Economy Mind

So I was a little bored so I started watching this Authors at Google talk by Tim Harford. He is not a good speaker but he does a good job talking about some really interesting results of using economic thinking and economic analysis to understand human behaviour. One point I particularly liked was the conclusion that people in addictive and similar circumstances are naturally inclined to do things that help them deal with their habits. The findings suggest that if a system is put in-place to help people deal with such problems they are likely to use them with the hope they will be affected. 

Also in the talk he mentions a service that offers related solutions called Stickk. Their model is to provide a way to document progress with a stake, made up of personal value, at hand. If the progress falls below a user set amount the stake is contributed to a charitable cause. This company has found that such a method can successfully motivate people to manage their own habits. 

On another note, I had to watch parts of a few other Google talks to find to one that was truly interesting. I wonder if the quality of google talks is going down. I also still wish they created a good summarisation service. 

Paper Pushing Thinking

I think nobody thinks enough. And those who think they think too much are actually just not doing anything, I think.

In any case here is a cool tool with a bunch of layouts to help various kinds of directed thought. It is a nice idea and I think the interface has been done in quite a smart way, thought it is a little messy. It is called Exploratree and I actually think that name is a bit lame. 

Music and Clean Code

I just came home from a wonderful concert. Here is some data about it:

Friday, January 25, 2008
7:30pm / Saint Augustine Church
1738 West University Avenue, Gainesville
THOMAS KRAINES RECITAL
Thomas Kraines, cello Jubilus 2008 Resident Artist
Stephen Coxe, piano

Thomas Kraines (b. 1970)
Three Etudes for Cello Alone (2001)

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
Cello Suite No. 4 in E-flat major, BWV 1010 (1723)

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)
"Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus" from Quartet for the End of Time (1940)

Anton Webern (1883-1945)
Three Little Pieces for Cello and Piano, Op. 11 (1914)

Stephen Coxe (b. 1966)
Cello Sonata (2007) WORLD PREMIERE
I. Con moto, sempre cantabile

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)
Sicilienne, Op. 78 (1898)

There is to be another one on Tuesday at the same place and time with the same cellist. Everyone should go, it is free and wonderful. Here is some more info.

Also, I was looking at the whole Internet and this really cool site popped up. It is called Drawter, and it is a dynamic interface for creating really nice web code. It is by far the best such tool I have seen and it even seems to incorporate some unique interface methods. I have just spent some time building a site for work and this kind of tool would have made it a lot easier. 

If you look at it check out the screen cast too, it shoes some good techniques.

Puphones ATH-ESW9

So, a while back I mentioned Audio-Technica, more recently they brought out some new headphones in the same series as my existing ATH-EW9 Sovereign clip on phones. The new model is called the ATH-ESW9 Le Luxe and they are a full bodied headphone for portable use with luxury as a fundamental design requirement. They are made of cherry and leather so on but they are supposed to sound lovely so I am quite sure I am going to have to buy a pair. At the moment, AudioCubes has them for USD 289.99. 

Shooting Starts

As mentioned I am back in Gainesville. Here there is very little good food and almost no Korean food, however, recently a new restaurant opened called Shooting Star. They are primarily a Sushi joint and have a few really lovely Sakes. Luckily, they also sell some korean dishes including Bulgogi, Kalbi, and Bibimbap. Though I think they will not do Dolsot Bibimbap.

All in all, the food is good and the experience is good. Much less crowded than some of the other Sushi places in town and with a great vibe. At last there is somewhere to eat Korean food here. 

Now I think I will make sure they are in Google's business directory.


View Larger Map

Update: The website is down at the moment. Google directory later when it comes up and I can find the address. For anyone who is interested, it is on SW 2nd Ave, just a block or two from Main St.

America Working Looking for Work

So I am actually back in America. And that is true.

I am back working at Adaptive Equipment which is ok fun. Right now I am doing web stuff for them but I have not put up their new site yet so it is still a quite old one.

Other than that I am trying to think about a more long term job. I am not sure what you do so I am applying at a lot of the larger companies. Also back to the problem of what software to use for a good portfolio. I think I may just do it in Blogger because I need to get one online sooner rather than later. It should be ok. I can always get the rss out. 

WordCamp Melbourne Middle

We are back.

Darren Rose from Problogger is talking. Almost 5 years blogging. Talking about making money from WordPress, or on a larger scale, blogging in general. He shows some survey stuff and shows that he has a statistic that about 8% of his audience is making 15K per month or more. He brakes people who make money like this into two groups. People who make money from blogging and people who make money from having a blog. Things like advertising, affiliate programs, merchandise, paid reviews, donations and CPM, selling adds directly. Most bloggers seem to just want to write. There are many ways to do this stuff. monetizing readers. Even people selling space on blogs to do poles and other market research stuff. For less direct methods a lot of people are also getting sales systems and empowering their skills though blog networks, Ginna Trapani from Lifehacker and her book as well as many consultants and others working to create ebooks and so on. Lastly many people are using blogs as a gateway for resumes. He asks, what do people think about this list. One audience member talks about the specialisation of consulting work, another mentions networking and growing contacts or audience contact, another member talks about valuing niche skills by generating a need context for highly valued skills that can be 'advertised' on one's blog.  Now we are moving on to methods and advice in this context. If you are going to make money you need to aligned your self with a specific niche. Make your self the specific person of value, establishing trust and expertise and authority. He also advocates running showcases on what you do and why it is important in the context of a specific context. Case studies are really valuable. Give away what you can, especially principals. Sell your self, not someone else, AdSense can be used to sell other peoples work because it links contextually. Lastly, make your self accessible. He moves on to talk about utilising better design to optimise your add value. Less is more, fewer adds can translate to higher value. Relevance and content relation is really key to value. Keeping all kinds of traffic is really important but one should keep and understanding of what most of their traffic is. Try moving adds around.

Questions:

1. Q. How could Google improve their percent accuracy and rules about AdSense? A. I have never though about this. I think there should be more communication about this from Google but I understand that it is hard for them to avoid bad SEO.
2. Q. Is visual value very important. A. Yes and no, some advertisers really care about what competition you are using but most readers do not care as much as expected.
3. Q. How do you know who is using the adds. A. We tend to put some survey information as the results to some adds. Some advertisers ask about this and ask what you reader demographic is. 
4. Q. What companies do you go to to get advertising. A. I do not look for companies it is more the other way around. I think the best thing to do is to work at what you are good at and find what suites from who comes looking. That said I put adds up early and just waited.
5. I could not hear this one
6. Q. RSS advertisement, what do you say. A. I do not really use it. I find that in general it does not work, most of my money RSS is from the larger numbers of readers and affiliate programs. 

Christene Davis is now going to talk about classification models. 

Content categorisation availability. Aggregating common information. She is talking a little bit about the displacement of a tag out come and a link to a tag content page. 

Machine Tags - Flickr introduced this idea that is like a more developed tagging context. Including info like Geo tags and other standardisation off tag information. Machine tags are a little like making a wiki out of a tag context, giving special attributes and empowering connectivity.

Folksonomy is a terrible word. She sees this as a useless made up word that does not seem to deal well with the connection between the various groups in the context of blogging. She says there are distinct branches and they seem not to be allied well. 

James has asked about mircoformats or something. He is suggesting that there may be no point at which meta is too small, and asking that there is some point where it should be overtaken. Referencing the microformat plugging for WP. She answers that this is not really an issue, essentially. 

Structured tagging paradigms are really valuable. 

Another question from the crowd. What is the difference between a category and a tag. She suggests that one is higher in the order of power but the fundamental difference is that categories is finding similarities and tags are documenting specific aspect.  People are discussing some of the aspects of the problems of permalinking for tags and categories. One audience member is suggesting that categories are like organisational systems while tags are like cross organisational information connections. Another person is allying tagging to an index and categories to chapter headings in a book. 

James tries to bring it back to a more structured presentation.

Now we are moving into a real question and answer time

Questions: 

1. Q. How aware are search engines of categories? Some are quite good, there is a bit of worked done especially looking for commonalities in the themes of pages such as a tag page. On my work I find that tag sections have higher conversions because the content specialisation is so rich.
2. Q. There is a tool that can take content and provide some appropriate tags. This uses some yahoo service. What do you think? A. There is a bit of other stuff going on there like Delicious tags of tags. 

We have finishing up this round, James is now talking about adding a WCM07 tags to any content related to this event.

WordCamp Melbourne Intro and Morning Presentations

Today I am at my first blogging event, WordCamp Melbourne. 

The morning started of with an introduction from Simon Chen from Eight Black.

James Farmer from Edublogs something, a local WordPress guru then introduced the first speaker, Alex Shiels from Automattic. 

Alex spoke first about various statistics of WordPress such as how much info transfer there is, how many users, how much spam. A lot of spam. Then went on to talk about their management process. He displays $250,000,000,000 and states it is the largest amount they have ever been sued over. He then goes on to talk more about management process including their load sharing systems and chasing systems. He then goes on to mention the troubles of timing associated with propagating changes though the caches in their various server farms. 

Questions

1. Q. Is there going to be a Themes competition like blogger did a while ago? A. There are some new themes in the pipeline and we are working on ideas of a theme marketplace.
2. Q. What is the relationship of WordPress.org? A. They are quite similar, Wordpress MU and WordPress.org are more similar to each other than with .com. Right now there is a few things that are not released because of secrecy but in general they are the same.
3. Q. WPMU, are there plans to create larger scale features? A. HyperDB has been released, Barry gave a talk about this a while back that should be online. I will talk to some people about that but for now there are only some implementations of ideas for this.
4. Q. Automattics opinion on the GPL? A. Each person working there would have a different opinion. I like the BSD license, others at the company really like the GPL. 
5. Q. The question really is, as a plug-in developer what licenses would you like people to use? A. We support people using GPL it is easy and it is efficient. 
6. Q. Are you changing the admin theme? A. There is work on that, it has been around for a while and it kind of sucks. We are more concerned with doing it right than doing it now. 

James came back to talk some more and do his own talk on his work with WPMU. He talks a little about his companies growth, a whole punch of blog sites... He clams he is not going to talks about, security, promotion, attention, support, communication, time or feedback. If you are going to compete you have to have something great to compete with. However, the market is NOT flooded. There is a huge opportunity to stay out of the social network market. A blog site has a major difference, it is close to you, a social network, on the other hand, is a place you go to do something... 

One has to decide, community or service. Community is about interaction and sharing, you will need a lot of plug-ins to help run the WPMU site as a community and enable community features. Service, is a thing you use, a tool. Most bloggers are not quite doing a community, but generating a service. Similarly there will be a lot of associated plug ins and customisations to help organise everything. 

Code. You really need some good code work if you are going to do a blog network because there are a lot of things like plug-ins that continually need to be messed with. Server topology is also very important and having a skilled person to deal with these issue is paramount to success. What you do not need is a graphic designer. We found out that it does not matter at all, in the end what mattered was that people could pretend that it was a community system. People want to feel part of a community, they may not interact, but they want the feeling. 

Money. This is really the question of why you are doing your work, is it for money? If it is, you really need to think about the model. We do this, we sell parts of our code as our main business model. Also, however you can actually do advertising, without being an asshole. This is quite rare but people like Wordpress.com do it quite well. Do it as an external link, ie search, click through. But, it does not have to be about the money, it can be about the passion. 

Questions:

1. Q. Can you talk more about the adds work? A. I don't really know that much but there are some good plug ins that do it, for instance only have adds for non friends, only have ads for people coming from a search engine, adds for non registered users. We do not do it as we are for education.
2. Q. If you were starting something new what would it be? A. Farmnet.com.au is an interesting, a pretty big network. He works with a great email list and he shares it on the grounds of a network. If you do not have that list, find someone who does. 
3. Q. How big a problem is SPAM? A. It is a pretty big problem, we check all posts. We also use capchas on sign up and we have a terms of service agreement system on sign up. I think it is not a bad idea to make people try hard to get a blog, to avoid too much spam. Akin to the idea or Barriers of Entry (some book).

The Toothpaste I Use

I really like toothpaste and I really like trying new and odd ones that I find in strange places. I also really really like going to the dentist but that is a different matter.

Anyway, I was reading medgadget and saw this lovely picture. It is of a Korean toothpaste that I think would be just swell. I have used a few other Korean toothpastes but I have not ever seen this one in stores. I which someone would send me some. 

Really Looking at Design

I recently heard of someone, Nathan Shedroff, who actually understands things and speaks about them well, a rarity in a world where most designers make up what they want to be true. The picture is one from his recent presentation at the Connecting 07 Conference. Please don't take my word for it and have a look at the whole presentation here and his homepage here.

Thanks to core77 for making me more aware.

Smooth Things and Good Information

Over this last weekend I have been to a number of quite good lectures from the RMIT GRC, graduate research conference. Apart from just being a good showcase of interesting work it also unveiled the reason and value of doing a PhD at some point and now I am even considering this a real possibility. For the time being I am interested in doing it some place where I do not speak the language and where I can get a scholarship. More on this later.

At the same time there is some interesting work here on interface design. I think this is a great example of what more projects should be like. Seeing many of the graduate projects I realised that most people do not know anything about presenting content well. I was saddened also to see that a number of the applicants, especially masters were at quite an elementary level of development of ideology. I am not sure if these people will be allowed to progress immediately and I hope that RMIT presses them to work harder in the future.

Because I was away watching presentations and working on projects a lot recently I have a huge number of reading built up in my Google reader. I am working though it and learning interesting things. Read my reblog if you want to see more on that.