David Emery Online

Over on news.com there’s an interesting article on MTV’s web stratergy. Interesting I guess because I’ve always thought of MTV’s web presence – up until about a year ago – as pretty poor; scrabbling around, trying to come up with immersive experiences around their content but ending up with flash based junk that no one wants to use.

However, all that changed with the re-launch last year of MTV.com. Gone was the flash monstrosity that came before it – all sizzle, no steak – and in came an HTML-based site packed with easy to access content. As an aside, that MTV blog post linked to above has 8174 comments, which is fairly staggering.

This re-launch seems to have triggered a bit of a sea change at MTV and they’ve really focused themselves on the web, and creating sites for their content properties. However, I’m not sure – for all this focus and good intentions – that they’ve been making anything good. The article mentions that they’ve launched 32 sites in the last year, which seems to sound impressive but I’m not sure if it actually is; MTV have both a) a huge amount of content and b) a large budget to throw at promotion and marketing (which is all these sites are – promotion for their TV shows).

Having done a quick count, at work we’ve launched at least 26 sites in the last year, and we’re nowhere near the size of MTV; there’s 3 of us building sites, ranging from a small content heavy mini-site to a large interactive band site. Now, I’m sure the MTV sites are more complicated then the ones we launch but quite frankly I’d be surprised if they weren’t launching this many.

MTV, with the right focus and people, could be a huge web force. There’s absolutely no reason why MTV.com shouldn’t be the premier site for music on the web, and while it gets a large amount of users at the moment it really could be so much more important. Move away from the assembly line and focus on innovation and what music lovers really want. Of course, that’s assuming that MTV is still about music, which is quite probably a faulty assumption…

There’s an ever increasing trend that I’ve noticed cropping up all over the place which I thought I’d highlight; it doesn’t really have a name – or at least a single one, yet – but can be referred to as Tumbleloging, Microblogging, Activity Feeds and many others.

All of these terms refer to essentially the same activity, namely taking the blogging format and removing the focus on long form posts that the medium normally implies and instead aggregating smaller pieces of content generated on other sites by the author. We’re talking about photos from flickr, links from Delicious, Twitters from twitter, events from Upcoming and more. It’s a very good solution to the problem of ever-more distributed content generation; a lot of people are generating this content as they become more and more active online, so it only makes sense to have some way of collating it together (which would be useful by itself, to be honest) and publishing it.

The distributed nature of this is I think the most important aspect. Flickr, for example, has the best interface for managing and sharing your photos online – there are many third party applications that help you upload pictures, and it has a built up community of users; why would you want to use anything else to manage your photos? Certainly any blogging package is never going to be able to compete with Flickr when it comes to managing photos so it makes sense to directly utilise Flickr in your (micro)blogging software.

The other element to this is that people are already uploading to Flickr; working as an aggregator to upkeep your Tumblelog you don’t have to do anything – you’re already doing it. One of the key difficulties that blogging faces (not that this is really a problem, as blogging is doing fine) as it shifts ever more mainstream-wards is that most people (think they) don’t have the time do it. With Tumbleloging they don’t have to do anything extra.

No, really – they don’t have to do anything – they already have a Tumblelog. In fact, you almost certainly have one already as well.

The Facebook news feed is almost the archetypal example of a Tumblelog. I would go as far as saying that it may well be responsible for the whole thing. Sure, it’s a private feed but it still follows the same concept of aggregating your activity, which then gets published (to your friends). I’ve written about Facebook’s news feed before (over 6 months ago, to my surprise) and it’s interesting to see that it really does seem to have started a trend, especially with the combined river-of-news-and-everything-else view that it uses.

I think tumblelogging and it’s ilk are going to spread pretty far and wide – in a couple of years it’s going to be hard to find a personal site that doesn’t use some form of microblogging/content feed aggregation.

More reading:
Mashable: Six Apart Launches Activity Streams for Movable Type Blogs
ReadWriteWeb: Six Apart Gets Into Microblogging with Activity Streams
TechCrunch: SixApart Offers MT Activity Plugin: This Is Good
FriendFeed: Ex-Googlers Create Social Network Experience Using Feeds
Tumblr
GelatoCMS

NowPlaying – a visualising radio prototype
Yet more good work from the BBC Radio Labs

Luddite and paranoid – why the big record labels failed at digital
Lots of wise words in this.

Shelf and the Google Social API
Nice use of the new Google Social API.

Justin Kropp
Very nice site design.

Zeroing Out Palm
‘You may need the help of a dextrous friend if you find it too difficult to do by yourself’ – If you need to write this in a consumer electronics manual, you’re doing it wrong.

Buzzword
Very impressive online Word Processor from Adobe.

How Flickr could take advantage of Facebook
It frustrates me massively that I haven’t found a good way of integrating my Flickr with Facebook – all the Facebook apps out there that do it seem to be pretty rubbish. Come on Flickr – write your own one!

Snap
I think adding simple actions to RSS feeds is a very good idea – a comment RSS admin feed, for example, where you good just hit ‘spam’ or ‘approve’ links in-feed would be very handy.

Reuters Wants The World To Be Tagged
This sounds curiously amazing – I loves me a bit of metadata…

Google Docs Gets Forms, More Access Like Little By Little
Nice little enhancement – useful for anyone who wants to do a quick survey.

OS X 10.5.2 (9C31) Seeded, Safari 3.1 Beta Incorporates Latest Webkit Features
Good to see that we don’t have to wait until 10.6 to get a new version of Safari.

BBC iPlayer to hit Macs in 2008
I wonder what DRM they’re going to use?

Heroku Lifts Ruby on Rails Development into the Cloud
Don’t think I could code in a web-based text editor – also, the very fact that this exists shows how painful RoR is to deploy.

Technology Leaders Join OpenID Foundation to Promote Open Identity Management on the Web
OpenID seems to have really got traction now.

FancyZoom
Very nifty Javascript image zoomer.

querySelector and querySelectorAll
These look very handy.

CD Cover Meme
Very clever.

Live Music Webcasting Starts Making Sense in 2008
I think we’re finally at the point where the quality is good enough for live video broadcasting – this could be quite interesting…

So you now know why I’ve haven’t been posting much; the redesign bug hit (yet) again, and it really took hold this time. This is the 11th iteration of this site, and the second in about 6 months which is a pretty high turnover even for my standards. I really wanted to get this design out there, though – it’s probably the thing I’ve been happiest with for quite a while.

The most obvious feature to highlight are the changing background images. Each post now has two images: the existing wide screen image, and a larger photo background that accompanies it wherever you see it (RSS readers: take a look at the home page and scroll about). This was born out of the realisation that due to project365 I’ve now got loads of photos to choose from on any given day, so I can now quite easily showcase large images. I’ve also elected to cast aside anyone on a slow connection – all the large images are loaded asynchronously via javascript, but its still a big page to load.

The other thing that you may well have not noticed is it’s enhanced for Safari 3 (and 3.1, which I’ll get onto in a minute). As Safari 3 supports a whole load of useful CSS 3 I’ve decided instead of messing around trying to do fancy things with layered PNGs and the like I’d just optimise for anything that can handle box shadows, text-shadows and RBGA (RGB with an alpha value) colours. It still looks nice in Firefox – I don’t think you’d ever know if you didn’t compare it. I haven’t looked at it in IE yet, but it’s going to get a reduced experience.

Now, what’s even more fun is taking advantage of the forthcoming Safari 3.1 release, which supports CSS animation. So, if you look at the site in Safari 3 all sorts of bits fade in and out on roll over, and the sidebar does some fun sliding things. It was amazingly easy to implement some very impressive touches – I really hope that the other browser makers get on board with this. If you want to have a play you can download a WebKit nightly build.

Right. Must try and keep this design up for a little longer then last time…

At some point I may return to posting more then one coherent post in a row.

That day is sadly not quite yet upon us, I fear.

You and I both know this thing works a lot better when I’ve got a theme, a topic, yet-another-tech-whatever to write about. And something to write about sadly (again for both of us) requires a bit of free brain space.

I’m most definitely short of a bit of brain space right now.

The head equivalent of too many cooks spoiling the broth, except the cooks are things needing doing and the broth is the thing trying to do them.

I’d rather not just stop posting, as if I did that I fear I might never quite find the time again, so you’re just going to have to put up with a load of rambling rubbish instead. Er, sorry about that.

On a slightly different note, the thing I vaguely teased last week in a similarly rambling way now looks like it’s going to happen next week. However if I get a bit of luck I might have something else to show you, slightly closer to home.

Consider yourselves teased further.