aiaio - the Alexander Interactive blog

When I find a bundle of interesting links, I send them in an email to all of Ai. I thought I would start sharing them here as well. I am always hopeful they will spark some conversation, so feel free to leave comments if you have anything to say.

Beautiful HTML Markup
Learn some HTML standards (some of this is based on the forthcoming HTML5).

Google Acquires AdMob for $750 Million in Stock
Google buys mobile advertising startup, AdMob (Google is gobbling everything up: Blogger, YouTube, AdMob, Picasa, On2, reCaptcha, Gizmo5, and a slew of others).

Digital Distractions
How many of these apply to you?

Murdoch: We'll probably remove our sites from Google's index
Rupert Murdoch may remove News Corporation sites from Google's index.

Talk about a nail in the coffin: Comscore has declared an 80/20 rule on online ads, with an updated study reporting that only 16% of users click on ad banners. Worse, the study says half of that population accounts for a staggering 85% of ad clicks.

Study author Linda Anderson is right when she notes, "Marketers who attempt to optimize their advertising campaigns solely around the click are assigning no value to the 84% of Internet users who don't click on an ad. ..." Clickthroughs no longer reflect whether a run of ads is successful. Integrated campaigns are a must, and banners should be assumed as valueless in terms of driving traffic.

What do ads do, then? Done well, they can create context, awareness and recall. See enough Sony Cyber-shot ads and consumers will remember that Cyber-shot is a brand name with immediacy and relevance.

But the users seeing them won't be clicking on those ads, no matter how large they get. Nowadays, that's what search and social media are for.

Paul Carr published a terrific opinion piece on TechCrunch about the pitfalls of the real-time web. In short: people are spending a lot of time in the land of meta, making note of their presence without actively participating. Or, as he puts it, "LOOK AT ME, LOOKING AT THIS."

It's a great point, and one worth contemplating. Sites like Twitter actively encourage such activity. Indeed, Twitter utilities like Tweepi actually give people extra credit for posting more links and retweets and less original content. Somehow, connectedness doesn't include originality.

At the same time, social media has its logical limits. The old joke, that no one needs to know what you had for lunch, is probably true (unless you're, say, Sam Sifton). Sooner or later, we're going to crave a hierarchy: content creators, the doers and the makers, will need to rise above the redundancies and inanities. But then, we've been saying this about the Internet since the rise of Geocities, and we're still here. Let's see where this goes.

If you aren't already familiar with Google Wave, check out some basic info, and a very in-depth video here. Wave is a new project from Google that reinvents email communication. Forget everything you know about email, it was invented back in the 70's, things have changed; technology is faster, we have cloud computing, web apps look fancier, and for a while, a large portion of email users are moving (back) to web based clients.

Email is the current method of communication and collaboration when working on a project. You usually have a folder for that project in Outlook, some rules to filter project related messages into that folder, and an email chain for each issue. People reply to messages inside that chain somewhere, the thread gets continued, people get added to the thread, people drop off. You don't know where you are in the chain when you check in a few hours later, and you get bombarded by... STOP!

Wave is very early in its adoption, it's invite only, but it has the strong potential to fix a lot of these problems. It can clean up a lot of the clutter of project communication and throw it on the cloud so you can get to it anywhere. Wave does need some more security built in for the corporate settings, but that is in the pipeline. Right now waves can only be private or public, but once inside a private wave, that user can invite anyone.

Some notes on how Wave can help a project:

• Each Project would get its own folder in wave


• Anyone working on the project would have access to this folder


• Every issue or conversation would get its own wave and everyone who needs to be involved in the issue is added to the wave.


• At this point every project related message is confined to the projects folder. No Outlook rules or message dragging will ever be needed. If a new person needs to be involved in the discussion, they are just added to the wave, no forwarding or reply-all.


• The conversation can continue similar to email, with individual replies, but it can be so much more. In line replies with related topics can appear right with the original topic, not hidden down 6 replies in an email chain


• You can show only new replies on the wave and get caught back up in the discussion quickly


• You can do a playback of all or part of the discussion and see who chimed in and when


• Need to share documents? You will eventually be able to drag them right out of your file system into the browser and into the wave. (This is currently only supported for pictures)

As I said, Wave is very early in its adoption, but after more people join, and more developer plugins come out, I think it will be a very valuable tool both in the workplace and at home.

I received in email today an invitation to be in a research study tracking web searches. The teaser for the study says:

"In this study, we're interested in learning more about how people use search engines to find information on the Web. ... The duration of the study is 3 weeks. To participate you will need to ... be willing to install a small piece of software on your home computer that will log your web browsing & searches [and] answer a few simple questions related to your searches on a daily basis (for a 3 week period)."

The research group is offering $200 for participation, which seems like a rather paltry total for the privacy invasion it invites. But the question is a good one for the masses: how do we use search engines to find information on the Web? So obvious yet so undefined.

I decided to peek at my own Google queries on my work computer to analyze themes and trends. I consider myself a pretty solid, if shallow web searcher: I can almost always find what I'm looking for, though I tend to rephrase searches to find better results than dig past the first 20 or 30 results.

Some of my own trends, exposed:

• I use quotes. A lot. Many of my searches force Boolean-style operations on Google, allowing me to pinpoint terms as written. I find a lot of proper nouns this way, such as "dan gingold" "mach five", which helped me track down my former coworker's band. (I have Pandora to thank for that one. And Dan is now my Facebook friend. Natch.)
• I do a lot of iterative searching, as noted above: "fountains of wayne" then "fountains of wayne store" then "fountains of wayne closed" and "fountains of wayne timely demise."
• Maybe I shouldn't admit this, but I have a whole bunch of mp3 searches in my results, for when I want to hear that one song one time at work.
• I use Google Maps a lot, and I apparently fine-tune my mappings a lot--I'll do a town-to-town search, then I'll put in the specific destination, and then tweak my settings somehow. (So restless.)
• I also use Google for a lot of searches that could take place on the site itself, because it's easier just to do the google. I have dozens of people's names with linkedin in the search, and many references to aiaio or Timely Demise from cross-referencing my own archives.

I just discovered that Windows 7 (pro and above I believe) has RAID 1 (mirroring) built in. You can even boot from it.

I've used this feature on a Windows Server in the past, but I believe this is the first time it has been released in a desktop operating system.

To get it working is pretty easy. Please note that this is only appropriate if Windows 7 is the only operating system that you are running on the system. Other operating systems may not be able to see the dynamic disks.

• Add a second hard drive of equal size to your first one - I recommend using the exact same model
• Open up Computer Management in Administrative Tools. Go to the Disk Manager.
• Right click each disk (make sure you right click the disk and not a partition on the disk) and convert it to a dynamic disk
• Right click each partition on the original hard drive, and select add mirror.
• Wait for disks to sync.

Also worth noting is that software mirrors created by Windows 7 will not auto rebuild. If a hard drive dies, you'll have to replace the broken drive, boot off of the working drive, break and then recreate the mirror set (or so I've read). Even with this limitation, it was perfect for an older machine that I didn't want to buy a RAID card for.

Things Magazine (which, by any measure, has been a fantastic blog for nigh a decade) recently mused on image-curation blogs and the coming demise of the 'thing'. I've read the post several times--Things posts demand as much--and while the concept is compelling, I'm not sure I agree.

Things takes to task the continuous nature of websites that focus on visual presentation. To them, the individual item is losing its individuality: "There is no space for contemplation, just clicking, scrolling and flicking. This leaves the solitary object somewhat adrift, only embodying meaning when it is juxtaposed or collated or slotted into a larger collection."

Certainly, the web lends itself to curation, and good curators stand out. Witness the collections of news links on Drudge; the photography saturation of The Big Picture or the Ai-designed Air America; and the linklog happiness of old-school blogs like waxy.org. It's a presentation style that Things acknowledges works well, even for them.

Where Things gets upset is in the loss of isolation. Because unlike, say, an art gallery, a visual blog or tumblr feed lacks the space constraints that force tight curating and clever presentation. Art on a wall gets both its own white space and a finite amount of visual competition. Visitors know the show has n number of items, and that each one is there for a reason, and that they should spend an accordant amount of time on each piece.

Meanwhile, viewers of a visually oriented blog are disinclined to pause, because there's always more, always another item behind the link, waiting for exploration. And with the invitation to sprawl--and to publish frequently; for frequent posts generate traffic--the curation can be more about inclusion than selection.

Still, I don't think the synopsis that "the 'thing' is in danger of imminent extinction" is accurate. People will always pause to explore and enjoy that which is worth exploring and enjoying. The difficulty lies in quantity and curating. The blogs that get this will continue to thrive, and the items within them will find the audiences they deserve.

My firewall has been sitting untouched for a good 2 weeks now. Some other projects came up, so I had to put this aside for a little while. But here's where I'm at.

Everything is assembled and seems to be working great. I did make 1 goof on the hardware. The picoPSU I purchased had 24 pins instead of the 20 pins that I needed. Since I have another use for the 24 pin, I just replaced the 150 watt PSU with the 20 pin 120 watt one. Here's the final parts list of what I have running:

• Jetway NF76-N1GL-LF- $140
• AD3RTLANG - Jetway 3 x Gigabit LAN Daughter board - $48
• picoPSU-120 + 102W Adapter Power Kit - $65
• M350 Universal Mini-ITX enclosure - $40
• 4GB 40 pin Embedded Disk Card 4000 - $58
• 2GB DDR2 Memory - $28

I'm now currently trying to build my own copy of Vyatta. Basically, I noticed that there were some bugfixes for the Via Nano, as well as support for it's RNG added in the 2.6.31 kernel. I'm attempting to build Vyatta's jenner branch with the newer kernel.

Hopefully next week I will have time to start tinkering with my custom Vyatta build again.

Spotted in my RSS feed today:

The little coffee shop on West 21st Street has, dangling under its potato chip rack, a row of flip-flops.

I pointed to them today as I bought my pretzels. "Sell a lot of flip-flops?" I asked the owner, an affable woman who's always manning the register.

"You know, we open sometimes on Saturday nights, when the weather's cool," she explained to me. "And all the clubs around here, they don't let women in wearing flats. So all these girls come out after wearing their heels all night, and they say to me, 'Do you have flip-flops? I'd pay anything for a pair of flip-flops!'

"So, we got some flip-flops. I know how they feel--I once spent $20 on flip-flops after a night like that. But they're all college girls, you know? I don't want to rip them off, so I just charge five dollars."

Have your customers voiced unexpected needs to you? How are you solving their problems?