Cafe Bucky

Ah, how remiss of me to go so long without posting …

Early rising commute bus work get home at dark blur.

My other excuse is the Olympics.

The post that’s been percolating in the noggin for a while is about the Widening Web Gap. It’s not quite brewed, but the gist of it is:

• When I started looking at the web around 1993, it was a very simple place. We didn’t even have frames or tables, and AJAX was merely a cleanser. The gap between the simplest web page and the most complex wasn’t that wide. User expectations were low. We were all just flat out fascinated to see pages from far flung places.
• The types of sites, and those using them, has absolutely exploded, and will continue to do so.
• The gap between those who barely use and understand the net, and those who are pushing the boundaries every day, is widening by the second. The 20th Century Web crowd are happy with bare minimum functionality — they’ll be damned if they have to learn a new concept, such as making use of an RSS feed, or rearranging options on a default start page. The Fast Forward Button crowd can never get enough. Pity the designers in between who try to appeal to both.
• I think we’ll see an increasingly tiered web. Some sites will consciously punt on the entry level users. Some will keep things so stripped down and basic that they’ll make AOL look like rocket science. Some will try to appeal to everyone and have the toughest job of all.
• I’ll be paying special attention to ETech next week, and am hoping to get the time to lay this out in a coherent way. There’s a lot of experimentation going on out there (check out any 10 sites from Kottke’s “The secret to Web 2.0″ post.) I am thinking we’ll hit a sort of saturation point soon, and that the next major bit will be “Web 3D”. More to come on all of this …

An inevitable question I’ll hear over the next few weeks or months will be “So, Where Do You See Yourself, Five Years From Now?”. There are many answers to that, and it would take too long to list them here.

So here’s one of the answers, focusing on “my personal tech projects”, as opposed to “getting a degree” or “travel” or “write a book”, etc. …

I’ve written about FlexiPhoto quite a bit. What I haven’t gone into is how ThereThen Addresses and Sub-posts tie in. The condensed version is: They Do! There’s an overall concept of being able to click on a link, and have a draggable window pop up that has multiple choices of where to go next, where those choices have to do with relevant Locations and/or Time.

Here’s an example to help out. We’ll deal with looking up photos:

• Click on a location within Google Maps
• That pops up a draggable window with a photo from FlexiPhoto .. one that is closest to that location, and closest to the current time
• The window has a few controls in it, which allow searching by date, or a range of dates, or keywords/phrases, etc.

To sum up, over the next few years, I’d like to work on two front ends for searching photos: one is by Map, and one is by Calendar. The two complement each other very well:

• Map - clicking on a point brings up a Calendar with days/date-ranges indicated. The hotspots on the calendar have photos, collections, or exhibits
• Calendar - clicking on a day brings up a Map of points that indicate relevant photos, collections, etc.

Of course, with a grant, this will take a year or less, and then I’ll have another 4 years left to answer the question! Nah, I don’t seriously believe that. There will be iterations on the theme. My thought is that combining the elements of Location and Time for searching in a web app (and my keen interest is for searching photos) is something that hasn’t been explored enough. A lot will done outside of the context of traditonal forms.

Slight update: obviously a prototype or draft version of all the functionality bundled together isn’t going to take a full-time year. I’m thinking of production quality AJAX & Flash front ends, testing, docs, and so on — that’ll take some time.

My daughter and I picked up a couple of books to feed her voracious appetite for words (Eldest and Inkspell). We then ambled over to Dempsey’s to feed our own appetites for Beer (me), Roy Rogers (her), and various cooked animals.

Somehow the notion of the Harry Potter iPod came up, with its engraved crest and Audiobooks. We started wondering how the blind use iPods …

One of the gadgets I have is an iTalk. Imagine something like that capable of speaking menu items. Someone with little or no vision could use an iPod by pausing on menu items for a second, and the device would read the name of the playlist, artist, genre, song, etc. It would be text-to-speech navigation.

Sophia and I think it would be straightforward (though we haven’t the hardware tech chops to back that up!). Seems like a device you could plug into the top of an iPod, that could retail for under $100. Hey, Belkin & Griffin Tech - go for it!

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

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 couple of years ago, I wrote Topics, Categories, Keywords, and Konfusion, out of a sense of bewilderment. You simply can’t come up with a categorization scheme where everything is nicely tucked away in one place. The problem stems from how different people think about the same thing (quick: “Overturned Red Hummer!” — what category?) Not only that, but the same person thinks about the same thing in different ways, depending on context (”Norte Dame is a historic church - a French National Treasure”, versus “I will meet you at the ice cream stand in front of Notre Dame, and then we will get some dinner”).

Context is everything.

So I was really happy to come across Clay Shirky’s recent “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags” essay. He goes into a lot more depth (and it’s much better written :-) The Yahoo vs Google comparison is very interesting (”There Is No Filesystem”). It illustrates the differences between what I would call “Old Guard” thinking (something can only appear in three places, as if there were some sort of physical shelf), and recognition of what the web is good at (we find phrases, we match words, we might find related documents, why tagging works)

I’ve been very impressed lately with what’s happening in the AJAX world. There are so many new pieces of tech out there that are just waiting to be assembled in exciting ways.

Check out an edit-in-place example. Sure the TiddlyWiki does this, but this is also showing all sorts of drag and drop functionality. I especially like the Slideshow Sorter. Also see Walter Zorn’s site

Then take a gander at HoverSmack, which is combining search requests with DIV generation

And then watch Sam Stephenson’s movie, where he goes through the process of converting a form to use AJAX (with Ruby on Rails) in just a few minutes …

Now imagine these elements coming together is more polished, fleshed out web apps …

Another thing I’ll check out soon (I need to be discplined, and get back to my real work, and my WP plugin) is Lickr, which accesses Flickr content in pure HTML and JavaScript.

A good place to find out what’s going on in this space is on del.icio.us