Archive for the ‘thoughts’ Category

Apprentice

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

Disclaimer: I don’t think I can form this post in a way that won’t make you think “What a pompous ass” when you’re finished reading it. With that in mind please bear with me through all the ego boosting statements.

I’ve been a web developer for seven years at Parsek which is a leading web development agency since its inception. We’ve been developing cutting edge websites since the beginning, using some sort of AJAX in 2001, creating reward winning sites with Flash and without it, were one of the first to switch to a CSS layout for corporate pages in Slovenia and are still one of the technologically most innovative web developers. I can easily say that I was a part of almost every exceptional product that we released into the wild.

During these seven years I accumulated a lot of knowledge that I no longer use to the extent that I used to. I didn’t pass any official certifications, visited workshops nor I have any specific product or feature to show (my mistake I guess). I don’t even have a portfolio to show.

Since this knowledge could be of great value to somebody else I decided to share it in a structured form. People who work with me know that I already do this at Parsek in a less organized manner that depends more on the person that’s in need of this knowledge.

There are some limitations to the offer. The person cannot have a job and has to have time for regular meetings and time to work on learning and working assignments. I do not expect any prior knowledge of web development – all you have to do is convince me that you’re the best possible choice and you’re willing to go all the way. I can guarantee work on projects, some payed and some pro bono and at the end of it I can guarantee a job.

Video is the new AJAX

Monday, April 14th, 2008

TVImage via WikipediaRecently there’s been a lot of video news sites popping up here in Slovenia. In addition to TV networks almost every newspaper site now has a video section. I understand that these sites need to evolve and that media is changing. Every year we see statistics changing telling us we read more on the web and less newspapers. Even TV is losing ground. The media business is changing and in this ever changing world the easiest and the cheapest solution is to follow what others are doing. Unfortunately this also means that you do things without thinking them over thoroughly.

When you do that you have a problem – you’re thinking that you’re giving readers what they really want but in turn you’re giving them what you want. Or what you think they want – either way you’re not on the right track. That made me think of the ways I watch video online and the ways I want to watch it.

Podcasts

Most video I watch is actually not on the internet – it gets downloaded (almost) automatically into iTunes. I don’t watch the podcasts everyday even though some podcasts are daily news reports.

So local media companies are adding podcast feeds to their video content and hoping that people watch them[1]. Newsflash – podcasts are not a technical issue. Most people don’t even know what feeds are (another story), why do you think that they know what podcasts are?

The solution here is quite simple – for a quick start of course. Make real podcasts, use the news you’re making or providing on your site already. This way you can leverage your existing content while providing something that people might actually watch. Focus on local news[2] and target the younger audience, with daily episodes not exceeding 4 minutes in length. A very important thing is choosing the presenter – they need to reflect your your goals and suite your target content and audience. This means that your average TV anchormen won’t work – check the most popular podcasts to get the feeling what you’re looking for, keywords probably being humorous, personal, friendly.

Such podcasts have a few possible ways of monetizing themselves. One possibility is to add commercials (add them at the end, not the beginning), you might have weekly or monthly sponsors that you display in the background or even at the beginning of the show (not more that one screenshot). Since you can differentiate your subscribers from random web users you can adjust advertising to get most from both worlds. Be creative!

TV shows

Fortunately both local TV networks now have ways of watching locally produced shows I’ve missed. I do that quite often[3] since I can’t really fit some of them into my already busy schedule. When I’m watching such a show on the internet that’s probably the only thing I’m doing at that specific time and means that the computer is actually acting as if it was a TV.

Since I can move the slider you can’t push ads to me as you would on TV. That doesn’t mean you can’t have ads in such shows, you just need to think about them differently. What I do often is pause the video to check my email, browse around or just wait for the show to download – perfect time for placing ads. When I come back there’ll be an ad waiting, I’ll click next and continue watching the show.

The idea is not mine – when I was in the Netherlands a few years ago I went to the movies – in the middle of the movie there was a commercial which announced a brief break during the movie. I don’t remember the commercials going on while the break lasted (we all left the theater) but they were on again when we started coming back.

A great option with watching TV shows would also be to allow me to set the shows in my profile – that way I could see when something will be on TV and when I can watch it online. If I have a few shows to check you should allow me to add them to a playlist much as I would in iTunes or on my iPod. And I wouldn’t mind ads in between – if I’m watching a show that has already preloaded you could preload an ad into memory and play it while you start buffering the next show in my playlist – I’d have to wait anyway. You could also create a podcast that would push the shows I added or subscribed to.

Video news

This is the one that most media providers do currently and get it wrong most of the time. When reading news on the internet I’ll have many tabs open since what I’m doing is browsing. This means I’ll start at the homepage and then click on random news there, maybe click a category I’m really interested in, when news open I might click some related news and so on. This “trip” is rather random and fast.

Since I’m in browsing mode I’m more likely to only skim the information on the news page. This means that when I come to a page that only provides a video I’ll have nothing to skim and will close that tab immediately. I won’t see the ad in front of the video and I won’t see the video. In a month I might discover that I’m not getting quality information and move on to another site that will let me skim what I want to skim and fully concentrate on what I want to see.

Video as add-on

One solution to this problem is to use the video to convey information that text can’t. For example if you’re talking about a football match you might add video of the best move or all the goals scored. Another possibility would be that you’re pushing news on Britney and you add video of the incident. This way I can skim the news, figure if I want to see the video and check it if it interests me enough.

Video as primary content

When you think the only way to present content is video (I don’t think that ever happens but some do) you could use the idea already mentioned – profiles and sort-of bookmarks. I first saw this implemented on the International Herald Tribune website for text only articles – while browsing and skimming for interesting news you add what you want to read to your profile. At the end you can sit back and read what you saved or in this case check your own news show. Hey, you could even add social features to this with sharing of such shows (technically speaking playlists) with friends,… This also makes ads less invasive since you can add them less often then on every video I watch.

AJAX?

Some of you might know that I hate AJAX and I do for the same reason I hate video on the web currently. There’s a bunch of idiotssites shoving it down my throat in totally inappropriate ways and I really hate being molestedbothered this way. Technologies are here to solve problems and the only way they can do that is if people think what problems they solve better than others. That way we can read the news, watch the video, get an AJAXy[4] exeprience when and where we want to and where that specific technology solves our problems best.

  1. I’d really love to see the statistics on that. Anybody know where to get them? back
  2. We get world news in other podcasts or from other sources – keep it linked to what you know best. back
  3. More often on PopTV since I prefer their way of delivering content – via a fullscreen Flash interface – opposed to a small Windows Media / Real player on RTV Slovenija. back
  4. By the way – with all the AJAX around home pages of both local media houses reload automatically (which could really be an asynchronous request to retrieve the latest news) – one with a meta refresh tag and the other with inline JavaScript. back
Zemified

Another year gone by

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

A few days ago this blog celebrated its second birthday. It’s been a good year, with links to my article published by such notable authors as Luke Wroblewski and Ethan Marcotte – the same article was translated into Russian. The blog was also included in Planet Microformats.

I’ve written only 61 posts (down from 100 in the first year), gotten 134 comments (down from 155 in the first year) and more than 70.000 spam comments (up from 17.000). I have 56 subscribers according to FeedBurner, which is more than a 100% increase from 25 a year before.

Firefox is the dominant browser with 47%, Internet Explorer lost some market share and is down to 44% with Safari rising to 4% and Opera to 2.5%. Almost 90% of the visitors have Flash 9 installed, an additional 4.5% are stuck at Flash 8. Screens grew a bit with only 27% having 1024×768 or less (32% year before) and less than 2% 800×600 or less. Windows have a share of 85%, Mac OS 10%, Linux 4%.

Top content is still This page contains both secure and nonsecure items, Messing up the interface coming in at a distant second with merely a third of the visits.

Redesign

I’ve had a redesign planned since day 1, but as usual it took quite some time to get here. Since I’m not a design I couldn’t just create a fancy look with everything else left the same. The idea was to shake everything up and try to come out with a layout that would be worth redoing everything. When I posted about what a TV network / news page should have when being redone I was also setting my own targets.

Tableless layout

This goes without saying. All the pages should validate, although there might be some crap left.

Width

I increased the width to 850px with the addition of 140px to the left used only for design purpose, not content. The main content is only 410px wide which means you can easily read this blog on devices like the Nokia n800.

YSlow

Not really that relevant since the page only creates about 15 requests which might even decrease as I compact the JavaScript. There are a bunch of other requests made that are content related – images, Zemanta pixies, favicons…

Microformats

Every page is supposed to be valid hAtom and the About section is an hCard with adr and geo. Links to others are of course XFNed. The about page is planned to be an hResume.

There’s no need to talk about blog compatibility and screensaving for banners. I don’t use OpenID there are no log-ins.

Context sensitive

Markos recently pointed out the fact that not many pages on the internet make use of the possibility to change the page for different users and different context. This, of course, is not an easy job, especially if you’re doing heavy processing – doing this for each user might be a bit to heavy. It is something I think differentiates the internet from other media and should be used to provide a better user experience.

User based

Returning visitors of this page will get special treatment. Since they’re coming back they don’t need to see the About section and they will also not have banners displayed.

Referrer based

People coming from search engines will see their query parsed into words that will be colored for easier findability. They will be able to switch them on and off and be able to repeat the same query on the internal search with the last option available only if the referrer was an external search engine.

Location based

Even though many blog themes have the same sidebar for all the pages (as did the previous one I used) this doesn’t follow the normal architecture rules. The sidebar is normally context specific – in my case a regular user reading a blog post will currently see nothing in it (while others will see the About and the Ads.

Other candy

Grid and baseline

The page is set to a 7 unit grid, with units 60px wide with a 10px gutter in between. It’s also set to a baseline height of 18px that is respected throughout the page. Images and other non-text blocks on the page are corrected with JavaScript to a half of the unit (9px).

Links

The links bar will try to retrieve the favicon of the link – if it succeeds it will use it instead of the default icon.

Maps

If you click on the Google Maps link in the About section they will open as small inline maps with a link to open them in a new window.

Yet to be done

You might have noticed that post categories are nowhere to be found. I didn’t forget them I just found out that I’ve changed my categorizing pattern and had to rethink the display. I also wanted to add the Elsewhere section with links to or even content from other pages where pieces of me reside (Twitter, Flickr, Marela, Pownce, Facebook, LinkedIn, del.icio.us,…). Another thing missing is the Projects and Experiments sections, I’ll tackle these in a separate post sometime in the future…

Zemified

The Catch-22 of contextual advertising

Monday, April 7th, 2008

Wikipedia states the following:

Contextual advertising is the term applied to advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as content displayed in mobile phones, where the advertisements are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed by the user.

As a content publisher I have the possibility to put ads on my blog and earn a few bucks whenever a visitor clicks on the link. Since I’m to small to be targeted by any advertising agency or advertisers directly (which is proven by the lack of text-link-ads on this page) the contextual advertising is the only way to go.

The goal of contextual advertising is to display ads targeted at the reader of the content and in the case of blogs also the creator / owner of the blog. This essentially means that whenever I check my blog to moderate comments, write a new post or just to check what’s going on I’ll see ads that target me directly. When I see such an ad I’m invited to click it and I sometimes do – when the ad is interesting enough. I click on it as I would click on the same banner if I saw it on any other page.

If we try to see this from the other side – the advertising network will pay me for every click anybody makes on any ads on my blog. Actually the advertisers pay for the ads and a part of that money is passed on to me as the content owner. This means that I could easily place ads on my blog and earn money by just clicking on them. Obviously they will want to prevent such action. A local advertising network ToboAds does this transparently – they told me that they registered a few fraudulent clicks and that it constitutes a breach of their TOS – if I continue to do this they’ll throw me out of the system. I wonder what Google does…

So they’re targeting ME and not letting ME click.

As I talked with a guy from the ToboAds team today it made me think whether I could find a favorable solution for all parties. I understand that this might be hard but how about this – I could only use the money I earn from clicking on “my” ads for buying ads on the same network. Of course if the amount is relatively high there need to be other measures – we wouldn’t want ad networks to charge us for clicks some freak did on their own blog.

I’d really like to know how these guys (oh, and these guys) do it.

Zemified

Announcing TechCrunch Slovenia!

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

After a month of hard negotiation and work I’m proud to present:
TechCrunch Slovenia

The site is in Slovenian and you can read more at www.techcrunch.si.

24ur.com relaunched

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

What we got:

What we didn’t get:,

  • yslow – >160 requests for >450k – but it takes more time to load, probably due to javascripts in the head
  • microformats – wishful thinking
  • openid – wishful thinking

What I didn’t check but I think it’s safe to say we didn’t get:

  • blogs compatibility
  • screen saver for banners

Another thing we lost in the transition is the TV guide. I don’t know where they lost it but you can get it here.

Zemified