Twitter Updates for 2008-02-29

If you think any of this gibberish looks interesting, you should poke around and subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with new content.

OK, time for a little counter-strike before trivia #
the carpet guys just walked into my roommate’s room like they owned the place. Nice guys, mostly, but really? #
jacob was definitely asleep when they did #
question: if I Jailbreak my iPhone, how much do I risk getting bricked? Less than unlocking it? the same? no risk? #
having a burger a The Slipp in Kirkland with my dad #
upgraded to latest Twitterific, supposedly smoother. hope so. #
@JaySlacks oh, snap! ;) #
@jefftippett such great food! #
@Veronica new icon! #

February 29, 2008 | Filed Under Tweets |

Trism : Upcoming iPhone Game by Demiforce

Remember my five tips for iPhone game developers? This guy has definitely followed parts 2, 3, and 4.

I suspect that he’s paid attention to numbers 1 and 5 as well. It looks like a damn cool evolution of some popular casual games. Check out this video:

Also, I’m not sure what he’s patenting.

I’ll be severely disappointed if the US patent office calls “using an accelerometer to determine game orientation” a non-obvious development.

February 29, 2008 | Filed Under Gaming |

Learning about CSS

I recently picked up a copy of Eric Meyer’s CSS: The Definitive Guide, in order to edumicate myself semi-officially in the mysterious ways of CSS.

As I do with most things, I’ve been teaching myself CSS by dissecting the work of others, examining it, and then like a giant with a teacup, carefully destroying it. I figured it was about time I learn some of the actual rules.

I’ve gone through the first two chapters so far, and OH BOY do I know jack shit about CSS.

For example, in CSS you do things like this:

#monkey {color: blue; margin-left: 10px; margin-top: 10px;}

As far as I knew, this meant that any div with the property id="monkey" would have blue text, and 10px margins on the top and left.

In most browsers, that is actually the case. What I didn’t know is that “id” is supposed to be unique. In other words, the style applies to the first instance, but not to subsequent instances (most browsers ignore this — how was I to know?)

I also didn’t know that #monkey is shorthand for *#monkey, which means “anything with id=’monkey’.” So it could be a div, an em, practically anything (but only the first instance).

Basically I had no concept of selectors. Now it’s time to figure out what else I have no concept of.

On the other hand, I’m having a lot of fun learning this new stuff, and I’m excited to put it to use. I think I did a decent job of styling the new Sentimine portal page. Next stop: fixing all my errant legacy wordpress theme code throughout all of our blogs!

February 29, 2008 | Filed Under Technology |

Twitter Updates for 2008-02-28

@TeteSagehen lol, our bossman is awesome #
Just set up http://sentimine.com with a placeholder. Looks pretty good I think. #
5 million things to blog about and I can’t get my mind to wrap around anything concise and well directed #

February 28, 2008 | Filed Under Tweets |

I am a controller snob

So many videogames have bad controls.

In some cases I’m more or less ok with it. In an RTS, it’s more or less not an issue; precision and reaction time are not critical factors.

But if you are making a fighting game or a shooter, for the love of God, make sure your controls are responsive.

I’ve been frustrated with DOA4 recently because there’s a delay between when I hit a button and when my character reacts. In a fighting game that’s pretty unacceptable. The only game I’ve played with perfect response is Counter-Strike (Half-Life).

It makes all the difference in the world to me.

February 28, 2008 | Filed Under Gaming |

Bjorn Lomborg TED Talk: Why Global Warming is at the bottom of the list

My boss pointed me to this video yesterday from TED. I found it fascinating:

He starts with a very valid premise: we can only do so much good. Which good should we do?

I’m not sure I agree that all good is equal good, however. If we accept that advancing the work in preventing the spread of AIDS is, in essence, the same “good” as the “good” we could do in slowing/altering climate change, then you’ve got a very valid argument here.

In fact, I think he’s got a great argument. I’m just not sure the way he values “good for price” is accurate.

February 28, 2008 | Filed Under Nonsense |

Twitter Updates for 2008-02-27

@TeteSagehen fortunately I am not stuck, I snuck by just before it was getting terrible #
@cbensen but of course! Thanks for writing good posts ;) #
Oh, right, the debate. Let me check that out. #
wow Clinton, that was whiny. #
I am the drunken master!!!! OK, enough DOA4. Time for bed. #
@marismith i got that e-mail. It made me feel cool ;) #
That’s a monster post, btw, might take a few minutes for you to actually read the whole thing. #
@mikegermano it’s so damn hard for me to go to ikea and not buy freaking everything #
@waderockett :( ? #
@waderockett it’s a glamorous life, filled with pirates, treasure, and most importantly, pizzazz. What more do they need to know? #
picked up my free ebook copy of Old Man’s War (by Scalzi) #

February 27, 2008 | Filed Under Tweets |

IBM Ideating commercial - why I will always chuckle at the word

I can’t help it. It’s funny when people say “ideate.”

ideate from ax09001h on Vimeo.

February 27, 2008 | Filed Under Nonsense |

Ads alone won’t save newspapers

Douglas McLennan wrote a post the other day titled Who Put These Guys In Charge? (Why Newspapers Are Failing), which is a damn good start to what appears to be a series of posts on, unsurprisingly, what newspapers are doing wrong.

As you might have noticed, I’ve been musing about the future of newspapers for a while now, so this is right up my alley. People might actually take me seriously if I ever took that geeky-looking videogame troggle out of the top left corner (not gonna happen).

McLennan points out in his post—and I think he’s dead-on—that newspapers are drastically under-utilizing their ad space.

I was recently talking to someone who, as an editor at a pretty sizeable newspaper, would know. He tells me that he thinks internet ad sales revenue drops so far behind print ad revenue for two major reasons:

The sales team doesn’t understand internet ads
The internet ad clients are different than the classic ad clients

That seems like a pretty big duh, but it’s also good news that newspapers employ people who do in fact, contrary to popular opinion, “get” the internet.

McLennan seems to imply that the answer is to lower ad costs and introduce a google-esque CPC ad system throughout a paper’s site. Having tried that system myself I can tell you: CPC ads are, by and large, a publisher’s worst nightmare.

I think introducing some CPC inventory for local advertisers and small fish to buy is a great idea. I think that trusting too much in CPC is a mistake. CPC ads are inherently flawed: they don’t charge advertisers for the very tangible benefits of brand affinity and brand exposure.

But the question remains: will ads alone save a newspaper? Will newspapers, more or less as they are now, become profitable with enough tweaking in the ad department?

This is going to require a good bit of guesswork and a few mystery numbers, so take this with at least five grains of salt, and a recommended two margaritas.

Let’s go hunting for some data. The data on numbers of unique audience members that McLennan points to is cool, rather hard to determine, and completely useless in determining what kind of revenue you might be able to suck from it.

What we’re really after is “page views.” This is, at least currently, the magic number, since it refers to the number of times any given page is “served” to a viewer. Consequently, it also means the number of times any given ad is displayed.

[ As a side note, reporters: you should be paying very close attention to how many page views your articles are getting when they are put online. This number will vary depending on how far down the rabbit hole they stick your headline, but it is going to become a VERY IMPORTANT metric for you in the near future. It is, in short, what you are worth to the online portion of the newspaper. ]

Let’s use the hallmark of internet newspaper success, the New York Times. TechCrunch lists the Comscore numbers (oh, to be Fred Wilson, and get at those numbers anytime you like) from last October as 181 million pageviews in that month:

comscore numbers

Scale those two for “accurate” page views and we’re looking at about 170 million page views per month. This number is almost certainly inaccurate.

Now, we also need to know what the earning potential of those page views is. This is trickier, since sites use all different kinds of ad services to fill in the ad space, and different sites get different returns, and nobody publishes their numbers anyway.

Well, not quite nobody. You can click the little sitemeter icon on the bottom of Gawker blogs to get their traffic. If you check the stats for Gawker.com. They report an average of 496,967 page views per day.

This means that we can collect (or rather, other people already have) pretty accurate data on what kind of traffic the whole Gawker media network commands. Various people have estimated that gawker servers about 150 million page views per year and pulls in somewhere around $20m.

And that’s with an experienced internet ad team doing a damn fine job of selling ads. According to my voodoo, the NYT serves roughly 2040 million pages per year. If they sold like Gawker, they’d make $272 million per year. Is that enough to run the New York Times? I doubt it.

Even if my numbers aren’t accurate, someone at the New York Times can do the calculations themselves. I bet I’m not so far off that my conclusion is wrong.

The good news is that the Times has more inventory to sell than Gawker, and they have a much stronger MSM brand they can use to wrangle bigger ad deals. The bad news is that they’re already doing this, and we know it’s not enough. It’s a similar conclusion (and actually, more or less a similar revenue number, that others have reached by different methods).

Anyone looking for solutions in the newspaper industry needs to be looking beyond advertising solutions. A good place to start would be this post, which catalogues the current list of web-based business models.

Some of these models don’t apply. The New York Times proved already with Times Select, for instance, that freemium is not going to be workable for newspapers unless your value-added is something other than newspaper content. Two big ones that jumps out at me are API fees and alternate output.

Why not develop an API for your newspaper? For a fee, let other businesses plug into your system. Why not offer high-quality PDFs with print layouts for people to use on digital readers or to take on plane flights?

Why not sell “merchandise?” I’m willing to bet the New Yoker makes a fair bit of cash from letting people order any cartoon with their caption attached.

I’m sure that the costs of running a newspaper are far higher than many people account for. And I’m sure that many newsrooms are staffed with savvy, smart people who are hampered by a management system that is bulky and resistant to change.

But I share McLennan’s hope that with a little bit of ingenuity, newspapers can figure out how to effectively monetize their larger-than-ever audience. If there is ever a great time to be in the newspaper business—or any business, for that matter—it is a time like now, when the whole industry is reinventing itself.

February 27, 2008 | Filed Under Technology |

Twitter Updates for 2008-02-26

plans: finish mega blog post, tour local gym to see about membership, get groceries (make dinner), upload pics to facebook, read. #
OK, time to figure out what FriendFeed is #
@sernovitz I know that @moniguzman is going to be hanging out at Caffe Vita - they’re giving out free coffee for the duration! #
Found out more about FriendFeed: http://tinyurl.com/38oxdn #
Anyone else think David Plouffe’s Obama campaign emails are a bit preachy? I think he should be more "authentic," whatever that means. #
truck on fire 405 north by 520, ppl might want to find an alternate route… #

February 26, 2008 | Filed Under Tweets |

So much search is “re-find”

I think a large majority of what I search for is, essentially, “stuff that I’ve already seen.”

When I’m writing a new post, and I want to refer to something I’ve written in the past, I search for it.

When I’m writing a post, and I want to link to something I read last month, I search for it.

When I’m showing my friend a funny video, image, or post, I search for it.

When I’m looking for a recipe I know I saw last week, I search for it.

Someone should make a browser or a browser plug-in that archives the text on web pages that you visit for the past six months, and then lets you power-search through that content, effectively cutting out “the rest of the internet,” since you’re only after something that you’ve already seen.

February 26, 2008 | Filed Under Technology |