What’s the Future of Content?

This is my confession. I was a pre-teen intellectual property pirate.

Every thursday night I would sit in front of the television waiting for the “Top of the Pops” television show to come on with tape recorder primed and ready to “steal” my favorite songs of that week.

My piracy and “bootlegging” didn’t stop there. It only got worse.

Once my brother recieved his double-deck tape recorder we went into overdrive. We would make and swap mix tapes. Friends and I would copy computer games. There was no stopping us.

Only then we entered the world of video. Our first VHS machine became a paradise of counterfeit movies. We must of cost Hollywood tens of dollars in missing revenue. Maybe even a hundred dollars of profit. We were that hardcore by that point.

I say all this to establish that when I complain about my own intellectual property being ripped off that I am being a hypocrite.

My first experience of having something of my own “stolen” (in the purely digital intellectual property sense) was when my first book appeared on P2P networks. My friend Tony found it and showed me that it was being distributed by Kazaa or one of the others, I can’t recall. The publisher had offered the book as a PDF and now it was zinging its way around the intertubes with wild abaondon.

I didn’t lose any money, at that time I didn’t get any royalties and was hardly likely to. In fact it probably made me money because the more people who saw my name attached to the book the better. What it likely did do as a downside was make the publisher think twice about their persuing that line of business. Like a cold shower.

Like it or not, unlike my generation, this new generation have grown up with instant access to any media they want. I’m not even sure the thought of buying it enters their heads. My daughter and her friends do not even watch MTV, why would they wait for a popular artist to appear on some schedule when they can watch any music video as and when they like on YouTube? Don’t for a minute think people leave them on YouTube either, look into the right forums and you will see how easy it is for those preferred videos to end up on iPods, and other media players.

People over the age of 20 will likely know the great feeling of purchasing music or a video in a store, something we have been waiting to be released especially. I have seen kids grow tired of music that hasn’t even been released yet. Ripping open packaging is something they only associate with console games, and how long will that last? Games can be downloaded even officially now.

Once a product is entirely ones and zeros, and the culture makes it the norm to copy rather than buy, can we continue to act like the old rules apply?

As a person who makes a living out of content and information, I realize what a perilous situation we have made for ourselves.

What many of us produce now is ephemeral and intangible, where value is in the eye of the beholder, is it the future or just a blip in history?

Crumb Trail Navigation in WordPress

A website with blog building project I have been working on recently is Modern Eco Homes, and again it is a WordPress as CMS solution. For this project we wanted to give the existing site a usability makeover. As well as navigation problems, we also wanted to give a little SEO lift.

Back in the day even my hard coded sites would often feature a crumb trail. That is where you can see where you are in the site hierarchy from Home -> Parent -> Current page.

Even though WordPress features the concept of page parents and children, it doesn’t have crumb trail built in.

Luckily Yoast has a plugin that is perfect.

All you have to do is install the plugin and drop in a tiny piece of code into your page template and ta-da, nice and easy crumb trail navigation. I am sure you will agree, it works well …

Eco Outdoor Furniture 2014 Modern Eco Blog

I love WordPress, but the WordPress community really rocks!

Twitter Timer Sends Timed Twitter Reminders

Twitter / timer

Twitter has rapidly grown far beyond the original “what are you doing” status service idea. More and more wonderfully creative ideas are surfacing around Twitter, such as this reminder service called “Timer“.

The idea is you send Timer a direct message in the following format:

Twitter Reminder

So the number of minutes, followed by a space, followed by the reminder message, eg.

Twitter Timer Sends Timed Twitter Reminders : Codswallop

This would send me a reminder in 5 minutes saying “call Peter”.

You get the reminder as a direct message in the following format:

Twitter Reminder

So my previous example would look like this:

Twitter

Not only that, because it is sent as a direct message, you also get an email. I don’t have my Twitter hooked up to my phone number, but I would assume if you did it would send a SMS text message also.

Now providing I remember to add a reminder I have no excuses for forgetting things ;)

Pretty neat isn’t it?

A letter to my hosting company

Dear Web Host,

We had a good run. Lots of great memories.

But I think it is about time I left.

Yes, I have been looking around, I have been seeing others. It’s me, not you. Don’t blame yourself.

People told me you were cheap, but I didn’t mind, in fact I found that charming about you. I liked that you were popular, though I know people thought that meant you were “easy”. Perhaps you did have too many friends now thinking about it, probably too many for you to handle. Half the mess was likely caused by you trying to please too many too often.

I think it is best for both of us that I move on. Don’t worry, you won’t even notice me moving my stuff out.

It’s just I was ready to get serious, and it seems you were not up to that level of commitment. I had grown up, but you just wanted to stick to your old fun ways. I need more than that.

I need to know you will be there when I need you.

Do you take your responsibilities seriously? I’m not sure you do.

A bit of fun is great and all, but, you know, I am looking for you to be by my side through good times and bad. How do you think your behavior reflects on me when I have visitors over?

Sometimes people come to visit and you are not even there. How hard do you think it is to get people to come back? Not easy, I will tell you. And when they do visit and everything is a mess? It’s just not the impression I want to give people.

So, I am sorry, but I have found someone else. Someone that is willing to be a serious partner, who will look after me.

But I will always remember the good times.

Lots of love

Your hosting customer

RSS to Email MailChimp

mailchimpIf you have a blog then you need to provide email access to your content. Very few people outside of blogging and tech audiences understand RSS but everyone understands email.

Up to now most people have used Aweber, Feedblitz and FeedBurner for this, but now they have a new competitor.

MailChimp is a commercial service that takes the idea of “blog to email” and builds it out to be a professional email software tool.

Yes, if you have more than 100 subscribers you have to pay for it. So already it is different to Feedburner and Feedblitz. There are more features though, so it is really more in competition with Aweber.

Now I love Aweber. I have written about how bloggers should use Aweber before. That said, MailChimp is really going for it with additional features that Aweber do not have. Some very cool, but more advanced like an API for programmers.

MailChimp starts at $15 for 500 emails so is competitively priced with Aweber, and there is a free trial.

You can see the full details of what you can do at the MailChimp site.

WordPress as a CMS

I have been on a bit of a love-fest lately about my favorite blogging software, WordPress.

This is because I have been using it more and more as a Content Management System for traditional sites, rather than just as a blog platform. Combined with the fantastic Thesis theme I have never been so productive as a website builder.

It really is a delight to use, both as a developer and as an end user. If the client can use Hotmail then they are sure to be able to edit their own site in WordPress. This sort of functionality used to cost a lot of money (and still can) but WordPress is capable, flexible and free.

Some people get confused though thinking what I am suggesting is to have a blog look and feel, but that is not the case.

A traditional website can be built very quickly and you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between a WP based site and a hard coded one, on looks alone.

Whites Recycling Solutions is a site I am working on right now (excuse the lack of graphics, it’s a work in progress). The client has already been in and tweaked the content before I even got around to teaching them the system, how is that for ease of use?

You will see the home page is static content, while the “blog” style page is in a tab, under “news“.

No technical fancy work was required, it’s just a settings/reading option:

Reading Settings WordPress

People who are used to hard-coded or traditional CMS systems often worry about being able to cater to the sorts of request clients often have, such as “I want it to look like this apart from on that page”.

No worries there either, you can have custom page templates which are then selected from a drop down when editing the page, or you can do what I did on me and my friend Ryan’s Credit Card Pundit site and introduce a little WordPress logic.

We wanted the banners for the various types of credit cards to appear on every page apart from the credit cards page, which would have just been ugly duplication.

It couldn’t have been easier!

code

Translated into English we get “If this is not page ’8′ then do the following” – easy, eh?

The one problem with WordPress is keeping up with the upgrade cycle, I just wish they would release patches separate from functionality upgrades so people could keep up.

Other than that, I LOVE WordPress … can you tell? :)

The Alternative Google Chrome Comic

Google Chrome
Google Chrome
Google Chrome

People seemed to be losing the plot a little, getting a touch over excited, calling Chrome a Windows-killer (a browser does not an operating system make, no matter how optimism-fueled). Any ideas that Google was going to take Explorers market share over night is just wishful thinking.

I just thought I would inject some sanity into the proceedings.

Idea for Fixing Reddit Voting

reddit

I am getting increasingly annoyed with Reddit. Not so much the service, but the voting system.

One of the best, and most frustrating, aspects of Reddit is the fact you can see how many up and down votes a submission has received.

This is a great feature and a surprisingly uncommon one amongst these kinds of social bookmarking services.

Unfortunately great stories get down voted and you have no idea of why. OK, at least on Reddit you can see that you have been down voted, on some competing services you are just left wondering what went on with zero clues.

Now on Mixx you can see not only the votes, but who voted. That is a good start.

The Flaw in Thumb Downs

What would be even better, would be to see who voted, and if they voted, WHY. In theory the comments should tell you, but they don’t. If you actually got some feedback you could improve your next submission, making the whole service much better.

Ideal would be to get actual justifications for down voting, but a compromise would have to be made in the form of check boxes or some sort of list. My concern with that is I don’t think many of the down votes are justified, and giving someone the ability to randomly pick a reason would keep the whole thing going down the same path.

Not All Votes Are Made Equal

A solution to THAT would be to penalize anyone who repeatedly abused the voting system. If they are marking “spam spam spam” perhaps they would have to justify one in five spam submissions, or perhaps they would get flagged as habitual down-voter and their votes count for less.

I’m sure a lot of down votes are simply because the voter has a competing story they want to promote.

Split “Taste-Bias” Votes from “Quality” Votes

At the very least, some distinction needs to be made between “I just don’t like this, it is not to my taste” and “This is factually or morally wrong”. It makes me sick how many times people down vote because they don’t like blogs. Some down votes are because people don’t like commercial and for-profit sites. These same people happily watch cable television stuffed with ads but don’t think web publishers should be allowed to make money from their creativity. You see it in the comments all the time. There are people who actually believe blog = spam, hello?

How would you fix Reddit voting?

Automate Twitter With Tweetlater

Twitter is a fantastic social tool for chatting, getting introduced to people you would otherwise have little hope of talking to, and following the news and trends of the day.

Once you really get into it though there are a couple of tasks you would like it to perform on your behalf. For example many people have gone to complicated lengths to follow everyone who follows them. I once considered that, but after a thousand or so people the system breaks down and there are just too many messages to keep up with.

Another aspect that would be nice to be built into the system is to pre-post messages to be delivered at a certain time, for example if you are going to be speaking at an event with a live feed it would be cool to say “Log on to xxx to hear my talk”.

Tweetlater is a service that aims to fill these gaps, and also has been used in a cunning way to help build a friends email list.

Firstly as the name suggest the service allows that pre-post idea, which is cool in itself.

But then if you register you will see there is an option to automate a “Send a Welcome Message” allowing you to welcome new followers either publically or privately – nice touch.

Add a New Twitter Account ยป TweetLater.com

Michel Fortin told me about this feature, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of it before. It really does make people feel welcomed, and so easy. I immediately thought about using it on my “chrisgarret” (the misspelled version) Twitter account to warn people they had followed the wrong one.

Then I heard from Dr Mani about a cool way he was going to use it to build his email list. His approach is much more automated and more directly builds his list but I have another approach based on the same idea. As an auto message offer a free download, which of course you get by subscribing. Twitter user meets you on Twitter, follows you, gets a greeting, clicks the link, signs up to email. Nice!

What other ways could this service be used?