GLOBADOM

This isn’t a shopping blog, but I actually found a deal so good I feel like using this space to endorse it. Or brag. Either way.

My club-mate Johnny Cheung suggested an entirely gimcrack website called LED Shoppe as a source of a cheapo Bluetooth USB thingy. And he was right! The sucker cost me about $8.25 in Canadian funds, shipped.

From Hong Kong. Or to put it another way, I don’t know how they’re making money, except to assume that their unit cost on these little electronic bits is, to a first order, zero dollars.

But while that’s a good deal, then they sent me a note about a smoking hot deal, which I took advantage of: 5-packs of AA or AAA Ni-MH rechargables for…C$5.86. Again, that’s the shipped, all-taxes-included price. 4-battery charger? Same price.

If you check, you will find that that pirce is not only incredibly cheap for rechargable batteries (of any type, really), it’s cheaper than typical packs of name-brand non-rechargable alkalines.

Did I like this deal? Um, I just ordered 30 batteries, a charger, and two bike lights from them.

I wish I was getting some sort of referral deal for posting this, but sadly, no such scam was available. In “revenge,” I’ll give you the coupon codes I got from them via email:

5% off any order of 3 or more items: 3MORE
10% off an order of $30 or more: 1030
15% off $60 or more: 1560

The selection in the shop largely runs to small computer peripherals or electronic odds and ends, or LED lights in the middling-quality zone. The key seems to be items that are small enough to be cheaply shipped via regular post. Check it out. Have fun. Tell ’em Wired Cola sent you. I don’t think it will make any difference, but maybe they’ll start reading my blog or something.

Oh, the kicker that sold me on this place? The package with the Bluetooth dongles in it arrived complete with a friendly smiley-face design stamped on the mailing label. I think this place is probably a living-room business run by two teenage girls with atrocious web skillz. But they pass the savings on to you!

Ulturducken!. The logical extension of Turducken. Ernie took pictures.

I’m hungry now.

My click-through rate on online ads is somewhere around zero: maybe one every couple of months (but hey, advertisers, keep spending the ad dollars on the Internet: it’s the easiest way you can get impressions from me!) at best. But then a Telus ad made a promise so absurdly underachieving I couldn’t believe it: If they drop 1% of your calls, they’ll give you a small credit on your bill.

Now, I know a small amount about reliability and performance in stuff like computer networks, where something like five nines of service (99.999% uptime) is considered a hard but achievable metric. Terrestrial phone services use “five nines” as a basic standard of availability (and routinely hit it: when’s the last time you picked up a phone and didn’t get a dial tone?). This isn’t quite the same as Telus’ pathetic promise (they are implicitly promising better than 99% network availability), but the Telus promise isn’t even trying. My wife and I both have mobile phones on the same (non-Telus) network, and I can’t recall the last time either phone dropped a call or even had no signal.

This “promise” is so bad it actually makes me doubt the quality of Telus’ network in a way I had never contemplated before. It’s as if my favourite restaurant suddenly put up ads saying “guaranteed rat-free!”

They compound their bizarre marketing mistake with a pathetically mincing promise of compensation: if they DO drop 1% of their calls over a year, they’ll…credit you a minute for each dropped call, to a maximum of 100 minutes. Woo! They’re offering me a miniscule discount on a service whose marginal cost of provision is practically zero! I’m as happy as a little girl! It’s as if my favourite restaurant put up ads saying “rat-free food, or 10% off your bill!”

So here’s to Telus, for the least brilliant promotion since . . . hm. I couldn’t google a worse one. Suggestions in the comments?

Once again, in association with Team Escape Velocity, it’s time for On Bike Interviews.

If you hated the last one, you might dislike this one less: tighter editing, funnier visual bits. I think I ought to get a better camera, though.

So, in between bouts of procrastinating the creation of my new cyclocross bike (working title: Azzuri Sporco), the new MEC catalog arrived.

Always fun to see what’s in there. The best find in the bike section is probably these Freddy Speedeez.

The Speedeez are total knock-offs of the popular and useful $50 SKS Race Blades, a quick-on, quick-off fender set designed for easily converting your fancy, clearance-free road bike into an effective rain bike. The trick with the Speedeez is that they cost less than $20. Since anything that costs less than $20 is virtually free in my mental landscape, a set of these are very likely to end up in The Pile!

I am in Victoria, and will be for another day.

Butchart Gardens costs $23/person in the high season. It may be worth it. I shall say it is the most impressive garden I have ever experienced. There’s not much more to discuss about it, except that we took two hours to tour it in a reasonably leisurely fashion. It is an excellent place to stop and smell the roses. Photos should be forthcoming on Saturday.

We saw Drea, and I tried to encourage her to resume blogging.

Tomorrow we see Nelson, and I should try to make him put a blog on his site.

Now, I’m going to bed.

Barcamp was awesome. Massive knowledge transfer. Half the workshops I attended were great, and I missed many more that I wanted to check out. I frightened DB by saying that I liked it so much I would attend one every month if they would organize it. Even the t-shirt was nice.

Quick notes:

Peter van Ganderen gave a great overview of the state of digital archiving today. The only known solution is moving your data from one hard drive to the next, and aiming for non-obsolescent file formats.

Brent van Weringen talked about the state of mobile phones, the MVNO world, data, and where phones are going. The short version is that data is a weird market right now, and Brent suspects that there will be lots of money for a data-centric MVNO that leverages a few key strengths: a limited, targeted, tightly-integrated hardware-software platform and upcoming phones that will access WiFi and WiMax seamlessly. The sum total would be a cheap data plan on a phone that jumps from mobile networks to WiFi/WiMax in order to save on data charges for the MVNO. We’ll see. Right now, a lot more MVNOs are staring at microscopic client logs. So maybe they had best try something.

Richard Sexton, who works at Technicolor locally, told some great stories about Dr. Uwe Boll and thinks that his critics are about to find out that Dr. Boll is a pretty good boxer. Richard was actually trying to talk about how he thought that video game tropes and visual styles were ruining movies, but I don’t think he made the point. What I frequently worry about (perhaps too often) is that video games are being infected with the style of movies, whether they need it or not.

DB presented on memes, using the example of his icryptex meme, and had some excellent info on how the thing propagated from his referrer logs. Here’s a hint: Internet Dark Matter (aka email, IM, and other visits without referrals) is a powerful source of links.

Photocamp, a presentation by Kris Krug, Warwick Patterson, and Matt Trent was great. The part of the presentation on what the future ideas in digital photography will be shocked me: for a start, how about “plenoptic” cameras that will allow variable, post-hoc choices of depth of field and focus; relighting one image using the data from another, space-generation and photo-collaging from arbitrary collections of photos, and more.

Todd Maffin, official blogger of the CBC, bravely faced a crowd that mostly consisted of people mad the CBC was underfunded, plus me who was mad the CBC was funded. He had some interesting stuff to say, including how the crisis for the CBC is not just its so-so-to-poor ratings, but also its 65-yo-white-people demographic. Things are different for CBC Radio 3, which actual listeners may know is not really a radio station.

Oh, and we’ve had our differences, but trust the photo: Boris Mann is evil.

Look! He’s evil! The photo!

Me (this is paraphrased), talking to Beau Hartshorne about his day job, the web-based image editor Snipshot:

“So, I guess you guys benefit from the sort of revision and versioning advantages that Paul Graham talks about?”

“Yes. So you must know that Paul Graham invested in our company? He’s a really nice guy, by the way.”

[Ryan continues to babble on stupidly for several minutes, having just quoted Paul Graham to a guy who has a genuine financial relationship with the guy…]

I’m the dumbest guy in the room right now.

“Ninety percent of everything is crud” – Sturgeon’s Revelation

With that principle in mind, I want to avoid burying all the things we hold dear (web 2.0, flickr, podcasting, bloggery, Darren Barefoot) just because 90% of them suck. If the suck rate was only 90%, we’d be doing great!

I want to get at the inherent flaws that are causing some of this stuff to achieve 3-5 nines of suck. Also, I should stop making up statistics.

Rethinking this after the first night of Bar Camp but before my presentation, I begin to doubt that things are really so dire, or that all these media and systems are such deadly dead ends. I want to say that most new (“web 2.0” for lack of a better geek-phrase) concepts are going to be subject to Sturgeon’s Revelation themselves, thus dooming virtually 100% of the content on 90% of the new media. But that’s another made-up statistic, and the popular media/services/ideas we are currently thinking about may already be the “good 10%”.

“PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content.”
PowerPoint is Evil – Edward R. Tufte

I’m worried about technologies that lead smart people to stupid outcomes: Powerpoint can make your presentation worse. Chartjunk destroys your visual graphics.

But I’m seeing some dangerous stuff in the stuff bloggers like, too: podcasting is a medium for making commentary slower, unsearchable, and less interactive.

“I demand four minutes and twenty seconds of your life” (the single finest podcast I have heard, and the blog has the greatest slogan of any. Transcript).

But…hooray for podcasts, they give commuters something to do. Think hard: are there enough commuters to sustain your podcast? If they’re on transit, shouldn’t they be reading something instead of listening to audio?

Tagging text fragments: I think you can trust search.

Google: innovation has ceased, let the moribundity begin! But like Microsoft, it will take rather longer for market dominance to cease. And Google has probably got a pretty good handle on what is about to become the next big thing: Web Services for Everything (all your Base are belong to Google).

videocasting: see podcasting, but with a higher bandwidth load. bloggingheads.tv is a major criminal here, along with Cringely’s half-brilliant Nerd TV.

Since we have the inventor of the Dingalink at Bar Camp, here’s a closer reading of bloggingheads, what it does right and wrong:

• Enabling the ability to change the playback speed is a clever way to improve the “slower” problem.
• Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus’ bobbing heads are not a compelling use of bandwidth, though they seem to be there to improve one’s ability to tell who is talking during the “diavlog.”
• All hail the Dingalink, and the idea of segmenting the video into bite-sized (YouTube-sized?) chunks. It makes it easier to eat the bits you like, and ignore the morsels you don’t care for. Video smorgasbord!
• The video on the page is surrounded by text, links, and notes. It’s almost as if the creators know something more is needed…
• Where are the transcripts? The diavlog format is great for creating the conversations, but I wonder if its real fulfillment is to use the diavlogs as a means to the end of getting a (searchable!) transcript up.

Which leads us to Robert X. Cringely’s Nerd TV (note to Dingle: sorry, it doesn’t look like he uses machine-generated transcripts…after-midnight stupid idea: use machine transcripts as a starting point, and then wiki them to get your audience to edit out the mistakes! If they love you, they’ll do it gladly)

Half-brilliant? He has wonderful interviews with interesting subjects.
The transcripts are great, and usable. The video, featuring nothing but
an hour of a barely-moving head, has been a waste of bandwidth. I
stopped downloading anything  but the 2-minute excerpts after episode
four.
 
But he also has those glorious transcripts, which give you the meat (and the flavour, and the searchability, and the speed) without the fat. Dieting should always be this easy!

When audio and video goes good: Penny Arcade, where the voices are, in some meaningful way, a raw performance (hm, this is fuzzy and stupid-sounding…). On-bike videos, and cyclocross videos, and the dog versus the Roomba. Actual music; Actual things happening on camera: should you be doing a podcast, or doing a blog that has video and audio “quotes”: short clips that enhance the mostly-text content?

Flickr right and wrong:

• It’s so much better than any other photo site out there it’s like crack for shutterbugs
• Little UI/workflow details that drive me nuts, and should be shaved down, optimized, refactored, fixed!
• Tags work here because despite the adages, most pictures need far less than a thousand words to classify their content effectively. And unlike video or audio, you can experience a picture in seconds. Note the holographic nature of the added data gathered from viewing a larger version of the same photo.
• Would flickr work as a video/audio/photo site? As a general content dump? I don’t know; just asking.

Ryan versus all phones and data plans ever:
In five years, everything I say on this subject will be moot. Stuff will have worked out. But right now, data in Canada is expensive, and is preventing many people from using content-gathering (or content-processing, or content-reading) phones as they should be used. Note to the PDA-phone and camera-phone makers of the world: fix the carriers so your phones will sell.

Google:

They may be in the land of diminishing returns (on their investments, on their revenues, on their new ideas per genius they hire, on the productivity gains they can get by improving the on-site meals…) but they can probably live there for a very long time. Will they become just another search-engine failure (Altavista, Askjeeves, Yahoo’s cataloguing project…), or stay on top? Will search matter in the future? Please give an example of an ultimate trivia question: one that cannot be easily Googled. Will link-farms and other evil SEO ultimately win over the forces of not-evil?

Blogs themselves: strive for expertise. Own a part of the long tail. The short body is largely consumed. Local blogging is mostly a crock: you can only live in one city, (and Metroblogging Vancouver has this turf! Or maybe it’s Beyond Robson…) but there are many topics you know a little about, and if you’re lucky, maybe there’s one topic you know enough about to sustain the interest of both writer and readers.

That said, if you want to blog about your cat, that’s not an abuse of the medium. I just expect higher goals of you Bar Camp-ers.

Thematic conclusions:

• Be a merciless critic of your own content and your own stuff.
• Be usable, accessible, searchable: don’t violate web-centric principles.
• Optimize. Refine. Keep shaving off the sharp corners, and most of all, the frictional barriers (reference “broken windows”) that keep your audience from doing what they want to do (and what we want them to do; it’s great when they’re the same thing)
• Change your medium to reflect the optimization. It’s a web 2.0, user-created, [buzzword-tech-buzzword; fill in later] world out there: you get to make it up, make it work, and make it better. Design is not just code, and maybe not even primarily code in some cases.

PS: if anyone can come up with a way of being cool in a hot medium, let me know. Controversy is a sad substitute for depth.

Nerd fun: playing Mario Kart on some DSen.

Yeah, we’re productive.