Author: Victor

An enjoyable read, informative, and free: How Fatbrain.com chose their name. I love getting an inside look at the crucial and not always so pretty operations of Internet companies.

While it seems a lot of other bloggers are offering their epinions, I chose to offer some ematter. First, because the idea of selling content in the form of encrypted files is a similar model to something I’m doing at work.

Second, it feels more like being published. Even if you get published on a site like Salon that makes money (and you make money) it’s not the same, because the site didn’t necessarily make money on your article. It’s different when an actual person opens up their wallet and lays out hard earned cash for your opus, that says something that epinion will need a while to say. Of course, having a publisher risk financial burden by publishing your work would mean even more, but I’ve got to choose my battles.

By the way, when the ematter goes live on 10-18-1999 my 15 page article will retail for $2.00.

Note to self: make entry on Lambertville and the Inn

Some photos from college. Believe or not they’re barely touched up – that’s natural fog.

Makes me pine for my old Pentax K1000. This guy even includes a .wav file of the shutter sound! What a nice touch.

I like how the proprietor of the nubbin is proud of her cat photos and not averse to exposing details of her life to the world. I really must do more of this.

Here’s a photo of Limerick (mostly my girlfriend’s cat but a little mine too):

I’m at LivePerson right now trying out this live support thingy. Gotta admit at first I was genuinely afraid to initiate this conversation – maybe I’m just too shy.

Interestingly they let you choose from among four different “operators” – there must be some interesting psychology behind who chooses a male or female or what the names mean to people.

Here’s the (reversed) conversation (the second session. The first time I tried to enlarge the window and my browser crashed):

Tracey: Hi there, Victor. What can I
help you with today?

Victor: sorry – browser crashed. So I
was asking about how you like this form
of support vs. a phone call.

Tracey: It is easier to talk with a group
of people.

Tracey: And you can handle more
volume efficiently .

Victor: ahhhh, I see – you can keep a
few conversations going simultaneously.
Do customers get frustrated by the time
lag?

Tracey: No. We haven’t had any
complaints that I know of.

Victor: Do you think the questions
people ask are more or less descriptive
as a result of having to type them?

Tracey: Some questions can be very
specific…

Tracey: Most of the times, they are
short and to the point.

Victor: Are you typing or using speech
recognition?

Tracey: Typing, but some of the
answers are preformatted…

Tracey: Preformatting is useful for sake
of time.

(said goodbyes and hung up)…

OK, so I’ve gone from thinking that was silly to thinking it’s darn useful. But I’ve yet to use it with an actual sales or technical problem.

Confusing chat with sales support. At first the idea of chat-based support seems silly, but given that you may be tying up your only phone line, or want support while you’re shopping, or surfing from your WAP phone, I guess it’s not so silly.

I’m trying to use the Open Directory Project search engine instead of Yahoo!, but it’s a difficult adjustment. Lulled into an easier way of phrasing queries like “creating a taxonomy” by Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, et al, I’m back to having to just type key terms, since Open Directory will search and retrive the “a” in the phrase above (duh).

peterme just landed a job as creative director at epinions, which makes me think about the epinions business model and sociology more (are sociologists studying this stuff? They should).

I’m comparing a book reviewer who works at a newspaper to a book reviewer at epinions. Let’s see if I can do a table freehand…

newspaper	epinions
Hired by editor, subjective but with expertise in field of journalism	Self-hired and “promoted” by the masses who are (as a group) objective but with varying degrees of expertise
Reviewer may accept and review feedback, but the editor/publisher is the ultimate judge of quality	Reviewer (and all the reviews back through time) is automatically ranked using direct reader feedback
Newspaper can only employ a limited number of reviewers	Epinions’ review collection only limited by disk space

The “…and all the reviews back through time…” note is particularly interesting, because any current ranking is cumulative – mixing the rankings over time and combining the changing attitudes and tastes of the public.

As someone with journalism experience (and a lover of the Internet) I like both models very much. I’ll continue to give much weight to what I read in the New York Times and, when I can’t find something there, I’ll turn to epinions as more of a research option.

I never cease to be amazed at Jakob Nielsen’s conformist philosophy. Take these two passages from his newest Alertbox:

“It is much harder to say what good things to do since I have never seen a website that was truly stellar with respect to usability. “

and

(in a list of things that will “will increase the usability of virtually all sites)

“10. Do the same as everybody else: if most big websites do something in a certain way, then follow along since users will expect things to work the same on your site. Remember Jakob’s Law of the Web User Experience: users spend most of their time on other sites, so that’s where they form their expectations for how the Web works.

I take this to mean, “Even though no one is producing usable sites, imitate them anyway so users will know they have to go through the same suck ass experience as everywhere else on the web. For God’s sake don’t innovate! A little learning on the user’s part isn’t worth creating something better.”

ohhhhhhhhhhhh, I’ve heard of Nathan before, he did this “Unified Field Theory of Design” that, despite its grandiose name, has some great ideas in it.

The Throwing Sponge technique below helped me find Nathan, who will actually be at the same Living Surfaces conferences as myself this month!

Yehaaa…a beautiful new way to find cool new stuff on the web. Take a work that’s rare and specific to your domain of interest – for me today it was “taxonomy” (a scheme for categorizing stuff) and offer it to the Search Engine Gods. Neat results. Like taking a sponge soaked in your favorite color and throwing it against the wall.

An aside: Upon rereading this I said to myself, “That’s the normal way everyone looks for information, silly.” I guess I found this neat because 1) I know the futility of most brute searches and usually opt for a directory, and 2) because I picked a term I normally would never use in a search term – the rarity of it is the key.

Another ridiculously one-sided and shallow story about Google. I’ve ranted about their dangerous equating of importance with popularity, and will continue to harass these authors until they think about the implications of this stuff.

On a related note, “Whose Web Is It, Anyway?” points out that Yahoo!’s editors are getting too picky for the mortal webweaver, though they partner with Inktomi for the heavy duty keyword searching (I haven’t looked into the latter’s filtering philosophy yet). Nevertheless, I’ve replaced my shortcut to the once beloved and familiar Yahoo! with one to the Open Directory Project. They’re open and collaborative and warm and fuzzy and everything that the early web was before Yahoo! made commercialism possible.

An aside: I’m benefitting professionally from this commercialism on a professional level, but I equate Yahoo’s policies with censorship. A directory should be like the phone book; organized and open to all.

Dave Seigal, author of the questionable Creating Killer Web Sites book, is now thinking big concept: “Futurize Your Enterprise”. That little rhyming title sets the hokey tone for the whole presentation, which seems to use the same template as the Ginsu knives commercials. And why should we trust this guy who could be perceived as an HTML/design guy as a organization development consultant? Blech.