Cafe Bucky

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

I’m going to sound like such a fanboy saying “TiddlyWiki Rocks”. But heck, it does. So check it out at tiddlywiki.com. In a nutshell, it’s a self-contained Wiki within a page.

I came across it while doing research into all things AJAX and XMLHttpRequest-ish. To me, it’s yet another example of how boundaries are getting pushed in all directions in the “old technologies being used in new ways” meme. I realize it isn’t strictly AJAX. The fact that it dynamically updates is where it’s at. It’s impressive.

The goal I’m after is to implement what I was talking about in “IFrame Sub-Posts?”. The TiddlyWiki is a bit of functionality that I find inspiring. The one thing I would add to is the ability to upload itself to a server (which dovetails into my interest in XMLHttpRequest).

These are fun, fast-moving webdev days we’re living in!

Paul Graham wrote Hackers & Painters, which I was interested in reading, way back in June 2004. It’s finally available on Safari, so I’ll plunge in this week.

I gotta thank my pal Mike Schilli, because I mentioned H&P and Safari to him, and he pointed me at an excellent essay by Paul, entitled “How to Start a Startup” I don’t agree with absolutely everything in it, but I’d go as far as to say that it’s a “must read” for anyone thinking of starting a tech company. He’s been there, and shares his experience in an enjoyable read (chock full of great advice, delivered in a matter-of-fact manner)

A few of the best bits:

• work with good people that know the area of expertise. Don’t hire business people that don’t understand the tech (”newscasters”).
• don’t hire solely to fill up holes in an org chart
• use trade shows as a means of research – chance to listen and learn from customers as to what they want
• important to get a first version out there quickly
• best odds are in niche markets
• don’t burn up startup money on flashy offices (and, location is very important – got to be a place where people want to come back after dinner)

Jason Kottke has decided to quit his day job and blog full-time. He won’t be accepting ads, and will derive his income from micro-patronage.

I hope it works for him! There are only so many artists, performers, creators that can make a go of doing what they love full time. I think my writing would warrant a Mocha (hmm, perhaps just a single) every other week month or so. (but while y’all are holding off, I’ll keep buying my own :-)

I don’t know Jason personally (I see him at Apple SoHo, or ETCon), but my impression is that he’s at a good stage of life to do the all-out risk-taking thing. Perhaps it’s not so much of a risk. He knows he has tons of readers, and 7200-odd links from Google to his site. I’d wager that he has a good chance.

The last bit here is: will it change how he writes? It’s one thing to write for fun. Will it be any different when others are giving bucks? Is there the temptation to steer words towards what the patrons might want to read? Does it make the difference between cooking at home versus grabbing a slice and a beer? I think this is the most interesting part of the experiment: can you get paid to be yourself, or do you change yourself to get paid?

Go for it, Jason. Break a leg!