This presentation is over a year old but I have just discovered it via a link on the 4iP blog so Ewan has my sincere thanks as this is a great presentation. One of the things I do at Jiva (at least in theory) is write the copy for the apps. I struggle with this quite a bit as while I don’t have much trouble writing relatively coherently on my various blogs I do find it difficult to find the right tone for copy on applications and even more difficult to be consistent throughout them. For the most part I stick pretty closely to her guidelines just due to the fact I tend to look for inspiration at sites she recommends (and maybe worked on!) and I am particularly keen on one quote;
We aren’t writing, we are speaking in text
Enjoy the presentation;
[Nat Torkington on the O'Reilly blog regularly posts 'Four Quick Links' - a format that I have always liked - particularly as it would allow me to post a bit more often and share the many things I add to my shared items in Google Reader. Hopefully Nat won't mind me pinching his format!]
Flickr CC Attribution Helper Greasemonkey Script
http://cogdogblog.com/2009/05/17/flickr-cc-attribution-helper/
Alan Levine works for the New Media Consortium in the US (publishers of the Horizon Report amongst other interesting stuff). He has built a hugely useful tool for those of us who use the combination of Flickr and Creative Commons to brighten up our blogs but have to fiddle with sorting out the attribution details. Equally useful (for me anyway) is that he has given me a format for my attributions! I wonder if I could make this work for using in my Keynote/Powerpoint presentations?
On Aardvark Research
http://blog.vark.com/?p=74
Here at Jiva we are pretty interested in the work Aardvark are doing and have enjoyed having a play with it since we got our invites. This blog post is a really interesting insight into the process they have been through as far as using different research techniques in the development of their app. I’m not sure we ever think of it in such a formal manner but our research work broadly falls into the same three categories.
On Semantic Web: What it is, and what it will never be
http://mashable.com/2009/05/14/semantic-web/
A post on Mashable from Stan Schroeder that actually has little to do with the wider semantic web but does nicely articulate some of the problems with Wolfram Alpha and why its much vaunted ability for users to ask natural language queries means very little when you can get better results with simple queries in Google.
Jump into the stream
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/17/jump-into-the-stream/
Post from Eric Schonfeld on Techcruch (for what its worth I only really read Schonfeld now on Techcrunch, well apart from when Arrington kicks up some kind of furore!) This post is essentially a justification for the investment and hype around the concept of realtime streams. Its interesting stuff and their does certainly seem to have been a shift towards this concept in recent months. More and more sites seem to resemble a Twitter/Friendfeed/Facebook hybrid and it’ll be interesting to see if this continues.
Trying to identify the mythical ‘Google killer’ has become something of a sport in certain circles online. Not so long ago Cuil was being hyped to the rafters only to be a crushing disappointment when it finally saw the light of day. Yahoo is actually driving alot of innovation in the search space with its open strategy with tools like BOSS and Search Monkey but something about the chaos that seems to surround Yahoo seems to taint this great work and it gets little love.
The latest next big thing is apparently WolframAlpha. First lets get the obvious prejudices out of the way – naming your app after yourself is narcissistic in the extreme but that shouldn’t get in the way of a great service. Also what the hell is a “computational knowledge engine” – I hope the Plain English Campaign get hold of that one.
My main impression from trying WolframAlpha out was that this was along way from a competitor to Google. Certainly in its current form it is more a competitor to Wikipedia or more traditional reference materials. At best it was able to give me results to one in three of my queries and the results it gave were no great (though I did like the format) and Google was able to get me the same, or better, answers in the first couple of results. By all accounts it handle mathematical and scientific queries better (not surprising as it is built on Mathematica) but that is hardly going to appeal to a mainstream audience.
I’m not knocking it out of hand – I’m sure that as its database expands it will become increasingly useful – as the way with these things – but at the moment it feels very much like a specialist tool, the kind of thing you might have access to in a University Research library or the corporate equivalent rather than something like Google.
I certainly think the hype has hindered the launch more than helped it. They certainly achieved wide publicity but I have seen as many negative reviews as positive but hopefully they will cope with the spotlight rather better than Cuil did.
For reasons that will soon become apparent to anyone who take even the most passing of interests in what gos on here at Jiva I have been thinking alot about the concept of white label products lately.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pray/337725635/
Now being a child of the DJ era my definition of white label (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_label) required a bit of tweaking so I’ve been doing a bit of reading and researching and here are a few notes on what I have come up with.
The Wikipedia definition of a whitelabel product is “A white label product or service is a product or service produced by one company (the producer) that other companies (the marketers) rebrand to make it appear as if they made it.”
Now thats fine but not exactly inspiring – the rest of the article gives a few useful examples and draws the comparison to the white label records of my youth but its generally a weak entry.
A recent(ish) post from ReadWriteWeb about Netvibes gave some insight into their whitelabeling strategy (http://business.netvibes.com/premium-universe.php) and how they had shifted focus to that from an initial focus on the early adopter, consumer market;
[Netvibes] CEO Freddy Mini explained that the start page paradigm hasn’t really taken off beyond the early adopter set but remains useful as a driver for sales of the company’s new enterprise and “branded portal” offerings
The company also cut its burn rate (expenses) by 50% during the same period.
Since starting to offer enterprise and branded products, though, Mini says that Netvibes increased its revenue 4X in the last 3 quarters of 2008.
LOVEFiLM is another example of a company embracing whitelabeling alongside its main offering. The UK Netflix clone/competitor has whitelabeled dvd rental websites built on its infrastructure and using its distribution for companies like Tesco, Odeon Cinemas and WH Smith (it alway bought the Amazon DVD rental business in the UK). It used these sites not only to bring in much needed revenue but also to increase brand awareness due to prominent ‘powered by LOVEFiLM’ buttons on all the sites.
A different take on the whitelabel business model is White Label Dating – a business that gives itself over totally to whitelabeling its comprehensive dating site technology while sharing revenue with these ‘partners’ who essentially concentrate on audience building and sales and outsource the technical matters to WLD.