Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
Get excited and make things with science
There are many reasons to go to South by Southwest Interactive: meeting up with friends old and new being the primary one. Then there’s the motivational factor. I always end up feeling very inspired by what I see.
This year, that feeling of inspiration was front and centre. First off, I tried to impart some of it on the How to Rawk SXSW panel, which was a lot of fun. Mind you, I did throw some shit at the fan by demonstrating how wasteful the overstuffed schwag bags are. I hope I didn’t get MJ into trouble.
My other public appearance was on The Heather Gold Show which was bags of fun. With a theme of Get Excited and Make Things
, the topic of inspiration was bandied about a lot. It was a blast. Heather is a superb host and the other guests were truly inspirational. I discovered a kindred spirit in fellow excitable geek, Gina Trapani.
The actual panels and presentations at SXSW are the usual mixture of hit and miss, although the Cooking For Geeks presentation was really terrific. Any presenter who hacks the audience’s taste buds during a presentation is alright with me.
But by far the most inspirational thing I’ve seen was a panel hosted by Tantek on Open Science. The subject matter was utterly compelling and the panelists were ludicrously articulate and knowledgeable:
The URLs were flying thick and fast: the Signtific thought experiment game, the collaborative Galaxy Zoo—now joined by Moon Zoo—and the excellent Spacehack directory.
I was struck by the sheer volume of scientific data and APIs out there now. And yet, we aren’t really making use of it. Why we aren’t we making mashups using Google Mars? Why haven’t I built a Farmville-style game with Google Moon?
Halfway through the panel, I turned to Riccardo and whispered, We should organise a Science Hack Day.
I’m serious. It would probably be somewhere in London. I have no idea where or when. I have no idea how to get a venue or sponsors. But maybe you do.
What do you think? Everyone I’ve mentioned the idea to so far seems pretty excited about the idea. I’ll try to set up a wiki for brainstorming venues, sponsors, APIs, datasets and all that stuff. In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment here.
I got excited. Now I want to make things …with science! Are you with me?
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
South by Twenty Ten
I’m about to head off to Austin for South by Southwest, the annual Bacchanalian geek festival. I’m speaking on a panel again, but this year, the emphasis is very squarely on having fun. MJ very kindly asked me to represent the British contingent on her How to Rawk SXSW panel.
It will be a fun, if somewhat bittersweet affair: Brad Graham was also going to be on the panel. Ol’ bastard Death has put paid to that. Southby won’t be quite the same without him. But while there won’t be a Break Bread with Brad, there will be Break Bread for Brad, shortly after the panel on Friday afternoon.
Given my recent musings on the transience of domains, I can’t help but wonder what will happen to the bradlands.com domain. I hope it doesn’t go the way of Leslie Harpold’s online legacy at smug.com and harpold.com.
Anyway, I’ll be taking a break from my doom-laden predictions of the disappearance of our collective online culture to drink beer and eat barbecue in Texas. I’m looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones. Oh, and I’ll be having a good ol’ chinwag on The Heather Gold Show on Saturday. Come along if you’re around.
As is now traditional, I’ve updated Adactio Austin with a selection of hCalendared, hCarded hand-picked parties that I’ll be checking out. Compared with the whizz-banginess of location-aware real-time iPhone apps, it seems positively quaint.
If you’re going to Austin too and you spot me amongst the heaving throngs of geeks, say hello. We can have a Shiner Bock together.
Sunday, March 7th, 2010
Linkrot
The geeks of the UK have been enjoying a prime-time television show dedicated to the all things webby. Virtual Revoltution is a rare thing: a television programme about the web made by someone who actually understands the web (Aleks, to be precise).
Still, the four-part series does rely on the usual television documentary trope of presenting its subject matter as a series of yin and yang possibilities. The web: blessing or curse? The web: force for democracy or tool of oppression? Rhetorical questions: a necessary evil or an evil necessity?
The third episode tackles one of the most serious of society’s concerns about our brave new online world, namely the increasing amount of information available to commercial interests and the associated fear that technology is having a negative effect on privacy. Personally, I’m with Matt when he says:
If the end of privacy comes about, it’s because we misunderstand the current changes as the end of privacy, and make the mistake of encoding this misunderstanding into technology. It’s not the end of privacy because of these new visibilities, but it may be the end of privacy because it looks like the end of privacy because of these new visibilities*.
Inevitably, whenever there’s a moral panic about the web, a truism that raises its head is the assertion that The Internets Never Forget:
On the one hand, the Internet can freeze youthful folly and a small transgressions can stick with you for life. So that picture of you drunk and passed out in a skip, or that heated argument you had on a mailing list when you were twenty can come back and haunt you.
Citation needed.
We seem to have a collective fundamental attribution error when it comes to the longevity of data on the web. While we are very quick to recall the instances when a resource remains addressable for a long enough time period to cause embarrassment or shame later on, we completely ignore all the link rot and 404s that is the fate of most data on the web.
There is an inverse relationship between the age of a resource and its longevity. You are one hundred times more likely to find an embarrassing picture of you on the web uploaded in the last year than to find an embarrassing picture of you uploaded ten years ago.
If a potential boss finds a ten-year old picture of you drunk and passed out at a party, that’s certainly a cause for concern. But such an event would be extraordinary rather than commonplace. If that situation ever happened to me, I would probably feel outrage and indignation like anybody else, but I bet that I would also wonder Hmmm, where’s that picture being hosted? Sounds like a good place for off-site backups.
The majority of data uploaded to the web will disappear. But we don’t pay attention to the disappearances. We pay attention to the minority of instances when data survives.
This isn’t anything specific to the web; this is just the way we human beings operate. It doesn’t matter if the national statistics show a decrease in crime; if someone is mugged on your street, you’ll probably be worried about increased crime. It doesn’t matter how many airplanes successfully take off and land; one airplane crash in ten thousand is enough to make us very worried about dying on a plane trip. It makes sense that we’ve taken this cognitive bias with us onto the web.
As for why resources on the web tend to disappear over time, there are two possible reasons:
- The resource is being hosted on a third-party site or
- The resource is being hosted on an independent site.
The problem with the first instance is obvious. A commercial third-party responsible for hosting someone else’s hopes and dreams will pull the plug as soon as the finances stop adding up.
I’m sure you’ve seen the famous chart of Web 2.0 logos but have seen Meg Pickard’s updated version, adjusted for dead companies?
You cannot rely on a third-party service for data longevity, whether it’s Geocities, Magnolia, Pownce, or anything else.
That leaves you with The Pemberton Option: host your own data.
This is where the web excels: distributed and decentralised data linked together with hypertext. You can still ping third-party sites and allow them access to your data, but crucially, you are in control of the canonical copy (Tantek is currently doing just that, microblogging on his own site and sending copies to Twitter).
Distributed HTML, addressable by URL and available through HTTP: it’s a beautiful ballet that creates the network effects that makes the web such a wonderful creation. There’s just one problem and it lies with the URL portion of the equation.
Domain names aren’t bought, they are rented. Nobody owns domain names, except ICANN. While you get to decide the relative structure of URLs on your site, everything between the colon slash slash and the subsequent slash belongs to ICANN. Centralised. Not distributed.
Cool URIs don’t change but even with the best will in the world, there’s only so much we can do when we are tenants rather than owners of our domains.
In his book Weaving The Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee mentions that exposing URLs in the browser interface was a throwaway decision, a feature that would probably only be of interest to power users. It’s strange to imagine what the web would be like if we used IP numbers rather than domain names—more like a phone system than a postal system.
But in the age of Google, perhaps domain names aren’t quite as important as they once were. In Japanese advertising, URLs are totally out. Instead they show search boxes with recommended search terms.
I’m not saying that we should ditch domain names. But there’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that thinks about domain names in time periods as short as a year or two. It doesn’t bode well for the long-term stability of our data on the web.
On the plus side, that embarrassing picture of you passed out at a party will inevitably disappear …along with almost everything else on the web.
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Testing Huffduffer’s sign-up
Ever since I launched Huffduffer, one of the features that really caught people’s attention was the sign up form.
I have to admit, I didn’t really think it was that revolutionary an idea. All I was trying to do was make the sign-up process a little friendlier and if web standards have taught us anything, it’s that there’s nothing inherent in the presentation of any element, much less forms. So I made the form more conversational and less blocky and rigid.
Well, it turns out that people love it. I’ve received bucketloads of Twitter messages and emails from people telling me how much they enjoyed the sign-up process.
But amongst all the positive comments I saw about the sign-up form when Huffduffer launched, I saw some armchair UX practitioners wondering about the usability of this somewhat unorthodox approach to forms. Fair point. Without user testing, how can I really know if the mad-libs approach is really working?
Now, it happens that Luke W. likes the Huffduffer sign-up form, as evidenced by a recent chat he had with Jared.
If anyone knows anything about the usability of web forms, it’s Luke. He literally wrote the book on it.
Not content with simply expressing a liking for the Huffduffer-style of human-friendly form presentation, he decided to put it to the test with Vast.com:
After seeing the Huffduffer form in action, I was curious how it would perform against a traditional form. Would people be more inclined to complete it because of the narrative format? Or would the unfamiliar presentation format confuse people? Thanks to Ron Kurti and the team at Vast.com, I now have some early answers.
Ron and his team ran some A/B testing online that compared a traditional Web form layout with a narrative “Mad Libs” format. In Vast.com’s testing, Mad Libs style forms increased conversion across the board by 25-40%.
That seems to be a statistically-significant result, even accounting for Cennydd’s reality-check on A/B testing.
It’ll be interesting to see if this is the start of a trend. If nothing else, it’s a way of getting designers to think about the presentation of common human-computer interactions, such as signing up to a new website.
Friday, February 19th, 2010
Music::Business
The past
These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy…in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.
The present
The future
The International Convention on Performing Rights is holding a third round of crisis talks in an attempt to stave off the final collapse of the WIPO music licensing regime. On the one hand, hard-liners representing the Copyright Control Association of America are pressing for restrictions on duplicating the altered emotional states associated with specific media performances: As a demonstration that they mean business, two “software engineers” in California have been kneecapped, tarred, feathered, and left for dead under placards accusing them of reverse-engineering movie plot lines using avatars of dead and out-of-copyright stars.
On the opposite side of the fence, the Association of Free Artists are demanding the right of perform music in public without a recording contract, and are denouncing the CCAA as being a tool of Mafiya apparachiks who have bought it from the moribund music industry in an attempt to go legit. FBI Director Leonid Kuibyshev responds by denying that the Mafiya is a significant presence in the United States. But the music biz’s position isn’t strengthened by the near collapse of the legitimate American entertainment industry, which has been accelerating ever since the nasty noughties.
—Accelerando by Charles Stross
Saturday, January 30th, 2010
The iPad and the web
Before Apple launched the iPad, I managed to refrain from adding to the deluge of speculation and rumour. Now that the much-anticipated tablet has been unveiled, I can’t resist jotting down my thoughts.
Now, this is just my reaction to a piece of technology. I feel a need to clarify that because discourse on the internet has a strange way of getting warped. Someone says I like Italian food,
and someone else responds with Why do you hate Mexican food?
Someone says I enjoyed watching Avatar,
and someone else hears Everyone should enjoy watching Avatar.
So bear in mind that this is just my personal reaction. I’m not saying that everyone should share my feelings. ‘Twould be a very dull world indeed in which we all felt the same.
I didn’t watch Steve Jobs unveiling the iPad—I was busy learning at a Skillswap event—but when I was reading up about it afterwards, I thought to myself I’m probably going to get an iPad…
Actually, at this point I need to take care of something:
Mum, if you’re reading this, could you stop now please? Thanks. Love you.
Anyway, as I was saying, I thought to myself I’m probably going to get an iPad …for my mother.
Honestly, there isn’t much on offer in the iPad that I don’t already have in my Macbook. I don’t think it is the device for me. But it is most definitely the device for my mother. I don’t mean “a theoretical persona such as one’s mother,” I mean my mother.
My mother is currently using a G3 Ruby iMac that used to belong to me. When she started using this machine, she had never used a keyboard, much less a computer. I am very, very glad that her first computer was a Mac and that she’s never had to deal with the world of pain that is Windows, but even a Mac has a learning curve for someone who’s never used a computer before.
I remember explaining what the cursor was and how the mouse controlled it. When I said “move it up”, she lifted up the mouse off the table. Thinking about it, the mouse isn’t as straightforward as we think: moving the mouse left and right does map to moving the cursor left and right, but moving the mouse forward and backward maps to moving the cursor up and down. Both the cursor and the mouse move on two-dimensional surfaces but only half the movements of the mouse correspond directly to movements of the cursor.
In computer years, a G3 iMac is ancient. It’s amazing that it still runs at all. I’ve been thinking for a while now about what would make a suitable replacement. A newer iMac would be good but they’re a little pricey for something that’s going to be used for web surfing, email, some digital photography and little else. A laptop would be nice. Now that my mother has WiFi, there’s no need for her to have to remain in one place to use her computer. But laptops are fiddly things with fiddly trackpads.
The iPad strikes me as the Goldilocks solution. It’s just right. If the European pricing follows the general Apple conversion rate, the iPad should be pretty darn affordable. It would be nice if it came with an iSight for iChatting; that might well get added in a later version. Web surfing, email and photo browsing are all not just possible, but likely to be pleasurable. That’s because the multitouch control mechanism is likely to feel far more intuitive than either a mouse or a trackpad. (Caveat: I haven’t used an iPad. Take my opinion, and the opinions of anyone else who hasn’t actually used one, with a heaped tablespoon of salt.)
So I’m probably going to get an iPad, but for someone else. If it came with nothing more than a WiFi connection and a web browser, it would still be a worthwhile device for my mother. In fact, the idea of using a computing device based around a browser is what’s driving the Google Chrome OS. Google’s vision is one wherein the file system and the hard drive are far less important than the web browser and the web server.
That’s why I’m slightly mystified about the App Store grumblings. Yes, it’s a closed system that Apple controls completely. But the same devices that support the App Store also come with a very advanced web browser. Personally, I think that if a device is capable of running HTML, CSS and JavaScript, I don’t think it can be described as “closed”.
Don’t like the closed nature of the App Store? Don’t use it. Use the web instead. That’s the point that PPK was making, albeit a bit stridently. Admittedly, if you want to make money directly from an app, you might have a harder time of it on the web than on the App Store. Make your app distribution bed and lie in it.
I’ve already seen people on Twitter sharing some ideas for the uses to which the iPad could be put:
- displaying sheet music on a music stand,
- showing recipes on a kitchen worktop,
- playing scrabble, sudoku and crosswords,
- reading comics,
- reading magazines a la Mag+,
- reading books in a way that doesn’t involve the silly page-turning visual metaphor built into the iBooks app.
All of those are great ideas and all of them can be implemented on the web. Remember that Mobile Safari already has excellent support for canvas, audio, video and offline storage. No App Store required. As Simon St. Laurent puts it, web developers can rule the iPad.
I understand the concerns of my fellow geeks who see the read-only nature of the iPad as restrictive compared to the read-write nature of laptop and desktop computers. Rafe Colburn asks Is the iPad the harbinger of doom for personal computing?:
I think that it’s a real possibility that in 10 years, general purpose computers will be seen as being strictly for developers and hobbyists.
Alex Payne foresees a tinkerer’s sunset:
The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today.
While I understand and to a certain extent, share these forebodings, I’m cautiously optimistic that these fears won’t be realised. The iPad isn’t going to replace laptop or desktop computers; it’s a different kind of machine for a different kind of user.
Frasier Spiers welcomes the glimpse that the iPad offers us of information processing dissolving into behaviour when he writes:
If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.
Yes, it’s an entirely prescriptive way of computing - one that the hackers, tinkerers and geeks will find alien and protest about its lack of openness. But here’s the thing: for the people who the iPad is aimed at it really doesn’t matter that this experience is prescriptive.
I think he’s right. The iPad isn’t for geeks but I can foresee geeks, like me, buying iPads for members of their family …if for no other reason than to reverse the trend of the holiday season becoming the tech support season.
I’m not usually one for predictions, but I think I’ll try my hand at one now. The iPad will be the best-selling device to be purchased as a gift for Christmas 2010.
Monday, January 25th, 2010
Approval
This is the last week during which you can grab a ticket for UX London at the early bird price. From February 1st, the price goes up by a hundred squid (and from April 1st, the price goes up by another hundred squid—no joke).
In case you’re wondering whether or not you should go, wonder no more. Just check out the line-up of speakers and imagine three solid days of inspirational talks and hands-on workshops in their company. If attended last year’s event, you know what a great gathering it is. If you didn’t attend last year, talk to someone who did.
Of course, it could be that even if you want to go, you still need to convince somebody in your company to send you. Let’s face it, UX London is a very different beast from dConstruct.
dConstruct is deliberately low in price and a more rough’n’ready one-day affair. One of the reasons why we try to keep the price of dConstruct down is so that just about anybody can afford to come: freelancers, students, whatever. If that means we can’t afford to feed everyone or hand out goodies, then so be it—everyone fends for themselves at lunchtime and there’s no schwag.
The audience for UX London is a bit different. It’s almost exclusively attended by people who have been sent by their company. With one day of presentations and two full days of workshops, and all three days fully catered, the price is, of course, far higher than dConstruct …although if you go to dConstruct and attend both days of workshops beforehand, then it works out at much the same price as UX London’s early bird ticket.
Anyway, if you are in that situation—working at a company where you have to convince someone to send you to training events like UX London—Kimberly Blessing has written a guide to getting your conference or training request approved. She shares her three-step strategy:
- Build a strong case.
- Request funding.
- Negotiate!
- Try before you buy.
- Strength in numbers.
- Volunteer.
- Ask for partial funding.
- Finally, if you must: send yourself.
If you’ve got any other techniques, share them in the comments to Kimberly’s post.
Saturday, January 16th, 2010
Trajectory
Dan came down to Brighton for a visit, so naturally a bunch of us ended up singing in a karaoke pod together.
I think Brian Eno is on to something; getting together with a group of friends to holler your lungs out is quite life-affirming. Of course Dan had to ruin it all by being really, really good. The bastard.
There was a preponderance of songs with “love” in the title because Andy insisted that every instance of that word be substituted for “lunch”: Addicted to Lunch, It Must Be Lunch and, best of all, Tainted Lunch—dedicated to Paul who couldn’t be with us due to probable food poisoning.
One of the non-lunch related songs that somebody queued up was The Final Countdown by Europe. This is a crap karaoke song for two reasons:
- it’s crap and
- the catchiest part of the song is the bit where no-one is singing.
However, it is one of the few songs written about generation starships leaving a dying Earth. The only other such song I can think of offhand is After The Goldrush by Neil Young: flying mother nature’s silver seed to a new home in the sun
…and let us hope that this is the last time that Neil Young and Europe are ever mentioned together in any kind of context.
Something bothered me about the lyrics of The Final Countdown that confronted me on the karaoke screen. Presumably the interstellar ark is heading out of the solar system and yet the narrator tells us this about the plotted course: We’re heading for Venus.
Really? Surely that’s in the completely wrong direction—towards the sun. But then I realised that, although it remains unsaid in the song, the craft is probably going to carry out a gravitational slingshot manoeuvre around our star.
Knowing that, I can rest easy …or at least, I would be able to rest easy if I didn’t have that damn song stuck in my head.
Friday, January 15th, 2010
The audio of place
Last year, the good people at Web Directions asked me if I would like to write an article for the second issue of their Scroll magazine—an honest-to-goodness dead-tree publication. I told them I would be delighted.
The theme of the issue was “place.” I took the word and ran with it, delivering an over-the-top pretentious piece about language, wormholes and virtual worlds. An edited version appeared in the magazine as Disrupting the conceptual metaphors of the web.
I’ve published the raw, unedited version here in the articles section under its original title of There Is No “There” There. I also recorded an audio version, which clocks in at just over eight and a half minutes.
Feel free to huffduff it. Feel free to anything you like with it: it’s licenced under a Creative Commons attribution license.
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
Making Workshops for the Web
The latest Clearleft offering is Workshops for the Web. It made sense to move our workshop offerings out of the Clearleft site—where they were kind of distracting from the main message of the company—and give them their own home, just like our other events, dConstruct and UX London.
As well as the range of workshops that can be booked privately at any time, there’s a schedule of upcoming public workshops for 2010:
- CSS3 Wizardry on January 29th,
- Copywriting for the Web on March 5th,
- HTML5 for Web Designers on April 23rd,
- UX Fundamentals on June 11th and
- Usability Testing on July 16th.
The next workshop, CSS3 Wizardry with Rich and Nat, promises to be packed full of cutting-edge front-end techniques. Book a place if you want to have CSS3 kung-fu injected into your brainstem.
Visual Design
I’m pretty pleased with how the site turned out. When I began designing it initially, I thought I would give it a sort of Russian constructivist feeling: the title Workshops for the Web made me think of an international workers movement. I started researching political propaganda posters, beginning with the book Revolutionary Tides.
There’s also some fantastic propaganda material in The National Archives (and I just love the modern twist of World War Three propaganda posters). I found a treasure trove of images of American working life in the Flickr Commons collection from The Library of Congress. I started gathering these sources together and distilling some of the common components such as bold colours and diagonal lines.
This was when Jon was working as an intern at Clearleft. I enlisted his help in brainstorming some ideas and he came up with some great stuff—like using Soviet space-race imagery—and we played around with proof-of-concept ideas for creating diagonal backgrounds using CSS3 transforms.
But it never really came together for me. Much as I loved the Russian constructivist propaganda angle, I ditched it and started from scratch.
IA
I scribbled down a page description diagram describing what the site needed to communicate in order of importance:
- The name of the site.
- A positioning statement.
- The next workshop.
- Other upcoming workshops.
- A list of all workshops available.
- A way of getting in touch.
The hierarchy for an individual workshop page looked pretty similar:
- The title of the workshop.
- The date of the workshop.
- The location of the workshop.
- The price of the workshop.
- Details of the workshop.
It was clear that the page needed to quickly answer some basic questions: what? where? how much?
I started marking up the answers to those questions from top to bottom. That’s when it started to come together. Working with markup and CSS in the browser felt more productive than any of the sketching I had done in Photoshop. I started really sweating the typography …to the extent that I decided that even the logotype should be created with “live” text rather than an image.
Build
From the start, I knew that I wanted the site to be a self-describing example of the technologies taught in the workshops. The site is built in HTML5, making good use of the new structural elements and the powerful outline algorithm. Marking up an events site with the hCalendar microformat was a no-brainer. There are hCards a-plenty too.
CSS3 nth-child selectors came in very handy and media queries are, quite simply, the bee’s knees when it comes to building a flexible site: just a few declarations allowed me to make sure the liquid layout could be optimised for different ranges of viewport size.
Given the audience of the site, I could be fairly certain that Internet Explorer 6 wouldn’t be much of a hindrance. As it turns out, everything looks more or less okay even in that crappy browser. It looks different, of course, but then do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser?
Right before launch, Paul took a shot at tweaking the visual design, adding a bit more contrast and separation on the homepage with some horizontal banding. That’s a visual element that I had been subconsciously avoiding, probably because it’s already used on some of our other sites, but once it was added, it helped to emphasise the next upcoming workshop—the main purpose of the homepage.
Just because the site is live now doesn’t mean that I’ll stop working on it. I’d like to keep tweaking and evolving it. Maybe I’ll finally figure out a way of incorporating some elements of those great propaganda posters.
