the dotmatrix project

Saying that Last.fm doesn’t have a clue in how to structure information retrieval in their own domain is the understatement of the century. I’ve become a pretty faithful user of the music service, but I have a hell of a time finding what I’m looking for with their search engine.

How bad is it? When I search for an artist (for example: Molly McGinn) I expect to get direct navigation to her artist page if there’s only one “Molly McGinn” in their artist database. Instead, I receive this result page:

Information Retrieval 101: Precision is better than recall. And if a system can’t be precise with a return, then it needs to be smart with how it displays relevant recall. In this case, since there are actually two “Molly McGinn” artist assets in their database, the recall should be limited to those two entries.

How did a query with the two terms, “molly” and “mcginn,” return artist results that don’t have both (not either) terms in their title? I tried searching both with and without quotes around the full name, but I get the same results.

It’s almost as if Last.fm reinvented the very premise of search for their own purposes, yet I can’t figure out what business or user objective they’ve supported.

Non-structured artist discovery during a precise search?

But that’s not the worst of it. Check out what the very same search query gets you in the soon to be live beta redesign:

Not only is there far too much recall, but the two most relevant returns don’t even bubble up to the top of the results page. “Molly McGinn” doesn’t appear until page 2, while “Molly McGinn and the Buster Dillys” don’t show up until… shit, I’m on page 6 of the results and it still hasn’t shown up.

The top results are now based on popularity. Who’s in charge over there? They’ve actually managed to make search far worse in this platform redesign.

Google To The Rescue

For all you frustrated Last.fm users, here’s a super simple way to work around their popularity-driven search results when you’re simply looking for a band page:

• Install Google Toolbar (link)
  
• When you’re on Last.fm, enter the band name, song name, shit, even your Last.fm friend’s profile name into the search field
• Don’t click on the “Search” label to the right of the field; be sure to click on the small arrow to the right of the label. Choose “Search Site” from the drop down list.

Following this method, my search for “molly mcginn” netted me these results:

It sucks that I have to step outside the domain to get solid domain results, but I have no other choice when trying to find specific pages. I’d love to close this post with a catchy one-liner to the extent of “and that’s why Google is worth so much” but this is best practice, standard approach stuff we’re dealing with here.

It’s kind of pitiful that Last.fm can’t get it right.

After 10 minutes of playing with it tonight, there are a bunch of positives to report. Information navigation is much more contextual in it’s nature, the visual design is much cleaner and there’s an interesting addition of an activity feed at play (think News Feed from Facebook).

That said, there are a few major pain points remaining.

Search Is Doing Too Much For Its Own Good

I tried to get to Molly’s artist page by using each of these queries:

• molly mcginn
• Molly McGinn
• “molly mcginn”
• “Molly McGinn”

Normally, I don’t worry about proper capitalization when searching, but Last.fm has always been finicky like that, so I figured that hadn’t changed. It looks like that has been fixed, but now the results are much worse. Now a search for “Molly McGinn” — an explicit bit of structured data in the Last.fm database — doesn’t return her in the results until page 2:

It seems as though someone decided that marketing trumps precision in a search result. If you click on the image, you can see that the return of artist matches seems to be based on popularity. Popularity is a great search filter or sorting criteria, but implemented as the default driver of relevancy?

That’s a terrible user experience.

Page By Page Players?

The Last.fm embedded player strategy must have been hatched with the end goal of driving downloads of the player/scrobbling software. Not embedding the site player in a manner that allows for navigation across the site without losing the stream — you often launch a new Last.fm window when trying to navigate from a radio page — is very problematic.

While there’s a bunch of great information on a radio page about the artist, group or tag, similar artists, listeners, nearby artist events, etc., the display of this information shouldn’t be driving the listening experience across the domain. It literally makes me stay on one page to hear my station, instead of following me across multiple pages.

Why not design the player experience so that it lives in a thin, consistent frame and when someone wants more contextual details about the song, artists, group, etc., they can puppet the info display into the page through an explicit interaction with the player?

Playing music on the site kills my experience moving about, adding info to the site or discovering new music. I literally have to make a choice: listen to the end of the song or do what I need to do on another page.

Last.fm already has my $3 per month, so maybe my pain doesn’t matter, but when non-subscribers get this redesign it might impact traffic numbers when it comes to the bottom-line.

Beta Review Wrap

Last.fm’s contextual navigation is great — I’m able to discover new music in a variety of ways– and I really dig most of the re-organization of features, along with the new UI presentation.

But getting search right is essential to a majority of my tasks on the site. Along with the implementation of the music player, this current iteration has me leaning towards stamping a huge FAIL on the beta release.

Dan and I just finished remixing the live albums for both Sorry About Dresden and The Radials. Both bands gave us similar feedback on our original mix — vocals dominated while the instruments faded at times — so we took a few hours tonight to make the changes. It was worth it, as they both sound much fuller now.

We’re using the Mackie Tracktion 3 music production software that came with the Onyx 1620 board w/ Firewire output. It’s basically left us marveling over the fact that unlike the old days — when bands had to navigate their live play around one centrally located ribbon mic to land a decent recording — we have the luxury with out-of-the-box software to record multiple channels directly to a rather standard MacBook Pro and get amazing results.

I love me some technology.

Here’s the channel breakdown for how we setup the first show:

• Red: Backup vocal mic one
• Orange: Backup vocal mic two
• Yellow: Lead vocal mic
• Green: Guitar mic (The Radials only)
• Aqua: Reverb channel
• Sky blue: Band mic, left
• Dark blue: Band mic, right
• Purple: Audience mic

Based on the bands feedback, we’re going to move in the left and right side band mics closer to the amps for this Thursday night’s show. They were directly behind the FOH monitors and didn’t get quite enough oomph with their default output. We might even play with running extra lines directly out of the amps to capture the sound clean.

We’re recognizing patterns on a bunch of levels these days at HQ, and not only within the production environment.

A Different Kind Of “Label”

If we keep up this show & recording pace, we’ll probably put out somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 live albums per year — all acts local to Greensboro and the surrounding region — with quality standards moving towards being just a few degrees below a studio recording. All at no cost to the artists.

So what’s in it for us? Straight up and down, the answer is quite simply, “the attention.”

No, I’m not referring to attention as in the, “Check us out, we’re fucking cool,” kind of attention. We’re not shooting for gold stars, free drinks or ego boosts — we’re talking about harnessing the attention economy of the internet age.

This is an information age business in the planning.

While we’re building community in the real world with live, original music productions in downtown Greensboro, we’re simultaneously creating synapses in the intertubes with media reproductions of each evening — live recordings, photographs and music videos.

Once the media has been generated, edited and uploaded, we’re applying a pretty intense metadata schema to each media object for enhancing findability and to grow online community around all of the participants — the musicians, filmmakers, photographers, sound engineer and, yes, our brand.

At the core of this entire approach is the notion that this is all free for people to engage with — from going to a free show to ripping track recordings for iPod plays to participating in the tagging of online media which helps promote your favorite artists or songs.

More important to the core position of the dotmatrix brand — built around the idea that many individuals coming together will convey a unique experience in the aggregate — is that whether the participants of the dotmatrix project are musicians, filmmakers, photographers, audience members or online fans, each participant can be promoted to one degree or another due to the structured nature of web object data and metadata aggregation.

Bands building community around media of their performances; people building community around similar tastes in music, videos, photos and shows. And hopefully, a business that can present compelling interface representations of these relationships — both in the real and online.

Down the line, this 2.0 focus on already valuable semantic concepts like free, open, read/write and aggregation will most likely vest with future implementations including notions such as Data Portability.

All we have to do in the short-term is make sure we don’t hard code our business plan into a corner where it can’t be tapped by the never-ending “things to come.”

Oh, yeah. And to make sure we don’t get crappy instrumental channel recordings.

(originally uploaded by Kaj Bjurman)

Scripps Shoots for “Total Category Dominance”

[...] Brown told me that what she’s really concentrating on over the next few months is an extensive rebuild of Scripps’ backend, particularly the CMS, to bring more Web 2.0 functionality to the networks’ numerous sites. “After eight years of the same CMS, it’s time for a change,” she said.

Users won’t see a difference, but will be able to use the sites differently and in deeper, more engaging ways. Methinks this is an issue many media companies are going to have to address — and invest in — to remain competitive, retain audience and attract advertisers.

Guess what dotmatrix has been busy working on?

We’re knee deep in defining the information architecture and internal user experience for the aforementioned CMS, juggling the needs of more than 10 discrete design personae and numerous internal and external systems.

If you’re an interaction designer looking for a challenge, ping me.

Do I need to say anything?

Before I get into this post, let me put out there that I’m not that big a fan of advertising anything through traditional channels.

I mean, the cost of both print and television advertising (production and placement) in relation to the ability to gage actual ROI makes for a ridiculously obscene (read: poor) investment. Companies — or more specifically, executives — have money allocated to marketing budgets that need to be spent, but imagine if a percentage of marketing budgets were to be reallocated to actual product development instead.

You know, adding improved talent or more resources to the mix to give products or entertainers a chance to actually sell themselves based on their merit?

Dream on, right?

Enter Facebook

I’ve been playing around with Facebook as a platform for the past few months, deep diving into its advertising functionality to get a sense of its potential value for independent musicians trying to raise local awareness.

I can’t tell you if Facebook is worth its $15 billion valuation, but man, to an indie artist this platform is gold.

The above is a snapshot I took of a campaign that I created to pimp Molly’s recurring Tuesday night show at M’Coul’s Pub in downtown Greensboro, NC. Through 5 some odd days, we’ve served just over 7,000 impressions with 7 click-throughs, which in traditional advertising terms is a wasted campaign. But there’s nothing traditional about our internet, so even a walled garden like Facebook can flip the script on another angle of meat space industry.

For Team Molly, that .10% click-through rate represents a huge win. Let me explain.

Less Is More… Seriously

Facebook users tend to fill out a good percentage of their profile information, so advertisers attempting to target any number of niche markets have a wealth of structured, personal meta-data options to leverage. Take the above campaign as an example.

Molly plays a weekly 2 hour show — a mix of jazz, blues, alt-country and funk — in downtown Greensboro at a 21 and over pub venue. Our primary goal at this early phase of her solo career is to raise awareness of her musical style, specifically with locals who dig the style she plays.

Alright, so here’s where our ROI kicks in:

• Greensboro is a city about 230,000 strong and 79,360 of them are Facebook users (34.5%)
• Out of that crew, 4,320 people have explicitly told Facebook that they like Jazz, Blues or Country music (5.4% of Facebook users in Greensboro)
• Narrowing that set down to a 21 to 50 year-old range — our guess at who Tuesday night bar goers might be — 2,460 people remain (3.1%)
• I created an ad to speak to those 2,460 people, choosing to go the CPC route, bidding a top bid of $.75 (the range was $.53 to $.75) for every click-through to Molly’s Facebook musician page. If we had chosen to place the ad in the News feed — going the CPM route — the cost would’ve jumped to ~$10 per every 1,000 impressions.
• I then set the daily budget to $5.00, knowing upfront that we’ll never get more than 7 or 8 click-throughs per day, which is fine because we’re promoting a weekly event

So yeah, we’re only getting a .10% click-through rate, with an average impression day of ~1,200… but Molly’s Tuesday night show isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. For less than $7.00 per week, we’re serving twice as many impressions than the total number of neighbors who probably most appreciate Molly’s talents.

Over time, that equals awareness.

This week, 3 of the click-throughs have “fanned” her page, which in Facebook lingo is synonymous with making a commitment to be kept up to date with her happenings around town. It’s too early to bank on those numbers staying consistent, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume they keep steady. Extrapolated over the next 52 weeks:

• One years worth of fans: ~156 people (6.3% of our targeted market)
• Cost to reach them: ~$338
• M’Coul’s upstairs capacity = ~40 people

That’s four times the capacity of Molly’s weekly show, located smack dab in the middle of our hometown. These people have visible names and actual faces attached to them and they can be contacted either individually or as a group — Facebook’s notification system delivers iCast updates of what Molly’s doing and auto-updates fans when new gigs are scheduled.

Compare those costs and the qualified ROI of the campaign with a Rhino Times (a local, free weekly) full-page ad that runs for ~$1,200.

That .10% click-through rate is looking pretty sweet now, isn’t it?

We’re now building our local strategy around the contextual, hyper-local, interconnectivity that Facebook’s platform provides for free. The platform is working for us 24/7 — the exposure of friend’s actions consistently drives fan adds — and now we have a low-cost mechanism for simultaneously overlapping multiple niche campaigns to a local crowd.

Fuck making it big time; we want to make it locally.

You can become a “fan” of Molly here. Just know upfront that if you click that magic link, it’s a two-way sentiment coming right back ‘atcha.

(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”…?

Thank you, Michael Wesch.

(via Joho)

UPDATE: Doc Searls touches upon information, meaning and knowledge in next gen search via a conversation with Jeremie Miller. For some reason, data is left out of the conversation.

I know data and information appear to be identical twins in the eyes of computer science, but I swear data has a distinguishable birthmark behind its left ear.

(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.

• Another information architecture gig just went live last week; Landwatch is a redesign of an existing property listing service and an arm of the start-up property service, Second Space. Once again, Ray Mancini is the party responsible for the UI.
• I’m currently looking to book three acts for the ConvergeSouth Music Festival to be held at M’Coul’s Pub in downtown Greensboro on October 19th. Okay, so it’s not really a “festival” per se — it’s our first year and I’ll be happy with putting on a great gig with a small number of local/regional acts. Hopefully we’ll have a line-up announcement soon.

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:

• As time passes, I’m going to extend an invite — one at a time — to fellow independent colleagues to join me in this space. Further criteria I’m using is that the person will need to be either a designer, technologist, artist, musician or a thinker.
• Each person who receives an invitation will already need to be publishing to the internet. Tagging is going to play a large part in the evolutionary design of this space and I’m going to make cross-posting to the dotmatrix project super-duper simple.
• As consulting opportunities come my way, I’m going to tap into this organically developed pool of brilliance to form like Voltron on gigs. Hopefully, each member will feel free to do the same, creating a loosely connected network of professionals that are vibing with each other more and more each day.
• As our conversations develop in the ether, I’m going to keep an eye on opportunities to develop dotmatrix project conversations into potential service concepts. My underlying premise is the more smart folk at the table, the more chances for brilliant solutions to become exposed.

(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.