Blog March 2008

A SXSW brain dump via Bambuser threw up an interesting concept for me when Stef Lewandowski asked the question “is your mum on Twitter?”

That simple rhetorical question for me encapsulates the state of the Social Internet as it is. We have a whole raft of great apps available to us for free, but we as early adopters seem, in my opinion to have difficulty bridging the gap between what is a “cool application” and what an average web user can gain from it in his/her day-to-day life.

I was in the pub with a mate who’s a student at Leeds University. After listening to some of his tales of drunken misdeeds I quickly found myself evangelising tools like Twitter. Here I thought was a prime example of how an app such as this can be used to great effect, for one thing by the University itself. What is a lecture was cancelled? What if students needed a quick reminder that an important project was due? What if the local Rock Soc had organised a pissup somewhere? This is all fairly obvious stuff but there are myriad uses for it in and outside the education service.

What’s interesting is that, even for students who spend three years of their lives learning and developing so are not afraid of hearing about new developments in worlds that interest them, it’s very difficult to make the leap from “yeah, that’s cool; right, I’m off to the bar” and “yeah, that’s cool, what’s the address again?”

I wholeheartedly believe that everyone can benefit from such a unique app, but that’s not true of the entire Social Internet. The beauty of Twitter is that you don’t need to be connected to the Web after you’ve signed up: you can do everything via SMS, and even my mum’s got a mobile.

So do the monitor and keyboard form the barrier between great services and the digitally bewildered? My mum sends emails and maintains a blog (would you believe) but using my dad as a proxy, so she never really uses the Internet; but she’ll happily send a text on her mobile. So does it just come back to the fear of breaking the Internet, or is it just too much effort? If you could plug your camera into your TV and upload your photos via your digibox, would more people start using Flickr for example?

These questions can’t be answered for all sites, especially when you get onto social media behemoths like Spacebook or MyFace, but these often contain elements of other sites (Facebook status vs Twitter tweets, MySpace Music vs Last.fm etc).

Google are starting to understand that the beauty of the Internet is such that you don’t need to be sat infront of a 17" screen to experience it, and in the case of some of Google’s telephony services you can take a screen of any size out of the equation entirely.

So do the early adopters need to bridge the gap or should it be on the heads of the app developers to make their services available without the big scary screen?

I’m sure this is a sore fact for many web developers, but websites don’t always work. CAPTCHA images are often badly compiled so that meaningless symbols look like legitimate characters, or verification emails fail to reach the registrant’s inbox. As someone who likes to try out lots of different social media sites (among many others) this can become an increasing source of frustration, because web developers are making their lives easier by making users’ lives harder.

But this isn’t the problem for me: as an experienced web developer who works on big enterprise projects (thus projects that may lure in spammers, harvesters and other bots) I’m well aware that there are necessary steps that need to be taken to ensure the people using these sites are people, and not mechanical creatures of the digital underworld.

No, what really gets my goat is that when these systems fail (when CAPTCHA imags don’t validate or verification emails just don’t get sent), you’re completely locked out of that website if the webmaster has seen fit to make all contact with either him/herself or the company completely impossible.

Every site that has an element of interactivity must have a point of contact, whether it be an icky contact form or a direct email link. Don’t be swayed by the arrogance of your developer - we all think our stuff works all the time and we’re often wrong, although we’ll never admit it -and don’t disadvantage your users in order to put less strain on your spam filter: you can always upgrade your mail server, but a user who has been spurned by your site will never come back.

For the last 18 months or so I’ve been skipping from one host to another trying to find a company that didn’t cost the earth but also provided decent support. This is harder than you’d imagine.

My journey really started back in 2005 when I discovered GNX Online, a small firm who I think were based in India. As I was an ASP.NET programmer I plumped for their .NET hosting which was - and still is - extremely cheap. It used a Plesk control panel which is great, and they had both instant chat and a support ticket system.

In all fairness the web side of things was OK on the whole: now and again the permissions I’d setup in Plesk would be reset and I’d have to go in and reinstate them, but the real problem was with their email services. There really is nothing worse than knowing you should have received an email but having no evidence to suggest this: hosts love that because there’s no mail to dispute (you can argue about a late email, but a missing one? forget it).

To cut a long story short, one of my clients complained so I found another host: Dataflame. God they were great to begin with: cheap .NET hosting, free MySQL databases, instant chat, Plesk and a telephone number. I lapped it up, and ended up hosting about 8 sites with them.

I’ve recommended Dataflame in the past, and for small “set it and forget it” sites (minisites, static sites, email asset hosting) they’re great because you shouldn’t ever have to rely on their support...which is poor, to say the last. As I often do with hosts I started off very polite with lots of pleases, thank yous and complements, but I think the last online chat I had with one of their support guys (obviously stationed in an Indian call centre but given fake English names) ended with me calling him a bloody fool. Hardly offensive but not very professional either.

Not so long ago I decided to move this blog from wordpress.com to my own host, and thoroughly disillusioned with Dataflame and not willing to stump up the cash for a company like Fasthosts (who are great, but not cheap), and on a Twitter recommendation I signed up with Lunarpages, another budget host. And boy did they look budget! But the thing that attracted me was the distinct lack of an instant chat button and the welcome presence of a UK phone number. Could I be on to something here?

I’ve had two occasions to contact their support team and on both I’ve been really impressed. The first was down to my own ignorance but the second was a genuine problem that couldn’t be countered with their cPanel installation (the poor man’s Plesk). I got in touch and within an hour or so (on bank holiday Monday no less) the problem was resolved. Plus they were really polite and above all helpful.

I should stress though that this is not a .NET host but a PHP one (obviously the other hosts I’ve mentioned provide PHP but I was going for their .NET packages at the time), so I’m still stumped for a budget .NET host which leads me to wonder whether such a company exists. As I’ve mentioned I’m a big fan of Fasthosts, as I am of Titan Internet, but you’ve really got to reach into your pockets with those and they’re not great for getting a website out of the door quickly.

Many are of the opinion that the word “nice” should be banned from all polite conversation, and that’s a viewpoint I can understand. It’s a lazy word that conveys very little and in some cases for “nice” you can simply read “uninteresting”.

But in the world of technology - especially in these days of Web 2.0 - the word “nice” can convey a good deal of information that is generally understood within techie circles: a ”nice” laptop will have all the connections and wireless capabilities that one could reasonably want whilst being light and portable; a “nice” camera will be easy to operate yet packed with features, and a “nice” operating system will be robust, secure and user-friendly.

So what is a “nice” website and why is it important? Let me give you an example. Two “life stream” sites exist (there are many more, but these are possibly the two most popular): FriendFeed and Profilactic. They both have much the same functionality: you pile all your various social media usernames or profile URLs into one place and you get a page a little like a Twitter timeline with your every move documented, aswell as an RSS feed. I’m signed up for both, but I much prefer Profilactic because it is “nicer”. It has very few actual features that set it apart from FriendFeed (it has a much larger list of profiles you can add, but most of them are irrelevant, at least to me) and it’s actually a little buggier, but I prefer it to FriendFeed. So why? Let’s look at the clues...

1. It uses AJAX. Although an accessibility nightmare and very much “the in thing” it does make for an attractive site: you get a lovely ”please wait” message while your timeline (or your “mashup” as it’s called in Profilactic) is built.
2. The layout is much more attractive. I’ve stumbled around FriendFeed looking for the link I’d clicked the last time I was there, because things weren’t laid out all that well. FriendFeed is not by any means an ugly site, but it gets a little cluttered when you have lots of different feed items whereas they’re separated far better in Profilactic.
3. You can play your YouTube videos direct from the timeline (you can’t in FriendFeed, you’ve got to click the link).

I think the problem here is that, what separates a good site from a “nice” site is a collection of things which, if this were a project being built for a paying client would never have been added because they don’t provide extra functionality, they just make the site a more pleasant place to be in and clients aren’t always prepared to stump up the cash for that. I’m not suggesting that FriendFeed was built by anyone other than its original brainchild - I have no idea - but it possibly suffers from the “Phase 2” mentality whereby the “bells and whistles” are added later. Unfortunately sometimes it’s the bells and whistles that separate you from the competition, and that’s certainly the case with these two websites.

So in conclusion, “nice” is important, but it comes at a price.

When I was at uni I imagined a TV system where no channels existed, and you simply picked a program to watch without having to wait for it to start. A couple of years later, NTL:Telewest made this a reality when they launched their Teleport service (now called On-Demand), and now three years later you can get it on your phone, but for real this time, not in a “isn’t it nice but no-one will use it” kind of way.

While I was at uni, not going to clubs, getting slaughtered or missing lectures, I learned a lot about the Big British Castle (as Adam & Joe call it) and really grew to respect this massive corporation. Yes I’m concerned by the ongoing threat of service cuts and yes it would be nice it their podcasts contained more original content rather than just “best of the week” stuff, but when it comes to online media they’re streets ahead of any other broadcaster in the world.

In mid-to-late 2007 the BBC unveiled the iPlayer in all its shiny pink and black glory. I took part in the test run back in 2005 and my, hasn’t our baby grown? Then in early ’08 they announced they were to make many of their shows available from the iTunes store (spit, spit).

Obviously this is all ”because of the unique way the BBC is funded” and its erstwhile public service remit, but that doesn’t stop them being jolly good at web stuff! Take for example the iPlayer: at the moment you need a PC and a decent Internet connection to catch up on the week’s TV and radio, but the Beeb are changing that, not only by bringing the iPlayer to Virgin Media (what? no Sky? boo hoo) but by making it available on the iPhone and iPod Touch, and on other devices like the PlayStation and Xbox in the coming months.

If I weren’t a Virgin Media customer I’d be quite excited by the prospect of having UK TV content on my Xbox (and I don’t mean the stuff that winds up on Dave), as it’s already a great platform for downloadable video, but am more anxious to be able to download and watch BBC stuff on the move with my iPod Classic without having to use iTunes (I like Winamp: it works with an iPod and isn’t evil).

Nitpicking aside, this news coupled with rumours of a merger of on-demand services between the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, makes for exciting times. The only question is, in a few years’ time, will the Beeb have much content to distribute via their fancy new services except reruns of Dog Borstal and Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps?

The other thing to mention of course is that, if Murdock can lift his fat arse out of his money-counting sofa and put a rocket up Sky’s overpriced and overhyped rump, we can kiss goodbye to TV recorders because it’ll all be available whenever we want it. Super, smashing [pause, rewind], smashing [fast-forward], great.

First off, let’s clear something up: a blog is a collection of posts; a blog is not a single post, just like a podcast is not a single MP3 but a series of audio files delivered via a feed...otherwise, it’s just an MP3 and we already have a name for that.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I’ll get on to what my post is supposed to be about. I’ve been a blogger in various capacities since 2005. Admittedly I never really engaged with it: all I was doing was regurgitating the articles I’d been writing for my MSO Media newsletter, Getting Results. However I had a blogger.com account, I was listed in a couple of directories and had one or two comments, so I thought I was doing alright.

Then I closed down MSO Media, moved out of my parents’ house and got myself a flat, during which time I’d setup a new, more casual portfolio site which had a blog filled with thoughts on web development issues and personal reflections. This went along very nicely for a while and, because I was writing about quite well-known topics - and because I had a good grasp of SEO - I found myself attracting a few hits. But it was still not a blog, so if I have to be honest, I reckon I’ve only been blogging properly for about three weeks.

So what had I been doing for the past couple of years? I was writing posts in the right style - even though there really is no such thing any more - and with a good degree of regularity, I’d written my own CMS so I could have full control and I knew how to put an RSS feed together, so what was the problem?

The basic difference between what I had written in the past and what I’m now writing can be found in the word blogosphere. My old ramshackle collection of musings existed almost entirely in their own entity: they could be found through Google, but only as standard web pages. My site wasn’t understood to be a blog because I didn’t realise that the best thing about writing a blog is to be connected with other bloggers: techniques like tagging, pinging and trackbacks were almost totally alien to me, and these are the things that make a blog what it is.

So a blog is not simply a collection of pages in reverse date order, but rather something that exists as a part of an interconnected matrix of searchable and exchangeable content where comment is encouraged and sharing paramount.

Welcome to the real world. Welcome to the blogosphere.

Check out the Wikipedia entry on blogosphere if you’re still curious.

I’ve just downloaded Duffy’s debut album Rockferry, from 7Digital, a nice music site offering music downloads, protected and non-protected alike. I could have sworn I’d seen this advertised on play.com as a DRM-free download but when I looked on Saturday, Duffy was there none, which leads me to wonder whether

1. there was some sort of a falling out between Play and Universal Ireland (her record label) or
2. Universal had decided against going DRM-free

Since I wasn’t able to find the album (legally) without DRM on any other site I guess it’s the latter. So I trotted off to 7Digital, bought the album in WMA format and reached straight for Tunebite, a lovely piece of software which harks back to the late 80s by reviving the term “high speed dubbing” (ask your parents).

The software plays back your protected WMA or M4A files using its own virtual sound card and can play up to 9 tracks at once, meaning you can strip the protection from the average album in about 10 minutes or so, without feeling dirty about it (Tunebite is a well-made piece of software so you don’t feel as if your computer is going to get infested by spying maggots or whatnot).

“Why”, you might ask “have you paid for the album then stripped it of its DRM if you could have just bought it for £1 from some Russian site or downloaded it for free via BitTorrent?” and the answer is simple. I still believe that the people responsible for making a record “happen” (be it obviously the performers and writers but also the engineers, producers and yes, those responsible for promoting and distributing it) because they do a job just like anyone else.

I had a discussion with Danny Smith at the last Birmingham Bloggers meetup about the idea of paying for music, which Danny found abhorrent. I understood his and Kev’s viewpoint about making the tracks free in lew of charging for the live event, but the fact is that I won’t spend £15 to see the top of Duffy’s head. I do love going to gigs but I really have to like a band or artist before I’ll spend over a fiver on them (I’ll happily go and see someone new or relatively unknown for £5) and I should imagine that most of Duffy’s listeners have (and will never) go to a gig in their lives (a Party in the Park doesn’t constitute a gig!)

The problem with this paradigm is that, it may work really well for smaller, independent labels who are more likely to take a chance on something they believe in, but for the larger labels or anyone owned by the Big Four, it won’t work. Labels are cautious beasts as it is: I’ve been waiting for one of my favourite bands, Misty’s Big Adventure to sign on the dotted line for years but it seems no label will touch them, partly through Grandmaster Gareth (the lead)’s stubbornness but also because they’re too “risky” for anyone who has an accountant to answer for. So if you then take Danny’s idea and apply it here, Misty’s will never find a label, and neither will many others. Unless of course they put on a good live show (which incidentally Misty’s do).

So let’s say record companies don’t get paid when you buy a single or album they release, but they do get paid when you see them. Doesn’t that then mean that they’ll only sign bands that they know can pack ’em in?

The problem here is that bands like Bloc Party who produce very well-made albums but don’t play live music, and the Polyphonic Spree who pack a full orchestra will have trouble cutting a deal, whereas bands that really only work live (the White Stripes for example: terrible musicians but entertaining to watch) will end up with a lucrative recording deal on the strength of their stage skills alone.

There is of course another way to make money from a live event, even for a studio-centric band. The last couple of Barenaked Ladies gigs I went to were recorded, and the last one offered as collection of DRM-free MP3s copied onto memory stick which was made available as you left the venue. Besides being bloody clever and very stressful for the guys who have to do the copying, it could be a great way to make money from a live event. But the problem is you still lose those bands that aren’t as strong (or can’t as accurately reproduce their sound) live.

I’m still happy to pay for my music and always will be, but I don’t agree with the idea that a record company can tell me what I can and can’t do with my music. I recently started selling off all my CDs, partly to make a bit of ready cash but also because I’ve come to the realisation that I’ve nothing to prove (the only reason we buy CDs over downloads is for display purposes), but that’s a violation of copyright laws. But then so is playing your CD in the car when someone else is there (I’m not joking, it constitutes a public performance) unless they’ve bought the CD too.

Record companies are universally hated and I don’t see why that has to be so. Everyone deserves to get paid for doing the job they do and the money has to come from somewhere, however there needs to be a bit of give and take. If I buy an album I want it in MP3 at 128kbps and nothing else. If a friend wants a copy he can have one - it’s called sharing and that’s how people find out about music - but there’s a big difference between home taping (which kills music about as much as oxygen kills hamsters) and producing mass copies to sell out of a car boot, or distributing it via BitTorrent.

There are so many different angles to take on this and lots of other ways to look at Danny’s idea - and it’s a great way of getting people out of the house - but I think there is an irreconcilable difference between a recording a live event, and so any rethink on pricing has to be based on the recording itself.