Elsewhere

Hey you. Yeah, you, over there in the blue shirt, sippin’ on your extra large Jamba Juice.

I’m blogging about you right now, motherfucker.

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I never thought I’d be much of a photo
person. People who took photos arranged them into albums and treated it
as a hobby — not for me. Yeah, it’s cool, but the time and effort
required is more than I’m willing to commit. You can only do so many
things in a day.

Now, with digital cameras and easy-to-use photo apps like iPhoto and Flickr,
the time and effort required to participate in such a hobby is
drastically reduced. I probably won’t ever be a real photo guy, but now
I can play with it a little bit, for fun. And maybe I’ll buy a better,
more compact digital camera, or maybe a Flickr Pro account or the
latest iLife upgrade to make it easier.

Whoa — I just got sold into a new market.

Making
things more accessible and putting them in the hands of people who
otherwise wouldn’t be interested — creating a new market — that’s
vision. And getting other people to buy into your ideas — that’s
marketing (as per Seth Godin).

And that’s why I’m not rich yet but some other people are.

Food for thought.

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Recent history has shown that
capitalism is a fantastic way to mediocritize your society’s output.
When everything is designed to generate as wide a profit margin as
possible, you start playing things safe; innovation and
artistry/craftsmanship take a back seat to market research and
demographics.

When Ikea replaced our local carpenter, The Gap
replaced our local clothier, and Starbucks replaced our local coffee
shop, we lamented the good old days of decentralized, localized and
individualized merchandise, but then sighed, took our products to the
till and said, “You know, it really is a good deal for the price…”

Now,
with blogs and social web services run by end users, our information
distribution system is becoming decentralized again. Hailed as a new
dawn of personal expression, we all rush to our keyboards to take part
in the global orgy of idea intercourse, finally free from the control
of the corporate media super-entities.

And then we start to
wonder how we can get more exposure for our personal expression… how
we can broaden our audience. How we can turn our two cents into
something more via ad revenues. “I heard that the most popular blogs
have frequent posts but short entries…”

And now our freedom of
expression is directly influenced by our capitalist inclinations. We
start to change the way we speak, the ideas we communicate, the content
and the presentation in hopes that we can make a profit on it…

… aha, you say, but isn’t this where the Long Tail
comes into play? Going for the lowest common denominator isn’t
effective anymore, you want to go for the niche, that’s where the
future lies! So feel free to be as crazy as you want, and pay no
attention to the numbers, they will come if you’ve got the content they
want!

Ah, but how can I get the content they want?

Are we
simply replaying in the personal sphere what has already happened in
the business sphere, and it’s worse now because it invades our very
homes and heads? Or is this no different than natural social behaviour
in which we all try to market ourselves to the rest of the world in
some way (consciously or not)?

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Hey, there’s nothing wrong with playing devil’s advocate sometimes. It’s a healthy thing. No comments

A little over a year ago I was finishing up my BS in CS (well, close enough anyway)
with an elective class in Knowledge Management Systems, in which we
gave group presentations on this big new idea called the Semantic Web.

It
boils down to the idea of a global, standard meta-tagging convention,
in which every data element in every webpage is tagged with the kind of
information it contains in such a way that “semantic engines” can
recognize data in a linguistic fashion… i.e. you tell your computer
something and it understands what you mean enough to search online web
services for the answer to your question, the resources you need,
related info, etc… basically an intelligent web search enabled by
thorough tagging of web data.

Two big questions arose from this discussion:
1) How do we maintain and enforce a set of standard tags?
2) Who is going to bother to tag all of their data?

It’s
fascinating to me, now, to see the answers to these questions start to
bubble up from the ether. We thought it might require some sort of
forced “web revolution” to bring about these changes, but they are
happening on their own, in a way. It’s being referred to as “social”
web services.

A few that I know of (in no particular order):

• Flickr (photo sharing)
• Technorati (blog searching)
• del.icio.us (web bookmark sharing)
• digg (tech news)
• Wikipedia (encyclopedia)
• YubNub (command-line interface for web services)

Some older, more recognizable but more narrow uses:

• Amazon.com reviews
• eBay user reviews
• iTunes (iMix)

Each
of these services operates on a “social” philosophy in that the
content, and related metadata such as tags or ratings, are created and
maintained by the end user audience. Some of these sites even help
users choose the right (i.e. most common and therefore de facto
standard) tags by suggesting tags based on how similar content has been
tagged by other users; and users are encouraged to tag well and tag
often because it will increase the likelihood of their content turning
up in the search results of other users… hence the social dimension
of the service.

Still a long way away from the true Semantic Web
vision, but it’s quite an interesting step in that direction…
although, whether or not any of these services will catch on among
mainstream users, much less significantly change the web for anyone but
the tech elite who are up on such things, is yet to be seen. Then
again, who heard of blogging a few years ago, or podcasting six months
ago? And now they are everywhere

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If I were Steve Jobs for a day:

Overhaul
iTunes with tags. I want to be able to be able to create my own tags
for songs, such as “mood” or “activity”, as well as assign multiple
tags to a song, such as multiple genres. Think along the lines of
Gmail, GarageBand, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc.

Taking it one step
further, there will be meta-tags to help organize the tags; in fact,
these meta-tags will replace the existing information fields, although
the existing, standard tags will remain un-deletable. Same
functionality, different implementation, to allow more flexibility.

For example:

Standard:

• Name (required) - Bad Boyfriend / Galvanize / The CameraEye
• Artist - Garbage / The Chemical Brothers / Billy Corgan
• Album - Bleed Like Me / Push the Button / TheFutureEmbrace
• Genre - Rock,Alternative / Electronica / Alternative
• Track Number - 1 / 1 / 3
• Disc Number - 1 / 1 / 1
• Year - 2005 / 2005 / 2005
• Artwork - [image data] / [image data] / [image data]
• MyRating - 3 / 5 / 4

Custom (anything you want!):

• Mood - Fun / Upbeat,Energy / Introspective
• Activity - Driving / Workout,Driving,Party / Moping
• Singer - Shirley Manson / Q-Tip / Billy Corgan
• Guitarist - …
• Producer - …
• RecordLabel - …
• MajorOrIndie - Major / Major / Indie
• SawInConcert - TheGorge_2005-04-21 / /
• SexyScale - 7 / 5 / 3
• HomeCountry - USA / UK / USA
• HomeCity - / / Chicago
• etc. you get the idea

The key points, again: 1) multiple tags allowed; 2) custom tags allowed

Since
this doesn’t change the existing functionality, it need not be enabled
by default so that it doesn’t confuse the casual user; it can be
enabled in the options by those who are ready for more organization
control. There can be a dynamically generated button-interface like in
GarageBand so that you can filter on multiple tags at once, and of
course Smart Playlists can filter by tags.

This could
effectively replace the existing static Genre/Artist/Album panel
interface; and it looks like the technology already exists in OS X 4
(Tiger), in the form of Spotlight. Really, it ties into the idea that’s
starting to float around about eliminating file system folders
altogether in favor of modern search utilities like Spotlight. I really
think the tag idea is the way to go for just about any media
organization system.

One more point: while we’re at it, let’s
give it an open API for importing and exporting tags. Online
communities could spring up to share all kinds of crazy information
about songs via tags. Of course this would require standardization
around means of song identification, but we can write a little app that
will verify your collection’s identifiers against a central master
database and suggest corrections where your song doesn’t match up, sort
of like a spell checker for song information.

I guess what I’m
really talking about is totally XML’izing the iTunes collection. I
think it’s already stored in XML, but let’s open it up for more
customization via a standard user interface. Hmm. Maybe I should write
the damn thing myself. Make a plug-in that will demo this idea. It’s
probably not a new idea, but has anyone else bothered to implement it
yet? Maybe I’ll look into that.

OK I need to finish doing the dishes. Being sick with a cold gives you more time to blog, I’m finding.

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In my experience, IT and software
projects are generally very messy. Inadequate planning, under- and
over-estimations, political maneuvering, miscommunication, ambiguous or
unrealistic expectations, and plain old human mistakes. Even the
best-managed projects require a lot of focused effort by disciplined,
intelligent individuals to carry through, and it’s always at least a
little stressful for everyone involved.

And I keep wondering, why does it have to be this way? How can we make it better?

I think it boils down to 2 key factors:
1)
Relatively speaking, software is a very young industry. We’ve only been
doing it for a few decades now, compared to well over a century for
other engineering sciences. Collectively, we’re still figuring it out.
2)
In software, people are the machines, and ideas are the product. And as
everyone knows, humans are an imperfect system; anything that we create
will have flaws. Even the best, most rigorously designed and controlled
physical manufacturing processes still have minor and subtle variations
in each output unit.

This discussion, of course, is covered in
most basic computer science cirriculum, and there are several private
and public individuals and organizations that are working on these
issues.

But I think it’s important to keep in mind that it will
never be perfect–projects will get off schedule and over budget and
bugs will slip through all of your most diligent testing efforts. The
beauty of software is its flexibility and abbreviated product life
cycle; the price we pay for that is imperfection. If we could make
perfect software, that would mean we are perfect software-generating
machines, which we are not (although some cultures are attempting to
achieve this).

Undoubtedly, software and IT projects will get
better the more we learn about the process and create intelligent tools
that help keep us on track. I guess that point I’m reaching for is that
too often, business folks think that software will solve all of their
problems, by tomorrow night, for $19.99 plus shipping. Let’s be
realistic folks. Software is great and it helps us do more than we ever
could before, but it’s always going to be an imperfect tool created by
imperfect people with imperfect results. Any business or project plan
needs to take this reality into account, and whenever possible, KISS
(keep it simple, stupid).

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