Artificial Limitations in PlanHQ

Recently PlanHQ have done a bunch of updates to their service which are making it a lot more usable. I think they are still missing the money in some respects and they persist in providing an interface which seems to remove all familiarity and context driven knowlege from the process of business decision making.  Workflow should not be ignored, yet the updates are exciting. Now it works in most browsers quite acceptably.

One aspect of their product which they are yet to change is the minimisation model. Currently the do not offer a free product, though next week they are opening one aspect of the product to free accounts, which in its self is not a bad thing but I think most costumers they could get are turned away buy the fact they have to pay even on the lowest level. My real gripe with this model is that it often inspires companies to create really lame lowest level products. In the case of PlanHQ it is not too different, their lowest level model includes a number of serious hindrances that are completely artificial to the system. There is no complexity involved just convenience on the customers part, for updating to the higher services. The limitation in this software are things like the number of users, which is 3, and the number of (presumably) concurrent goals, which is 10. There are a few other more legitimate limitations like higher security and customisation, but really, for $9 a month, you can only have 3 users. I think that is really lame. 

So in protest, perhaps, I have been using the software on a trial plan for 30 days. On Monday I think I am going to start paying for it but I am still really annoyed that I would have to pay $49 just to get more than a few users. 

Ok so I hate artificial limitations, especially ones you have to pay for. But all this ranted, I think that the limitations in something like twitter really make the product. Without such a thing it would be quite a different, and presumably less desirable service. 

Just is my last utterances I think PlanHQ should set up a contractor account system. That could be really nice, almost like a CMS service. Perhaps this is a distorted dream that would never work as well as Sugar or Highrise with companion services. 

Dialogue Mapping Webinar

This afternoon I took part in a dialogue mapping webinar which was fun though there was not a whole lot of new content. The things I found most interesting are as follows:

1. The idea that Dialogue mapping is there to essentially give context to the comments that are made by members of a discussion that do not really address the issue at hand but that are still relevant.
2. There fact that are tools which supposedly can be used to do collaborative mapping tasks - multi input mapping.

During the discussion I also came to think that making text chat based compendium tools would be good. I still really think that doing the tool set web enabled is really important but I think by adding various key features the value could improve greatly. The things I would want to see are:

1. In browser audio and video sharing 
2. Text (im) centric map creation, with things like text bubble drag and drop for mapping
3. Auto map optimisation software. ( I really think very few people do this well. And it would make a world of difference to the users)
4. Import export of data from compendium and others.
5. Retro-processing data and offering assistance in extracting a good map from any external or old data source. 
6. Keeping track of chronological data as well as issue based data as I think chronology is often overlooked in this kind of work. Perhaps even letting this inform the way maps render to some degree, to connote the flow of relevance in the conversation that lead to a given map.
7. Building of rich and mixed model data systems. For instance, easily incorporate another dynamic data from the Internet and allow piping via connections in Compendium. 
8. Use pain biased windowing, instead of the very wasteful window object model. 

So yeah. I hope that happens. If it does not I might just have to start a company to do it :-) Comments on what to put in such a thing would be really liked.

In other news, this whole thing being a webinar and all was interesting. I really think better remote meeting systems are a big part of the next frontier. 

Update: I now have a link to the complete webinar map series. Check it out if you are interested in this kind of thing. I think the Conversational versus Issue Based Structure.ppt offers some good insight for people who are really new this kind of mapping. 

Business and Art

Today I started using PlanHQ for more serious work for a new venture at Adaptive Equipment. So far I do not really have a structured opinion of the toolkit however a feature I do sort of like is that the system forces you to give every project and sub project to a specific individual. I think this will really help people care about their work and be more strict about deadlines. We will see how well it works out. 

In other news. I found a really cool art blog that is almost continuously updated called FFFFound. There is some really great art on there of many kinds. I think mostly 2d stuff. I think there are a few too many posts to syndicate the feed. Does anyone know of any other interesting art blogs?

More Barcamp before Gainesville

I just found out that Barcamp Orlando is coming up and this one is going to be a two day event. I am really looking forward to it and already signed up for both days. Not sure if I will talk this time but I might just have to say a thing or two. Here is a little video the organisers put out: 


View Video on Vimeo.

In other news, I think this is a nice way to do Barcamp and I am starting to think about what should happen at our's here in Gainesville. 

Why isn't Del.icio.us Better Software

So today I got a delicious account and started importing some of my bookmarks from various other services. Quite quickly I became annoyed that the workflow seemed to be quite indirect. The first feature I should would be important was something like is found in email tagging and management software like gmail, in which one can check messages that one wants to effect. I think it is really stupid that there is not a basic set of batch tools in the standard interface. Especially after I have just imported 850 links and there are a fair few more to come. 

Secondly I found the response time in search and tag finding so slow. Surely they could make this a lot faster and potentially even do it as a Google Suggest like feature. The website is designed around such a specific use model, surely they could optimise the experience a bit more. 

Another thing that made me queasy was the lack of an in window solution for storing other peoples links. I think this is such crap. They could auto fill a number of the fields and just have a little pop over using ajax.

For now the last think I will complain about is the social aspect of the service. It really dose not feel social. It feels like being in a operators room from phone services of the past. I say this because in the standard view, the one were you do editing and building of your link base, there is very little social information. The only context given is how many people have also selected a given item. I think they could include more, for instance common tags on items with colour or size representing how common those tags were for those items.  Another method would be to have some kind of indicator of how related a given link, tag, or stored link, is to you and your community. 

In any case though, I really think they have not done a great job at making this service sing. I will continue using it and perhaps realise that everything I have said here is wrong. If you think so please tell me so in the comments. My Del.icio.us user name is Metophile as usual.

In other news, one of the groups I am working for at the moment is starting a consumer geared laser marking and manufacture service. We think iPods and so forth are a good starting point. Leave comments if you have any requests or ideas, we are testing things out currently.

People and working with them

Today I was informed that someone was interested in part of something I said a while back on Issue Mapping. I was a little surprised but as a result I have spent the afternoon thinking about work flow in compendium and also considering what it will actually take to build a good version of compendium online. I really wish they would do that. The basis of compendium's current collaborative tools is really week and if it were built to run in a browser I think the audience would also widen greatly. In any case. That is a project for later.

For now, I am thinking about business models but I would really love some help. I am trying to work out some good approaches to dealing with various problems and opportunities I think are ever more popular, and though this is not necessarily impossible, I am yet to find a particular business to start that is ideal. Most recently I considered the prospect of building a working community which essentially is not designed to provide any given service but more designed to provide open doors to services or products within the community. I think this is a little like a economy via social network, however I would like to have consideration for technologically isolated actins as well. We will see what comes of this, if you have any suggestions I would love to hear them.

The last lecture

This is a long but great talk. Everyone who has 95 minutes to spare should do so watching this lecture. 

In other news, I started using twitter as Metophile of course. I am finding it really great so far, it is surprising how useful the information the service provides actually is. 

In other other news FOWA was really great as was BarCamp Miami. I am looking into setting up a BarCamp Gainesville now. Interested people should comment or email me or something. 

And the last of other news, I am going to the Dry Tortugas for a few days for a quick holiday. 

Also, my work website (that I made) is now up, please leave comments on what can be improved.  

Encyclopedia of Life

This morning I received notification that the Encyclopaedia of Life has gone live. If you are not familiar with this it is a service that hopes to have documentation and classification of all life on earth. The service has opened with more than 1 million species, which I guess is quite a lot. I think there is still a ways to come and at the moment their site is running pretty slowly. 

We will see. 

In other news, I am really excited about the conferences this weekend. 

Using what's there

Recently I started thinking about the prospect of establishing developing relationships with various native species to utilise them as tools for common chores. I thought firs about dirt of floors and how it is likely that there is some little creature that would really like to eat my dirt, but, that I have locked out or banished from my vision. In line with this I started thinking about the design of houses that capitalise on the services that the local native plants animals and insects could provide. Not having much of a background in the area I just brainstormed lightly with the hope of getting into it more scientifically further down the line.



Today, I was looking though the recent TED talks I had not seen and found one which seems to be talking about a similar prospect. Realising what nature is for and letting us and it work together advantageously. I think, the way the idea is presented in this talk, makes it seems so simple and so advantageous that people have forgotten the reason of being. I think that addressing the question of motivation is something which will happen but only slowly, and when it happens, most things will be fixed.

If you have good ideas about this, please comment.

Appropriation

I have been writing a personal statement of sorts to give to companies for employment prospects. During this process I have tried to understand what I really love in design and in the thing we call the future. I think, after some time, I have come to the conclusion that I really like the idea of simply making things better by making them more appropriate. This process is not uncommon, of course there are things like the appropriate technology school of thought however I think they are only getting half the picture. I think the other half is outside of the technology and the outcome but in the methodology and the sources of decision making context. 

I also really like the idea of the future as being an achievable end, as is demonstrated considering an effort to bring the future sooner. I think this is the role of design and will be the result of appropriation. 

Perhaps I am not saying anything new here, just reiterating what most designer know, but I think the lexical difference is enough to provoke a new approach to the same information. 

Trucks and Cars and Things

So recently I started working a little on an automobile system looking at most aspects of transport and mechanical design from a new perspective. For the time being I am just kind of concept storming and using Google SketchUp to model some ideas but eventually I think it would be really interesting to take the project a bit further. In any case, today I was reading Dark Roasted Belnd where they were discussing truck trains. One of the companies highlighted by the article is a really innovative new company that is doing a few interesting things to create universally better trucks. The company is called ETF (Emirates Truck Factory) and as far as I can immediately tell they are not in production at the moment. I hope the do come soon and I hope they apply some of their interesting innovations to a wider range of mobility applications. 

Camping, Baring and Thinking About Apps

Today I read on TechCrunch about a conference in Miami on the future of web apps called FOWA.  It seems like a fun even and I am in FL at the moment so I am going to try to go. Also, BarCamp is being held the day before so I signed it too. 

This should be a lot of fun. I will blog about it if I live.

Lacquer Conduit

Today I read about a really awesome tool called Conduit. It is a lot like Shake though it is a fair bit more responsive and also a bit less hard core. It seems it doesn't quite meet shake on flexibility though the fresh design is quite nice. The toolkit is based on GPU calculations which makes it a lot faster and more capable of doing realtime adjustments. In the interface there is even a dashboard like pane that lets one pipe realtime variables from though any node while looking at a given output. I imagine this could be quite convenient for client sessions.

I would still love to see a program as flexible as Shake built with core image so it can run a bit faster. For the time being i prefer the shake interface a bit.

Conduit seems to be made by Lacquer and distributed by GarageDV. I hate DV. Also, I heard about it all from ProLost. Also, there are some videos introducing features and techniques and so forth. 

Website Blogs

Many companies these days have blogs and so forth and most of them even have links to their blogs from their home pages, what I find annoying however is that so many of these companies' blogs do not then link back to their main site. Of course this is usually not a huge problem, you can adjust the url or go back in history. I think it is really awefull when they blog has a logo in the header that is similar to the main page, on the main page clicking on the header would take you to the homepage, however on many such blogs it does not, it just returns you to the top of the blog.

Anyway. I really love the fact that more groups are blogging now. I am currently trying to get my company to start their own such thing.

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.

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.