Tom Smith’s: theOTHERblog

I’ve was quite excited when I saw this… Templatemaker, because the idea in it is that rather than tell a web crawler what to do, you basically let the dog smell the rabbit, let it off the lead and then ask it what’s in it’s mouth when it comes back.

It didn’t work.  This function says it all…

num_holes( )

… but then, looking more closely at it, it can’t work. Because if you were to teach it two pages with songs on, such as “Frank Black” and “Hank Williams”, it will return…

 Fr{{hole}} Wi{{hole}}liams

… which is not what I (or anyone) wants.

Ironically, this post begins having been locked out of my Flickr account since Yahoo took it over, so I’ve not been dumping my phone photos like I used to. I’ve found that my phone camera is a sort of visual memory. I often look back at it, amazed at the sights I’ve seen, taken a picture of, and then completely forgotten I’ve been there.

Double ironically, I tried Twitxr for a while, but the forgotten password routine doesn’t work…

I was astonished to find a hand-dryer in Kennedy’s bar in York that actually worked! It fires a thin jet of air and you lift your hands up and down through it.

Note: Kennedy’s has crap beer btw. Why can’t pubs do good beer (for me) AND good wine (for Sophie)? Is it so impossible a combination to manage?

It’s amazing that a hand-drier that works has taken so long to be invented. I can’t imagine what the first demo of the very first hand-driers must have been like, with people nodding their heads and putting in orders for something that warmed your hands slightly but made enough noise to reassure the girls in accounts that you’d actually washed your hands. And then dried them on the arse of your trousers.
This joy at finding something that worked for once was tempered by the fact that a few minutes earlier I’d been subjected to one of my biggest usability hates of all time, modern taps.

Why oh why do people like taps that are so difficult to use and need de-coding and experimenting with before you spray a huge jet of water all over your groin? Something the lovely hand-drier above won’t be able to sort out unless you take your trousers off and lift them up and down through the fine jets of air.

So, then on to the station, where there used to be an independent coffee shop (that did delicious toasted bacon rolls…and not in a bloody microwave) which has now been replaced with a Costa Coffee (the one on the bridge with the big clock).

They’ve tarted the place up a bit, replaced bacon rolls with sellaphane and cardboarded breakfast solutions but worst of all, off-center saucers that make a cup almost uncarryable! I await the injury claim court cases eagerly.

And finally… Every little helps…. You know that the saying, “Every little helps…” comes from a victorian cartoon in which an old lady was taking a leak into the sea, uttering the now immortal Hoskins/Wogan words.

And knowing that somehow makes everything make some sort of ironic sense.

p.s There is also another footnote about the WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress, which seems to have got to the pinnacle of Mount Good Enough To Use But Bad Enough To Drive You Bloody Loopy….

 I met Jonathan to swap hints and tips last week in Covent Garden (downstairs) whilst he took a few photographs for The Market Quarter, his new gourmet ecommerce site growing out of his (and my) work with Bedales in Borough Market. Interestingly, he used his camera to grab the incredients (quickly) from the labels for use on the site later.

I wonder if that would be a good web2.0 service? Email a picture, receive the text back. I’m sure its been done hasn’t it?

Rory Motion is riffing on James Street and Morrisons, he’s also playing at the Winning Post this Saturday.

Another Rich Application coming atcha… this time it’s page-turning cover-flow for PDFs….via Issuu - nowhereware. I’d really like a few collaboration tools thrown in here, even just the ability to add a Post-It note would be nice.

Cover flow is fast becoming what Lists used to be. Shopping will never be the same.

… You came to the right place, Searchme. Cover flow for search results. Rich interfaces are coming to get you, I wonder if Google have realised yet… or care.

I’ve just had a run with FriendFeed and it’s quite good at pulling all these web services (Flickr, Twitter, Blogs etc) together into a single page, a little like the Facebook “home” page without, well, the Facebook. I really couldn’t bring myself to invite all my contacts though, which is the point at which I could see this service becoming interesting, because adding my stuff does little more than any common or garden RSS reader. If friends and contacts add their stuff, then they are effectively helping me keep up with their stuff for me. There is real value there because with the best will in the world, I can’t keep up with the umpteen sites and services other people are trying… it’s not just blogs n flickr anymore kids!

On the train last week, I started work on what I think is a cool tool, that is a bit like FriendFeed but takes a very different approach. It assumes you/we can’t keep up with stuff. This for me is the only tenable starting point for creating web software nowadays. For example, how well-kept is your RSS reader? How many great information sources do you find yourself back at realising you haven’t subscribed yet? How often do you feel that you won’t bother subscribing to something because “you’ve got enough” feeds to last you till Thursday afternoon?

So I put it to you, that a site/service that you need to explicitly maintain is doomed to failure (in terms of subscriptions). It will simply not work, or become too much work… take your pick.

And the tool is aiming to do this… Work out what the components of identity are, such as…

• A blog
• A Flickr account
• A Twitter account
• A Facebook account
• A Delicious account
• A YouTube account
• An Upcoming account
• A LastFM account
• An email address

…and many more. Now the interesting thing is, is that everyone is different. Wouldn’t it be great if you could assume a blog was someone’s identity and from there crawl to find what their Flickr username was etc… but many people don’t blog, but do Twitter or both Delicious and StumbleUpon.

And isn’t it funny that Twitter and LastFM let you have profile pictures which would should/might we use when trying to piece together a Frankenstein’s version of someone’s online identity.

One thing is for sure, when someone lists their online identities we can get a very good picture of who they are online. Take a look at Andy’s blog ( OFFMESSAGE ), you can see what he’s reading (Delicious) and hear what he’s listening to (LastFM) and even to some degree, see what he’s seeing (Flickr).

You find yourself making snap judgements about someone’s online appearance based on what services they use. For example, the fact that there’s no Dopplr link says something (to me). Dopplr users all seem a bit crass and flashy to me, saying, “Oh look at how important I am because I’m in a foreign city”. That of course is thinly veiled jealously and I’ll be signing up for Dopplr as soon as I can afford air tickets to anywhere.

So, here’s the plan and premise…

• Peoples’ identities are made up of content created on an ever-expanding collection of sites and services. Expect this list to be at over 100 within the year for geeks like us. There will be attempts to consolidate systems (like Facebook did) but new facets and tools will keep emerging. Having a “Add service A/B/C” feature is not the way to go, because people will have created their own service “X/Y/Z” by tea-time.
• The people/information I would like to track is not a constant, it changes depending on context. So subscribing per se is a complete nonsense. I’m not suggesting that one can “discover” how certain peoples’ sites are connected, that way lies madness, but I would like to be able to both broaden and narrow my feed-space based on connections and usage.

I’ve got a sneaky suspicion that all of this is simpler than I just made it sound. Read between the lines.

Since my NorthPack post, they’ve Been Busy On NorthCrew Farm and have started adding a number of features.

Just in case the Linkbait-y title meant you perhaps didn’t get the real gist of the post, I’d like to re-iterate what I meant.

The post was not meant as moaning for moaning’s sake, it wasn’t having a go, and it definitely wasn’t a “What’s in it for me?” - all get thrown at you moment as 3HV suggests.

My point was this. I think NorthPack is a great initiative, but wanted to strongly point out how, despite its charm it was setting out on the wrong foot in terms of building a community. All communities are built, to some degree on a “what’s in for me” factor. Even if that factor is, “I get a warm feeling because I haven’t brutally killed anyone today”.

It all comes down to focus. I felt that NorthPack, wrongly, was focusing on NorthPack when, if it wants to be successful, I reckon it should really focus on interactions between members, enabling me (and everyone else to do/find/read things that my RSS reader doesn’t). Added value!

The difference is subtle. For example, there is a huge difference between being able to browse profiles, and being able to browse profiles near me. The first is a “feature” (yawn!) the second enables ME to do something with regards to other NorthPack members (membershiptastic!)

So…

• In the world of NorthPack, we are the “Social Objects”
• I really like the idea of a NorthPack Twitter channel. It is a “we” thing, well done!
• The stats are fun but can you now we-ify them? Let’s have a “Top of the Posts” chart
• Why not add a Post-code field to the profiles. Let’s worry about what we do with it later.
• Why not have a “NorthPack Stalk Suggestion Box”. This would allow people to recommend cool Northern bloggers. Their feed would get picked up, with their news shown in a sidebar. This would encourage them to sign-up and prevent NorthPack from becoming clique-y.

So… hope that’s clearer. All I wanted to say was that, if NorthPack want to really engage me and not be blown away by the next NorthPack, then you really do have to think about the “What’s in it for me” factor. And by me, I really don’t me… I mean all of us…. we.

So please, don’t go “feature mad”, keep up with the good work and keep focussing on the “we” factor.

Oh, finally… Uniting the North under the banner of a Flat Cap, is what my next post will be about.

(Newsflash, you have to change a Doncaster on the way to London from York today)

A while ago, my attempt to get my head around social media marketing looked like the image above. Today, as part of my Eat My Own Dog Food regime, it’s turned into an article called…

Five Social Media Marketing Strategies to help clients work out what they’re going to do with Facebook, Myspace, YouTube, SlideShare, Blogging, Wikis and all the other fun stuff out there.

 A nice octopussy map showing London tube map passenger traffic. I particularly like maps that use this data source, I often think it doesn’t get the credit it deserves. If you were to use this particular data source, which animal would your map look like?

And if you haven’t played with PicLens, shame on you. Like the Apple Dock, this will keep you entertained for hours. Or is that just me? Whoo-hoo! It’s still fun. I’d love to be able to do this for recent documents (with previews) on my computer.

Is this a “Lifestreams” interface done right? I think it might be.