Recently in Web Category

I've finally gotten around to the long-overdue task of properly linking to the sprawling reaches of my little Web 2.0 empire from the main page on Karlo.Org. From now on, if you're looking for my Flickr page, or my Facebook profile, or whatever, you can find it in the link of lists on the Karlo.Org home page. If you run into any problem using the new links, let me know -- they seem to work for me, but some services can be a little funny about profile links (I'm looking at you, Facebook.)

The NYT has an article on the launch of Cuil.com, a search engine by some Google alums. It's interesting, but I'm getting a lot of weirdness in the results for searches. When I search for "Tom Karlo" (Doesn't everyone throw their own name into a new search engine during the first session?) I get some really odd responses, including Google.com and on occasion, either 600,000+ matches, or zero matches. And when it does come back with matches it often has the weird pairing of my home page, and an image I've never seen next to it as my "photo". It also spat out fails for "Britney Spears," "George Carlin" and didn't include itself in the front page results for "Cuil." I suspect they're having some first-day issues.

Wordle.net is a fun little Java utility that turns any block of text (or, as in the case above, my RSS feed) into a beautifully rendered word cloud. Lots of fun to play with and coincidentally adjacent to some work I've been doing lately with my new project (more on that later.) Wordle gives the best result if you tell it to block out common words in the language you're submitting (for English, "if, and, but... etc.").

[via The Morning News]

If you have a Facebook account you can go here to see the new profile page design. I understand what they're trying to do with it - focus folks on user activity rather than static profile boxes - but I think they're going to take a lot of flack for it.

It's very much like FriendFeed or Tumblr - which is great for people who spend all day posting little tidbits for everyone, etc. But a lot of Facebook users are much more casual net users who are using it as a substitute homepage. By removing all of the application boxes that users had been employing to customize their profile, Facebook is disrupting one of the reasons why it's become so popular.

I've always thought of FB as "blog light" - the next step in the evolution from HTML to MoveableType/Wordpress to Typepad and finally to Tumblr/Twitter. Each has respectively reduced the barriers to entry for users. FB takes it even further by basically bringing your real world friends right to your "blog", which is what most private individuals want anyway (you're not posting photos of kids for random Internet readers, you're posting them for Aunt Ida.)

Application developers are going to feel particularly slighted as well... their profile boxes, which users used to be able to place wherever they wanted on their profile page, have now been relegated to the "boxes" tab, a virtual interface ghetto. Facebook says this is because they wanted to isolate the sometimes unruly interfaces of 3rd party apps, but that's kind of a weak excuse -- after all, it was users choosing to put these applications into their profiles and use them, so obviously the interface issues weren't causing that many problems.

(Part of the lesson here is how difficult it is to remodel a product once it's released to the public. The people who have adopted it were the ones that liked how it was laid out, even if it wasn't optimal. Going to a new, better layout isn't always going to get the response you might expect, although sometimes it does.)

Update: It seems like different people see slightly different layouts in the new system, but there are similar comments regardless... as seen on another blog talking about the new UI.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
I was using this originally to illustrate the earlier post on HD video... but frankly it wasn't a great spot for that. I still love this video, and the back story.

Alone in Tokyo HD from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

There's something really remarkable going on right now around the ability of consumers to create truly remarkable HD content and distribute it via the Internet. We've reach a moment where the production gear costs have dropped low enough, a fairly "average" computer like a MacBook Pro can edit in HD, and there are ready channels to distribute to the world, both in terms of technology (sites like Vimeo,  which hosts the above video) and the bandwidth and capabilities of end users.

HD video is leaps and bounds ahead of standard video in terms of how "film like" it can get, and the tools are now arriving that let individuals record very high quality HD video for as less than $2000 - cameras run $600-800, and a $1000 adapter called the Letus Mini lets you connect SLR lenses for "film like" depth of field and fous effects, and a $2000 laptop with iMovieHD (free with new Macs) is all you need to edit, output and upload.

Right now this is leading to a lot of playing around on sites like Vimeo's HD Channel, but it won't be long before folks are producing their own documentaries, etc. using this. It's going to lead to an explosion of niche HD content, plus I'm sure a lot of more widespread hits as well. And it's going to have a real impact on traditional broadcast media - when a home user can produce niche content with quality twice that of a DVD, you're going to see a lot of competition for all those low-budget cable shows trying to survive out there right now.

It's very exciting, and I'm looking forward to see how it plays out over the next year or two. One thing I know for sure - this means I'd rather have a full on computer, like a Mac Mini, attached to my HDTV rather than something like the AppleTV where I'm locked into only a few distribution channels.

It's such a great little hack on Twitter, it's hard to do justice. Just go look at Favrd.

One of the big issues for blogs these days is that most authors also generate a lot of online activity away from their weblog (this wasn't true in the pre-Facebook/Flickr/YouTube days). A great option I've found for Moveable Type users is Action Streams, which I'm using to power the "Elsewhere" section at the right side of my home page. The items aren't posted into the weblog, however, as per my old "link for date" posts from de.licio.us. At first I considered that a shortcoming (I wouldn't mind Twitter comments showing up in my blog) but for the moment I'm in favor of it, as I've realized that the combined activity on other sites would overwhelm the edited content in the weblog.

One problem I'm starting to encounter is that when you use meta-social sites like FriendFeed, which aggregate activity from the social sites, you can start seeing some circularities in your feeds... my FriendFeed feed follows my twitter and Facebook profiiles, but it's also able to post events into my Facebook profile via a plugin, and... uh... problems start to arise.

One of the biggest problems I had with transitioning to the new MT setup is that I've moved to the new MT 4.0 URL format, which substitutes dashes ("-") for underscores ("_") in the web address of posts.

The optimal solution: a perl script that rewrites the URLs intelligently. This was a much better solution than alternates I saw around the web, some of which included writing a huge .htaccess file full of rewrite commands, one for each old post.

There's still a ways to go; obviously I haven't figured out what to do with the old photolog, I'd still like to get my recent flickr photos showing in the sidebar, and for the love of God, I'd like to get my old image files downloaded from the last hosting provider.

A week or two I finally broke down and purchased a Nike+ sensor for my second generation iPod Nano. For those of you not familiar with this product, it's basically a super-fancy pedometer you attach to your shoe that communicates with your iPod wirelessly via a small attachment plugged into the bottom of the iPod (it only works with the Nano.)

In terms of base execution, it's fantastic -- it absolutely performs as advertised, records distance and pace, and your iPod can even tell you during a run how far and fast you've gone. After you run, your data is automatically uploaded to the Nike+ website, which keeps track of your training and can even track your exercise pattern versus long-term goals.

The quality of the fundamental project, however, make's Nike's approach to the web site extremely fustrating. It's a totally closed system (you can't even get an RSS feed of your run data, nor can anyone make a screen-scraper because it's entirely done in flash) and it's totally lacking in what we'd expect from any "Web 2.0" era site (think Flickr, Youtube, etc.) There are some community features, but they're weak and ad-hoc, allowing you to manually create "challenges" and add users to them. Why can't I simply connect with other people I know who are using this, and stay connected, a-la Flickr or MySpace? Or why can't Nike at least provide enough of an API (like Flickr, Amazon, or any other of a million of immensely popular sites) so that the legions of programmers out there can think up even better things, that will drive sales, etc.? Surely Apple understands this dynamic, so I can only assume that this traces back to Nike having a relatively old-school (Web "1.0") attitude around marketing, and around allowing end customers to use their data as they please and leverage relationships online.

That said, anyone out there using this, and want to join a friendly challenge group? Let me know.

(BTW, I'm not using the Nike+ shoes; I purchased the Marware Sensor+, which lets me use the system with my regular running shoes. It doesn't seem to affect accuracy to any material degree.)