All posts by onlyconnect

internet, search, Uncategorized, web authoring

Web 2.0 for the rest of us?

We all know what Web 2.0 means. Google, Flickr, Facebook, Yahoo, mash-ups usually with Google Maps or Flickr, Salesforce.com, and anything but Microsoft. But what does it mean for everyday businesses, like some of the small businesses I talk to from time to time? Some are sceptical. One I can think of sells a successful software application but does not even run a support forum – why make it easy for others to discuss and publicise flaws and problems in your product?

I was interested therefore in a recent book by Amy Shuen, called Web 2.0: A strategy Guide. A foreword by Tim O’Reilly says, "it is the first book that really does justice to my ideas". It was O’Reilly who popularized the Web 2.0 concept – and yes, it is anO’Reilly book.

Shuen writes enthusiastically about network effects, using Flickr, Netflix, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon and Apple (iPod/iTunes/iPhone) as case studies. I enjoyed it, but the problem with this kind of book is the chasm between these few web giants and everyone else. Another problem is the tendency to ignore the Web 2.0 graveyard – thousands of start-ups that fail, or moribund and/or spam-infested blogs and forums. Since there are more failures than successes, it would be sobering to investigate these rather than riding a wave of Web 2.0 hype. Nevertheless, it is a thought-provoking book with an extensive bibliography, and not a bad starting point for investigating Web 2.0 concepts. I liked the “five steps to Web 2.0”, which begin with finding collective value and end with perhaps the most important, which is what Shuen calls “recombining innovations”:

New-style click-and-mortar, online-offline network partnerships focus on bridging and building new networks rather than replacing or disrupting the infrastructures of offline companies.

I’ve also received a short Web 2.0 book by Marco Cantù, called The Social Web. It is a brisk tour of the sites and concepts that form today’s online communities. Typical readers of this blog probably won’t find anything new here; but I liked the common-sense tips on things like blogging and creating interactive web sites.

I would argue that almost all businesses either are, or should be, “click-and-mortar” entities. Whatever business you are in, a useful question is: what proportion of purchases in your sector begin with or include a Google search? If the answer is significant, you are in the Web 2.0 business.

That does not mean SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the answer to everything. I am an SEO sceptic. All too often, SEO is lipstick on a pig. Optimise your web site for users, not robots. Further, it is no good trying to get users to interact with you, if you are not willing to interact with them. Surprisingly, I see this all the time. I suggest spending less time worrying about high Google ranking, and more time worrying about what users find when they do land on your site.

The case studies that interest me most are where old-style businesses have found ways to engage successfully with Web 2.0 innovations. For example, I’ve written about kitchons.com, which services domestic appliances and tunes its business via Google ads. I came across another example today: a financial company which lets you put an image from Flickr on your credit card. Clever.

Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide by Amy Shuen (ISBN: 978-0-596-52996-3). O’Reilly $24.99.

The Social Web written and published by Marco Cantù. $17.39 print or $8.70 electronic, from Lulu.

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Uncategorized

Changing models of journalism

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Chris Green, editor of IT Pro, has written about analysing professional writers in terms of “costs per unique user visit”. He says:

I honestly believe that in the not too distant future, online publications in all sectors, not just technology, will have to adopt a results-driven approach to freelance commissions in order to maximise revenue and to achieve maximum return from their freelance budgets.

The most likely outcome will be that publications begin paying writers purely on how much traffic an article pulls in. Also likely is that commissioning editors will need to take a more frequent and brutal approach to deciding which freelancers to commission regularly and which to drop from their rotation, based on the kind of metrics I am currently looking at.

I write for several publications, print and online, and in every case I am paid per word. If this prediction is accurate, how will this affect me and others who write for money?

Green says writers will have to work harder at pulling in readers. He talks about search engine optimisation (SEO), link seeding, cross-linking, encouraging comments, and supplying photos and even videos as well as words (no doubt to the fury of pro snappers).

If writers are paid per view, clearly they will have more incentive to do such things. Best tread carefully though. Link seeding done badly is spamming. Encouraging comments done badly is trolling. SEO done badly is keyword madness.

Further, there must be a reason why writers rarely write their own headlines. Publishers decided long ago (in print and online) that writing attention-grabbing headlines, which is a kind of SEO, is a job best done by specialists. So is snapping pictures, designing page layouts, and marketing the results. Giving the writer more of these roles doesn’t make sense except for low-budget publications like, errm, blogs. It also gives writers less time for their core competency, which is researching and writing.

Another problem is that not all traffic is equal. If a publication is ad-funded, then the traffic that counts most is that from potential purchasers, those who approve budgets or click ads. Click ratios are easy to measure, but profiling readers per-article is harder.

I agree that the Web is changing journalism, mostly for the better. One of my reasons for starting and persevering with this blog is that I value its immediacy, the feedback from readers, and the comments from those about whom I blog. The quality of the writer-reader interaction is immeasurably better than in the old days of occasional letters printed ages after publication.

Further, I don’t think any writer should mind being paid in some sense by results. Book authors have always had to put up with (or enjoy) this approach.

The problem is how to measure those results. Pay per view sounds good; but it punishes writers who happen to get commissioned for less popular subjects. If those subjects are nevertheless ones that the publication wants to cover, that suggests scope for bargaining.

What about measuring quality? The Register now lets readers rate some articles from one to ten. Nice if you get a good score; but is this more a measure of excellence, or of what readers agree with?

Kudos to Chris Green for throwing this open for debate.

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dylan

Dylan’s Drawn Blank exhibition

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Yesterday I attended the Bob Dylan – Drawn Blank exhibition at the Halcyon Gallery in London. This is a smart gallery near Bond Street; the exhibition is free but this is also a highly successful commercial enterprise.

I really enjoyed the exhibition and recommend it highly. It is open in London for a few more weeks; following which I gather there will be a world tour.

The origin of the pictures is unusual. Dylan drew some sketches while on tour (then again, he is always on tour) between 1989 and 1992. These were published by Random House under the title Drawn Blank. A museum curator called Ingrid Mössinger picked up on them in 2006 and got Dylan to agree to reworking them for an exhibition and for sale as originals and limited edition prints.

The original drawings were scanned, enlarged, and printed. Dylan then added colour by painting on them, mainly over a period of 8 months in 2007. Some, possibly most, of the drawings were painted several times; Dylan being Dylan, he used different colours each time.

This means that what you can buy is either an unique painted print, for sums of £25,000 and upwards, or a limited edition coloured print, for sums of around £2000 upwards. Note the “upwards”: the prices I saw were several times larger on many of the pictures. I also noticed that most of the paintings were already sold.

The exhibition is on several floors, with the paintings on the lower floors and the prints above. I spent a happy hour or two looking at them. I have no idea how they rate as art; I cannot separate them in my mind from the Bob Dylan I know as a singer and songwriter. The pictures have a certain naivety; but I found them rich in meaning as well.

He gets perspectives slightly wrong at times, but in a charming manner. For example, there is an image showing a timber porch and stairway beyond which you can see cars driving up a hill. They are like toy cars and one is at an especially odd angle, but it is quaint and humorous. Dylan seems interested in angles; he draws a car parallel to the banister of the stairway; we see pillars and telegraph poles leaning this way and that.

There are several images of train tracks which are highly evocative; there is also a rather sensual picture of two sisters which brings to mind Ballad in plain D “Of the two sisters, I loved the young…”

In a memorable quote on one of the walls Dylan recalls visiting an office and seeing a “blazing secretary”; who else would put together those two words? For me it evoked a woman with deep passions who keeps them constrained and hidden during her humdrum working day – though who knows if that was what Dylan meant?

If the prints had been a few hundred rather than a few thousand pounds I might have scraped together the money to buy one or two. As it was, I contented myself with the books. The hardback exhibition book is a well produced collection with nearly 300 pages in large format; at £39.95 it struck me as pretty good value. There is also a cheaper paperback which just has the prints. Being a fan, I bought one of each.

Is the rebel Dylan of the Sixties now totally owned by the establishment? I fear so; but it is a compliment as well.

apple

iPhone fever in London

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I happen to be in London this morning for iPhone 3G day. Congratulations to Apple on another successful launch. There were queues outside the (numerous) branches of Carphone Warehouse and O2; I didn’t visit the temple of Apple itself in Regent Street. Further, the other mobile stores seemed particularly quiet, with plenty of staff but few customers. The 16GB model was most in demand; early birds were able to grab one, but by about 11.00 I was told that it was sold out "all over London".

I did have a quick play with a sample. Lovely design, but, errrm, superficially much like iPhone 1.0. 

Seeing these queues has a remarkable power. Part of me wanted to stand in line and sign up, just because. Another part of me knows that it is not a good fit for my requirements. I am a partial match. I am a heavy data user while out of the office, and fairly annoyed with my current 3G phone (Samsung i600) which seems to lose its data connection for no apparent reason and requires a restart.

On the other hand, here’s what I don’t like. First, the price. The cheapest deal, presuming you want the 16GB (8GB is £50 less), is £159 for the device plus £30 monthly for 18 months. That’s £699; or a little bit less if you understand about net present value. For the true cost, you also have to deduct what you would otherwise spend on mobile fees; in my case I pay as I go so it is not very much.

I might still buy it, except that I prefer a real thumb keyboard. Further, I hate the App Store idea (though I admire the way Apple makes everything into a profit centre); I feel that for £699 I should be able to install whatever apps I want from wherever I want, as I can with the i600. I also hate the games Apple is playing by disallowing Flash and Java.

Perhaps I’ll pick up a used and jailbroken first gen model.

PS blog posted using Tablet PC connected to the Internet via Bluetooth on the Samsung i600

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linux, php, software development, virtualization, web authoring

Debugging PHP code to fix a WordPress problem

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How do you debug a PHP application? Traditionally developers resort to outputting variable values to HTML, or peering through logs, but why not set breakpoints and step through code just as you would in C# or Java? Maybe because it can take some effort to set this up, as I was reminded today.

I was motivated by an annoying WordPress problem which I’ve blogged about before. For historical reasons, I have a lot of subscribers to an old RSS url which delivers the feed in the now deprecated RSS 0.92 format. I prefer to have a full text feed, and this used to work fine with WordPress, which placed the entire blog post in the element of the feed.

At some point this stopped working, and subscribers got a summary only. In fact, the feed broke completely for a while, after I switched to pretty permalinks; but even after fixing that, I still had the problem with summary items. I tried upping the length of the description, but it was delivered without any HTML formatting so that did not work.

Next I tried the WordPress support forums. There are lots of good folk there; but if you review the posts its clear that many queries go unanswered. That’s nobody’s fault; it is a community, and for whatever reason there seem to be more people seeking help than there are experts with the time to give free advice.

So how about debugging the PHP code and working out what was happening? It seemed a good opportunity to try the latest Eclipse Ganymede, released a couple of weeks ago, along with the PHP Development Tools (PDT). I also figured it would be easier to set this up on Linux, to match what I use on the web server. I used the same Ubuntu on VirtualBox setup that worked well for trying out SproutCore. It worked…

Debugging PHP with Eclipse Ganymede

…but I can’t pretend it was wholly straightforward. Here’s how it went. I installed the latest Ubuntu distro versions of Apache, MySql and PHP – easy. Ubuntu’s Eclipse is not the latest, so I downloaded it from the Eclipse site and used some tips to set it up tidily. Note: make sure Sun Java is installed; I set it as the default JVM. Adding the PHP development tools was more fiddly. I’d half expected this to be part of a standard Eclipse download by now, but it is not, and if you try to install it into Ganymede using the standard update site is does not work because of dependency issues (a big problem with Eclipse). You have to download a 2.0.0 build from here instead.

I’d decided to use the Zend debugger – that’s a separate Eclipse update too, as explained here. Note that even after updating Eclipse, you still have to install the separate Zend debugger server from here, if you want to debug real web applications. I had a few problems getting this working, mainly because of the zend_debugger.allow_hosts directive which you have to edit in php.ini, and which is not brilliantly documented.

I replicated my blog on the Ubuntu virtual box – easy. But how do you get your Eclipse PHP project pointing at this existing code? The method I settled on after a couple of experiments was to start a new PHP project, uncheck the Use default option for project contents, and select the blog directory in /var/www. You then get a scary dialog which observes that files already exist. You can either create your project as a subdirectory, in which case you cannot debug with the existing files, or else pass the scary warning:

Create project in /var/www/blog
(Deleting the project will delete the entire /var/www/blog folder)

I mis-read this at first, thinking it would delete all the files when creating the project. That’s not what it says. Everything was a backup anyway, so I took the plunge; it worked fine. In fact, if you look closely at the screenshot above (click for a full size image) you can see that it is nicely done. You can see the call stack at top left, current variable values, output as it is being generated, and the usual options to step into or over the code.

That said, I did have some problems with Step Into. Just when it was going to be most useful, it bombed out with a message that said Error. If you looked at the detail, that also just said Error. The only fix I found was to set breakpoints in the actual file I needed to debug.

Still, it worked. I found that by adding a single argument to a line in feed-rss.php I could get my full text feed back. I’ve duly reported this in the WordPress support forums.

A couple of observations.

First, I don’t much like the WordPress code. Sorry, because the product is marvelous, but the code seems like a typical PHP tangle. Using pretty permalinks, which I regret, makes it worse.

Second, are there not plenty of developers who use both Java and PHP and would like it to be a tiny bit easier to set up in Eclipse? I’m being a little unfair, since Ganymede is just out and I guess the PDT will integrate better with it soon. Even so, Eclipse is still not quite the smooth plug-in dream that I once hoped it would become.

Note that if you don’t mind paying, you can have Zend Studio which I should think makes life easier. Or perhaps Delphi for PHP.

apple, security

Apple accused of security blunder; highlights cloud risks

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According to this post, someone at Apple committed a huge security blunder, giving the password to someone’s Apple ID to a third party. How was this accomplished? Someone emailed from an email account not associated with the Apple ID, and asked for the password. Apple apparently just reset the password and emailed it to the enquirer.

I haven’t verified the claim; but even if it is false, it highlights the risks of living the cloud life. Here’s what victim Marko Karppinen emailed to Apple:

Apparently based on a single-line email inquiry, you have allowed a third party access to:
– My personal details
– My personal email
– All the files stored on my iDisk
– Everything I’ve synchronized to .Mac, including my Address Book, Bookmarks, Keychain items, etc.
– My credit card details as stored in my Apple Store profile
– My iTunes Music Store Account
– My ADC Premier membership, including the software seed key and other assets
– The iPhone Developer Program’s Program Portal, including details of our development team

Frankly, this makes me so angry that I can’t see straight.

Simon Willison, whose blog alerted me to the incident, mentioned a few weeks ago the security problem inherent in any site which will email you a password:

I have a very simple rule of thumb for whether or not a site should consider whitelisting OpenID providers: does the site offer a “forgotten password” feature that e-mails the user a login token? If it does, then the owners have already made the decision to outsource the security of their users to whoever they picked as an e-mail provider.

Let’s bear in mind too that email mostly travels through the internet as plain text, vulnerable to interception.

Thought for the day: how much of your data is protected only by a simple username/password combination, and presuming there is some, how well protected is that password itself?

I imagine Apple will be tightening up its procedures, if the incident above is confirmed, since it was easily avoidable.

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software development, windows

Sample code for a very very simple VB database application

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I wrote a short piece for Personal Computer World about making a simple Windows Forms database application. I did this because I get a lot of enquiries about it, and search hits to this site looking for samples.

The piece is actually in two parts. Part one shows how to do CRUD without any databinding or datasets.

You can download the code here – but please don’t bother if you can already do this in your sleep. The app is for Visual Basic Express 2008.

Part two is about using the VB wizards to create an app with a typed dataset, TableAdapters and so on. The database is SQL Server CE, which is well suited to this kind of application. It is the default in Visual Studio 2008 even though it turns out not to be fully compatible with the wizards. Typical Microsoft – simple, but with enough gotchas to frustrate beginners and keep experts in business.

I ran into another little puzzle while doing the sample. I needed to populate the listbox with both a string value and the ID that is the primary key in the database table. The way I would do this normally is to create a custom class to represent the record, implement a ToString() that returns the display value, and add instances of this object to the listbox. I wanted an even simpler way though, so I decided to use a ListView. This lets you add items that have both a key and a value. You can do this with one of the overloaded Add methods for a ListViewItemCollection, documented like this:

Creates an item with the specified key, text, and image and adds an item to the collection.

The strange thing is, the ListViewItem has no key property. So how do you retrieve the value of the key?

The answer is that the ListViewItem.Name property returns the value of the key. So the key is the name. Why not call it the name in both places? Or the key?

I guess that would be too easy.

.net, adobe, apple, flash, internet, java, microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring

The messy world of the Web 2.0 user interface

Verity Stob’s Web 2.0 app diagram is worth a look.

So is it back to plain old HTML+forms then? That won’t do either; your app will look a decade old, and offline will never work.

This is why the current RIA wars are fascinating – particularly since Apple seems averse to runtimes like Flash, Java or Silverlight on its iPhone.

Which leaves what? JavaScript, hélas.

general

My early days with music part 2: records with my parents

In the late sixties we lived in a small village in Oxfordshire (then Berkshire). I have a few musical memories. One is a song covered by Tom Jones, The Green Green Grass of Home. We had a television, and there must have been some programme we watched that followed Top of the Pops. As a result, we always caught the last song, which was the number one, and in my memory it was always Tom Jones and The Green Green Grass of Home. I see that according to wikipedia it was number one for just seven weeks in 1966; but it was possibly an entire school holiday. I had no idea what a sad tale the song told, about a man awaiting execution. Still, that wasn’t my favourite tune at the time. That would have been the theme tune to Thunderbirds, a TV puppet show about rescuing people with fabulous machines.

We had a record player, a green one-box affair, mono of course, but with an auto-changer. My dad bought a record of Vaughan Williams’ On Wenlock Edge, and another with someone crooning Sullivan’s The Lost Chord. The tale of perfection found fleetingly but lost forever appealed to him; bear in mind that he was an artist too (a writer):

It linked all perplexéd meanings
Into one perfect peace,
And trembled away into silence
As if it were loth to cease.

I have sought, but I seek it vainly,
That one lost chord divine,
Which came from the soul of the organ,
And entered into mine.

I remember musicals too. A great Saturday treat was to go to the cinema and see the latest: The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Doctor Doolittle, Mary Poppins, Thoroughly Modern Millie. We bought some of these soundtracks (like everyone else) and the songs will stay with me forever. I still enjoy My Fair Lady and its extreme political incorrectness.

My brother managed to come home one day with a job lot of secondhand singles. I think we bought one or two as well. There was treasure here, though I didn’t know it. The Carnival is Over by The Seekers makes my eyes prick whenever I hear it. Windmills of my mind sung by Noel Harrison, with its clever words by Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman and Michel Legrand:

Like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own
down a hollow to a cavern where the sun has never shone
like a door that keeps revolving in a half forgotten dream
or the ripples from a pebble someone tosses in a stream
like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
and the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
like the circles that you find
in the windmills of your mind

There was also Goodbye my love, by the Searchers, which we thought was hilarious (goodbyyy-yy-yy-yy-yyee my love); and a single by the Rolling Stones, As Tears go By which we quite liked, but had 19th Nervous Breakdown on the other side which we considered very silly (actually it was the A side and, I realised later, a great song).

The next event was going away to school and getting a portable radio. Yes, a tranny (transitor radio). That’s the next post.