Web Development, startups, entrepreneurship, books, art, and other stuff
I know it’s neat to hear new “similar” artists on sites like Pandora, but Jango gives you exactly what you want: exactly the artists you request. It will suggest others, but you decide if they play or not.
I haven’t opened iTunes all day. I’m not sure how this startup managed to be able to play all these songs (I’m assuming this is legal?), but it’s an incredible service.
I saw Tumblr awhile back. Neat, I thought. Another blog engine/service. The default templates all well-designed. Stereotypical “2.0″ name. Beyond that, didn’t think too much of it, neither positive nor negative.
I was recently looking at how some people use it, and it has a lot of aspects that I like. So, see philcrissman.tumblr.com if you like. It will basically be an aggregation of this feed and a few other feeds that come from my general vicinity.
I think part of what we (anyone with an idea or an entrepreneurial urge) miss is: if an idea is marketable, there’s room for competition. There very fact that competition exists is a good thing - it proves that a market exists.
In some cases, competition can even simplify your plan; find out what your competition is doing wrong (or could be doing better), and do it right.
A local example might illustrate what Aiken’s quote means to me: Here in Minneapolis there is a fast growing local coffee chain called Dunn Bros. Coffee. How could they — or anyone — even try to compete against giants like Starbucks? Automatic “bad idea”?
As it turns out, no. Dunn Bros sells only coffee roasted fresh in the last few days, and most locations feature local artists’ work on the walls. To a coffee lover or a person with a soft spot for local artists, it’s automatically better and hipper than any Starbucks could be or probably ever will be.
(Okay, it’s pretty easy to see which place I prefer. Actually, some of the independent coffee shops here are very good as well, but they don’t make as good of an example.)
That said, if someone came up to you and said, “I’m going to start a chain of coffee shops and compete with Starbucks/etc” — sounds like a pretty bad idea. You would literally have to ram it down peoples throats to get them to see that it could be done, and they still might not see it.
Is there any competition too big? Microsoft? Google? IBM? Maybe, in some time periods, and for awhile. But Microsoft pulled the rug from under IBM, and Google seems to be doing the same to Microsoft. Eventually someone will do it to Google, and who’s to say that it won’t be you? That sounds a bit crazy — and certainly I don’t think that any of my ideas from the previous post are in the “Google-killer” category. But the point is, if you decide before you start that you can’t compete with company x, you’ll never start. And the company who does become the New Leader in their field will do so despite everyone who told them it couldn’t be done.
Another of my favorite quotes, when applied to business or competition:
“If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.”
- Michael Corleone, The Godfather: Part II (mp3)
EDIT: And yes, that is my sorry attempt at a Kathy Sierra style funky illustrative graph. I try.
Recently stumbled over a great post: Don’t Keep Your Idea A Secret.
I seem to remember reading some other similar things:
It reminds me of a moderately famous quote (also seen in one of the above links):
“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you will have to ram them down people’s throats.” -Howard Aiken
It sounds like good advice, to me. In the spirit of this, here’s what I’ve been percolating, incubating, and trying to throw some spare time at:
It could incorporate a sort of popularity based ranking - add the times that a site’s ad is clicked, as well as the times that the links on their site are clicked; The better the score, the more likely it would be that your link would appear on other pages. Lest it become a tyranny of the popular, some forced rotation of all members could be put into place. Because the system would be reciprocal (someone who wanted their “free ad/link” displayed on another site would need to also include the ad script on their own site), there should always be enough sites to display all members ads multiple times throughout each day.
I’d like to have one, or two levels above “free” that would allow more text, and/or a small image, and/or an additional number of guaranteed impressions per day.
Has online advertising been done to death? Maybe. Despite my rant about advertising being a shaky business model for the future, I do think it’s a very solid model right now.
I’m already looking at the above description and seeing challenges. Also, there’s no particular reason this would be monetizable (unless you just started with subscriptions, like SixApart/Typepad) or any better than any other blog system. I want to build it anyways, because it just appeals to me.
At the moment, I’m thinking it would be a micro-blog type format, but at the same time, I don’t see any reason to prohibit longer posts. I started a prototype of this in PHP, but I’d really like to develop it in Rails using acts_as_tree. Again, just because.
In my mind, an app like this would literally make it possible to build blogs, databases, social networks, or whatever, all using this tool. There’s no reason you couldn’t allow people to map their own domain name to their app when it’s finished, much like SixApart and Blogger let users have their own domain names point to their hosted blogs.
I’m really intrigued by this idea, and I really want to build it. I’d need help for this one. I know sites like DabbleDB already exist; that’s fine. To me, the fact that something similar exists only confirms that it’s a good idea.
This is just a thought — I haven’t worked out whether this sort of site would even be possible, profitable, or legal. (Really; investing in risky ventures has some fussy rules, IIRC; I’d rather not have the SEC bothering me.) I still think it could be good idea; it just needs some research and some fine tuning.
That’s all I have, for now at least. Tell me what you like, what you hate. Leave your own ideas in the comments, or just link to them. Thanks!
I was thinking earlier today that with Rails slowly (quickly?) infiltrating the Enterprise, maybe we’ll start seeing more YAML in places where XML is currently used.
Disclaimer: I’m not saying that XML will, or even should, go away. But there’s a reason YAML is used; it’s simple. For simple documents, a language as (potentially) rich as XML might not be needed.
Maybe this time next year we’ll see Java and YAML sitting on the shelf next to Java and XML.
Which led me to ask myself: why not a YAML-based syndication feed?
One possible answer is, with RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and ATOM… do we really want Yet Another Syndication Format?
A quick search just revealed The Okay Project, which I found, predictably enough, at whytheluckystiff.net. I might have guessed that. It’s not specifically a syndication feed standard, but it seems to encompass that idea.
I’m interested.
I really like hoodwink.d. I’m not extremely active with it, but the whole concept appeals to me on a number of levels. It’s like a riddle / social experiment / art project with a life of its own.
However, I can’t really say too much more than link to the Information Booth, because like fight club, the first rule of Hoodwink.d is that you don’t talk about Hoodwink.d. Er, at least, not very much. And it’s not really a rule. I suppose I could reveal all in excruciating detail, but that somewhat violates the spirit of the whole idea.
I know; that sounds vaguely elitist, something that I’m generally opposed to. I prefer to think of it as a meme with a narrow target audience. Or one of those fancy, colorful “3D” pictures that some people can see, and some people can’t (I usually can’t. Then again, I used to look at the ones in the newspaper, and the registration of colors in newspaper printing leaves much to be desired.)
So I think that anyone who is interested in hoodwink.d can probably figure it out. (There is always Google, after all. And if you are in a corporate network, behind a firewall/proxy — I can reasonably guarantee that it won’t work. Hoodwink.d is for your spare time, outside the walls of your corporation. After all, at work, you should be working. This is what I’ve been told, at least.)
It seems that it’s obligatory, these days, to love one’s hosting provider. Not just in the sense that you would acknowledge them as they pass you on the street. More in the sense that you would willingly purchase t-shirts emblazoned with their logo. Buy them a coffee, even an XXL triple shot mocha. Invite them into your house without question when they stop by without calling first, because they just know they can do that. Send them cards for the holidays. Put their logo on your website. Sure, you are only really doing this because it’s secretly an affiliate link, but partly it’s because of how special they are.
I’m using Dreamhost. I’m quite happy with the service… it’s worked very well so far. The few technical issues I’ve had, I’ve been helped promptly upon logging the ticket.
I did use MediaTemple for a short while. I think there’s a lot to like about MediaTemple, but I did not really enjoy the hoops I had to jump through to create Rails applications in their Rails container. (That memory may be partly colored by the fact that I was also completely green in the world of Rails, rather than just light green, as I flatter myself that I have become.) Also: they are more expensive.
So, yes, I will admit it. I’m very happy with Dreamhost. Dreamhosters, if you all stop by Minneapolis, I may even buy you a coffee. But just one. All of you will have to share it. Much like I share space on one of your servers; see how that works? :-)
However, I do feel compelled to qualify my statement of corporate devotion with a quote:
Would I ever leave this company? Look, I’m all about loyalty. In fact, I feel like part of what I’m being paid for here is my loyalty. But if there were somewhere else that valued loyalty more highly, I’m going wherever they value loyalty the most.
Dwight Schrute, The Office
So, until some web hosting provider values my loyalty more than the fine geeks at Dreamhost; long live Dreamhost!
I read not too long ago that I could request an invite to the preview of the new Del.icio.us site.
So, I promptly did so. I just noticed this morning that the invite came in.
I love the new interface. It can’t be rolled out soon enough. It looks great, and I’m one of those people who believes that how a page/application looks does matter. No, it doesn’t need to be flashy, and looks don’t trump functionality, but it still matters (Ma.gnolia has arguably looked better than del.icio.us for years, but I still preferred del.icio.us, because despite not being exquisitely designed, the UI was still great. If the UI had sucked, that would be a different story).
A taste:
Some things:
Can we all agree that the new interface is awesome? Perhaps not, since you may not have used it. I will prematurely begin to agree with this sentiment and wait for you all to catch up. No worries: I’ll be here.
From Wladimir Palant (AdsensePlus’ developer)’s blog:
Do you think there will be technological solutions to prevent Adblock Plus from working?
I doubt anything can make Adblock Plus entirely unusable. However, Adblock Plus has a very distinct technological limit. Blocking every single ad on the Internet requires too much effort — which is why I think that over time we will reach a balance where only the annoying advertisements will be blocked by filter lists like EasyList. The others would “survive” because nobody will bother blocking them. Which is a good thing, we need something to discourage advertisers from using annoying ads.
I agree completely (the whole post linked to above is interesting), and I hope that this is the eventual result of Ad-blocking extensions. Unobtrusive, non annoying ads should survive. I think they will.
Annoying “push the button/kill the samurai/look at me I’m floating across the screen over the content” ads should die a swift and un-mourned death. At least, if you asked me about it.
Also… due to thinking about this for the last day, I decided that I did want to install Adblock plus. I white-listed Google Ads and The Deck, because I want to encourage that type of advertising; everything else on the EasyList(US) is blocked.
Though Google ads can be abused, too: anyone who’s seen one of those sites with a few lines of content and three HUGE blocks of Adsense getting in the way knows what I mean. Also, I’ve heard YouTube adsense ads are now available; not sure yet what I think of that; I guess I’ll know when I see some.
UPDATE: In another post, Wladimir also links to two great articles on the topic: Adblock: Adapt or Die and Adblock Doesn’t Matter: Get Over It. From the former article a great observation:
… if you are in an ad-supported content providing business, you need to learn a little bit of economic Darwinism: “Capitalism makes no guarantees whether your business model will succeed from one day to the next. Adapt or die.”
That’s the same thing I’ve been thinking: if it doesn’t work, it’s not the site visitors who need to change, it’s the business model. Imagine trying to change your customers to suit your business model… how well is that going to work? (Answer: not very.)
Just made my bimonthly visit to myspace, got to one of my friend’s pages, and noted that I wasn’t logged in.
I scanned the navigation bar (you know: “Home | Browse | Search | Invite | [etc]“), and — there is no “login” link. To login, you actually have to go to “Home” first, then login, then go back to whatever page or profile you were trying to get to previously.
MySpace is in a position where in a very real sense, they have so many users they can afford not to care that their UI sucks. This will not always be the case; are they going to fix their UI before then?
Maybe.
Sidenote: Are they still using ColdFusion? Wow.
