Cafe Bucky

I completely agree with the Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols “There are too darned many Linuxes” opinion piece over on linux-watch.com.

There ARE way too many distros.

The point I would add to his piece is: for the outside world looking in (from Mac or Windows-land), the Linux landscape must look like utter confusion and anarchy. I gotta wonder how often an IT mammal is asked to “look at this Linux thing” by their management. They get back from lunch (one martini, because it’s only Monday), start poking around online, and panic - what the heck?! - what to choose?! By 3pm, they’ve worked up a sweat. By 4pm. they’ve located some Microsoft FUD article on how “Windows is cheaper to maintain”. By 5pm, they’ve sent off an email explaining why the company “should hold off on experimenting with Linux at this time, because there appears to be too much choice and crazyness to deal with”. By 5:05, the mammal is out the door, after ducking into their managers office long enough to agree that “maybe we’ll look at this Linux thing in Fiscal 2007″.

Although I may have embellished (what? me? embellish?!), I’m certain this isn’t too far from the truth. I’m firmly ensconced in the Mac & Linux camp, and cut my teeth on 4.1 BSD Unix in 1981 - and even I find it a little challenging to figure out which Linux distro to go with. (server: Debian, client: Ubuntu)

Hmm, maybe I should just make my own! Something like “Buckynix”. Then I could have it the way I want it.

Not!

A couple of days ago, I spied the link to the The Million Dollar Homepage off of kottke.org. The gist of the page is: there are a million pixels, and advertisers can buy them at $1 per pixel. They put up a graphic in that space that points to their site. The pixels are sold off in 10×10 blocks. It’s the brainchild of a 21 year old student in the UK. A snippet of it looks like this:

So how is the student (Alex Tew) doing? In a few weeks time, he sold enough space to pay for 3 years of college! As of this writing, he’s made $191,000.

Not bad. If nothing else, it proves the notion that a Good Idea Can Come From Anywhere, At Any Time. Hats off to Alex!

Of course, there may be a virtual flood of copycat sites. It’s not a hard idea to implement.

So I’ll toss out a few ideas on what the 2nd generation “ad collage” sites could do to possibly improve on the original:

• Tiers / Geo / Tags - I would have a Global view, and perhaps others that are restricted to a region (within 100 miles of a zip code), and/or a view based on search tags/keywords. You charge more for the ads that appear everywhere, and not as much for ads that are confined to a region or a keyword.
• Zooming - a 10×10 pixel block is a bit small. I was thinking it would be great to have the zooming effect of the Mac dock, so that the ads under the mouse cursor would be magnified. That’s an implementation nightmare though, because it would take 10,000 individual images to do it in HTML. Forget that! On the other hand, you COULD have a draggable window that displays a zoomed in view of the the current block under the cursor (along with its neighbors).
• Zoomed Animation - Alex made a very good choice in not allowing animated gifs. It would be way too hard to look at so many at once! It also gets in the way of his implementation, which is a basically one large concatenated graphic of the ads, along with a huge imagemap. Sane Choice! Now think about my previous idea of a draggable window within the browser frame - within that window, it would be fine for an advertiser to have an animated gif. Of course they would pay a little more for that, as opposed to a zoomed in look at their static gif.

Update: by “Global View”, I just mean a display of ads just like MDHP (for the advertisers that paid extra to be “everywhere”) - I’m not talking about ads placed on some world map.. although that’s a tangent worth thinking about

Quick mentions … The Party is Scaled Back!. Webzine 2005 was fun, strange, and inspirational. Wish I could have gone back for Sunday.

I’m keeping my eyes out for a contract. In the meantime, I’ve been putting a lot of work into porting FlexiPhoto to PHP 5. More about that when it’s time to post it.

The NetToberFest Wiki is up. You can IM me for the password to update. It’s a word that likes to party.

The Wiki is sort of overkill for a 12 hour party. The party is a warm-up event that I can see expanding (rent a hall, more space & people) in the future. I’ll need a fair bit of help just to pull off this small scale adventure; hence the Wiki!

Updated!

And let’s not forget the Beer!

I have a wild idea for a party: mix Social, Creative, and Tech types for an evening, and have fun digitizing the gig itself. A main goal is cross-pollination: someone who knows GarageBand can talk to the person that can edit video - a photographer can talk to someone who groks Flickr - writer meets Wiki person, and so on. It’s an intersection of Artists, Yakkers, and Hackers. Part Geek, Part Performance Art.

To back up a bit, I’m inspired by what I’ve been reading about BAR Camp, an impromptu weekend hackfest that took place last month. My thought is to have a party where sites & creative apps are demoed, and there’s WiFi all around, but also to cross pollinate a bit with, say, a few people who can get something going in GarageBand…. take that music and throw it into iMovie, and mix with scenes from the party itself. Now have someone wander around getting stories / commentary from the guests, and have them quickly demo how they do a podcast. Others tap in an entry or two into a Wiki (links to what got demoed). Someone writes funny captions that go in the video. Some are taking photos, and learning (or showing) the bit about making a slideshow.

Whatever … those are just some ideas. Part Geekfest. Part OctoberFest. Part Art. Bad News: can’t do it at my house. Good News: I can come up with a wee bit of $$ & some equipment to help make this happen (monitors, a few airport express/extreme base stations, a midi keyboard, game consoles, charcoal, lighter fluid, etc :-)
More Good News: this will be at my house

A quick thought - IP addresses have become increasingly LESS USEFUL for determining location.

Here and there on the web, you’ll come across sites (or services, such as Quova) that use your IP address to make a guess at where you are coming from. I expect these will fall out of favor over the next few years, for the following reasons:

• Security - When I log into my T-Mobile account at some random Starbucks (such as Denver CO, NYC, or San Francisco), or just use free WiFI (Bryant Park, NYC, OSCON in Portland, OR, etc.), I go through VPN to my ISP. Where do you think I am at that point? My IP address would have you believing I’m in Santa Rosa, CA. The rise of free & for-pay WiFi means an increase in the use of VPN. In other words, all those people in coffee shops, airport lounges, and public parks are potentially 1000’s of miles away from the guess you’d come up with, based on an IP address. As more users get hip to security, this trend will ramp up.
• Remote Access - Anyone that uses VNC or an equivalent remote access technique is doing the “I’m over here, but my computer is over there” bit. If I set up things so that I can use a Browser in Chicago to get at my desktop in Petaluma, and I run Safari on the desktop, where am I really coming from? Santa Rosa? (my ISP) Petaluma? (my computer) Chicago? (my PowerBook running a VNC java client in a browser). The permutations are endless. Once the software gets more mass-market friendly, the number of people using such services will seem endless as well.
• Proxy Servers - either via a large entity such as AOL, or an Educational institution or Commercial biz. You don’t have the user’s physical location; you have the location of the proxy. Ditto for anyone using an anonymous service to connect to your site (not to be confused with VPN).
• Why Someone Is Accessing - this is the hardest one of all to predict. Let’s say you sell widgets in 100’s of American cities (let’s say you’re Gap, Best Buy, or Home Depot , or whatever BigStore). I’m surfing because I want to see if you have something in stock. I happen to be in an airport lounge (thanks Jet Blue for the free WiFi!) Do you show me results based on where I live, where I happen to be, or where I’m going? (i.e. Petaluma, JFK, or NYC?)

To sum up, I think the use of IP addresses to determine location is not only going to decline in a big way - it’s going to fall off a cliff! Privacy, Security, and Intent (why one clicks on a given link) are just a few of the reasons.