Posted on May 16, 2008. In The Web.
If you haven’t heard of Twitter already it’s a ‘micro-blogging platform’ where users post tweets - 140 character messages - in answer to the question “What are you doing?”. As a user you can ‘follow’ others, and others can ‘follow’ you, with your tweets being broadcasted to your followers. It works out as a mixture of status updates, IM messages, and shared links.
“What’s the point?” you may ask, on the surface there’s not much to it, and certainly most non-twitterers don’t get it. But the same question was asked of many social networks, before wide-spread adoption, and users are flocking to Twitter much as they once did to Facebook. I for one can certainly attest to an addiction to Twitter, it’s described beautifully by the TwitterCycle.
My very own Twitter Cycle
Tweets can be posted a variety of ways - through the web interface, by IM, by SMS, or using one of the many apps - making updating hassle-free. As tweets are short messages they’re very manageable - I’ll almost always read a tweet - whereas I’m often put off by a lengthy blog post. This makes Twitter a great tool for keeping up to date with people and for them to keep up with you. People naturally like to share and to receive - Twitter facilitates this beautifully.
The system of following allows Twitter to take on another dimension. Tweets are broadcast to all your followers - a one-to-many message - but there’s the functionality for direct messages - private one-to-one messages - and @replies - a weird amalgam best described as one-to-one-to-many messages. This lets Twitter take on a conversational element thereby adding another layer of functionality.
Twistori
People have been finding new and interesting ways in which to use Twitter. Stories recently such as the user who posted “Arrested” on his arrest in Egypt - rallying followers to take action on his behalf - and claims that news of the Chinese earthquake was broken on Twitter by web icon Robert Scoble just go to demonstrate it’s power. The marketing possibilities with Twitter are enormous - there’s huge potential for ‘word of mouth’ marketing - and there are great tools such as TweetScan which can be used to monitor a campaign’s impact. And there’s lots being done by the tech community, who have taken Twitter into their hearts, creating a deluge of mashups and apps. There are apps to post to, and monitor, Twitter - Twhirl, Twitterific, and Hahlo to name but a few - and some tasty little mashups - my recent favourite being Twistori - appearing all the time.
So Twitter undoubtedly has its uses. It might not be just a tech world fad either - recent estimates put the user base between 1m and 1.5m (Twitter doesn’t publish actual figures) - and the buzz is spreading amongst journalists and marketeers. Give it a try, the worst that can happen is that you’ll become hopelessly addicted. I think Twitter is here to stay, I’m addicted anyway.
Shiny new design(y)
Posted on May 7, 2008. In News, The Web.
I felt it was time for a bit of a change to this site, there were some things I wanted to implement at the last redesign and some things I wasn’t happy with. Also I was bored. So I gave it a new lick of paint, and toyed around with the backend, I hope you like it. Anyway, to document the changes (and mainly to show off) this is what’s new.
Designing
I was happy with basics of the old design, the central column layout remains, with a sidebar on the right, header and footer. The sections of the site are now all equal, instead of being broken into ‘about’, ‘blog’, and ‘portfolio’, and in a single menu. The new design also scales beautifully, unlike the old fixed-width design, with all measurements in relative units.
I’ve also kept the colour scheme from the old design, with the shades of grey plus blue (although I may consider having a different highlight colour per section down the line, we’ll see). There are some more fancy web 2.0 style touches though - gradients on the header and footer, a mirror effect on the menubar, and a stripy page background.
There are also some experimental design flourishes in there; the header, footer, and content box have drop shadows, there are some rounded corners, the menubar items have an embossed/extruded effect using a text-shadow, and menubar items background colours change with a transition. All these are browser dependent however - you’ll only see them on a webkit browser - and I think it still looks good without them.
Safari flourishes - drop shadows and rounded corners
And the site works in IE of course (despite the pain it caused me). There are a few bugs in IE 5.x where it doesn’t like PNGs (although these do work, thanks to a PNG fix) and where CSS auto margins aren’t obeyed, but it’s all viewable and nice looking!
Browser comparisons courtesy of browsershots.org
Behind the scenes
There’s a lot of content that’s common to various pages, on each page common content is included using php include statements. This method is used for the footer, sidebar, and menubar. In the latter a PHP global variable $section_current is set at the top of the document which is then looked up to write an id variable on the body tag, the title of the document, and in the menubar include (a PHP file) to label the current section.
There are some clever things going on with my .htaccess too. Tidy URLs are provided so you can visit hugoking.com/cv or hugoking.com/cv/ and get the same page, thanks to webforumz.com. URLs prepended with a www. are handled nicely as well (the www. is removed) thanks to the following code:
# remove www.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.+)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L]
There are custom error documents, and the ability to go into maintenance mode, using this code:
# custom error docs (for various codes)
ErrorDocument 404 /error.php?err_code=404
…
# ‘under construction’ override
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^127\.0\.0\.0$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ error.php?err_code=maintenance
And there’s a PNG fix courtesy of 24ways.org, float clearing done nicely, and a bit of box model hack.
New features
I’m addictaed to Twitter, I wanted it to be more prominent on the site. A lot of people have a Twitter box in the sidebar, now I do too! It’s all done with a fantastic script from Remy Sharp, something I’ve played with before, which displays tweets and provides a miriad of options.
My Twitter box
A single feed is now provided for the whole site using the FeedBlendr service to combine the portfolio and blog RSS feeds. This should make it easier for subscribers to be alerted of site updates and provides more flexibility and support for users.
There’s now site wide search provided by Google Custom Search Engine, this is rather than individual search for both the portfolio and blog. Search results are returned from the entire site, everything that’s indexed by Google, and displayed in an iframe on a special search page. Unfortunately this currently includes ads, this isn’t ideal but I think people can live with that.
Site search results from Google CSE
I wanted to incorporate my tumblelog a lot more closely with the site, there are various ways to add tumblelog items to a webpage - using a piece of javascript, creating a bespoke script using the API, etc - but I came across this post which was much closer to what I wanted. It describes how to mirror a tumblelog as a subdirectory of a site using a simple PHP proxy and a little .htaccess fun. You can now visit hugoking.com/tumblelog and see my tumblelog.
And that’s it
It didn’t take me that long to make all the changes, and I enjoyed it anyway. Of course all comments are welcome!
MacWild
Posted on Jan 16, 2008. In Apple.
So another year, another Macworld, and this year the big news is the MacBook Air. But before I get onto that a little on what else we saw, or in my case read, from San Fran this time round.
Movies
Apparently people want “movies, movies, movies” or so say Steve-o, personally I’ve got a big thing for TV and podcasts. So along come movie rentals, with a box to make the model work. Apple TV mark 2 is all right, it only just improves on the first try in my book. I want to see a box that’ll play any codec, is a clever PVR, and plays optical media too, now that I would shell out for.
The big iTunes announcement is undoubtedly movie rentals, loads of titles and all the major studios on board, congrats Apple movies are in the bag. The prices are bearable, the HD and dolby 5.1 are nice touches, but again the rest of the world is left behind. As with so many things I want right now, like the Amazon music download service, it’s US only. I know it’s coming over here in time but I’m willing to bet that when it does arrive our prices will be anything but fair.
Time capsule
It’s a AirPort Extreme with a hard drive (okay it’s a ‘server grade’ hard drive) but has everyone forgotten that we were meant to be able to plug our regular hard drives into our base stations and use these to backup?! If it’s possible to backup wirelessly with time machine, let people do it without a whole new device!
Update 1.1.3
Some nice additions to the iPhone; location for Google maps is neat, multiple recipients for SMS messages will elate some, and bookmarking to the home screen and rearranging icons are both good prep for the SDK. But it’s a poor show for the iPod Touch owners, a $20 upgrade just smacks of Apple trying to pull another fast one on early adopters, and we all know how that worked out last time.
The MacBook Air
Everyone knew about the MBA before it was announced, it was one of the most ubiquitous rumours and magically it actually came true, unlike some of the much more practical ones. *cough* 3G iPhone *cough*
It is a truly lovely looking piece of kit, ‘the worlds thinnest notebook’ if you discount the Pedion (another badly named device) which appeared from Mitsubishi in ’98, CNET revealed, and beat the MBA in the anorexia stakes by a whole 0.03 inches. The package is beautiful, it has the aluminium shell of the MBP but adds sexy curves. At only 3 pounds it’s as light as a feather and it’s prettier than a dove.
You’re going to look super cool on the train when you whip out that manilla envelope and out comes not a sheaf of tax forms but your sexy, slim notebook. With that 5 hours battery life you can sit down to watch your rented movies and work on your next keynote, and you’ll be the coolest kid on the train.
But damn hell it’s expensive. Compare it to the regular MacBook if you will; weight - a win, size - a win, screen and keyboard - a draw, expandability - a lose, connectivity - a lose, power - a lose, price - a big lose. What you’re paying an extra $700 for (and that’s the cheap model, add another $1000 for a SSD) is saving yourself from carrying around an extra 2 pounds, and you lose yourself a whole bunch of the good stuff! I know the competitors (Sony) are coming in at this price point, I know it’s Apple and Apple is expensive, and I know it’s a luxury item.
And so comes the conclusion Apple must bet on time after time; should I buy one? No. Do I want one? Yeah, I really do.
The vid-e-web
Posted on Jan 11, 2008. In The Web, Video.
Video on the internet is a big deal. A fair number of conversations I have contain the words “have you seen … on YouTube” and regional news even occasionally run a story on the latest ‘viral video phenomenon’. YouTube itself is so popular that it has completely proliferated our day-to-day lives.
We have come to expect to get any information we desire from the internet. If a teacher were to ask their students to write reports without using the internet they would be faced with an uproar. Try to do it yourself - research and write something without using the internet AT ALL, go on, I dare you. I fire up IMDB and look up the actors when I watch a film, check word definitions through Google, and solve arguments with Wikipedia. We can get any piece of information so quickly and easily it’s ridiculous, and we’re used to it, we expect it!
Looking up the names of the characters in The Raccoons on Wikipedia
And now we’re starting to expect the same immediacy from everything. We want the news as it happens with pictures and comment round the clock, we have our radio shows and music automatically downloaded at the click of a button, and we even want to connect with other people, without all that fuss of moving. The new ‘spirit of the web’ demands whatever it wants, wherever it is, however it desires.
But traditional video models - TV and film - aren’t suited to this ‘new way’. They’re timely and costly to produce, both of which don’t suit the ‘here, now, free’ new world order. What’s needed for the ‘now generation’ is quick and cheap production, content that can be produced fast and delivered faster, a streamlined approach. This approach is how user generated content (UGC), vodcasts, and vlogging exist.
But we can’t get away with producing crap (it’s a damn shame I know). The benefit of the fact that it is quick and cheap to produce (okay, okay…relatively speaking) means that there’s a lot of content out there. It comes down to simple economics - supply is high - so if the content is not up to scratch it fails it’s audience, gets ignored, and dies. This is true for content across all mediums, but the immediacy given to web content means that out here something either booms or dies, very quickly.
Our new video content is good value too, for the relatively low cost of production you can get a lot in return. Ad revenue is a big one, but brand exposure is equally important, as is the ability to build a community around a product.
One such successful viral (note the views count)
The viral is the new big idea in marketing, and it can be worth huge sums of money. Imagine a workplace, a new video is discovered on YouTube, it’s entertaining, word about it spreads like wildfire, and soon it has tens of thousands of views. It may be a short-lived phenomenon but the exposure the brand behind the video has received can be enormously valuable. But video content doesn’t have to be from an ad campaign to be profitable, look at the huge followings of the vlogging drama lonelygirl15 or the vodcast Diggnation, the community around these is valuable in itself even if the content generates no cash revenue.
So I’m pretty excited about video on the web, but it’s okay because there’s a lot to get excited about. Check out the following for some of the great content being produced at the moment:
- Channel flip - producing great video podcasts from here in the UK
- Revision 3 - producing great video from the US
- Lonelygirl15 and UK spinoff KateModern - trashy teen vlogging drama
- Concerts a Emporter - beautiful music videos from France
- B3ta - a plethora of tasteless UGC from the community
- And just browse YouTube for hours, and hours, and hours…
Next time: stealing vs streaming.
Blogs are a funny thing
Posted on Dec 14, 2007. In The Web, Thoughts.
Well this is my first blog entry, my foray into the blogosphere, the yard stick against which all future posts will be measured. So what better subject to get stuck in with than the concept of the ‘blog’.
Blogs must be one of the stranger things to come out of the bright, new world of interwebbing. Originally referred to as weblogs (a term which seems so quaint now) they started appearing in the late ninties, and were a mix of links and written thoughts. Now, around ten years after the term weblog was first used, they’re a common sight of the web. And I mean common - the number of blogs worldwide was recently put at 50 million. Every man, woman, and child (give or take) has a blog!
As I see it, it’s just a descendant of a concept that breeds on the web - the self-illusion that something you do is important. The idea that your opinion matters, what you’ve got to say is important, that other people care. But look at a single blog in the bigger scheme of things, and against such a large thing as the internet it means entirely nothing.
I concede it’s different for a brand - be it a person, or company - where a blog is a very different entity. But for the individual (like moi) it’s just pretty crazy isn’t it? It’s that little thought you (I) have: "If I make something, maybe people will love it, maybe it’ll make me really popular, and then I will be cool!". I think if most of us are honest being cool is a big motivation (or is that just me?). And that’s why we make these things, why we write our blogs, and make our videos, why we create this content.
That’s my reason for starting this blog anyway. But you all think I’m cool already, right? Riiight?!
