Bernhard Seefeld's Blog

Fun with Acronyms

Ben Hammersley: Acronymic Acrobatics or "Greatest MetaFilter Thread Ever". Indeed!

Blogstop, Where the last word of an entry must be used as an acronym for the next entry.

Somehow reminds me, that I will have to watch a improv theater performance again. I once had the chance to see one in the Improv Asylum in Boston; it was absolutely great.

The performances are completely improvised and based on suggestions from the audience and the rules from handles. This is probably the reason this is called Theatersport around here. Blogstop reminds of a handle, where two actors had to carry a dialog by using the partners last word as the beginning of a sentence. Also similar is the alphabet scene, where every sentence has to begin with the next letter from the alphabet.

bild.li with RSS and Trackback Support

Chris and me just implemented RSS and Trackback support in bild.li, our experimental moblogging service. There is even a skeleton FOAF support. bild.li is in open beta test, but beware that many things will change and sometimes break in the next days and weeks.

The Trackback URLs are identical with the permalinks. Strangely enough, I have yet to discover another site that implements Trackbacks in this style, so maybe I got something wrong with the specification? IMHO, I just have to check for a POST request with a url parameter to recognize a Trackback send, don't I? Using the permalink as Trackback URL seems like a worthwhile usability enhancement for users with blogging tools without auto discovery.

Update: bild.li is now also pinging weblogs.com, blo.gs and Technorati. Whew!

Sell your own Music Online

CD Baby is a online store for independent musicians, that reverses the ratio of payments in favor of the artists. They keep US$ 4 per CD, and the rest (the artist sets the price) goes to the musicians. Now they offer a new program to allow independent musicians to publish their music to Apple's iTunes, listen.com and emusic.com with more for distributors in negotiation. They ask US$ 40 once per CD and then keep 9% of what they get from the distributor. The contracts are carefully crafted to leave as much rights as possible to the artist and can be cancelled within 30 days.

According the early reports from Apple 50% of the songs available in their shop were downloaded at least once, implying a much more level playfield than in the traditional structures of the music business. A further nail in the coffin?

CD Baby is based in Portland, Oregon. Lately I'm getting a lot of pointers to Portland. Many people tell me that this is a cool place and has a very open-minded culture. Need to have a closer look, once. Anyhow, many pictures in the human clock were apparently taken there...

More Blogging in Bern

Habi is now blogging away on his new blog. Fun fact about Habi: He once modelled for a swiss meat campaign. And he's is a vegetarian.

And I found another longer running Blog in Bern: flagr.ant, powered by antville.

Dangerous Campaigning

A local candidate from the right populist party is campaigning for a seat in the national parliament: Promoting his slogan "for more security" he is giving away swiss army knives to anyone who asks. Huh? Yes, free knives for everyone as a symbol for actively increasing security.

Then I really prefer the christian's party idea to distribute free toothbrushes.

Anonymous Address Books in FOAF

Ben Hammersley writes about anonymously publishing an address book in FOAF, that is publishing the relationship but omitting all other details (even the person's name) and leaving it up to the contact to add the information. This is similar to the problem of publishing anonymous communities in FOAF. A crucial difference however is, that I wouldn't be able to hide my relation to Ben (if I had any) because I already have a FOAF file, whereas I could still hide my membership in that anonymous community. But then, this was exactly Ben's goal: To publish the relationship and only the relationship.

Swiss Moblogging Companies Launching

KAYWA.com went live today. Congratulations! And I hope the cuban cigar is a good omen that will lead to tropical weather for your streetparade feast.

In other news (sorry, link will expire in a few weeks) a service called "share the moment" was launched in cooperation with Sony-Ericsson, that has some resemblance to moblogging. They use the swiss dial codes for mobile phones as domains, like 079.ch, and then expose your actual phone number in the URL. I don't think that I would want it. And I hear that signing up is quite complicated as it involves receiving three SMS and then uploading a configuration, and then finally registering (Thanks, Chris's, for the link and testing).

Easy signup is important in this field. A really lovely example for easy signup techniques - while unrelated to moblogging - is the Mailinator. Free Email without any signup at all! Perfect if sites ask for your email for no apparent reason.

HTTP Caching

HTTP Caching is often something, that is automatically broken as soon as systems like CGI, PHP or ASP are being used. Even when the actual result page is quite static. This is a pity, as details like this could easily accelerate a web application when navigating within: E.g., when it seems to take forever to just react on the click of the back button. Applications with dynamic graphical components like map applications would stand to profit even more, yet this is rarely used. There is a huge gap in usability when you get down from several seconds reaction time to one second and another when you get down from one second to the order of 0.2 seconds. Caching can help you get there.

A useful tool to check how your current application is cacheable is Mark Nottingham's Cacheability Engine. You will find his useful Caching Tutorial there.

You can get caching right in seemingly hard cases, too: Itamar Shtull-Trauring describes how to use HTTP/1.1 features like ETag to correctly make personalized content cacheable.

Usability of E-Mail Whitelist Services

Someone just got the following message and asked me wether this was serious or just some fraudulent data collector:

Alfred here,

I'm protecting myself from receiving junk mail.


Just this once, click the link below so I can receive your emails. You won't have to do this again.

http://spamarrest.com/a?#################



You are receiving this message in response to your email to Alfred, a Spam Arrest customer.

Spam Arrest requests that senders verify themselves before their email is delivered.

When you click the above link, you will be taken to a page with a graphic on it. Simply read the word in the graphic, type it into the form, and you're verified.

You will only need to do this once per Spam Arrest customer.

Webmasters help stop spam and make 50%.
http://spamarrest.com/affiliates

He sends a lot of email and just the name 'Alfred' alone didn't ring any bells immediately. Thus, he decided to ignore this message.

I had to reread it several times before I came to the conclusion that this was actually real and that probably only, because I heard of spamarrest before. I personally think, that whitelist systems like this destroy too much functionality of emails. Others think alike (e.g. Jon Udell).

And I guess that owners of these systems run into enough problems themselves. Especially where wanted automated emails are in the game, like in mailinglists, order confirmations, etc. I think this is the wrong way of solving the spam problem.

New Blogs in Bern

There are several new blogs in Bern!

My brother Arni started his blog. He will soon be traveling a long time and will keep us up to date on this page. Meanwhile he is selling his drum set.

My old class mate from high school and university Habi has actually been blogging for almost three years! Unfortunately his archives are members only at his hosting site. Luckily, he will run a second blog on his new homepage. He also has a moblog.

And Miklos, another old class mate of mine, also catched the blog virus. Welcome, and add some more movie making pictures!

/ch/open Debian Presentation in Bern

Martin Krafft talked about Debian at a /ch/open business lunch here in Bern. He reviewed the history and philosophy of Debian and described how the community works today. He positions Debian as "it's not easy, it's not colorful, it is professional" emphasizing the focus on quality of the package maintainers and the Debian process. Some people in the audience told stories how they migrated from Red Hat, SuSE or Mandrake to Debian and also how they watched how communities that were almost all-SuSE two years ago are now almost all-Debian. But it was also clear, that Debian is not the distribution to absolutely recommend to linux beginners.

Martin was also involved in Munich's decision to switch to Linux. It was very interesting to hear this story from an insider and Martin says that the people involved in the migration are very highly skilled, which is good to hear, as this is going to make a very important example.

I also met Hannes Gassert from mediagonal. He is the first person I coincidentally meet, that says "I know you, I read your blog" after he learns who I am. Very cool experience. The world is a village. I added him to my FOAF file.

Distributed, Open Source Surveillance

Yesterday I met Roger and Gregor from Kaywa. Roger already blogged it. We talked about moblogging, of course.

But before Roger had a chance to mention it on his blog, Urs already knew of the meeting by finding me on Roger's and Chris's moblogs at the same time and mailed me about it. He called it geostationary coincidence. I found it quite impressive and also eye-opening. Things like this will also be a part of the moblogging future! Reminds me of David Brin's seven year old text about ubiquitous cameras and a rather open source handling of them in a transparent society.

imagine wireless

I just recently bought a notebook with integrated wireless card and today it's the first time I am blogging from a restaurant with a free connection: imagine in the zurich main station. Cool.

Blogs as Marketing Tool

Will professional business blogs be something impersonal and thus less authentic and less useful? Interesting question and good thoughts with a valuable comment section in this german article. Contains links to various blogs about marketing, which will serve as a good starting point if you plan to explore this region of the blogosphere.

Combination of Phonebook and Web Search

We just launched a new feature on search.ch, that I am very excited about:

Make a query in our Swiss Phonebook and you will see links, that connect non-private entries with a query on our swiss search engine that returns pages related to that phonebook entry. (If there would be no results, there is no link)

This is simple business intelligence for average users. All the information was already there before, but many people didn't bother making those queries. Now they have the possibility within one click.

As searching for just the company name wouldn't be precise enough, we primarily look for occurrences of the phone number in any of the formats that are usual notations of phone numbers. Of course, this reduces the number of results but we think that the precision is more important in this kind of queries. This is a classical question of precision vs recall. As a side effect you will get quite different results than with standard queries, i.e. a new view on the web that is not driven by standard keyword based querying.

And the results are often quite interesting. E.g. for restaurants, you will often find reviews. For small companies without websites you will still find who they worked for and which societies they are members of. For example, search for restaurants in basel or hotels in montreux. But also search for your business partners!

A very interesting aspect is that these links are gathered automatically and neutrally. Anyone can comment on a company in this way. So it is somewhat similar to Trackback. If you write something about a company and it include their contact information, it will show up here.

Of course, this isn't a full fledged business intelligence application, but it will still give a larger mass the possibility to get an impression of what the web says about a company. A small further step in the reduction of practical obscurity.

A natural question that arises, is wether this also works for private entries. For now, we have disabled this function as we still want to implement further checks for enhanced precision (we feel that getting a irrelevant hit is even more dangerous here), but of course it works pretty well. You would find reasons that person wants to be contacted, usually extra curricula activities like event organizations and clubs. But sometimes you will also find political activism, smaller private businesses, etc.

You can still try what we find about you by entering your phone number in a "telnr:<your phone number>" query on search.ch. (Be aware that in this way you will find information on roommates and live partners, too. Should we eventually offer related links in the phonebook, we will make sure, that these matches won't appear by requiring your name the appear near the phone number)

Generally, these kind of mechanisms offer a higher precision than general googling for a name. And it also works for very common names. But a lot of information will be omitted as private phone numbers on webpages are generally very rare.

This is our first try at this kind of web mining / free business intelligence and we have a number of ideas how to improve recall and navigability. Let's see what kind of impact something like this has on usage patterns. Please, let me know what you think about it!

Yahoo buys Overture

Just in: Yahoo buys Overture. Wow, that means that internationally, there are really only two major players left: Google and Yahoo (which now owns the Inktomi, FAST (alltheweb) and Altavista indexes). Others run portals, but these two now own all major indexes and paid placement systems.

It will be interesting to watch what MSN Search will do. They started developing their own search engine, but now the major revenue channel is owned by a competitor, too.

Learn Salsa!

Monday through Thursday 20:00-21:00 next week, I will be giving open air salsa classes for beginners here in Bern. This is organized by the New Dance Academy, a dance school here, and I will be teaching together with Selina, a good friend of mine and a very good dancer.

Dancing Salsa is great fun and I can only recommend it to everyone. If you live near Bern, then this is a great chance to start. Cost is SFr. 60.- for four 60 minute lessons. Just send me a mail if you are interested.

(the picture was taken by Mario from Salsamillo)

geocaching

Gregor mentions geocaching, which sounds like great fun. People all over the world hide things and you can try to find them and start creating new caches yourself. Most contain some items like books, CDs, card games, etc. and when you find a cache you can take things out of them and put new things into them and leave a note on the geocaching website. And in many cases the true treasure is the place surrounding the cache; I guess that many geocachers point others to their favourite places like that.

The whole thing is very GPS oriented, which kind of puzzles me - I feel this takes half the fun out of it (like computerized telescopes), but maybe go-fifty-step-to-the-big-tree-and-turn-left description are not really practical :) So I will have to ask someone for a GPS device to try it myself as I postpone the purchase of that gadget until I figure out how I want to combine GPS with Moblogging (link via Bitflux).

Of course, geocaching would be even more interesting if it would be more blog-enabled (e.g. by supporting trackback).

The Web as Primary UI Platform

Tim Bray thinks the Web's the Place for most UI interfaces. At least surely for those targeted by WinForms. His most important argument for the success of the web browser is the simplicity of the building blocks and powerful global features like the back button, the print function and the ability to bookmark pages. This reminds me of my observations about haystack's user interface continuations, which bring some of these simple yet powerful concepts to more traditional UIs (including Tim's third group of content creation UIs, which generally don't fit the browser that well - or ask for extensions like the bitflux editor and mozile). It will be interesting to see what concepts and models RDF/data-model driven UI generation will introduce. Projects like haystack give a glimpse in what platform could eventually replace the web-browser as we know it today and factors similar to those that drove the success of the browser will drive the success of this new browser generation, i.e. new powerful meta concepts like the back button will arise and be almost universally usable.

Dave Winer thinks that then, the platform becomes internet explorer, and thus is vendor controlled, too. I disagree: The most import incompatibilities arise if you want to emulate the richer elements from traditional UIs, which you shouldn't want to in the first place. Other incompatibilities arise in graphical design issues, which I think are less relevant in the context of this discussion, but will remain a nuisance while developing. And an important argument for Web UIs is the extremely easy deployment. In the context of Dave's arguments you could still gain complete independence if you sacrifice this advantage as require the installation of an open and standards based browser.

I wonder what people think about XUL (which is open but not backed by a standards committee) and especially W3C's XForms, which competes strongly with WinForms, but is browser based. Both introduce those richer UI elements.

Identifying things in FOAF

Dan Brickley writes about identifying things in FOAF. This explains nicely what I wanted to know, when I asked how a FOAF navigator would handle FOAF files coming from an by-default anonymous community.

CSS is useful

In the last months I keep stumbling on very nice applications of CSS. An older, but very impressive is the CSS Zen Garden, which demonstrates the seperation of the HTML and flexibillity in design. Today I found Michael Pick's beautiful blog with a demonstration of Pull Quotes.

Done cleanly (which is possible under some constraints driven by browser bugs..), your HTML would usually consist of mainly a few <div>-Tags with class attributes.

A nice side-effect of HTML that is marked up this way, is that it is possible to write much cleaner and stable regression tests for your web applications. These usually involve some form of scraping, and scraping becomes much easier in this way.

FOAF for anonymous communities

Recently, Gregor suggested to add FOAF to meinbild.ch. As meinbild is an anonymous community there are a few things to pay attention to, but still a lot of interesting things that can happen by opening it in a safe way. I asked about it on the foaf mailing list, and got very interesting feedback there. It seems like the principal technical questions are solved now (and that it was a good idea to ask first..). So I only have to persuade the guys from meinbild to let me implement it :) And, of course, not only FOAF but also an RSS feed with all the newest members.

AOL starts blogging

Now AOL starts blogging, that is their millions of users will get easy access (also via IM!) to blogging tools. And it evens seems, that they have a clue and do it right! I think, that this will have a huge positive impact on the blogosphere and makes me wonder (and hope) what would happen if the bigger swiss ISPs would start with similar offerings...

Keep it Simple

Clay Shirky has a new and long but also very interesting article about group forming and social software online.

One of his points is that you can't separate the technological and the social aspects. The software will always influence the users behavior. And it will do so in a non-trivial way. That is, it is both hard to predict and also not of diminishing importance. There are a lot of interesting things to learn here.

There is a project I am a little bit involved in - not very much, but enough to see behind the curtain from time to time: meinbild. Even though it doesn't say so explicitly, it is primarily used as a dating site. And what is noticeable are two things: 1. It is really, really basic and lacks many features of the usual dating sites. 2. It is quite successful.

meinbild is simple: You upload one or more pictures of you, give some basic information about you and then your profile is on the site and visitors can contact you. Ok, that's quite normal, except that maybe the signup procedure is simpler than usual.

What is missing almost entirely are the search features. As a visitor you can only browse with 'next' and 'previous', but you can't filter! You can't say 'just show me girls between 24 and 30 from my region, at least 1'72m tall and preferably blond or black hair' as all the other sites offer you. You have to look at all profiles; you also have to look at your competition. Just as in the offline world.

If you think this sucks, then you might be surprised by the growth this site has (sorry, can't disclose absolute numbers)! But even more astonishing is one of the unintended social effects: Most dating sites have a skew towards male members, often like 75% and more. An exception are expensive sites, geared towards more serious lookers. Another is meinbild, where (among the hetero users) it is more like 45%/55% ladies/gentlemen.

I think, that this is quite a remarkable behavior of this community. The users can see all others, there are no selfimposed filters, and this influences their behavior in an unusual (and unpredicted, I suppose) sense.

There is a lot to learn in these things.

Update: Hmm, by data and observations seem to have been outdated (I noticed these things a few months ago, and Clay's article reminded me of that): meinbild.ch now features a filter option and also the gender distribution is now more slanted towards male. I'll try to reconstruct this and see wether I made a mistake in my original assessment, too.