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We’re fixated on music over here, but we’re also a bunch of UX design, code monkey geeks. John Ford is getting close to putting the finishing touches on our first WP plugin.
Can you guess what it does?
Also, feel free to suggest a better name. I couldn’t come up with one, so I created the worst possible mashup of 2.0 product name spellings.
(originally uploaded by maria flash)
Blogs will be Record Labels, and Bloggers will be the new Music Moguls - BlogJs anyone?
Within 2 years, the leading music blogs will become what used to be called ‘Record Labels’. The people running them will be those sharp, tuned-in, hyper-networked and resourceful BlogJs formerly known as bloggers. They will use their blogs as the primary attention channel (yes - attention really is the new distribution) and will dish up a complete, interactive and highly relevant multi-media experience that will include TV shows, chats, webcasts and games. Forget about ‘websites’ and browsers - the BlogJs will do it on all platforms and devices.
The future brings 1000s of micro-music-channels that will literally broadcast - or rather, ‘narrow-cast’ their longtailing creations — be it text, audio, images or videos — to their hungry subscribers using MediaRSS feeds and customized my-stuff-pages such as [fiction alert] imoogli, beatwibes amd muflakes that will ‘live’ on any connected device, e.g. your mobile, your TV, your computer, your interactive bathroom screen, your wrist watch, your wimax-ing car radio, or your new P2P global gaming network. Widgets will continue to become instant, ubiquitous mini-site modules that will allow anyone to re-distribute any kind of content, to any device and any platform, anywhere. Most marketing will be done through and with the users - and some of them will get paid for it, too.
[...]
n less than 2 years from now, ubiquitous and fully legal yet ‘feels like free’ music offerings will bring us music bloggers that will become bigger than the biggest radio DJs we’ve ever had. And just like a lot of successful radio personalities before them they will move on to become A&R people and label owners, too. The difference is, of course, that they will have powerful, direct, zero - friction distribution channels at their disposal, and a loyal global audience, built-in and ready to go. All they have to do is keep on earning and retaining the attention of their users.
[...]
It’s a bit choppy and reaching, but Gerd Leonhard’s full article is a must read.
Along the lines of the article, a major part of what I’m trying to do in this spot is build an attention economy around the dotmatrix project; not just to spread the word of what we’re doing, but to help evolve what we’re doing.
I’ve been jumping between pimping local music, exposing instances of music impacting culture and delving into thinking about the business of music — from where we were to how the industry is folding to where we might go. As guest bloggers begin to post here with similar but varied opinions, drivers, experiences, the dotmatrix project’s direction will undoubtedly be influenced.
[insight] The genesis of the dotmatrix brand name is this crazy idea that while we’re all individuals, when we come together over a similar interest and build community, a position becomes apparent. And with a position, comes opportunities to interact… to build… to exchange… to create. [/insight]
Another angle of our approach is participating in the live music scene with a recurring event in downtown Greensboro — we’re putting on our first show this Friday night at The Green Burro. Where that leads or how it folds into this site is still up in the air, which is exciting.
If anything, that notion is the future of music — having fun enjoying a personalized experience with artists that you directly support. From a “label” perspective, the money will come based on how open you are and how committed you are to the careers of artists you assist.
Or not. Fuck it. Either way, we revel in music.
(via KOAR)
Pipes Badges are damn cool mechanisms for presenting custom feeds of data on your blog, though I have to admit — even being a web guy myself — that the user input field nomenclature can be confusing as hell at times.
When I used Pipes in the past it seemed like I ran into these types of usability questions pretty often, which probably means that more explicit nomenclature or structuring of the widgets would help. You know, like be super clear about what each field means or if, as in our example, a field is simply metadata, then shift the addition of metadata to the end of the workflow; make it a part of the save process itself.
I realize that developers use Pipes, but obviously content creators are target users as well.
Big props to my buddy Paul Donnelly at Yahoo! Pipes, who was a killer Front-End Engineer in my User Experience team at Ameritrade back in the day.
Rock star!
(shot by Lenslinger)
Man, if Jason McCabe Calacanis is nothing else, he sure as hell is one smooth-talking dude.
Ever since Silicon Alley Reporter shut down due to the crash of the web agency industry he’s been stitching together the work of other people into something ripe for purchase. Funny how a business (SAR) that pimped those very same web agencies, driving up their visibility & rates and SAR’s advertising dollars, died the same death.
I heard a lot about Calacanis’ latest project, Mahalo, over the past 6 months, primarily through friends conversations out on the left coast and the occasional Scoble / Techcrunch / Winer ruminations. But when listening to Calacanis present Mahalo to Ed Cone and the audience this past weekend at ConvergeSouth, I have to admit I was a bit taken aback by some of the claims in his elevator pitch.
When contextualizing the features of Mahalo in the search world, Calacanis spoke of Google’s search algorithm (PageRank) in the past tense. He continued on, bloviating about the old way of presenting search results, where a machine based relevancy off of explicit criteria found within the markup, such as keyword matches with domain names and titles and the number of links to individual domains. This, Calacanis argued, creates relevancy that cannot be trusted as valuable, because SEO is a game and results are flattened out without any consideration of quality.
Mahalo is apparently different because Calacanis has hired a team of employees experts to create result pages that enhance the results of the zeitgeist of society (through the top 25,000 search queries). Forget the subjective argument surrounding “expertise” and answer this one question for me:
How does this make Mahalo a search engine?
The way I see it, Calacanis has created a super-collaborative link blog. Sure, there are community elements to it and there is a search box up top, but authors (or “guides”) are simply culling together their top link choices to give further context to an idea, issue, topic, place, etc. Mahalo isn’t a destination search engine; Mahalo pages are built to show up high in… you guessed it, Google search results.
None of this is bad, but it doesn’t make Mahalo a search engine. Or at least one attempting to compete with Google.
See, the vibe of the pitch keynote leaned pretty heavily in the direction of Mahalo being the future and Google being the past. Being that Mahalo is human in a miscellaneous fashion, I won’t compare it to Yahoo! back in the day — a site that attempted to categorize every known site into a master ontology. This is much smarter, as the well structured page titles, super-relevant links and structured data makes Mahalo pages ultra-ripe for a Google crawl and a well placed search result.
Calling a spade a spade — an SEO optimized link blog, trying to gain top spots in Google to cash in eventually on AdSense or similar — isn’t what CEOs do in this world.
To front like Mahalo is revolutionary in redefining search or that it will become a destination search engine — particularly, one that can marginalize Google’s PageRank algorithm through human expertise (btw, this very same algorithm is the one exposing these secondary result pages to the general public in the first place) — is a bit of crazy talk.
For shits and giggles, say that Mahalo succeeds in creating result pages for the top 25,000 search queries from Google and Yahoo!. Then what? How many “expert” monkeys are needed to not only scale to meet the demand of the ever shifting zeitgeist, but to maintain pre-existing hand-linked search result pages?
How long can Calacanis’ pet example, “Paris hotel,” stay relevant as the months and years creep on by?
Or is that the phase in Mahalo’s strategic plan where the real crowdsourcing kicks in?
Interesting stuff to ruminate over, but to lead off a conference hyped as “Creativity online for all people”…?
(originally uploaded by Benjamin James)
Simply put: The grass is greener on the other side.
Really.
Do yourself a favor and stop and smell it. Or is it the coffee you’re supposed to smell? I remember now — sip your coffee and smell the roses while laying out on a freshly cut patch of grass by your ever trusty John Deere tractor.
Ok, the picture has tulips in it. Cut me some slack, I really tried.
Seriously, though, this past two months of not reading my feed reader from top to bottom while contextualizing a myriad of news items and thoughts into posts as if my life depended on it… well, it’s a pause that I highly recommend to all intra-day bloggers.
I’m sure their loved ones would agree with me.
Since shutting down connecting*the*dots, I’ve been able to shift my focus to a few loves (mm… photography), take care of myself more with semi-frequent trips to the gym after a lunch at Earth Fare and concentrate much more on the foundation of dotmatrix — from client work to infrastructure issues to exploring potential business models.
So yeah, I’ve been busy.
Longing for details? Here are a handful of projects I’ve been working on during the Great Blogging Blackout of 2007:
dotmatrix has been leading the user experience design of a future-state CMS for Scripps Networks since April, recently bringing two great designers into the mix — David Reid of RadiantUX and Tina Roth Eisenberg, A.K.A. swissmiss.
Last month, we wrapped up an information architecture project with Rutgers University’s School of Communication, Information and Library Studies (SCILS). During our initial conversations, I lobbied for the introduction of blogs to their professors and staff, proposing that if adopted, the blogs would provide a necessary voice to the online face of the staff and a mechanism for communicating with prospective students, current students, research colleagues and fellow professors steeped in cliques across department lines. The web committee agreed.
While SCILS won’t be taking advantage of the live web until sometime in the upcoming year — blogging will have to earn its place in the daily workings of professors — the newly designed website is scheduled to launch towards the end of the summer. Longtime friend and colleague, Ray Mancini of Good World Media, led the visual design of the site.
Toss in my incessant desire to photograph everything under the sun and my work on a number of personal projects that are just beginning to see the light of day, I’ve kept my hands quite full these last few months.
So I stopped blogging and the earth kept spinning — imagine that.
Sometimes you really do have to just stop and mow the… er… smell the roses.
Welcome to day one of an experiment that I’m calling the dotmatrix project.
Don’t look too closely. Take in the big picture. It’s all pie in the sky type stuff.
This spot is going to start off rather lonely — it’ll primarily serve as a place for me to share my thoughts on information architecture, design and the future of the internets (yes, those crazy tubes).
Much more of a dot than a matrix of any sort.
I mean, sure, my thoughts will definitely weave through and cross over numerous topics and mix in with commenter’s perspectives, eventually taking some form of a representative shape — you’ll know my approach to design and how I’m thinking — but that’s not necessarily the sort of matrix I’m interested in watching develop.
I deal with that mess every day.
Here’s where I hope it gets interesting:
(originally uploaded by Robinnnnn)
After a period of time, I’m hoping that our individual personalities, experiences, skill sets and voices will begin to form a distinct shape, tone and representation — individuals crossing over and coming together as one for brief moments in time.
Is the sky the limit?
Only one way to find out.