buildcontext blog

Open office hours to discuss Mobile, Web and Product Management opportunities at Best Buy

2012-05-10T12:00:00Z

Let's face it really strong full time talent in the mobile, web and product areas are hard to come by and it's not going to get any easier. The pull to start your own startup is high and it's unclear if the big companies like Best Buy looking accelerate get it or are for real looking from the outside in.

Scarcity and friction are not friends...

Throw on top of the constrained talent pool the outsourced HR website, the standard corporate job description template, and (if you get that far) the gargantuan form you need to submit to be considered and you've created the highest friction experience for the very people who are so hard to find... I won't even get into the fact we are trying to hire people to deliver really exceptional customer experiences by putting them through what is certainly far from exceptional.

So...

In order to short-circuit this I am going to try a little experiment, I am going to hold virtual open office hours next Monday, May 14th from 1pm to 3pm CST.

Sign up to meet or share this link: Open office hours to discuss Mobile, Web and Product Management opportunities at Best Buy

These sessions are open to anyone, in them I hope to discuss what both our team is interested in working on and what you are. We are looking for full-time employees. Please share this ohours.org link with anyone you know who is working in the mobile, web and product management space that may be interested in learning about the work we are doing at Best Buy... hoping to talk to some of you and find a new way to meet, interact and get our message out.

Hope to talk to you soon. -Ben

Simplify your server using Dropbox, Selective Sync

2012-04-09T12:00:00Z

Icon: Linkz57

Everyone loves Dropbox for the simple and instant syncing of files between their devices but as anyone who runs their own website or blog knows it can often be a pain to get files to and from your servers... Dropbox is made to solve this problem, it just takes a little coaxing.

In this tutorial we are going to bring the simplicity of Dropbox to your server by selectively syncing your files, make those files accessible anywhere and your life easier.

Begin

This tutorial assumes you are using Ubuntu on your server it may work on other distributions with small tweaks. I run simple servers on Amazon EC2 and Linode, if you are just getting started start there.

I'm going to go a little fast with the steps here, my main goal is to get all this information together so the next person doesn't need to search half of the internet to find it like I did.

Step 1: Go into your local Dropbox folder and create a folder called Server, or whatever you'd like but if it's different you'll need to remember that later.

Install Dropbox

Step 2: Next, get a command line session with your server via SSH. Then let's check if you are on 32 or 64 bit.

uname -m

If it says x86_64:

cd ~ && wget -O - "http://www.dropbox.com/download\
?plat=lnx.x86_64" | tar xzf -

If it says i686:

cd ~ && wget -O - "http://www.dropbox.com/download\
?plat=lnx.x86" | tar xzf -

Step 3: Let's download a nice python script to help us manage Dropbox. And a bash script that we'll use to start and stop Dropbox.

mkdir ~/utils
wget -O ~/utils/dropbox.py "http://www.dropbox.com/\
download?dl=packages/dropbox.py"
chmod 755 ~/utils/dropbox.py 
wget -O ~/utils/dropbox_temp "https://raw.github.com/\
gist/2347727/108fc8af551cb4fdf7cdd08b891a45f405d283dc/dropbox"

Step 4: Run the Dropbox daemon from the newly created .dropbox-dist folder.

~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd

Step 5: Dropboxd will tell you "This client is not linked to any account..." and give you a link copy that and paste it in your local web browser, authenticate and validate the new connection.

Step 6: Once Dropbox is connected kill the daemon with a Ctrl-C.

Now that Dropbox is linked let's install it as a service in Ubuntu.

Step 7: First, edit the script and replace "user1 user2" with your server username not your Dropbox account. Then we'll move it to the right place, set the proper permissions and have it start on boot.

nano ~/utils/dropbox_temp
sudo mv ~/utils/dropbox_temp /etc/init.d/dropbox
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/dropbox
sudo update-rc.d dropbox defaults

Check if Dropbox is running, if it's not start it.

sudo service dropbox status
sudo service dropbox start

It's Alive

~/utils/dropbox.py status
-> Downloading 3,134 files (0.1 KB/sec, a long time left.
 Grab a Snickers)

Ahhh! Basically right now Dropbox is syncing your entire Dropbox to your server, for me that's not good so let's pare it down using selective syncing.

Selective Sync

Step 8: You will need to call the 'exclude add' command for each top level folder you don't want to sync, I'd suggest starting by excluding your biggest folder to save Dropbox and your server some work.

cd ~/Dropbox
~/utils/dropbox.py ls
-> Photos  Projects  Public  Server  Work
 
~/utils/dropbox.py exclude add Projects
~/utils/dropbox.py exclude add Photos
~/utils/dropbox.py exclude add Public
~/utils/dropbox.py exclude add Work
~/utils/dropbox.py ls
-> Server

Success?

Go to the Dropbox folder in your server home directory, create a file in it and let's test it out.

cd ~/Dropbox/Server
echo 'success' > success.txt

Check your Dropbox folder on your local machine, if success.txt just showed up you are connected!

Success!

The folder works both ways, make edits, add a new file and you'll see it on your server nearly instantly.

-Ben

"The 411 Parable": Make sure you are playing the same game.

2011-05-03T12:00:00Z

par·a·ble A parable is a succinct story, in prose or verse, that illustrates a lesson. [source Wikipedia]

Hardly a week goes by where a message doesn't arrive in my inbox stating someone has launched something we should have done or at the very least should immediately do now... we are all guilty of that reactionary thinking. When it happens to me I remind myself of what I'll call "The 411 Parable" and take a bit of time and figure out just what is really going on before I react.

The 411 Parable

Some time in 2007 Google announced to the world that 1-800-GOOG-411 was coming on the scene to save you from using a phone book by letting you to speak to find a local business, a nice simple feature that made your burgeoning mobile life easier.

That same day I can imagine in Redmond, WA inside the Microsoft campus an Outlook new mail chime rang... Google launched a 411 service, where is ours? and I am guessing the response was "It's on the list!" and time passed...

Sometime in 2009 someone revived the list and thankfully found a company they could pay to power Bing 411 at launch it was said...

This value-added content should give Microsoft some steady ground to stand on when going head-to-head against Google for the same local space.

...nice, I'm sure they were happy to have that feature covered. But just when the "head-to-head" competition was rolling Google announced GOOG-411 was no more... they'd captured all the human speech they needed to train their algorithms and were on to bigger and better things... Huh, voice recognition... algorithms?

I thought Google was just disintermediating that darn phone book?

Short story...

Take the time to understand what is driving moves... Make sure you are playing the same game, playing at the surface will leave you with nothing but a big bunch of yellow "disintermediated" paper as your "competitor" blows past you.

Insult to Injury

Oh and just so you know, in 2007 right around the same time GOOG-411 launched Microsoft had acquired TellMe for a tidy sum, they were one of the biggest players in the voice recognition space at the time that had captured over "10 billion utterances", Google was starting largely from scratch... just today I "wrote" the first paragraph of this post by speaking into my Android phone, thanks GOOG-411 for playing a bigger game.

-Ben

On balance, what games creators and startups know that big teams often miss.

2011-05-03T12:00:00Z

photo: digitalnative

I was talking to some game developers the other day about what it takes to build a good game we talked design, platforms, social, technology approaches, monetization and the hot buzzword heavy world of game mechanics... they gave me thoughts on how long a game takes and what it costs to build but then, surprisingly to me, we got to the meat of the matter...

Thinking we had just covered all the big rocks in making a game I said “Where do you spend most of that time?” and the three of them said without hesitation and in sync... balance.

Balance

In making a game the developers understand the interplay of these important forces is the game. Nothing stands on its own, it’s not the achievements, the graphic quality, the platform, whether it’s social or not... it’s really how all of that works together.

Too often we lose this working in or with big companies on big products and big ideas.

It’s easy to see it as a plus that you have enough people and money to put a person in command of each of these precious verticals knowing they are going to constantly push for the height of thinking, quite possibly they are industry experts in that vertical... the best of the best. The development teams pushing for the most advanced programming languages, the data guys pushing for bleeding edge approaches and tools, the social guys pushing to go “viral” (yuck) and the most connected maxed out sharing models and of course the security and standards guys telling you why all of that is a bad idea... it is needlessly complex and everyone ends up compromising their “vision” and not feeling good about it.

None of this is in service of the user or "the game" you are trying to play, the balance is hopelessly off.

In pretty much any run of the mill startup a balance, maybe not the right balance, is forced by scarce resources. In good startups product managers, customer development and a drive to minimize premature optimization keeps the balance in check but as you get bigger and more specialized we need to find a way architect for balance both in the vertical teams and with a product leader.

So my question for you in your vertical of specialty no matter what it is, do you find yourself in the ivory tower talking about the leading edge, best possible approach bar none and fight for it to the end... or do you spend a majority of your time on balance like my friends the game devs do?

I bet we can tell when we look at the final product.

-Ben

What ways do you build balance into large products? I’d love to hear what works and doesn’t work.

Android Browser Emulator - Test your site on a Nexus S or Xoom Tablet right on your PC.

2011-04-17T12:00:00Z

In late 2008 I put together a post that helped get the early Android SDK up and running as a simple browser emulator beacause I believed getting easier access to modern mobile browsers for the web development and design community was becoming a necessity.

Browser testing is critical to any web developer, designer… really any web professional. You need to know how your users or customers are seeing your work through the multitude of browsers and devices available to them, new ones become available every day. - Ben Hedrington, 2008

Well it's 2011 and to say a lot has changed in mobile would be putting it lightly, thankfully much of it played out in the way I had hoped back then. I'm seeing my work related Mobile projects growing like crazy and it's no longer just an iPhone world, Android is everywhere and even more of a necessity for any website.

Time to re-hash setting up an Android emulator on your Windows PC (Mac and Linux, my personal desktops of choice, coming soon...) this time let's emulate the current best of breed the Nexus S and throw in a Xoom (Honeycomb) tablet for good testing measure.

Let's get started...

We'll need to download and run two installers.

First lets grab and install the Java SE Development Kit (JDK) you'll need to choose the right one for your machine Windows 7 32-bit or Windows 7 64-bit. If you don't know your "bits" here is how to find out.

Once you have it, install it. All the defaults will be fine.

Next we will download the latest Android SDK grab the recommended Windows "installer" version for simplicity sake. Install it. Again the defaults will be fine.

Once the Android SDK installer finishes make sure the Start SDK Manager checkbox is checked and click Finish.

SDK Manager will launch if disk space is not an issue I suggest just downloading and accepting all packages so you will have every Android version at your disposal in the future. Click Install and wait a bit for your downloads to complete.

All our software is now installed, let's create some Android emulators.

Creating a Nexus S Emulator...

Click Virtual devices.

Enter a name no spaces, slashes or special characters allowed. Choose Android 2.3.3 in the Target field. Put 128 in the Size field. Create the Android Virtual Device click Create AVD.

Double click your new Nexus S AVD. I usually check Scale display... and choose 3 or 4 (inches). Click Launch.

Success! Unlock your new "phone."

Launch the Browser icon (the globe near the bottom of the screen).

Type in the URL of the site you'd like to test... and you are in business.

Extra Credit: Let's make a Xoom (Honeycomb) Tablet Emulator

Create the Xoom AVD, the Target for a Honeycomb Tablet is "Android 3.0" the rest you can figure out.

Start it up, I launched it at 10 inches.

Click Apps near the top of your new tablet's screen. Launch Browser.

Enter your URL and test your site in all its tablet goodness. :)

Hope this tutorial helps some of you get your sites ready for the mobile and tablet revolution. -Ben

Playing with stickers: Writing NFC Tags with Google's Android Nexus S

2011-04-15T12:00:00Z

near field com·mu·ni·ca·tion Near Field Communication or NFC, is a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology which enables the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimetre (around 4 inches) distance... [source Wikipedia]

As you all know NFC is the new hip way to bridge from the physical world to your mobile device... and the only way to understand something is to play with it right? Right.

Here we go...

First things first, you are going to need to get some NFC stickers in the mail coming your way. I found mine at TagAge in Finland so even more reason to get your order in early for their trip overseas.

Next you are going to need access to a Google Nexus S runnning Android 2.3.3 once you've secured that jump to the Android Market and install NXP Tagwriter from NXP Semiconductor. Believe it or not that was the hard part, now follow the simple steps in the app and you can program any writable NFC tag you come across.

An NFC tag beautiful, clean and new.

Open up the NXP Tagwriter Android app, choose Create

I went with a URL for my first tag and then typed in my blog's URL.

Hold your phone over the blank tag.

Success!

Now exit the app and return to the Android home screen. (The phone needs to be unlocked unlike the picture.)

Place your phone over the NFC tag, ding new tag collected! Click the URL you just received from the NFC tag...

Success!

Happy NFC tag writing, let me know what kind of interesting uses for the tags you come up with. -Ben

Google TV plus Ubuntu: The making of a simple powerful media server a family can actually use.

2011-01-01T12:00:00Z

I've built bulky, ugly, noisy purpose built media computers and wedged it and a few other media player devices that shall remain nameless under my slim sleek HDTV all aiming to push network/web video and web browsing to my TV... unfortunately it always ends up unwieldy and a bit of a hack.

Worse would the family even try to touch it? Never. It might as well have been a paperweight... but "it was a whole computer" I would say "just think of all the things we can do"... that was exactly the problem... complexity.

Enter Google TV

Enter Google TV specifically the Logitech Revue... nice and small, custom thin keyboard with trackpad (always an issue when building your own HTPC), powerful enough and nearly silent, a very solid web browser Google Chrome and support for DLNA basically making it a slim front-end for a media sever... oh and for my kids, one click TV to YouTube videos of Elmo and such... Sold.

Bring in the Ubuntu Media Server

So at my house we are nearly all Ubuntu, especially on the network side, we keep our files, video, years of pictures and music. The Google TV has a media player installed right when you boot it, it supports the DLNA standard like many of the connected devices we purchase today.

Needless to say sometimes getting new software on your Ubuntu box to play nice isn't easy, that's not really Ubuntu's fault some of the packages are not all at the same level of completeness yet or occasionally not maintained at all any more. So to save you a couple hours of trial and error, there are a lot of packages out there and blog posts about how to tweak those packages, here is a solid and simple solution for DLNA on Ubuntu for your Google TV or really any DLNA powered media consumer.

Simple DLNA Media Serving on Ubuntu

Download the latest MiniDLNA ('static' not 'src') from http://sourceforge.net/projects/minidlna/files/minidlna/

Extract the files:

tar -zxvf [The MiniDLNA archive you downloaded].tar.gz

Move the files to the right home:

cd [Where you extracted the tar.gz]
sudo cp -R ./usr/* /usr/
sudo cp ./etc/minidlna.conf /etc/

Configure minidlna.conf file.

sudo nano /etc/minidlna.conf

Change these settings. Set your file directories A=Audio, P=Pictures and V=Video.

media_dir=A,/mnt/data/music
media_dir=P,/mnt/data/camera
media_dir=V,/mnt/data/videos

Name your server.

friendly_name=Hedrington-Media

Ctrl-X and save the file.

All set... start it up!

/usr/sbin/minidlna -f /etc/minidlna.conf

Ubuntu backing for any DLNA device!

Start up your Google TV or really any other DLNA device and go to the Media Player, you should see your files right there and ready to play! It just works, same controls, nothing extra to turn on, log into or learn.

MiniDLNA is the simplest and best answer I have found to powering your media server and staying in the free and open source software world. Give it a shot!

Thanks

Special thanks to jmaggard and NETGEAR for making MiniDLNA happen and making it available to the open source community!

Mobile Commerce Daily: Best Buy takes third place 2010 Mobile Retailer of the Year

2010-10-15T22:07:29Z

Today Mobile Commerce Daily reports that our Mobile efforts at Best Buy rank third in a retailer of the year race they held for 2010. We are excited for all the positive words and promise we are getting ever more sharp on our customer focus and there is a lot more to come in the next year!

Mobile Commerce Daily: Best Buy takes third place: 2010 Mobile Retailer of the Year

Best Buy has taken third place in the 2010 Mobile Retailer of the Year awards due to its all-round excellence in mobile marketing and commerce, offering a strategy that is worthy of emulation.

There were many worthy candidates, but based on the nominations received from readers and submissions from this publication’s editorial team, Mobile Commerce Daily is convinced that Best Buy serves as a role model for retailers and merchants for its outstanding use of mobile.

“As a retailer we see a lot of benefits from getting a lot of more open, trusted information into customers’ hands by letting them use a mobile phone to get access to customer reviews and ratings from people like themselves,” said Ben Hedrington, director of mobile and Web strategy for emerging platforms at Best Buy, Minneapolis. “We want to reinvent ourselves as a connected retailer, offering the best of the Web and upgradiing our store by using these digital platforms and mobile apps—that is a priority.

“We’re not just focused on phones, but also tablets and connected TVs, and we think about all of these connected devices in the same breath as mobile,” he said. “We’re thinking about it more in terms of portability in general, rather than just the mobile phone.

“We’re definitely looking at impressive growth in mobile.”

Read the rest of the article >

Turning off HTC Sense UI on the HTC EVO 4G, Incredible and similar Android phones.

2010-05-23T12:24:00Z

If you are lucky enough to have one of the new smoking fast, beautiful Android phones from HTC the Incredible or the EVO 4G you have little to complain about... but... well... some of us just aren't in love with that HTC Sense UI...

Is a more standard Android experience is what you want? Well it's only a few settings away.

Below is the stock Sense UI home screen on my HTC EVO 4G (with a custom background only.) Let's get rid of it!

Just a few quick steps...

	Press the Menu button.
	Press Settings.
	Choose Applications.
	Expand Manage Applications.
	Wait for the application names to load, scroll down and select HTC Sense.
	Press the Clear defaults button.
	Now press the Home button on your phone. Check "Use by default..." ...and then choose Launcher.
	There you go, your new smoking fast phone in a more native Android flavor. Enjoy! -Ben

Wow... 'spy' Plays a Small Part in Helping Volcano Stranded Travelers

2010-04-19T08:27:29Z

Photo: Sverrir Thor

It's so humbling to see simple social networking tools like spy which I created on a whim be discovered and serve purposes on a level I never would have anticipated. I first saw this when people found and used spy during the crisis in Mumbai but just today I discovered...

'spy'ing on Volcano Stranded Travelers?

It seems the almost 1000 members of When Volcanoes Erupt: A Survival Guide for Stranded Travelers on Facebook are sharing and using a link to spy for the hash tag #getmehome. If this tool helps just one person get where they need to safely I am more than ecstatic.

Building on the Open Web for the future... there isn't an App for that.

2010-01-21T10:35:29Z

Photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

There is an interesting article I picked up today in Fast Company that quickly and succinctly cuts to the point of what these critical moves forward on the Web mean for the future. Counter intuitive to the folks very wrapped up in the "There's an App for That" mindset comes this article Killer Apps: Why App Stores Are Not the Business Model for the 21st Century which brings to the forefront the fallacies that every company creating, and more over controlling, an App Store concept for their business will lead to a nirvana of beautiful, useful devices and software for our collective future.

All quotes from the article.

In the age of the Web, developers can get their programs to end users without anyone intervening, so locked-down software sales will always be going against the grain.

...the App Store's true rival isn't a competing app marketplace. Rather, it's the open, developer-friendly Web. When Apple rejected Google Latitude, the search company's nearby-friend-mapping program, developers created a nearly identical version that works perfectly on the iPhone's Web browser. Google looks to be doing something similar with Voice, another app that Apple barred from its store.

Too many times in the Apple App Store's short life has controversy over gatekeeping cropped up, this generally isn't when Johnny Developer wants to deploy his 1,000th copy of a flashlight app to the App Store but when truly disruptive, innovative ideas are hatched, for instance Google Voice, that disintermediate Apple or its carrier partners from something they currently completely control.

Continuing to increase what is possible on the web, like HTML5 and it's related technologies are doing, ensure Apple or any other device or connectivity company will not define how technology effects our lives. Google Voice is a huge boon to how I use my phone and how people contact me from the transcription of messages to the transparent ringing of multiples lines... My Android phone let's me choose this time and sanity saving work flow for myself, Apple says my phone will work the way they want it to and AT&T says the data they choose will flow over their pipes.

Apple's app bonanza won't end anytime soon...

Yes... I'm not crazy, things generally don't just appear, get wildly popular and then disappear completely. The Apple App Store will serve iPhone users as long as the iPhone exists...

...but you'd be a fool to ignore the long-term trend in software -- away from incompatible platforms and restrictive programming regimes, and toward write-once, run-anywhere code that works on a variety of devices, without interference from middlemen. As different kinds of mobile devices hit the market, from phones to tablet PCs to smartpens to e-book readers and beyond, developers will find that trend harder to ignore. They'll need to create programs that can work not just on iPhones but on everything...

Fortunately, there's an app for that: It's called the Web.

'Nuff said.

Posted from AppliedHTML5

Early Experiments with Web Sockets

2010-01-20T14:09:29Z

Photo: z6p6tist6

Web Sockets are set to revolutionize the way the "real time web" works, today most websites use AJAX as a way to fake a real time dynamic experience... think a stream of Twitter tweets popping up relating to a current event. AJAX approaches that try to get to the "real time" end are similar to a kid riding in the back seat on a long driving vaction with their parents "Are we there yet?... Are we there now?... How about now?" constantly pinging their data sources asking if something changed. Web Sockets aim to change all that and simplify it for web users and developers across all web browsers and devices that contain them think Mobile devices, televisions, nearly anything with a screen in the future... you have to love open standards!

The Web Sockets API creates real time two way communications between a server and the end user allowing streaming of information back and forth just like a desktop application in real time without the waste of the current AJAX approach either checking too often when nothing has changed or potentially missing a new message between its checks the Web Socket will only transfer data when needed.

Well... Are we there yet?

We are not quite there yet, Web Sockets will require support on the server side and the client side but in my view both are progressing nicely. Here is a run down of the early Web Socket server side tool kits I could find.

Python
http://code.google.com/p/pywebsocket/
Ruby
http://www.igvita.com/2009/12/22/ruby-websockets-tcp-for-the-browser/
PHP
http://code.google.com/p/phpwebsocket/
JavaScript
http://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js (Powered by Flash as a fallback)
Erlang
http://armstrongonsoftware.blogspot.com/2009/12/comet-is-dead-long-live-websockets.html

Browser Support

Web Sockets are currently supported in the developer releases of Google Chrome and will soon be available in Mozilla FireFox.

I think I've heard of this before... Is this new?

There are many players in this space trying to make real time information to the browser possible some names you may have heard are Comet, Ajax Push, and Ajax long polling (as I discussed earlier). I found a great post for the more technical among us that helps you decipher the differences in these protocols for further reading on the topic.

HTML 5 Web Sockets vs. Comet and Ajax

Posted from AppliedHTML5

Experiment: Browser Based Geolocation - HTML5 Points the Future of the Web

2010-01-05T20:13:29Z

The adoption of HTML5 and its surrounding cast of powerful new features is going to be a huge boon to web users and points towards a very positive direction for the future of the web. From the smoother interfaces of canvas, local storage enabling offline modes for online email programs and the like seamlessly, online video free of dependencies like Flash, web sockets making the real time web a breeze without all the current AJAX workarounds, and so much more but I'll save all of those for future posts....

Today I wanted to finish up and release an experiment using the HTML5 Geolocation feature (sticklers, click here), a feature allowing your web browser (with your permission of course) to share your location, enabling any current website to tailor itself right to where you are... a powerful feature for todays increasingly mobile web user.

Why is This Important?

Today this level of convenience, all the applications you use every day seamlessly knowing where you are, is unheard of for the user as well as the web developer outside of proprietary built "apps" on iPhone or Android you need to seek out and download. But little do most people know those web browsers in their pockets on those same devices can do this today, opening the playing field of a personal local experience up to the entire web... no downloads, no waiting, no device lock-in.

The Experiment

My experiment started with a simple need, in the summer I drive a Jeep to work with a soft top and I prefer to have it down as much as possible, I mean sun in Minnesota only happens for a short stint i need to suck it up. What I needed was a simple view of the current temperature, maybe a radar map to look for any rain on the map coming my direction, not a huge list. In the early summer I quickly built a one page HTML and JavaScript mashup using jQuery, HTML5 (or Google Gears as a fallback) and the Weather Underground API to build a web page that did just that, polished it up a bit (let's call it a working prototype as of today) and hosted it on Google App Engine purely for worry free scalability to show it to you all.

Initially on load my experiment "Weather GEO" asks if I want to share my location, of course I select yes, this allows my browser to pull a location from my GPS, Wifi or internet address depending on what the device sees fit.

It passes that longitude and latitude back to my page's JavaScript I in turn query Weather Underground for the next two forecast elements and a radar map for that longitude and latitude and display them as soon as they come back...

Pretty slick... solves a problem in a simple way, just one click from a browser bookmark, no custom proprietary "app" code to build and it will work in every browser when HTML5 is fully adopted, but currently works in the major mobile browsers, Android and iPhone, in FireFox 3.5+ and any browser that has Google Gears on the PC, Mac and Linux... thats more than enough for me.

A great example of where the web is going and how progress on open standards like this benefit everyone, give my little experiment a try here http://bctx.info/wx. Let me know how it works for you, if your device is passing your proper location and what you think in the comments. Currently I am seeing the Droid have a problem with the code and have posted to the Android Developers Google Group.

* Ok, technically Geolocation is part of the W3C Geolocation Working Group, not HTML5 but it will largely be implemented with HTML5 so it really has become part and parcel of the browser based future.

A Hands on Post From and About Google's Chrome OS

2009-12-28T21:44:29Z

In order to get my feet wet with Google's Chrome OS (in it's current developer build state, Chromium OS properly) and test a real world workflow with this "web only" device I figured I'd put together a blog post with some photos courtesy my new DSLR never leaving the Chrome "browser" now grown up to an OS... let's go.

Getting Ready

It wasn't much of a chore to get Chromium OS up and running on my Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook, I decided to go with @hexxeh's build and run it directly from an SD card rather than build Chromium OS from source on my Ubuntu box for simplicity's sake. I only had one small hiccup moving Hexxeh's image file to the SD card in Ubuntu which was cleared up by visiting his wiki, he has instructions for loading the USB/SD card from Mac and Windows too.

Start Up

I booted from the SD card and in less than 10 seconds had a login box, wow... much quicker than my daily stand by Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Currently with most Chromium OS builds the first thing you need to do is log in as an admin user and fire up your wifi before restarting and logging in as yourself with any Google account, no problems here. Once you are logged in the Chromium logo in the top left shows you the menu screen with a nice launcher, it also loads up your GMail and other Google tools for you right off the bat.

More Than Meets the Eye

The web app I use for photos on this blog is Flickr so I fired it up and popped my memory card into the card reader not knowing exactly how a "web browser" would handle that... not to my surprise but certainly to my delight a slick little content browser popped up auto mounting my card and allowing me to view the files in what else but Chrome. Using Flickr's uploaders on Linux in general is not the prettiest endeavor but it all worked I quickly discovered the ESC key is the key to closing full screen windows and all was well.

Conclusion

I easily fired up WordPress and threw together this post of no more than a little geek and eye candy just to see how it all held together and I would say for Chrome OS' current young vintage that things are very well. Hardware support was awesome, no tweaking for me (some of that likely is credit to Hexxeh, thanks!), the software and its all web based workflow work well for the cloud residents like me and I think the simplicity will appeal to the current desktop bound user who's lost files, gotten burned by viruses and simply doesn't have time to understand all the bells and whistles those boxes are now full of...

...I didn't miss semi-transparent flying minimizing windows or things "snapping" to my screen once during the writing of this post.

Installing Google Android for Mobile Browser Testing on Mac OS

2009-11-06T20:36:29Z

Browser testing is critical to any web developer, designer… really any web professional. You need to know how your users or customers are seeing your work through the multitude of browsers and devices available to them, new ones become available every day.

About a year ago I wrote a post walking you through installing the Google Android SDK on your machine to use as a mobile web browser. This time I am doing it on Mac OS X but I might just make a Windows version too if I get a little time... let me know if you'd like to see that happen.

Let's get started...

Get the SDK...

Go to the Android SDK page.
Download Android SDK for Mac OS X (intel)
Unzip it and move it to the root of your home directory.

Set it up...

Open Terminal, enter the following commands...
```
cd ~
nano .bash_profile
```
Paste this into the new file, or add it if there are existing contents.
```
export PATH=${PATH}:~/android-sdk-mac/tools
```
Press "Control X" and save the file.
Close Terminal.

Load up an Android OS...

Open Terminal, enter the following command...
```
android
```
The Android SDK and AVD Manager will open.
Choose "Available Packages"
Click the arrow beside "dl-ssl.google.com..."
Check one or more Android Platforms, I chose Android 1.6 and 2.0 for good measure you can choose whatever versions you are targeting.
Click "Install Selected" and then "Install Accepted"
Your SDK is now complete and ready to run... Stick in your Android SDK and AVD Manager let's make a device!

Getting your virtual Android device ready...

Chose "Virtual Devices"
Click "New..."
Give your AVD a name for this tutorial I chose "default2.0"
Choose one of the Android platforms you downloaded in the "Target" pulldown, I chose Android 2.0.
Give the SD card some value, let's say 25mb.
Click "Create AVD"
You should return back to the home screen, click your new Android AVD's name and press "Start"
Success!

Create an icon of sorts to launch your new emulator...

Open Terminal, enter the following commands...
```
cd ~/Desktop/
nano Android.command
```
Add this command to the new file...
```
emulator -scale .7 -avd default2.0
```
Press "Control X" and save the file
Run this final command....
```
chmod 755 Android.command
```
Close Terminal
Double click on Android.command on your desktop... Success!

Embedding my first Google Wave into Wordpress!

2009-06-03T10:06:29Z

This is a test!

Below I embedded my first Wave "Hello World... I mean Wave!"... The first of many likely... let's see what it looks like out in public... I know many of you probably can't see it... This is a test!

UPDATE: I believe and claimed this as the first Google Wave embed in a blog outside of the Googleplex! My claim on Twitter.

For those not in Wave yet here was a screenshot from 4pm 6/3/09.

Here we go...

UPDATE: Now just including the screenshot from this post as Wave is slowly passing away.

Best Buy speaks Google App Engine at Google I/O 2009

2009-06-02T12:05:29Z

I was very excited to not just attend but be a part of Google I/O 2009, Google's annual developer conference. A Best Buy contingent of Steve Bendt, Gary Koelling and myself as well as uber developers Curtis Thompson and Thomas Bombach made the trip and were part of the Developer Sandbox.

I/O's Key Points

The keynotes (day 1, day 2) were both great heralding Google's confidence in the web browser centric future (woo hoo!) powered by what is possible in HTML5, open communications and collaboration systems like the introduction Google Wave and the cloud based power plant that is Google App Engine... among so much more. The whole time they hit hard their belief that developers outside their company, like the ones in the room, are the only way all this becomes possible. They left us inspired for where the web is going and future open architectures we can share versus build ourselves allowing the user, be it the end user or developer, the portability they need... great to see that becoming a reality.

Best Buy and App Engine

Best Buy was asked to come speak about App Engine and our point of view, that we have shared many times, that it projects a strong model for the future of web development that allows the creativity of a web developer to shine through and takes huge infrastructure and scalability best practices from Google and gives them to you on a sliver platter... no pagers to carry and drastically less system set-up and runtime headaches... growing into a true platform as a service not just boxes in the cloud. The Google crew shot a few videos of us, we'll see what was smart enough to stay off the cutting room floor!

We talked to many in the Developer Sandbox, answering the question "Best Buy? Like you mean the retailer?" more times than I could count but once we got through that relayed the message that we are out there, experimenting, trying, showing our company what is becoming possible on the web via new methods of getting things done, notably App Engine and open APIs like our own Best Buy Remix. It's a great time to experiment even... no especially at a large company that can easily slow down as I've said here before...

Google App Engine and Open APIs clearly show where the web is going, the playing field is leveled… get out there and deploy those ideas you say you have scrawled on those napkins that you say are going to revolutionize the world, the tools you need to prove it are out there right now.

...these movements only further speed up rapid evolution on the web, jump in now with two feet because it's not slowing down any time soon. Experimenting out in front is the key no matter your size. -Ben

Problem Solving: Get Google App Engine working on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)

2009-05-03T08:10:29Z

By default the Google App Engine SDK doesn't run on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackelope)... You can fix it!

After a little searching I noticed neither posts about this issue nor a quick fix were top of the Google rankings... hoping to resolve that with this post and get all of us Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) users up on App Engine. UPDATE: This post is now first when searching for "App Engine Ubuntu Jaunty Problem" and even "App Engine Ubuntu Jaunty" in one day, nice!

Once you download the SDK as usual and run one of your apps on a default Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty install you will see errors galore, you see Ubuntu 9.04 ships Python 2.6 and App Engine is built on Python 2.5 and they are not friendly!

Here is how I got my environment running, I will update the post if I run into further errors.

In a terminal install Python 2.5

They will coexist on the system.

sudo apt-get install python2.5

Edit dev_appserver.py in your google_appengine directory

Change the first line in dev_appserver.py...

#!/usr/bin/env python

....to...

#!/usr/bin/env python2.5

App Engine should now load and run your apps properly!

I believe this is the simplest noninvasive way to let App Engine find what it wants, Python 2.5, and let Ubuntu carry on as it likes with Python 2.6 and beyond. Here is a source on this issue, commenters have many different solutions.

Hope this post helps at least one of you, -Ben

Exploring your way into Social Media: The Presentation?

2009-02-23T22:07:29Z

This post exists because I was asked to create a presentation of the high points of what I've discovered in my exploration of social media that could be conveyed to others just getting started looking at the space. I was asked to include why I was so interested to build my apps on my spare time (spy, retweet radar, and ConnectTweet) which are really about poking, prodding and learning about the social media conversation's value by experimenting with it... not just technology hijinks (although that's interesting too).

After a fair amount of brain freeze (still only partially defrosted at this point) I knew this "presentation" was largely a series of links to tools, great blog posts and examples... I quickly determined PowerPoint, the grand old corporate standard for this type of thing, could not capture or fairly represent the multifaceted and decentralized conversation around social media it dawned on me -- a blog post -- which by it's nature is a containing thought, linking to others to expound upon it is open for debate [comments] just like the current malleable state of social media.

So here it is my "presentation"...

I come from the perspective that you don't start doing something just because it's the cool new thing - the buzzword buzzing in your peers/bosses/co-worker's ears - rather you should see true value to your relationships, your work, your future... or simply some entertainment value. I am going to try to give you a walking tour through interesting aspects of social media channels specifically Twitter, which at it's roots is a communication channel for short pointed messages... essentially an email message without the "blah blah" bloat and open for all to read. My goal will be to give you tools to discover why you care about participating in this channel, if in the end you just don't see it that's ok... forced conversation isn't fun for anyone.

outline How it all goes down.

Listen first!
- Discover by Listening
- Discover by Trends
Listen and Participate for Business
Participate for Yourself - Your Growth, Your Career.

Listen first!

Your boss asked you why you aren't on "The Web 2.0 Twitters" yet... you are itching to go out and create that Twitter account, even though I told you not to... don't, you need to learn to listen first. [And don't worry (s)he's just asking because (s)he can't figure it out :)] So many people go out create those shiny new empty accounts maybe add one or two friends [who don't participate] and say "it doesn't work", "I don't get it" and "whats so interesting about this" here is the truth it's not interesting or useful by itself... it's a communication channel not a television! You need to discover interesting conversations and people and then jump in on it, your empty account is one of hundreds of thousands out there who didn't realize discovery and a little work is a must.

Discover by Listening

Let's find something interesting and see whats being said about it... this is where my first tool 'spy' comes in but there are many others to look at too. The idea with 'spy' is to "listen in on the social media conversation going on around you" on something you already care about for example say the name of your company... spy on Best Buy Now we're going to see all sorts of interesting things being said... you feel the vibe of the public towards you today... people hate us, people love us, people post weird [really weird] things... but in that mess at least one things will get you motivated you'll read a post and say "hey, I can fix that for him", "hey, she needs this product to make that better" or "hey, that's completely not true where do I find this guy!" or any of a myriad of other responses... there it happened you found a connection an interaction you want to have this is one bud of a conversation in this global decentralized chatter going on around us every day. If you are an Apple nut or are argumentative about politics, among so many other examples, your sure to not go dry on topics to listen to and converse about. Take something you personally care and plug them into tools like Twitter Search, 'spy', monitter.com or maybe check out Twellow a list of Twitterers by their interests when you do get started you'll know who you want to listen to.

Discover by Trends

One of my personal favorites is to watch trends, not "what's next on the internet" but what are people talking about casually right now... Google can step aside here this is the rawest view on open conversations on the web -- real time conversation trends. If you take a look at the "Trending topics" or "Trends" sections on Twitter Search and 'spy' respectively click on any one that interests you you see up to the second conversation on that topic from hundreds or maybe thousands of participants. Yes you are going to see bad TV shows (American Idol and your sort I am looking at you...) celebrity gossip, and a bit of spam but real time shines during national or global events if you are watching you'll know about any national event first far before the traditional media can report on it, even full time cable news. During events like the US National Debates or the terror in Mumbai a real powerful side conversation is being had in real time of which you are listening and can participate, I remember watching the debates on the TV with real people's Twitter commentary scrolling on my laptop in full screen on 'spy' totally changes the experience. My second tool plays in this trends space, there is a concept on Twitter where you "retweet" someone's Twitter post when you think it is important and you want more people to see it, more about retweets here. My tool retweet radar gathers all those "retweeted" messages and attempts to pull out relevant terms and plot them... this view quickly allows you to see what people think is interesting so far today and even right now, an interesting way to keep your finger on the pulse of the conversation and a fun little project.

linksListening, trend watching.

Listen and Participate for Business

Listening as closely as possible to customers and interacting with them should be the first thing that comes to mind from a business mindset when we discuss these tools, we've already talked about it a bit above. You now have the unique ability to put your ear to the masses, ask them questions about your product and share in their excitement or pain using them. In this medium some customers are turned into zealots on both positive and negative sides of the fence, they have a megaphone to speak their mind and they do. This can be good for you, they serve to keep you honest, keep a spotlight on you and spread the word of your brand and products this channel allows you to keep up a conversation with zealots and use them as a leading indicator for your decisions, maybe even including some of them in those directions. As an example, the day a new Best Buy marketing pieces hits people's homes the social media channels erupt in conversation both good and bad an almost immediate barometer on the impact of that offer, particularly today a get $100 off an iPhone offer hit all Best Buy RewardZone Silver customers and the social media conversation was very positive. A further example, the day RewardZone Black was accidentally emailed to millions of people, Barry Judge our CMO noticed the increased conversation on the 'spy' in his office and quickly issued an apology through his Twitter account and his blog a first for Best Buy in both speed and openness to admit our mistake. Best Buy and other Twin Cities companies were written up in this Pioneer Press article for our early social media efforts including blueshirts from the stores, corporate workers and even our CMO on Twitter not to mention some nice 'spy' coverage. Outside of Best Buy using 'spy' to watch the social media conversation in the Hub, HP has implemented 'spy' in their internal marketing portal to help their workers keep up on the conversation around their company. Chris Brogan and others covers ideas for business well in video and bullet point format so read on.

linksListening to Social Media for Business.

Participate for Yourself - Your Growth, Your Career.

Wherever and however your expertise, passion and occupation line up there are a limited number of people who do what you do, the way you do with the experiences you have... social media thrives on this fuel. People who throw out that new idea, business tip, graphic design guide, free font or nugget of web development advice are lifted up. People are eager to hear from others cross pollinate ideas and practices and generally to learn, putting yourself in this pool and being looked to for advice by this international group of "followers" can propel you to learn more, advance your skills and show you the market out there for you as a leader in your space. I have been writing this blog for about 8 months now, polluting the internet and social media with my then poor, now slightly better, writing abilities; I progressed, I helped people, I participated in thousands of conversations with people I would have never met including many big names on the internet and getting my name out there. Your ability to use social media, build your niche and "personal brand" as they say is nearly limitless. If you are the "best X person in the office" take it to the web, I guarantee you will learn something further and people will recognize your skills and you will be rewarded as many times as I feel I have been, your company, your industry, your world can be flattened by these barrier crossing social media connections.

linksBuilding your skills and "personal brand."

HP keeping up on their social media "Buzz" powered by spy.appspot.com!

2009-02-12T11:52:29Z

I just received word from Pam Dearen at HP of some great launch news partially powered by spy.appspot.com!

Our new internal Digital Marketing Community Portal launched as planned on January 15. One of its top features is our "HP Buzz" -- our custom version of your Spy app.

It's truly exciting to see big business gravitating toward social media and empowering employees to listen fulfilling my vision for 'spy' -- it was never about the technology or the website but finding and amassing these relevant and timely social media conversations and getting them in front of people who care about them but may not yet participate in the social media space.

HP's "Buzz" section of their internal Digital Marketing Community Portal does all of this well, the employees in this group will see a constantly refreshed and relevant view of what people are saying about HP, if they only find one actionable nugget of information from their customers via this method it would feel great to me and I am positive they will.

I really appreciate the quick and relevant work they have done here, the very kind attribution and the clear view and message that empowering employees with more direct channels to listen to and interact with their customers can only better the experience for all customers and help to shape business decisions we all make every day. Kudos to the HP Digital Marketing team for getting out there, testing and trying new avenues and listening to their customers wherever are.

Click for full size.

The Birth of ConnectTweet - Combining Your Voices on Twitter

2009-02-11T11:46:29Z

ConnectTweet is a simple utility built under the concept [reality in my opinion] that all groups, companies or brands are just collections of many people whose passion, ideas and behavior completely shape it. Often those people's voices are drowned out in communications by a need to feel "official" instead making it feel robotic, monochromatic and cold... this is especially evident as companies are showing up in social mediums like Twitter where forced news releases and push marketing stick out like a sore thumb.

There needs to be a better way for a company to be represented on Twitter by many passionate people on the inside versus a robot or a single voice.

Making it happen with ConnectTweet

ConnectTweet flips that equation for groups and lets the real people all across your organization to show through on Twitter and be your voice. They can have real, human conversations with customers and share their unique perspectives and passion for their work as people at the front lines of your organization. This unique transparency shows the vibrancy that networks like Twitter have is inside your organization it's just waiting to be shown the light of day.

First, you need to find and tap the passionates... the people all over your organization many of whom may already use tools like Twitter for their own uses, ask them to be your voice, to share openly their perspectives, interesting tidbits (guarantee you will learn something too) and to answer other users questions about the company on Twitter tagging each of their company posts with #companyname.

ConnectTweet can be then setup to gather up the tweets from the approved users and post them to your organization's Twitter account allowing your followers to clearly see the human voices on the inside and give your organization that true human interface your customer always wanted to see.

A simple example

Below ConnectTweet has posted to the Twitter account of one of my tools a message I relayed from my personal account to let the tool's approximately 1000 followers know about something cool that just happened. I simply posted this to my account, and the below tweet appeared in @retweetradar's stream. If ten people worked for retweetradar.com they all could do the same thing creating an organic stream of information about the site right from the people on the front lines.

ConnectTweet is in a limited Alpha test but I would love to hear if you'd find it useful and would be interested in trying it out.

Retweetradar.com gets a new design!

2009-01-19T13:01:29Z

I have to admit it's nice to have people around you that can drop a killer new web design with one hand and build in, from the beginning, an understanding of how those designs can be executed on today's browsers with the other...

Jason Galep stopped by out of the blue and asked if he could contribute a design for retweetradar... the contemplation period was brief and something like a "heck yeah" came from my mouth... I have no delusions that I am a designer and this opportunity was perfect timing for both of us. We worked back and forth over just a couple hours and a few emails and it was executed... a rapidly built, high quality, and great looking new face for retweetradar.com!

Hearing some great feedback on the design already via Twitter... what do you think? Tweet your feedback here!

Captured http://retweetradar.com as it is today here on Flickr, since we all know the train doesn't stop and changes will keep coming!

Thanks for all the interest in my little project! -Ben

I'm a "Web Development Elf" cool?... Yes cool!

2009-01-17T14:11:29Z

Didn't want to let this pass in the night, blogger and strategist at Undercurrent Mike Arauz picked up on the apps I have been exercising my brain on lately (retweetradar.com and spy.appspot.com) out of the blue and wrote a couple great posts... I mean the titles alone are classic, but they have some prefect messages that everyone in the web industry better be hearing and understand. You are hearing it from me, now listen to Mike.

Act I: Bigger != Better

From the first installment: The Web Development Elves

These great little sites didn't require a multi-million dollar creative agency. They didn't require a creative brief. And they didn't require a million dollar investment from a major corporate client. They just needed the curiosity, ingenuity, creativity, time, and effort of one clever tinkerer.

I really appreciate that Mike, dead on. Mike writes on the same vein I am about theses applications, it's not the change in technology that's critically important here it's the openness and pervasiveness of the new tools... anyone can do this... it's no longer just the game of big IT or big agencies.

Small websites, tools, and online services, built by independent developers will eventually dwarf the contributions of the major digital creative agencies.

Act II: Efforts playing outside influence the day job? - Benefits to Best Buy (my employer)

In the second installment: Web Development Elves II: Double Agent Mike picks up on the excellent article in the Economist "Generation Y goes to work" that mentions some of our work at Best Buy and sees:

Another Net Gener at the company cobbled together a mobile-phone version of Best Buy’s website for fun in seven days in his spare time.

Mike got in contact with me and asked... yep, he got me again... turned it into this post: Web Development Elves II: Double Agent Read the whole post, but this was his final flurry and I couldn't agree more!

Big corporations are so used to working with big agencies on big projects that it's difficult for them to adapt to this new way of working. Small projects. Iterative process. Limited bureaucracy. But, best of all, small budgets and limited risk.

Every corporation in the world should be seeking out this kind of embedded intelligence, and making effective use of it. Create systems for discovering these talents. Create regular rewards for employees who share these talents. And create ways for groups of employees to find each other and begin collaborating.

More and more you will find that this is how people expect to work - flexible interests, collaborative, non-hierarchical - because this is how the internet works. Adapt.

Fun stuff! ...Now back to the lab...

Getting Windows 7 Beta running on Ubuntu Intrepid via VirtualBox

2009-01-11T15:02:29Z

I'm throwing this post out there that brings together the things I learned as I worked to get the free Windows 7 Public Beta running on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex via VirtualBox. Hoping this post helps those trying to do the same, in all my Google queries on these issues information was sparse... a few hours wasted on my part will hopefully save you time. This is written in a "just the facts" style and not a full "how to" but should get you where you are going avoiding some of the pot holes.

Proof it's possible!

Tips

Getting the Install Media - Downloading ISOs

Ok, so Microsoft is having trouble serving download demand thus I tried many paths (torrents, 3rd party links, etc.) to download these multi-gigabyte files trying to avoid the rush... Don't! Getting partial or corrupted files is rampant even from the right source. I found the cleanest path was to download through the TechNet Customer Preview pages, they don't have near the traffic pointed to them and seemed reliable. Follow all the steps and save your key to a text file on the desktop when you get it. I suggest downloading the 32 bit version for VirtualBox use, although 64 bit is supposed to work in the latest version unless you are going to give it a ton of RAM (4GB plus) I'd just stay with 32 bit.

Second tip here... no matter how much you want to use Linux/FireFox/wget to download, I tried them all... Don't! Follow their rules, fire up a copy of Internet Explorer however you can to download the ISOs and then copy them over a network or large flash drive back to your Ubuntu machine. The ActiveX (I know, gross...) downloader appears to have less issues corrupting files which just plain saves you time.

Getting VirtualBox Ready

Either... You already have VirtualBox running on Ubuntu and have run a number of virtual OSs without any issues... Great!... Nope, thats what I thought... Make sure you force an upgrade to the very latest VirtualBox available, doing anything on older version causes blank screens, "Aborting" of the OS and other things that waste your time. Or... You are new to VirtualBox, in this instance you are probably better off, go to VirtualBox.org and grab the latest version.

Setup a new VirtualBox "machine" choose Windows Vista as the type and give it at least 1GB of RAM and 20GB of hard drive. In the network area I suggest you choose the "Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (82540EM)" adapter rather than the default, Windows 7 seems to like it better from scratch. Connect your downloaded ISO to the CDROM and it should boot from it by default. You won't even have to ever even burn that DVD, beautiful.

Installation Bumps and Bruises

Install speed, blank screens, file expanding... Installation will be SLOW don't shut it down and restart when you are impatient, I did that about 5 times, it is working unless the VirtualBox aborts of the installer throws errors.

Can't find "install.wim" - Your ISO is corrupt, you are going to have to download again unfortunately please make sure you download if from Microsoft directly and via Internet Explorer and the custom downloader. I downloaded two corrupt version before I gave in and followed the rules too, thats 5+ GB of wasted time and downloaded bytes.

Virtual machine crashes and returns to Virtual Box with the status "Aborted" - For me, all these issues were due to running and old version of VirtualBox and corrupted ISOs.

I hope some of those issues I dealt with help you get you copy up an running, now go beat the tar out of it and let Microsoft know if you will be using it in the future or sticking on the Linux side of the fence. -Ben

All feedback is good feedback... especially when it's from Tim O'Reilly! - retweetradar.com

2008-12-28T09:07:29Z

Saturday afternoon Robert Scoble sent out a simple tweet letting people know he popped up on the retweetradar (much appreciated Robert!), we had been talking about use of interesting metadata, for instance retweeted information, possibly being used to rank quality posts on Twitter in the comments of his blog posts about a better Twitter Search.

Then out of the blue I see Robert received a tweet back from Tim O'Reilly with feedback on retweetradar!

I read it, thought about it, and you know he was right on... the mixing of terms, people and links made the cloud too busy and "people" were not the topic of the tweets they we just authors and interested parties... I needed to jump to work couldn't waste my chance to show Tim and the many others showing attention yesterday what could be done.

I reworked the interface so "people" and "links" had their own area but were still prominent and displayed the top ten of each among a few other minor tweaks. I let Tim know I made some changes, not expecting a response, but par for the course on this odd day I got one! Tim responded that the tool was now more useful to him.

I sent a tweet thanking Tim for taking any time to look at my little app and then sent him the link to my previous post on retweetradar's launch. I wanted him to understand this wasn't supposed to be a technical feat but that I was trying to evangelize the use of the amazing tools we have at out fingertips today to create anything we like on the web, in this instance Google App Engine and Open APIs. Suffice it to say Tim got it, as the father of the real concept of Web 2.0 should!

Quite a day indeed... one for the books... -Ben

retweetradar.com - One days work from concept to launch with Google App Engine... Scobleized!

2008-12-22T12:09:29Z

So I was getting a little restless and decided to work on another Google App Engine app, this time without all the Python learning curve and with some real world experience with the Google tools under the belt from http://spy.appspot.com. The goal was to see how fast I could go from concept to useful application leveraging a few of the revolutionary tools we all have at our fingertips today. In the end with about one days work an app was released, likely with a few bugs, but some fun things happened and I believe a bit of foreshadowing of the future of building web apps.

The Concept

I had an idea that I really wanted to extract meaning from a large-ish set of social media messages in near real time and visually trend it over time, showing topics heating up in conversations even while still slightly off the conventional news radar. We've all seen lately the groundswell social media conversation routinely outpacing tradition broadcast media in speed and openess of accounting, this app would be yet another way to put your finger on that pulse.

The class of information that looked interesting was "retweets" in other words messages where Twitter users were quoting someone else's post, essentially saying they liked it, or spreading the word. Tech blogger Robert Scoble called out the same last Friday saying "[Retweets] ...by the way, great place to find news!"

The How

So now to the how, obviously Google App Engine was my choice for delivering this application, it's ease of access, familiar development environment, ease to scale and obvious lack of initial cost make it a winner -- Paul McDonald and Tom Stocky being very great folks to talk to, among other Googlers on the App Engine team I am sure, helps as well.

Next I needed the information, Twitter's great search API acquired with the Summize purchase makes pulling tweets in near real time a non event. Now the value add, the real magic in the idea was to pull relevant information from the tweets and trend them, for that the lesser known Yahoo Term Extraction API was chosen, it's simple interface, reliability and quality results. So the parts were chosen... we have the ability to capture social media posts, process out key terms, save, count and display them on the web... very nice. So in the equivalent of one days work over the last two days I took these parts and pieces, shook them up with jQuery and released http://retweetradar.com to the world.

The Outcome

The outcome was astounding http://www.retweetradar.com launched publicly via a Tweet and FriendFeed posts at around 8pm CST on Saturday, given the work done on Friday and Saturday certainly no greater than one common work day from start to launch. Once Sunday came around I tweeted the news to a few folks, Dan Zarrella was one he has done work on the data behind viral messaging on Twitter another of note was Robert Scoble to close the loop on his tweet about the value of retweets... then things took and unexpected turn... an inconspicuous but cool "like" came in from Scoble on Friendfeed.

Next thing I know Robert Scoble is using me as an example in a great blog post about events the mainstream media and even Internet media miss...

Robert says:

I love developers who try new things out. Check this out. Is this on TechMeme? No. Plus using Google’s App Engine, which is another trend we’re tracking: cloud computing.

I couldn't agree more with the topic of that blog, even if I wasn't involved! You did read it right?

This isn't about launching another web app...

The fact this is possible is the real star here, the ability for anyone to bring an idea to the web in a highly reliable and scalable way for little to no initial investment shows a bright light toward the future... folks used to say the same for picking up some shared hosting for $5.95 and knocking out some PHP but realistically that app tipped over the second it saw real traffic and was hard to say whether it would be up day by day based on the other people, number of whom soaring each month, who shared your hardware.

Google App Engine and Open APIs clearly show where the web is going, the playing field is leveled... get out there and deploy those ideas you say you have scrawled on those napkins that you say are going to revolutionize the world, the tools you need to prove it are out there right now.

So, draw your own conclusions to the viability of my new app retweetradar -- No, please do! Contact me with feedback on whether it is useful and any ideas to make it better -- it's really not a huge concern long term... but I don't believe it is possible to argue that these tools be it social media, cloud computing or whatever you want to call them are truly leveling the playing field, flattening the world and company hierarchies and making whatever the future of the web will be possible for anyone.

'spy' makes "15 Useful Google App Engine Applications" on LouisGray.com!

2008-12-04T20:35:29Z

My little Social Media 'spy' application http://spy.appspot.com makes "15 Useful Google App Engine Applications" on LouisGray.com written by Mike Fruchter! I just slid in there at 15... hoping to keep plugging along adding useful features and using 'spy' to expose more and more folks to the value of Social Media.

Google App Engine really does make it possible to kick out an idea out into the world delivering scalability, quality and efficiency right out of the gate. I hope developers continue to discover it's power, Python and Django are nothing to be afraid of in fact I really value learning them.

Thanks again to Mike and Louis!

'spy'ing on Mumbai? Floored that my little app can help...

2008-11-27T21:33:29Z

As Pete Cashmore of Mashable, Dan Farber of CNet and many others have reported Twitter and social media in general are playing a huge part in receiving accurate and timely information from the crisis in Mumbai.

While not in those leagues, in the last twenty four hours I've received notice of a number of posts written by bloggers looking to help people keep an eye on the events unfolding in Mumbai in real time and linking to http://spy.appspot.com/find/#Mumbai some of them written by people with family and friends too near to the events... I am floored... This tool I created largely on a whim had no delusions of helping people in situations like these but none the less I am humbled to see that it has helped even one person in a context like this. It appears at some points the use 'spy' was seeing peaks at almost eight times the average number of requests per second from the previous days... wow...

It's true social media opens many personal opportunities... to flatten your company's ladder, to enable passion in any niche space, to truly listen to your customers, constituents or opponents... but surely filling in this vital communication gap, reporting on a critical and emotionally charged event in a personal and unfiltered way, enabling people to keep closer to events effecting their families... is enough for me to say these channels are here to stay. Yes some folks tweet very inane events of their life, but today even skeptics need to step back and see just what these open channels allow.

Best Buy: I Spy Twitter - Social Media Efforts at Best Buy and My App 'spy' Featured in the Pioneer Press!

2008-11-23T14:08:29Z

Julio Ojeda-Zapata technology writer and columnist at the St. Paul Pioneer Press and author of twitter means business: how microblogging can help or hurt your company wrote a nice piece today in the Sunday Pioneer Press titled "To twit or not?" [Update: PDFs here] about three Minnesota companies finding some success on Twitter excited to see one of them was Best Buy.

Julio captures well a few of our early efforts namely @BestBuyTulsa221 and other folks in our stores Tweeting to help customers, @jbweb using Twitter to find others in the company passionate about projects she is working on crossing existing hierarchies effortlessly and @BestBuyCMO shows the power of open thinking and openness to feedback all the way at the top. Really exciting stuff, and I love the sub headline "Best Buy: I Spy Twitter" couldn't be more perfect!

I am personally excited Julio specifically calls out the ideas behind my work on the application 'spy' (more on why I created 'spy' here) and how we used it to display Best Buy buzz on in the "Hub" of our headquarters, exposing everyone to the Social Media conversation and it's relevance to our business. I believe, especially in economies like today's, finding new ways to tune into the conversation around your company can only help you focus on the right things and solve customers problems more quickly.

Thanks to Julio and the Pioneer Press for great coverage of our early efforts hopefully there will be more fun to report as this whole space moves forward, I know I am not stopping here.

This may be a bit self promotional but capturing Julio's 'spy' coverage here:

Ben Hedrington, a Web developer for the company's BestBuy.com division, is such a Twitter fanatic that he created a new way to troll the twitterverse — along with other "social media" services such as FriendFeed and Flickr — via a built-from-scratch search engine he has christened "Spy" (spy.appspot.com).

Though fashioned in Hedrington's spare time, Spy became an instant Best Buy hit. At one point, a big screen in Best Buy's vast main lobby had Spy displaying the latest Best Buy-related buzz on Twitter. Spy has come in handy for Best Buy-related events, too. A screen behind the speakers is typically present, displaying a rolling series of event-specific tweets so staffers not physically present are able to chime in on discussions by using their Twitter accounts.

Even Barry Judge, Best Buy's chief marketing officer, has Spy running in his office so he'll know what is being said about his company on Twitter. Judge, a recent Twitter convert, said the service complements his blog and is a good way to gauge customer sentiment while speaking directly to his clientele in a way that feels genuine.

When Best Buy recently botched a phased rollout of a rewards-card program (meant to initially target 1,000 folks, it was e-mailed to about 7 million instead), Judge used his "BestBuyCMO" Twitter feed as well as his blog for mea culpas.

"Full transparency was helpful for maintaining trust," Judge said. "Twitter gave me that visibility."

How To: Install and Browser Test Your Site With Google Android Right on Your PC

2008-11-21T22:16:29Z

Update 4/2011: A more recent guide to setting up an Android Nexus S and Xoom (Honeycomb) emulator on Android 2.3 and 3.0 is here.

The post below is for Android SDK versions 1.1 (2008) and under.

Browser testing is critical to any web developer, designer... really any web professional. You need to know how your users or customers are seeing your work through the multitude of browsers and devices available to them, new ones become available every day. I wasn't able to find a quick answer to browser testing on the new Google Android mobile platform so I blazed a trail, captured and boiled down the steps so anyone can follow and get Android up and running on their Windows PC quickly and painlessly.

Installing the SDK and Browser

First things first visit the Android SDK download page and download the Windows version of the SDK.
Create a folder under C:\Program Files called "android-sdk"
Un-zip the contents of the Android SDK you downloaded into this folder.
Now that you have the all files you need to edit your "path" so Windows can find the emulator when it is run.
- Right click on "My Computer"
- Select "Properties"
- Click the "Advanced" tab
- Click on the "Environment Variables" in "System Variables" scroll down to "Path"
- Double click on "Path" move to the end of the "Variable value" and paste in this path (don't forget the semicolon to close the previous path) ;C:\Program Files\android-sdk\tools
- Click "Ok" on all open windows.
Ok now the SDK is set up to run, lets quickly create some shortcuts icons to launch our emulator.
- Right click on your Desktop, mouse over "New" then click "Shortcut"
- Paste this command into the entry field then click next emulator.exe -datadir "C:\Program Files\android-sdk" -skin HVGA-P
- If you like give your shortcut a name I chose "Android - Standard" (I chose "Standard" for a reason if you want to try the other versions see "Extra Credit")

Success!

Double click your shortcut and you should see the Android emulator starting up, it does take a little time the first run.

Doing Some Quick Testing

Once the emulator phone boots, click "Menu" on the phone and proceed to the browser.

Click on the Browser icon
Click "Menu" again then click "Go to URL"
Type in the URL of the site you are interested in and see what your users see!
That should be enough to get you going, there is a lot more to find in the Android emulator poke around and understand the experience on these new devices and keep looking out for new ways your users are seeing your site.

-Ben

Extra Credit

If you are interested there are three more iterations on the Google Android screen that will be in users's hands. Create shortcuts for these commands if you'd like to try them.

emulator.exe -datadir "C:\Program Files\android-sdk" -skin HVGA-L

emulator.exe -datadir "C:\Program Files\android-sdk" -skin QVGA-P

emulator.exe -datadir "C:\Program Files\android-sdk" -skin QVGA-L

Paving a Path to the Truly Mobile Web: Mozilla Fennec Alpha 1 Released

2008-10-20T20:30:29Z

My back story: I recently got into a friendly argument with some Mobile experts on a RWW Live: Mobile App Development call, I threw on my rosy colored glasses and spoke of a time where the Mobile web browser has access to device features like GPS, Contacts, etc we could leverage what we learned on the web and build even cooler more contextual and helpful Mobile Web apps that worked everywhere... and was told maybe... someday... but for the foreseeable future we'll be building our apps 20+ times and asking carriers permission to do so (listen to the MP3, really!)... well the news today strikes me well, the glasses are rosy again!

Mozilla has the Vision

Today Mozilla fires the first shots across the bow of the future Mobile web, or as Mitchell Baker and many others put it "One Web." Today Mozilla launched the first alpha release of Fennec it's mobile browser that has goals to re-envision how we will use our Mobile device's simple web browsers.

[Quotes from FennecVision]

Fennec will bring a true Web experience to mobile phones and other non-PC devices, yet take advantage of the specific opportunities for new and useful user experiences enabled by mobility and telephony.

Even in it's first release it will break huge ground delivering the first of breed access to the device's GPS and they have goal to do the same across many other device features.

It will integrate smoothly with device features, including easy initiation of phone calls from Web pages, access to local search, maps and directions.

Curing Fragmentation? (ok at least a start)

Fennec will be the mobile Web browser that content and application developers can target to create great software for mobile phones, rather than the plethora of native platforms and programming languages required to reach people in a mobile environment today. Any developer with skills in HTML, CSS and JavaScript will be able to develop for mobile.

Hard to argue with any of this, in my mind aside from the carriers this is the biggest limitation seen today with Mobile development.

Don't overlook this Mobile Web milestone

This seemingly small browser release will in the future be noted as a milestone in the evolution of Mobile and the Mobile Web. The path this release sets into motion, I believe, will make possible to reuse the years of learning we've compiled as the web grew up moving our experiences Mobile with the same rich capabilities of the browser we have on the desktop. On top of that web learning we throw in access to key Mobile features like GPS and likely soon address book and calling... the ability to really build for a users context is now real, making the Mobile web browser the true platform of the future... and delivering, as closely as possible, One Web. A web that sits in the palm of your hand and works seamlessly with your life regardless of your current location or device.

Rosy indeed... -Ben

Can Making Social Media a Spectator Sport Move it to the Mainstream? - Why I Created spy.appspot.com.

2008-08-05T09:23:29Z

There is much conversation among bloggers lately about targeting early adopters versus the mainstream, as Scoble would say the passionates versus the non-passionates, should we be excited when the early adopters love our product or service but the masses don't understand it?

No, we shouldn't we need to find ways that show the value of what we do to the mainstream otherwise we'll be here talking to ourselves for years... how can we create that passion, or at least show ours?

The creation of my Google App Engine project 'spy' has created a wave of conversation among my close daily contacts, in my company and even from the Google App Engine team itself, but to me it's not the JSON feed compositing, the jQuery goodness or even the fun of trying out the App Engine itself... none of that is really that new or complicated it's about simplicity and visualizing the social media conversation that give meaning to the applications like Twitter and FriendFeed and I believe a larger understanding of social media in general to its 'viewers'.

Viewers?

Yes 'viewers', many need to see the value for themselves before they'd ever jump in and create that first FriendFeed account while we, the early adopters, scurry around and try to sign up for the newest thing in the first hour it's created (Plurk, Identi.ca, Cuil anyone?).

You see, I talk to (real "normal") people every day and similar things happen...

Me: "hey, I saw a great post on FriendFeed today, I commented back a tweet to Robert Scoble and he responded back to me in like 5 seconds" or maybe "last night Leo Laporte 'liked' my post about spy!"

Them: "huh, cool I guess"

it just doesn't mean anything to them... I got the opportunity to talk to people I respect and have never met in a here to for unprecedented manner thanks to social media... but to them it is chatter, buzzwords, etc... if I would have got an email maybe that would have meant something to them?

These back channel social conversations just don't hit home yet for the masses, it is really cool but not impactful to their life... this is where my idea for 'spy' was born. How could I make listening into the social media conversation about something you care about as low impact as turning on your TV. How can you show someone meaningful discourse via these new channels that they are overlooking or discounting?

A glimpse of social media from your armchair

So I did something about it, I combined feeds from Summize and Friendfeed to bring together the posts over a given time period and set them to scroll using some packaged JavaScript libraries, this created a simple interface that put in your face exactly what is being said about something that is relevant to you, say a conference you happen to be at, a company you work for, watch a news event unfold in front of your eyes before the US media is reporting it or maybe the news on your favorite presidential candidate.

Tipping Point?

What I saw was once I put something to scroll on a TV in front of someone that they care about people perked up, they laughed, they showed their friends, when a negative or odd post about their company or cause showed up they said "why would people say that online" my answer was two fold...

a) it doesn't matter why they are saying it, they are... and we need to be listening

and

b) if they are saying it online they are, at least, saying the same thing verbally to all of their friends and it is affecting your company or cause... and we need to be part of the conversation, it is our brand

The next logical question from them was "how do we respond?" Yes! This engagement tipping point I believe is what social media needs, it's not about newer technologies it needs to be about the conversation its value and its increasing relevance to everything we do.

From our early adopter lens here is no reason that everyone in your company is not participating in the conversation and monitoring their interests, but you need to start from somewhere you need to put the candy infront of the masses and let them decide the value for themselves to me visualization and simplicity are the key to this tipping point.

Responsible Corporate Laptop Stickering!

2008-05-29T19:41:29Z

So lets say you are a web guy at a big mid-western corporation and you at the Web 2.0 Expo this year and pick up a handful of cool stickers, then you see folks like Scoble (Mac, PC) and everyone up in the Blogtropolus with their laptops stickered end to end... you need to use those stickers... you need to be like those valley guys... you need to show where your allliances lie and spread the word... but can you? You've got the standard leased HP laptop, even with the barcode right at the top formally proclaiming you as a cog in the machine.

I think you can... You just need some Responsible Corporate Laptop Stickering!

How to

Grab your Clear Contact paper (available at most general home goods stores like Target and Wal-Mart, it's usually used for covering old cabinet shelves) and a scissors, choose a size bigger than your sticker, cut cut cut...

...place your sticker on the face of the Contact paper and cut around the sticker, peel off the paper backing and spread on your laptop cover as you like.

Ta da!

Now you have a canvas for showing off your stickers and if worse comes to worse you can peel it right off.

Re-positionable, removable you've got it all!

The Mobile Web may just may drive forward the web of tomorrow. - Thoughts from Mitchell Baker's (Mozilla) Keynote

2008-05-09T09:22:29Z

Photo: Duncan Davidson

I wanted to capture my thoughts intermixed with quotes from Mitchell Baker, Chairman, Mozilla Foundation at the recent Web 2.0 Expo keynote entitled Opening the Mobile Web, it was truly a great concept and conversation and eye opening for me to see there is real commitment to making the browser (which Mitchell would say is a poor metaphor, but that's another story) the true platform of the web regardless of the device. Video: Mitchel Baker: Opening the Mobile Web

Your Mobile experience just may be your web experience of tomorrow...

Seems counter intuitive huh? it did to me at first... we all know where we are as far as Mobile capabilities... browsers are clunky and don't support the same things, the connection is slow and the screen is small so everyone you talk to says, "dumb down your design for mobile," "find a few most important things and put them on the first page," "think about your user only having a few seconds, in a rush, to get your key data," after we hear all that we simplify our application, for mine it was just search and find a store for http://m.bestbuy.com my first run at a quick Mobile Web prototype... but is this really the direction we are heading because of technical inadequacy?

Mitchell Baker says no, and I very much agree... we are doing this because our customers want it to just work, to have unfettered access to our information from any context and any device... to simply and efficiently get to what they need wherever they are.

You should not be thinking about what data can I get to or I've got this device so I can get to this data... ...or this device has a phone on it so I can't really get to the Internet I can only get to some part of it... that's a lousy setting... doesn't work well for people doesn't work well for developers -- there is no reason we need to build a world that looks like that...

The key of the Internet should be the same and what is that key that core it's information... What can I get to and what can I do with it... and that should not be dependent on the device I am holding.

Right, I agree give people access to what we know wherever they are, but the trap you quickly fall into is creating the Mobile version of everything, firing up new web servers, cutting features, rewriting copy, creating hundreds of Java apps... doubling (probably more) your work and removing at least some user value all in the name of making it Mobile... we need to find ways to put the critical information and functions back and make them work in the Mobile context without all this rework.

Because Mobile is different right?

Mitchell sees this trend too, we are all designing for the "new Mobile use cases" and that is all good and fine but asks are they really new? Web users want easier access to more and more relevant information, using less keystrokes and have it available from wherever they are... is that new? No... it's not... she said and I believe, these paradigms will become more and more the accepted web (notice I didn't say "Mobile") practice, but it will involve a little rewiring.

I bet in a few years all of those use cases web are finding today for people using Mobile will be equally important wherever we are and that being at home doesn't mean we will live with outdated or clunky techniques... so I'm on a Mobile device I want things quickly I want the information I want, I want to get at them with fewer keystrokes... why won't I want that if I happen to be sitting at home?

These use cases are convenience cases that are driven by the constraints of the Mobile device that we will find very useful on machines that have bigger screens and memory and permanent connections... there are constraints when developing for the desktop we don't have with mobile devices... mental and human constraints, experience constrains us... we have had 35 years of desktop and laptop machines and coming up on 15 years of the graphical world wide web... those form knowledge, experience and baggage about how we approach things... as we explore the use cases of Mobile devices we will find new ways to use our computers that will be equally important if we are sitting in an office or at home on a differently formatted machine because mental constraints are often the hardest to get past.

Putting it out there, pushing the envelope towards “one web”.

There is one web for most people the Mobile Web is irrelevant, it should be something we don't think about and basically is something we are not aware of... there is one web.

Mitchell is a "one web" purist, as you would and should expect from someone driving forward these concepts and taking them to reality and we should all appreciate it, it will simplify both our and our users lives.

I tend to take a different but very related tact, from everything I am gathering the browser can and will be the center of the Mobile Web as many of us had predicted and hoped. The work we are now doing to understand, optimize and simplify the web as part of Mobile use cases will be rewarded by our users and I can sleep better knowing that within the near future creating hundreds of versions of a Java clients will quickly go from a "feature" to a funny memory of the past like the classic "Under Construction" animated GIF.

Working within the current Mobile web browser set is possible -- it's not always fun -- but it is possible and relatively reusable across many devices... As the iPhone metaphors and quality browsers emerge (WebKit, Mozilla) it will be even clearer that this is the path...Why not jump in now?

Jumping in...

That's the way we will see the constraints and the creativity and this odd openness of expectations that has to be fulfilled on Mobile devices move back into our entire web experience... how do we get there? it's a better world for users... there is one web... you don't have to choose... your device doesn't limit you to the data of experience you can have.... well to get there we need and open development platform, an open web based development platform and of course coming from Mozilla we view FireFox as that platform....

Hear, hear Mitchell looking forward to developing for Mozilla Fennec and the open Mobile Web.

I'm ready to build for the "cognative surplus" - thoughts from the Clay Shirky - Web 2.0 Expo Keynote

2008-04-29T08:49:29Z

Photo: Duncan Davidson

Shortly after the keynote by Tim O'Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week we were treated to a talk with Clay Shirky author of Here Comes Everybody, his talk for me crystallized why the phenomenon of social interaction, sharing and co-creation is thriving on the web today and why this "little" emergent concept might just be getting started changing the world.

Thankfully the talk was captured on video by NewsBlaze.com: Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo (Video 17 minutes) and just now transcribed by Clay himself.

Foundation

Clay began foreshadowing this story with a story from the early industrial revolution as we put our collective minds and “civil surplus” to use creating libraries and museums, education for children, and electing leaders; that massive change from rural to urban and industrial ways of life taxed the minds of everyone involved... he told us the "cognitive heatsink" in that time was gin, dissipating the brain cycles and complication of changing from overwhelming our minds.

Fast forward to the 20th century as more and more of the workforce started working 8 to 5, Monday to Friday a new concept emerged... free time. With this new free time, we were taxed to figure out what to do with it. We needed to fill it... along came the new "cognative heatsink" television "dissipating thinking that may have built up and caused society to overheat", successfully filling our time with entertaining stories and calming those pesky brain cycles as we adapted to the new way of working.

Human thought… burnt to a crisp.

Clay tells us today our "cognative heatsink" of choice, television, consumes 200 billion hours of human thought in the US alone, to put that in context Clay did some back of the envelope math that tells us the entirety of Wikipedia, all the pages, edits, talk pages, lines of code and the translation of every language is the equivalent of 100 million hours of human thought... That's right, our "cognative heatsink" today burns about 2000 Wikipedia's of human thought a year, in the US we spend 100 million hours (1 Wikipedia) a weekend just watching the ads.

This all builds to the premise, how do we harness this cognitive surplus and really to what magnitude could this change our society? He believes that media is a triathlon - “people like to consume but they also like to produce and they like to share”... but often we, the creators of the current web, don't always allow or design for all three. Clay says "The interesting thing about a surplus is you don't know what to do with them at first, you can't... hence the sitcoms and the gin..." and that's ok, but now that we are realizing it and there are a few good examples and experiments out there, but what are we ready to do now to put this surplus to work?

"Even a small change could have huge ramifications, lets say that everything stayed 99% the same, people watched 99% the television they used to but 1% is carved out for producing and sharing, the internet connected population watches roughly 1 trillion hours of TV a year that's about 5 times the size of the US in terms of consumption... that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects a year work of participation... I think that's going to be a big deal, don't you?"

Exposing the possibility of participation.

Clay's premise: "It's always better to do something than do nothing..."

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan screws something up and they didn't? I saw that one; I saw that one a lot when I was growing up.

Grown men sitting in their basements pretending to be elves [referring to World of Warcraft]... At least they were doing something!

Even Lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter by little captions, hold out a invitation to participation, when you see a Lolcat what it essentially says is if you have some san-serif fonts on your computer you can play this game too... And thats a big change, right?

I could do that too...

Building to a crescendo, what are we doing here? "We're looking for the mouse."

Clay tells a story from a guest at his dinner party:

“… a dad sitting with his 4 year old daughter watching a DVD, in the middle of the movie she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen... seems like a cute moment, maybe she was seeing if Dora was back there, but that isn't what she was doing... she was rooting around and the cables, Dad said ‘What are you doing?’... she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said ‘looking for the mouse’”...

“Here's what 4 year olds know a screen that ships without a mouse ships broken... Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for...”

“It's also become my motto, when people ask what we [the collective industry] are doing... ‘we're looking for the mouse’ we are going to look every place a user or reader or listener or a viewer has been locked out has been served a passive or fixed or canned experience and ask ourselves if we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus we now recognize could we make a good thing happen... I am betting we can.”

Building My Context

Clay’s story is both easily relatable to what we are seeing on the web and eye opening at the same time when you realize we haven’t even scratched the surface. The amount of time we burn off is staggering and the problems we could solve with that surplus are great. Working every day on the web we all know that Wikipedia itself along with other examples will be huge markers of our time, the level of collaboration and connectedness of the world it took to build these initiatives is unprecedented but the question always is creeping around “is this a fad?,” “who really does this stuff?,” “is this sustainable?,” “would I let those people edit my stuff? they’ll wreck it.” Clay’s story in part shows that the collective brain that is our society is looking for some exercise and genuinely wants to contribute; they need us as to open up, give up control and ask for help... to build participation and collaboration at the core of what we do and not as a bolt on non-integrated side forum to burn off their cycles.

Much of what we do, even as for profit corporations, is play in markets of quality of knowledge, quality of perspective and trust all of which could be bolstered significantly by listening and participating in an unfiltered way with any collaborator willing to pick up the mouse and keyboard. In the next projects I consult on, I promise to find a way to include "the mouse" in the box as a design goal rather than a reactionary bolt on.

Thank you Clay for the great talk...

Returning from Web 2.0 Expo - Going to start writing...

2008-04-26T20:23:29Z

Just returned from the Web 2.0 Expo, learned a lot, talked to and heard many smart folks talking about what is going on today on the web and where we believe it is all going. By writing this I am committing to distilling much of what I heard in order to better build my context for my work and join the conversation rather than being an observer.

Me: Twitter FriendFeed Blog