I was happy to hear about eSnips re-releasing this week on Mashable, even if Pete is less than optimistic about it. One of the eSnips team, Efrat Moshkoviz, liked my comments there and even put me on the blogroll! eSnips currently does a lot of things other bookmarking/archiving services don’t and I’m glad they seem to be still working on making their service even better!
I got several invites to betas over the last few days, Boxxet, Krugle and Riya. They’re all pretty cool so far… Hopefully I’ll have a chance to write up some reviews soon. I love betas!
I was having a conversation with a friend last night about Photoshop and how there are about 900 ways to do the same thing or variations on the same thing. Photoshop is such a versatile tool that I don’t think you can ever run out new options to discover.
My friend was looking for a method to make colors pop in pictures so here’s what I came up with. I have been experimenting with inverting layers and playing with blending a good bit lately to see what interesting things might result. There are already many tutorials on how to make colors pop out there, but maybe you’ll find this one has a slightly different effect. I’ve noticed it tends to emphasize Yellows a bit more than some approaches I’ve tried before.
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You can download the action that I created for this, but if you’re curious about what it’s doing or you just like to do things the hard way, here are the steps:
There you go! Your colors should be pretty saturated. At this point it’s a matter of playing with the Color Pop layer. You can tone it down by adjusting the Opacity, and you can also get some interesting effects by changing the Blending Mode:
While playing with this, I also found an interesting way to subdue the colors in an image for a nice washed out effect that doesn’t reduce the depth of your shadows. See the Subdued Color tutorial if you’re interested!
While playing around with inversions and trying to figure out how to make colors pop, I stumbled across a nice way to achieve the opposite effect: making colors subdued and washed out. The nice thing about this effect is that it doesn’t also wash out your shadows, only the color is affected (unless you use some special blend modes).
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Here is the action I created if you’d like to download it and save some effort. Otherwise, here are the steps to do it yourself:
Well it’s been an interesting week at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. And now it’s time to wrap things up.
My summary of the experience is that I’m glad that I got to be around people as excited and curious as I am about the development of technology, accessibility of information, and usability of interfaces. The theme was the Attention Economy, and while some of the presentations didn’t really fit, most of them had good insights that I will be taking with me.
I think the real theme was about how to deal with the information overload most of us are experiencing now, especially since RSS feeds came on the scene and exponentially widened the river of information we swim against every day. Attention is definitely the most valuable resource we have. Focusing it by removing the noise from the information stream is the next immediate task. As Linda Stone said, we need to develop applications that are designed to improve the quality of our life, not just make it easier for us to do more.
I took a lot of notes this week, many of which will never be polished enough to make it to this blog, but here are some thoughts from various speakers that I jotted down during the seminar that resonated with me for some reason or another. For the things that I managed to write down exactly as I heard them, I’ll enclose in quotes, otherwise they’re paraphrased ideas from the speakers I attributed.
“Write when you’re filled with wonder; waiting till you’re an expert is too late.”
“Burnout is what happens to people who don’t know when to quit.”
Notes from the last day of the ETech conference:
Storing data in cookies means all changes are saved with every request. This is good because no special code needed to send updates to server, but bad because you’re potentially wasting bandwidth sending the same data over requests.
Traditionally you have only 3 storage options for data locally on the client:
You must approach storing data in disconnected apps differently than constantly connected apps:
Trimpath Junction is an MVC Framework for Javascript designed as WORA (write once run anywhere) and able to run with more than one storage provider.
Trimpath uses TQL which is a Javascript, function based substitution for SQL to manage data. It also uses Javascript templates which are enabled using the With statement, which allows you to change the scope of a call during runtime, and so switch whether you are going against the network or a local store.
Steve was just getting into showing us how Trimpath could be used when he ran out of time. I will be looking into it more though because I found TQL and the Javascript Templates intriguing.
Yahoo!’s motto now is to “Enable people to find, use, share and expand (FUSE) all human knowledge”.
The most interesting part of the presentation was their perspective on Flickr. Directly from the slides:
Flickr is an…
“Entire ecosystem created by less that ten employees aided by millions in the Flickr community.”
I think mainly this is the lesson learned: If you want to have a successful social site you need to encorporate this level of user participation. Or, at least you should use Flickr as a model if you want to get bought by Yahoo!
Some nice presentations this morning. Here’s some of the stuff I found interesting.
An interesting concept that he proposed is that a URL is a promise to update itself in the future. If it points to a list of items (such as a del.icio.us archive), the list can continue to grow. Sharing your links with people instead of full copy of text or lists is more of a dynamic exchange.
And he demonstrated something I hadn’t seen before: you can bookmark soundbites! Very cool.
First was Slashdot. Clay emphasized several times that it is set up to defend readers from the writers. Slashdot doesn’t have “users” in a general sense. They also have a very dedicated small group of moderators who work tirelessly to ensure that the content that appears on the site is worth reading.
There is a problem with group contribution sites, in the “Tragedy of the Commons” where people will try to get attention by being disruptive. Slashdot handles this through design choices and moderation:
This can give the moderators a lot of power which could also be abused. They implement another pattern to answer the question “Who will guard the guardians?”:
Another example is Bronze Beta, which is a very stripped down and simple group blog. Users are not required to be logged in to post, and the posts are not threaded, but the lack of complexity is intentional and the focus is not on posting articles but on commenting and group participation. The pattern follows:
Clay’s final example was Writely.com, which takes yet another approach
Clay made a good point: by deciding what moderation patterns to use, we are encoding the ability (or lack thereof) for freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools. We should be conscious of these decisions and their effects. If these tools do not make it possible for the users to defend themselves from the moderators then something is wrong.
There’s more information about these ideas on Clay’s wiki or you can join a yahoo group to participate in discussing them.
He listed several free tools for development:
There’s not much else I can really say other than I am definitely curious about it after seeing the demo and will be shortly checking out the development labs that he mentioned.
The most interesting part of the presentation was about the new featureset Eventful released today called Eventful Demand. It is a way for you to make a wish for an event, request it, promote it, and hopefully (if you got enough interest and it’s actually possible) have the wish fulfilled. Once you make a demand request, if you get enough people interested, the performer will be contacted. You can promote your demand through email and blog badges. It’s a cool idea, though it may be hard on a general blog to get enough people in your physical area to vote for your demand and have it reach critical mass.
It’s an exciting idea though, to be able to let performers know where they’re really appreciated and it potentially takes away some of the power from the big bad record companies which is always a good thing.
Joel had one of the best quotes so far in the conference while talking about why SUVs make you feel safe because they are full of soft rounded curves but where they fall short of the obvious psychological message implied there: “You can’t put breasts on a sports utility vehicle.”
Yay!
Update: We’re at break so I got to go pick up my prize: two Griffin iPod products. PowerJolt, a cigarette lighter car charger and an iTrip for the iPod mini. So now I have to go get a mini I guess! We just got the iPod Video for Christmas. Always an excuse to spend more money .
Yes, I know it’s Wednesday but I didn’t have my laptop with me on Monday and then left the notebook that I recorded interesting stuff in on Monday in the hotel yesterday. So here we go, a day late. I’ll do this as a series as I get them in.
(Jesse James Garrett and Jeffery Veen)
Jesse and Jeff spent this session dissecting Jesse’s Elements graph from the bottom up and then from the top down again.
Here’s the bullet points that I picked up:
These approaches are both valid, and should be considered during all steps in designing applications for the web. Becoming too rooted in one mindset or the other can cause problems in the design.
Jeff refered to this as “Emotional Design”. If a site is displeasing, then people will not be willing to invest the effort to learn how to use it, but in studies, they’ve noticed that people will keep trying at sites they find visually engaging even if they are not getting the results they want.
Jeff said that there have been studies that show that we tend to anthropomorphize web sites (or anthing that we’re exposed to that has interactivity). It’s a different psychology from designing products or art. Just as you don’t want to spend time with a person that treats you badly, you don’t want to stay in an abusive relationship with a website.
Here are the slides, but it’s a big file so be forwarned!
Besides Ray Ozzie’s Live Clipboard, here are some other things I found interesting at this morning’s presentations.
I hadn’t realized that it was that “simple” before.
The Nathan McFarland of CastingWords.com spoke about how their business was basically built around “outsourcing” to MT and gave the conference goers a url to try 30 minutes of transcription for free.
Previously I wasn’t sure how Mechancial Turk could be used for things that required specialized knowledge, but there is a way you can specify criteria for the people who will be performing your “HITs”. Nathan cited examples of college chemistry students working on a transcription of chemistry lectures for him and so earning money while also educating themselves.
Here’s a list of some of the types of tasks Mechanical Turk can be applied to according to Felipe:
Sxip has an implementation for bloggers in it’s sister site Sxore.com. Signing up and using Sxore is a way to control the quality of comments posted on your blog by both eliminating comment spam and allowing frequent commenters to build trusted identities. It’s an interesting concept and they offer a Wordpress plugin for the functionality (which I will be evaluating soon).
Cory described the way that the users of the game have surprised the developers with the things that they have created (using the tools provided by the game) and also described the unique economy that has been created in both the virtual world of the game and the real world we live in. It’s not a typical MMORPG in that there are no levels, tasks, quests or goals. There’s no subscription model for paying to participate in the game. You pay to make the things you create and the property you aquire “permanent”.
Some facts he shared that I found interesting:
Overall, Second Life is something I think I’m going to have to take a second look at.
PPAs are valuable because if you default on them your reputation suffers. For example: if you don’t show up when you commiteed to watching your kid’s soccer game, you’ve lost some of your reputation as a good parent.
PPAs are a precious commodity because they involve the most scarce and perishable factor of all: your time. Since they are so valuable, according to Seth, they can also be “pooled, securitized and traded”, which means, in other words, you can make money off them if handled properly. Root is setting itself up to be a way to monetize your PPAs.
Linda mentioned that in the mid 60s to mid 80s there was a cultural change to a focus from the group to the individual. It became all about “me, me, me” and what’s best for “me”. After that, and up to the current time, we’ve been going through another shift, into building a network, and becoming connected to other people through that network. Though Linda didn’t say it, it seems to me that these connections are all in the virtual space, and that, in the majority of cases, they’re relatively shallow. One example she mentioned was someone being proud of their 3000 friends on Frienster. She said that our current situation means that our actions are mainly “motivated by a desire to be a live node on the network”. The stress of maintaining your connection to the internet can be overwhelming, but cutting yourself off from it is equally as stressful because you might be missing something really or artificially important.
Linda said that the mantra of new software that came out used to be “ease of use”, but with today’s problems all new software should focus on how it “improves the quality of life”. I think on top of this is a need for us to connect in a deeper and more fundamental way with the people in our networks as well. Hopefully some relief is on the way.
More notes tomorrow!
Ray Ozzie (MS CTO) gave an interesting presentation this morning about incorporating the functionality of the standard clipboard into the web. Deemed “Live Clipboard” he showed us examples of how it could be used to transfer structured content on websites between websites and between websites and Windows applications.
The interface itself is a modified text box which looks like a button. If there is structured data on the web page, the user can click the button to copy it to the clipboard. The first example was copying event data from Eventful to a sample website. The “pasted” data showed up already formatted into fields as it was on the Eventful site. It is stored as a modifed version of CFText in the clipboard so that it can be created in the same structure that it was copied from. Transfering the copied event to Outlook was just a matter of pasting it into a new event.
Ray then showed how he could paste profile data from his MySpace blog to his profile on Facebook as a “live link” that would be automatically updated if changes were made to the MySpace profile.
Finally he gave some interesting examples with Flickr: One-click copying and then pasting an image directly into Windows explorer as well as pasting an entire Flickr feed packaged automatically in a subfolder. A special file was created in the feed folder which would allow the feed to be continuously updated as new items are added.
While definitely a cool idea, Ray admitted it will take wide adoption to make it really useful to most people. It requires both the inclusion of a script on participating sites and the use of specialized microformats that the data will be wrapped in.
Ray said Internet Explorer 7 will have some of this functionality already built in when it is released. He has more details about the concept and the microformats necessary to support it on his blog post.
This could be extremely helpful for synchronizing information between sites that you have a presence on, for creating automatic downloads of files as they become available (using the updating RSS feed to Explorer) and just to make it easier to maintain your personal data both online and offline. I can see potential, if there’s enough momentum to actually implement it on a critical mass of websites.
Well, not as if my post rate has been standard, but I won’t be around for a little bit. Ten out of the next 36 hours will be spent training in Aikido at my dojo’s 10th anniversary seminar, then I immediately fly to San Diego for the O’Reilly Emerging Tech Conference!! Woohoo! I’m very excited!
I’ve been thinking about the Geek Divide after Pete’s post yesterday on it (from which I found Scott Karp’s geek qualification list list that inspired me to create my own).
This is a subject close to my heart, being what I am. But I often wonder, why can’t everyone just be geeky?? How come everyone doesn’t get excited about new technology? Why does the world have so many oblivious, uninterested or just plain ludditious people in it?
Yes, I am firmly entrenched in my little reality tunnel, but I often honestly wonder how people in this day and age can even avoid being geeky. I think it’s an age thing. Maybe things just move too fast for most folks over the age of 25…
I believe that most of the kids 16 and under will be geeks by default. Exposure to computers, the internet, cell phones and gaming consoles for their entire life can’t help but make it so. And it doesn’t phase them that it changes wholly in a matter of months. From their perspective, that rate of change is a normal part of life. And I think that’s a good thing because the rate of change is only going to accelerate.
TAD and I were very entertained by two “popular looking” high school aged kids at the Apple store the other night that were playing with an iLife on an iBook and had to call their friends on their cell and tell them to come see all the awesome stuff it could do. That never would have happened even 5 years ago. Every time we go there are gaggles of teenage girls ohhing and ahhing over iPods and cameras and laptops. It’s become fashionable to have geeky tendencies.
So maybe I’m biased (of course I am), but I’m thinking the Geek Divide, being more of an age issue, will resolve itself as the younger generation matures and starts becoming financially independent. These kids are used to putting time and effort into the things they use, they’re willing to endure the pain of the complexity over lack of features that most of us early adopters willingly go through now and they’ll take it for granted that it’s part of the experience. The issues that people have been talking about lately with “commercializing” Web 2.0 offerings will eventually just kind of fade away.
I’m not saying that “commercializing” isn’t important because it is, especially right now. Usability and feature value should always be major factors in the development of applications. Currently, and over the course of the next few years, the Geek Divide will still be a large chasm. But, I think that the level of user sophistication is going to go up radically after that. We’ll just have to be conscious of the needs of the geek-deficient and hold their hands until then.
I discovered Scott Karp’s blog today and the Top 10 List he created to evaluate yourself and discover whether you’re a geek or not…
Well, I definitely qualify if that’s the total criteria, but I think there are levels of geekness. Scott’s quiz defines the entry level. Here’s a quiz for the next rung of “You might just be a geek if…”
Admittedly, two of these I haven’t done, so I’ll say if you score an 8, you’re at least as geeky as me and that’s pretty dang geeky. I’ll leave the next tier list to someone else!!
Today Pete had an article about the financial viablility of web based “home page” services such as Netvibes, Protopage, Favoor and others. Personally, I haven’t figured out what the usefulness is, myself. I just don’t get them.
My first peeve about web home pages is that they take a long time to load. I don’t use any page as a default in my browser. When I open a browser, I generally am after some kind of information and I already know the url I’m headed for, or I am going to Google to find it. I want the browser to open fast so I can get where I’m going. Few things annoy me more than if the browser has a home page specified and I have to wait for it to load before I can even type in my url (it will overwrite what I’ve typed once it finishes loading the page and I’ll just have to type it again unless I’m patient). And web home pages take a long time to load because of all the widgets and modules.
My second peeve is that I don’t gain anything from another RSS aggregator and there aren’t really any other useful widgets. I have RSS feeds funneled to my mail service so that I only have to go one place for incoming information. Yes, I know I can set up my “home page” to have a widget to view my inbox but I still have to click on it to open my mail program so what’s the point? As for other widgets, I don’t have time to play games and I don’t need the weather reports (I can look out the window).
Which leads to my last peeve: widget screen real estate is so limited for the useful tools (like search, inbox or even flickr feeds) on home pages that I don’t want to use those tools on the home page. I’d much prefer to use those tools on their native sites so that I can focus on them and the task at hand without the distraction of other stuff on the page and the limitation of having to scroll for full functionality.
So, I haven’t figured out a good reason to use these services. And this is an opinion of a very techy/geeky/early adopter type person… Isn’t it way too complicated for the “average” guy who’s still daunted by (if even aware of) RSS feeds? I will be surprised if any of these services survive the next year or two, with the possible exception of the early players in the space (such as Netvibes) just because of the novelty.
I’d like to hear of some innovative uses for these things… Maybe they’d be useful as a way to aggregate info and “share” it with others? Ehh, no… SuperGlu, PeopleFeeds and Squidoo bascially do that… What else could you do with them? Anyone have some suggestions?
