and through about all the different ways a feature might be “supported” by a CMS.

Here’s my list. I hope this is useful the next time you encounter an Excel document that’s 1,000-rows long, but only three columns wide.

(Thanks go to Seth Gottlieb and Tony Byrne for some helpful discussions around this post.)

1. Supported Out-of-the Box

This is a good one – the requested feature is just supported, period. This is the time when checking the box on the feature matrix feels so good. It’s an expected feature, everyone agrees on the label and the functionality, and it just works. Awesome.

Check the box, we’re good here.

2. Supported Through Configuration

In this situation, the requested feature doesn’t run out of the box, but the site can be configured to do it without having to develop for it.

Need to store and display the author’s current mood with your blog posts? Well, that’s not supported out-of-the-box in Drupal, but you could create a new field for it, and configure it to display, and with some CSS – voila! – you now have it.

Is this out-of-the-box? I don’t think so. Someone with an intimate understanding of how Drupal works has to go in and configure the system to do what you want, but at the same time, no one had to write any code, so it’s pretty good.

Can you check the box for this type of support? I think so, perhaps with a footnote or something.

3. Supported Through an Existing Plugin

Here, the CMS may not support the requested feature, but the problem has been solved before and wrapped up into reusable plugin that does support it.

CMS developers tend to a share a lot of code. For many systems, there are libraries of modules, plugins, extensions, and integrations (many word for the same thing) that can be added to the base system to enable all sorts of features. If a CMS was built with this in mind, it supports a lot of extra functionality through these plugins.

Can you check the box for this? Probably, though you need to mention that you’re not completed the feature matrix in the context of CMS X, but rather CMS X Supported By Plugins A, B, and C. In some cases, that unique combination might comprise a unique product in-and-of itself.

4. Supported Through Expected Development

In this situation, the feature is support through development that is expected with the average CMS integration.

Probably 99% of CMS integrations require some development. At the very least, templates have to be written, and they often contain logical processing, beyond just spitting out data. Some systems are more configurable than others, but for every Drupal, there are systems that present nothing more than an API you have to develop against.

This is what I call “expected development.” It’s development that you know you’re going to have to put in when you integrate a system. You’re going to have to write templates, you might have to write some code for a workflow or two, and you’re going to wrap some logic around the special navigation scheme you want. This doesn’t exist out-of-the-box, and it’s not something easily configurable.

But, at the same time, you’re not re-inventing the wheel. This is development that you or your integrator knows is coming, and the feature is not difficult to put together. The CMS was likely designed with this situation in mind, and integration points exist to support accomplishing exactly what you want to do. Furthermore, you’ve done this same thing in the past, so it’s a known quantity.

(So, if this is so common, why is it not supported out-of-the-box or through configuration? Because it comes up so seldom, or is so nuanced in every situation, that building it wouldn’t be worth at, and trying to make it configurable would be too confusing. Simply put, light development is the easiest, most efficient way to enable this feature.)

Can you check the box for this? Well…I think so, but I’m an integrator, so I know what’s coming – I know there’s going to be development involved. But an argument could be made that CMS X doesn’t support this, but CMS X and an average integration surrounding it supports this. If the client knows development is involved, perhaps they’ll understand, but with a feature matrix being evaluated in isolation, checking the box here could be considered deceptive.

5. Supported Through Custom Development

In this situation, the feature isn’t supported, and you have to do significant development to make it work.

Oftentimes, clients want something that’s not planned for by the designers of the CMS. They want to do something really out there or they want to integrate with something very specific to their organization (an internal, custom system, for instance).

This is what I call “custom development.” These are instances where you really have to break off some time and dig deep into the API. In some situations, I’ve called this “heroic development” because pulling it off can make you feel like the knight on the white horse, riding back to the village amidst cheers and marriage proposals.

In no way can your CMS say it “supports” what you just did. Indeed, there’s no way the designers of your CMS could have ever dreamed of someone doing what you just did, so how could they build in support for it?

However, your CMS can make your life a lot easier or harder in these situations. The quality of the API really shines through at times like this. A great API can make this really satisfying and victorious, while a bad API can destroy the morale of the team and render many desired features simply unobtainable.

So, an you check the box here? Not a chance. You can pimp your API and try to get the client to understand how flexible your system is, but you can’t check the box.

6. Supported Through Integration With Other Systems

Often, a desired feature is not supported in a CMS, but could be supported through usage or integration with some other system.

Do you want advanced analytics? Well, some systems are building this in, but will it really be much better than Google Analytics? Perhaps your system can embed a GA widget somewhere in the admin interface which solves this problem. Need forms? Perhaps using Wufoo might be smarter instead.

Can you check the box here? I don’t think so – not without significant explanation, at least.

7. Supported Through Process or Workaround

Perhaps the feature the client wants is not really what they need. Perhaps there’s a question-behind-the question that, if solved, would eliminate their need for this particular feature.

Example: the client says they need a “sophisticated workflow system.” However, they really just want to make sure the CEO gets an email every time a press release is issued. Well, maybe simple subscription would work better here. Or maybe the CEO just needs an RSS feed in his Outlook. Or maybe a Twitter notification is the better answer.

In addition to situations where the client just doesn’t know what they really need, you have situations where the system can’t support something, but there’s a workaround that’s really not that odious.

Perhaps the need for collaboration can be solved by roughing out content in Google Docs, then creating a page in the CMS for further review. Perfect? No. Clunky? Yes. But if the system solves every other problem nicely, it would suck to throw it out because of this one thing that it doesn’t solve.

Can you check the box for this one? Nope. You just have to leave it empty, and hope you get a chance to make your case.

(Thanks to Seth for this one.)

8. Not Supported

Sadly, sometimes it’s just not supported. An argument can be made that anything can be support with enough development, but that’s not an acceptable answer.

Sometimes you have to just hang your head and leave the box empty.

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Why IA is Hard: A Practical Application

Posted: November 26, 2011, 5:01 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Ethan Zuckerman wants you to eat your (news) vegetables — or at least have better information: I love this article, not only for the main idea (“dietary guidelines” for news), but for the sheer number of issues it raises about Information Architecture. It probably (and inadvertently) does the best job I’ve seen at showing how hard IA can be.

So, here’s the first-order problem – the problem we’re trying to solve through application of IA and analysis:

Ethan Zuckerman, the new director for the MIT Media Lab, wants to create some kind of system that shows you a summary of the topics of news you’re consuming. The idea is that you could see if you were deficient in any particular area – perhaps your consumption is tilted toward liberal sources, or perhaps you’ve been subconsciously avoiding news about the Arab Spring, etc.

This should be simple. Let’s get to it –

Sadly, the practical application of this theory gets complicated, very quickly. Yes, IA can get political:

First problem: As soon as you stick a label on something, it’s political.

“Anything tracked on a label is the subject of enormous lobbying,” he told me. “If you decide that you’re going to start tracking saturated versus unsaturated fat, there’s enormous controversy over that, and whether or not we should be subdividing out sodium and potassium….Everyone has vested interest.”

Once you get past that, there’s a problem in structuring information:

How do you design a hierarchy that is comprehensive but precise? Future-proof? At what point in the Tunisian revolution does the story become a category; and at what point does that category become a subcategory, of Arab Spring? Is a story about a medical study labeled Science, Health, Health & Science, or Medicine? Moreover, a hierarchy that works for one publication may not work for another. This is how even descriptive labeling gets political.

So, let’s just use some tagging and semantic analysis and let a computer figure it out! That’ll work, right? Well, no.

A story about the German economy might return the entities “Germany,” “economy,” “Angela Merkel,” and “Euro,” to name a few. A computer can easily pluck those entities out of text, but there are two problems: A human has to tell a computer what entities are important, one, and two, entities are not hierarchical. As far as a computer is concerned, “Angela Merkel” is not a subcategory of “German politicians” or “world leaders” — it’s just a flat piece of metadata.

Even if we get past that, where are we going to get all the data?

So where does he get all this data? When you’re talking about all of the news outlets in America, that’s a challenge. Zuckerman’s students were be able to build the New York Times contraption because they had access to publicly available, well-documented APIs (and were willing to use the Times’ existing taxonomy). Only a handful of major news organizations are so accessible.

And, back to the original problem, if we solve all these other problems, this one will work itself out, right? Well, no, probably not.

But does everyone want to see a digest of his own news nutrition, let alone look at someone else’s? I bet a lot of us are afraid of what it might say. Twenty-one years ago President Bush signed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act. Many local laws now mandate posting calorie counts in chain restaurants. And America is still pretty fat.

I just loved this whole article. I love the problem he’s trying to solve, but I also loved the analysis of all the meta-problems that go into solving that other problem. So, to solve the first order problem, you have to solve about a dozen second-order IA problems.

Yes, it turns out that organizing information is hard. If anyone wants to know why IA projects can get so expensive, have them go read this article.

(Also, if this idea of balancing your news sources is interesting to you, read The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser. It’s a great book that discusses the same thing in a much broader scale. Also, go read about homopily.)

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When Apple Does It, It’s Okay

Posted: November 24, 2011, 4:16 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Serving at the Pleasure of the King: My antipathy for Apple is no secret. But Jeff Atwood really hits the nail on the head with this post and explains why he has the same problems:

[…] as a software developer, I am deeply ambivalent about an Apple dominated future. Apple isn’t shy about cultivating the experience around their new iOS products and the App Store. There are unusually strict, often mysterious rules around what software developers can and cannot do — at least if they want entry into the App Store. And once you’re in, the rules can and will change at any time.

He explains the crux of the problem with the example of Apple replacing the much-loved Instapaper with their own Reading List:

If Microsoft added a feature to Windows that duplicated a popular application’s functionality, developers would be screaming bloody murder and rioting in the, er, blogs and web forums. But in the Mac world, if the king deems it necessary, then so it must be.

It’s that pervasive, appalling hypocrisy that kills me. Microsoft did things in the 90s that got them vilified and even prosecuted. When Apple does the same thing, they’re celebrated.

So it doesn’t really matter what your business practices are, so long as your hardware is pretty.

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Automatic Policing in Tennessee

Posted: November 22, 2011, 3:36 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Gigabit Cops: Here’s a description of some of the automation the Dept. of Public Safety in Chattanooga, Tennessee has enabled using their cities new gigabit network. This is either awesome or terrifying, depending on your point-of-view.

Automation is a major part of this new set of tools. With new sensors installed on streetlights and about 200 security cameras installed throughout the city, streetlights can automatically be turned on when something fishy’s happening. Officers can also turn on lights at will, or set an entire neighborhood’s streetlights flashing to warn of emergencies.

There’s a pedestrian bridge over the river leading to Coolidge Park that’s been a known hotspot for criminal activity. It’s a dark part of the park at night, and an easy place to deliberately stay out of sight. After responding to a number of incidents beneath the bridge over the years, police have tapped into the new high speed network to use security cameras on site to automatically alert officers when suspicious activity is detected. Officers can even tune into the feed from those cameras from within their squad cars, or remotely turn on lights in the area.

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TextRunner and Inference Engines

Posted: November 18, 2011, 1:23 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Extracting Meaning from Millions of Pages: I’m becoming quite interesting in finding ways for computers to make human-ish determinations about information. I talked about sentiment analysis the other day, and now here’s an article about — and a really good description of — an inference engine — a system that examines words and tries to understand them, and even make leaps of knowledge about them.

An inference engine attempts to understand relationships by examining the words which describe them, and by finding sets of word patterns called “triples.”

[There exists] a general model for how relationships are expressed in English that holds true no matter the topic. “For example, the simple pattern ‘entity1, verb, entity2’ covers the relationship ‘Edison invented the light bulb’ as well as ‘Microsoft acquired Farecast’ and many more,” he says. “TextRunner relies on this model, which is automatically learned from text, to analyze sentences and extract triples with high accuracy.”

What gets interesting from there, is that it then tries to make leaps by putting together seperate things that it has learned.

TextRunner also serves as a starting point for building inferences from natural-language queries, which is what the group is now working on. To give a simple example: if TextRunner finds a Web page that says “mammals are warm blooded” and another Web page that says “dogs are mammals,” an inference engine will produce the information that dogs are probably warm blooded.

TextRunner is available now. And, of course, Wolfram Alpha has been online for the last year.

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Logitech Drops Google TV

Posted: November 14, 2011, 7:29 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

Logitech says Google TV was a ‘big mistake’: This is too bad. Still waiting for someone to solve the TV problem.

Logitech Chief Executive Guerrino De Luca is writing off Google TV as a “big mistake” […] At an event for analysts and investors, De Luca called the 2010 launch of Google TV “a mistake of implementation of a gigantic nature,” according to The Verge.

De Luca said the company would bring “closure” to the “saga,” which included steep price cuts to the Logitech Revue set-top boxes by letting the inventory run out this quarter.

He said there are “no plans to introduce another box to replace Revue.”

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Have Analytics Cursed Journalism?

Posted: November 12, 2011, 6:52 am by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

I just watched Page One, which is a great documentary on the New York Times and its place in the post-print world. One recurring theme – hinted at a lot, and outright stated a couple times – is that the public often needs news that it doesn’t want to read.

They had an interview with Nick Denton of Gawker fame, who discussed the infamous Big Board which shows everyone how their stories are doing in realtime – how many hits are they getting, are the links being passed around, etc. As a writer for Gawker, you very much want to be on this board.

I read the same thing in AOL’s leaked media plan – traffic drives everything. It doesn’t matter what you write, just get more and more traffic, because we have analytics, and we can tell.

In Page One, they have a video clip of owner Sam Zell addressing the Tribune staff on this topic. he explains how they’re going to give the public exactly what they want. Someone from the audience says “But the public just wants puppy dogs.” Zell gets annoyed, accuses the person of “journalistic arrogance,” and ends by muttering “f*ck you.”

One of the biggest shifts from paper journalism to online journalism is that analytics can tell us exactly what people are reading, and, by extension, what they want to read. So we now know, more than ever before, that people want to read about Kim Kardashian’s wedding of the moment, rather than the war in Iraq.

What long-term effect will this have on journalism? Now that we know what people want, we also know that what they want is often frivolous and superficial. Is that judgmental? Perhaps. But you’d have to be an idiot not to know that the Kardashian wedding has very little long-term impact on anything, while the progress of the Eurozone economic crisis could drive this country into another recession.

Carl Bernstein is interviewed in the film, and he discussed how he and Bob Woodward pursued Watergate for two years, writing 100 stories the first year. The fact is, they never uncovered anything the FBI didn’t already know, but they kept the story in the news, and wouldn’t let it fade away, even when the public was completely uninterested.

If Watergate happened today, would it be the same? Were Woodward and Bernstein blessed by ignorance, not having any idea if anyone was reading their stories or really cared about them? More importantly, if they had a full analytics suite and a Big Board, would they turn their attention away from Watergate and to more culturally palatable stories that would get them on the Board?

Hard news are like vegetables. You didn’t want them as a kid, but you needed them. They served a vital purpose. But we wanted Twinkies, and if we never had a mother that hid the Twinkies and made sure we got our brussel sprouts, how healthy would that have been?

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3D Movies are Fading Away

Posted: November 12, 2011, 6:47 pm by editors@gadgetopia.com (Deane Barker)

3D’s fading promise: Hollywood’s recent love affair with 3D appears to be over:

[…] a majority of viewers chose to see a 3D picture, Pirates of the Caribbean 4, in the 2D format, thereby avoiding the higher price of 3D tickets. The same fate befell Kung-Fu Panda 2, Green Lantern, and the final Harry Potter sequel, all of which were expected to reap huge profits from 3D screenings. And if 3D was supposed to get audiences back into movie theaters, it didn’t work — cinema attendance dropped to a 17-year low this summer. Analysts are now predicting that the audience drop-off for 3D movies will only get worse, and investors are taking flight.

In addition to the high ticket prices, this can’t be helpful.

Studies have found that as many as 30 percent of viewers become nauseous while watching movies in 3D format, which requires a viewer’s eyes to focus on the screen while converging on the constantly changing distance of the 3D images.

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