Jeff Simmermon wrote a blog post entitled Drowning Kittens In A River Full Of Cash which he seems to have deleted but which is cached here. There was a sentence from that blog post which stayed with me and I have reproduced below

Forget about trying to write under that kind of dread. Writing under family-friendly corporate constraints is a necessary but curious clusterfuck in the best conditions. Sometimes it's like reaching deep within your soul and pulling out a basket of kittens, then quietly drowning it in a river. A man's gotta eat, though, and I never griped about the paycheck. That was my choice, and I made it every day.

This year was the first year I considered ending this blog because I'd finally gotten tired of the hassle of people complaining about what I wrote here. The final straw for me surprisingly hasn't been work related although there have been stretching points from disgruntled coworkers who lashed out because I use competing products to people complaining to my management chain and theirs hoping to get me reprimanded or even fired for not toeing the party line. I stand by everything I've written in this blog but I've now gotten enough heat and taken enough inter-personal communication training classes to realize that some opinions are more trouble than they are worth. So every once in a while, a quietly drown a kitten of a half written blog post because I can't be bothered with dealing with the feedback. However that wasn't the breaking point, since I've considered this experience part of "growing up".

What I didn't expect to have to deal with was people back home in Nigeria reading my blog. Or even worse, certain posts in from my blog being printed out and republished in Nigerian print magazines. That audience which now includes quite a few members of my family is one I hadn't anticipated and one whose feedback on misconstrued posts is one I take more to heart than the other kinds of feedback I'm used to getting about my blog. This has now introduced a new set of filters I have to apply to my blog posts.

I've now begun to question the purpose of continuing to write this blog and considered ending it and perhaps restarting an anonymous one on some generic blog hosting service like TypePad or Blogger. I'm not sure what I'm going to do next but thought it only fair to let the couple thousand folks who read this blog regularly to know why it stopped if it does stop.

Have a Happy New Year.
 

The Wired Vaporware Awards '06 was announced this week and item #8 is The IPod Killer. Specifically the article states

8. The "IPod Killer"

Every time we hear about a new portable audio device, it's touted as the magic bullet that will end the iPod's reign once and for all.

Oh, you mean that thing? The one with the ugly design and clunky user interface? Does it at least work with iTunes?

Microsoft's Zune was supposed to do the trick, but it's sitting on the shelves (even the SanDisk Sansa is selling better than Zune) while the kids are all enjoying their freshly unwrapped, shiny new iPods.

Note to everyone: It's a White Wire World. Get over it.

I've bought a lot of iPods in my day and I've been making a list of things I'd like to see out of Microsoft's Zune effort that would tip the scales and make us go from a multiple iPod household to a Zune household. Below is a list of the 5 things that I think it would take to convert myself, my girlfriend and her oldest daughter from iPod users to Zune users based on conversations we've had about switching.

1. Improve the Pocketability Factor: If you check out pictures of an iPod and a Zune side by side you'll notice that the iPod is thinner and shorter. Since I carry an MP3 player around a few hours a day either around my arm when working out or when walking around at work, the less bulky it is the better. My girlfriend definitely doesn't want to walk around with the outline of a rectangular brick in her pants especially now that skinny jeans are in

2. Do Something Cool with the Wifi: At Christmas dinner, I was talking to a family friend who just graduated from college and she asked me about the Zune. She perked up when she heard about the Wifi capabilities and music sharing until she found out the limitations in the music sharing capabilities (3 days or 3 plays) which she described as lame. I doubt that there is much that can be done to make the music sharing feature interesting to college kids since [as she told me] they just want free music. However there are a lot of cool things I can imagine doing with a portable music player that has Wifi. For example, what if I was listening to a song on the radio on my Zune then could purchase that song in a few clicks right from the device? What if I could receive internet radio with no ads on my device?  

3. iPod Dock Connector Compatibility: A lot of people mistakenly think that the large investment that prevents people from switching from an iPod is the library of songs they've purchased from iTMS which won't be compatible with another DRM system. However in my experience I've noticed that the huge range of iPod dock connector accessories is becoming more of a factor. After all, auto manufacturers from Chrysler to Ford, GM and Mazda are all shipping iPod-ready cars. We spent a few hundred dollars converting my girlfriend's SUV to an iPod-ready one. Then there's all the travel speakers, including my Christmas present a FUNKit DJ iPod Speakers. Re-buying hundreds of dollars worth of accessories doesn't fill me with glee. However if we could go to an electronics store like RadioShack and get a an iPod<->Zune connector that would ease the transition a great deal.

4. Smaller, Cheaper Versions: The iPod Nano has totally swept the young girl demographic. Whenever we end up at the mall and I'm dragged to Claire's I tend to see a lot of iPod Nano accessories but very few for the video iPod. We need a Zune that targets that demographic.

5. Celebrity Product Placement: I almost feel embarrassed to admit this but the tipping point for getting my first iPod wasn't when all the gadget wunderkinds at work got one or when I almost fell of the treadmill because I was switching CDs on my portable CD player. No, the tipping point was when I saw 50 Cent using one in the P.I.M.P. video. If you want to impress me with the cool kids that are using the player, don't show me annoying looking hipsters I probably couldn't stand if I met in real life. Another good example of this kind of product placement is Mariah Carey using a RAZR in the Shake It Off video.

What would it take for you to switch to a Zune?
 

Mark Cuban has a blog post entitled Ripping on Gootube... Again which introduced me to a Youtube trend I hadn't even noticed. He writes

Take a look at Decembers Top Viewed English Videos.
Most Viewed (This Month)
...

Britney Spears caught without underpants 01:07 Added: 3 weeks ago From: tylermcgregor Views: 1408363 3523 ratings

Me and My Cell Phone -- The past 25 years 00:59 Added: 1 week ago From: VerizonWireless Views: 1373397 5731 ratings

BRITNEY'S SKIRT FLIES UP, CROTCH SHOT SHOWN AGAIN, CHECK IT! 00:29 Added: 1 week ago From: wylinoutbitch Views: 1341496 3299 ratings

Matt Damon Does Matthew McConaughey 01:28 Added: 2 weeks ago From: CBS Views: 1277719 3895 ratings

Go through the list. Only the StarWars PSA, the Christmas Tree Jump and PowerTool Racing are really user generated content. 3 out of 20.

From there you have a contrived 12 days of christmas that is one of thousands of promos for Youtube users themselves trying to build a following. Is this social networking at its best ?

From there we have commercials or promos for movies, for tv shows, for blenders, knives, for music videos and for a phone company. Then we have the most popular of Youtube videos these days. The fake Porn thumbnail with headlines of. Britney, Paris, whoever, nude, in the shower, wherever, doing whatever. 5 of the top 20 are fake porn.

The fact that the professionally produced content is more popular on YouTube than amateur content isn't that surprising. By definition, professionals can put more time and effort into producing high quality content which is why their content is more popular. This is true in almost all areas of user generated content areas including blogging, see the Technorati Top 100 for proof.

What is surprising is how popular 'gotcha' content which pretends to be soft porn turns out to be a practical joke has become. The two fake porn videos linked above have been viewed over a million times. The interesting question is whether Google/Youtube will do anything to curtail this trend. This is likely a cause for user dissatisfaction on the site based on all the negative responses I saw in the comments to the videos, however there seem to be enough people who find it funny that this isn't a clear case of spam nor can it be voted down by the community since a lot of people may vote them up since they find them amusing. 

As Mark Cuban points out in his post, this is one of those perennial problems with social software. If trends or people that are harmful to the community show up there isn't a clear way to deal with them without it seeming like the heavy hand authority slapping down people trying to have fun and express themselves. On the other hand, I doubt Google spent $1.62 billion for Youtube just to watch it turn into a haven for fake porn and other forms of griefing.

 

The bigger Google grows, the more it seems that like every large company it's products now have to pay a strategy tax which may end up shortchanging their users. If you are unfamiliar with the term, you should read Dave Winer's excellent essay Strategy Tax which is excerpted below

Ben explained that sometimes products developed inside a company such as Microsoft have to accept constraints that go against competitiveness, or might displease users, in order to further the cause of another product. I recognized the concept but had never heard the term.

An example. Consider a company that develops both a Web browser and a word processor. The product team for the browser might get lots of input from users saying "We'd like a better editor in the browser." It would be natural to give the users what they want. So they put the feature in their project plan, but when it comes up for review, the CEO shoots them down. "They should use the word processor," he says.

Another example. An electronics company makes a portable music player, and also owns a recording studio. The team working on the music player knows that there's a big market for players that work with a format that's popular with computer users, but lacks sophisticated copy protection. They project huge sales. But when the product comes up for review, the CEO shoots them down. "We'll lose sales of our music," he says.

Before I read this essay I thought this was a problem unique to Microsoft and also thought that I was being astute in observing the trend at the company when in truth the term was part of the cultural knowledge of the company while I was still in programming diapers. Over time, it has become clear to me that this is a problem that affects any business endeavor where different product units either rely on each other or indirectly compete with each other [assuming that the company isn't dysfunctional enough to have products that directly compete against each other]. Below are three examples of how the strategy tax is affecting Google, all of which are observations by other bloggers which I've noticed myself but refrained from mentioning since I work for a competitor and it would have come off as sour grapes.

Disincentive to Improve Search Due to Ad Business

In his post Good Luck Jimmy, Dave Winer writes

Google is repeating the pattern of the previous generation of search engines (Alta Vista, Infoseek) were doing when Google zigged to their zag, so successfully. Today, Google is fattening up and spreading out, going after Microsoft in productivity apps, chasing the TV networks with YouTube. Etc etc. Today search is only one of the things Google is doing, and it may not be the most important thing.

Today Google's profits come from ads, and that business gives them a reason to keep search weak. They want you to do a lot of searching to find what you're looking for -- and the stuff they find for you for free is competing with the stuff they make money on. So Google actually has a disincentive to make search better.

A few months ago, I used to get into regular debates with Matt Augustine who argued that the fact that companies like Google make so much money from search advertising seems like a bug in the system. Matt would argue that if search engines were really that good at finding what we want, we would never have to click on the results they had been paid to show us unless we were deceived into doing so.

This seems to put a 'glass ceiling' on how good the search engine can be because you don't want people to stop clicking on ads when you make billions of dollars a year from them doing so.

Promoting Google Services at the Expense of the Integrity of Search Results and it's Advertisers

Blake Ross has a blog post entitled Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose where he writes

But Google lost me today, and it didn’t take much:

Google is now displaying “tips” that point searchers to Google Calendar, Blogger and Picasa for any search phrase that includes “calendar” (e.g. Yahoo calendar), “blog” and “photo sharing,” respectively. This is clearly bad for competitors, and it’s also a bad sign for Google. But I generally support anything that benefits users, including monopolistic packaging. I believe, for instance, that shipping Internet Explorer with Windows was a good move. So why are tips bad for users?
...
The tips are different—and bad for users—because the services they recommend are not the best in their class. If Google wants to make it faster and easier for users to manage events, create a blog or share photos, it could do what it does when you search GOOG: link to the best services. To prevent Google from being the gatekeeper, the company could identify the services algorithmically. But if that sounds familiar, perhaps that’s because Google already works that way. After all, Google is predicated on the idea that the democratic structure of the Web will push the cream to the top. Search for “photo sharing” and you should already get the highest quality services. According to Google, Picasa is not one of them.
...
While advertisers compete to be first in a string of lookalike ads that are often shunted to the side, Google now determines the precise position and appearance of ads tips that are not subject to any of the same rules. Its ads get icons while others don’t, and if you think that’s small potatoes, you are not an advertiser: images boost clickthrough. Google can make a Picasa ad say “Easier to use than Kodak,” but Kodak cannot create an ad that reads “Easier to use than Picasa.” And the kicker: neither the highest quality ads nor the highest quality search results can replace these tips.

The "strategy tax" here is being paid by the search engine and advertising groups at Google. To carry along Google services that Blake points out are not best in class, Google is foregoing ad dollars from a number of lucrative keywords and causing distrust in the search engine by the very power users upon whose backs it rose to fame in the first place. Google used to brag about how unlike other search engines, they don't use misleading ads that people can confuse for search results. However I tend to agree with the last statement in Blake's post

Perhaps the most nefarious aspect of this feature is how it operates within our collective blind spots. Advertisers are happy that Google no longer invades the canonical Ad Results. Technology purists continue to see untainted Search Results. But does my mother make that distinction? How much does a result have to look like a Result to cross the line?

Indeed.

Artificially Promoting it's Products in Search Results

From a comment highlighted in the post Google's Silent Monopoly Redux (Google Responds - Issues Public Statement) which states

But type in "maps". Google is again first. Ahead of Mapquest. Ahead of Yahoo maps. Yahoo also has backlinks out the ying yang. So why is it third? And mapquest has been around forever.. I'm sure there are more links to mapquest.com than to the maps.google.com URL, simply because the millions of web pages that linked their directions to Mapquest from 1996 to 2004 didn't all rush out and change all their links to Google maps in February of 2005 (when it was released), even if Google's is a better product.

Next, try "mail". Despite the fact that Yahoo mail has been around forever, and has all sorts of links, and that Hotmail has also been around forever, Gmail still manages to come up first.

And the most interesting thing about this particular keyword? The word "mail" by itself doesn't even appear on the gmail.google.com page! The words gmail, webmail, and email appear. But not "mail". At least on the Yahoo page, the word "mail" does indeed appear. Yet Google still manages to rank ahead of Yahoo.

Finally, try "answers". Yes, answers.google.com comes up second, rather than first. But answers.yahoo.com comes in third! Is the Google Answers site really getting that many more links than Yahoo's? Especially in light of the fact that Google recently decided to kill it, because almost no one was using it, while Yahoo's usage (and therefore also linkage, no doubt) are skyrocketing?

This claim was actually the most interesting to me since Google is very adamant about the integrity of their search results and claims we don’t accept payment for inclusion in our index, nor do we manipulate search results by hand. I tried a number of these queries myself and was pretty shocked by the results especially when it came to "mail". Here are some screenshots that illustrate the point

1. Search results for "mail" on Google

2. Number of links to gmail.google.com (also the same as gmail.com) according to Google

3. Number of links to mail.yahoo.com according to Google

It's hard to imagine any objective metric that should make Gmail show up ahead of Yahoo! Mail in a search for the word "mail". Of course, this doesn't mean that Google is tampering with search results "by hand". Their algorithm can simply have allowances to rank sites in their domain or linked from their domain higher without having to actually sully their hands by tweaking individual results by hand. Still, if Google is how the world finds information and we are increasingly being pointed to information that financially benefits Google, doesn't that taint the much vaunted claim of the integrity of their search results even if it is being done in an automated manner?

 

There were two stories announced today with a couple of fairly obvious reactions.

1. Story: Google Replaces SOAP API with AJAX widget

   Obvious Misinterpretation: Google Search API? - mistakes a Web service endpoint the widget talks to for a sanctioned API

   Obvious Reaction: The end of SOAP

2. Story: del.icio.us announces AJAX widget

   Obvious Misinterpretation: del.icio.us API for URL top tags, bookmark count - mistakes the web service endpoint the widget talks to for a sanctioned API

   Obvious Reaction: God bless the re-inventers - complains that the "new API" uses JSON instead of XML-RPC

The obvious reaction was to make the Google and del.icio.us announcements into a REST vs. SOAP or XML vs. JSON story since geeks like to turn every business decision into a technology decision. However if you scratch the surface, the one thing that is slowly becoming clear is that providers of data services would rather provide you their data in ways they can explicitly monetize (e.g. driving traffic to their social bookmarking site or showing their search ads) instead of letting you drain their resources for free no matter how much geek cred it gets them in the blogosphere.

This is a good thing because it means that as an industry we are slowly figuring out why and how to provide Web APIs and Web services and when not to.

PS: If you are a site that thrives on user generated content this doesn't mean that you should replace APIs that make it easier to add content to your site (e.g. the MetaWeblog API, Flickr API or the del.icio.us API) with a widget. That would make you an idiot.

 

I've been tagged by Nick Bradbury as part of the 5 Things People Don't Know About Me meme. Here's my list

1. I've gained back 25 lbs of the 60 lbs I lost earlier this year. With the holidays and an upcoming trip to Las Vegas to attend CES I assume I'll be gaining another 5 lbs due to disruptions to my schedule and poor eating habits before I can get things back under control.

2. I sold all my stock options when MSFT hit 30 last week.

3. I used to smile a lot as a child until when I was about 11 or 12. I was in a Nigerian miltary school during my middle school years and some senior students didn't like the fact that I always walked around with a smile on my face. So they decided to beat me until I wiped that silly smile off my face. It worked. My regular scowl was mentioned as a dampener in more first dates than I'd like to admit while I was in college. I'm glad my mom decided to pull me out of the military school after only two years. At the time, I thought that was the equivalent of running away. Mother knows best, I guess.

4. My dad is in New York this week but I turned down an opportunity to fly up and see him. I found out the details of his trip on Saturday evening which meant I'd have had to break of prior engagements such as baby sitting my girlfriend's kids and taking my intern on his farewell lunch if I wanted to see him. I'm sure I'll regret missing opportunities like this later in life.

5. I have songs from every G-Unit Radio mixtape on my iPod.

I'm tagging the following bloggers to spread the meme; Mike Torres, Shelley Powers, Sanaz Ahari, Derek Denny-Brown and Doug Purdy

 

While browsing my referrer logs I noticed a lot of hits from a comment on Jensen Harris's blog post about the Office 2007 UI being licenced. Below is the comment which has driven several hundred page views on my blog

My reason for moving to a ribbon-like interface for the Phoenix release of RSS Bandit was because I was under the impression that the Ribbon was the wave of the future with regards to application user interfaces in Windows. However I just read a blog post by Mike Torres entitled More on the Office 2007 UI where he points out that practically every Windows application released by Microsoft this year has abandoned the traditional File menu and toolbar structure in a different way. Below are links to the screenshots from Mike's post [and one extra which was suggested by Omar]

1. Office 2007
2. Windows Media Player 11
3. Windows Live Messenger 8
4. Windows Photo Gallery
5. Windows Live Mail _Desktop
   
6. Internet Explorer 7
   

As you can se all of the above applications which where shipped by Microsoft this year embraced the idea of getting rid of the traditional File menu and toolbars yet didn't agree on what to replace them with. As a developer of a Windows application, it is clear to me that the traditional yet consistent File menu and toolbar look is now played out on Windows. The main question is which app I should emulate. If history tells me anything, I can't go wrong betting on Office driving user expectations around what Windows applications should act and feel like. I'm glad to see Infragistics on the list of vendors who will be adopting the Office 2007 UI guidelines. This means we'll likely inherit some best practices around using the Office 2007 Ribbon for free since we now use the Infragistics NetAdvantage GUI components in RSS Bandit.

If this means, I'm going to get people like Mike Dimmick flaming me for not living up to the vision of the 'Ribbon' then so be it. I'd rather that than an application that looked old and busted instead of being the new hotness. ;)

 

I'm using the Windows Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) as the technology for downloading podcasts in the background so that RSS Bandit doesn't hog too much bandwidth while downloading the latest Ze Frank video. However it came to my attention that there certain conditions that had to apply before BITS was able to be clever about downloading a file from a website in the background. The conditions are spelled out in the HTTP Requirements for BITS Downloads which states

BITS supports HTTP and HTTPS downloads and uploads and requires that the server supports the HTTP/1.1 protocol. For downloads, the HTTP server's Head method must return the file size and its Get method must support the Content-Range and Content-Length headers. As a result, BITS only transfers static file content and generates an error if you try to transfer dynamic content, unless the ASP, ISAPI, or CGI script supports the Content-Range and Content-Length headers.

This means you can't use BITS to download podcasts from the feeds of sites such as C|Net MP3 Insider because it doesn't provide a Content-Length header when retrieving podcasts. Due to this limitation I've had to implement a fallback mode where we use a direct HTTP download request to retrieve the podcast. This solution is problematic if large video files are being downloaded in this manner because all the PCs bandwidth may end up being consumed by this task. For this reason, I've borrowed a leaf from the RSS platform in IE 7 and will also only support this for podcasts that are 15MB or less.

I sampled a number of files over 15MB at http://audio.weblogs.com and didn't see many which were provided by a Web server that didn't meet the BITS requirements. Of course, I might be mistaken and there is some popular podcast which regularly provides files over 15MB and doesn't meet the conditions set forth by BITS. In that case, I'd consider upping the limit to something higher or providing some config file option to increase the limit. 

 

My girlfriend recently purchased an iDog for one of her kids and I thought that was the silliest iPod accessory imaginable. It seems I was wrong. Podcasting News has an article entitled The Ten Worst iPod-Related Christmas Presents Ever which has gems such as

iPod Toilet Paper Dispenser

Here’s something that we thought we should flush out of our system right away - the iCarta toilet paper dispenser/iPod player. The last thing we want anyone doing in the Podcasting News bathroom is making a #$#@ playlist for using the toilet.

The one that really takes the cake is the iBuzz. You'll have to read the article to see what that accessory does.
 

Earlier today I noticed a link from Mike Torres to a press release from ComScore Media Metrix entitled The Score: Blogs Gain Favor Worldwide which states

In recent years blogs have garnered significant media coverage in the United States for their ability to reach a wide audience. With more than one-third of the online population in the United States visiting blogs within a given month, it is clear that the category has become mainstream. An analysis of blog penetration by country in North America and Western Europe shows that the popularity of blogs is a worldwide phenomenon.
...

• Windows Live Spaces is the favorite blog site among the majority of countries studied, with 37 percent of all Canadians visiting the site in October 2006. Blogger.com had the highest penetration in the United States (12.4 percent) and Germany (9.7 percent), while the same was true for Skyblog in France (27.4 percent).

Interesting statistics although I wonder whether ComScore is including social networking sites like Bebo and MySpace in its reckoning. Based on how ComScore usually scores things my assumption is that they are going by number of unique users instead of page views which is where heavily trafficked social networking sites like Bebo and MySpace reign supreme.