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Define: Dogma

May 5th, 2010 · Opinion

There’s nothing worse than watching the idiocy of the whole Apple v Adobe argument playing out online, with fan boys and girls on both sides touting the superiority of their argument in a block-headed and dogmatic fashion.  Ultimately who really cares?

Who’s right?

No one is right.  We can argue both sides till we are blue in the face but it will change nothing. The whole argument entangles so many different debates and boils them down to such a base and single denominator that any discussion turns worthless fast.

Apple and Adobe are just pawns in a much bigger picture.  SHOCK HORROR.  Who really cares about either company than those with vested interests.  The picture is much wider, bigger and greater than the sum of those two entities.  At the heart of this massive tussle is the debate about where technology is really heading and the only element of concern should be the long term benefits of the approach being taken.  Who benefits and who suffers at the behest of this path?

The Best Way Forward

Everyone has there soap box to stand on from content providers to software developers to service providers, and each of them is touting their ways as best practice, but in the end, none of these enterprises would be anywhere without the consumer, and it is the consumer that should decide.

Foisting your opinions on the public at large and telling them what will be, irrespective of how they wish to consume your product or service is stupid.  Any mature business trading in established brands knows the benefits of letting your assets sweat and that means talking as many routes as possible to make a return on investments.  Delivering your content in the right format or slew of possible formats is the best approach for all parties concerned.  And, frankly speaking, any enterprise that doesn’t is being exceedingly wasteful and turning away possible and easy profits.

Don’t Make Yourself The Idiot

This argument is neither about Apple nor Adobe and their Flash technology. It’s about a common sense approach to delivery, and where delivery platforms will head in the future.  Personally, I prefer an open and agnostic approach in as many cases as possible, but then that’s because I work with the web and have to satisfy access in many different forms.  No doubt software developers prefer an app store approach.

Anyhow, all I can say is: Before you end up telling an Adobe fan boy to enjoy the rest of his life using Windows, think, and engage your brain.  Avoid swinging your foot firmly into your own mouth, because frankly speaking, there are more important points of discussion!  So let’s talk about the greater good, and for the best means of delivery for traditional content and traditional software, whatever guise that might take.

Photo Credit: James Cridland on Flickr. Licensed under CC.

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Building A Recommendation Engine

April 5th, 2010 · Web Design

Every now and then you hit a dearth of information.  Its like striking black gold or a never ending seam at the face of a coal mine.  Anyhow, it seems to be the case, having come across a tweet regarding some PDFs of slides for talks given by Alex Lin of Intelligent Mining.

As is clearly stated on their site, Intelligent Mining was set up to both “help people develop a clear understanding of the possibilities and challenges of modern predictive analytics techniques in online environments” and “Create solutions to help our clients leverage their data assets and make their websites more efficient & the visitor experience more relevant. Solutions that add value to your business.” and they clearly seem to do that.

In the Intelligent Mining knowledge base are 3 PDFs:

  • Building a Predictive Model – An example of a product recommendation engine.
  • Recommendation Engine Demystified – Neighbourhood based collaborative filtering.
  • Probabilistic Retrieval – Incorporating Probabilistic Retrieval Knowledge into TFIDF Search Engine

The know-how contained in these documents is hardly going to get you up and running with a recommendation engine of your very own, but they will at least put you on the right track to being able to sniff out the tools and build what you want.

It goes without saying that you will need no fear of maths and scientific equations, because the PDFs are packed full of them, but broader topics within them include:

  • Item and user-orientated collaborative filtering
  • Data normalisation
  • Neighbourhood formation & recommendation generation
  • Challenges of available data
  • Best practices and end goals

Anyhow.  Before I take any longer, by way of introduction to these useful docs, tuck in, and hopefully you can learn a thing or two about building your own recommendation engine.

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We, The People

April 3rd, 2010 · Opinion

I love this!  Dan Walsh aka Vagabond, has created a game that allows you to run the United States of America.  The board game is detailed in his blog post Hail to the Chief – Soon You Too Can Be President.

It’s a great game that brings the truths and half-truths of Washington DC with all its filibustering, pork barreling, bribery, lobbying, campaign funding and more, to your playing table.  Who says that politics is dead?

Dan, with his frustration of the 2008 Presidential Election, put his creative energies to good use, and who can deny this new board game is a wonderful idea and superbly executed – just look at this image on the right and the wonderful artwork, colour and sleek lines.

I suppose the complexities of the political process are harder to compress into a single board with a single game ring on it, but no doubt the playability is still super fun and even if you start with multiple players or candidates, you will likely end up with just a two horse race, as one does in real life.

Recreating the political gesturing, the sidestepping of beliefs for political gain, and the general showmanship of politics might be trickier, but it seems like Dan does have those covered with voting cards and the like.  Something that will definitely make the game play much more engaging amongst the players, with, as Dan says, a lot of “name calling and finger pointing” that will  “give the players a little taste of what it’s like to be a politician.”

All this reminds me of the wonderful idea executed by the JFK Library, re-running the 1963 Presidential Campaign on Twitter, as covered in my post, On The Campaign Trail with JFK, and is ever useful in engaging with new generations that feel so disaffected.   Anyhow, as Dan reflects, no wonder kids no longer esteem to go into politics anymore.

Definitely check out the game, Hail to the Chief, and add your feedback!

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Digital Curation, Web Design, Self-Publishing and Fun!

April 2nd, 2010 · Link Roundup, Marketing, Web Design

Dope Data is the blog for Erin Scime covering content strategy ideas and her portfolio.  It’s an excellent body of work and example of how great ideas can win through.  This notion is backed up by an excellent article from Erin on A List Apart entitled Content Strategist as Digital Curator.

On the topic of digital curation and museums, the Collections Trust blog has a post entitled Getting Started: Building a Digital Agency.  It’s the first part in a series that guides museums, and anyone else who cares to listen, through the process of setting up a digital department.  What to do and what not to do.

Keith Burtis has a great post, Exploring Character vs Human Face as the Representative of a Digital Brand on keithburtis.com, a good and totally relevant take on social media and the representation of you or your business online.  With some many business large and small going online with social media these days it is important to get the mix right when reaching out to your audience.

On another tangent, and on the topic of web design, this is Give PNG a Chance on the phpied site. In the excellent article by Stoyan Stefanov that talks about the pitfalls of using PNG, what works and what doesn’t, and how best to integrate it when using it on your website.  Definitely something that more designers and creative directors should be fully aware of in the process of how their design is going to end up being cut up and used on the front-end of a website.

For those interested in the actual construction of site and the usability and experience architecture behind them, the following is a top down review of the art of User Interaction Design: Complete Beginers Guide to Interaction Design.  The article is on UXBooth, an awesome site which covers many great related topics, and more recently reviewed a plethora of UX Testing apps, Information Gathering – A Roundup of UX Apps. An article definitely worth reading too.

Back on my favourite topic of museums and design, Nina K Simon, the lady of Museum 2.0 fame and much more, has written an incredible series of blog posts detailing the story of self-publishing her latest book, The Participatory Museum.  The series is entitled The Participatory Process and is split into 4 parts – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

On to my next favourite topic of search engine optimisation, and back to what I repeatedly bang on about in terms of effectiveness, here is a useful guide to 10 free tools for small businesses in the battle of SEO on the Small Business Computing website.  They provide the tools, but as an end user you need to know how to stretch beyond this, so reading more around the topic is also a good thing, with plenty of good articles on this very site (apologies for the self-promotion).

Anyhow, time to hang up my boots for another post.  I hope you enjoyed it, and happy reading!

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Things to Learn About Managing & Developing Product

April 1st, 2010 · Opinion

Wired’s Webmonkey recently caught-up with Google’s Todd Jackson.  He is the product manager for Google Mail, and more recently Google Buzz.  The interview is an interesting mix of talk about GMail, Buzz and how his team manages development and maintenance the products. Their are some great take home points to glean from it if you are developing products and services online.

So in summary, here they are:

  • “Eat your own dog food” – There’s nothing quite like using the product you develop for your own resources, before forcing others to use it, and to this end the GMail team all use the product to run their operations.
  • Learn from the hiccups – There is always something to be learned even from the most negative events, and the GMail team cover every last detail of issues to ensure that periods of downtime do not necessarily occur again.
  • Learn quickly – The privacy issues surrounding the roll out of Buzz really kicked up a storm and Google got plenty of egg on its face.  The sweet and the short is that you need to learn and respond quickly to such concerns.
  • Respond to the smallest outages – In Google’s case, even if only 0.1% of users are affect that still represents a massive number, made even more acute when the outage is to a mission critical service such as email.  When people rely on your products you shouldn’t wait around if there are issues.
  • Communicate with users – When there are problems, or when users are making requests for new features, it is always good to provide channels of communication to ensure they are kept in the loop, this both eases concerns, but also makes them feel valued.
  • Redundant sections – To increase the level of redundancy you need to ensure that sections of functionality are not inter-dependent.  Dependencies are bad.  To this end, make sure that sections of your product are resilient to outages.  In google’s case, contacts outages int he past had rendered GMail unnecessarily inoperable.
  • Performance & speed are features - More speed = more usage.  When Google sped up Picasa 2 times, the usage levels double.  This is a pretty conclusive driver for improved speed on sites and faster loading times.  Speed is good and with the availability of broadband, ever more critical.  Don’t make users wait around.
  • Avoid noise – People loved buzz, but they hated the noise it created in the box. Noise not just in people’s inboxes, but online as a whole is a real problem.  It hinders productivity and can kill the working day.  Helping users cut noise is a good thing.
  • Keep public & private separate – When developing products and services, remember that people do like to keep public and private personas.  Keeping these separate is a good thing, and allowing people to keep them separate helps.  Invading them constantly as Facebook does only gives yourself a bad rep.

Many great points and things to be learned by product managers and development teams around the globe.  Some nice extras, but as well as a few things I have covered before in topics such as my review of the Whitney Museum website, as well as the aforementioned institution’s response to negative feedback.

Anyhow, a useful lesson for the forthcoming Easter weekend.  Enjoy!

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