Say hello to the experience-value map

I recently had a QA on Linkedin with a guy who asked:

Community-based websites: the effectiveness of engagement and Interaction? There is still a real opportunity for them to be a leader using a community-based solution. How long will these community-based solutions continue to be effective?

Since about 2005 I've been getting a steadily increasing demand for sites that build, support or promote community. I was surprised by the above question as it was beginning to feel like pretty much every brand out their had gotten on the bus with varying degrees of commitment and success.

So I thought I'd drop my answer in hear for safekeeping:

If you rephrase your question slightly:

"What can my client do with interactive technologies to increase value co-creation and engagement?"

If the creation of social capital and the building of a value co-creation network become core business objectives then the worth of community-based efforts becomes self-evident.

A community can rally around an issue (changing legislation, agreeing safety standards for toys) or a task (designing the Lego Mindstorm, pushing GM towards sustainability) and collectively generate solutions. The alternative is a network of business development types driving around the country in cars. I gotta say, I like the website option better.

Please take note of Stephen's point about commitment. A thriving community does require investment in capital, in time, in risk management. Make sure you factor these issues into your planing.

> B to B is typically not a great area for community

I just wanted to add a comment about Tom's point above.

I have recently implemented "group pages" that allow insurance advisers to ask each other questions in a private, branded area. The service is hosted by the underwriting insurance company.

Here's what the value-map looks like:

1 - Each advisor builds her knowledge and feels more competent as a result of participating (similar to what we are doing here)

2 - The system reduces the number of calls to the underwriters which means they get more done in a day (their days become more valuable)

Created social capital:

The partner advisers deepen their engagement with the underwriting company. The experience of dealing with this company as opposed to one that doesn't provide this service is such that over time the business relationship is stronger (ie sales increase)

It's always worth trying to quantify this value when deciding what to build.

Experience value-mapping

I'm developing a methodology to map the co-creation of value by customers onto the traditional human-centred design assets we already use. I'm not sure where that's going to end up. Should I start another agency? (still a little sobered after the Pumpernickle experience) or do i just use this as a consultant, bringing the techniques to my day-to-day work?

In the meantime, feel free to ring me on 07515 661655 if you're a product owner and are trying to understand how value co-creation can impact your business requirement choices.

Orange RockCorps - socia...

Just saw Tim's piece on the Glasshouse blog on Orange Rockcorps and understanding the value of the social capital.

From there I had a quick look around and wow, quite a lot of negative opinion out there and a surprisingly downbeat response to the Orange rockcorps thing over at brandrepublic:

This is incredibly lame. The Orange 'I Am' campaign just limps from bad to worse. Busta Rhymes? What year are we in? 1999? I can't remember the last campaign from Fallon that was any good.

I guess there's a gap between the original and the Orange "I am" branded version? This is how the rc site describes the initiative:

RockCorps harnesses the power of music to inspire volunteering. We produce concerts for which the only way in is to volunteer 4 hours at a project we organize with non-profit partners. You can't win a ticket; you can't buy a ticket; you have to earn a ticket to a concert that becomes a celebration of giving back.

Tim reckons

If the company makes it work, it's the energy and community productivity generated that will constitute the value of the initiative; not the SMS bundles sold. The number of hours donated, or playgrounds renovated is a wholly inadequate proxy for the social capital generated by a campaign like this...

read Tim's whole post over at Glasshouse Partnership

Vikings v. Aliens

So Charlotte wants me to spread the web2 love re ex-classmate Dirk Blackman's new production Outlander and why not? (that's our in-house Viking Haldane on the big-boy climbing frame over there on the left for our family readers)

As Eva Metalios puts it:

Subject: Fw: Dirk needs our help
Hey all -

After working in the Sisyphean task of being a writer in LA for over two decades, and the three year odyssey that OUTLANDER took to actually be made, the movie our friend Dirk Blackman (Columbia class of '85) authored with his partner and the project's director Howard McCain, is coming out. It is a sci-fi take on the Beowulf legend, nach.

C'mon, we are talking Dirk here. This is not
your daddy's Viking movie.

And Charlotte makes the point

Douglas,
the Norway thing, the Columbia thing, the media thing...

Well, yes, she's got a point I guess (and only Charlotte and my mother can get away with calling me Douglas).

The Norway thing huh? well we named our boy Haldane in an attempt to ping him into investigating his Norse roots... He is named after King Healfdene (lit. "half-dane") whose name has survived from myth into modern Danish under the popular form Halfdan

I initially wanted to call Hal Healfdene but worrying got the better of me and in the end I didn't want to relive a boy named Sue so tried to anglicise it some. We could have gone with Haldan, also in use in modern Danish but in the end we settled on Haldane (also good because it's a Scottish name).

Oh, right, back to the link love;-)

• the Morwen character is in development here: G4 video
• Healfdene Goguen is as far as I can tell the only man online to sport the BW original spelling
• and here's another site about Outlander
• here's the trailer on Youtube

Judging from the amount of traffic already generated, Dirk's project doesn't need any help but I liked Eva's closer make the Weinstein Company to feel the noise. Take that Harvey!

eat.co.uk get it right

Wow, when was the last time you thought you'd get a response as a result of filling in a form on the web (never mind a rapid response)?

Well, I had a little grief from the fraud protection mob at Firstdirect this afternoon and as a result posted this note in the feedback form on the Eat website (and I won't go into the domain name resolution issue on the site which means if you load the flash movie by entering the domain without the 'www' the links to the feedback form are broken--I wonder how much more feedback they'd get if that was fixed...)

At 14:31:55 on 27 June 2008 (roughly an hour ago) I purchased a soup and sandwich from your 15 Basinghall Street shop.

When I returned to my desk to eat my lunch I received a call from my bank (first direct) informing me that there had been fraudulent behaviour on my switch card.

According to their records, the transaction I had just made in the City of London was routed through a supplier in Equador.

The security guys at the bank where I work reckon this is a man-in-the-middle attack and that someone has tampered with the keypad in the store (similar to attaching card readers to ATM tellers, to harvest card details).

Please review this situation asap.

All the best,
Dug Falby

To be honest, I really didn't think I'd get an answer (strangely, the Flash front-end is what gave me this impression: If it's not a real html form, how can it yield real results?) but I did.

A nice man called Martin (I think he said he was head of business communications?) rung up to explain what was going on as a result of my note. From his description, I pictured a black helicopter appearing over Basinghall street and special forces whisking the card-reader off to a controlled explosion. It was very impressive, he said he'd frozen all card transactions at the store, notified the card processing supplier who are going to come in and refit the store tonight and would double-check records for staff access to card processing stuff.

He also made a point of checking that I had notified my bank and assured me he would get back to with with any progress relevant to my situation. Prompt, courteous and thorough, just the way it oughta be.

Which of course means I'll be all the more likely to go buy delicious soups and salads from Eat:-)

Future of Web Design, London 2008

Well, the afternoon was pretty good too, but with a dead powerbook battery and no charger I ended up sending commentary via Twitter.

13:00 -- Lunch

One design direction will do -- AMEN

12:38 -- Larissa Meek (AgencyNet) Getting your designs approved: 12 Simple Rules
watching a demo of an Aston Martin website and I hate it! Hard to beleive but this agency team is making exactly the same mistakes the boo.com crew. They are trying to replicate a sensual experience using tech and it just doesn't work :-(

... and at this point, Dug's battery expired and he switched to iphone mode. I can't believe I forgot the bloody charger this morning!

Casino is a "feedback engine" (he's describing what the adiction thing call "near-win experiences" ie gamblers never loose, they just almost win) Vegas master of feedback...

Creating delightful experiences: Innocent's "stop looking at my bottom", fun, easter eggs (find it and share)

Andy just said "social object"

11:36 -- Andy Budd is doing great things showing examples of great experience curves

[ interview break ]

I just interviewed Steve Pearce, I wanted to ask him the agency questions I posted earlier. How does Poke get clients to focus on the bottom of the iceberg after the pitch was won on the basis of the shiny top of the iceberg.

He reckons Poke has solved this by saying "no", by never going to the client with a ready-made solution. In ongoing work, he always keeps referring to interaction, thinking about the backend and appserver looking for hooks into the experience. He quotes the example of the Topshop re-skin where his team looked carefully at the appserver and found a number of services that had been disabled, never implemented or under-used. As a result, he was able to use an up-sell module to create a dynamic user-ratings system.

The second question is the Hugh McLeod question about agencies being asked help clients redefine their business and how agencies are going to fit into this new world. Steve's take on this was

that agencies live the client's product (use Windows machines to sell Microsoft products) and build deep relationships with clients such that the feedback mechanism from agency to client can be about a lot more that just the current project.

Finally, Steve reckons

that Poke is based on values and that if those are always kept at the core of all projects, the thinking about the project (and by extension the client's business) will naturally flow back to the client.

11:25 -- Andy Budd (Clearleft) is doing "Designing the User Experience Curve"

(Break: back at 11:20)

10:42 -- Andy Clarke of Stuff & Nonsense & Steve Pearce are taking questions

Well, I came to see Steve Pearce from Poke and managed to catch the last five minutes of his chat.

He did an interesting presentation on the process of creating user experiences. He uses a great iceberg metaphor (see others on this) to describe the process.

It's an interesting parallel to Jesse James Garett's "Elements" in that in the iceberg metaphor you dive under the surface to the bottom of the experience and then float up to the top will in JJG land you float up from abstract to concrete via the stages of strategy, scope, structure, skeleton and surface :-)

FOWA 2007 - day one

This 'stream-of-listening' feed was provided for folk that couldn't make the event. In the end I'm not sure it's very useful, so today I'll just take notes and publish more structured thoughts after the event.

In terms of getting a better idea of what speakers actually said, I strongly recommend Lars Plougmann and his amazing mind maps which are both complete and accurate, and are of course released on a CC licence.

And that, folks, was day one of FOWA 2007

DIGG "crowd generated media"

Kevin Rose talks about the Digg ecosystem

• Why should the crowd care?
• Create incentives on every level
• Why should people submit content
• Why do people digg
• Content -> Diggs -> Quality --> WOM --> More traffic --> 3rd party site traffic --> Smart Digg buttons

Now we're talking about enhancing Digg (swarming the story, better fact checking, location-based opinions).

Benefits of Flash visualisation, could make tools to help people understand how their shifting opinions interact with others - visualisations of swarms.

Big announcement, support for openID
(applause)

Stéphane from Soocial

The future of contact management

(does demo mmmm...)

Two nice chaps talking about quotes

http://quotationsbook.com

Very interesting stuff, will need to pass on to a few folk who have been working with citation indexes.

The spotlight section, first up, BT's Stephen Stokols

Converged communication online

Stephen promises us that the wifi cloud might be available for tomorrow (audience cheers)

Four online trends driving shift

• Lines being blurred as online cos move into telecoms space
• P2P proliferation (need to embrace it)
• Advertising funds free models
• 1 to 1 voice no longer good enough - 1 to many is emerging

Telcos need to embrace shifting landscape turn threats into opportunities

(Gordon Bennet, no cliché left unturned)

Shows screengrabs of BT Contact. (kind of looks like what I'm currently working on...)

(free sms etc)

See btcontact.com

Bradley Horowitz Yahoo VP of ADD (Advanced Development Division)

"User rehab, a story of redemption"

Few creators, many consumers

Need to lower barrier to entry

Uses Flickr as an example of how to do this:

Talks about "interestingness" (photographs that have been interacted with more than other by analysis of log data)

Talks about tagging (mentions speed) the ease goes to the lowering of barriers to entry.

Mentions folksonomies

Mentions ZoneTag. Not having to remember the tag for an event (system merges cell data and other info from upcoming.com to come up with suggestion)

Clustering by sense

And now we're talking about pipes, as in Yahoo Pipes, very cool:-)

Pipes is sampling, not synthesizing

We're now asking questions...

Werner Vogels, CTO amazon.com

Here to talk about Amazon EC2 and S3

Web scale computing (compete on ideas not resources)

Alternative resource model:

• Increasing uncertainty
• Move from push to pull (socially, industrially, culturally)
• Move to mashing up on the fly
• Co-creative effect of customers (power of the consumer)
• Greater focus on learning and improvisation

(this guy has so totally read CK Pralahad)

Claim and release resources dynamically

(points out that the pull model doesn't let VCs take such a big chunk of you)

Talks about "Getting Real" by Jason Friedman. Chapter 4, scalling is too hard to plan for at the start.

Don't worry about tornados and SLAs

Only pay for what you use

Examples:

• smugmug.com
• Second Life
• youos.com
• Render Rocket

Mentions the mechanical turk as part of the AWS product family

Check it out at http://aws.amazon.com

Google Jason Chuck

Open apis

KLM in maps (channel 4 ticket price)

Sketchup (promoting user generated)

Talks about tomorrow's discussion of the new apps, spreadsheet etc (and their guy will discuss best practise)

Thinkfree (SOA)

• browser neutral
• speaks MS Office

Free mashup mashup api :-) Let your blog visitors view office documents without using MS Office software

Cool:-)

http://viewer.thinkfree.com/html?url=http:domain/file.xls&action=view&pageurl=uri

OK, gotta try this

Lessons from Last.fm Matt and Anil

Connect people to the music they love

Audio-scrobbling (listen -> share -> discover)

• 15M tracks scrobbled
• 175 scrobbles per second
• 10M artists
• 70M tracks
• 700k tracks streamable on last.fm
• 17M items taged
• 145K artist wikis

Matt is talking about the collaborative requirements of developping a sharing application. Keeping it as open as possible, reward participation as much as possible, be realistic with finances, building engagement from your community, be transparent (downtime charts published)

...people sending us money after each server failure to encourage us to upgrade the server...

establishing an open protocol from the start got scrobbling off the ground. Before long, loads of music players supported the protocol.

Anil takes the mike to talk about growth

What happens to the team?

• The changes when you get to 30-40 people
• People trump processes
• Use simple tools and adapt them

Shows irc transcript from their developer channel (osmotic communication)

What happens to the product?

• Plan for going global
• "everyone's going to want a piece of you"
• Embed your service in others
• Make transition from service to platform (think about your service as a platform)

Liking what you've got to say Anil:-)

Matt comes back

Attention data
Scrobbling data is attention data Powered by AudioScrobbler, Myware is 'spying on yourself'

He shows us the 'events dashboard' (gigs near me)

Anil comes back to talk about monetising attention data

Monetising attention

• Sponsored airtime
• Personalise based on attention data
• New attention metrics
• No more cpm - the scrobble is the unit

Dealing with tag cloud spam

• Censorship is not acceptable in a folksonomy
• Attention data does not lie
• Weigh user tags by volume of attention
• Attention earns trust

Matt comes back to talk about what Last would like to do in the comming years.

• Fewer interfaces
• More ambient findability
• Reduce barriers to entry (hard to start when prefs are not established)

Questions session

The VC bit (Danny Rimer couldn't make it)

mmm...

Simon Wardley

From hot stuff to yawn, the commoditisation of IT

(note that Simon says IT not IS...)

Goes through example of electricity

(Simon is a great speaker, he's doing crowd-pleasing things with graphics - big tag clouds with ducks and ponds)

Talks about yack shaving to introduce the idea behind his startup. Build what you want and pay for what you use (zimki)

Tara 'miss rogue' Hunt

What community is or isn't...

(mentions her blog)

What is community?

• co-creation leading to relationships
• sharing profiles
• User benefits, self policing, increased loyalty

(the 'free' wifi turns out to be a solitary OpenZone base station which is currently struggling to keep up...)

Examples

• Lightweight social processes (voting, digging)
• collaborative information structures (YouTube, Odeo, Threadless, Flickr)
• High end collaboration - Wikipedia, open source projects (Lostpedia)

Themes

• Sense of fun
• Keeping the dialogue going
• Simple platforms
• Compelling stories
• Rewarding community members

(what is it about Wordpress that people are happy to wait for messages like "woa, only x comments a minute, slow down cowboy")

Compares yahoo maps to Google maps:

Yahoo experience totally rocks, Google maps v. empty and boring but: developers currently working with mapping apis 51% Google to only 4% Yahoo!
(stats from programmableweb)

Fostering your own - fertile ground

What is sense of community?

• Feelings of membership (inside the boundaries, do I belong here?)
• Feelings of influence (voice heard, learning from the group, feedback)
• Integration and fulfilment of needs (shared values, the feeling of being supported by others)
• Maslow

Be patient! community takes time

Edwin Aoki

Web-based email leading driver of page views

Dissagregation and syndication

(Dug is beginning to daydream about bacon sarnies and a steamy latte...)

Edwin says "drag and drop" arrrrg!!!

Interesting slide about the developer's responsibility to society.

• Tools must be safe, effective and neutral (v. relevant to the work I'm doing now).
• With great power comes great responsibility. For instance, it's our responsability to ensure that the default behaviour of the systems we build is the right behaviour, the safe behaviour

(and break...)

Mike Arrington

On YouTube: 1 Million dollars a month but it didn't burn because it provides an IPTV service (as opposed to user-generated content).

AMIE St. first self-regulated music market.

Buzz Factor - Solve a problem.

Mike is talking about what makes a successful startup (and what to look for in a failing one. One point is: don't raise too much money).

Offline/Online = Apollo. If you don't use it, you're wasting money. Apollo looks to bridge the overhead of bridging the file system and the cloud.

And we've stopped for questions...

Election haiku by Nicki

Air quivers with possibility
Punch chad

New president

Punch air

Find your place to vote

Switching? Not...

Apple says get a Mac So you know, I replaced my lovely 12" iBook with a lovely 12" powerbook back in 2006. Since then, I've travelled miles and miles on motorcycle and Eurostar and the whole time my mini workstation has been powering through... I tend to have Virtual PC, Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Omnigraffle, BBEdit, three or four browsers and Omnioutline all running at the same time (while downloading podcasts and listening to iTunes) with snappy response and power to spare...

Now, I know that's no big deal in modern laptop terms but for me (as I create my own unique value in partnership with apple's products) it's both great and exactly what need. Unfortunately, everything is beginning to run on Intel macs, Adobe CS3 looks like Leopard only so if I upgrade I'm also gonna need a new system... add to that the running Windows without VPC and I really need to update my Powerbook.

So, dammit Steve, I thought you were going to anounce the new 12" powerbook last month, but nooooo, you had to go and do the Air™ thing:-(

Steve, this is a machine I cannot use. For starters, I don't need thin, I need small. I need bounce-resistance (speed bumps and motorways) and I need crush-resistance (as I get kicked out of the conference room again and hastily stuff reports and coiled cables into my already overstuff laptop bag).

So where does that leave me...

I need a new laptop with an optical drive, an ethernet, an intel processor and a 12" form-factor. I need it soon, so if I can't get a 12" Powerbook, what are my options? I may actually have to shudder switch to a PC and go with a Dell or a Toshiba...

Movable Type 4.2 is here...

Wow, I thought I'd be playing with RC5 for a while before getting the final release but no, the real thing is here. Go grab yourself a copy

With the long list of recent launch disappointments (with iPhone 3G by far the smelliest) I gotta say, Six Apart have not only delivered a hugely improved product (faster, more features) but a whole new license structure.

The new licenses are very much value co-creation engines. In a nutshell, let the mass of small businesses and bloggers use all the variations and toys for free, let them build on them, change them, and if they manage to scrape some revenue out of their enterprise, then ask them to buy services (primarily the excellent support) and pay for a commercial license.

I am very, very impressed and will be upgrading all my installations immediately. Great work 6A:-)

Wordpress v. Movable Typ...

Disclamer: We've had a bit of an ongoing debate on this one with Anil fanning the flames as he tries to support the MT cause. I should disclose that I'm a member of the Six Apart Professional Network and also a 6A partner for the Paris office just so's you know...

While I'm a long-time Movable Type fan and user, I remember the first time time I installed Wordpress. What a treat, the thing was completely painless and took no time at all. I was way impressed and have been since. Added to functionality, the open-source community around Wordpress has spawned a huge templating and design resource with hundreds of very high-quality designs for the lay blogger to chose from. In fact, for many a year I considered switching to Wordpress and was only prevented by the thought of having to maintain security on a php installation and how I would handle any serious load should one of my client's projects really take off.

Now I've pretty much stopped worrying about this in much the same way as I've given up on the flash/no-flash, mac/pc, tomato/tomahhto arguments—they seem a bit pointless and on average both options/solutions have their merits.

I had an experience of doing some migration and configuring last night which brought to light some issues I hadn't yet come across in any Wordpress v. Movable Type discussions. I was trying to replicate behaviours from an MT installation into a series of WP ones and came across the following difficulties where Wordpress let me down:

• I couldn't perform a search and replace of strings across blogs and their pages, entries, comments and templates. To get the job done I had to edit template and entry data outside of the WP environment
• I couldn't use my global templates. I use these to configure global variables that several blogs can then share (in particular, I use primarily to manage root path across different systems and to avoid multiblog-calling-itself errors)
• I couldn't re-use my user configurations across blogs and if I wanted to set up an admin to cover more than one blog I couldn't re-gen their password
• Cutting and pasting, or generally moving data between templates across blogs was very unproductive (ended up jumping between Firefox tabs)
• There were two other things that got up my nose and I'll get them down here as soon as I remember them...

Before the WPfanboys jump on me, YES, I understand there are workarounds, upgrades, plugins and other fixes to the above and of course I'm going to struggle working in an environment that isn't my first choice. I simply wanted to list these experiences as I hadn't seen them outlined anywhere else.

Ch-ch-changes

Well a bunch of stuff has happened recently and I just noticed that last entry about Universal was my 1000th post! Turns out I've been spewing this nonsense since 2001 so now seemed like a good time for something new.

Normally, I use the blog as a platform to discuss web design, standards and so on, but recently I've been more interested in how the advertising industry is going to adapt to embrace the forces of value co-creation. So I guess that means I'm less fussed about the design and more fussed about the semantics, ie I don't want to spend as much time tweaking the design, and whatever design I settle on either won't be mine, or won't have taken me months of effort to create.

Visitors from A List Apart can still see my positionally-based flexible layout and more recent visitors wanting to discuss the relative merits of my shufflebox design concept can still get to my first attempt at a complete shufflebox page but for everyone else, I'm going to start playing with plain old default templates and a bunch of designs taken from The Style Contest. Incidentally, if you're an MT user wondering how to access the stylecontest templates, all you need to do is paste the url "http://www.thestylecontest.com/designs/" into the StyleCatcher window--beautifully simple:-)

Finally, as Movetype default templates don't have a standardised template credit, here is some template link love: this blog currently using the style Kiss 82 (as in keep it simple stupid) from Oinam

Thinking about Movabletype plugins

Well, I've been thinking about finding a low cost CMS that has both good static page management and nice blogging tools like Movabletype and have looked at a number of options.

If it's important to stay with static page publishing for scaling and server resource reasons and you believe PHP has too high a security maintenance overhead for your project, the options start to become quite limited.

In any case, we're still evaluating a couple of options but in the meantime I set about thinking about how one could customise the Movabletype interface in such a way as to integrate static page handling. I set myself a number of requirements:

• The system would have to allow users with no settings or template-editing priviledges to create static pages (ie I didn't want to go the index-template route)
• If possible, the same user should be able to edit the heirarchical tree of pages using an interface she had already learned
• The user would have a choice of templates to apply to the new page (these templates to be edited and created by an admin user using the standard template-editing tookit)
• The user can choose between standard and index-list page types. The index list page type supports lists of authors, lists of file downloads etc.

So I'm working on an idea. I've created a new data type, the 'static page'. In MT-speak, it is the same object as an entry, but with a few more properties. It has the following additional attributes:

• family relations (parent, child, sibling)
• page template association
• page type definition

The idea behind describing pages this way is to make them similar to entries. This way users familiar with the concepts of creating new entries and associating categories to them might not freak out at the idea of creating new static pages and assigning a parent to them.

By the same token, if you're familiar with the behaviour of the "entries" function, you'll probably be happy with a "pages" function (one lists all entries, the other all static pages).

So I've got a new object, now how do I manipulate the hierarchical tree of page nodes? What interface do I use to manipulate the relationships between pages?

Well, here's a theory: you use the same interface Movabletype provides to manipulate hierarchical lists of categories. Now, hold on there, I know I've said before that I hate this interface and yes, I still think it's unfeasibly clunky and unintuitive (sorry Ben, no offence intended), but it exists!

This means I can grab much of the source code and javascript and, more importantly, the poor users who have struggled to learn the category interface won't have to learn a new one, they can just use their existing skills to manipulate these new features.

Here's how the "manage static pages" screen might look (click for a bigger version) sorry about the crap graphic quality, had to do this in a hurry, will correct details on images asap:

And here are some close-ups of the new attributes being selected. In this case, the user is creating a new page about leaflets in the "publications" section. The page is a child of "publications" and becomes a sibling of "essays" and "white papers":

The page type is selected (in this case a standard page):

And finally, the user chooses her pre-prepared templates to associate with the new page. In this example, an admin has created a template expressly for the new publications section:

The "adding a static page" screen would look very similar to the existing "new entry" screen, also reusing as much code as possible:

Has anyone out there been working on anything similar? Feel free to chime in.

Tags: movabletype, Movable Type, Movable-Type, Blog, Blogs, Plugin, Plugins

Customer dropouts in our...

Hi All, DavidW sent a message 'round with some thoughts on the Dixons delivery screen. Metrics are indicating this step in the purchase process triggers lots of abandoned baskets.

Here is the current basket delivery step screen (click to enlarge):

What bits stand out as particularly wrong?

• Page title is "delivery" but no delivery choices visible
• No call to action to continue the process is visible (continue button is waaaay down and on the left)
• Incorrect postcode caused by bug in postcode check loop
• "Print" button occupies the continue "hot spot"
• There is no indication of total cost of transaction

Here's a suggested fix:

And here's what it looks like if you stretch the window to accommodate the whole interface:

What do you guys reckon? Leona? Mohammed?

Discovery is the new coc...

The ever-groovy Mark (@redeye) links to this funky service. I've just received my D from Twitter and apparently it will take " Mr. Tweet would take roughly 4.4 days to be ready to serve you. We know this sounds long, and we are working hard to speed things up!" so lessee now...

The Slideshare link

Say hello to the experience-value map

I recently had a QA on Linkedin with a guy who asked:

Community-based websites: the effectiveness of engagement and Interaction? There is still a real opportunity for them to be a leader using a community-based solution. How long will these community-based solutions continue to be effective?

Since about 2005 I've been getting a steadily increasing demand for sites that build, support or promote community. I was surprised by the above question as it was beginning to feel like pretty much every brand out their had gotten on the bus with varying degrees of commitment and success.

So I thought I'd drop my answer in hear for safekeeping:

If you rephrase your question slightly:

"What can my client do with interactive technologies to increase value co-creation and engagement?"

If the creation of social capital and the building of a value co-creation network become core business objectives then the worth of community-based efforts becomes self-evident.

A community can rally around an issue (changing legislation, agreeing safety standards for toys) or a task (designing the Lego Mindstorm, pushing GM towards sustainability) and collectively generate solutions. The alternative is a network of business development types driving around the country in cars. I gotta say, I like the website option better.

Please take note of Stephen's point about commitment. A thriving community does require investment in capital, in time, in risk management. Make sure you factor these issues into your planing.

> B to B is typically not a great area for community

I just wanted to add a comment about Tom's point above.

I have recently implemented "group pages" that allow insurance advisers to ask each other questions in a private, branded area. The service is hosted by the underwriting insurance company.

Here's what the value-map looks like:

1 - Each advisor builds her knowledge and feels more competent as a result of participating (similar to what we are doing here)

2 - The system reduces the number of calls to the underwriters which means they get more done in a day (their days become more valuable)

Created social capital:

The partner advisers deepen their engagement with the underwriting company. The experience of dealing with this company as opposed to one that doesn't provide this service is such that over time the business relationship is stronger (ie sales increase)

It's always worth trying to quantify this value when deciding what to build.

Experience value-mapping

I'm developing a methodology to map the co-creation of value by customers onto the traditional human-centred design assets we already use. I'm not sure where that's going to end up. Should I start another agency? (still a little sobered after the Pumpernickle experience) or do i just use this as a consultant, bringing the techniques to my day-to-day work?

In the meantime, feel free to ring me on 07515 661655 if you're a product owner and are trying to understand how value co-creation can impact your business requirement choices.

What does "build cheaply...

This is what it means for old spice

Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made so far today have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. The team worked for 11 hours yesterday to make 87 short videos, that's just over 7 minutes per video

SEO landing pages - food...

Hi,

I've spent a few minutes looking at a typical user flow from the point of view of a comparison shopper and wanted to share some thoughts based on landing pages. In this case Washing machines

A user lands on a generic listing page of relevant products which succeeds in the first golden rule--answer the question!

Some thoughts I had for the future, maybe in conjunction with a MVT integration, would be to make the page stickier for comparison shoppers and provide more reasons to purchase with {brand} and not another site.

Whilst most shoppers may compare by price alone, it's worth considering other emotions involved in the buying psyche.

• Why book with {brand}? USPs provide the user reasons to use your brand, beyond price alone.These may be reputation, product offering etc.
• Comprehensive guides. Positioning yourself as a expert in an area will create confidence in your customer.

Beyond these fairly simple quick wins, I've listed a few ideas for landing pages which may be worth considering as you see fit.

• Incorporate reviews / review score into listing--customers can quickly establish high performing products.
• Allow the customer to filter their results further. These could extend to review score, home delivery, reserve and collect etc
• Cross-sell relevant items (ie) tumble dryers with washing machines
• Competitor pricing--(one for legal) whether {brand} is cheaper or equal to your competitors pricing
• Emphasis on urgency--There are {x} items left "order now to avoid disappointment"

Just a few more observations, please use as you feel appropriate--you now the business better than I.

Darren

Using CSS3 text-shadow

Group buying

The daddy, Groupon, trading since 2008

Groupola, one of the many copycat services (note even the video copy and content is virtually identical)

A bunch of group buying sites have started and failed but Groupon's particular mix has struck a chord and it doesn't look like they're going anywhere soon.

Mesh, morph, swarm: Life...

Interesting vid of my old boss talking about a theme we uncovered in a "what's next" project.

The first 5 minutes are rough going but when he defines "life with impermanence" in terms of three service design prompts "mesh, morph & swarm" it gets really interesting (also, knowing what came before, it's really interesting to see how he synthesizes across industries, audiences, needs etc--he does a really good job of defining a vision for potential change. I'm less bought into the idea of creating a "vocabulary" to spread the word in a corp. environment but nice work).

At Vodafone I worked on a number of transactional prototypes based on the "impermanence" concepts and while these may seem a bit wanky fartsy bollocks they're actually happening all around us and will increasingly colour how we compete in the marketplace.

If our ecommerce platform used mesh thinking we might be completely distributed across Europe and be resilient enough to withstand peak without going belly up.

If our website architectures were based on swarm thinking we could be adapting in real time, from displaying products or groups of product areas on the basis of local, current needs and be more likely to convert some of the huge numbers of Currys visitors.

Actually, I'm hoping the Rich Relevance dynamic product recommendations we're testing in January will take us a little bit closer to a swarm-driven experience.

Also, re new stuff, if we experiment with ways to involve the crowd and the cloud in merchandising (group buying, price negotiation and transparency, individual deal structures etc) we could probably do worse that thinking along the lines of the Mechanical Turk (imagine the Turk scanning for price matches and returning value estimates of the items customers propose for swap or part exchange--could be very cool).

(for those that are curious I've uploaded the PDF of the "themes for 2012" document that was our team's contribution to "life with impermanence")

Is Google's design proce...

Really interesting article on the Google un-design process by the guy who writes on design for Fast Company:

The chief mandate of design thinking is empathy -- and I'm pretty sure Google's engineers didn't have too much empathy for all those over the age of 28 who don't find it all that useful to have their eyes assaulted by information they weren't looking for in the first place.

Which brings me to my last point. Testing can only tell you so much -- and it often only reveals that people only like things that are similar to what they've had before. But brilliant design solutions convert people over time, because they're both subtle and ground breaking.

This is really tricky. I love Google's design and mostly agree with the testing process. That said, I also love Apple and agree with Steve (who in paraphrasing Henry Ford) states that had he asked his customers what they really wanted they would have said a smaller portable CD player.

Design today benefits from our understanding of how people think about the world (6 hats etc.) and codesign and collaborative ideation are a vital part of successful product design. While that's true, we tend to forget that ideation techniques provide the raw materials for a design solution but not the solution itself.

In the context of interactive design or information architecture, the discovery and research phase exposes levers that an information model can pull on but it doesn't give us the model. The choices about structure, connections and relationships needs to come from the creative thinker.

OK, I'm rambling now 'cause I didn't sleep much last night. Jim Coudal does a great talk on the creative moment based on a game born in the toilets of his studio in Chicago. (see booking bands)

Good content needs to re...

Or "have scent" in the words of Jared Spool

In the article he mentions Are Halland's Cores and Paths methodology:

The idea is brilliantly simple: First, you have a core. This could be content, a feature, functionality, or even a work flow. Find what that is and design it first. Note that in doing this you necessarily have to get clarity from stakeholders and from the project team as to what it is that you should focus on.

And of course, how 37Signals keeps the stink levels up while copy-fitting

blackbouler : définition...

Je trouve quand même étonnant que le dico internaute propose une définition du verbe "blackbouler" sans en expliquer l'étymologie anglaise.

Le mot vient de l'anglais "black ball". Cela viens d'une façon de voter dans les associations privée où l'on admettais ou rejetais un candidat en déposant sa bille dans un chapeau. On avait le choix d'une bille blanche ou—pour rejeter le candidat—une bille noire (black ball)

Clémentine la creatrice ...

Clem has been busy blocking out her Halloween costume. I'm a bit amazed, she drew the hat, the skirt and the cape and is now working with her nanny to make the costume. I've seen an early attempt and it looks just like her drawings... Of course I quite like the idea of her in the RAF air cadets but I guess dads don't get everything they wish for ;-)

Son on YouTube Screening Room

Ohna's film Son won best UK short film at Edinburgh last month and now the picture is being featured on the YouTube Screening Room and hey I'm impressed :-)

Click on the pic above or on the Paypal button below to make a donation to the Ohna's film fund and download a handy iPod/iTouch mpeg file (make sure you click on "Return to Sister Films" to get your download link).

Nice one Ohna :-)

Vikings v. Aliens

So Charlotte wants me to spread the web2 love re ex-classmate Dirk Blackman's new production Outlander and why not? (that's our in-house Viking Haldane on the big-boy climbing frame over there on the left for our family readers)

As Eva Metalios puts it:

Subject: Fw: Dirk needs our help
Hey all -

After working in the Sisyphean task of being a writer in LA for over two decades, and the three year odyssey that OUTLANDER took to actually be made, the movie our friend Dirk Blackman (Columbia class of '85) authored with his partner and the project's director Howard McCain, is coming out. It is a sci-fi take on the Beowulf legend, nach.

C'mon, we are talking Dirk here. This is not
your daddy's Viking movie.

And Charlotte makes the point

Douglas,
the Norway thing, the Columbia thing, the media thing...

Well, yes, she's got a point I guess (and only Charlotte and my mother can get away with calling me Douglas).

The Norway thing huh? well we named our boy Haldane in an attempt to ping him into investigating his Norse roots... He is named after King Healfdene (lit. "half-dane") whose name has survived from myth into modern Danish under the popular form Halfdan

I initially wanted to call Hal Healfdene but worrying got the better of me and in the end I didn't want to relive a boy named Sue so tried to anglicise it some. We could have gone with Haldan, also in use in modern Danish but in the end we settled on Haldane (also good because it's a Scottish name).

Oh, right, back to the link love;-)

• the Morwen character is in development here: G4 video
• Healfdene Goguen is as far as I can tell the only man online to sport the BW original spelling
• and here's another site about Outlander
• here's the trailer on Youtube

Judging from the amount of traffic already generated, Dirk's project doesn't need any help but I liked Eva's closer make the Weinstein Company to feel the noise. Take that Harvey!

Avignon quiz

Couple of weeks ago I was on hols in Avignon with the whole extended Falby clan and we all wrote games for the evening's entertainment. Margaret, Nicki's mum came up with a devilishly difficult Balderdash (I knew only two of the ten words) and I did a pub-quiz.

Don't know if you've set a pub-quiz before but this was my first go and and was way more difficult than I had anticipated. It's not enough to find things people might not know--you need to try and prevent folk getting bored and you need to make the questions relevant to your audience. In my case I had an audience of three 70-year-olds, three 40-year-olds, two teenagers and Clemmie who is six now and was supposed to be in bed (she helped by numbering the questions and that's her below trying her first diabolo menthe).

Tricky stuff.

At the end of the evening Billy--who knows about these things--reassured me that I had got it about right as the two teams scored better than average but not so much as to make it seem easy.

I'm on the flight back from Chicago listening to Laura Cantrell's version of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald while flying over Lake Erie (which is kinda weird) and was going to do a little work (and write some stuff about Seed) when I found the quiz questions in my bag.

So I thought I'd share them before dropping the sheets in the bin:-)

1. In United States law, which branch of the government declares war. The supreme court, congress or the president?
   (for 1 point)
2. Who were the last captains of the RMS Lusitania and the Edmund Fitzgerald?
   (for 2 points)
3. What do Lorne from Angel, Raven from Teen Titans, Peter Petrelli from Heroes, Pru and Phoebe from Charmed have in common with Betazoïds and for a bonus point who the missing character in this list?
   (for 1 point and bonus 1 point)
4. Where would you find your "minor arcana"?
   (for 1 point)
5. What connects Danish physicist Neils Böhr and Eels frontman Mark Everett?
   (for 1 point)
6. Name two grape varieties common in the "Côtes de Ventoux" appélation and for a bonus point what do Côtes de Ventoux winemakers call their terraces?
   (for 1 point and bonus 1 point)
7. If you've just passed Governor's Bridge and The Cutting and are half-way to Creg-ny-baa what are you doing?
   (for 1 point)
8. How many goalposts are there on a regulation quidditch pitch?
   (for 1 point)
9. Which motion picture won "Best Picture" at the 1968 Oscars? Two bonus points available for naming one or both of the two "more worthy" runners up that year.
   (for 1 point with 2 bonus points)
10. In the 1994 San Marino Formula One Grand Prix Ayrton Senna carried a furled flag in his cockpit. Of what country was the flag?
    (for 1 point)
11. In French cooking, what do "nappé", "petit boulé" and "grand cassé" refer to?
    (for 1 point)
12. What is the waltz from Tchaïkovski's fairy-tale-inspired ballet of 1890 better known as?
    (for 1 point)
13. Who first invited Harry and Stein to the Bronx? For a bonus point, who took his place in the video when he was sick on the day of the shoot?
    (for 1 point and bonus 1 point)
14. What did King of France Louis XIII create in 1622? For a bonus point, who succeeded Richelieu as Cardinal?
    (for 1 point and bonus 1 point)
15. Excluding Rockall, what is the Northernmost point of Scotland?
    (for 1 point)
16. By German law, how must Weißbier be fermented? For a bonus point, what is "botrytis cinerea"
    (for 1 point and bonus 1 point)
17. Who broke the production motorcycle land-speed record for the rolling kilometre at Nardo on 29 September 1985
    (for 1 point)
18. What was the first film Alfred Hitchcock directed (title and year)? What was the last film he directed. For a bonus point, which film did he direct in 1935?
    (for up to 4 points and bonus 1 point)
19. What problem did John Harrison solve to win £20,000? For a bonus point, what was his solution made out of?
    (for 1 point and bonus 1 point)
20. First Babakoto then Mojo Pin then Dear Eskimo. Who is this? For a bonus point, what is this person's current label?
    (for 1 point and bonus 1 point)

Well, of course with the interweb y'all have the answers to hand, but (as Barney the Purple Dinosaur would say) it's fun to try and guess them the hard way first...

Before, after

Well, in the end, the damage to the knee was worse than the scans had suggested and the knee arthroscopy took a lot longer than planned.

I had apparently damaged the front of the knee joint by overdoing it on staircases and the overall state of the cartilage and meniscus was pretty poor. The meniscus tear had a horizontal element which was unseen in the MRI scan and took a lot longer to trim.

The primary meniscus tear was a sudden incident. I was behind third base at a TMW softball game and was determined to not let the side down. I never did catch any balls but the stop-start without warm-up took care of the cartilage. Talk about stupid boy, not only was the accident avoidable, but I was busy at work and never took the knee to the doc. I had company health insurance at the time and could have had the whole thing sorted (retro-kicking myself as I write this grrr).

I'm guessing the damaging stair action might have been getting very pissed and lugging an entire photoshoot's worth of lighting and camera gear up to the top of the Positano cliffs (in a oner) from down on the seafront. Lugging Sven's camera gear up to the top-floor studio at Jubilee Place for a year probably didn't help either...

Needless to say, the op was considerably more expensive than I had planned for. Basically, without health insurance and having lost mobility (I had been limping for three weeks) I needed to get it sorted very quickly. As well as the obvious need for going to work, I didn't want the damage to reduce my future mobility and ability to play with Clem and Hal.

The major onset of pain was triggered by teaching Clementine to skateboard. We'd been looking at videos of Tony Alva grinding pools and planning a trip to North London's three decent skateparks. The thought of not being able to share this with her was a real blow:-(

In any case, I'm crossing my fingers that with only three weeks between re-injury and op, I've managed to not grind or scratch the knee too much...

I'd rather be in Whetsto...

(Family thoughts, you tech readers may want to skip this post)

So the rain is damaging down, the best-of-classic-motown cd is skipping like a techno track and I'm looking out the window of the Sancerre onto the Square du Temple. I'm dry, I've just been handed a glass of Brouilly and I caught the last metro before the strike started (at 20h) so all-in-all feeling very relieved.

Wow, the rain is now moving from dismantling to total continental submergence, but the tape has been changed and I'm now listening to Stevie Wonder (the guys at the Sancerre only ever seem to play two tapes... "ma cherrrie amorrr") which is cheering me up some.

Nicki and Haldane and Clementine are back in London at the new house (the last one was "The Yellow House"--don't know what we'll call this one) in Whetstone. I'm missing them already and I've been feeling really protective of Hal and Clemmie ever since the move, watching them soak in the new surroundings and settle into their new rooms.

Clemmie in particular I worry a little about, she comes up with worrying statements which I'm never entirely sure how to evaluate. She is the same age I was when my folks moved from Connecticut to Paris and in the years that followed I was moved from school to school and across a few borders (actually not that many, just Paris to Milan and back to Paris) and I don't remember being that upset by the process. Of course maybe that's a problem in itself, but that's another story. Hopefully the fact that Clementine is staying in the same school should iron out most difficulties.

It looks like we've moved into Budleigh-Salterton-on-Thames. It's a quiet suburban street and neighbours east and west are over 65. Just to rub the point in, a scan with the trusty N95 reveals not a single 802.11 signal (bizarre!) so yeah, hopefully we'll find some locals with kids.

Finally, and so I've got a note of it, the move went great, happened on the 9th November 2007--four very nice men from a company called Ward Thomas:-)

Anyways, the rain is slowing now so I'm going to make a run for it down the Rue des Archives and try and squeeze a little wireframing in before bed.

BBC News egging the pudd...

OK so the news late last night was pretty horrific. Yes, we're all setting up barter economies and I've started planting vegetables, but the thing that really did it was the BBC art department.

First, we had the great big red "CRISIS" artwork background, red on white with an extrabold down-arrow extending the "R" downwards to the studio floor. Last night it was the share price indicator (again, in glowing, black-on-red) which was synchronised to the newsreader "then this happened" and the red line takes a vertical plunge.

Basically, only Chris Morris did it better:

If they keep this up they'll have us wearing denim overalls and playing ukulele on the G-Man breadline by next Monday.

Son on YouTube Screening Room

Ohna's film Son won best UK short film at Edinburgh last month and now the picture is being featured on the YouTube Screening Room and hey I'm impressed :-)

Click on the pic above or on the Paypal button below to make a donation to the Ohna's film fund and download a handy iPod/iTouch mpeg file (make sure you click on "Return to Sister Films" to get your download link).

Nice one Ohna :-)

I know it when I see it

Just re-read that last post. What a load of pants, let me try again...

Flickr was founded by an artist and at first, lots of artists where members. While there are clearly loads of ordinary family pics on the service there are also loads of really interesting, edgy creations. These range from surreal mindmaps, to strange images made with toy cameras to the nude self-portraits of Female Tech.

Like most wonderful, slightly marginal things, the content was never going to be to everybody's taste. Those of us who where there in the beginning feel a sense of belonging and Flickr's transition from online photography haven for the creatively inclined to mainstream storage service for the merry masses' Kodak moments is proving to be a painful one.

It's not that there's anything wrong with Yahoo or even with the aims of providing the sort of all-American, clean-living service that they are trying to build. It's just that they're crossing the line where arbitration and moderation are taking place.

It's these moderation 'choices' that are causing the trouble. No one has ever been able to get this right and there's just no way Yahoo's group of ingenue moderators are going to be able to get through this cultural minefield in one piece.

Le Paris-Orléans (Brasse...

Dans la série c'est fou ce qu'on mange mal à Paris je vous suggère d'eviter à tout prix la brasserie "Paris Orléans", Porte d'Orléan à Paris.

Le Paris-Orléans (Brasserie)
2 Rue De Patay

75013 Paris

A little visual inspirat...

Stumbled across this design studio on my web travels, they do some very attractive, clean work. Their icons are particularly impressive.

Artua Design Studios

Rich Content and new way...

I have been meeting with some different companies recently looking at ways we can increase the benefit of the content on our sites for our users.

There were many interesting things I looked at including product tours, interactive buyer's guides, presenter led content, branded editorial and complete TV channels online.

Below are a snapshot of some of the different things discussed. Check them out and let me know your thoughts on them:

Coast Productions produced some really engaging content for Canon as parted of a brand campaign that involved taking competition winners to do dream photo shoots with a professional photographer in some incredible locations. Check out the results

Adjust Your Set are the people behind M&S TV and have created the 12 channels for their current allocation. Here are some interesting videos

Gate Web Video do a range of presenter led content, using a presenter to talk users through all aspects of their journey, embedding the presenter onto the page. See what you think and have a look at their showreel

We also had a pitch from Dennis for producing an interactive magazine for helping with Buyer's Guides and distributing content online. Here is their pitch work, a basic magazine on imaging

Hope you find some of the stuff interesting, any ideas on content or new tech we could utilise let me know!!

Ssssssssssee ya....


Chris

Lamb's lettuce

The corn salad (Valerianella P. Mill.) has been sitting in a seed tray for ages. I can't seem to get the darn things to move beyond this stage so potted them up in a bigger pot this morning.

I've been waiting for the lollo rosso letuce to get a move on as well—I think they're not getting enough sunlight, might plant them outside under a dome (a pyrex salad bowl actually)

Eat updated

I think the nice man who went in search of my Identity theft woes last week would have liked me to update my previous post.

So here goes: according to his findings there is nothing wrong with either his payment-processing software or hardware and a review of staff at the branch revealed nothing untoward.

So just to confirm: all is well at Eat. You can pick up your soup and sandwiches safe in the knowledge that these guys pay attention to detail, act fast when required and are just generally a bunch of excellent people!

eat.co.uk

eat.co.uk get it right

Wow, when was the last time you thought you'd get a response as a result of filling in a form on the web (never mind a rapid response)?

Well, I had a little grief from the fraud protection mob at Firstdirect this afternoon and as a result posted this note in the feedback form on the Eat website (and I won't go into the domain name resolution issue on the site which means if you load the flash movie by entering the domain without the 'www' the links to the feedback form are broken--I wonder how much more feedback they'd get if that was fixed...)

At 14:31:55 on 27 June 2008 (roughly an hour ago) I purchased a soup and sandwich from your 15 Basinghall Street shop.

When I returned to my desk to eat my lunch I received a call from my bank (first direct) informing me that there had been fraudulent behaviour on my switch card.

According to their records, the transaction I had just made in the City of London was routed through a supplier in Equador.

The security guys at the bank where I work reckon this is a man-in-the-middle attack and that someone has tampered with the keypad in the store (similar to attaching card readers to ATM tellers, to harvest card details).

Please review this situation asap.

All the best,
Dug Falby

To be honest, I really didn't think I'd get an answer (strangely, the Flash front-end is what gave me this impression: If it's not a real html form, how can it yield real results?) but I did.

A nice man called Martin (I think he said he was head of business communications?) rung up to explain what was going on as a result of my note. From his description, I pictured a black helicopter appearing over Basinghall street and special forces whisking the card-reader off to a controlled explosion. It was very impressive, he said he'd frozen all card transactions at the store, notified the card processing supplier who are going to come in and refit the store tonight and would double-check records for staff access to card processing stuff.

He also made a point of checking that I had notified my bank and assured me he would get back to with with any progress relevant to my situation. Prompt, courteous and thorough, just the way it oughta be.

Which of course means I'll be all the more likely to go buy delicious soups and salads from Eat:-)

Google: bête et méchant

Have just got off the phone with Ohna and it seems that Google/Youtube's behaviour is even more absurd than I thought...

Ohna's film Son wasn't just posted by her production company. Oh no:

• YouTube vetted a large number of independent film-makers for their "screening room" project and approached Ohna to ask her to participate.
• Not only was Son hand-picked by Google, it was reviewed by an approval board and checked for copyright.
• In an effort to promote the filmmakers, YouTube proposed that each film have a "buy now" button.

So let me get this straight. You go out and find the best films. You have lengthy conversations with the producers of each. You check each for quality and appropriateness of content and verify that each producer owns the right to broadcast the work.

Then, you nail them with a copyright-theft cease-and-desist and take down the film you've just spent months organising the screening of.

Never mind that this is just the worst possible PR job in the world. Isn't this frankly just downright stupid?

More interest in the BT ...

Discovery is the new coc...

The ever-groovy Mark (@redeye) links to this funky service. I've just received my D from Twitter and apparently it will take " Mr. Tweet would take roughly 4.4 days to be ready to serve you. We know this sounds long, and we are working hard to speed things up!" so lessee now...

The Slideshare link

Say hello to the experience-value map

I recently had a QA on Linkedin with a guy who asked:

Community-based websites: the effectiveness of engagement and Interaction? There is still a real opportunity for them to be a leader using a community-based solution. How long will these community-based solutions continue to be effective?

Since about 2005 I've been getting a steadily increasing demand for sites that build, support or promote community. I was surprised by the above question as it was beginning to feel like pretty much every brand out their had gotten on the bus with varying degrees of commitment and success.

So I thought I'd drop my answer in hear for safekeeping:

If you rephrase your question slightly:

"What can my client do with interactive technologies to increase value co-creation and engagement?"

If the creation of social capital and the building of a value co-creation network become core business objectives then the worth of community-based efforts becomes self-evident.

A community can rally around an issue (changing legislation, agreeing safety standards for toys) or a task (designing the Lego Mindstorm, pushing GM towards sustainability) and collectively generate solutions. The alternative is a network of business development types driving around the country in cars. I gotta say, I like the website option better.

Please take note of Stephen's point about commitment. A thriving community does require investment in capital, in time, in risk management. Make sure you factor these issues into your planing.

> B to B is typically not a great area for community

I just wanted to add a comment about Tom's point above.

I have recently implemented "group pages" that allow insurance advisers to ask each other questions in a private, branded area. The service is hosted by the underwriting insurance company.

Here's what the value-map looks like:

1 - Each advisor builds her knowledge and feels more competent as a result of participating (similar to what we are doing here)

2 - The system reduces the number of calls to the underwriters which means they get more done in a day (their days become more valuable)

Created social capital:

The partner advisers deepen their engagement with the underwriting company. The experience of dealing with this company as opposed to one that doesn't provide this service is such that over time the business relationship is stronger (ie sales increase)

It's always worth trying to quantify this value when deciding what to build.

Experience value-mapping

I'm developing a methodology to map the co-creation of value by customers onto the traditional human-centred design assets we already use. I'm not sure where that's going to end up. Should I start another agency? (still a little sobered after the Pumpernickle experience) or do i just use this as a consultant, bringing the techniques to my day-to-day work?

In the meantime, feel free to ring me on 07515 661655 if you're a product owner and are trying to understand how value co-creation can impact your business requirement choices.

eat.co.uk get it right

Wow, when was the last time you thought you'd get a response as a result of filling in a form on the web (never mind a rapid response)?

Well, I had a little grief from the fraud protection mob at Firstdirect this afternoon and as a result posted this note in the feedback form on the Eat website (and I won't go into the domain name resolution issue on the site which means if you load the flash movie by entering the domain without the 'www' the links to the feedback form are broken--I wonder how much more feedback they'd get if that was fixed...)

At 14:31:55 on 27 June 2008 (roughly an hour ago) I purchased a soup and sandwich from your 15 Basinghall Street shop.

When I returned to my desk to eat my lunch I received a call from my bank (first direct) informing me that there had been fraudulent behaviour on my switch card.

According to their records, the transaction I had just made in the City of London was routed through a supplier in Equador.

The security guys at the bank where I work reckon this is a man-in-the-middle attack and that someone has tampered with the keypad in the store (similar to attaching card readers to ATM tellers, to harvest card details).

Please review this situation asap.

All the best,
Dug Falby

To be honest, I really didn't think I'd get an answer (strangely, the Flash front-end is what gave me this impression: If it's not a real html form, how can it yield real results?) but I did.

A nice man called Martin (I think he said he was head of business communications?) rung up to explain what was going on as a result of my note. From his description, I pictured a black helicopter appearing over Basinghall street and special forces whisking the card-reader off to a controlled explosion. It was very impressive, he said he'd frozen all card transactions at the store, notified the card processing supplier who are going to come in and refit the store tonight and would double-check records for staff access to card processing stuff.

He also made a point of checking that I had notified my bank and assured me he would get back to with with any progress relevant to my situation. Prompt, courteous and thorough, just the way it oughta be.

Which of course means I'll be all the more likely to go buy delicious soups and salads from Eat:-)

iPhone floppyware 2.0

OK so it's now Stevenote - 7 and my iPhone is stuck in an imap loop and when I turn it off it reboots instantly. Of course plugging it in and clicking "restore" (which theoretically wipes your iPhone and restores it to OEM condition) doesn't fix the problem so I'm sort of hoping the 2.0 firmware will sort this...

...but I keep trying to decide if I should continue to put up with the phone. So many aspects of it drive me crazy. Take the battery for instance. On my N95, when Symbian thinks it's the best mobile OS on the planet but gets it wrong, the phone lets me take the battery out. This is kinda like the handset saying "sorry" like a grumpy two-year-old, a good thing. When it turns out iPhone needs to be disciplined, Steve just repeats "no, mine!" like another kind of two-year-old, a very bad thing indeed:-(

Well, on balance I think my iPhone sucks, but it sucks less than the other twenty smartphones I've lived with over the last couple of years.

It's not all handset woes, take for example O2's brilliant Apple-approved billing structure. Unlimited data (unless you instal a demon in which case the fair-use policy kicks in) and a set number of calls for a set monthly price. That is (almost) exactly what I want except that when I call my bank, or the power company, or I want book a movie ticket or call a helpline I have to pay extra for the 0870 local-call number. Never mind that I haven't got the choice. Powergen hasn't got a local extension I can call so the word from O2 is "tough" :-(

Not a big deal you might say but my £45/month all-in contract quickly becomes an £80/month which is way way more that I want to pay for the service.

I thought O2's iPhone contracts might have jogged the other operators into finding some sense so I checked my fave, Orange (France Telecom) to see what unlimited data contracts they had for new users.

Well, surprisingly, as of 2 June 2008 not a sausage

Sigh... crap really.

Southwest Academy postca...

Hey, Jed's on TV :-)

more from Devon

Jed writes about life as a Devon councillor

On the lst/05/2003 Lesley Roden and I became the first Independent Councillors to represent East Budleigh and Budleigh Salterton at East Devon District Council (EDDC) at Knowle in Sidmouth.

To be Independent sounds fine--no political pressures for local issues - but Lesley and I faced the realities in our very first meetings.

EDDC is controlled by the Conservative majority. They hold the positions of Chair and Vice Chair of the Council, and those same important posts on all the Committees, so most votes are a foregone conclusion--if the 6 Independents vote with the 18 Lib Dems we are still outnumbered (24 to 35). The Independents being truly independent do not always vote the same way, so it's not with votes in Council that we can do any good.

To my great surprise, I discover our real influence is in direct contact with any of the EDDC Officers. As Ward Member I can access the heads of any Department or the Chief Executive at any time, on any project or problem.

Lesley and I know full well that we were voted in by the Town's voters who were fed up with a whole series of Planning blunders--so Planning is where we put most of our efforts. It would be terribly easy to be diverted by dog bins, buses, beaches or tourism--but we try to stay focused on Planning.

A few successes:

'Chance' on Coastguard Road now reduced to an acceptable size

The Cliff Path re-instated above Links Pinewood

Failures:

Trees at Elvestone removed, TPOs and protests notwithstanding

The phone mast at the Games Club still solidly in place

But the most important work is for the future of our Town, that's where I am spending most of my time on two critically important projects.

The Town Design Statement

After a year's work, this is now a 50 page book that will be coming up for the Town's approval at an exhibition in May.

The Traffic / Parking Survey

Working with Devon County (roads) EDDC (Planning), the Police and Chamber of Commerce on how to make our High Street a safer, more pleasant place to shop, stroll or park. No easy answers here!

East Devon is a Conservative Council wriggling under the thumb of a Labour Government that orders EDDC to do more and more, yet reduces the money available by taking our funds and transferring them to needy Labour strongholds in the North. John Prescott's office is removing the old protection from 'Residential Areas of Special Character' (West Hill) and trying to promote housebuilding everywhere (your back garden).

So your support is just as vital now a year later--we need to finish our Design Statement, as once approved by EDDC, it will become an important bulwark against unsympathetic development.

So thank you again for your help last year--and remember, we still need you to get anything done this year too.

Cheers!
Jed

This material ©Jed Falby 2004

Why I love being a Euros...

From the Eurostar frequent traveller website

Dedicated ticket desk & express check-in

Glide through the formalities at our seamless Business Premier priority ticket desk and 10 minute check-in, again, regardless of the ticket you have.

Unless there are humans in the terminal in which case you might find yourself pushing on a door which has been remotely locked and missing your train and ending up on a strapontin because there isn't an empty seat on the train.

There is nothing more pathetic than the hordes of lumpen business travelers desperately waving their various badges, tickets and 'club' memberships in a vain attempt to get The Upgrade that is their due... And yesterday, I was one of them (hangs head in shame).

Still, on the bright side, I've discovered that the fold-down seats on the Eurostar have more legroom that the normal seats. Might have to try this again;-)

O2's adventures in electronic customer self-care (ECSS)

OK, I think O2 wins this donkey's current "Edge du Jour" tag.

Take a look at this wizard-style information display from the O2 self-care website. I landed here as I had just invested a chunk of my free time trying to review my invoice online having received my monthly your invoice is ready html email. Of course I failed, and I then failed to refresh my password, and sent a few paragraphs of vitriol to the support email only to be told that O2 can only be contacted using their customer contact wizard (perversly named "email us").

So before you even get started, what does this display suggest?

1. O2 only gives customer service to customers who know their details. This could be a problem for new customers who may not yet have received all the cryptic bits of misorganised pseudo-information that O2 sends out in a bid to help new customers settle in. This might also be a problem for existing customers who are on holiday or away from their base (imagine being in an internet café in Belize City trying to get help with your phone).
2. Assuming a customer has their details to hand, O2 will only engage in dialogue with users who can pass security. Now, this is a support email for crissake, what the hell kind of security do you mean? I just want to email you to complain or ask for help and you will only hear me out if I can give you secret password (which I've either forgotten or never had to begin with). This is just ridiculous
3. O2 will only listen to queries for internet users who get through steps one and two above

This is bad on a number of levels but the most obvious one is that the experience design takes no account of context-of-use.

If you are designing a support interface you can be pretty sure that most of the users who engage with it will have negative context-of-use issues. A big part of the interface's success will be taking into account why the user might feel upset or confused. Think of issues like:

• my phone is broken
• there's a problem with my bill
• I don't understand something and need help
• I'm in unfamiliar surroundings
• I don't have access to my own computer (with its cookies and bookmarks)

I think it's obvious from the entire interface that the O2 team took no account of these issues.

This is bad on further level. Dialog and transparency are now key elements of most sensible corporations' comms strategies. There is no point having your CSR team and your marketing folk writing about how open you are to dialog when your website clearly isn't.

Finally, the contact form has an input box which I think demonstrates the marketing team's deep understanding of the customer:

Now I'm pretty sure most iPhone customers can't tell the difference between an N95, an iPhone and a K800i. I know i certainly struggle with that one every day;-)

eat.co.uk get it right

Wow, when was the last time you thought you'd get a response as a result of filling in a form on the web (never mind a rapid response)?

Well, I had a little grief from the fraud protection mob at Firstdirect this afternoon and as a result posted this note in the feedback form on the Eat website (and I won't go into the domain name resolution issue on the site which means if you load the flash movie by entering the domain without the 'www' the links to the feedback form are broken--I wonder how much more feedback they'd get if that was fixed...)

At 14:31:55 on 27 June 2008 (roughly an hour ago) I purchased a soup and sandwich from your 15 Basinghall Street shop.

When I returned to my desk to eat my lunch I received a call from my bank (first direct) informing me that there had been fraudulent behaviour on my switch card.

According to their records, the transaction I had just made in the City of London was routed through a supplier in Equador.

The security guys at the bank where I work reckon this is a man-in-the-middle attack and that someone has tampered with the keypad in the store (similar to attaching card readers to ATM tellers, to harvest card details).

Please review this situation asap.

All the best,
Dug Falby

To be honest, I really didn't think I'd get an answer (strangely, the Flash front-end is what gave me this impression: If it's not a real html form, how can it yield real results?) but I did.

A nice man called Martin (I think he said he was head of business communications?) rung up to explain what was going on as a result of my note. From his description, I pictured a black helicopter appearing over Basinghall street and special forces whisking the card-reader off to a controlled explosion. It was very impressive, he said he'd frozen all card transactions at the store, notified the card processing supplier who are going to come in and refit the store tonight and would double-check records for staff access to card processing stuff.

He also made a point of checking that I had notified my bank and assured me he would get back to with with any progress relevant to my situation. Prompt, courteous and thorough, just the way it oughta be.

Which of course means I'll be all the more likely to go buy delicious soups and salads from Eat:-)

Yahoo Flickr exploits

You know, I wasn't going to get all huffy about it, but I just don't believe the explanations coming out of Yahoo.

I ignored the many emails explaining how this was going to be a seamless transition and that us early adopters who sent Katerina our cash from day one would be happily assimilated into the collective and that really this was for the best for all concerned. So I finally got this today:

Aside from just not liking their style or their products, one of the main reasons I never got a yahoo id is because the options suck. Well, not in any inherent way, but because they've been carrying a registration database around since 1996 so have more than two users.

Call me a wanker (and many do) but I've grown used to having nice logins, I'm "dug" on delicious and most other places. If not, I'm Bozo (generally for thing's I'd be a little embarrassed to discuss with my mom) or even donkeyontheedge if I'm trying to extend or integrate with the blog.

So of course I tried donkeyontheedge@yahoo.com (and co.uk) and hey, of course they're gone, as are dieyahoodie, dieyahoodiediedie, yahooarescum, filthyyahooscum (which I thought sounded a bit like self-criticism but which Nicki suggested) and any permutation of yahoo and sucks...

Nope, I'm not kidding;-)

So yeah, has this harmed my experience of Flickr, has it impacted our network of one? Well, yes it has. Am I going to stop using Flickr? No. Am I going to stop fantasising about Katerina? Well, probably not but I'm gonna try, dammit. In any case, while I was regressing to the state of a vindictive six-year-old, I finally managed to find a yahoo id that wasn't taken:

This rant inspired by Digital Mavericks: Opal Fruits, Marathon, Jif, now Flickr - Grrrrr! via Technorati.

links for 2009-01-09

• Social Entrepreneurship - Change.org
  the "Nine Inch Nails Theory of Entrepreneurship":

  1. Love your clients/customers/stakeholders
  2. Find business models that accurately capture the value you're trying to create in ways that people respond to with joy
  
  The value an organization or a business creates is not static. In the music world, the way value is priced (the cost of music) has stayed largely static, despite the costs involved in reproduction and distribution dropping to almost nothing. This has (clearly) produced a backlash.

  3. Turn possible threats to opportunities to amplify brand love
  (tags: 2012 value co-creation collaboration riaa)

links for 2008-11-19

• International Farmers Exchange for Mutual Learning = Privatisation of knowledge and seeds | Natural Resources | International Institute for Environment and Development
  
  
  
  (tags: farmers)
• Research for Development - Sustainable Agriculture
  
  
  
  (tags: farmers)
• Research for Development - DFID Research Strategy 2008-2013. Working Paper Series: Sustainable Agriculture
  
  
  
  (tags: farmers)
• Publications Search| International Institute for Environment and Development
  
  
  
  (tags: farmers)
• Sustainable Agriculture and Food
  
  
  
  (tags: farmers)
• What is Sustainable Agriculture?
  
  
  
  (tags: farmers)
• Ecology Action Home
  
  
  
  (tags: farmers)
• Centre for Environment and Society: Reducing Food Poverty with Sustainable Agriculture: A Summary of New Evidence
  
  
  
  (tags: farmers)
• Food, farming and subsistence agriculture, women’s voices from U-Mhlanga village Eastern Cape, South Africa
  
  
  
  (tags: farmers)
• LRMS Liability Plus | Smallholders Insurance | Cattle: Public Liability and Employers Liability
  
  
  
  (tags: farmers)
• 20 Excellent AJAX Effects You Should Know - NETTUTS
  
  
  
  (tags: javascript)
• The Showcase - Community Media archive - Planetary Voices: Harmonious Agriculture
  
  
  
  (tags: farmers)
• Muddy Matches - Online Dating and Friendship for the Countryside
  
  
  
  (tags: farmers)
• Grit Magazine: Celebrating Rural Community Since 1882
  
  
  
  (tags: farmers)

Christmas day swim in Bu...

Well, merry Christmas all.

The water was extremely cold today but there were no heart attacks or sinking eccentrics... Funny that the RNIB lifeboat goes up the coast in 60-minute steps as crazy people all along the south coast rush into the freezing waters :-)

Avignon quiz

Couple of weeks ago I was on hols in Avignon with the whole extended Falby clan and we all wrote games for the evening's entertainment. Margaret, Nicki's mum came up with a devilishly difficult Balderdash (I knew only two of the ten words) and I did a pub-quiz.

Don't know if you've set a pub-quiz before but this was my first go and and was way more difficult than I had anticipated. It's not enough to find things people might not know--you need to try and prevent folk getting bored and you need to make the questions relevant to your audience. In my case I had an audience of three 70-year-olds, three 40-year-olds, two teenagers and Clemmie who is six now and was supposed to be in bed (she helped by numbering the questions and that's her below trying her first diabolo menthe).

Tricky stuff.

At the end of the evening Billy--who knows about these things--reassured me that I had got it about right as the two teams scored better than average but not so much as to make it seem easy.

I'm on the flight back from Chicago listening to Laura Cantrell's version of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald while flying over Lake Erie (which is kinda weird) and was going to do a little work (and write some stuff about Seed) when I found the quiz questions in my bag.

So I thought I'd share them before dropping the sheets in the bin:-)

1. In United States law, which branch of the government declares war. The supreme court, congress or the president?
   (for 1 point)
2. Who were the last captains of the RMS Lusitania and the Edmund Fitzgerald?
   (for 2 points)
3. What do Lorne from Angel, Raven from Teen Titans, Peter Petrelli from Heroes, Pru and Phoebe from Charmed have in common with Betazoïds and for a bonus point who the missing character in this list?
   (for 1 point and bonus 1 point)
4. Where would you find your "minor arcana"?
   (for 1 point)
5. What connects Danish physicist Neils Böhr and Eels frontman Mark Everett?
   (for 1 point)
6. Name two grape varieties common in the "Côtes de Ventoux" appélation and for a bonus point what do Côtes de Ventoux winemakers call their terraces?
   (for 1 point and bonus 1 point)
7. If you've just passed Governor's Bridge and The Cutting and are half-way to Creg-ny-baa what are you doing?
   (for 1 point)
8. How many goalposts are there on a regulation quidditch pitch?
   (for 1 point)
9. Which motion picture won "Best Picture" at the 1968 Oscars? Two bonus points available for naming one or both of the two "more worthy" runners up that year.
   (for 1 point with 2 bonus points)
10. In the 1994 San Marino Formula One Grand Prix Ayrton Senna carried a furled flag in his cockpit. Of what country was the flag?
    (for 1 point)
11. In French cooking, what do "nappé", "petit boulé" and "grand cassé" refer to?
    (for 1 point)
12. What is the waltz from Tchaïkovski's fairy-tale-inspired ballet of 1890 better known as?
    (for 1 point)
13. Who first invited Harry and Stein to the Bronx? For a bonus point, who took his place in the video when he was sick on the day of the shoot?
    (for 1 point and bonus 1 point)
14. What did King of France Louis XIII create in 1622? For a bonus point, who succeeded Richelieu as Cardinal?
    (for 1 point and bonus 1 point)
15. Excluding Rockall, what is the Northernmost point of Scotland?
    (for 1 point)
16. By German law, how must Weißbier be fermented? For a bonus point, what is "botrytis cinerea"
    (for 1 point and bonus 1 point)
17. Who broke the production motorcycle land-speed record for the rolling kilometre at Nardo on 29 September 1985
    (for 1 point)
18. What was the first film Alfred Hitchcock directed (title and year)? What was the last film he directed. For a bonus point, which film did he direct in 1935?
    (for up to 4 points and bonus 1 point)
19. What problem did John Harrison solve to win £20,000? For a bonus point, what was his solution made out of?
    (for 1 point and bonus 1 point)
20. First Babakoto then Mojo Pin then Dear Eskimo. Who is this? For a bonus point, what is this person's current label?
    (for 1 point and bonus 1 point)

Well, of course with the interweb y'all have the answers to hand, but (as Barney the Purple Dinosaur would say) it's fun to try and guess them the hard way first...

Why am I working on a Su...

You know you're a Mac OS X user when you tend to forget about computer problems. I've carried a system-repair disk in by bag for the last 10 years but since about OS X 10.2 I haven't used it in anger. Most problems can be dealt with with a combination of fsck -fy, booting in target mode or the plain old disk utilities app.

So yesterday afternoon, I'd been working like an absolute dog all week trying to define a page-personalisation technique that meets the demands of the client in France while keeping to our company's brand values and interaction principles when the document I opened looked slightly different...

After faffing about for a bit trying to figure out what was up (I figured I must have done a "save as" in the wrong place late last night or something) I realised that my entire project directory was an image of where it was at 1 o'clock the previous morning.

I effect, my file system had been through a wormhole, a temporal disturbance or whatever and had resulted in me spending most of Saturday saving files into nothingness, a parallel universe (Spock with a beard etc etc).

Gordon Bennet, this one was new to me. Turns out it's to do with journalled file systems -- as far I get the concept, the OS maintains multiple states of your file system and repairs and readjusts in real time.

So anyway, I haven't used a commercial disk utility in years, but late last night Alsoft's DiskWarrior saved (most) of my bacon.

So here we go again in the garage and last I checked it was -2° but on the plus side, I'm listening to Weekend's La Varieté album and I haven't heard old Alison Statton in ages:-)

Blast from the musical p...

Have started using the old ipod again (8gig just doesn't do it) and bumped into this:

Architects may come and
Architects may go and ...

... When I run dry

I stop a while and think of you

Simon & Garfunkel signing about Frank Lloyd Wright. Wonderful:-)

Sean's amazing playlist

Tucking into the mega opus "Mood Aberdeen" created by Sean Wilke for Nick's 40th birthday.

It's a huge thing, more than fifteen hours of solid jazz, expertly intertwining the classics with the obscure. Am currently in "Fitdee". Thanks again Sean:-)

ed: the following added 16/7/2007

There's a man out there who can't listen to jazz anymore... I'm adding the playlist below to cheer him up.

Mood Aberdeen. A moment in Sean and Nicki's life expressed in six movements:-)

I knew nothing of jazz until I met Nicki and she started playing me the tapes Sean and Harry and duncan had lovingly crafted for her. Sean's playlist below sort of captures that moment of wonder for me and I hope it might give a fresh taste to those in need...

Vélib'

Terrible pictures but astonishing transport system. The docking kiosk allows individual or subscription payments using your oyster card--get out of the metro and hop on one of these:-)

Bob Marley on Basecamp

Yahoo Flickr exploits

You know, I wasn't going to get all huffy about it, but I just don't believe the explanations coming out of Yahoo.

I ignored the many emails explaining how this was going to be a seamless transition and that us early adopters who sent Katerina our cash from day one would be happily assimilated into the collective and that really this was for the best for all concerned. So I finally got this today:

Aside from just not liking their style or their products, one of the main reasons I never got a yahoo id is because the options suck. Well, not in any inherent way, but because they've been carrying a registration database around since 1996 so have more than two users.

Call me a wanker (and many do) but I've grown used to having nice logins, I'm "dug" on delicious and most other places. If not, I'm Bozo (generally for thing's I'd be a little embarrassed to discuss with my mom) or even donkeyontheedge if I'm trying to extend or integrate with the blog.

So of course I tried donkeyontheedge@yahoo.com (and co.uk) and hey, of course they're gone, as are dieyahoodie, dieyahoodiediedie, yahooarescum, filthyyahooscum (which I thought sounded a bit like self-criticism but which Nicki suggested) and any permutation of yahoo and sucks...

Nope, I'm not kidding;-)

So yeah, has this harmed my experience of Flickr, has it impacted our network of one? Well, yes it has. Am I going to stop using Flickr? No. Am I going to stop fantasising about Katerina? Well, probably not but I'm gonna try, dammit. In any case, while I was regressing to the state of a vindictive six-year-old, I finally managed to find a yahoo id that wasn't taken:

This rant inspired by Digital Mavericks: Opal Fruits, Marathon, Jif, now Flickr - Grrrrr! via Technorati.

Election haiku by Nicki

Air quivers with possibility
Punch chad

New president

Punch air

Find your place to vote

Le Paris-Orléans (Brasse...

Dans la série c'est fou ce qu'on mange mal à Paris je vous suggère d'eviter à tout prix la brasserie "Paris Orléans", Porte d'Orléan à Paris.

Le Paris-Orléans (Brasserie)
2 Rue De Patay

75013 Paris

Chu Chi

"Pan Asian Diner and Takeaway"--the subtitle on the menu doesn't say it all.

I know this because I live next to a pan-asian diner and takeaway and it's exactly as you'd expect: a place serving up a wide range of sweet, spicy and sour from Australia to Vietnam. The batters are light and crispy, the flesh tender and aromatic, the atmosphere is functional but friendly, the service adequate and prompt and of course the bill is reasonable.

What Chu Chi's menu might more accurately read is "a small, licenced, pan-asian restaurant with a modern decor". It lists wok, curries, steamer and noodles with choices like flash-fried peanut beef (£6.95), Vietnamese bass (£8.95) and your usual favourites green thai curry (£6.25), beef ho-fun (£6.75) and pad thai (£6.25). Lunchtime bento boxes are £9.50 which seems like good value given the venue's trendy location.

I readily confess to not being an expert in the world of pan-asian, but I couldn't help noticing that a trendy dim sum place and the "Thai Metro" are just a few doors up Charlotte Street. Clearly someone thinks this type of cooking is a sure-thing with the punters.

Well, I wont be back. Nothing wrong with the decor, the service or the menu, but my bento box was uninspiring. The "Nippon" advertises teriyaki beef and prawn tempura. What you get is a scrawny little prawn covered in chewy batter and a floppy slice of resistant cow flesh and seaweed placed in the two cavities of a plastic bento box (you could tell it was plastic as it had at some point in the past come a little too close to a heating lamp). The other cavities contained white rice and cabbage.

Of the whole box, the kanar (cabbage-like green leaf and soy beans) with soy sauce and chilli slices was by far the most satisfying.

Right, well I suppose I should go try the other two on the street for consistency's sake.

Chu Chi
Pan Asian Diner and Takeaway

14 Charlotte Street

London W1

Tel: 0207 436 7460

Fax: 0207 436 7461

Lunch: "Nippon" bento box set price lunch and a cup of tea. Total bill inc. service charge £12.38

An FTP server would be n...

This isn't my Christmas list. It's a shout-out to anyone who can possibly to give us access to the FTP server controlling the DSGi websites.

I'm not sure if it's known, but we have to send every image and stylesheet to Paris via email. Once received, these files can take up to 24 hours to be added and while I wait for this 2 minute task to be done, I can either wait or start another scheduled job. To be honest it would be quicker for me to travel to Paris and add the files myself. The caching issue is a problem too. Even when files are created and uploaded, if they are amended CSS files or updated images the cache must be flushed at the server end. This involves more requests to Paris. Frustrating.

So I regularly have several jobs currently running at any one time. And, having to return to a job a day later to see if even loaded correctly is not only confusing but very disruptive.

If we could only gain access permissions to the FTP server, create folders and manage the uploading of files ourselves we would definitely increase productivity. No more confusion and time wasted familiarising ourselves with previously written code. No waiting endlessly for CSS files to be updated and then be flushed. Working practises could be speeded up and turn-around time would be shorter.

END.

Nokia's iPhone beater?

Well, not exactly... I wish Nokia all the best, but I've got a couple questions:

• In my experience, v1 Nokia Symbian firmware is always rough (I suspect there is internal pressure to release new devices from groups that think more in terms of hand-feel and physical device than software-led user experience). Both my N73 and my N95 were essentially unusable out of the box (unusable = requiring a hard reset more than one per 15 minutes). They do get better but if you want to go after iPhone customers you're going to need the software to work pretty much straight away. In the case of the N97, an early-ish 2009 launch in restricted markets (USA) means that in reality, us Europeans won't have a good N97-based user experience until Q1 2010 by which time Android will have a wider developer pool and Apple may well have come up with even more challenging goodies
• I'm surprised to read that Nokia can't use multi-touch and that Apple has a patent on the process. I thought the system was developed by Jeff Han at NYU and later developed into a shippable product by his own company? I guess not, if anyone can fill in those blanks I'd be curious to hear.
• How social is the social? I'd love to hear more about the value-creation network Nokia is proposing to set up with the N97 as a hub. Also, will the social survive the firmware? I guess we'll see.

Wordpress v. Movable Typ...

Disclamer: We've had a bit of an ongoing debate on this one with Anil fanning the flames as he tries to support the MT cause. I should disclose that I'm a member of the Six Apart Professional Network and also a 6A partner for the Paris office just so's you know...

While I'm a long-time Movable Type fan and user, I remember the first time time I installed Wordpress. What a treat, the thing was completely painless and took no time at all. I was way impressed and have been since. Added to functionality, the open-source community around Wordpress has spawned a huge templating and design resource with hundreds of very high-quality designs for the lay blogger to chose from. In fact, for many a year I considered switching to Wordpress and was only prevented by the thought of having to maintain security on a php installation and how I would handle any serious load should one of my client's projects really take off.

Now I've pretty much stopped worrying about this in much the same way as I've given up on the flash/no-flash, mac/pc, tomato/tomahhto arguments—they seem a bit pointless and on average both options/solutions have their merits.

I had an experience of doing some migration and configuring last night which brought to light some issues I hadn't yet come across in any Wordpress v. Movable Type discussions. I was trying to replicate behaviours from an MT installation into a series of WP ones and came across the following difficulties where Wordpress let me down:

• I couldn't perform a search and replace of strings across blogs and their pages, entries, comments and templates. To get the job done I had to edit template and entry data outside of the WP environment
• I couldn't use my global templates. I use these to configure global variables that several blogs can then share (in particular, I use primarily to manage root path across different systems and to avoid multiblog-calling-itself errors)
• I couldn't re-use my user configurations across blogs and if I wanted to set up an admin to cover more than one blog I couldn't re-gen their password
• Cutting and pasting, or generally moving data between templates across blogs was very unproductive (ended up jumping between Firefox tabs)
• There were two other things that got up my nose and I'll get them down here as soon as I remember them...

Before the WPfanboys jump on me, YES, I understand there are workarounds, upgrades, plugins and other fixes to the above and of course I'm going to struggle working in an environment that isn't my first choice. I simply wanted to list these experiences as I hadn't seen them outlined anywhere else.

eat.co.uk get it right

Wow, when was the last time you thought you'd get a response as a result of filling in a form on the web (never mind a rapid response)?

Well, I had a little grief from the fraud protection mob at Firstdirect this afternoon and as a result posted this note in the feedback form on the Eat website (and I won't go into the domain name resolution issue on the site which means if you load the flash movie by entering the domain without the 'www' the links to the feedback form are broken--I wonder how much more feedback they'd get if that was fixed...)

At 14:31:55 on 27 June 2008 (roughly an hour ago) I purchased a soup and sandwich from your 15 Basinghall Street shop.

When I returned to my desk to eat my lunch I received a call from my bank (first direct) informing me that there had been fraudulent behaviour on my switch card.

According to their records, the transaction I had just made in the City of London was routed through a supplier in Equador.

The security guys at the bank where I work reckon this is a man-in-the-middle attack and that someone has tampered with the keypad in the store (similar to attaching card readers to ATM tellers, to harvest card details).

Please review this situation asap.

All the best,
Dug Falby

To be honest, I really didn't think I'd get an answer (strangely, the Flash front-end is what gave me this impression: If it's not a real html form, how can it yield real results?) but I did.

A nice man called Martin (I think he said he was head of business communications?) rung up to explain what was going on as a result of my note. From his description, I pictured a black helicopter appearing over Basinghall street and special forces whisking the card-reader off to a controlled explosion. It was very impressive, he said he'd frozen all card transactions at the store, notified the card processing supplier who are going to come in and refit the store tonight and would double-check records for staff access to card processing stuff.

He also made a point of checking that I had notified my bank and assured me he would get back to with with any progress relevant to my situation. Prompt, courteous and thorough, just the way it oughta be.

Which of course means I'll be all the more likely to go buy delicious soups and salads from Eat:-)

iPhone floppyware 2.0

OK so it's now Stevenote - 7 and my iPhone is stuck in an imap loop and when I turn it off it reboots instantly. Of course plugging it in and clicking "restore" (which theoretically wipes your iPhone and restores it to OEM condition) doesn't fix the problem so I'm sort of hoping the 2.0 firmware will sort this...

...but I keep trying to decide if I should continue to put up with the phone. So many aspects of it drive me crazy. Take the battery for instance. On my N95, when Symbian thinks it's the best mobile OS on the planet but gets it wrong, the phone lets me take the battery out. This is kinda like the handset saying "sorry" like a grumpy two-year-old, a good thing. When it turns out iPhone needs to be disciplined, Steve just repeats "no, mine!" like another kind of two-year-old, a very bad thing indeed:-(

Well, on balance I think my iPhone sucks, but it sucks less than the other twenty smartphones I've lived with over the last couple of years.

It's not all handset woes, take for example O2's brilliant Apple-approved billing structure. Unlimited data (unless you instal a demon in which case the fair-use policy kicks in) and a set number of calls for a set monthly price. That is (almost) exactly what I want except that when I call my bank, or the power company, or I want book a movie ticket or call a helpline I have to pay extra for the 0870 local-call number. Never mind that I haven't got the choice. Powergen hasn't got a local extension I can call so the word from O2 is "tough" :-(

Not a big deal you might say but my £45/month all-in contract quickly becomes an £80/month which is way way more that I want to pay for the service.

I thought O2's iPhone contracts might have jogged the other operators into finding some sense so I checked my fave, Orange (France Telecom) to see what unlimited data contracts they had for new users.

Well, surprisingly, as of 2 June 2008 not a sausage

Sigh... crap really.

Charging for wi-fi?

The DVD format is a fiasco born out of a desire to control the way customers consume the products they buy.

I can't imagine any parent out there who would be happy to fork out fifteen quid for a DVD full of extra features they will never have the free time to watch knowing that after a couple of weeks worth of little fingers it will become a worthless piece of unplayable plastic.

The value is the experience of your child watching the movie NOT the stone-age tech used to play it (and don't get me started on a format that lets the media owner disable the customer's menu features).

The smarter we consumers become (and the more we share our experiences), the more the techpants will struggle with their pointless offerings and hopefully, new value-creation networks will take over:-)

So anyway, I was just going to write about wi-fi before going off on one...

I just got a couple of tweets from a guy who was trying to get on the net from the brand-new Heathrow terminal 5. Unbeleivably, he was being asked to jump through hoops, fill in forms, and worst of all, pay! Now let me make this completely clear:

Charging for wi-fi is like charging for tap-water in a restaurant.

Hell, it's like charging for air conditioning, or light, or cleanliness... These are all infrastructure items that are factored into the cost of the main event.

So look, you pay for your airline ticket, you pay for your state and city taxes, you pay your airport taxes, you pay for your extra luggage, you paid for the cab to the airport. You paid a king's ransome for the latte the kid at the next table keeps threatening to spill on your keyboard so YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE TO PAY FOR CONNECTIVITY!

Ok?!?

And just so we're completely clear on this one, not only should you not have to pay with currency or credit, you shouldn't have to pay with attention or privacy. No landing pages, portals or branded content, just unfettered, universal access for all.

The worst part is we're all buying into this nonsense, the average Londoner can see five wi-fi networks from his sitting room. In a five-flat Victorian conversion counting neighbours on both sides that's 15 broadband contracts. If you just got together with your neighbours you could share a low-contention business connection for a fraction of the cost (think about it, you're collectively forking out £300 a month for a highly contended connection with no service contract or decent support while £50 split between you would secure a bandwidth-assured connection contract).

So if you don't mind, cancel your broadband and talk to your neighbours and in the meantime, disable your password and open up your wireless connection :-)

Just nuts :-)

10131 views!

Hello BT engineer

Hey, we've just had a long and very informative post from Matt, a Luton-based Openreach engineer. I hope this really is an engineer speaking and not some perverse item from a 'guerilla marketing' agency subverting from within. He describes some real horror stories, if you're interested in the BT thing it's well worth a read:

I was on a fault last week and the customer drop-wire from the pole to the house was rubbing through trees so I replaced it only to get a phone call the next day from my manager asking why I hadn't charged the customer as the trees were on his property--this is the level that they are stooping to.

Do they care? This thing has been simmering for a while now, I wonder at what point a BT pr person is going to chime in?

Is BT still shit? (A Donkey on the Edge)