Move slow and fix things.

Towards the end of the working day on Friday, Darragh casually mentioned that he was going to see “some guy called Ze Frank” at the Science Gallery in Trinity that evening. Immediately I was asking to tag along, because Ze is probably one of the funniest people I have ever encountered, online or off. Like most good comedians, he also has a way of getting a message across when he wants to, though I’m not sure what he thinks of being considered a comedian. Well, at least I’m not saying it alone.

Turns out Ze wasn’t the only person speaking, Jonah Peretti was also speaking. I wasn’t familiar with the name, but he’s the guy behind BlackPeopleLoveUs, which I found quite hilarious in college Not necessarily a good reason to listen to him talk for an hour of course, but he also happens to be one of the founders of The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed and now his cred is apparent.

As one fellow attendee put it, Jonah was there to talk about the physical mechanics of the network by which viral media is dispersed, whereas Ze was there to talk about the media itself.

Jonah had some interesting stuff to say about “viral marketing” which he summarized as such:

• Contagious Media
  
• Big Seed Marketing
  
• Mullet Strategy
• Fanatics
• Mormonism

To expand on the concepts a little as I understood them (because I’m no journo and paraphrasing from memory doesn’t count as an explanation):

Contagious Media

The idea of contagious media is that it’s stuff that will appeal to the “Bored At Work Network”, ie the large group of office workers who don’t necessarily enjoy their jobs, have free time and a fast Internet connection. I feel this is a pretty basic concept, but I can see why it might be overlooked. After all, how many people are really capable of looking beyond their own fascination with their creation to notice whether other people might actually enjoy it? Just because you like looking at pictures of your kid doesn’t mean anyone else necessarily will, unless…

Big Seed Marketing

Big seed marketing sounds to me like dressed up spam, the idea being that you seed a very large audience with the idea being that a percentage of that large audience will pass along the message to a much smaller, but still significant (due to the large seed) secondary group.

Mullet Strategy

Keep your shiny, well presented content to the fore and your rough, unedited user generated content deeper in the site, “Business up front, party in the back”. This is the model the Huffington Post uses for presenting it’s data, and I think it has it’s uses. If you think about a user generated content reviews site, for example, you’d probably want to have some professional level articles seeded in there to draw users in in the first place. Some sites work well as pure user generated content, some don’t. Many novice webmasters are under the impression that simply by building something, or installing a piece of OOTB software, people will flock to it. This is another example of “my kids photo” mentality and it’s a prevalent one.

Fanatics

Peretti coins this as something like “people with personality disorders”, which I think is quite appropriate. One of his examples he used in the talk was Wikipedia, which singularly exploits the Obsessive Compulsive disorder. Edit, revert, tidy, cite, categorize. I vaguely recall a generic statistic on user generated content sites that the generators are something like 1% of the actual audience of the content. This sort of correlates with rough Boards.ie data, which last year put “active contributors” at a figure of about 16,000 per month, while our audience figures were something like 1.3 million.

Mormonism

Evangelists. People who love your stuff and will “sell it” to their friends and anyone they know. I thought a more Irish equivalent would be your average chugger on the street, but I have a feeling Mormons don’t generate nearly the amount of animosity that charity muggers do. Mormons are persistent overall, but polite and generally inoffensive in my experience. More importantly, they slowly make conversions without, I believe, generating heavy negative collateral.

Ze’s segment of the talk was largely focused on the surprising unpredictability what is and isn’t popular. He spoke about connecting to people on a very personal level, and put emphasis on how he doesn’t set out to make money on any of his forays into social media. He’s just trying to have fun and try new ways of interacting with people and having them interact with each other using the Internet.

Some of the most successful experiments by Ze appear to possess the commons traits of having a low barrier to entry (almost anyone can try it) and requiring minimal effort or expenditure of time. But they also allow for the “fanatics” to really push the boundaries and explore the limits of the idea. Some examples of these are “YoungMeNowMe”, the “Ray – Whip Ass” remixes and “Earth Sandwich”.

Overall, I was very happy that I was able to attend this talk, I also met a few interesting people at the gathering in the Science Gallery café after the talk, like @cianmm and @patrickod. Unfortunately I missed out on the flashmob experiment at the Stag’s Head on Saturday (I would have been a circle), probably missed my only opportunity to get a photo with Ze too, which is disappointing. Ah well.

Directly stolen convention from Irish blogs that I assume stems from Damien Mulley‘s Fluffy Links, “DeveLinks” will attempt to be no more than a weekly list of interesting web development related links collected from Twitter, emails, and various social and news portals. There are other blogs for other randomly curious links, and my twitter feed, so I don’t see the need to replicate this.

By the way, I’m keeping track of these generally by using Ben McRedmond‘s Picomarks service that he developed while doing work experience in Contrast (what a deliciously link-filled sentence).

Instant Domain Name Search Tool – App for checking the availability of .com/.net/.org names as you type. Would be a lot more useful if it worked with the extensive range of domains that other registrars offer, but it’s a nice idea.

NameChk.com – This one’s really nifty, simply checks for a given username on a large selection of widely known social networking sites all at once, allowing you an effective birds-eye view of your available name space on the Internet. Quite useful for users, especially useful for businesses.

Freelancer Hourly Rate Calculator – Put in all of your incomings and outgoings and get two figures at the end: your ideal hourly rate, and the minimal rate you need to break even.

Practical JSON Format Standard – David Coallier at the EchoLibre blog puts forward a proposal for a set of standards for JSON formatting. This has the feel of something that could explode into something powerful, watch this space.

Update: A better written article.

Update 2: Alternate POV.

Probably common knowledge at this stage, but Facebook has made a definite move towards taking over the “microblogosphere” of Twitter with the recent update to their newsfeed feature.

I’ve never directly compared Twitter to the Facebook newsfeed, because I don’t see their usage as overlapping. Twitter, for me, is for communicating with people who share the same interests as me, “networking” as it were, whereas Facebook is more of a noticeboard for all the people I’ve known from school, work, as well as friends and family.
If the distinction between the people I converse with on Twitter and the people I converse with on Facebook began to become hazy, then chances are I’d just end up drifting to the better platform.

Which brings me to comparisons.

Interesting differences

Facebook has threaded conversations – This is something that people have been asking for on Twitter for a while now. To be fair to Twitter, when you’ve got something that’s obviously popular, you’re reluctant to tamper with it too much (especially when you didn’t really realize what you were creating in the first place).

Facebook has grouping – Also something people have been asking for for some time (same list as above).

Facebook has embedded objects – Like video. This is an attractive use, but I’m not sure how portable a concept it is. I can’t see video on my low-tech phone, and even if it was high tech, the data fees in Ireland are astronomical.

In fact, Facebook appears to have picked up on some of the weaknesses of Twitter and tried to improve, but somehow – if you’ll allow the pun – have managed to completely rearrange their own face in the process. I don’t particularly want Facebook to be a replacement for Twitter, it has too much personal / irrelevant information, and I don’t want to micromanage who does and doesn’t see that information anymore than I already have to.

I don’t really care to bombard people on Twitter with photos of events / parties that just have no bearing to them. I like wandering through friends/family photos on Facebook, but if I was being bombarded with party photos from the CTO of xyz on Twitter I’d be unfollowing and would expect the same if the situation were reversed. I want information from Twitter and some updates that are perfectly ok to share with strangers / acquantiances that allow you a casual insight into their mindset. I don’t expect them to care any more about my family photos than I care about theirs, and it would be insulting and disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

There’s many subtle differences that seperate the two. In any case, I don’t see myself warming to the Facebook newsfeed option in the near future.

What is up with Google search engine results for the last few months?

I can’t be the only person who uses Google like this. If I’m looking for a URL for something I’m referencing in a blog post, or on Boards.ie, or on Twitter, I’ll run a quick Google search (knowing I’ll find the correctl URL within the first couple of results) and then copy the link straight from the search page.

Only for some reason, as of some time last year, these previously nice and clean URLs are now full of Google-garbage. Hashcodes and redirects as though I were clicking on some obnoxious clicktracking advertisment. Surely there’s a less intrusive way to track your traffic, Google? I find myself visiting the website in question and copying the result from the address bar now, which is cutting precious seconds away from my perfectly timed razor sharp Internet humour, occasionally even stealing moments of glory from me.

It irritates me.

It especially irritates me because I don’t actually know how to search for the problem. If one searches for any combination of “google”, “links” and “problem” or similar, all it pulls up is information about malware. It also irritates me because the link is fine on hover, but changes on right-click. Surely that in itself is bad UI practice?

Maybe this is a more common problem with a more common solution than I’m aware of, so any comments are welcome.

I watched a video today by Tom Raftery via his GreenMonk blog/ustream show, in which he was talking about the ramifications of smart grid technology. I’m sure I’ve heard of this stuff before considering it’s been in development for a while, but consciously this is new to me.

In a nutshell, as I understand it, “smart grid” technology is a digital method of distributing electricity, allowing for advanced monitoring, even feedback and remote control, resulting in greater efficiency and reduced cost.

Clever stuff, sounds like a great, obvious helper in the fight to make the world more energy efficient. However, as Tom points out, due to the nature of the technology this means that the power company can tell what tech you’re running in your house. This sort of granular access, one might imagine, would be as powerful a force in advertising as Google, quite possibly even more so.

Imagine being able to profile households on the sort of electrical devices they use. How many televisions they have, what brands of televisions they use, when they have them on, etc, and being able to plot and compare this information across every household on the planet that uses electricty. The consequences of such a powerhouse (excuse the pun) put to the task of advertising are nothing short of staggering. The possibilities are virtually unlimited in a world that grows ever dependent on high technology.

You can read more about the emerging smart grid technologies in this Economist article.

Update: Smartgrid Vulnerability.

Update 2: Looks like Google are already on top of this one, clever people, them.