heisel.org

Early Web 2.0 braindump

Thursday | April 24, 2008 | 7:05 pm  

I thought I’d take advantage of the slow Wednesday afternoon to try and collalesce some thoughts from the first two days of the Web 2.0 Conference

• There are a lot of suit-types-with-PCs here (as opposed to geeks-with-macs). I’m guessing that means that the “enterprise” is starting to pay attention to all this stuff if they’re sending execs, product management folks, etc.

• OpenID & OAuth are being talked about. A. Lot.

• OpenSocial is as well, to a lesser extent.

• Data Portability is on a lot of folks’ minds.

• It seems like a lot of folks are hoping that OpenID + OAuth + OpenSocial + Data Portability + As Yet Unknown Social Graph Provider == Facebook killer.

• The social web is broken. That is, unless you like re-accounting, re-friending, re-profiling, re-usernaming and re-passwording with every site you go to.

• If you’re trying to convince your enterprise to adopt social/Web 2.0 features, then get them a copy of Groundswell, it’s written by some folks from Forrester so it has that shiny veneer of expensive consulting. (I’m being a little too hard on them, they did have some good and interesting points and compelling data).

• Web 2.0 is a stupid term. However, if it gets translated as “talk with and then listen to your customers” then it might worth having yet-another-buzzword. Snarky comment: Uh, maybe I’m just in the wrong generation, but why is this such a difficult concept for companies to grasp?

• Clay Shirky is a smart guy. (Clay, where’s the RSS at?). Traditional media will continue to see a decline in usage as each new generation of Internet users becomes more participative. If you don’t allow your consumers to become creators, sharers and commentators of your content, then watch out.

• Jonathan Zittrain is also a really smart guy. As computing moves into the cloud (can we come up with a better metaphor) there are some real and serious legal issues to consider. If the government or a mega-corp doesn’t like your application hosted on EC2/Google App Engine, what’s more likely: they help you in your legal battle to keep it alive -or- they suspend your account to avoid a costly lawsuit.

• The mobile Web is broken and is a bad idea. One Web, one set of standards is the only way to have an even remote chance at replicating the success of the “Desktop Web”.

• Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Facebook and others are to Web 2.0 what Microsoft was to Web 1.0 — they want you to develop on their platform and be locked into their API. Smart developers will remember that the only API we need is HTML/HTTP — play in their gardens (walled or otherwise) but live on the Web.

Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Business, Programming, Technology

Quote of the day: NITF

Thursday | February 21, 2008 | 2:57 pm  

“OMG I can hear the clunking sounds coming from the NITF website” – IM conversation with Zellyn

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Journalism, Programming, Technology

My favorite Web development laws

Saturday | February 9, 2008 | 7:25 am  

From the great list over at Blue Flavor:

Lister’s Law

People under time pressure don’t think faster.

Hofstadter’s Law

A task always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Management, Programming

Urban renewal for data ghettos

Tuesday | January 22, 2008 | 8:18 pm  

So, I gather that in newsrooms it’s become fashionable to put public records online.

I totally love the term that Matt Waite coined — calling them data ghettos:

But if you take a step into one of the databases and you get to my second problem with them: couple of search boxes and a button.

Is that really it? Is that the big newspaper.com push into data? Sprawling, barely organized pages to get to a couple of search boxes and a button?

I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself.

But I love the solution that my team came up with at work for a Georgia names project that went live tonight.

They provided both a searchable interface and some pre-set searches that highlight interesting names.

The best part is that Zellyn made it so that journalists, developers, designers, or anyone in our group can create new lists on the fly in our neat-o keen Django application.

It’s the first time at work that we’ve built a tool around a set of data. Normally we lump our work into two camps:

• Data-driven applications like my purchase card project expect that the only human interaction is our loyal readers contrasted with…
• Tools like our gallery publishing system expect staff users on the ‘backend’ and loyal readers to interact with them on the ‘front’ end

This the first time that we’ve merged aspects of both and I think it provides some urban renewal to what could otherwise be a data ghetto.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Databases, Journalism, Programming

Let’s not forget about graceful degradation

Tuesday | December 4, 2007 | 10:59 am  

Far be it from me to be a nattering nabob of negativity, but in all the Web 2.0 euphoria (I hate that name, BTW), let’s not forget about graceful degradation.

Let’s examine the discussion between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 in regards to errors like this:

Web 1.0: What is this?

Web 1.0: Where did you get this?

Web 1.0: Where did you learn about this kind of thing?

Web 2.0: [Filled with teen angst] I learned it by watching you!

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Programming, Technology, Web design

AJC development group mentioned at APME

Saturday | October 6, 2007 | 3:29 pm  

We’re in film!

Robin Henry, our Digital Managing Editor extraordinaire, spoke at a recent Associated Press Managing Editors conference and screened this Soundslides presentation that Emily Murphy and the AJC’s multimedia group put together.

I look and sound like a total dweeb, but wanted to take a chance to pimp the developers, designers, DBAs and sysadmins at work who make all the cool stuff we do possible!

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Django, Journalism, Programming, Python, Technology

Two takes on agile development worth discussing

Monday | January 8, 2007 | 5:50 pm  

Over at Code Craft Kevin is arguing that agile methodologies make for more code, rather than less.

It’s an interesting idea — that the waterfall model introduces some sort of Darwin-esque survival of the fittest trials that only worthy features/products can make it through.

I’d argue the opposite — that, if done right, agile methodogolies (esp. when combined with dynamic languages) bring about less code. And that the agile process, especially if it’s augmented by user monitoring/metrics, creates an actual Darwin-esque feature ecosystem.

If you can write a feature in less code (with Python, Ruby, PHP, your dynamic language here), in less time and deploy to users quickly — then your code and business processes are much closer to the “pulse” of your userbase.

On the other hand, a long waterfall process probably errs on the side of the personal tastes and preferences of the managers and stakeholders in the review process. If that’s mated with a more-code oriented shop then you’re dangerously removed from that “pulse.”

Post-Agile?

Meanwhile… back at Creating Passionate Users they’re asking the question what comes after agile in the evolution of development processes.

Right now agile/xp seems like the be-all, end-all, as fast and as good a process as you could ask for. But then I also thought doing pointer arithmetic and remembering the semi-colon was fun.

Change is constant, there’ll be something better… let the battles begin.

Will my Mom ever grok RSS?

Slightly off topic, but still worth mentioning Wisdump thinks RSS will never go maintstream.

I’m not strongly inclined to say it’ll never go mainstream, but I am surprised that it hasn’t gone more mainstream already.

Will RSS only ever be the de-facto simple REST API for content providers?

Or will my Mom ever sign up for Google Reader, Bloglines or MyAJC?

I think this one’s still in play, for now, it’s an interesting idea that RSS may be a primarily power user- and developer-focused technology…

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Journalism, Programming, Technology

Myghty needs some myghty good docs

Friday | September 16, 2005 | 12:43 pm  

Maybe it’s because I’ve never used Mason, but I’m having a hard time figuring out how to get started with Myghty.

At the moment I’m just trying to play around with it and get a feel for how you use it but I have to say that Django and Rails have set the bar high for the “tell me how to dive in” user.

I understand that you can structure your Myghty app in just about any way imaginable, and I appreciate that kind of flexibility, but it would be nice if there was something similar to the 10-minute Rails video, or the Django tutorial.

I’ve tried Googling and the best I can come up with is that you probably want to use Myghty with SQLObject and Formencode.

But how, and what is the best way, to combine those three packages?

Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Programming, Technology

del.icio.us has a new look

Monday | June 6, 2005 | 4:21 pm  

If you haven’t del.icio.us’d anything yet today, check out their new interface:

It’s got a shiny coat of Javascript-powered tag usability added on!

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Programming, Web design

Quote of the day

Tuesday | May 24, 2005 | 10:47 am  

“It’s a Gmail task in a Hotmail world”

A coworker sent me that quote, and neither of us can find the source… if anyone out there in great wild Web knows, please drop a line…

Update: 5-16-06: Thanks to irayo we now know the source:

“Cross-referencing was impossible; I was attempting a Gmail task in a Hotmail world.”

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Programming, Technology, Web design