Not Winner Take All

April 16th, 2013

Despite what you might have heard or thought, it’s not a winner-take-all market. No new “winner” will emerge after Google Reader has left the stage. And more so, Google Reader was never the old “winner”. Even with all its many views (expanded, list, search results, all items, only new items, etc.) its was never the “King of the Hill” absolute winner of RSS Readers. There was room for Flipboard, Reeder, Fever and many others. Feed reading is inherently polymorphic, after many years this still holds true. The interface of  a feed reader has »to be athletically flexible to match a wide variety of reading styles« as Chris Wetherell writes. No one product will dominate, but there will be many “winners” and many, many RSS Reading products.

However platforms or formats tend to monopolise. And Google Reader had a monopoly with its RSS Syncing platform and API format. We have been there and we are not going back. Although we will converge to a single API format (perhaps two), we will not be going back to one company controlling it, and with it holding that much power over the entire RSS ecosystem. We will see a commonly shared API format – open to many and enhanced by many. The network effects and externalities that were present, and allowed Google Reader to build a monopoly around its API format, are no longer present.

If you are a RSS Syncing platform »there is no reason to fear competition if you support [one format] … People will choose your service because of you, your extras, your modern web page, your great community, your awesome support, your reliable and fast servers« as Oliver Fürniß writes. When we talk about platforms and not products, then it’s a different game, with different rules. Google didn’t understand this, but they don’t get platforms (best illustrated with the lack of an official and documented API for Google Reader). So please don’t repeat their mistakes.

UPDATE: Please go read A Letter to all Present and Future RSS Syncing Platforms – The RSS Consensus.

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Mandag Morgen RSS – courtesy of Feed43

August 14th, 2010

I consume through Google Reader.
I used to question the benefits of RSS.
That was then, and this is now.

And now I hardly read an online article unless it has somehow made its way through my RSS Reader. The work required to stay up to date otherwise is just too tedious.

Luckily it has now become customary to provide an RSS feeds along with ones content. But some, for some mysterious reason, still don’t follow this code of practice. For those rare instances Feed43 is a “free online service that converts any web page to an RSS feed on the fly.”

Using this service I created an RSS feed for respectively mm.dk and mandagmorgen.no:

The technical setup

I tried a couple of other services first. Some much easier to setup. But as fare as I could tell non of the other services could be customized (free of charge) to capture all the articles. On mm.dk The syntax for the top article and “ugens graf” is slightly different from the rest of the articles. And the URLs do not look similar enough. For those two reasons the other services came up short. If the page you want to convert is more uniform I would recommend using Ponyfish.

But using Feed43 was quite straight forward once you got the syntax: parameter and joker.

Global Search Pattern:

<div id="content">{%}<div id="sidebarLeft"

Item (repeatable) Search Pattern:

<h{*}><a href="{%}">{%}</a></h{*}>
{*}
<p class="content">{%}</p>

You use the Global Search Pattern to limit the area of interest, so to speak. In the case of mm.dk I toke advantage of the three column design. Limiting my search to the middle column. And you use Item Search Pattern to further limit so you left with only the parameters (title, url, describtion). The pattern is repeatedly searched for until there are no more matching items. I wanted the headings (<h1> and <h2>), and with the joker I was able to catch both. The paragraph was more straight forward because of the class name. And out comes:

{%1} = https://www.mm.dk/drejebog-til-et-dronningemord
{%2} = Drejebog til et&nbsp;dronningemord
{%3} = <strong>MM Perspektiv: </strong> <span>De danske medier</span> har med sine 
       spinkelt underbyggede vedvarende angreb på Lene Espersen, undergravet 
       deres&nbsp;troværdighed.

Beautiful.

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Albatros Travel

August 13th, 2010

Another project from 2007. Albatros Travel is a travel agency specializing in luxurious trips, cruises and travels to various marathons.

It was a redesign assignment, aimed at modernizing their outdated website. Albatros had a huge catalog of persuasive images, but the quality varied alot. Even though beautiful not all images could withstand being displayed in a size that would fit the page width. They also had vast amounts of text describing each of their trips day-by-day in great detail.

The design aimed to set the mood of a truly extraordinary journey using local symbols, patterns and small but almost iconic images. And combining this with one large full-size image at the top of the page.

A lot of attention when into the typography; mixing different display styles, optimizing liability and simply making the vast amounts of text more eatable for the users. (Doing the type, I was greatly inspired by Jason Santa Maria’s work – especially the A List Apart website).

The process was quite shady. It was done through another agency, so I had to do the design without meeting the client in person and only hearing their feedback from secondhand. When the client had approved the design, it was turned over to this other agency, who went and made a great big mess of it all. Not at all giving the typography the attention it need. Looking at their current site therefore always makes me sad – and I feel the client has been shortchanged.

Read the rest of this entry »

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TDC Netway Lounge

August 13th, 2010

TDC Netway Lounge is a project pitch from 2007. TDC Netway was a simple broadband connection, but marketed at young people (early twenties, if I remember correct). Instead of simply promoting the download/upload speeds and prices – which could easily have been matched by competitors and which is not all that sexy to talk about – the concept was to focus on music.

The Lounge was created as a place were customers could listen, rate and discuss music. Participate in competitions, get special event invitations and read about new gadgets and phones. And help one another with the more technical aspects of the product – support (which was not part of the subscription). Furthermore customers could redecorate the lounge. Change the view, change the wall decorations and wallpaper etc.

The design was done by taking bits and pieces from magazines and catalogs, and then manipulating them into one, where layers could be turned on and off. Thereafter the interface elements was added. We wanted to avoid using flash, so quite a bit of effort when into creating dynamic (and vertical) areas for text and pictures. The interface/navigation areas were highlighted with the orange color.

When navigating, the lounge would remain unchanged at the top, and the page would expand downward with the remaining content. The remain content was kept in a more strict format (boxed and dark grey).

The lounge never when into production. TDC’s product didn’t succeed in attracting enough customers and they pulled the plug on it a couple of months later. But some aspects of concept seemed correct. A year later or so they introduced TDC Play. Moving focus towards music, by giving unlimited access to their subscribers.

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Islands of Music

July 26th, 2010
Island of Music

Island of Music from Last.FM's Playground. Visualization of listing habits based on tags

I just stumbled upon this great visualization on Last.fm Playground site. It maps listing habits based on tags as Islands. It’s not beautiful as such, but very informative and good at communicating a lot of data to viewers. Go and have a try with the interactive image.

Last.fm describes it as:

The islands of music playground demonstration is something like a tag cloud where similar tags are located close to each together. The map was created using clustering algorithms.

These algorithms group similar music on islands. Similar islands are placed close to each other. For example, various flavours of metal are located close to each other in the upper right of the map. The map also suggests several more or less continuous transitions. For example, there is a path from folk to doom metal (via psychedelic, progressive rock, and progressive metal).

I particularly like the visualization of the paths between the different tags; “… there is a path from folk to doom metal…”. The big genres or “heavily used tags” and are placed at the edges of the map. Those genres that most people would normally use as an answer to the question, “What kind of music do you listen to?”. Musical clusters, if you like. And I might be miss- or over-interpreting here, but  the smaller islands in the middle seems like commonly used bridges between these clusters (e.g. jazz, new age, soundtrack/instrumental, classical/instrumental). For-example if you listen to hip-hop and psychedelic the chances of you also listing to jazz is quite high.

There is of course a lot of noise in the data (mistagged artist, irish, comedy) like they also point out, but none the less I really like it.

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Obesity trends – Makeover

April 29th, 2010

A response to the challenge at FlowingData.

The original graph – people are getting fatter, but it is hard to see:

My approach:

My main “beef” with the graph above, is that comparison is difficult, if not impossible. This is of course due to the data gaps, but it could easily be fix with a guideline of some sort. Adding an age-group average, makes it much easier for the viewer to see if the level of obesity is in fact high or low.

Of course the problem with the data gap still exists. And the age-group average will most likely be underestimated here. But now there is some level of comparison.

Final result:

I calculated an index in Excel where 100 =  the age-group average. Then grouped the periods with a stacked column graph. I copied the graph into Illustrator and played around a bit. The final result is multiple indexes/histograms aligned with the different periods.

Regardless of which age-group you choose to look at now, the trend is quite clear: Obesity has increased over time.

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The Value of Number of Words Indexed by Google Equation

April 7th, 2010

Why?

I have a subscription to the danish newspaper, Weekendavisen. They have some great articles on society, sciences and politics. Articles that are still relevant many years after first being published. The other day I wanted to look-up an old article, so I went to the website, to search their archive. I signed-up using my customer number.

After signing up I went to the Avisen-section, only to find

  1. four (open and free) articles,
  2. an non-mechanical read audio-version of the entire, last newspaper (a quite cool feature),
  3. an e-paper.dk version of a PDF (These flash/PDF/e-paper viewers are useless gimicks with no real value to anyone. And if you are foced to use one, please use a propper one),
  4. and the archive – which you for an additional fee can get access to. Now, the prices is 49 DKK for seven days of access to the database, so my temptation was resistible.

You can complain about the prices being to high, and I think most will, but that is not what this post is about. This post is about Weekendavisen cheating themselves of potential profits. According to FDIM they have around 6.000 unique cookies a week. If just 1% of those pay every single week (and that is in my experience a very high estimate), it will amount to a revenue of 2.940 DKK a week. Or 12. 783 DKK a month, and a tiny fraction more from the extra advertising revenue that those 1% generate.

The Missing Equation

My hypothesis is that by making their entire archive – minus the last years articles (to avoid market cannibalism) – open, free and indexable. They can get more visits and generate a much greater monthly revenue, than they do today, solely from their advertising.

If they already have digitalized all their articles the cost of granting access to everyone will be minimal. They can still keep the pay wall for the audio-versions and for articles that are less than 12 months old.

I was only able to find prices from 2008; Two formats with a Cost per thousand (CPM) of respectively 250 DKK and 200 DKK. Provided that they were able to sell both formats and they were on every page, Weekendavisen would only need 6.533 extra page-views a week to break-even with todays 1% revenue. Today they have approximately 30.000 page-views a week according to FDIM, hence the objective is to get an 22% increase in page-views from releasing their entire article archive. This objective sounds quite reasonable. Note: (2940/(200+250))*1000 = 6.533

The only thing they would have to insure was that their articles where indexed by Google (and preferably also search engine optimized), and Google would supply the new extra visitors that would to drive up revenue.

Unfortunately I was unable to find any model or equation that could be used to calculate and support the last claim. Something on the lines of “more content, more traffic”. Or even better yet, a model that not only looked at content as a whole, but more specifically number of words, since Weekendavisen’s four open articles range between 460-2.400 words each. Anyway the general notion is that it’s easier to gain keyphrase relevancy when Google has more words to choose from.

Anyways…

I am hoping weekendavisen will try the above-mentioned calculations with they own numbers (1% was just my guess). And even test what their indexed word count vs number of non-branded visits from search engines, to get a sense of what their content is worth.

I have only discussed the direct revenues from this – customer satisfaction is priceless.

If anybody else has some numbers of interest or the missing equation please comment.

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The Narrows (2008) movie soundtrack/song listing

November 1st, 2009

UPDATE: There are properly many more movies out there where the song listing is not available online, so i setup a separate site focused on giving users that infomation. The Narrows (2008) song listing/soundtrack is available on Soundtracka.com along with many other movies. Enjoy.

I find movie soundtracks a great way to discover new music. Others have taken the time to digg crates, music libraries and own collections. Using their skills and expertise they have handpicked music, that otherwise would have remained unknown to me. All I have to do is lean back, listen and enjoy the fruits of their labor.

On that note, The Narrows is a great movie (go watch it, seriously!) and features some great songs. But I was unable to find the song listing anywhere online, so I copied it out.

–

Song listing for The Narrows (2008)

“Have Mercy On Me”
Written by Junior Kimbrough
Preformed by The Black Keys
Courtesy of Fat Possum Records

“T.R.B”
Written by Ryan Moys
Preformed by Autopoilot
Courtesy of INgrooves

“The Lengths”
Written by Daniel Auerbach and Patrick Carney
Preformed by The Black Keys
Courtesy of  Fat Possum Records

“Home Is Where Hatred Is”
Written by Gill Scott-Herson
Preformed by Esther Phillips
Courtesy ofColumbia Records
By arrangement with SONY/BMG and King Record Co., Ltd.

“Busted”
Written by Daniel Auerbach and Patrick Carney
Preformed by The Black Keys
Courtesy of Fat Possum Records

“Adore”
Written by Nicolas Chaix
Preformed by I:Cube
Courtesy of Versatile Records

“Girl Is On My Mind”
Written by Daniel Auerbach and Patrick Carney
Preformed by The Black Keys
Courtesy of Fat Possum Records

“Woman”
Written by Neneh Cherry, Cameron McVey and Jonnathan Sharp
Preformed by Neneh Cherry
Courtesy of Virgin Records Ltd.
Under license from EMI Film & Television Music

“Big Lake” & “Tenderness Games”
Written by Rob Simonsen
Courtesy of KAP Music, LLC

“The Desperate Man”
Written by Daniel Auerbach and Patrick Carney
Preformed by The Black Keys
Courtesy of Fat Possum Records

“Delta Blue”
Written and preformed by Brian Tarquin-Browne
Courtesy of MasterSource

“Am I Black Enough”
Written by David Hadland, Scoot Schoot and Victor Williams
Preformed by Turntable Bay
Courtesy of Lazy Bones Recordings

“Don’t Look”
Written by Ryan Poulson
Courtesy of KAP Music, LLC

“Scene Of The Crime”
Written by Gleen Morrissette
Courtesy of KAP Music, LLC

“The Reunion” & “Creepy Guitar Build”
Written by Jonathan D. Krupp
Courtesy of KAP Music, LLC

“Meet Me In the City”
Written by Junior Kimbrough
Preformed by The Black Keys
Courtesy of Fat Possum Records

“Hayksad”
Written by Andrea Centazzo
Courtesy of KAP Music, LLC

“Two Paychecks From The Street”
Written by John Reed Kekar
Preformed by Steve Parrish
Courtesy of MasterScouce

“Hidden Path”
Written by Dana DiAnda
Courtesy of KAP Music, LLC

“Life In Reverse”
Written by Russ Horward III
Courtesy of KAP Music, LLC

“Blue Over You”
Written by Marc Ferrari, Michael Muholand & Danny Gill
Preformed by Medicine Wheel
Courtesy of MasterSource

“She Has No Time”
Written by Tim Rice-Owley, Tom Chapcaim, Richard Hughes And James Sanger
Preformed by Keane
Courtesy of Island Records Limited
Under license from Universal Music Enterprises

“Poor Leno”
Written by Svein Berge, Torbjørn Brundtland, Erlend Øye
Preformed by Röyksopp
Courtesy of EMI Music France / Astralwerks
Under license from EMI Film & Television Music

“All Hands Against His Own”
Written by Daniel Auerbach and Patrick Carney
Preformed by The Black Keys
Courtesy of Fat Possum Records

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Crowds teach computers to read the scanned text

September 16th, 2009

From the Google Acquires reCAPTCHA article at Mashable.com:

Why exactly does Google want to own this technology?

… many of the CAPTCHAs provided by reCAPTCHA come from scanned archival newspapers and old books. Computers find it hard to recognize these words because the ink and paper have degraded over time, but by typing them in as a CAPTCHA, crowds teach computers to read the scanned text.”

… those 100,000+ captcha forms are now Google-powered, with the data being used to improve Google’s ability to digitize old books and newspapers to make them Web searchable. It makes a lot of sense, and gives Google yet another strategic advantage over would-be competitors.

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The Current State of Water Purification Systems

August 29th, 2009

LifeStrawThis years winners of the INDEX: award (Design to Improve Life) has just been announced. So it seems like a perfectly good time to reflect back at a previous winner. The INDEX: award 2005 winner LifeStraw, a 10-inch  plastic cylinder that can filter out or kill bacteria, parasites and some viruses. A great invention aimed at helping the more than one billion people who do not have access to clean drinking water.

A similar water purifier-system was recently demoed at TEDGlobal, by Michael Pritchard. The Lifesaver; which can make the most revolting water drinkable in seconds. As seen in the video below.

Honestly I am not certain what the difference is between the Lifesaver and the LifeStraw. But they seem to use similar techniques and more importantly for this post, none of them seem to have a determined plan for distributing their wonderful technology to the previously mentioned one billion people – that is the entire one billion.

Lifesaver UltraJurying from their website, Lifesaver seems to target soldiers and participants of various outdoor activities. Hence the Lifesaver can be bought online and has distributers in the US and UK. While you can’t discredit Michael Pritchard & co, because the invention can in fact be a life saver, it is highly unlikely that these to groups are include in the category “without access to clean drinking water”. So how does the Lifesaver get in the hands of the one billion in actual need for it? The LifeStraw has taken a more tradition donation approach. You’re not able to buy the LifeStraw on their website, but you can donate one. But with a $6 prices tag per person per year (their own calculations based on data from the World Health Organization) that still amounts to 6 billion dollars a year if you want clean drinking water for all.

Michael Pritchard has calculated that his Lifesaver Bottle can supply clean water for three years to a family of four for 1/2 cent a day. That is 152,1 million a year for clean drinking water for all – a number much easier to grasp. But does that include the distribution cost? Michael Pritchard still need to come up with a viable solution on how families without access to clean drinking water, will get access to the Lifesaver Bottle. Are they supposed to go online with their credit cards, order and wait for a package in the post, like the outdoor athletes? Or how will one billion people get their hands on the Lifesaver/LifeStraw technology?

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